Tag: Non-fiction

Haggling in la Niebla de Guerra (Feb 24 2026)

JulianLeave a comment

In which our hero brings a negotiation to a key fight. 

After trying and failing to close my bank account at Wells Fargo, I strutted into the hardware store ready for a fight. 

“Three of the big keys; four of the small. How much?”
The older of the two cashiers replies, “Thees wun ees twenny. Thees wun ees fore.”
$20 is standard, but I know I can get the small for $3.50.
“I’ll give you $70 for all of them.”
“Huh?” The older man asks his younger compatriot.
The younger one says to me, “Set prices, no negotiating”.
“Ok, then just three big ones.”
They discuss my request in Spanish. They assume I don’t speak Spanish. They’re correct. But I do know my numbers. 

The younger fellow cuts the three big keys. When he’s done, the older fellow says, “Udder wun?”
I show him the small key. (I have 8 keys currently on my ring.) He takes it. I say, “I don’t know the price.” He ignores me. I think to myself: “After they’re cut, I have the leverage anyway” and look around the cash register ot see if there’s a fee for credit card. 

The older fellow finishes the small keys and rings it up: $68.99 for the seven keys.
I pull out my phone to pay with tap.
“Ahhh, card?” The older man says.
I suspected he would respond this way. But there’s no sign up-charging me for card usage. 

I pay and he gives me the receipt. I feel like a winner.
Then I look.
$15 each for the big ones.
$4 each for the small. 

Did I school him, saving $7.01 over retail price?
Or did he hoodwink me into thinking the $15 keys are $20 each? 

At home, I tried all three of the big keys. Success.
And then all five of the small keys. Also success.
Wait.
Five?
Did they copy me five keys instead of three?
Ha.

[Note: Last time Partner visited this store, they charged her $30 for a copy of the big key. 

New York City: where everything is made up… but the points definitely matter.] 

In the Spirit (Feb 23 2026)

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In which? IN THE SPIRIT! 

In the spirit of my yesterday writing, here are relatively trivial items I’m happy with: 

  1. Frolicking in the snow with Partner at 10pm yesterday in Central Park.
    1. I acquired a stick. A great stick. A passerby said, “That’s a great stick, man.” Some sticks are great. 
    2. Partner and I scaled the steps atop the ice rink. We passed two late-20s men who smelled like weed and soap. “Stay safe,” one of them told us. “Make sure you get out.”
      1. Partner & I both remarked how similar New York City is to Burning Man. 
    3. At the ice rink, a worker used a snowblower to shift snow from atop the ice to another place atop the ice. Then he used the snowblower to shift the snow back to its original location. I’m still not sure what he’s trying to accomplish. I suspect he either is failing or paid hourly. 
  2. I awoke at 6:30am thinking about all the quotidian aspects I’ve been enjoying.
    1. The review of 8 contracts for home renovators. 
    2. The simple pleasure of being able to host. 
    3. The comedy of being awoken by a THUNK-THUNK-THUNK at 6:30am and immediately fearing it’s someone banging on the door of your van, then recalling you haven’t lived in a van for almost a year.
      1. It’s still not clear what caused the THUNK-THUNK-THUNK. Snow falling? Radiators clanging? Someone actually knocking on our door? My hypothesis: GREMLINS!
    4. The sadness + regret for leaving your bedding with the man who bought your van, him promising to deliver it to you in New York when you closed on the house. He delivered it well enough. But he also washed one of the blankets, a dry-clean-only item that had been a gift from dear friends in Texas, and which will now never be as soft as it once was.
      1. The memory of accidentally doing a similar thing to another friend’s blanket. I borrowed it for a picnic; it acquired burrs, and I began picking them out by hand. Wanting to avoid me the trouble of picking them all out, he washed it and it developed piles. I don’t really blame yourself for the actual ruining of it: I would have picked it back to pristine. But the spirit is similar. 😔
  3. Partner: “Can you squish…” and points downward. I start squeezing her right foot. She laughs. “Can you squish the ottoman toward me? I like the default to the footrub, though. I do usually request that as, ‘Could you squish my feet?’” 
  4. In Central Park, Partner said, “What’s that?” And pointed at the ground. I inspected. She clarified: “No, that!”. I looked closer. She grabbed a hunk of snow with her arms and shoveled it in my face. 
  5. On 105th street, between Columbus and Amsterdam, Partner & I walked by some strangers. They had been throwing snowballs at each other. One of them asked, “Snowball fight?” as he walked past. Partner & I kept walking. Then three steps later, I wheeled around and whipped a snowball at him. We attacked back and forth for a while, until a man approached our makeshift war and said, “please don’t hit me with one of those.” We paused the thirty seconds for him to pass, then threw more snowballs at each other.
    1. An hour later, Partner happened upon these same strangers while walking down the street. One of them yelled “That’s our enemy!” and the fight reprised. 

Ahh. Are these not the joys of life? 

(I also completed 4 financial administrative tasks of necessity: opening a credit card; moving a bank account; creating an LLC; closing an LLC. But those, dear reader, are the mere mechanics that allow life’s joys to whir.) 

Less to Share (Feb 22 2026) 

JulianLeave a comment

In which Our… 

If my previous life was breadth, my now life is depth. 

When friends call, I have less to share. Not because I’m doing less, but because my focus is more tailored. 

I’m not flâning around Paris, happening upon big brass bands. 
I’m not traipsing around Rome eating lasagna. 
I’m not hand-over-handing chains to the top of Angels Landing. 

But I am doing things I like to do: 

  • Selecting the location of each light switch in my new home. 
  • Optimizing the width and swing of each door. 
  • Completing a daily Peloton workout. 
  • Spending time with my partner, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew. 
  • Studying and playing poker. 

It’s just… 

The depth of these doesn’t lend itself to sharing. 

(My partner disagrees. She thinks I just don’t have practice in sharing it. I agree with her, not with me.)

My poker friend and I talk poker. 
But most others don’t have enough context to follow. 
And my poker skill doesn’t even go that deep! 

What did I accomplish recently? 
I selected a cooktop, hood, two dishwashers, and oven. 
Did I enjoy it? 
Sure. 
Not earth-shattering, but sure. 

How much of this change is the lowered intensity of my more-flat-than-one-year-ago hormonal state? 
How much is a decreased verbal fluency that seems to have come with the switch back to testosterone? 
How much is being in the moment more, rather than reflecting less? 
I’m not sure. 
I don’t know. 

One of my dearest friends, when he had kids, shifted his entire focus to them. 
This is typical. I get it. 
Now, sometimes he calls me with nothing to say. 
He’ll hum or say “dum-dah-dum-dum…” 
I think he enjoys being with me, even if that’s all it is right now. 

Outside my window, the wind swirls snowflakes. 
This particular alcove tends to send them upwards. 
My partner enjoys watching. “Snowflakes don’t go up!”, she says. 

Yet here
they do. 

[Says Partner about these last two paragraphs: 

I think this is touching and banal and worth sharing in a way you should find more about your day-to-day life. 

Today you woke up to some of your favorite people at your front door.

You helped make a delicious dish you’d never made before that everyone raved about.

You wandered through the snow too far through the park because it was beautiful.

You scooted gleefully through Morningside Heights.

You snuggled and played NYT word games until you helped someone vent about their in-laws and recognized your role in soothing their worries.

All of these you could paint beautiful pictures of.

I used to do photography (*cough* also award-winning in a Ukiah competition *cough cough*) and one thing that inspired me about Ansel Adams’ work (other than the fact that they’re beautiful) is that he could see the beauty in the world and capture it to share. He didn’t photograph “interesting” things. They’re just random landscapes that tons of people could see, but he was able to recognize and capture that beauty in a stunning way.

]

Queens: a Lightyear Away (Feb 21 2026)

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In which Our Hero commutes for community. 

Partner and I visited a poker friend in Queen. It’s an hour away from our home on transit. It didn’t feel like an hour. Still, that’s two hours round trip. Partner comments that this distance is roughly equivalent to training from San Francisco to Palo Alto for a party. 

We did. 

The party was hot sauce themed. They collect hot sauces from all over the world and sample them with friends. A great way to get people to cUsually on Valentine’s Day. This year a week late. 

I met lovely people. Most work at the NYC parks department. I’m a big fan. Two canvassed for Mamdami. I asked one why she likes him. She said she likes his positivity and that he treats people like people (instead of, I gather, like numbers). 

Now, 2.5hrs later, I’m ready to be in my soft snuggly bed. Ready to start the sous vide pork belly in preparation for tomorrow’s morning poutine for the hockey game. 

And after my second cat in two days, 

Ready to have a cat 🐈. 

So what if Partner is allergic? 

She’ll learn. 

Elbows and Existence (Feb 20 2026)

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An infinite array of options; I’ll be aye. 

My elbow tenses.

At 32 years old, my first repetitive stress injury. 

Second, after a pickleball shoulder. 

But this elbow is also a pickleball injury. 

Squeezing paddle, sure. 

But also the orientation of my elbow as I laid on my back, my computer on my chest for too many hours: the hunched-over curl of a crone despite my then-13 years old. 

I hunched today as I did then. 

Now I pay. 

It’s odd to grow old. To scrape off one’s vigor and exchange passion for comfort. To realize my mind may be and continue to be heading farther away from me, not nearer. 

To replace exuberance with action. 

Having finished most of the big explore, to replace it with exploit. 

Enjoying everyday enough to select it among the infinite. 

To have experienced enough to know. 

How many have made pilgrimage to Seoul for the finals of your favorite childhood sport? 

Ran shirtless in Indonesia? 

Meditated in Thailand? 

How many have eaten pasta two blocks from the Vatican? 

Kayaked the arctic ocean? 

Swam the Great Barrier Reef?

Negotiated for tee shirts in Mumbai? 

I don’t feel like a life unlived. 

I feel like the foundation; the fundamentals of everyday existence: 

That those thusfar empties are slowly seeping solid. 

I don’t need to see the thousand buddhas again. 

I’ve seen them, snapped selfies with silly smirks, stumbled upon the graveyard, and biked home. 

Share these with a future wife and children, sure. 

Invite my extended family to duck and cheese at my Paris pied-à-terre. 

Learn what makes my new brothers laugh. 

When the door has opened, why keep knocking? 

Another Day, Another Deep Dive! (Feb 19 2026)

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In which Our Hero works hard (or hardly works?!) 

Remodeling an apartment is hard work. 

Between 10:05am and 6:30pm, non-stop (with breaks only for bathroom; no food), I… 

  1. Rejiggered my apartment floorplan, composing a total of 32 different line-item changes, including
    1. Selecting an oven.
      1. This was easy because 1) we want it mounted below the cooktop, and 2) our cooktop has a list of 20 different models that could safely be mounted below the cooktop. 
      2. This was difficult because our cooktop has a list of 20 different models that could be mounted below the cooktop. 
      3. All-in-all, a combing and comparing game. 
    2. Selected two dishwashers (my apartment will have two! :D)
      1. Did you know you’re supposed to clean your dishwasher filter regularly? Did you even know your dishwasher had a filter? Did you know they now make dishwashers that have basically garbage disposals in them so you never ever have to clean the filter again???
    3. Removing one refrigerator, but leaving its dedicated power supply and also placing another dedicated fridge power supply elsewhere. (I suspect I will eventually want to have two fridges, maybe two fridges and a chest freezer, maybe two fridges and a chest freezer and half a cow. That is a later problem.) 
  2. Crunched through 8 different general contractor proposals with the help of Claude and ChatGPT, resulting in
    1. Almost definitely selecting my contractor to hire. 
    2. A list of 44 open questions and contract terms to adjust with him. 

After that work sprint, I… 

  1. Completed a 20min Peloton Max ride and a 5min Peloton core workout. 
  2. Played penny poker for 2.5hrs. Lost $71. Played very well, except for one call. That call cost me $45. 
  3. Played dollar poker for… I’m still playing while I write this. Lol. Currently down $37. 

My Partner has a rule: She goes to Central Park every day. It’s less than a block away. I support this rule. 

I do not have that rule. 

Today, the farthest outside that I went was to drop trash off in our building’s bins. 

I have a rule: Live a good life. 

Today I did. 

A Half-Baked Production (Feb 18 2026)

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In which Our Hero has a crusty good time. 

The worst theatrical performance I’ve ever observed occurred in an off-broadway theater this afternoon from 2pm to 4pm. 

Experiential quality is the delta between expectation and outcome. 

This play, which retails for $55 per seat, but which my partner and I observed for a steep discount, prompted my partner to say, “We spent more money getting to and from the show, which is appropriate.” (We took the subway.) 

Issues included: 

  1. An actor flubbing her line, saying “first anniversary” instead of “fiftieth anniversary” in a very-obvious-to-everyone manner. 
  2. Plot point problems being invented only to be immediately resolved. It’s like Chekhov always said: “If a gun appears on stage in act 1, it better be fired within 5 seconds, lest any theatrical tension develop.” (That’s not the real meaning, duh.)
  3. A lead actor who had no light in his eyes. No joy on his face. No radiance whatsoever. When he sang about the weather – about his love for the wonders of the natural world – I received no awe. Only cringe. He hit his notes, his lines were clear and well inflected, he simply had no pleasure to share. 

A year or two ago, I watched my partner’s brother-in-law perform in a small town musical. He played Linus in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I left that performance appreciating the heart that the performers shared with us that day. I left with a new, darker view of the character of Charlie Brown. I left disillusioned with the influential characters I had formerly seen as simplistic. I asked questions like, “How have the archetypes of that generation’s comics/cartoons shifted and morphed as the American experience has changed over generations?” 

This play ended with the explicit moral “The real success was the friends we made along the way”. 

I’m not kidding. 

It wasn’t even tongue-in-cheek, self-aware. The writers seemed to actually think that was an acceptable moral. Or else the whole play is an over-the-top self-mocking farce that the director and actors failed to recognize. And then, why were the characters lit in purple for that one scene? Some avant-garde nod to Grimace? (Per my ex-professional-lighting-designer partner, “The lighting designer was incapable of changing the mood through anything but LED color washes and the colored lights weren’t powerful enough to properly light the scene and be visible.”)

Around 3/4ths of the way through the first act, when the characters on stage mention they’re about to go to intermission (they were performing in a TV program), I thought, “Ah, a fun meta-joke: Their intermission will be exactly the same time as ours.” Then, when their intermission struck, ours wasn’t for another 15 minutes! Another man in the audience clearly thought the same thing, as he stood up and then confusedly sat back down. 

Woof. 

My favorite part was before the show started, when a woman behind me narrated everything she was doing. “I like standing up so I don’t have to get up when people need to pass me. I hate shuffling by people and I am thoughtful and don’t want to make people shuffle by me. Oh, the row is now full, I will now sit,” she said to no one in particular. “It’s very stuffy in here. Very stuffy with all these people,” she said wearing a kn95 mask, her row full, but the theater only one-third full.

As my partner put it, “It was fun to sit near the woman who had to narrate everything out loud. I wonder what her IQ is.”

As that woman narrated just before the show started: “I do hope it’s a good performance.” 

I also hoped it would be a good performance. 

It was not. 

-1 star. 

The New Jehovah’s on Floor 6 (Feb 17 2026)

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A day of cleansing. 

Some days are not our own. This is equally true for my partner (who has a cold, and therefore feels lacking in her control of day) and for me (who spent today sweeping up loose detritus, most of which weren’t created by me). 

Here’s what I did: 

  1. Called the bank attorney who has now messed up my apartment closing 3x. She promises she now has a fix. She thinks it will work. Their mistakes have cost me $100. I have very little recourse that is likely to succeed, and none that are worth the cost in time. 
  2. Answered my mortgage bank’s “How likely would you be to recommend us?” survey with a 2/10. The survey included a box asking whether there had been issues, and if so, whether they had been resolved. Considering I am currently owed just north of $3k, I said there are issues that had not been resolved. I also left my phone number and email in case someone there wants to get in touch with me. I would very much enjoy ranting about stories of being sent on wild goose chases at midnight in rural France or the $50,000+ in escrow checks left at my attorney’s office after closing thanks to incompetent bankers. 
  3. I met a fellow resident in the elevator. She said, “Are you the new jehovah’s on floor 6?”, to which I said, “I’m sorry?” and she repeated, “Are you the new shareholders on floor 6?” 
  4. I successfully acquired a new credit card for my partner. With renovations impending, now is the time to hit signup bonuses. Let’s get ‘dem points. 
  5. After much harranguing, Peloton gave me a free month. I completed my first Peloton ride today. Big fan of their product. 
  6. A contractor stopped by for a walkthrough. This brings the total number of contractors I’ve interviewed to ~12. Of those, three are in the final running. One is most likely. It is no coincidence that this one is the one with the most detailed scope document and is the only one who offers a timeline guarantee. 

Somehow it is now 9:44pm and I feel like I have only been completing others’ activities. 

Huh. 

Perhaps tomorrow will be my own. 

Unsorted Segments. (Feb 16 2026)

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In which Our Hero meanders. 

The woman to whom I gave the free fridge circled back to say thank you. 

Some friends invited me to Peking duck with them. 

I bought theater tickets for $5 per seat to a show that my partner and I will enjoy. 

I acquired my computer from an apple store that is open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. 

They gave me a free USB-C cable because they had broken my computer ahead of my previous pickup, forcing me to leave my computer for another day. 

I ran 3mi through central park. 

I settled on a Peloton membership (I love their stationary bike classes). 

I wish I hadn’t eaten that slice of pizza (which was really more like some calzone-y monstrosity). 

I wish I’d eaten the homemade lentils instead of instant ramen. 

I wish I didn’t have pizza or ramen in my house. 

I remember being 12 or 13, cooking meatballs in the kitchen, being embarrassed when my mother walked in. I was embarrassed by the food I was eating. By the fat I was becoming. 

My partner rubs my belly sometimes and says she likes it. I’m not a fan, but I guess for her it means something like “Julian’s comfortable.” 

It’s especially hard to be comfortable about something that is itself uncomfortable.

Step-by-Step Instructions (Feb 15 2026) 

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In which Our Hero reflects on unusual timelines. 

People often ask me how I formed such an excellent relationship. (No one has asked me. But let’s assume.) 

Here’s my process, in case it helps: 

  1. Date her friend 
  2. Have a threesome with her and another one of her friends (not the one you were dating) 
  3. Let 10+ years pass 
  4. An AI matchmaker pairs you
  5. Schedule a 3-day-long camping trip as your first date 
  6. Extend date to 10 days long, ending only when one of you comes down with Covid 
  7. Wait 2 weeks <cough, cough> 
  8. As a second date, she moves into your van, and the two of you drive across the country together
  9. Attempt to purchase a house together in Puerto Rico within the first 6 months
  10. Backpack though Europe together
  11. Break up 
  12. Attend clown school together in France
  13. Get back together 
  14. Put down a deposit to buy an apartment 
  15. Buy life insurance on each other 
  16. Within one month:
    • Make embryos
    • Get engaged 
    • Buy apartment 

We’ve got all the right steps, just not in the normal timeline. Maybe next we have kids before getting pregnant.