SHOWS I LIKED THIS YEAR1. The Americans (FX ( Read more... )

Two thousand years ago, the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero described what he believed to be the six mistakes that consistently and continually plague humankind:

1. The delusion that personal gain is made by crushing others

2. The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected

3. Insisting that a thing is impossible ( Read more... )

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd ( Read more... )

This was my official entry for the contest. It’s actually a pretty substantial edit of a much longer journal entry I wrote way back in 2005. It was about four times as long and included a lot of stuff about my brother (who was with me on this adventure) as well as some additional excerpts from the waiver form I signed ( Read more... )

This piece was my runner-up. It’s clearly more of a traditional memoir than the macaroni & cheese piece and is probably the most “relatable” of my three drafts. A few people liked this one best, including my wife, and one other person who argued that its “pathos and bittersweetness … exert a stronger pull ( Read more... )

One commenter liked this piece the best. Pretty much everyone else who read it thought it was too weird ( Read more... )

"Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on Earth, will escape punishment hereafter."
- Jessamyn West

So, the Washington Post recently sponsored a humor-memoir contest, no doubt the brainchild of humor columnist Gene Weingarten. The prize was publication in the Post and $1,000 ( Read more... )

"Stop the bus, I wanna be lonely ( Read more... )

"The majority of men are bundles of beginnings" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

The following trifle was inspired most directly by the recent marriage of my two friends Eric and Sara, but could just as well have been kindled by the simultaneous wedding of my cousins-in-law Jimmy and Amy, or my own two-year wedding anniversary, or any of the other ( Read more... )

"Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things."
- Robert Frost

Per annual tradition, what follows is my 2012 list of Major League Baseball teams in the order of my preference -- that is, when two teams play each other, I root-root-root for the team that is higher on the list.

This list is in no ( Read more... )