The 6 Attributes of a Man’s Man
1. You instantly feel like a kid whenever you walk into a Home Depot or Lowe’s.
2. You like football, basketball, baseball, golf, hockey, tennis – and just about everything else that’s considered a sport.
3. Your sense of humor makes up at least 30 percent of your personality, thereby preventing you from acting serious and grown-up at times.
4. You haven’t been in a fight since you had your braces taken off because you don’t want to ruin that expensive smile your parents paid for.
5. You bought a special computer just for viewing porn.
6. You forced your girlfriend/fiancée/wife to see The Avengers with you when she really wanted to see The Hunger Games.
Working on a Sunday: just spent the last 3 hours deleting hundreds of old emails.
— Tim Freeman (@MrTimFreeman) April 22, 2012
Eating In: Why Restaurant Pretentiousness is a Myth
Restaurants can seem like pretty pretentious places if you suffer from a social anxiety disorder, and nothing exemplifies restaurant pretentiousness more than the restaurant menu. I have lost track of how many times I’ve sat down at a table in an above average eatery only to enter a fugue-like state, lost in a world of foreign phrases and daunting dishes. It is in these surreal moments that I face my biggest of all fears: realizing just how much I don’t know. It is disconcerting for a social climber such as myself to have to accept the sad fact that – despite all the books I’ve read, experiences I’ve had, and TV shows and movies I’ve watched – I know absolutely zilch. Yep, I am dumber than a person who has spent the last five years watching nothing but reality TV.
Or am I? Over the years I’ve developed enough of a tolerance to the menu-induced phobia to be able to see through the smokescreen that has blinded me into believing my ignorance was insurmountable. This has allowed me to read between the lines describing those snooty dishes and exotic platters. Meals formerly fit for kings and queens suddenly seemed more like simple, everyday restaurant fare.
Overcoming my fear of the offputting restaurant menu may have seemed like a work of serendipitous magic, but there is actually a quite simple explanation behind it.
Restaurant menus are fascinating rhetorical devices. They are a testament to the power of words, and an example of how words have the ability to shape perception. Menus are a restaurant’s resume. They are a chance for the owners and the chefs to flex their creative muscles and put forth the best version of what they have to offer. Menus don’t just summarize a restaurant’s culinary creations, but rather unveil those creations in language most fitting for a valedictorian speech.
Take, for instance, my fictitious menu description for the following meal: This delectable fusion of fresh baked bread, Swiss-style cheese and all natural butter is served alongside a creamy bowl of soupe a la tomate swirling with flakes of basil. Now, anybody who has ever had their mom whip up this comfort food favorite on a rainy day will recognize that I am describing a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. Nothing fancy. I spiced up the description by calling the grilled cheese sandwich a “fusion.” I also added a few tidbits of information that don’t mean much but go a long way in embellishing the description: I hastened to add that the bread used to make the sandwich is freshly baked, I used the term “Swiss-style cheese” instead of Swiss cheese, and I mentioned that the butter which gives the sandwich its grilled-ness is “all natural.” You will also see that I converted the spelling of tomato soup into French, so that it becomes “soupe a la tomate” (I can get away with this because, fictitiously, my mom was born in Canada).
Most restaurant menus aren’t guilty of this kind of extreme embellishment, but a lot of menu designers do take creative liberties when outlining their dishes. And it is the perceptions created by these liberties that can make dining out a stultifying experience for some people.
I have learned to deflect the feeling of uptight restaurant fear with skepticism. When I survey the menu, I pay close attention to the choice of words employed by the menu designer to describe the dishes. I also pay close attention to my surroundings. I look beyond the overall atmosphere of the restaurant and notice little things which make the place feel more homelike and down to earth. A framed watercolor butterfly painted by a child that looks like a psychedelic Rorschach blotch. An aquarium with a depressed-looking fish floating around in it. Once I feel more at ease in my surroundings, I can begin to enjoy my dining experience without feeling intimidated.
But restaurants will never stop seeking new ways to try to scare us. They will only continue to get bigger and bolder. They will beat us down with dimly lit environs and menus that educate us like primers for all of eternity. But we don’t have to let these illusions deceive us. We can take charge of our awareness and fight back against the scaremongers.
Continue reading Eating In: Why Restaurant Pretentiousness is a Myth…
‘Tis the Season for Chris
It is that time of year again. People will either be rejoicing or groaning as the familiar rush of shopping, Christmas caroling and eggnog sipping reaches its peak.
This year and in recent years we have been bombarded by talk about the War on Christmas, a supposed attempt by capitalist dictators and their willing executioners to transform the holy celebration of Christ’s birth into a secular, economy-boosting season. According to a few paranoid fanatics, the mere mention of Christ invokes such a feeling of repulsion in the hearer that big box stores and other institutions have banished expressions such as “Merry Christmas,” and even “Merry Xmas,” to the dustbin of holiday phrases.
But there is another holiday utterance which flies below the radar of conservative pundit censure. The two words “Merry Chrismas.” Let’s be honest, the t in the word Christmas is elided so often in everyday speech as to almost have become obsolete. Only people who speak English as a second language and elocution teachers (and their star pupils) actually pronounce the word Christmas with phonetic precision.
If some Christians have gone on the offensive in recent years attacking big corporations and the media for trying to kill Christmas, why haven’t they ever had a bad thing to say about Chris? If I have been hearing things correctly, people have been saying “Merry CHRISmas” for as long as I can remember. Who is this person Chris who has subverted Christianity’s second holiest holiday? Why isn’t he the number one target the Christmas purists are going after?
For perhaps centuries, Chris has injected himself into the tradition of worshipping the Baby Jesus. Maybe it is because Chris was an unloved baby himself, someone who was reared by an overworked and non-affectionate au pair instead of by a nurturing mother. Or Chris may have been the offspring of a single teenage mom who employed shouting threats of violence against his cries for touch. On the other hand, Chris could just be a bitter and vengeful ghost who suffered from gift neglect during his life.
Whatever the reason for this Chris person’s need to be an integral part of every past and future Yuletide season, his relationship to this joyous time of year is inseparable. We may overlook Chris every single time we say “Merry Chrismas” to somebody, but he is still there in our subconscious being passed along to future generations.
I invite all of you to celebrate Chris’s day on December 25th. Make a place in your heart for Chris when you attend your places of worship and while you go door to door singing songs about him. Also be sure not to forget him when the exit greeter at your favorite retail store implies the Chris season without actually saying Chris’s name (or a name similar to Chris’s) so as not to sound presumptuous or offensive.
This is supposed to be the time of year when we all stop and bask in Chris’s transcendent and everlasting glory. But if you find yourself unable to refrain from saying “Merry Chrismas,” please do not feel ashamed or hindered. Chris would have wanted it that way.
Talkin’ ’bout My Generation
Now that the Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for over a month, I decided to finally chime in. I wrote a talking point piece that ran in last week’s issue of The Downtown Express. In it, I sympathize with the basic thrust of the demonstrations from the perspective of frustrated twenty and thirty-somethings who can’t find jobs in this stagnant economy. I am touched by this particular angle of the Occupy Wall Street movement because I am the same age as most of the young people protesting. It is hard to see so many of my peers struggling and not having what their parents had when they were the same age. I think there is a lot of positive energy behind the O.W.S. protests, and if channeled properly, I believe that energy has the ability to effect real change across America and around the world.
Tim Freeman Visits the Occupy Wall Street Protests
Nirvana’s Nevermind Defined a Decade, Introduced the World to a New Genre of Music
In early September of 1991, when I was 14-years-old, I was exposed to something that changed the course of my life. A video on MTV that looked and sounded unlike anything I had previously seen or heard played repeatedly. This video would come to have such an impact on me not so much because I was influenced by its strange sound and the strange people dancing in the video to those sounds, but because it would profoundly change America and the closer world around me.
The video featured raw-looking youth screaming and moshing in a sea of anarchy. The sound of the video was just as raw and anarchic. The setting for this musical catharsis was a high school gymnasium. A trio of flannel-clad, long-haired hippies played to a bleacher of similar-looking folk. Accompanying the joyous mayhem were a couple of pompom-waving cheerleaders flaunting (you guessed it) anarchy symbols on their chests. The setting and design of the video lent the whole spectacle the appearance of a high school pep rally.
The song in the video was “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by a band out of Seattle nobody had ever heard of called Nirvana. Teen Spirit was (and still is) a female deodorant, so already this new song and video had a fresh and clean after-shower smell to it, despite its unpolished scruffiness.
Seeing the antics of a newfangled counterculture portrayed within the familiar contexts of mainstream culture (the pep rally setting, the cheerleaders, the deodorant reference) didn’t seem to suggest, in this instance, an infiltration or subversion of mainstream culture, as heavy metal videos during the 80s were wont to display. Rather, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” gave birth to an entirely new phenomenon: the elevation of counterculture to mainstream culture.
Not long after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” dominated MTV and radio airwaves, the countercultural movement known as Grunge swept across the American landscape. Grunge came to define the early- and mid-90s for many Gen X teenagers and young adults. Bands such as Pearl Jam, Alice N’ Chains and Mudhoney were other Seattle Grunge bands that broke onto the scene around the same time Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was climbing the charts. The Seattle-based Grunge movement would quickly spread to other big cities and trickle down to suburbs and small towns in every corner of America.
The commercial success of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video propelled sales of Nirvana’s Nevermind album, which was actually the band’s second studio album. Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991, marking the date when Nirvana (who released their first album on an independent Seattle label in 1989) officially broke onto the scene. Since its release, Nevermind has gone on to sell 30 million copies, and critics have dubbed it one of the best rock albums of all time.
I remember riding my bike to a Tower Records to buy Nevermind and spending $10 of my paper route money for the cassette featuring a naked baby swimming underwater on the cover. The baby was being lured by a dollar bill on a fish hook. The picture of the baby swimming underwater is a powerful one. It is a reference point for Nevermind’s psychedelic mix of youthful, anti-establishment anthems – you, the listener, are the naked baby, being lured by the Almighty Dollar.
Or perhaps Kurt Cobain is the naked baby.
Nevermind’s swift success catapulted Kurt Cobain to superstardom and made him the unofficial leader of the Grunge movement. Kurt, however, never basked in this achievement but instead regretted fame and all the trappings that came with it. Because of this reluctance to embrace celebrity, the members of Nirvana were never above making ironic, self-effacing jabs at themselves. They lobbed similar ironic jabs at the mechanisms of capitalism which enabled their world-dominating influence. The band’s anti-corporate stance struck a chord with its young fans, forming the foundation for sensibilities which have come to define Generation-X.
In January of 1992, during end-of-semester exam week at my high school, a couple of friends and I shut ourselves in a dark room and listened to Nevermind in its entirety. We ensconced ourselves on the floor like drowsing dogs and let our minds expand to the watery sounds of the tracks. We were blowing off stress from the exams, but we were also doing something more – we were embracing this new thing called Grunge which would ultimately end up being bigger than each of us, and bigger than all of us.
Grunge would explode quickly and peak early, but during its short-lived heyday it would touch millions of hearts and minds. The Grunge movement was the 90′s equivalent of the 1960′s hippy revolution. And the ripples of Grunge are still being felt today.
Grunge appeared seemingly out of nowhere with no segue to herald its approach. Since grunge followed directly on the heels of heavy metal, it shared many similarities with its evil predecessor. The two musical genres, however, were distant cousins at best. Grunge had an unmistakable sound that could best be described as loud, unpracticed and unfinished. It washed out imperfections with loudness. Grunge’s unsynchronized and off-key structure, topped with heaping piles of amplification, quickly came to be appreciated as a unique kind of art form. Heavy metal was similarly loud and rough-edged, but its beats, chords and rhythms were practiced, synchronized and precise. And whereas heavy metal was notorious for being satanic devil-worshipping music, grunge often invoked Christian themes and elements into its songs. Grunge was folksy in a Dylan-esque sort of way, slipping in references to Jesus and Mother Mary subversively. Instead of being turned off by these references, grunge fans were actually drawn closer to the message.
Grunge was more than just music, it was a living, breathing force.
Kurt Cobain, the unofficial leader of the Grunge movement, who came to define Grunge in a short period of time, shocked the world when he killed himself in 1994. Cobain was a tortured soul, wracked with grief and guilt about fame and plagued with a heroin addiction that kept him at death’s door, but while he endured the crest of fame, he gave us all he had. He poured out his soul to his fans, until there was nothing left to pour out.
This is not to say that Grunge music, spearheaded by suicidal Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, was death music. Rather, the core of Grunge spoke of something deeply personal and spiritual. In his poem “8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain,” Jim Carroll (author of The Basketball Diaries) writes, “Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound/ Less and less light/ Until you hit solid rock . . . . Pressure/ That’s how diamonds are made.”
Grunge did not end with Kurt Cobain, but it certainly began with his band Nirvana upon the release of Nevermind. The catalyst for Nevermind’s success was its newness – it sounded unlike anything people had ever heard before. Grunge music shared similar elements with punk, heavy metal and folk, but it had an entirely unique sound that many listeners found palatable.
Nevermind introduced the world to an entirely new genre of music, and it gave birth to a mainstream countercultural movement that defined the decade of the 1990s for millions of adolescents and young adults. Only a few musical albums in history have achieved a similar feat, and given the current state of music today, it is a feat that is unlikely to ever be repeated.
Ten Years
IT WAS A DAY that started like any other. It was Tuesday. As I am often filled with energy at the start of the week, I was happy that morning. I made coffee. I stepped out onto my porch to retrieve the newspaper. I gazed up at the sky and marveled at how crisp and blue it was – a nice late-summer day, hardly a cloud.
I lived in Upstate, NY. I worked at a supermarket. Life was good.
When I walked inside and flipped on the TV, something immediately seemed wrong. Voices of tension and panic. Peter Jennings was trying to make sense of what had just happened – a large smoldering hole clear through one of the Twin Towers. A plane had hit it. Citizens were reporting on cell phones from the ground on the TV. Suddenly, out of nowhere, another plane hit. A big explosion and fireball. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “I wonder if they’re having air traffic control problems?” a lady who was standing below the World Trade Center said on the news.
I called my mom who lived nearby, and I stayed glued to the TV. We watched the South Tower collapse together. I let a primal scream rip forth. I tugged at my hair. The world was over. “The South Tower has just collapsed,” a reporter said on TV. “You mean the side of it has collapsed?” Peter Jennings asked. “No, the whole, entire South Tower has collapsed.”
My supervisor at the supermarket called. She wanted to know why I wasn’t at work. Her voice sounded normal and casual, almost as if she was calling from another dimension, another reality. Maybe she hadn’t heard? I told her what I had just witnessed on TV, my voice shaking and trembling, still not really believing it was real, but instead a hoax from God.
My supervisor convinced me to come into work. I marched out of my apartment, not sure if we would all be dead soon, not sure if there would be a tomorrow.
All that night and during the next several days, I camped out in front of the TV, comforted by the presence of Peter Jennings. He brought us viewers back to reality in the midst of all the madness and carnage. When Peter Jennings died of lung cancer in 2005, he would come to represent in my mind another casualty of 9/11 (Jennings, who was a longtime former smoker, revealed on-air that he resumed smoking after 9/11 due to the stress he endured from his marathon reporting of the terrorist attacks).
The weeks after 9/11 were like one continuous gloomy night. My brother who lived in Manhattan described the smell of burning flesh permeating New York City, and he watched the second plane strike the Towers from the roof of his SoHo apartment building.
Just days before the attacks, my brother came to visit my parents and I in Upstate NY. He arrived bearing gifts for my 25th birthday, and I remember how nice it felt to receive so much recognition on my special day.
During my birthday dinner, the World Trade Center coincidentally became a topic of conversation. My brother’s in-laws had visited him and his wife in Manhattan a few days earlier, and he told us of how he treated them to a view of the Big Apple from the observation deck of the Twin Towers.
“How tall are the Twin Towers?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
“About 110 stories,” my brother replied.
“Isn’t it weird how a building can be that tall,” I said. My brother, interpreting this last comment as a non sequitur, gave me an exasperated look.
That conversation would haunt me in the days following 9/11. Sometimes I believe hints about the future are visible all around us, all the time. Our minds have a funny way of thinking about people and things, usually vaguely, in anticipation of those entities subsequently occupying a great amount of our attention and concern. Hindsight usually points out these hints only after the prophesied events have already occurred. It could have been nothing less than one of these prophetic hints that compelled me to ask my brother how tall the Twin Towers were, even though I already knew the answer.
Now we find ourselves full circle, ten years later, mourning the day that changed everything. Today the 9/11 Memorial opened in the footprint of Ground Zero, beneath where the new One World Trade Center rises and twists 80 stories into the sky as it nears completion. A Renaissance is taking place in Lower Manhattan. When 1WTC is finished, it will be the new home of magazine publisher Condé Nast. Goldman Sachs has built a new headquarters in Battery Park City, across from the rising 1WTC building, and a new W Hotel currently looms south of 1WTC and the 9/11 Memorial. New condominium buildings have also sprung up everywhere, including a 76-story Frank Gehry tower next to the Woolworth building.
After the attacks of 9/11, people were saying that Lower Manhattan would never be the same. It was predicted that there would be an exodus of people and businesses away from New York City’s financial district. Those predictions were wrong. Likewise, people were saying America would be forever changed as a result of 9/11. We would forever be a nation on edge and alert, no longer complacent in our superior strength as a world power. Once again, those predictions fell short. There is no question that we are a changed nation, but we have changed for the better. We are more aware of our sensibilities in the wake of 9/11, and collectively we are more cautious and critical of how we appropriate our world-dominating authority and influence at home and around the globe.
9/11 shattered America. In many ways, the attacks were a test, and how we reacted to that test informed our sensibilities and set precedents for moving forward. We have embraced technology to create new systems for combating terrorism, making ourselves safer and more secure as a result.
But most of all, we now know that we can withstand any great tribulation that strikes our nation. It has taken us ten years to arrive at this realization, but it has been an invaluable lesson. All the grief, shock, anger and overblown emotions and reactions have led to one thing: resolve. In the end, Americans have resolve. We have chosen not to roll over and be victims, but instead to have resolve. Resolve to rebuild, resolve to teach, resolve to be free again and resolve to remember. This is the essence of the American spirit. It is a bond that has been strengthened as a result of collectively witnessing and experiencing the tragic events of 9/11. It is a resolve that we will carry before us as we blaze a trail into the next century and millennium. This national resolve, reinforced by 9/11, echoes in our handling of the current economic crisis. It is reflected in the face of every single American who has lost his or her home, and in the faces of the millions who are out of work. It is a resolve that says we won’t give up!
There is light at the end of the tunnel. That light is the light of Resolve. What will you do with it?
A video I made on September 11th, 2010 at the 9-year commemoration of 9/11 in Lower Manhattan.
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Still Standing
I decided to re-post this blog post from August 25, 2009 only because it could have been written yesterday. The sentiments I express about getting further away from a perfect youth, while taking on the undesirable (and unhealthy) burdens of an “un-caring” adulthood, definitely hit home. I joined the YMCA last week, and I went swimming twice this weekend in their 25-yard pool. It is refreshing to be finally (belatedly) taking action to improve my health and my quality of life. It seems I went through the same thing 2 years ago.
- Tim Freeman, left, and his mother, right, pose for a picture after a swim meet in 1992,
from [April 25, 2009]
I was over at my dad’s house yesterday and I found this old photo. It was taken after a swim meet in the Spring of 1992, back when I lived in California. I am 15-years-old in the picture, shirtless and tan, with a towel wrapped around my waist to conceal my skimpy Speedo-clad loins. My semi-long hair is parted down the center, sculpted to form two cresting platinum-blond waves on either side. My mom stands next to me, not sure what to make of her eye-candy son. Should she be proud or displeased that her youngest child is attracting her so much attention?
I have the right to brag about my former pubescent good looks, mainly because I don’t look anything like the kid in this picture anymore. I was a freshman in high school when the snapshot was taken, and quite possibly in the best shape of my life. As the picture shows, I have washboard abs, a v-shaped torso, a slender waist, and my muscles are toned and firm. Furthermore, my face is angular and beaming with life and expression, as it often was in those days.
These days, I’m afraid to even gaze in the mirror. It’s safe to say that I look like Bill Miller from Still Standing, only I have a slightly flatter affect than Mark Addy’s character. The kid in the picture is all but dead. I killed him off with too many mindless spoonfuls of cookie dough ice cream, and buried his athletic remains with bags of Cheetos. I have taken his beautiful body and inflated it with juices and carbonated beverages until his bronzed skin stretched and expanded. I have deformed his statuesque countenance by heaping the crushing weight of so much fat upon him. And his face, which once exuded a flexible and resilient spirit, has now been reduced to two rolling eyes which try to hide a weakness that bubbles to the surface from within.
My eating habits can best be summed up by quoting funnyman and stand-up comedian Louis C.K.: “When I eat, I fill my body to capacity then blow everything out my ass!”
Sadly, this is one of the sad realities of approaching the mid-30s milestone. The slowing down of our metabolisms, the dearth of structured sports programs in our lives, and the fact of just not caring inhibit us from leading active, healthy lives.
The truth is, I wasn’t born a fat person. Rather, I inherited my weight problem over the course of several years marked by bad eating and exercise habits. I wouldn’t be lying if I said I don’t know how to be fat. The experience of being heavy is still foreign and awkward. I don’t know what my body is supposed to do most of the time. I don’t know how I’m supposed to stand. And I still don’t have all the balance issues worked out.
I am like an adult who is having a growth spurt. I keep bumping into walls and stubbing my toes because I haven’t quite grown into my new, bigger body yet. I still expect myself to be agile and capable of performing the same fluid, graceful movements as somebody who is a healthy weight. For instance, my gait naturally wants to be propelled from the shoulders, chest and hips like a thin person’s, rather than from the knees and lower legs like a fat individual. This creates enormous balance problems, especially when I have to stop abruptly in mid-walk. There are other problems that arise as well, such as feeling incredibly winded after a sudden, swift movement.
My mental image of myself, however, is still that of the slender boy in the picture above. This self-reflection was burned into my brain at an early age, and it is as much a part of who I am as my name, favorite color or social security number. It will never go away, no matter how fat I get, and it will always form the basis of how I think and how I judge my self-esteem.
This is why getting fat messed everything up. It took the perfect harmony of my life and made it unsynchronized and cumbersome. My body was designed to its former slender proportions, this I know. Some people wear their weight like a comfortable suit, or they ride around in it as if it’s an SUV – but not me. Everything feels off when I am fat. My hands hang limply at my side when I walk, like two fat dolphin flippers. I usually have to affect their former natural swaying motion, and this only makes it look as if I’m paddling in mid-air. And I often cross my arms in some unconscious attempt to conceal my belly, but this has the unintended and embarrassing effect of making me look like a faux tough guy (like the white mafiosos that star in the background of Kid Rock videos).
It might benefit me to take some cues from Still Standing’s Bill Miller. In the sitcom, Bill and his wife exemplify a common characteristic of adulthood: that we give up trying to reach back in time for our purest moments of happiness and simply accept what is before us. Our sagging bodies, imperfect parenting skills, our careers and financial responsibilities are all we have. We stop working on ourselves and work on our kids instead – and as life ceaselessly proves, that road is filled with surprising ironies and hypocrisies at every turn.
I am about ten years younger than the fictional Bill Miller, and I have yet to get married and have kids, but I can identify with the quandaries Bill faces in every episode – the depression that accompanies the changes of growing older mixed with a yearning for the uncorrupted simplicity of a long gone youth. In Bill’s case, he tries to vicariously relive his youth through his daughter, but in my case, I think I believe I can attain my youth again by losing weight.
The boy in the photo above represents a piece of my youth, and the fat person I see when I look in the mirror today represents the antithesis of that youth. I stated previously that that youth is still inside of me, but to fully bring it out again, I would need to lose the excess weight that layers the boy in the picture. That is why I recently joined a gym. After I write this, I plan to head off to Planet Fitness for some much needed exercise. I plan to utilize the stationary bikes, the weight machines and the basketball court to burn away fat and build muscle.
I have let myself go for too long, and I have developed lifestyle habits that are not conducive to a healthy, active and happy adulthood. The good thing is that I am still young (many people often tell me this). And, just like Bill Miller, I am still standing. I may not be as good or as fast or as sharp as I once was, but I know a thing or two about endurance and fortitude.
Boy, I’m gonna be sore tomorrow.
VITALS
