Twisdom for Wednesday, April 29th (Special Swine Flu Edition!)

Sorry if this seems a bit random. I may have swine flu. Or I just a ate a chef's salad with extra ham that disagreed with me.

• 06:54 Sometimes it feels like we've measured creativity into impossibility. #
• 07:41 I really need to work on this "having a life" thing I keep hearing about. Woke at 5 with storyboard ideas in my head. Now at my desk. #
• 08:49 Wearing glasses to work for the first time in years. Contacts make eyes ache. Benefits? I can see co-workers! And they seem good looking. #
• 10:09 Maybe Twitter is just hype? Nielsen study shows 60 percent of users don't come back after 1 month. bit.ly/3pcfXT #
• 12:14 Love that Phoenix was named one of America's Top 20 "fun cities." Why do I feel like we're 19th, right behind Toledo? #
• 12:22 Funny about the "most fun" list. San Jose, CA is #6. And Oakland -- Oakland -- is #11. Santa Ana, CA? #17. Talk about fun! #
• 18:26 Sleepy at 625 pm? Either I'm super lame or swine flu-ish. #
• 19:04 I hate when my fortune cookie isn't a fortune but an order. Tell my future, dammit. #
• 20:02 I used to excel at creating space from people who made me uncomfortable. Now I try too hard to be nice. A little conflict goes a long way. #
• 20:13 If AMC stands for "Amerian Movie Classics," why is "Road House" on?

Twisdom for Monday, April 27th

Another day, another batch of Twitter ramblings ...

• 07:08 Monday. Yep Monday. That about sums it up from this corner of the twitterverse. #
• 08:20 E*Trade is super convenient ... until you're on the phone to Mumbai to speak to the Slumdog Thousandaire in customer non-service. #
• 11:12 Swine flu, a massive earthquake. All Mexico needs now is a plague of locusts and the apocalypse trifecta may be complete. #
• 11:13 T-minus 10 minutes until lunch at Cibo. Monday is shaping up nicely. #
• 11:20 I'm worried about a massive swine sickout, where they all call in sick feeling headachy and nauseous. That'd kill my chef's salad dinner. #
• 17:43 How cool would it be if Hugh Jackman became the Valley's first case of swine flu? The media explosion heard 'round Arizona! #
• 19:41 The Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man in the World" ads are quickly getting way less interesting. #
• 19:49 What the hell is on Marv Albert's head? I haven't seen a rug that lousy since my college apartment. #
• 19:56 If there's one cool name in all sports, it's Pacquiao. I just like saying it. #
• 19:59 Love HBO's "24/7" boxing docs. And while I like Ricky Hatton, I'd love for Pacquiao to pummel Hatton's moron trainer, Floyd Mayweather Sr. #

Feel free to follow me at http://twitter.com/leiboaz

Twisdom for Sunday, April 26, 2009

So what went through my addled mind, you ask? Here you go:

• 08:26 "If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable." Seneca nails it, almost 2000 years ago. #
• 08:27 Ready, fire, aim. Still working for me after 40-odd years. #
• 08:28 And now comes Day One of my new "All Pancakes Diet." Talk about a bestseller! #
• 08:58 Great NY Times read on looks and how and why we stereotype. www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/fashion/26looks.html?em #
• 12:12 Cannot shake the funk. What's your remedy for a truly black mood? #
• 17:42 The funk seems to be lifting. Some sunshine, some conversation and a heaping dose of worrying about someone besides me. That did the trick. #
• 21:34 Love the news. Swine flu, salmonella-afflicted alfalfa sprouts and a multiple shooting on a college campus. I'll check back next month. #

Peace, David

Twisdom for Saturday, April 25, 2009

I've been having a lot of fun with Twitter lately. When you're restricted to 140 characters and you feel compelled to be interesting, well, that's a real writing challenge. Here's a day's worth of tweets:

• 05:24 Once upon a time, I used to be awake at 5:20 on a Saturday morning and I'd think, "Need to go home soon." Now I'm just watching dawn come. #
• 09:12 The iTunes Genius feature is ... sheer genius. #
• 10:01 Love the song "Red Rabbits" by The Shins. Still, 500 listens later, I have zero clue what it's about. #
• 10:48 Like I was saying, "Red Rabbits" is awesome ... but what's it about? Lunch on me for the first good explication. ♫ blip.fm/~4yifx #
• 10:52 My hope is, Boy George shows up today to front @randomkarma. Random Karma Khameleon would rock the McDowell Mtn Music Fest! #mmmf #
• 12:26 Cannot shake the malaise today. Blah blah blah. #
• 12:43 Sometimes I wonder: Am I walking toward the future or backing away from the past? #
• 13:01 So this seal walks into a club ... Yep, I'm appearing here all week, folks. #
• 13:21 And then there's not Maude. Bea Arthur passes away at 86. www.etonline.com/news/2009/04/73212/ #
• 13:25 With the 31st pick in the NFL draft, the Arizona Cardinals take - Susan Boyle. "She's cheap and she can sing the anthem," says Bill Bidwill. #
• 13:33 This swine flu thing is really impacting me. All morning, I've wanted a ham sandwich and maybe a hot dog. #
• 14:12 It's a good day for me. Just broke my personal record for consecutive days alive! #
• 14:47 I'm a believer in doing the right thing. Now if I could just figure out what the right thing is. #
• 17:28 Back to back, I've heard Winger and Warrant. Ears officially in rebellion. #
• 20:22 I really enjoy watching Kobe play. Gives me a chance to wonder about the fragility of the human ACL. #
• 02:10 I'm totally ready to hit the town. My nap from 930 till 2am really did the trick. #
• 02:12 This is how $100-a-hand 3am blackjack starts, people. Quick ... Where's the Tylenol PM? #

If you're on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/leiboaz

Peace.

Midlife in 1,000 Words or Less ...

Some men hit midlife and buy a Corvette. Others splurge on a super expensive second wife, half the age and double the cup size of the first. Me, I drove over to Borders books.

Sure, that sounds like an anticlimax. But with the economy being so lousy, book shopping seemed like the best way to battle massive anxiety yet stay within my budget.

The occasion? Only my 44th birthday, an over-hyped, underwhelming personal landmark full of smirky "wow, you're olds," wiseass Facebook comments, and a burning desire to avoid a colonscopy, the gift my family doctor has been trying to give me for a couple years now.

Fighting back middle age was how I ended up in the Women's Health aisle, leafing though Suzanne Somers' latest epic, "Breakthrough: 8 Steps to Wellness: Life-Altering Secrets from Today’s Cutting-Edge Doctors." Shockingly, I actually made it four pages, right up to here – "We are under the greatest environmental assault in the history of mankind; we live in a world of unbelievable stress and pollution. Our bodies are no longer able to tolerate this assault and as a result people are sick." That's when I realized three things:

One, I didn't need to spend $25.95 to depress the hell out of myself. I was already there. Two, I liked Suzanne Somers a lot better as Chrissy, the dingy blonde on Three's Company, or even on those Thighmaster infomercials. And three, I really need to write a self-help book.

Seems like everyone's an advice whiz these days. The comedian Steve Harvey has a self-help book. So does talk show host Montel Williams, and Playboy centerfold Jenny McCarthy. Oprah has her mug on a bunch, and LL Cool J has a workout book and on and on.

Me, all I have a title so far. I'm going to call mine, What Are You A Freakin' Moron: Simple Stuff That Will Screw Up Your Life If You Forget It!

Catchy, huh? The best part is, the title has a colon. That's something I learned from Suzanne Somers – all self-help bestsellers have a colon in the middle of the title. I'm not sure why that is, but it seems to be a rule.

As for content, here's a confession for you: I pretty much have nothing so far. But that didn't seem to stop Spencer Johnson, the guy who wrote Who Moved My Cheese? I read that thing in like a half hour 10 years ago, while waiting for a dentist's appointment, and all I remember about Hem and Haw and Sniff and Scurry is that I've never felt so good about a root canal, either before or since.

I think a big part of my problem – besides still being confused by the world around me pretty much 24/7, even after 44 years alive – is my inability to take a simple thought and explain it at great length. That appears to be another self-help staple, but my 15 years of journalism seems to have beaten the long-windedness out of me. For example, my first chapter was going to be about how to lose weight, a subject I know all too well, having lost at least 2,000 pounds in my lifetime (while unfortunately also gaining back approximately 2,250).

What have I written so far?

"Eat less. Exercise more."

You see my problem, I'm sure. I mean, I could fill out the chapter with some recipes, but let's be honest: No one really follows those anyway after, what, like the first three days on the diet? So what's the point?

Then there's the chapter about success at work. In a lot of books, that's like a whole book by itself, which makes sense given how tricky the workplace is in the 21st century. Me, I haven't been able to come up with a second paragraph. I'm stuck after just three sentences:

"Do a good job and be nice to people. Because if you do a bad job but you're nice to people, it won’t matter that you're nice, because people will get sick of you. And because if you do a good job but you're a jackass, it won't matter that you did a good job, because people will get sick of you."

Kind of a cause and effect thing. Anyway, I'm sure the publishers will tell me that I need some way to make it more complicated, or it'll never sell. Sort of like relationships.

That's my other chapter that I'm working on right now – my take on women and how we men can get along with them better. Here's what I have at press time.

"Nothing."

That's the set-up sentence. Then there's the explainer sentence which follows: "Look at the word 'Nothing' in the sentence above. Stare hard at the letter 'o,' at the space within its circle. That tiny area contains all the vast knowledge I have accumulated about women after more than 16,000 days on this planet. It also holds all the knowledge about women that has been passed down to me by generations of Leibowitz men and by all humans who have ever owned a Y-chromosome. Never forget this. Never think you know anything. Never think you will know anything. If you keep this lack of knowledge squarely in mind, you will still fail miserably with women, but at least you won't be overconfident."

I know. The chapter needs work; all the chapters need work. But, 44 years in, at least I feel like I'm finally making some progress.