I smartly moved to Northern Europe at the worst possible time. If you’re going to transplant yourself to a different climate, dive into it head-first, I say. You’re already bewildered by your new surroundings, and the suboptimal weather can be part of the bewilderment. Then you put on a brave face, and many many layers, and wait for the temperature outside to sloooooooooowly increase. 

And the daylight! I’m still not used to the daylight. These days the sun rises to the northeast around 5:30 AM, pinwheels *around* the sky, and sets to the northwest about 10 PM. And even then, it never gets much darker than twilight before brightening again. The situation has its downsides—the morning sun shining directly into the apartment does a number on my sleep pattern—but, for a sun-loving Texan, it’s generally fantastic. Besides the occasional shower, highs are in the 70s (Fahrenheit) and humidity is low. Perfecto. 

And yet, my inner Ned Stark is gripping his sword and looking stonily into the middle distance. We’re past the summer solstice, and from here on out, the days are getting shorter and shorter. Six months from now—right around my one-year Amsterversary—the sun will be as fleeting as the stars are now, with temperatures to match. I’ll be enjoying the summer as hard as I possibly can, storing up as many gallons¹ of vitamin D as my body can muster.

In other news, after 1,028 days without interruption², I finished the entire Dutch Duolingo course. It’s good timing that our COVID restrictions have finally ended, giving me the chance to interact with a lot more Dutch people mask-free. Just like everyone learning a new language, my comprehension is moving a lot faster than my speaking ability. HOW ARE THERE SO MANY RANDOM TURNS OF PHRASE I GOTTA LEARN?

Next in the Dutch reading list: the tall stack of Donald Duck comic books that our niece Sophie keeps giving me. Like a Dutch Billy Madison, I’m hoping to rapidly progress through higher and higher reading levels. My friend Ash recommends Dan Brown novels for Dutch reading, because—to put it gently—he doesn’t use big words.

I got my second COVID shot on Friday (Kiki’s is coming soon) and like everybody, we’ve begun tallying up “firsts since the pandemic”: first staged improv show (Kiki’s medical drama: fantastic), first indoor dining (George Marina: overpriced), first movie in a theater (A Quiet Place Part II: really good). Kiki and I were also featured in Het Parool, Amsterdam’s largest daily newspaper³, as part of their food critic’s regular “food you miss from home” feature. Honestly the bomb-ass breakfast tacos were as good as or better than anything I’ve had in Texas. Having a professional photographer documenting the experience was a nice bonus.

And it’s just about time for my first birthday as a full-time Amsterdammer. My cruise director Kiki has a dozen different surprises planned, so I’d better post this entry quick before I need to add them to it. 

On Inauguration Day, I want to share with you one of the weirdest things I’ve ever created: it’s a children’s book that I literally came up with in a *freaking dream* a few months back. Usually when you have a brilliant idea in your sleep, you realize upon waking that it’s incredibly stupid. But this idea actually turned into a proper story that I’m rather proud of!

I didn’t get any nibbles from publishers, and (despite my unemployment) didn’t have the bandwidth or skill to illustrate it myself, so I’m setting it free. Hope you enjoy it.
———

Black Cat, White House

Hans was a black cat who lived in the bushes next to a big white house. Every day, many people would come and go from the house on their human business, and every night Hans would hunt for food on the grounds.

Sometimes Hans would get a scratch from a passing tourist, or a bit of tuna sandwich from a friendly guard. Once, a very friendly lady¹ picked Hans up and told him he was a good cat. He liked that a lot.

Then one day, things at the white house changed. The friendly humans got in their large black cars and drove away; a new set of cars brought a new group of people.

They weren’t so friendly.

Hans heard the humans yelling at each other all the time. They interrupted his naps. The leader of the pack was a man who never laughed; Hans didn’t think he seemed like much of a leader at all.

As time went on, the humans in the house grew more unpleasant. When Hans tried to meow for a bit of food or a scratch, they yelled at him or even threw stones! Hans could tell that the people outside the house weren’t happy, either. Every day, large groups of them would gather and yell angry human words. An enormous wall was built to protect the white house from the outside world. But Hans didn’t feel very safe.

“Humans are awful,” thought Hans disgustedly one afternoon, after the guards sent people running with clouds of unpleasant gas. Hans hardly even remembered that people could be kind.

And then one day, a fleet of large black cars arrived again. Hans watched with interest as a new group of humans moved into the house. He recognized the new leader as someone who had once given him a bit of cheese. One night Hans saw the man passing by, and poked his face out of the bushes.

“I remember you!,” said the man with surprise, immediately reaching down to give Hans a scratch. Hans purred in relief. Maybe the white house could be a happy place again.

In November 2002, having been dismissed from my first job out of college (no hard feelings, NI), I reluctantly took a call-center job. It’s a glum rite of passage for any underemployed early-20-something, and the only thing about it that didn’t depress me right into the ground was who I’d be taking calls for: Apple, my favorite company since before I knew what a “company” was.

I walked in the doors as a temp worker on November 1, 2002, where my future coworker Elizabeth trained my class of new hires in the mysterious art of troubleshooting PowerBooks. After a three-week boot camp I was shown to my desk and issued an outdated blue-and-white Power Mac G3. My first bewildered day on the phones—telling people to reset their PMU *way* more than was necessary—was Thanksgiving Day. 

 Apple was more of a punk-rock company in those days, still an underdog to Microsoft and only five years removed from its near-certain death. Our call center was a couple of prefab buildings overlooking a highway interchange in low-rent Austin. Mac OS X was a buggy mess, and plenty of people were using the “classic” Mac OS. The iPod was still an overpriced curiosity.

Having passed muster with my call metrics, on my birthday—June 30, 2003—I was officially “badged” as an Apple employee. My employee ID was 55508; ID numbers are issued numerically, meaning I was the 55,508th person to ever be hired by Apple (Steve Jobs was #1). By the time I left, the numbers were approaching 650,000, which means by this inexact metric, Apple has done over 90% of its growing since I’ve been there.

Though Apple is a superior company to provide tech support for, it was still call-center work. Doing it for five years felt like a stint in purgatory. I remember in the early days having a pile of pennies that I would toss into a dish, one every three seconds, which was roughly the rate I was earning them.¹ My Job-like patience helped me stay on the job and get promoted to Tier 2, but there were many occasions where I was inches away from leaving The Fruit for somewhere else. 

I didn’t. 

There were many memorable moments over the years. Every Advisor had their share of famous-customer interactions. Mine included Isaac Mizrahi (tricked him into thinking he was getting VIP treatment; it was really our normal repair process); Scott Baio (spent an hour troubleshooting his printer); and Pat Sajak (replaced his PowerBook G4, only for it to be lost in transit due to Hurricane Katrina).

And naturally there were the exchanges that sound like jokes from an email forward. Not once, but twice I asked a customer to look near the clock at the top-right corner of their screen, only to have the following exchange:

“There’s no clock in the corner of my screen.”
“Okay… what DO you see in the top-right corner?”
“It says Tuesday, 2:43 pm.”
“…”

The most seminal moment during my 18 years was at noon on January 9, 2007, when a number of us watched the live broadcast as Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. (If you’ve never seen it, the first couple of minutes are genuinely worth your time as a historic artifact.) Steve was a deeply flawed man, but good lord, he could pitch a product. And he correctly predicted that everything about our company—maybe about the world—was about to change. 

The iPhone even helped me escape the hourly-wage tech-support life. A few months later I helped train the very first class of iPhone support agents, which would help land me a job in the AppleCare Training organization. 

That first class was a bit of a mess, because the iPhone wasn’t physically available to us—we didn’t even see one in person until the afternoon of the day it was released to the public. Apple is like that when it comes to secrecy. You don’t get new-product information unless strictly necessary, and sometimes not even then. When I wrote training all of our projects had code names, and often code names for code names. The training team once got a black eye when some of our screenshots leaked to an Apple rumor site, but I used context clues to help Apple Security identify the culprit, who I assume was drawn and quartered.

I also experienced business travel for the first time, visiting call centers in places as out of the way as Daleville, Indiana or as exotic as Hong Kong. (The latter was a spectacularly whirlwind trip: my boss asked me on a Thursday morning if I could be in Hong Kong on Monday morning.) My favorite trip was a three-week training class in Portland, June 2008—the class ran until 3pm, giving me leisurely evenings and not one but two weekends to explore the Pacific Northwest.² Regular business travel might never return in our lifetimes, but if you get the chance, I do recommend it.

Though the company changed, my job from 2007 until now largely hasn’t—besides switching from training delivery to training development, I’ve remained in place as Apple ballooned around me. In 2002, the iPod seemed like an odd product offering for Apple to be offering. Now we’re offering Ted Lasso.

I never aspired to greatness at Apple. I never wanted to be a manager, and I certainly didn’t want to move to California, so I was content to contribute to the big big company in my own small small way. I’m powerfully lucky to have found a niche where my tech-writing talents could be of good use. And I’m amused that that niche is almost exactly where I started—training newly hired tech-support agents.

Apple was a golden-handcuffs situation, to put it mildly. The company’s wild success is gratifying for anybody who rooted for it as an underdog, but it’s gone from a plucky little sailboat³ to an nuclear-powered icebreaker. That took some of the shine off the rose over time; much of my work the past year in particular has been 5% writing, 95% approval-process. Trying to implement a change these days is like turning an icebreaker. When you add that to my compelling personal situation, and with the *waves around generally* that is 2020, there are plenty of reasons to call it a career and figure out what’s next. I’d say it’s no guarantee that I won’t be back, but I’m very happy to think of my time at Apple as being finished.

Much like with improv, it’s difficult to imagine how different my life would have been without Apple as my employer. It seems unlikely that I would have gained the privilege that lets me now, 18 years later, quit the race and move to Europe. I’m boundlessly lucky and grateful to the company, even though the big ship will hardly notice as I hop off and set out across the ice.

I’ve been so in love with my car ever since I bought it that I’ve repeatedly thought of writing a blogpost just to sing its praises. Now that I’m offering it for sale (here’s why), I have a perfect praise-singing excuse.

In short, I have no idea why everyone isn’t falling all over themselves to buy a Chevy Volt. It’s an electric car that lets you take road trips. 

Here’s the key thing to know: the Chevy Volt is NOT a hybrid car in the normal sense of the word. It’s got both an electric motor with a limited range¹ and a regular gas engine. But the magic trick is this: from the moment you unplug the car and drive off, the Volt is a pure electric car until the battery runs out. At that point you feel the gas engine gently kick in, and the car behaves like a Prius-style hybrid; I typically get 35-40mpg when on my various road trips.

The upshot is that, given typical commutes (remember those?) and errands around town, I can sometimes go weeks without using a drop of gas. The display in the car reads “250+ mpg” and I whistle past every gas station I see. Even though it’s the most I’ve ever spent on a car, it’s also saved me a ton of gas money. There have been several months where my only car-related expense was a trip through the car wash. 

But again, you can hit the road and not worry about finding a plug anywhere. My car’s lifetime mileage is about 80 mpg, but if you’re not a frequent road-tripper then you can surely improve upon that. (Bonus: lots of places have primo parking for their electric charging stations, and charging is cheap.)

A few other nice things to know: the car is a hatchback and has carried home 2x4s without complaint many times. It’s the Premier-level model, so it’s got all the heated-leather-seat types of goodies—see below.

It’s just a fantastic car. It’s yours for $14,000. I’ll be so sad to part with it.

Some more details:

2016 Chevy Volt Premier in “light ash” with black leather interior. About 64,000 miles (although, for reasons above, the miles on the gas engine are a fraction of that). Condition is generally excellent, and it’s under powertrain warranty until 100,000 miles.

Basically every option is included: heated leather seats + steering wheel, backup camera, warnings for collision + blind spot + lane-keeping, a fancy robotic parallel-parking feature, CarPlay + Android Auto, etc. etc. Sunroof wasn’t an option. ?

Way back in 2014, I appeared in a commercial to oppose the light-rail plan then on the ballot. I don’t have a single regret about doing so. Much like belief in science has become a liberal thing, the desire to spend our tax dollars wisely has become a conservative thing, even though neither should have the slightest connection to politics. That’s a long-winded way of saying that I was against the 2014 proposal even though I’m in favor of mass transit. It just wasn’t a good proposal.

Now it’s 2020, and a new light-rail proposal is on the ballot. Like all ballot items, it’s far from perfect. Unlike the 2014 proposal, it’s very much worth voting for.

And so I’ve done what small thing I can to offer my support: I’ve self-produced a commercial to endorse Proposition A. As you can see it’s an unauthorized sequel that turns the original concept on its head. I’ve got no money left to get it on the air (if you know any rich uncles, let me know) so instead I’m sharing it, hoping you’ll enjoy it and consider sharing it yourself. Thanks to all the fabulous creative people who helped it to look and sound so good (credits are in the video).

Vote YES on Proposition A, and please encourage your friends and family to do the same. https://capmetro.org/project-connect

I love beef. It’s soooo yummy. But a few years ago I started cutting back on it, for reasons I’ll get to in a second.

Here’s the really crazy part: it wasn’t hard.

Now, there are probably some good health reasons to reduce your cow intake, which is fine and dandy. But I’m gonna skip that for the sake of your short attention span and get to some even better reasons why you can skip the beef stroganoff next time you have the choice.

1. It’s really good for the planet.

So the world is on fire, if you haven’t heard, and it turns out that our collective love for beef is a shockingly significant factor. Let me throw a crazy chart at you:

If you pick chicken over beef just once, you’ve generated a sixth of the carbon emissions that you otherwise would have. Less methane from cow farts, less rainforest chopped down for cattle grazing.

“If only the 20 percent of Americans who ate beef in a day switched to something else for one meal, that would reduce the overall carbon footprint of all U.S. diets by 9.6 percent and reduce water-use impacts by 5.9 percent.”

—Tulane News

Not bad for a dang ol’ sandwich.

2. It makes beef fun again.

You’ve had a burger for lunch. You probably didn’t think much of it. It was good, but not great. You forgot about it an hour later.

Guess what happens when you cut back on your beef? Burgers become special again. “Oh my God,” you think, “know what I want to do tonight? Eat a burger.” You decide on a place that serves properly good stuff (RIP Hut’s; long live Casino). You make a plan to go. It feels like the tastiest thing you’ve ever eaten. Sure you might regret it the next day; but you regretted that burger lunch, too, and this one was worth it.

For the same reason, I’ve cut my steak intake to once a year, on my birthday. Believe you me, I look forward to that birthday steak for months. It’s Beef Christmas.

3. There’s usually something else to eat.

This part won’t make my vegan friends happy, but news flash: pork is delicious. Chicken is good. If there’s an option, you can take it. Here’s a hot take: turkey is normally the worst of all meats, but next time you’re at a barbecue place, try the smoked turkey instead of brisket. Holy moly, it’s delicious.

And if you’re veggie curious, please go for it! I’m not over here yelling at you to eat a salad. (That being said: if you haven’t tried an Impossible Burger yet, now is the time.)

Yeah, I cheat sometimes. You can too! But I’m beefing a lot less than I used to beef, and that’s me doing my tiny-tiny part. And if a couple of you can join me, that would make my tiny-tiny part just a little bit bigger. (That’s what she said.)

4. It’s a birthday present.

I told you that I wanted you to read this blogpost for my birthday. That was a lie. What I really want for my birthday is for you to think for one minute—60 full seconds!—about eating less beef. Not to quit the stuff entirely! Just notice it on the menu next time you’re out, and notice the other options, and maybe go for one of those.

You probably won’t mind the shift so much. You probably will notice beef tasting just a little bit better once it becomes a sometimes food.

The name on her placard at Town Lake Animal Shelter¹ was “Shannon.” SHANNON. There has never been a worse name given to a dog. I like to think I lifted that curse when I adopted her. I also got her on sale; the shelter wasn’t no-kill back in those days, and “Shannon’s” days were literally numbered. Best $20 I ever spent.

She went nameless for a couple of weeks as my roommate Amalia and I sussed out her personality² and wrote a dozen suggestions on the whiteboard in our small apartment. The finalist just behind Lola was “Lego,” which in retrospect would have been PAINFULLY on the nose. 

But in her trips to the dog park she turned out to be a speedy runner, doing aimless excited laps around the other dogs, red fur flashing in the sun. Her name was definitely Lola, and if you don’t get that reference—most people don’t these days—then you have a crazy movie to watch.

She followed me to seven different addresses over 18 years. She was there for friendships, relationships, heartbreaks both given and received, and marriages (well, just one of those). In her prime, she knew a fantastic array of tricks that we would do in sequence: “Sit! Lay! Roll over! Up! Down! Speak!” She followed along excitedly, her eyes shining, her ears perfect triangles, her curled tail wagging irregularly. When I got laryngitis at one point, she re-learned the tricks with hand gestures and whistles. Clever girl.

I’m not just a different person than when I got her; I’m two or three people removed. The college graduate half my age, clinging desperately to his thinning hair; the married suburbanite living in Leander (Leander!!); the world-traveling improv teacher. None of this has anything to do with Lola per se, except that she was constant. One of the very few who knew and loved ALL of those skinny bald men. 

In 2014, doctors found a tumor the size of a dragon egg attached to her spleen—more accurate to say her spleen was attached to the tumor. She was rushed into surgery the next morning.

Looking back on it, I realize that’s when her time was up. But Lola decided otherwise. The tumor was benign; she recovered within a week; and she lived on borrowed time for another five years.

She faded over time, of course. First went the hearing, then the vision, then the hips. In the last year or so, she would wander the house listlessly, nails clackity-clacking on the laminate, as though she were seeking a spot she couldn’t quite remember. I’ll miss that persistent sound as I go to bed every night.

When we got divorced in 2011, my wife requested a clean break, and specifically asked me not to let her know about Lola’s health. “I’m just going to imagine her living happily forever,” she told me before we parted ways.

She very nearly got her wish.

Guillaume Néry has a superpower you and I don’t have: flight. Thanks to his massive lung capacity and low regard for safety, he can take a breath and soar around underwater spaces with the casual ease of a superhero. Here’s a lovely 12-minute video that made me painfully jealous. …But not so jealous that I’m going to venture more than two inches underwater.

This is just a hair too important for a Facebook post.

A year or more ago, I became enamored with a print that hangs next to the pool table at The Liberty in east Austin. It got to the point that I would specifically choose The Liberty over the other bars in the neighborhood, just to visit “my girlfriend.” I would even choose the table that faced the painting so I had a view of it. This doesn’t happen to me with art! But it did with this one.

It’s titled “God Forgives, I Don’t.” It’s by an artist called Gabe Leonard. He reminds me of Vermeer in how he captures an energized, dynamic movement and freezes it in amber. She’s swinging the gun around to fire, her face full of resolve, her dress shining and flowing; and yet she also seems perfectly at rest, stuck in time, never to pull the trigger.

Finally one day I got the courage to ask the bartender if it was for sale. No, it’s wasn’t; but they put me in touch with an Austin gallery that had some of his work. And his work is fantastic, you really should check him out! (This is a personal favorite.)

But it wasn’t the one I loved. Furthermore, they told me, Gabe had only created 100 prints of the painting, and they were all spoken for. And there my dream ended; any time I wanted to visit my girlfriend, I had to visit The Liberty. I told my friends that if anyone heisted the painting at any point, they could find it at my house.

My girlfriend—the real human one, not the painted lady with the rifle—knew about my obsession with this painting, and had seen it on a previous visit. And a few weeks ago, she confessed something: she had emailed Gabe Leonard directly (something I never thought to do) and asked if he knew of any prints that might be available. Alas, she told me, he didn’t know of any. That’s too bad, I said; but it was so sweet of her to even try!

A couple of weeks later, a roll arrived in the mail.

Kiki told me the truth about contacting the artist, but she was a sinful liar about no prints being available. Gabe had put her in touch with a gallery in California; they mailed it directly to me.

I was astonished.

A few days later I took it to the framers; today, I got it back. I couldn’t be happier. It’s one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.