oh, let's have an adventure.

i. Yesterday morning a co-worker walked in on me sitting at my office desktop, iPad in hand, scratching my head. “This is the nerdiest problem in the history of ever,” I told him. “My iPad to-do list and my web to-do list aren’t synching, and I can’t figure out how to make them work.”

Even your best digital to-do software can fail - particularly if, like me, you’re guilty of spending entire days not looking at it.

I take it as the opposite of concidence, then, that I read a great piece this evening on The 99 Percent on how analog habits can be more productive than digital ones - specifically with regards to to-do lists. To-do lists, it seems, can have a lot in common with study habits: the act of writing and re-writing these tasks imprints them in our brains in such a way that we become more eager to accomplish them.

(I have an entire series of tasks mapped out that lead up to larger goals in my Toodledo account. When I did it, I thought this was BRILLIANT. I have not competed a single task towards this goal.)

What I have started doing is taking a look at that digital list and writing the three most pressing items on it down on a notepad. Then I do those things. And one chunk at a time, digital moves to analog and things start getting done.

ii. It seems relatively impossible to me that we’d ever be able to actually track and quantify the sales correlations between artists + bands who talk to their fans on social networks, and those who don’t. Naturally, this is a bit sad for us all, because we’re all convinced that this connection is a part of what’s going to bring the music industry into a newer and brighter stage. Let’s be honest: if you’re not even a little excited when your favorite artist communicates directly back to you, you probably have bigger issues.

At the same time, I worry that the digital connection here, too, isn’t translating to the analog one. I don’t have real concrete evidence to this point, but in the past year I’ve seen multiple articles about how creativity is being compromised by social networking; the need to update and post more content is taking away from ideas. I reserve the right to someday change my mind on this, but it’s hard for me to see this now as not being lazy in some way. Through this technology, there’s now a world of new ideas and thoughts from other people out there, and you can connect to them all instantly. You can ask people what they think. You can let them be a part of your art.

But if we do socialize via The Twitter, does that make artists more or less likely to reach out to fans at shows? (Is there a correlation?) As a consumer, would I be more likely to buy a band’s album if I got a personal look into their lives than not? I want to have the answer to this question, but I don’t always.

What I do know is that there are a few defining moments of my youth in music that stay with me. My early twenties were spent learning the industry while still attending as many shows as humanly possible, and it was the bands I road-tripped to see and the ones I saw a million times that stuck in my heart. Not always because their music was important (it was!), but because you could walk into the Knitting Factory before a Wrens show, find Kevin, and get him to put your ticketless friend on the list for their show. (And then he’d play “I’d Made Enough Friends” because you asked for it.) You could go to some other band’s show and when you accidentally threw yourself in the opening band’s mosh pit because it looked like fun, the guy who pulled you out and back on your feet and hi-fived you was Ted Leo. And when you went to see a lesser-known band that you REALLY loved and they saw you knew all their songs, you suddenly ended up being best pals.

At the end of the day, whether they have a social media strategy or not, I hope new bands are still like this. When I’m old and senile, it’s not gonna be the tweets I remember.

i. While sitting on my couch with my iPad in pursuit of sloth this afternoon, I found myself catching up on the latest and greatest over at the Impose website and being really quite impressed. I will always have a weird personal attachment to this magazine given that I used to work for it (and if I”m being honest, I really miss writing for it), but what it’s become is kind of always what we wished it would be.

Mostly that’s because my friend Derek is really smart, and because he surrounds himself with smart people.

ii. Earlier this week I learned the fantastic news that my friend Pete has hit the NY Times Bestseller’s list for children’s books for the 2nd time. This is objectively awesome, as is he.

iii. Last night I did the thing that I do where I ask someone about their creative pursuits for purely selfish reasons. A while back, I went to a reading of my friend Rebecca’s play and left feeling kind of in awe of the fact that a person I knew made something that great. Much like when I get impatient for one of my favorite bands to make a new record, I would secretly like for Rebecca to drop all her other life priorities and make another thing that makes me feel that awesome.

Luckily, she’ll distract me with food writing in the interim.

iv. This is all important because I’m pretty sure that having smart friends is the opposite of intertia.

1. Before I knew a great deal about him as a political candidate, I was in love with Barack Obama for the very phrase “audacity of hope.” It seems like a pretty bold thing to ask for.

2. It also seems kind of embarrassing, like consulting a psychic or sleeping with wishes under your pillow and presuming this will make them come true. “Hope” is a word that seems designed for people who need faith in the intangible to get through their days, like a thing frowned upon by hard science and shifting media landscapes. It gets a bad rap as an antonym of “truth.”

3. I occasionally find having hope difficult for the above reasons; I think for most people who overthink things, it’s hard not to wonder if you’re using the word “hope” to delude yourself into feeling as though things you would like to magically happen will do so without your efforts to make them so.

Still, I think there’s something wildly compelling about it, and I think it’s the fact that so many wonderful tangible things and connections exist that gives us license to continue to have hope. We’ve had hope before, and we’ve had it in conjunction with amazing people and events and accomplishments, so can we really rule out its necessary presence in securing those things for our future?

I read a lot of studies daily - on marketing, on trends, on what works in social media and what motivates people intrinsically and what strategies work for productivity. I have never read one that discounts the effectiveness of hope in achieving any goal.

4. I’m not sure how this fits in with the other thoughts, but I would like to note that with respect to the “consult a psychic” comment above, I did have my palm read at a Flock of Seagulls show at Crash Mansion in early 2004. While you’re busy wrapping your head around the fact that such a confluence of events is possible, I will continue to blow your mind by saying this: she predicted a number of very specific and totally unhappy things, and every single one of them happened.

5. Sometimes songs give me immense, immense amounts of hope for no reason, and sometimes those songs are not very hopeful. I have also never seen any studies on these associations, but I would very much love to.

I spent a few days last week in San Francisco, a city that is dangerous because every time I get there, I forget why I don’t actually live there. This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that aside from New York, it’s the city with the highest concentration of my closest friends. Within an hour of checking into my hotel, I was eating bourbon and cornflakes ice cream with one of my best friends; by nighttime, eight of us were gathered at the Elbo Room, drinking beers, playing pinball, and taking memorable photobooth pictures.

San Francisco is also my favorite city to walk. It’s hillier than New York, it’s more varied in atmosphere than Seattle, and the weather is more often than not agreeable. On this trip, I had made a slightly more committed goal: to run both mornings I was there. On paper, this seemed easy enough, but in practice, I woke up each day with a body not certain of the time zone and a brain fuzzy with thoughts of work and anxiety.

Still, I packed my running shoes, and you can’t pack running shoes if you don’t mean it. For two mornings in a row, I put those shoes on and begrudgingly walked out the hotel room door and headed down Market Street to the water. Past the ferry building and the farmer’s market, past the trolleys, past the ships in the harbor and Alcatraz in the distance and the scattered expensive waterfront restaurants, I ran. They were short runs, for sure, but they felt easy. Being near the water felt good, all of the songs on my playlist sounded better, and the promise of Blue Bottle Coffee afterwards seemed like the best of anything to run towards.

And those runs set me up for something bigger and sort of unexpected: they paved the way for my return home and the fact that I’ve been creeping towards a bigger goal for almost a year now. I made a half-marathon-shaped promise to myself and some friends early last winter before I realized that my body is ill equipped for running. I’m the girl who gets side stitches and shin splints and notices weeks down the line that she’s also slightly bow-legged. I will trip over tree branches and fall spectacularly. I will wrinkle my nose at the cost of cold-weather running tights.

Most of all, I will hate just about every step of every run until it’s over and I suddenly feel like the king of all the kids.

It’s that last bit that makes me keep doing it - that, and the fact that this is never something I can do half-assedly. It requires effort, every single time, and it requires a commitment I can uphold whether I’m in Brooklyn or San Francisco or Seattle. Today I got up and I berated myself for the first two miles because they felt hard and I felt like quitting, and then I sang along silently for the next two miles as the songs started to creep into my brain, and then I spent the last mile realizing that I was going to make it all the way home without stopping.

Sometimes you wake up and it’s Monday and you’re in a different city with different friends who miss you, and you get ocean views as you run along the Embarcadero. And then other times you wake up and it’s Sunday and you get to remember that you can run in the park and return to your brownstone apartment and your backyard and your kitchen where there are homemade waffles and jam and coffee, and you start to worry about two things: that maybe this is how it was supposed to turn out, and that maybe you’re a runner.

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.” - Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Like Ahab before me, I can’t seem to stop talking about the whale.” - me

In the early planning stages of our Cape Cod getaway, my friend Brendan and I strategized. I wanted to go whale watching. He wanted to go out sailing. I’m a huge fan of compromise: “Brendan, do you think we’ll see whales while we’re out on the sailboat?”

“No, we can’t really go out far enough in the sailboat to see whales.”

I rephrased my question. “Brendan, can you please just tell me that we might see whales on the sailboat?”

“OK, we might see whales on the sailboat.”

With that, I was sold on our sailing adventure. We rented a sailboat for the day (at the low, low price of “less money than one night in a hotel costs”) in Provincetown, MA, and we diplomatically decided to take two groups of friends out in shifts. The morning shift found us learning the ropes (literally, of course): Brendan knows how to sail, and none of the rest of us did. He carefully explained sailing terms, how the rudder and centerboard work, and how to get us where we were going. I carefully tried to understand and was generally useless the one time he let me attempt to steer.

Still, we were on a boat on the high seas! We sailed out to the beach at the very tip of the Cape, marked by the Wood End Lighthouse, which we intended on exploring. Nature had other plans, and just after we anchored the boat (I know how to drop an anchor, at the least), the waves grew intense and started pushing it aground. Brendan flew into “order us around” mode, we shoved the boat back into the water, and took off scrambling.

The afternoon version of sailing set out much easier; the winds had settled down, the waves were manageable, and we were ready to eat sandwiches and crack open beers as soon as we were out of the mooring. All of a sudden, Brendan pointed behind me and yelled my favorite word: “WHALE!”

We all turned just in time to see the unmistakable black of a humpback whale breaching, and all of a sudden our excursion went from strict relaxation to high fives and “holy shit!”s. More remarkably, the whale breached four more times as we watched, and for the first time, I got to hear in person the low growling sound that is a whale talking.

There’s a humbling and terrifying feeling that happens in you when you’re in a 19-foot boat mere yards away from a 25-30 foot humpback whale. It could take you out pretty much instantly, and yet kt has no intention or desire to. At the same time, seeing a whale in the ocean means that there’s no feeling bad about it: the experience is without the sneaky feelings that aquariums give.

It was magical. And everyone on the boat was as excited or more excited than me, which catapulted us all into a pervasive sense of joy that made Miller High Life actually taste like the champagne of beers all afternoon.

On our way home a couple of days later, we stopped at Nauset Beach for an impromptu afternoon barbeque with some friends-of-friends; I spent the day looking out at the ocean and watching seals play in the waves. I mostly fail at having the appropriate words to describe these feelings, but all you really need to know about me is that I’m the kind of person who other people equate with videos of sea otters holding hands.

I spent the drive home trying to decide how weird it would be to go back to school for marine biology and trying to ignore the fact that Brendan really, really likes to listen to Bugs Bunny cartoon music. In reality, it seems that I’m not entirely unlike Ishmael before me, and one doesn’t need to become a marine biologist to recognize that when one is grim about the mouth, one might consider taking to the sea.

Here are some facts.

1) Every boy who had the most remote of romantic interests in me between the years of 1998 - 2003 seemed to come equipped with a Wilco mix tape.  I thought Wilco was boring.  The mix tapes piled up in my bedroom.  I tried not to think about any implications of what this might say about myself or the kind of dudes who loved me.

2) I have a friend who looks a great deal like Jeff Tweedy.  He also happens to love Jeff Tweedy.  He made me listen to “Sky Blue Sky” when it came out and I loved it because it sounded like a 70’s soft rock record.

3) Then all of a sudden I loved all of the other Wilco records too, even though they sound like Wilco and not like 70’s soft rock records.  I wondered what was wrong with my ears for all of those years.  I assumed this is what getting old sounds like.

4) I am going to spend all of this last Summer Friday sitting in my office listening to “Summerteeth.”  I want to apologize to all of the boys whose mix tapes I ignored and to Jeff Tweedy for all of those years we missed out on being together.  I want to submit “the ashtray says you’ve been up all night” to the canon of Greatest Lines in Literature.

I still assume this is what getting old sounds like.

5) Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm.

I’ve always seen adventure as a solo trip, rooted in the idea that only one person can stand on the peak of a mountain at a time and that Indiana Jones would have gotten a lot more done if he hadn’t always had to rescue some girl along the way.  Still, there are times when one’s sense of the world is necessarily enhanced by the presence of others. Indiana, for example, benefited greatly from the comic relief and quick reflexes of Short Round, who was basically The Best Sidekick Ever.

And so when I set off this past weekend to Cape Cod, it was not a journey rooted in solitude, but in the knowledge that when I got there, a whole mess of the Brooklyn contingent would already be there because the opposite of “alone” is “wedding”, and the best part of living in New York is getting to leave it.

A great deal of firsts were accomplished, about which I will write later, and about which you already probably know if you know me in the slightest (because dudes, I can’t stop talking about the whale.)  One thing that hit me hard, though, was taking group pictures, dancing, and sitting around a bonfire with a particular group of boys and realizing: this is where we ended up, somehow.

People make friends with co-workers all of the time, but how they end up completely entrenched in your everyday is another story altogether.  Nine years ago this month, I was the most timid little 20-year-old person on the planet, but a friend pulled a favor and basically shoved me into an internship at my favorite indie record label.  These are things you’re not really meant to survive, but I managed to get a career out of it.  I managed to get their publicist to remember my name, and nine years later I brought him as my platonic date to Cape Cod, and we posed for pictures with two of our closest friends, both of whom sat next to us in that office for years.  One of whom became my best pal, who brought me home for dinner one night and introduced me to his roommates, who in turn befriended half of Brooklyn and invited us all to this particular wedding where we celebrated their nuptials with great fanfare. 

Cape Cod Lesson One: Be careful who you meet, because you might just keep them.