6 p&p

Like anyone my age I've had my fair share of amateur gropings, and halfhearted love affairs, but I've not yet found something more meaningful. I haven't found anything to write home about. I've looked in bars, in coffee shops, at rock shows, weddings birthday parties and once even at a bar mitzvah.
But now I know what I want, and I have an idea of where to find it. It's not in bars, or dance clubs, or at a speed dating event.
It's not romance I'm after, or a quick score. I want action, adventure, and true mystery. I want to go where no man has gone before, and where no man will likely ever go again.

Ian: You're going to post a classified ad for a girl who just wants to get knocked up?
Steven: No, it's more than that. This is a social experiment. Why do you think your parents got divorced Josh?
Josh: I don't know, maybe because I was a total fuck up?
Ian: No, you didn't fuck up until after they got divorced.
Steven: Your parents got divorced because they weren't in love. You were the reason they tried to make it work for so long. I want to see if absent any prior dynamic relationship of the presence of a child could make love manifest itself. If not, the worst case is that the kid gets a pair of Christmases.
Ian: Yeah, and at least this kid wouldn't have the trauma of seeing it's dad chase another man out of the house with a bat.
Josh: I don't see why you always have to bring that up. It was a very confusing time for me. You know that guy was the shortstop on my dad's company softball team?
Steven: We know, and you thought they were running the strangest drills you'd ever seen. You've told us.
Josh: It was strange! Have you ever seen a shortstop get hit by a pitch while he was in the field?

5 -- Philistines and Philanderers

We are shaped by those around us, whether we appreciate it or not. It doesn't matter that you like a person, or that you respect them, but rather that you inhabit this earth with them that makes them a part of you. We are all out brother's keepers.
This is a story about my friends and me, and a search for meaning in this world. Before I was a graduate student, before I went away to college, my two best friends imparted themselves onto me, and I unto them. And even though I've gone further into my studies than either of them, whether for their disinterest or their disability, I don't have any more answers than they do. I have no greater ability to spin a world's meaning from whole cloth than the highest of philistines or the lowest of philanderers.
What has become most apparent to all of us is that must people attribute the meaning in their life to a love they've found. A love for art, a love for women, a zest for life. Meaning comes from within, and our insides are shaped by what surrounds us.

4

Religion is the crux of the problem. I had a girl tell me once that she believed math in all its elegance and glory was proof that there was a higher being watching over all of creation. She didn't need to observe the incredible unlikelihood of a species evolving to a point where the creation of new languages was almost a forgone conclusion. She didn't need to see the splendor of an asteroid's tail, or study the water cycle, or understand the underpinnings of electromagnetism, or really be aware of any number of truly beautiful coincidences. All she needed to keep the faith was a Fibonacci sequence.
"Do you know what a Mersenne prime is?" she asked me, before explaining why she believed it to be the ultimate proof that people are here for a reason. "A Mersenne prime is a prime number in the form of 2 to the nth minus 1. It so happens that in every Mersenne prime the term that 2 is raised to is also prime. How beautiful is that?"
I didn't have the heart to tell her that I thought it was about as beautiful as a car crash. That it sounds to me like a Mersenne prime serves even less of a purpose than an ordinary prime number, and the only reason we know anything about them at all is because some rubber-necker decided to stop the flow of society just to observe the wreckage.
"It sounds magical. It really puts things in perspective," interrupted my terrible habit of being polite. "Maybe you could parlay that into a theology dissertation."

3

"How was your day?" Karen said.
"Okay." I replied, "It's Tuesday, nothing extraordinary."
"Tuesdays rarely are sweetie."
She had a certain glow about her. It could have been the computer screen she was grazing over. But it wasn't. She looked at the screen begrudgingly as she tried to put the finishing touches on one of her numerous term papers. When she glanced at me, she was beaming.
But a relationship goes both ways, and the glow she saw on my face was borne of cathode rays.
And that was the first time that I realized I wasn't in love with her. Years had turned into month. Months have turned into Weeks. Weeks had turned into days. Time passed, as it did for everyone, but the most telling thing about the decline in our relationship was that Saturdays had somehow become Tuesdays.
Life was mundane, and I, had stopped noticing how beautiful life really was. When you quit taking account of those little things time just goes by faster. And you get old. And you die.
Death is an ugly thing. And this Tuesday just happened to be extraordinary.
"I'm calling off the wedding." I said. "I know you told me I probably get cold feet when we got closer to the date, but this isn't just cold feet. I think you should know that."

2: Roommates

As an Economist, and a human-being, I have determined that roommates are good for one thing and one thing only: sharing rent. For this they're invaluable. I know I couldn't afford my nice apartment with its spacious and the incredibly volume of its cabinets.
But you're crazy if you think for one second that I'd invite any of my roommate to a wedding. In fact, I'd invite every one of my ex-girlfriends to a wedding before I invited even one ex-roommate. You know why that is? It's because my roommates have all been total creeps, and shit-bags. I had one roommate, he was the kind of guy who puts a telescope by his window in the middle of a large urban center surrounded by large apartment buildings; The only stars he'd ever see with that were the glow-in-the-dark kind that speckle the ceiling of the nice lady's room across the way.
You know Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook guy? The genius behind the news-feed, and all sorts of other invasions of privacy? I bet he loves having roommates. There probably isn't anything in the world that could creep that guy out, because he already does all the creepy things in the world. He even had to come up with new creepy things just to get his jollies off.
I hate living with people too. Living with someone just brings out the littlest annoyances, and amplifies them until it drives you crazy. I can't imagine how compatible you'd have to be to make things work, you know? I mean, I love my parents, couldn't stand living with them. I don't wonder why the divorce rate is so high. With all the time married couples spend together, I'm surprised it's so low. Hell, I wonder why the homicide rate is so low.
The worst part about living with people is when they think it's okay to just use your stuff. Sure, it starts with something really innocuous, like they'll use a cookie sheet, but it'll definitely escalate from there. They might start eating your food, or using your scale, and that seems fine, but it's a slippery slope. Pretty soon they start using your mouth wash, and at that point they've got their foot in the bathroom door, and it is all over. They'll use soap, and deodorant, and all sorts of private products.
I even had one roommate who my live-in girlfriend cheated on me with. That is crossing the ultimate boundary. And I didn't find out because I caught them together, no this was much more poetic. This girl I was dating was really open, she was honest, and strait forward, you know, most of the time. She'd even leave the bathroom door open when she was in there, but not when my roommate was home because, and here's the kicker--she thought he was a total creep. So one day, I walk into the apartment, and she's on the John (incidentally also the name of my roommate at the time) and she says clearly, her voice not muffled by a door, "Honey, is that you?" And as I start to respond, I walk into the living room to find none other than my roommate greeting me with a smile, and I knew right away something was up.
The good part about all this was that there wasn't a long protracted awkward phase as one of us looked for a new apartment, with equally shitty roommates. I just moved all her crap into his room, which turned out to be a great decision for two reasons. First, because I was still paying a third of the rent, but was now getting a ton of bonus space. The second reason might not be quite as obvious to some people, but if you've ever had someone cheat on you, or if you've ever cheats on someone you're probably familiar with the golden rule: Once a cheater, always a cheater.
Hey, I've got to be some one's roommate, don't I?

1

I made two applications my Junior year of High school: one was a job that seems to rejects no one, the other was a prep academy summer program that accepts almost no one. just my luck, the job snubbed me, and the school gave me a scholarship.
So I spent my Summer in New Hampshire. For a time, I thought I loved everyone, and I told everyone, and I was in love with the world. It turned out though that I was really just sleep deprived. When I woke up, I realized that I didn't love the world, but I didn't realize that I really did love someone until it was too late.
The first hello, the last goodbye, the premiere and the penultimate kiss. That's all I remember, and the rest is just a drunken blur. When I finally sobered up, she was on a passenger plane en route to LaGuardia, and I had just a pair of aviator's that she had picked out moments earlier, and a tear in my eye.