My new Kindle

June 25th, 2009 | By Conor | 8 Comments »

Liz bought me a Kindle for Father’s Day. (A Kindle, for the proudly uninitiated, is an electronic reading device.) It is a marvelous gift, especially for somebody who takes the subway every day. I tried it out for the first time today, taking it from my bag and pressing a button and Shazam! (Or Kapow! for those who do not speak Turkish.) My book appears, magically, at the page where I left off.

It was at that moment, on the subway, that I noticed for the first time that not only did nobody else have a Kindle, but I had never seen anybody with a Kindle on the subway. (Strange, because Amazon makes you feel like you’re the last person on Earth to be reading off mutilated, processed rainforest wood that potentially held the cure for cancer but we’ll now never know because you had to find out what happens when Shopoholic Ties the Knot.)

I also noticed people openly staring not just at it, but at me for having it (I suppose they’d already read all the in-train advertisements for celebrity podiatrists.) Holding that thin, white case, I suddenly felt like I had been beamed there from the future to spy on 2009 Earthlings, trying to act all casual in my silver neoprene unitard while standing on a Segway, and trying to fit in by breezily and loudly mentioning, in Artoo Detoo beeps and boops, that I looked forward to reading my Jonathan Grisham novel.

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The Lives of Others

June 24th, 2009 | By Conor | 3 Comments »

I got an invitation to take a Facebook quiz yesterday that asked “What Chinese City are You?” I remember thinking, what are my options? Because I know Bejing and Shanghai. Am I one of those?

I don’t know if I can take these quizzes anymore, because frankly I don’t need Facebook to tell me What Decade I Am or Which TV Movie Lawyer I am or Who My Celebrity Boyfriend is or How Well I Know TV’s Matthew Perry. Nor do I want anybody to send me a Rhubarb plant and I do not wish to send a Rhubarb plant back to you. I don’t know the person Facebook tells me I should be friends with, and I don’t know most of the people who send me event invitations.

Yet there is something about Facebook that we all love, and I think it is because it gives us a peak into the lives of others without having to actually engage. It’s why Twitter is so popular, I suppose, even though the very idea of signing up for Twitter, at this moment, makes me want to climb a tree and refuse come down, kicking at the fireman who is trying to grab hold of my leg until they have to taser me down. (“OMG – just saw man get tasered out of a tree!! NYC is sooo cray-zeeeeeee!!”)

I do use Facebook, and I can assure you I am the first to click on any news story that contains “Paris Hilton” and “tweets about fall in toilet.” But I also know that I live without those sites, like those folks in Iran.

What I cannot live without, I have to tell you and I am ashamed to admit, is “Daisy of Love.”

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Public Profile

June 10th, 2009 | By Conor | 3 Comments »

We write about what we know, and at the moment, I know a lot about three month old babies. Or at least I know more than I did three months ago.

I realize that there are a lot of people out there, girl people, who really like babies. For me, there was little to get excited about until I had one of my own. To wit, this is a direct quote from a blog entry of mine from January 2006:
[New parents] believe that when they meet a friend, there is nothing more important in this world than relating the fact that their child pointed at a bush for the first time. The friend could be standing in the path of a speeding dump truck, the driver could be waving madly that he has no brakes, but that parent will still have to squeeze in the fact that Baby “ate-almost-an-entire-bowl-of-peas-this-morning-LOOK OUT!”

I am now that guy.

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First Born Son

May 31st, 2009 | By Conor | 5 Comments »

Liz and I have a son. His name is Finn; he is wonderful. We are madly in love with him. I am using the term “madly in love” here as a way of showing the lengths I am willing to go to illustrate how much I care for this child.

In any other circumstances, you see, the term “madly in love” is, for me, utterly unusable. In the past when I have heard parents use it to describe their feelings for their newborns I would, if I was feeling generous, merely roll my eyes. That’s because it always reminds me of a kind of dramatic proclamation that goes beyond the reasonable. “Madly in love?” Really? You will find the phrase in Jane Austin adaptations where Kate Winslet (who else plays these roles?) will burst into her mother’s bedroom in a flowing nightgown and cry, in an English accent, “I met him last night at the Wickersham’s Ball, Mother! His name is Philip and we are madly in love! We marry Friday week!”

We are not madly in love like that. But we are crazy about this boy and we love him to death. I’m going to tell you more about him now.
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