My building is modeled after a hotel, so we have breakfast and happy hour in the lobby. It’s one of the reasons why it can feel like Melrose Place at times and also why it is so easy to stay on top of what’s going on.
The dogs and I are walking in Perry Heights, which is a tiny historical neighborhood immediately behind my apartment building.
Perry Heights has some pretty single-family homes and it is a great place to walk dogs because the area is removed from all of the gay bars on Cedar Springs road. This cute residential area is also very poorly lit at night – the few street lights that exist are dim and often covered by huge trees.
The darkness of Perry Heights makes it really hard to pick up after my dogs without using the flashlight application my phone. However, the darkness it made it really easy to notice a car slowly creeping towards us with its lights dimmed.
She’s a Labradoodle (Labrador + Poodle mix) and about four months old.
I’ve contemplated getting a second dog ever since moving to Texas because I left Hugo back in Minnesota.
There a ton of dogs in my building, but Günter was still getting increasingly withdrawn at home.
Fall hasn’t quite arrived in Dallas yet – everything is still green and the temperature is way too hot to wear anything but shorts.
However, it is not as if I’m really spending a significant amount of time enjoying the weather – I’m inside working for most of the weekdays, and my weekends are spent freelancing inside neighborhood cafes because it is too hot to sit outside.
Freelancing at OakLawn Coffee
A random I.T. problem knocked out my company’s web applications and email systems for most of the morning, but instead of enjoying the weather at the pool, I took some time to page through this blog.
My experience with weddings is very limited:
I was a groomsman in this wedding, so it was somewhat nerve-racking, but nothing disastrous happened.
The photographer extraordinaire taking a picture of the rings at the Pierce House!
I think people were a little amused by my (utter) ignorance about how weddings work. For example – I had never heard of a receiving line. They don’t show that in movies!
The wedding was at Pierce House, which is a historic mansion in Lincoln, MA.
The Pierce House in Lincoln, MA.
We were also really close to Lexington and Concord…so history.
One of my favorite time management concepts is “Who’s got the Monkey?” by William Oncken, Jr. This time management classic is targeted at managers, but I think this time management skill works great for non-managerial employees too.
The author uses the “monkey on your back” metaphor to describe how we assign tasks to each other. The “monkey” belongs to whoever has the next move.
You typically have a monkey on your back when someone has a task that you agree to take on, or a problem that you agree to look into. You get the monkey because the burden is on you to act.
The monkey doesn’t jump back to the other person until you complete your task and the next move is theirs.
Monkeys from bosses and customers are inevitable, (and part of your job to deal with), but monkeys from peers and subordinates can sabotage your performance.
It is 5:15 a.m., and I am typically one of the first people at the café. (It is the first stop on the morning dog walk.)
Aside from the normal collection of doctors and nurses, there is a strange, short man standing by the half-and-half. He’s mumbling and shaking.
I look over to the barista, who is glaring at the man, who is apparently high.
Apparently there was a boom of filming here about 3 years ago, which makes me wonder whether I moved to Dallas after it was a fad.
Am I late to the party?
Is Dallas no longer a thing?
I had this experience while living in Miami, but not so much in Minneapolis. (When was the last major Minneapolis TV show? Mary Tyler Moore? Rehab Addict?)
A consistent error is that movies and TV shows tend to compress all of South Florida into one miniature city. Characters will often go from South Beach to Palm Beach within minutes, despite the 75 mile gap in real life. Also, traffic doesn’t appear to exist on the TV version of Miami. This often makes the shows too distracting to watch.
One thing that filmmakers get right about Miami is the collection of bizarre characters. You can’t make that shit up.
All the typical things happened – there were drag queens, ridiculous outfits, sloppy messes, and brawling lesbians.
Unlike Minneapolis gay pride or Chicago gay pride, I got to experience this parade as a resident. My building is right in the heart of the metroplex’s gay district, so I didn’t have any of the typical logistics to worry about.
My building also threw a block party for residents with a drag stage and open bar. My neighbors and I spent most of our time watching from our gated-off VIP section on the parade route.
Dancing at the iLume Block Party at Dallas Pride.
In addition to the open bar, there were also these guys from a local HIV resource center walking around handing out jello shots. I think they overestimated the number of party attendees, so they ended up giving 10+ shots to each person.
Although these apps can be entertaining, they are mostly just reminders about how terrible people are.
There are many creeps, bots, and boogeymen on gay dating apps, but the most confusing character is the guy who is genuinely confused about why people won’t chat with him before receiving a face picture.
I normally just block these clowns, but sometimes I do some #gaysplaining:
My Facebook feed has been full of complaints about the Stonewall movie ever since the trailer came out.
The most common objection to the film (or at least the trailer) is that it focuses on the fictional story of an attractive, square-jawed blonde guy.
This is supposedly problematic because the real heroes of Stonewall were a diverse collection of drag queens, lesbians, transgender individuals, and ethnic/racial minorities.
But here we have these diverse historical figures relegated to bit roles while we focus on a classically handsome white male.
Hollywood is dominated by white males. That’s how we get ridiculous moments like Matt Damon explaining diversity to Effie Brown on Project Greenlight. (Effie is also the only person in the room who isn’t a white male.)
The bigger someone’s title was, the harder they were to understand. I found myself leaving large meetings wondering what, if anything, had been said.
Who talks like that?
I thought that corporate jargon was the verbal equivalent of bad writing – a pretentious and unnecessarily convoluted way of speaking.
I prided myself on speaking plainly and avoiding the vague language that was so rampant throughout my company. However, I’ve come to realize that there are a various types of corporate jargon that serve specific purposes.
I kept getting told by my neighbors that I have only been to the outskirts of downtown, so I decided to finally make the trek on Saturday morning’s dog walk.
It’s a cool place.
A building just off of Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas
A fountain near Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.
Podcasts have come a long way – they used to be these clunky massive MP3 files that you had to download and manually transfer to your MP3 player. (Remember MP3 players?)
Now podcasts are available as free audio streams that you can listen to on the TuneIn Radio app or iTunes.
Like so many people, the show that first got me hooked on podcasts was Serial.
Season 1 of Serial followed the 1999 murder of high school student Hae Min Lee. It’s like a radio version of a 48 Hours true crime episode.
Serial was so addictive that I would wait for new episodes like an old lady anticipating a radio soap opera.
The second season of Serial is set to appear this fall.
I’m so excited.
New condos, townhouses, and apartment buildings are springing up throughout my neighborhood. The vast majority of these are insanely expensive luxury developments.
Rents are also jumping, despite the glut of cookie-cutter buildings.
Cookie-cutter town homes in the Oak Lawn neighborhood of Dallas. They start in the “low 400s”
Perhaps new arrivals like myself are out-pacing the building crews.
My building always has an informal pool party on Labor Day. The management company stocks the pool fridge with about 100 pounds of meat and soda, which we can grill throughout the weekend.
Almost everyone also brings cocktails to my apartment building’s pool, but most us don’t put much effort into our drinks.
This weekend it was time to step our cocktail game up.
Boozy chocolate drinks at the iLume pool in Dallas, Texas.
Boozy chocolate drink recipe with Baileys and Captain Morgan White Rum.
The Katy Trail is a long biking and walking path that cuts through Uptown Dallas. You can take the trail toward downtown Dallas or Highland Park.
We typically go for 5.5 miles in the morning and 3 or 4 miles in the evening.
My Fitbit friends must hate me.
A good week on Fitbit, mostly due to our rambling Katy Trail walks.
It’s ass-hot in Dallas during the summer, so we typically have to start our morning jaunts around 5 a.m.
According to Wired, the creator of this account wanted to “poke fun at all the people hashtagging photos with #liveauthentic and #socality. The homogeneity of their authenticity and universality of their socality all but demanded satirization.”
Apparently Socality is some sort of hipster Christian movement, but I doubt many of the Instagramers participating in the hashtag know that.
Road trip. Ready for this weekends adventure in the mountains! 🌲🗻 #vsco #vscocam #socality #liveauthentic #livefolk #kinfolk #visualcoop #finditliveit #getoutside #letsgosomewhere #neverstopexploring #exploreeverthing #exploremore #explore #adventure #lifeofadventure #pnw #pacificnorthwest #thatpnwlife #northwestisbest #thegeatpnw #greatnorthcollective #socalityportland #pdx #communityfirst #oregon #upperleftusa #peoplescreatives #wildernessculture #instagood A photo posted by Socality Barbie (@socalitybarbie) on
Karen Swallow Prior wrote in The Atlantic that the core marker of hipsterdom is “the claim of authenticity, a claim that paradoxically, is undermined by the very self-consciousness required to stake such a claim.”
This is exactly what Sociality Barbie satirizes.
I have been in Dallas for almost two months now.
I love this place.
A statue near the entrance of the Dallas Museum of Art in downtown Dallas.
A newly constructed skyscraper in downtown Dallas, near the American Airlines Arena.
Note: This post reflects my personal opinions, and not those of my employer.
Thomson Reuters is a conglomerate with about 50,000 employees across the globe.
Thomson Reuters is different than other conglomerates like Berkshire Hathaway or Samsung, because it has a standardized set of operating principles, consistent branding across divisions, and shared IT and HR resources.
I first noticed the problem after glancing at my email around 8 a.m. yesterday. I somehow had 54 emails despite being at inbox zero the night before.
