SHE’S FOR REALS.
Yes. I’ve watched the movie a million times. Yes. I was that guy that was like: “Huh, I wonder if they really have that site up.” Yes. I read all the entries on the site. Yes. I need to stop this. Yes. This is why you all adore me.

“Please call us back as soon as possible so we can get your information and send over these tickets!” A heavy Midwestern accent says to my voicemail last evening.
The voicemail and the very nasally voice mentioned some sort of drawing I entered when I was visiting a friend in Milwaukee a few months ago. I tried to remember the drawing as I jotted down the phone number I was to call tor reach “Kayla” the girl with a voice that sound like she was wearing a clothespin on her nose.
I sat on my couch with the pen and slip of paper with the random digits inbetween my fingers rehashing every place I had been in that visit where I could have been naive enough to think I had an opportunity to win anything. But instead of dwelling I seized the moment and dialed the number and awaited someone to pick up.
I know. I know. I totally know what you’re thinking. “BYRON! COME ON! This is too good to be true! You can’t even think for a second that this isn’t some sort of set up… some sort of ploy. Some sort of way to find out your personal information with a faux bribe! BYRON WAKE UP!”
That’s the the thing you may or may not know about me. I’m pretty awake. But sometimes you just want to hope that something randomly exciting could be true. Like somewhere there HAS to be a lost Atlantis or the Bermuda Triangle DOES exist or Jake Gyllenhaal is TOTALLY gay. Sometimes it’s just more fun to have that second that it is possible that something you weren’t expecting and totally have always wanted to happen to you… could actually be happening. In that exact moment! Especially since that something could change your point of view of late.
“Hello? Sundance Vacations, this is Kayla.” Says the pinched voice.
“Yes, um, I just received a call… that … I won something?”
“Oh! Yes! You did! You are one of our lucky winners!”
“Well… how does this work…what do I have to do?” I hesitated. “This sounds too good to be true.”
“Ohhhhh, no. It’s true. You just need to come to our office and have a meeting with us for an hour. We will show you some of our properties we have available in other states that you can buy… and…”
“SO! Wait. I have to buy something to get this trip…” I interrupt annoyed that my Thai food was getting cold from this call.
“Well… yes… sorta… but it…”
“I’m not interested…”
“No, sir, wait! It’s a free trip! You just…”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” I snap.
“No… I never said…” Her voice lowers to a whisper.
“Do you think that I don’t know what this is about? Some sort of time sharing?”
“No… it’s…”
“It’s been a long year for me… I don’t need people calling me during dinner to try to make me think I have things coming to me that aren’t. This is bull-shit.”
“But… it is a free trip all you have to do is…”
“No.” I snap and hang up the phone.
As sit down and poke at my spring rolls I realize I was a bit harsh with her. She was probably some college student just doing her job. HELL! I’ve done phone sales before and I KNOW how hard it is.
But there is something about false hope. That feeling you get when all hopes are game and the minute you find out it’s not going to happen: a free trip, getting a dream job or having a relationship that you were so willing to put the work in to actually succeed, feels like you just paid a million dollars for an non-returnable jacket that people say makes you look fat.
False hope is especially bad when you take out that lost hope on a cute girl named Kayla. Sorry Kayla.

My Saturday night was totally consisting of Chex Mix and a movie I will not say the name of because I could get beat down in a dark alley(or in a bright sunny-day alley, for that matter) if I mention what the name could even be close to(ahem, The Holiday).
Anyway, I was doing the whole “In for the evening” look. You know, my “in for the evening” attire with my “in for the evening” messy hair and “in for the evening” unshaven look while sprawled on my couch. I may or may not have been writing down quotes from the movie that I will not mention(ahem, The Holiday) laughing and crying and being all “Dang! Why do certain lines in certain movies HAVE to ALWAYS be right!” Because, lately, that’s what I have been doing… just looking for places and things and movies and music to identify with. In certain segments of our life, when we’re going through some things we just need a little help with, we try to find things where we can say: “Tooootalllly….” Because, well, as much as our friends love us they do get tired of saying: “It’s going to be alright.” And as much as our parents and mailmen and the guy that walks his dog every morning right in front of my apartment say: “It’s going to be alright”, you still keep searching for answers. And things seem tough and Saturday nights like that can seem lonely and the world can seem bitter and cruel and mean and dumb and not worth all the time you try to invest in it and then you get really crabby and your “In for the evening” attire isn’t as comfy as it was supposed to be and you hate the world and nothing seems right in life and then… you get a text that says:
“Will passed away.”
You will pause your movie. You will reread the text three and four and six times. You will sit up and hold your cell phone in your hand and shake it a little bit to see if the words that form that sentence will jumble in to a new organization of words to spell out something that will not make you want to cry.
Will was this big happy guy that came to my bar every shift I worked. He was the type of guy that had that laugh that echoed even if the room would have been padded with thick gooey no echo stuff. This laugh. DAMN! Huge. Loud. And it happened often because he always told bad jokes that were so bad they ended up good.
“Byron, Byron what does a gay horse say?” He would ask winking while sipping on his lite beer while I’d be doing glass cleaning.
“Um, I dunno Will, what does a gay horse say?”
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!”
And I would shake my head and laugh and then we’d most likely cheer our beers and he and his friends would stay for hours entertaining my often long shifts at the bar. He was just a good person that, well, you can just tell… because he got nicer and nicer the more drinks he drank. You can always tell a person’s heart by what kind of drunk they are. I didn’t know him well, just from the bar. But sometimes you just know people no matter how often you see him.
Plus. He was only twenty-six… my exact age.
I sat in my dark apartment with Cameran Diaz paused with her mouth open on my t.v. screen, I realized I’ve been looking for answers in a lot of wrong places. Movies give you the pretty version of all endings. Friends, as much as they love you, love you and want to tell to you the things you most likely want to hear. The mail man, well, we really never talk about anything except magazines getting stuck in mailboxes. But the people, the ones you barely know, they are the ones with the answers. They are the ones, when you lose them, don’t leave gaping holes in your life, but they leave harsh reminders.
They remind you that sometimes you do not have enough time to sit around and feel sorry for what isn’t happening and go for the things that are. They remind you that no matter how old you are ANYTHING can happen at ANY time.
They remind you that you should laugh as loud as you can because it will leave an echo that will be heard long after you are gone and will remind those, even those you didn’t know it could remind, that things are much better than they seem.

So a woman that smelled like my grandma sat down next to me on the train the other day. This doesn’t happen often because, you know, my grandma never really smelled like anyone. She had that grandma smell that if you put her in a grandma line-up and someone blindfolded you, you would have totally known which grandma was my grandma. It was this mix of lightly scented floral hand lotion, fresh of the clothesline clothes smell and a dash of( I swear to this day) smells like she rubbed daisies all over body. When you’d give her this big hug, it would stay with you. Not in a gross “I smell like old person” way. That’s rude. This was nice.
“You know, you smell like what my grandma used to smell like.” I say to the woman who is now reading a folded over newspaper.”
She looks at me for a second. Raises an eyebrow over her thick rimmed glasses and just nods and returns to read her newspaper.
“So how’s your day going?” I ask trying to get her attention again.
“Fine… just fine… and yours?” She asks putting the paper in her lap. She shifts her body towards me on the train and smiles.
“You know, it’s been tough these past couple of days with deadlines and just trying to get stuff done and…”
We continue the ride talking about everything that has been going on in each others lives. I told her about my last few vacations. She told me about the birds she’s been watching out in the back bird feeder of her house and about the seeds she had to shake out of the now dying flowers so she can replant for the next season. We laughed and she playfully tapped on the shoulder to tell me that I was making her laugh too hard.
As the train arrived at my stop I got up and wrapped my backpack around my shoulder and hugged her and told her I’d see her again soon. The instant I stepped off the train and headed up to the busy city street I felt a whole bit lighter.
Of course, this didn’t at all happen. I ended up sitting next to this woman in complete silence while she paged through her newspaper slowly breathing not to draw attention to the fact that she indeed did smell like my Oma, but in fact was not my Oma.
But sometimes, so we don’t forget them, we have to imagine that they’re there with us in those moments where usually nothing happens. While brushing your teeth or clipping your toenails or Swiffering the hardwood floors or on the train … some song or the way the light hits a wall or the way something smells will instantly have you in that moment conversing and chatting like the people you have lost are never really gone.
That’s the great thing about the past. It’s like a good perfume… too much of it is overbearing, but just the right amount in the right spots will make people unforgettable.

Rion Stassi, a hip designer friend, had a hip design party at a designy hip lounge this past week. It was one of those parties where you walk in and that ambient tech-music swarms around you along with the best dressed (short dresses that take months of rent to pay off) and shoes (that I press my face against store front windows for) on the well-dressed feet of those best dressed young twenty-somethings.
Rion is the type of a guy other guys(and guys that, um, like guys) want to be or have. Well dressed, cultured, beautiful friends, Italian(!!!!) and designs hot shit that gets in to a finalists position in a design contest with something that looks like this:

When you’re at these events you tend to get placed in those positions where you have to awkwardly start up a conversation with a stranger. For me, this usually involves a few cocktails.
“So, wow, you teach?” I ask this friend of Stossi’s. She’s this cute brunette with a perfect fitting black dress on.
“Yup, world cooking to children!” She glows when she says this. “My fiance teaches also. He also is an actor!
I start to tell them what I’m up to these days. Freelance writing and bartending and designing and teaching and traveling. As I continue to meet more of Rion’s friends and strangers I start to find out that everyone in that room is, well, pretty fricken awesome.
The cute blond drinking a martini was an event planner for a non for profit childrens’ organization. Another guy was a designer for a t.v. show they shoot in Chicago. The guy wearing this flashy silver tie does editing for a local magazine. The more I chatted the more I realized that I was in a room full of freaking talented people. Were many of them rich? Um, no. But where they doing things that they were really in to and were proud to talk about?
So many parties I’ve been to have involved people who talk about their careers as if they were whispering the diagnosis of cancer: “I’m a secretary at a bank” a woman will mumble or “I work retail downtown” another one will say. And then they will go on and talk about anything else than the job– nice cars or big houses or where they got their last massage. But the people at this event seemed really content in talking about projects that weren’t only interesting, but were making an impact on other people… getting a voice or educating or anything other than just pushing paper.
On my cab ride home I had the window rolled down. It was one of those perfect ends to a perfect night. I leaned my head back on the seat and watched as the city scape whipped by. There are times where we forget where we are. When we are surrounded by so many things, it’s easy to look at what others have and try to figure out why you don’t have it. You know, an unlimited income to shop at Barney’s COOp(sigh) or one of those houses in Lincoln Park made out of all glass(ho hum), but then you think about the things you do have that those same people might not: Really really really talented friends who are actually making an impact on others and not just on their credit cards. That’s why I moved to this city. I have to stop worrying about money… especially when I’ll just marry rich. (Wink).

Netflix, holy dang, Netflix has blown my mind in that fact that it is totally throwing these crazy awesome recommendations at me. It’s like Netflix and I were total roommies back in the dorms of college and even though we have grown so much since we were last really in the same room together, we totally still get each other. I love you Netflix!
ANYWAY, “the ‘flix” (we’re totally on the nickname basis) recommended this move called Jeffery(as did Josh at the same time!). It’s this movie about this gay guy that’s from Wisconsin(interesting…) who lives in New York in the early 90′s when HIV and AIDS just started to become a huge fear. So the main character vows to stop having sex because it is terrifying and that is, of course, when he meets the hot love of his life that… well, has HIV. The story follows this quirky guy(named Jeffery) through this crazzzzy adventure.
But there was one thing in the movie that really really really bugged me that was said by one of the characters:
“In a few years, this whole HIV thing will be cured… gone… right?”
(Excellent transition starts here). I’m running/walking the AIDS FOUNDATION WALK/RUN this weekend here in Chicago because, well, it still hasn’t been cured. And as much as I love well made movies that discuss the topic of these issues… I don’t want the issue to still exist. And, of course, you can totally help.

If you’d like to DONATE… VISIT HERE.

Walking on the street to get something to eat on a quiet fall day.
Byron: So, you know, maybe he and I will work out someday. That feeling won’t go away. It’s just one of those feelings that you have forever and as hard as you try to get rid of it, you will always have that feeling.
Josh: Like my feelings for Lisa Loeb.
Byron: Yes, Josh. Yes. Just like your feelings for Lisa Loeb.