It’s that time of year…

Time for the proverbial “it’s Thanksgiving, so that’s what I’m going to talk about” column…

But I don’t want to do the usual. I kinda want to do the opposite, since I hate doing “the usual.”

We’ll see how that goes now, I suppose…

So, aside from the upcoming holiday, I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about the idea of hope. It’s not a concept new to my mind, though. It’s definitely something that’s entered my consciousness a fair amount.

I’ve noticed through the years that hope is a funny thing. It’s of course, not something tangible or literal. You can’t touch it, or hold it. And yet, it’s something that so often, gives so many people a positive mindset that they’ve been in search of, and are perhaps in need of.

People have problems in their lives. Come on, admit it, you do. Hell, we ALL do. Any person you meet who says they have no problems whatsoever in their life is either lying to you, or is the luckiest person on the planet. And, I’ve not met that person yet, or even come close. We’ve all got problems and issues to contend with, and that’s just part of the deal and part of life.

And of course, sometimes those problems can be somewhat overwhelming, and persistent and constant, more than the average. Enter, hope.

Hope can keep people going, fighting through those difficult circumstances each day. Hoping for a better circumstance, for things to get better, for things to turn around, envisioning that arena of their life the way they want it to be… It can allow people to temporarily escape from their present reality which they don’t like, and give them the push to continue on.

I know what you’re probably thinking… “What a bunch of crap!” And the cynic in me would venture to agree with you, quite frankly. I mean, I’m …   More

I’ve been thinking a lot about loyalty lately.

Not just the last few days or weeks or so, but for a few years now it’s been a consistent topic on my consciousness.

I’m what I’ve noticed is a bit atypical on this topic. Now, I understand that there’s a reason that the “survival of the fittest” theory exists (thank you, Charles Darwin). After all, there is some logic in play there. But, at the same time, there’s gotta be a line where you still feel a loyalty to your friends and loved ones, and act on it.

Doesn’t there?

For me, I think it’s pretty logical… If someone does something detrimental or negative to a friend of loved one of mine, I think ill of that and also think ill of the person who engaged in that behavior. And I take that approach regardless of whether the person committing the infraction, so to speak, is a friend of mine or someone close to me.

After all, wrong is wrong. Just because I’m close to someone and we have a relationship of whatever sort, that doesn’t magically make the behavior acceptable.

And OF COURSE, the same concept applies to me. Logically, I’d expect my friends and loved ones to hold me to the same standards. I’m no different so…

Now, of course there are lines and limits here. Naturally, the degree that I look negatively on a detrimental action and the person who commits it differs based on what it is and how legitimately bad it is. There’s a difference between bumping into someone and not saying “excuse me” and simply not showing up for a close friend’s birthday without a word… Between forgetting to call someone back and constantly bad mouthing someone behind his back with facetious comments… Between being a few minutes late to pick someone up, and treating a former boyfriend or girlfriend like crap.

You get the idea…

To me, this is all just very logical. It’s …   More

Wow, this is going to be a tough one to write.

I’m actually feeling a little queasy as I start to write this, come to think of it.

Admittedly, I’m not entirely sure how to start…

OK, here we go…

Remember a few weeks ago I wrote a column discussing how I’ve had some, shall we say, “interesting” experiences with dating and girlfriends? Well, here’s a specific story on that front… triggered by the fact that my ex-girlfriend’s birthday was last week.

We’ve been broken up for a couple of months now, and I’ve been dating and I’m sure she has, as well — not that I know this for a fact or anything, but it’s a relatively safe assumption.

Still, I can’t help that I’m aware of it and my brain acknowledges it.

It’s how my mind is wired, for better or worse. I can’t help it.

We ended quite terribly. Everything appeared to be fine. We were on the phone finalizing our plans for the upcoming weekend together, which included our Valentine’s Day plans, before she went into the shower.

Yes, we broke up just a few days before Valentine’s Day. I had to return the gifts I’d already gotten for her. Sucks, huh?

Then she got into the shower, came back out, and was an entirely different person. She called me back, crying hysterically. What the hell happened in that now infamous — in my mind anyway — shower?

I could finally decipher her saying that something was bothering her about me and/or us. I’m not sure which, but that much I was finally able to understand from her.

But she wouldn’t tell me WHAT it was. And to this very day, I still don’t know. I tried for the next 24 hours to get her to tell me, but she refused. She said it was “too hard” to tell me, and she “couldn’t tell me.” I …   More

The Giants are Super Bowl champions again!

Great game, great win…

The same was true a couple of weeks ago when they won the NFC Championship. I watched that game with a bunch of friends at a Kodiak’s in Farmingdale, and the place was packed. Everyone was clearly having a great time and enjoying the game and having fun spending time with friends…

And then, the you-know-what hit the fan…

In the middle of the third quarter, we heard the sound of a glass breaking and yelling from the other side of the bar. Our eyes found the beginnings of a fight that had just broken out, and fists flying.

A fight… at a bar… during a football game. How cliché.

Cliché or not, however, it is what happened. It took about a half a dozen staff members from the bar to eventually separate the two guys. Luckily, after being separated, they dropped it and it was done and over with.

Well, one of the two guys dropped it and was done, anyway. The other gentleman, well, not so much…

After both were ejected from the bar by some of the larger waiters — who locked the side glass door behind them — one of them proceeded to punch that door over and over again until it broke. When the police arrived shortly after (you had to know that cops were going to enter the equation here sooner or later), the story of what had caused the fight finally made its way around the bar.

And this is the part that really pisses me off…

As it turns out, the guy who just wouldn’t let it go was at the bar with his sister, his girlfriend, and his buddy.

The story was that the guy who threw that first punch had been slapping around his girlfriend, and his buddy tried to get him to stop.

Apparently that effort wasn’t appreciated.

Obviously, a few ridiculous things are in play here, from the fight itself, to breaking the door, to not letting it go. But what aggravates me the most, of course, is that …   More

After a week off, I’m back just in time to wish a belated Happy Father’s Day to all of the dad’s out there and everyone celebrating.

A number of weeks ago, as many of you will remember, I wrote a column titled “My Mr. Feeny,” about my mentor of sorts, Roger Humes, and my relationship with him. As I discussed at that time, one reason that relationship is so special to me is that, in realistic terms, I don’t have a father.

I mean, obviously I have a “father.” I know how the birds and the bees work…

Somehow, my “father” read that column and, apparently, all of my columns. I’ve not spoken to him in quite a number of years now, so, I’m not quite sure how he found out that I have a column or where to find it. My best guess is that he just Googled my name in general and my column popped up as one of the search results.

My birthday rolled around not too long after that column ran, and I actually received a birthday card in the mail from my “father.” I’ve received a card from him for my birthday each of the last several years, with a simple, short note that he wrote in it.

This time, however, was different…

It was in that card from him that I learned that he’d read that column. He evidently reads my column regularly, from what I could gather. He inserted a piece of paper into the card on which he typed a longer note. And on this note he wrote that he was upset to learn that I feel I don’t really have a father, and confused about why I feel that way.

Seriously? Are you freakin’ kidding me?

It takes more than that previously mentioned birds and bees “donation” to be a father. I’ve learned that, unfortunately, that concept is lost on many people… and my “father” is one of those people.

Even after everything that happened and was done by my “father” when I was a …   More

My birthday is this week.

I’ll be 28.

Damn, that went fast.

Birthdays can be a time for celebration, but also a time for self-reflection and re-evaluation. We get so lost in the pattern of our everyday lives and the process of running our lives each day, but the time of year a birthday rolls around can provide a good opportunity to take a real look at everything in the big picture.

We have so many goals and aspirations in different arenas of our lives, and sometimes we accomplish those goals and other times we fall short, still striving to achieve them. And I’m certainly no different in that regard, on both sides of the spectrum…

Career-wise and in respect to relationships, I’ve had some good, and some bad. And that’s certainly also par for the course for most people out there. But, there are unquestionably things that I’ve not yet achieved and accomplished that I want to do. I’ve had some great relationships, but I do want to eventually meet the right woman and get married, and have a kid or two. If my mother has her way I’ll have more than one, including at least one daughter, but that’s another story entirely…

Vocationally, I’ve been with four major broadcast and cable networks, and a few production companies, and of course, I now write this column as well. But there are even bigger and better things that I want to accomplish — continuing to develop as a writer, and getting involved with more television projects, this time my own.

One of my favorite quotes actually comes from Will Smith. He said “Being realistic is the easiest traveled road to mediocrity.” So true, so true. After all, if you don’t dream big in the first place, you can’t achieve anything extraordinary. And, while I know some people surely won’t concur with that viewpoint and modus operandi, I certainly abide by it, and have for …   More

If you’re a woman, don’t try to play a round of golf at Augusta National.

I mean, you can try, but it ain’t gonna happen. They aren’t going to let you.

The golf club founded in 1933 clearly thinks it’s still in the 1930’s. They don’t let women join the club, period. Not that their discriminatory membership policy against women was OK even then, but…

The most elite golf club in the country is also home to The Masters golf tournament which, of course, just concluded. IBM is the largest sponsor of the tournament, and traditionally, the CEO of the company is always extended an invitation to become a member of Augusta National. The computer giant, at least publically, has never voiced opposition to this policy.

But this year, there’s a new wrinkle. For the first time, IBM has a female CEO, Virginia Rometty.

What an opportunity for IBM to step up and take a stand for the betterment of our society and our country — to tell Augusta National and The Masters that if they don’t change their policy, IBM will pull its sponsorship dollars from the tournament.

It would have been nice if the company did so when they had male CEOs, or even if other sponsors of the tournament had done so, but there’s a window here now, with a female CEO who can’t be genuinely OK with this policy of gender discrimination.

As the CEO of IBM, Ms. Rometty may want to ignore being blackballed by Augusta National because sponsoring the tournament is good for business, but how good would it be if protesters decided to boycott her products?

Besides, as a female, Augusta’s discriminatory policy surely has to irk her. And as a person, she has to recognize that she’s now in a position to do a great deal of good, not just her gender, but our society and nation as a whole.

It’s amazing to me that in this day and age, a club in the United States of America, private or otherwise, still has a …   More

I survived!

Phew.

You clearly did too.

Damn Hurricane Irene.

The way they were talking on the news, it was like Long Island and other areas in the tri-state region might no longer exist after Irene made her way through. And they weren’t totally off base in that regard, unfortunately. Some parts of Long Island, and upstate New York, New Jersey and Connecticut as well, for that matter, were absolutely annihilated by the storm.

As we’ve all seen in the news, countless people across the region — including many on Long Island — lost power, phone services, running water, had massive flooding, lost countless household items and precious memories… Many are still without power even now, more than a week after the storm. The list goes on and on…

Now, I know that much of the time I write about things that piss me off. Yes, I’m aware of this, it’s not lost on me. Unfortunately, there are just a lot of things on that side of the fence that occur (for all of us) about which I feel comfortable sharing my thoughts. But it’s nice to also be able to talk about, and for me also write about, nice things when they happen as well.

No, I don’t mean the hurricane is a nice thing to write about.

I’m talking about something nice that I experienced as a result of the hurricane.

I live in the massive mandatory evacuation zone south of Sunrise Highway, and eventually I decided, unlike many other people, that I didn’t want to roll the dice and flaunt the evacuation order.

When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, she told me that my mother and I could come to her place to wait out the storm. Her mother had told her that any of her friends who needed a place to stay to wait out the hurricane were welcome at their home. After some slight deliberation about what to do in general about the hurricane and the weekend, my mother and I both decided to take them up on their kind offer, and …   More

It can get lonely at times, I admit it.

I mean, everyone’s been there and can relate.

Being single can be, well, challenging.

Being one of the single people — if not the sole single person — amongst groups of friends and couples… at a wedding… at a family event… You’ve gotta love getting asked “So, when are you going to settle down?” fifteen times at a four hour party. Regardless, being single can make for interesting circumstances.

As a result, people often end up just kinda going with whatever they can get in their dating life. A.K.A., settling for what they can get — someone who they don’t find as attractive as they’d like, or even don’t really find terribly attractive at all, someone who doesn’t have many of the personality traits which they’d like in a partner. Or even someone who doesn’t want the same things or share the same values.

Of course, I have many friends in relationships and know many other people who are in relationships as well, whether as boyfriend and girlfriend, engaged, or married. Some of those relationships, I’m sure, will be successful and last forever. And then, there are the others. The relationships that I look at and think to myself “There’s no way this is going to last.” And that’s applicable to married and engaged couples I know as well. The common thread that I see in all those relationships that seem destined to fail is that one, if not both of the people in them seem to be settling for the person they’ve chosen as their partner.

And I get it, I do. I get the rationale for why people settle at times. People don’t want to be alone. They want a partner. Someone they can trust and count on. Hell, I want all of that stuff, too. But settling doesn’t come from a place of logic and common sense, but rather hurt emotions and most of all, frustration.

Settling is a …   More

Osama bin Laden... UBL... Usama bin Laden...

No matter how you spell his name, it's true... we got him.

Finally.

It's about time, huh?

10 years later, we finally got him.

I was out with a bunch of friends watching a WWE Pay-Per View, of all things. Yes, I’m a pro wrestling fan… get over it.

I started getting a ton of emails saying that President Obama was going to make a last minute statement at 10:30 PM that night. But it didn’t say what his statement was going to be about.

Naturally, I started to wonder what Obama was going to speak about. I began to debate if it would be regarding Muammar Ghaddafi’s son and grandsons being killed in a NATO airstrike earlier that weekend. Or if there were a brand new development in the Middle East. Or if it was something completely different and something that hadn’t hit the news cycle quite yet.

Never in a million years did it even enter my thought process that Obama would be announcing that the United States had killed a major terrorist threat, much less the most wanted man on the planet, Osama bin Laden. But as the Pay-Per-View ended and we turned to CNN, I soon discovered that was precisely what had occurred (in addition to learning that Obama was already running late to making his statement).

When the news coverage confirmed that was, in fact, what had happened, feelings of shock, happiness, and sadness (yes, sadness as well) came over me. Shock, because it’s certainly not every day that the most wanted person on the planet gets taken out, not to mention that nothing at all was leaked to the public at any point in the months of intelligence gathering stages of the operation or its ultimate execution.

Happiness, since, of course, the mastermind behind the 9/11 plot, as well as other attacks on U.S. citizens, and citizens of many of our allies as well, had been taken out and brought to justice.

…   More