Everyday he ate heartily, for it felt that he was making progress. The food kept him alive, what could possibly be wrong about such a situation? It wouldn’t be until many months later that he realized the food was making him fat. Rotund and vile. Undesired by the opposite sex. This would be his ultimate dilemma. Eat to live and be merry, or starve to fuck and live in an equally satisfying iniquity.

Three years ago a close friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer. Somewhere between two years and six and nine months ago, his left calf was mostly removed to make sure that his entire cancerous tumor went with it. It was unclear if he’d be able to run again. Two years ago, he ran a marathon. One year ago, he ran 35 miles on mud trails. On Saturday, he biked 103 miles over snowy mountain passes.

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I spend a lot of time thinking about being better. Being better at working out, being better at not being a fatso or a drunk, being better at my job by writing better, being better at being a friend and a brother and a son. (And being better at being a boyfriend…if I had a girlfriend.) I look at it all as a vague blob of slow improvements. Occasionally it’s all marked by concrete benchmarks: a raise, a new longest run, but mostly it’s all gray. Despite having few obstacles—highlighted by no major obstacles—I’m content with very incremental improvement. A super slow advance to better.

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I hope everyone takes this in the best way possible, but every time my buddy achieves one of these yearly feats of strength, I feel like a piece of shit. It’s not for lack of sincere appreciation for what he has accomplished. I’m incredibly thankful for and in awe of his ability to first beat cancer, and then give cancer an extra ‘fuck you’ every year on his cancer’s birthday. But rather, it’s because despite a yearly reminder of the ability of human willpower—manifested there in an amazing friend, or also in my mother who has now twice beat cancer—I don’t utilize that power that is innate in all of us. I plod towards better. If I don’t pick up my pace, I may never achieve better. Those around me, those close to me, do incredible things. It’s time to take them to heart; to be better by being more like them.

From: [Redacted]

To: John Vieira

Subject: Bridesmaids

Have you seen the movie Bridesmaids? (It’s okay to admit you’ve seen it… it’s a funny one).

From: John Vieira

To: [Redacted]

Subject: Bridesmaids

Not only have I seen Bridesmaids, but I saw it on opening night. There was a group of girls dressed up as bridesmaids and they had me take a picture of them with their tiny pocket camera. It felt minuscule in my stupidly large hands; I felt bad enough about seeing a movie alone, worse that it was ostensibly a movie for women, but this was just surreal. I should have felt shittier, but at that point I just kind of enjoyed the situation and hoped that someday I could tell this story after several drinks in a bar that served free popcorn, long after Bridesmaids had justly lost the perception that it was a movie only for women (and hardly a movie only about women) and in a manner that my shame in that story would be the shame of seeing a movie alone.

Insights and observations from a first visit to Las Vegas:

1. What is with the countless opportunities to ‘shoot a real machine gun’? I understand that Vegas is supposed to be the land of iniquity, but it just seemed sort of weird that shooting a machine gun was perhaps the main thing I saw advertised.

2. There were some extravagant things we did that I really enjoyed (hello neon dance club), but after paying multiple hundreds of dollars to travel a few thousand miles in a seat with just a little bit too little leg room for a man of my sticks, the the thing I loved the most was going to a shitty dive bar off the strip and buying cheap drinks and singing karaoke with my friends. You know, the same thing I do every other weekend at home.

3. Does an approximated sky help a mall become more pleasing to walk around in? Apparently yes. On some level, I felt like it was perpetually a pleasant dusk in the ‘Miracle Mile’ mall attached to our hotel.

4. Going for a run to shake a hangover was a very controversial move. People gave me a hard time (and I started to act all smug about it because everyone was giving me a hard time), and even my sister, upon picking me up from the airport after flying home told me this was a really weird thing for me to do. Was it weird? I sincerely find exercising to be the best way to shake a hangover.

5. I only ate sandwiches except for half a pizza at like 2 AM one night that I dropped on the ground on the way up the elevator.

6. My friends are much better than your friends.

I’m about two weeks in to my four month homeowner experiment and this doesn’t have much to do with owning a home, and more about proximity, but I’m finding that one of the things I miss the most about my apartment is my walks to and home from work. I’m (probably much like you) quite good at walking without thinking about it, so I could just let my mind get all ‘first year after college’ and go wander off in any direction it felt like. There were no RSS feeds and no menswear blogs to bother me.

It was just me and my unfocused mind, and unless it is summer time and I’m running outside a lot, it was the only time during the day where I had that sense of mental freedom. It felt good, and I miss it.

And then the Uncharted theme song comes on and everything feels like it’s going to be ok. You’ll play video games in your apartment and eat secret turkey sandwiches that nobody knows about because you tell the world you are a vegetarian. You’ll download Horrible Bosses from a torrent site and watch it as an excuse to eat candy even though you can barely hear the dialogue. You’ll lie on the floor and do twenty pushups in an effort to balance the king sized bag of candy you just ate.

And then you fire up your Playstation and press the button with the Playstation logo on your silver Playstation controller and then the Uncharted theme song comes on and everything feels like it’s going to be ok.

At some point we will all drop our iPhones and shatter the glass on the back. For some people it will be during the first week of ownership. Those people will be upset and feel that they’ve been ripped off by Apple. In a twist of irony, they’ll curse the ghost of Steve Jobs.

For other’s they won’t break their glass until the precise midpoint between when the current iPhone was released and when the new iPhone will be released. They will be literally paralyzed with indecision about whether they should wait for the next model or buy another of the previous model.

For a select few, they’ll drop their phone several times, often on very hard and rough surfaces, without incident. They’ll begin to feel invincible, they’ll start to remember how their bones felt when they were fifteen years old. Finally, one drop will prove to be too much and the glass back will break. Disillusioned by their newfound and very sobering sense of vulnerability, they will dig too deep into their own psyche and have an existential breakdown. The last coherent thought they will have is about how they wished they had not upgraded from the iPhone 3GS.