Josh Santangelo

I’ve eaten a couple of meals left-handed recently, but it’s still totally awkward. I’m trying.

I decided long ago that holidays, in general, are dumb wastes of time. I’m not religious, don’t enjoy spending time with my family, and don’t get to take days off for things like Veteran’s Day, so honestly I’d like to just skip all of the standard holidays if possible. I’m a scrooge like that.

One thing I can get behind is birthdays, though—I think it’s cool that everyone gets a day that’s all about them, and their friends come out and show their love and all that. It’s definitely justifiable merriment.

And while I say that now, I look back over the past year at how many birthday celebrations I flaked out on and how many birthday gifts I didn’t buy. So I’m thinking for the coming year being a good birthday friend will be my thing—I will show up, I will bring awesome gifts, and I will show my friends I love them.

I’m still not getting them anything for Christmas though.

A friend of mine ran off to live in Italy for a while and upon returning said “You could always tell the Americans by how they ate.” What she was getting at was that Europeans always seem to use both hands all the time, left (?) on the knife and right on the fork, cutting up bits of food with both, moving the bits to the fork with the knife, and leaving the plate clean at the end.

I want to learn to do that, but I’m so totally not ambidextrous. This will take practice.

The other day I was at a party and I knew most of the people there, so I was feeling fairly comfortable. Then a guy came up to me and was very much like “hi I’m from out of town and don’t know anyone, let’s chat.” Of course I didn’t really connect with this dude’s need for conversation until I had already been totally rude to him and left him standing alone in the corner (again).

Clearly I’m not done with this one.

This sounded way cooler when Buster was doing it and they had an exhibit in town. Now neither is really the case, and I somehow doubt the NSK passport would help get me laid anyway.

Running a small business pretty much requires caring about one’s finances. I track the income and expenses of my business in great detail—far more detail than than that of my regular checking account. This means I know exactly what I’m billing and spending for work, but no idea how much all of my dinners out are costing. I think that’s good enough for me, though.

...yeah, this hasn’t happened. Even though I’ve recently been working at MS, and now own a .NET book as well as a WPF book, I haven’t been given a good (read: paid) reason to learn it. So it’ll happen when it happens, but it’s not so much a goal anymore.

I took my mom when she came to visit a couple years ago. The corniness of it all was a bit much for me to bear.

It’s way more fun to rent a kayak and take it out on Lake Union and splash the ducks with your paddle as they go by.

Unless you’re actually going to be somewhere where it’s fun to do—Washington is not it.