In the true spirit of life’s cyclical nature, I find myself revisiting a theme of years gone by. A few Chicago summers ago, some friends and I found ourselves in a rut. It was the rut of routine. We saw the same people, frequented the same places, and bitched about the same enduring themes. The solution to breaking this rut was more of a challenge. It went by the name of “ballsy moves” (pronounced ball-zy, for the virtuosos amongst us).

The gist of ballsy moves is putting one’s self out there. Putting dignity aside. Taking risks. Not risky risks, but risks with your pride. Approaching a stranger. Introducing yourself to someone out of your league. Going old-school and buying a drink for someone (this time, without roofying it).

To ensure that the Ballsy Moves, v.2008 took form, there were a few simple rules:

1. Each participant must make a minimum of two ballsy moves per week.
2. There must be a witness for each ballsy move, to vouch for its occurrence.

Of the three of us enrolled in this program of my shameless mind, the scoring of ballsy moves unfolded as follows:

Lonika, 0.
Jonah, 1.
Justin, 283.

What can I say? I took pride in my idea. Possibly too much so, but pride nonetheless.

There’s no doubt that ballsy moves was a schtick reflecting my boredom; still, I believe that there continue to be some valuable lessons in this exercise of the “awww, the hell with it.” If nothing else, it resulted in some great stories about Chicago characters summarized by their most memorable characteristic. Ask me about Class Ring sometime…I assure you, it’s a good story.

While I can’t claim that ballsy moves resulted in any tangible life benefits, it was undeniably a summer of realizations. Among them, that you can’t wait for life to happen. In that fine line between letting life find you and going on the hunt for it, I’d rather hold the compass than follow the leader. If “leagues” really do exist, I’d rather draft people to mine than be convinced of theirs. And, of all the harsh truths to be learned in life, I’d rather uncover them now than spend my days sweeping them under Ikea rugs.

The essence of ballsy moves has little to do with the moves themselves. It has more to do with movement in general. Change can only come with movement and while it sometimes requires approaching something new, it often calls for rejecting something old.

So, while it’s going on two years and countless ballsy moves later (I stopped counting mine some time ago), I’m happy to announce that—for one of us— the score has changed.

One of us has made our first (known) ballsy move. Better late than never, right?

Now let’s just hope he doesn’t wear a class ring.

Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes (1963)

Last night Joy Behar interviewed Jenny Sanford, the soon-to-be ex-wife of South Carolina Governor, Mark Sanford. You know—the one who confused “hiking the Appalachian Trail” with “banging my mistress in Argentina”? Yeah, that Mark Sanford.

On the show, the betrayed wife-turned-author made what I consider an incredibly astute point regarding her husband’s behavior. She argued that our society—as a whole—has a problem with wanting to have our cake and eat it, too. From her husband wanting to have both a wife and a girlfriend to her children wanting to get straight ‘A’s without doing their homework, it’s a mentality that is seemingly engrained in our culture.

A cultural epidemic of wanting to have our cake and eat it, too?
Abso-fucking-lutely.

In thinking about cake, I thought of one of my favorite artists, Wayne Thiebaud [pronounced “tee-bow,” for the sake of future cocktail party banter]. Thiebaud’s work pulls heavily from pop culture, with subject matter of ice cream, cakes, cosmetics, gumball machines, etc. I vividly remember the first time I encountered his work. I was a second-year student at UVA and went to Washington, D.C. for the day with my friend Rachel. This trip doubled as the first time I had Thai food. Thanks, Rachel…Cozy Noodle & Rice in Chicago owe you a free appetizer for the repeat-business you’ve inadvertently created for them.

Back to Thiebaud, though. I find his work most striking in its use of color. Bright color. Irreverent color. I’m not sure if the image above captures it, but all of his pop-culture objects are outlined by borderline garish, multi-color streams. Look at the base line of the plates, for instance. Pink travels into yellow, which turns to blue. When taken in from a slight distance, these outlines are swallowed up by the image as a whole. A step forward, however, reveals the technicolor dream that constitutes each object’s outer coat.

The array of colors that make up seemingly simple images (they are, after all, just cakes in a neutral setting) is telling. There is a lot more to these cakes than initially meets the eye. The cakes are commonplace; they are easily recognizable. Their artistic construction, however, is not.

Herein resides Thiebaud’s connection to our societal desire to have our cake and eat it, too: We are incredibly susceptible to overlooking the work that goes into seemingly obvious, recognizable things (living, working, loving, etc.). We have become so accustomed to seeing the big picture that we often fail to dissect that picture into its requisite pigments.

Whether caused by laziness or brainwashing, I’m not so sure. But its effects are everywhere you look. That much I know.

For the record, identifying this truth is not to exempt myself from its grasp.

I love cake. I wish I could eat cake every day. Cake without consequence. But I try not to. Instead, I look at paintings of cake. And, if I fall off the cake wagon, I’ll burn the calories hiking the Appalachian Trail.

If there’s one thing that you learn to appreciate when living in Chicago, it’s the weather. Well, maybe not appreciate so much as loathe. And maybe not “the” weather, but weather period. And its ability to make life miserable. Chicago’s weather is like that bi-polar roommate that you were too afraid to ask to move out, so you applied to grad schools in other cities to create an explanation for leaving. Not that I ended up in Chicago through such measures…

With winters that approach The Neverending Story status, small victories are key. This entails recalibrating your internal thermometer. Thirty degrees? None too shabby. Forties? Cabo San Who? For me, nose hairs become a barometer for tolerability. There are days when the air is so cold and dry, the wind so brutal that I can wiggle my nose and feel nose hairs being pulled out of the follicle. I kid you not. It may be gross, but it serves as one less task in my grooming regimen.

Besides truly testing the legitimacy of humankind’s warm-blooded categorization, Chicago winters are a lesson in managing expectations. This balancing of fact and fiction, vacation resort and blustery reality has become especially relevant to me lately.

Getting ready for work this morning, NPR informed me that it was currently 23 degrees outside. The high for the day? 28.

For my purposes, I categorize the weather into its implications for layers and accessories. No, not accessories like jewelry (which guys should never wear, by the way). Accessories like gloves, scarves, hats and handguns (should the weather finally break me). Twenty three degrees qualifies as a double-double-double: A double layer of upper-body clothing, my dual-layered coat and two-out-of-three accessories. I decided to forego the scarf, should you be wondering.

Arriving at the bus stop with no bus in sight (and with CTA Bus Tracker solidifying its worthlessness…2 minutes my ass!), I was reminded about one of my principles of Chicago weather—managing expectations. To my surprise, the temperature, despite reading a nippy 23 degrees, was comfortable. I even opted against my gloves, turning this morning into a toasty double-double-single. How could this be? Either NPR was off or…wait. NPR is never off. Let’s be clear about that.

It dawned on me that my expectations were off; not just with the temperature, but with a lot of things these days. The discrepancy between what is expected and what transpires is a pretty easy trap to fall into. Maybe that’s what “Mind the Gap” means. The Brits are an insightful people, after all. 

I have processed more thoughts, feelings and realities in recent years than I could even begin to enumerate. While there’s no doubt that this has enhanced my quality of life as much as (if not more than) my new Sonicare toothbrush, it has also shaped my expectations in some inaccurate ways. I’m finding that there is much less correlation between how much something “should” feel and how it actually feels than originally believed. Sort of like the weather.

The complication with this reality is that life is much less predictable. Old sources of pain are substituted by new ones. But, then again, so are sources of happiness and fulfillment. It’s a trade-off, I suppose. It’s sort of like the Masala Veggie Burgers from Trader Joe’s. While I initially considered pureeing them and shooting them up like heroin, their novelty eventually wore off. [Kudos to me for opting out of my idea for a Masala Veggie Burger-inspired tattoo.] My palate became less-and-less enticed by their Indian-inspired deliciousness.

Such is life.

I’ve recently had to face life head-on. In myriad ways. I was expecting this to really suck the life out of me…at least for a while. I thought it would be debilitating. I thought I’d really hate it.

Truthfully, though, it’s not so bad. Definitely not as bad as I was expecting. And therein lies the lesson: though 23 degrees seems to call for a double-double-double, sometimes you’re better off single.