In 2007, Andrew Warner quickly emerged as Cincinnati's premier street magician. Following in the traditions of David Blaine and Criss Angel, Warner brings his own urban sensibilities to in-your-face magic. After a cross country magic tour sponsored by CiN Weekly, Warner is back in Ohio, now based in Columbus, re-establishing himself as a local presence.
People always talk about quitting, bad habits and their inability to quit bad habits.
I don’t get it.
Sometimes I like to get myself addicted to stuff just to prove to myself how easy it is to quit… Caffeine (the hardest). Cigarettes (the easiest). But through this process I’ve learned something about the nature of quitting and changing myself in general.
Essentially quitting is a split second endeavor, not a long process. Quitting is in a moment of decision when you look at all the consequences of your actions and make the best decision you can. If you’re still wavering when you’ve quit, then you haven’t quit. It’s only a matter of time until you relapse and it’s really just an exercise in vanity.
It’s like any commitment. If you’ve made a decision you’re going to stick with it. Some people just make irrational decisions in a split second because they feel they’re supposed to. These are the ones who get married at the appropriate age and probably get divorced when things get hard. These people buy nicotine patches en route to the next inevitable tobacco relapse.
It’s not a matter of will power and some people aren’t stronger than others. It’s just a matter of becoming who you want to be in your head and heart.
Now what’s harder is applying that concept to your real life, but that is the ultimate goal. My best advice is to not even have goals. If you want to be something or someone, decide that is who you are. If you find you’re drifting away from what you wanted to be or what you wanted to do, odds are it’s not what you really wanted to begin with.
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We’re getting older. I still feel the same. I still dream the same. I still expect something more.
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Somehow I find myself on the verge of living in a small college town in Berkeley, California. A place where I can dish out New York City dollars and get beer-pong tournaments and college bars in return.
And while it’s not where I pictured myself… ever… I couldn’t see myself anywhere else in the world. And the reason?
A girl… Or even more cliche, the girl.
Telling our love story is one of her favorite things to do. At least that’s what she tells me. I tell it a lot too, but it mostly just ends up frustrating me because most people won’t ever understand.
But in my mind it replays like a movie, or an epic novel. The first time we saw each other. Tristan and I were drinking 40s of High Life in our van. We kind of wanted to meet people, we kind of were licking our wounds and letting the weight of massive credit card bills hold us down. Until little wide-eyed Tracy walked by and said hello. The hello that changed my life.
What should have been an awkward two-minute exchange on the street somehow stretched out into an hour-long conversation of childish flirtation and brief moments where our eyes would meet and exchange possibilities. And then she was gone.
No number. No way to find her again. Just one of those missed opportunities. You know, the kind of thing that you know will haunt you. A fleeting thought of her eyes while laying on my death bed or something like that.
Until she came back.
We were back in the van, with different girls sadly, but the second I heard the tap on the window I knew a door was reopened… Or we were going to be arrested for drinking in the back of a van.
We picked up where we left off. I entertained her with a magic trick or two and convinced her to write her number on a playing card. A pink playing card—her favorite color.
After that the rest is history. Nights spent between the pink sheets of her bed at her awkward sorority house. Lying in the grass together under the California sun while the world passed us by. An amazing night at the Marina where I discovered the meaning of life, and to some degree myself (you’ll find it too). Our first “real date” where she went to Herbivore and ate vegan food even though she hates vegans and swore to me she would never eat vegan food. I could write a novel about it, but probably won’t.
So these are my memories and my small bit of truth. You probably don’t understand unless you too have slept with your head on someone’s chest and known you are exactly where you’re supposed to be.
And that’s why, after a lifetime of searching, I have finally found a home. Only home isn’t a place. It’s her. It’s me. Geography’s irrelevant.
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My cell phone broke last week. It was a good week.
I could go out to dinner with Tracy and not feel a compulsion to see if I missed a text, a call, or to check the latest news or weather.
I found myself driving a car with the music on paying full attention to the road. Weird I know. Didn’t have to spin my steering wheel with one hand or look down to text while swerving across lane.
People thought I must be going crazy without a cell phone. But it was just peaceful. I finally found myself enjoying where I was and who I was with, all the time. And even if I wasn’t enjoying it, I was paying attention.
Maybe you couldn’t picture life without your cell phone. But you have to get sick of MySpace and Facebook, right?
Well maybe not. But at least once a day I personally click on the delete my account button before I wuss out on the confirmation page. What can I say, I’m weak enough to where I can’t feel like I’m missing out.
Myspace, blogs, the internet… I used to see a great potential in these cutting edge technologies. A chance for the other guy to be heard, new perspectives to gain a medium, and a chance to improve upon what “the elite” give us.
And what did we do with it?
Well, I guess we just proved that we’re stupid and have very little to say or contribute. And I know what you’re thinking and I’m going to shut you up before you leave it in my comments… I’m as guilty as anyone, it’s true.
I really believed that we could do something with the internet. But the best we could come up with is self-portraits that try to make us look sexy, half-cocked videos giving our “opinions” on our lives (like someone will care), and swarms of surveys essentially asking the same questions when I don’t see a reason why anyone would want to read one, let alone the thousands that seem to find a little space here on my… uhh… space.
But it’s gotten to the point where instead of working at our jobs (yes, me) or reading a book, or hell, even watching a good TV show, we click on the same ten web sites over and over again… checking your friends status updates, leaving each other comments, watching videos with no plot, character development, or anything that would comprise a piece of art.
And worst of all, we all have a medium designed for mindless self indulgence (isn’t that a band?). This generation grew up thinking we would all be stars… at least we could score a reality show or something, right? Well.. we’re not. And we’re pissed. And we’re getting our vengeance, one MySpace page at a time.
Apparently we can’t live without knowing that someone cares enough about us to look at us on the internet. We assume people want to know random facts about our inner workings. Maybe they want to look at our pictures and tell us our eyes are striking or we look like a movie star… oh yeah, nothing gets to our hearts like fawning over our looks—especially on the record where everyone else can see it.
See, before all of this you had to give a girl a compliment to her face.
But for all this connectivity and access to your “friends,” all this medium is doing is separting us further… making us feel close when we’re anything but.
Sure, you may be one of the lucky few who has a few people read your surveys and give you madd “kudos.” Good for you. But I bet those people are folks you could probably talk to in real life. Maybe you are even cool enough to have people bored enough to take time to ready lengthy and self-righteous blog entiries (oooh, my fingers are crossed).
The point is.. Somewhere along the way we lost the desire to learn, or create, or pay attention to one thing. Blame it on a fast paced world. The sad thing is, we’ve replaced these desires with one big one: The desire to be noticed.
Basically this shit is just exposing for what we probably were all along: A bunch of needy whiners who need to be loved.
What scares me most is that we’ve got all this power at our fingertips and we just weaken it with our vanity. Instead of writing we answer questions about our pajamas or our sex life and throw that out to the world. Instead of thinking, we’re clicking on links mindlessly.
But these are all just thoughts. I got a new phone now. I’m surfing myspace.
Please read this? I’m not sure I can make it through the day without the validation that someone has noticed me.
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