Best of the Best
This morning I’m writing my first feature for POND Trade, the publication for which I work as the editor.
Actually, truth be told, I’ve written quite a bit of content for the magazine over the past year I’ve worked here. We deal with some of the top pond builders and water gardeners in the industry — an industry that is shockingly larger and more active than I would’ve imagined before I got my feet wet. A lot of these people make you hesitate to use the word “hobbyist,” because everything about them exudes professionalism. They’re diligent, dedicated, hardworking artists who create breathtaking, outdoor works of art.
But in most cases, they’re not writers. So a lot of the time, my job isn’t just correcting grammar and improving word usage. A year in, I’m getting much more comfortable with (and hopefully better at) taking a handful of pictures and some haphazard, typo-ridden notes and turning them into something that passes for acceptable journalism. (Sadly, the bar has been set pretty low in today’s media, but at least that makes my job easier.) One dude actually composed his article in Facebook Messenger and sent it to me. Yes, Facebook f-ing Messenger.
My name doesn’t go in the byline when I do this, but hey, at least I’m getting paid, and I’m making the writer and the magazine look a little more professional in the process — some more than others, of course.
Our next issue reveals the winners of our inaugural Water Artisans of the Year contest, which is sort of a “best of” issue, ranging from best waterfall to best pondless feature to best renovation. My publisher and her advisory team did a great job soliciting entries, blindly judging them and selecting winners and runners up, which I’ll start writing about shortly. To keep out the riffraff and add some meaning to the competition, we charged $25 per entry. So now that it’s all said and done, we’ve raised more than $1,300, and it’s all going to the Wounded Warrior Project. So it’s a little more special than just showing off backyard fanciness.
This isn’t the first time I’ve participated in a major publication’s “best of” issue. When I worked for the Robb Report during my last year of college, I took part in editorial board meetings for the magazine’s famed “Best of the Best” issue. From luxury cars to watches to houses to wine to private aircraft to hotels, we sought out the gaudiest of the gaudy. As I look back, over a decade later, I realize how capitalistically sickening and, at times, just plain silly it was. If you’re not familiar with the Robb Report, it’s the two-pound magazine with thick, glossy pages full of high-end materialism that the uber-rich keep by their toilets. It’s a favorite of Tony Soprano, if that means anything.
My co-intern at Robb was your stereotypical go-getting, cutthroat, aspiring journalist. Think the annoying British assistant in “The Devil Wears Prada.” She wasn’t British, but she might as well have been. Needless to say, she and I had vastly opposite dispositions, so we filled our sparse interactions with polite, at times resentful awkwardness. She worked under the female editor in charge of home and design, and I worked under the male managing editor. He and I had a great dynamic — we both liked baseball, and we were perpetually easygoing and low-energy.
Anyway, at one of the last editorial board meetings for the Best of the Best issue, the girl intern’s supervisor assigned her to write about the best home design project, which happened to be in Honolulu. And she was sending her to Honolulu to do some reconnaissance.
Even back then, I was a pretty reasonable, level-headed guy, but come on. The other intern gets to go Hawaii??
It was clear that my boss and her boss had some unspoken tension between them, and my boss couldn’t have looked more irritated with this seemingly irresponsible editorial decision. He called me into his office shortly after the meeting.
“So. Yeah. <name omitted> is going to Hawaii,” he said with a long sigh.
I slowly nodded, imitating the emoji with the straight horizontal line as its mouth.
“We still need another property to include in our ‘Best Hotels’ section. Do some research and see what you find.”
The next part of the story is a little fuzzy in my memory. I can’t imagine it went this way exactly, but from what I recall, I went back to my desk and started blindly searching for new, luxury hotel properties. Maybe I was naive, or maybe I was trying to passive aggressively make a statement by being as humble as possible, but I found a high-end hotel that had recently opened in Houston and presented it to my boss.
Houston.
He couldn’t help but shoot me a “what the fuck” look, but we pulled up the property on his computer and did some joint research. After a few minutes, it was clear that the hotel could probably pass for Robb Report material. He tossed me his corporate credit card and told me to make arrangements to go review the hotel.
Hey, I couldn’t complain. It was no Hawaiian paradise, but this 21-year-old college intern was getting to fly, all expenses paid, to review a luxury hotel. Even if it was on an old United plane to Screwston.
The trip itself was a bit of a whirlwind. Upon stepping off the plane at George Bush International Airport, I was met by Stuart, the public relations executive in charge of the Hotel ICON, among other properties in the area. He appeared to be an extroverted, 20-something dude who hadn’t been working for very long. It wasn’t really what I expected, but then again, I think he probably expected to see a 40-something senior editor in an Armani suit with embossed business cards and his nose perpetually held high in the air. This scrappy college intern handed him a “business card” cut from some card stock I found lying around the office, and we made our acquaintance.
I think somewhere on our walk between the terminal and the parking garage, Stuart had a “fuck it” moment, loosening his tie and and deciding to hit up a house party thrown by some of his friends. (It was the start of some big football weekend — I don’t remember the details.) Because if, say, my 40-something boss had gone on this trip, I can’t see him going to a house full of 20-somethings to drink beer out of Solo cups and hang out with recent college graduates. It wasn’t how I expected to begin my first-ever business trip, but I wasn’t in the habit of complaining.
We did a lot of partying over those three days, surprisingly. At one point he even took me to his health club, where he stripped naked in the locker room and strutted around like he owned the place before escorting me into the steam room. I was just as confused and bewildered as you might imagine, but I guess it was his way of “bonding” while talking business. It also helped us detox from the previous night’s copious glasses of bourbon at the hotel nightclub.
The hotel itself was just as luxurious and fancy as one might expect. The building was converted from a historic bank, with the vault, among many other features, still in tact. The building was ornately decorated in a contemporary style, and the rooms were beautifully appointed. I dined in the restaurant, where the chef personally came to greet me, and five or six servers catered to my every need. I got a complimentary massage from a dude built like a Rice University linebacker, and I still think it’s the only time I’ve ever shed tears during a spa treatment. It’s an unsettling feeling when a masseuse is grinding so far into your shoulder that you can feel it in your pectoral muscle. But I got past it eventually, just like I got over the repeated “why-am-I-kissing-this-kid’s-ass” looks from the staff.
In all, though, the hotel might as well have been a generic Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton anywhere in the country. There was nothing “over the top” about it, but since the company spent the cash to send me there, my 250-word writeup did appear in the runners up section in the 2003 Best of the Best issue. Stuart — whose sexual orientation is still a mystery to me — was endlessly appreciative, probably because his expectations of me were so low after he met me. But it goes without saying that his expectations were exceeded. He even offered me Super Bowl tickets a couple of years later (in exchange for I have no earthly idea), so I think the experience and the good press benefited him in the long run.
This is why I have such reservations about any magazine’s “Best Of” issue. We as a society love reading about the “best” things. Whether it’s because we want to own them, or we want to compare what we own against them, or we simply want to appreciate pretty things, we tend have an obsession with the best anything, regardless of how subjective the evaluation process may be… or how much advertisers paid the magazine to promote the product… or whatever self interests the publisher has with the product’s company. Or, just maybe, a jealous intern randomly just dug it up from a distant corner of the World Wide Web.
That’s why I’m so impressed with and, frankly, proud to be a part of POND Trade’s first annual “best of” competition. Unlike a lot of the mainstream, capitalism-driven publications, we solicited nominees in a non-discriminatory fashion, judged them blindly and raised money for a worthwhile cause in the process. In a world where I endlessly question everyone’s motives on everything, it’s refreshing to know that well-meaning initiatives like this one still exist.
Truth be told, though, sometimes I think I should’ve been a little more ambitious with my Google search that day back in 2003. Part of me wonders what would have happened had I returned to my boss’ office with a property in London or Shanghai. (Houston. REALLY?!) But as I’ve learned with my current position, if a fish finds itself out of water, as I did as a doe-eyed, 21-year-old, aspiring journalist, maybe it’s better to flip around as close to home as possible.
And while it was still the Republic of Texas, I guess that’s not too terribly far from my home country.
