Bitter in Advance

Guys, I am in the worst mood today. All it took was my iPod freezing up first thing this morning, and now I'm useless for the rest of the day. All morning long, people have been doing stupid or annoying thing all around me, and I feel justified getting more and more angry. In fact, I just yelled at a telemarketer (who completely deserved it, just to be clear) and felt profoundly more bitter when I hung up. This is not a good state of affairs.

By the time the commute home comes around, I'll probably be at the point where I road rage someone right off a bridge or something.

In order to stave off the waves of bitterness, I present you a book meme. Because I like making other people suffer along with my boring eccentricities. (via 50 Books)

Five most recent books you've bought for yourself:

1. Penny Arcade Vol 4: Birds are Weird, Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik
2. Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy, David Sedaris (so I can finally return Devon's copy)
3. Different Seasons, Stephen King
4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (preorder, natch.)
5. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

Five books you've most recently given other people:

1. Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets, Carole Walter
2. The Joiner King, Troy Denning
3. Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell
4. Invitiation to the Game, Monica Hughes
5. Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds

Five most recent books you've loaned other people, and their status:

1. Shalimar the Clown: A Novel, Salman Rushdie (still on loan from being on loan to me from the library)
2. Harry Potter and The Sorceror's Stone, J.K. Rowling (still on loan)
3. A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham (returned)
4. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris (returned)
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (returned)

Last five books you looked at on Amazon/Chapters/Powell's/etc.:

1. Specimen Days: A Novel by Michael Cunningham
2. The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell
3. Grand & Humble by Brent Hartinger
4. The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon
5. The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Top five books on your "to read" pile:

1. Century Rain, Alastair Reynolds (I will finish you yet, dammit)
2. Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
4. Glasshouse, Charles Stross
5. Old Man's War, John Scalzi

Bottom five books on your "to read" pile:

1. Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
2. Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson
3. Empire, Orson Scott Card
4. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson
5. A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar

Mm, all that talk of books now has me at least 22% less likely to kill someone on my way home. Books really do enrich your life.

As a Way of Unestablishing My Movie Credentials

Ever look over at that Watch sidebar and think "Sweet damn, this boy has the worst taste in film I have ever seen!"?

In order to help you prove that delightfully worded supposition, allow me to provide you with some hard evidence to back it up.

I give you the list of all of AFI's Top 100 American Films that I have actually seen, along with a brief explanation that verifies why I should never be allowed to criticize film. To make it even more fair, I'm only including movies I have seen in their entirety (e.g. no 2001: A Space Odyssey, since although I've probably seen the entire thing through various clips over the ages, I've never sat and watched it straight through) and can still remember the majority of (no The French Connection, because while I've seen it (twice) before, I couldn't tell you a bit about it, except for the car chase.

Prepare to be entirely underwhelmed

• #2 The Godfather - Barely makes the list, since it's basically a haze in my mind. I still retain the rough shape of the movie though, even if I could barely stay awake for the required 3 hours of difficult to understand accents.
• #10 The Wizard of Oz - Gets points for reminding me of my childhood, but seriously, I can never sit through this movie anymore; it both bores and bugs the crap out of me now.
• #13 Star Wars - Yes! One that I liked and have seen enough times to quote from memory. Take that, legitimate film critics! (I bet they haven't even read the Expanded Universe novels either, the Philistines.)
• #14 Psycho - Fine, it's a classic. And pretty cool actually. I still lose points for probably not fully grasping it's importance, though.
• #17 The Graduate - Jesus, I hated this movie. And pretty much every character it contained too.
• #24 E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial - I refuse to watch this ever again, after it made me cry like a little girl when I was around 9 years old. Stupid movie.
• #25 To Kill a Mockingbird - Had to watch it for school, I prefer the book approximately 1,000 times more.
• #30 Apocalypse Now - Was forced to watch this by Jim, who had to watch it for school. And by "forced," I mean "was over in his dorm drinking when he was watching it and didn't want to wander across campus drunk." I'm pretty sure the only way I survived this movie without dying of boredom was my blood alcohol content.
• #34 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Quite possibly my least favorite Disney movie ever. Nothing happens!
• #40 The Sound of Music - Okay, I will not hate on this movie. As ridiculous as a movie about escaping from Nazi's though music and pushy stage-parenting is, it still holds a place in my heart.
• #50 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Now that's what I'm talking about. Finally we agree on something.
• #55 North by Northwest - I think I watched this with Devon? Isn't this the one where they climbed down the face of Mt. Rushmore? Maybe I shouldn't have counted this one. Still, if it's what I think it is, I really didn't like it.
• #68 Unforgiven - Another good one. Pretty much the only Western I've ever liked.
• #71 Saving Private Ryan - The first half hour is pretty sweet, in an utterly horrifying sort of way. Other than that, blah.
• #72 The Shawshank Redemption - No gripe, would probably top my own list of best movies ever, too. I have yet to successfully see this playing on cable and not watch it all the way through.
• #74 The Silence of the Lambs - Oh man, two in a row. Another of my best movies ever. Maybe my cred can be salvaged.
• #76 Forrest Gump - Wait, there it goes. My distaste for this movie is a physical thing, with the potential to move large objects. Emotionally manipulative junk.
• #81 Spartacus - I enjoy it on an entirely campy level, which I'm pretty sure is the opposite of what this list is going for.
• #83 Titanic - And here's where we reach a conundrum: Do I admit that I really like this movie and incur the wrath of a populace that hates everything that Celine Dion has ever touched, or try and retain some street cred and continue my trend of hating all movies on the list? I think I'll just refrain from saying anything here.
• #89 The Sixth Sense - Was good the first time I saw it. Gets worse on every repeat viewing.
• #92 Goodfellas - A good movie that is basically twice as long as it needs to be for me to like it.
• #94 Pulp Fiction - As much as my brother will disown me for saying it, I totally don't get this movie. It's okay, but I would never watch it on purpose.
• #99 Toy Story - At least we end on an agreeable note. Awesome movie.

So I have seen 23 of the 100 best movies ever, and I only liked 8 of them. And just one in the top 39. I'm not sure which is more damning - the fact that I've not seen even a fourth of them, or that I hate the ones I have seen.

Either way, feel free to completely discount my movie opinions from now to eternity.

(You are also free to tell me exactly how wrong I am in the comments. Or to berate me for never seeing It's a Wonderful Life. You'll still never convince me to watch it. I turned it one one time, and some old man was hitting a kid in the ear! It was horrifying.)

Power Through the Pain

Tired of constantly bemoaning the fact that I couldn't even walk up the 18 steps required to reach my front door without getting winded, I decided to take back up the idea of exercising. Specifically, exercise through weight lifting. Because, see, there was a brief period of my life(June 2001-September 2002) in which I was totally awesome at: 1) picking up heavy things and 2) having gigantic arms. I vaguely remembered it being pretty cool.

Sadly I forgot about the fact that it goddamn hurts to start lifting weights. Instead, I was all rose-colored glasses, chock full of enthusiasm, "getting in shape is awesome!", et al.

Good lord, what was I thinking? Enthusiasm is both dangerous and wildly overrated. I picked up a couple of sets of dumbbells from our local sports emporium over the weekend and started back up like I had never stopped. This was stupid on so many levels that it's hard to properly describe without the use of ridiculously large fonts. Even when I was in remotely good shape, just easing in to a normal routine is a pain and a half. Picking up a mid level set of weights and going through your old routine out of the blue is like joining an NFL team on opening day because you used to play pick-up flag football on the weekends 10 years ago.

Since then I have spent better than 5 days in monumental agony from ever part of my body, with the exception of maybe my scalp and ears. Arms, legs, chest, even my neck, you name it, it hurts. After the round of lunges I completed on Tuesday, based on the amount of pain caused by just sitting down, I firmly believe that my ass will be the most spectacular thing in the world when I get done. Otherwise there is no possible way that this pain could be worth it.

And see, that's how they get you. Now I have to continue on with this ridiculous regimen, since if I don't it will have been not only a huge waste of time, it's a huge waste of pain. It will have been an entire week of moaning every time I took a step, falling into chairs rather than sitting down, and wincing like a gunshot victim each time I reached for a piece of paper, all for exactly nothing. I'm way too narcissistic to admit that large of a tactical error. Plus, when you add in the fact that I tend to have a self-worth that is directly tied to the size of my biceps, you can almost guarantee that, short of the destruction of a tendon or similar, I will not stop until I reach crazy buff guy status again.

This is exactly why people think that guys who go to the gym have no brains. Because, seriously: makes no sense whatsoever, causes wild amounts of pain, physical cues the exact opposite of the intended result, yet I keep on going.

It's a sickness, I tell you.

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But man, just check out my arms!

June Showers

Even though I don't own the condo I'm living in, I take a weird sort of pride in the place. It's a combination of it's age and quirkiness, I think, along with the fact that I'm renting it directly form a landlord, rather than from an apartment complex.

So when I find that the floors tend to slant even more than I realized, I don't get annoyed and call maintenance, I find it adds character to the place and take my own precautions. And when I turn around and run into the wall in the bathroom, I don't get mad at the incompetent placement of the toilet, I chuckle at how charming and unique the layout is. Faced with faulty wiring, I would probably praise the rustic nature of my new home, but luckily it hasn't come to that yet.

For now all my annoyances are minor and are far outweighed by knowing that when you walk in the door to my house, your first thought isn't "What low-rent hell have I gotten myself into now?"

The fact that the thought is probably "Why am I sliding downhill in the living room?" is irrelevant to me.

In the spirit of appreciating what you have, I try my best to take care of things on my own and not get the landlord involved in minor inconveniences. Whereas two months ago I felt justified calling my apartment complex with righteous indignation because the florescent light in my kitchen had burned out after only 3 years of constant use, I am far more likely to tackle gigantic home improvement projects by myself now. Despite knowing absolutely nothing about even the basics of, say, circuit breakers, or how one goes about 'grounding' a live wire, I still like to go it alone. Usually, though, I'm far more concerned with other pressing issues, like whether it's an "Allen" wrench or an "Alan" wrench, and exactly who this Allen/Alan guy was in the first place. But in any case, it's become almost a matter of principle that I don't go for help.

When minor annoyance #23, the shower head is shorter than I am and sprays practically no water, finally became to much to bear, I went out and found a replacement fixture and decided that I would install it myself that same afternoon.

Extracting the old shower head proved to be a very simple process of unscrewing a single bolt, and I felt pretty good about my chances of completing the project without physically injuring myself or flooding anything. However, when I attempted to attach the new head, the connecting pipe proved to be 2 inches too long for the existing fixture mounted to the wall. I was a bit stymied at first, but ultimately decided that all I needed to do was use a hacksaw to saw off the excess pipe from the new piece and everything would work out fine. Necessity being the mother of invention and other similar trite platitudes, et cetera, et cetera.

Sadly, I do not own a hacksaw. Or a saw for that matter. I systematically went through the house and found that the only sharp edge I owned was a set of steak knives that I had bought over 3 years ago. These were a set of 5 plastic-handled knives that I had picked up on clearance at Walmart, chosen primarily because they came with their own wooden block for storage, and at the time I hadn't had anywhere else to keep utensils. Also, the fact that the whole set cost $3.99 was appealing to my broke self at the time. These knives were not serrated and I doubted they held a sharp edge at all. Knowing that I had never cut myself with them despite my innate clumsiness, it seemed almost impossible that these guys held any stronger cutting power than a butter knife or pair of safety scissors.

I still tried using them, though, as I hated to throw in the towel on my first real home improvement project so quickly. I worked for a full half-hour at the plastic pipe, sawing back and forth with varying degrees of fervor, often pretending that I was playing a particularly cheap violin, before finally declaring it a lost cause. 30 minutes of work had left a cut that barely qualified for the term. "Depression" might have been a more accurate word, in more than one sense.

Thinking that there may be other, less brute-force/round-peg-square-hole sort of solutions to my problem, I went to the nearby home improvement mega-store and explained my problem to a sales clerk there. He returned in short order with a smug look and a 37 cent pipe extender that would take care of the whole issue without use of a single tool. Never mind my initial request to be pointed in the direction of the hacksaw department.

Suitably chastised, I went home and applied his solution in under 2 minutes. The extender fit easily to the pipe, and similarly to the shower head. When I turned the water on a steady stream of water came out, at the proper height and pressure. I was vindicated by my domination of sheer will over plumbing, but was sad that it took professional guidance towards a piece of equipment that cost less than a pack of gum to achieve it.

The next day, I woke up and took my first shower with proper water pressure in a month, still slightly stinging over my not-quite-moral victory. I appreciated the strength of the water and the fact that I didn't need to bend at the waist to rinse my hair, but that wasted half-hour flailing at a plastic tube with the dullest knife in the world still irked me. As petty as it was, I really wished someone else hadn't been the one to solve the problem for me so easily.

As it was, I probably should have been a bit more specific in my wish. As I finished the final rinse of my hair, the pipe extender, so graciously provided to me by the smirking clerk, snapped in half. Causing the new shower head to come smacking down into the back of my head, and sending a wild spray of water that soaked the entire bathroom before I could recover from the blow long enough to get the water turned off.

It's a hollow victory, to be sure. Actually, thinking about it, it's not so much a victory at all but a complete and utter defeat. Still, I feel...better. So someday when I do get the shower to work (we are back to the old, wildly inferior shower head until I come up with a working solution) it will be all my own doing, and I can proudly proclaim my handiness and plumbing mastery for all the world to see.

How I Spent My Weekend

This is my nephew, Elijah. He is awesome and 5 days old. Also, he's very tiny. He tends to sneeze a lot. I held him for upwards of 20 minutes, and didn't break him at all.

I now feel older than the earth.

That is all.

Notice of Construction

Update (6/7/07): Total blog overhaul complete. Let me know if you see anything broken or out of place.

Hear What I'm Sayin'?

On Sunday night I had my usual 3 month ear treatment for my allergies, as is common for all people who are chronically and unendingly sick for no apparent reason. It's just a quick flush of my ears to keep them from swelling too much because of whatever allergy du jour I am suffering from.

It's nothing big, takes maybe an hour all told, but does require me to lie on the couch with my head perfectly sideways for two long stretches of time. This is not so much a hardship, seeing as that's how I spend the majority of my weekends anyway. Usually my reasoning for doing so is less defined, like "oh, I was out late last night (until 11:00!)," or "I have to go to work in a couple of days, I really should conserve my strength." Now that I had a genuine excuse, lying on the couch was an excellent, guilt-free chance at laziness.

The problem I had though, was that the treatment leaves me deaf for the duration, since while the medicine is acting my ear is totally closed off. This made watching TV an issue, as the speaking component tends to add a lot to the pretty, pretty pictures that are flashing by. And closed captioning was out of the question; since my head was at a 90 degree angle to the TV and I don't possess the mental wherewithal to read vertically.

So what is a person to do? In my case, I decided to watch the latest movie in our Blockbuster queue in complete silence, and just fill in the dialogue in my head as it went along. You would think this would be difficult, especially seeing as it was a movie I had never seen before. Until I tell you the title of the movie (The Hitcher) and you realize that if anything, the actual dialogue in the movie probably would have detracted from the overall experience.

(Note: Wildly Extensive, All Encompassing SPOILERS are upcoming for the entire film. On the bizarre chance that you actually care for a single second about the plot behind this movie and have not yet experience the (wrong-kind-of) horror of it firsthand, I would recommend skipping this post entirely. And also seriously reevaluating your priorities in life.)

Y'all, deeply and truly - there has never been a more painfully telegraphed movie since the age of silent films. I didn't hear a single word any of the cast members said, but I bet I could give you just as good a synopsis as anyone who was unfortunate enough to see and hear the whole thing without the hindrance (aid?) of ear medication.

And okay, I know that people always say that movies should "show, not tell" in order to get their message across, but at some point you reach the overkill stage. And in this movie, I'm pretty sure we reached that stage approximately 20 minutes in, when we were treated to our 5th close up of Sean Bean's face looking as menacing as possible. And then again in the 21st minute when we got our 42nd close up of Sophia Bush looking scared.

I suppose I could have potentially gotten a little confused when the protagonists stole a cop car and started what seemed to be a multi-state high speed chase (with helicopter!). But the movie helpfully cleared all that up when it had Sean Bean kill every police officer and destroy every police car (and almost the helicopter!) involved, without so much as blinking.

And then for good measure, killed off the main character hot guy (In the most awesome and ridiculous way possible. Seriously, that was the best part of the movie by a mile.). At that point, I rapidly lost interest.

Without the particular brand of attention grabbing that only a cute guy can provide, I got intensely bored and tried to take on the near insurmountable task of misinterpreting the most obvious movie ever, with the remaining 15 minutes. Was there any way Sophia Bush could be interpreted as the villain and Sean Bean the tragic anti-hero, arrested for the wrong crime, a la Harrison Ford in The Fugitive? This was my new quest and I attempted it with every fiber of my being.

Sadly, I think I failed. Primarily because immediately after my vow, Sean Bean totally ripped some guy's throat out, shot another policeman in the head, and then did the same to a third. Shortly afterwards I thought I might make a go of it when, for some unknown reason, Sophia Bush stole the last remaining policeman's gun, leaving him helpless and trapped in a crashed car to die, and released Sean Bean from the back of a locked police vehicle to finish the job for her. But in the end, even when she smoked him with a goddamn shotgun, I still didn't feel like I came anywhere near my goal. I mean, her death count was only 1. I'm pretty sure at final count Sean had at least 14, two of which were kids and one in which he literally ripped a guy in half.

Sadly, no one wins with this abomination of a movie.

On the plus side though, with or without sound, I can recommend that no one ever, ever, ever again watch this movie.

I'm glad I could be of service.

Oh, and hey, now my ears are super clear.