Mostly Safe For Work

"Exactly like Gump, except with no AIDS"

I really like most of the work of director David Fincher, especially his collaborations with Brad Pitt (Fight Club, Se7en).  However, I haven't yet gathered the will to go see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Penned by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), the film has been criticized for too closely resembling the goofy Tom Hanks vehicle, as illustrated by this double trailer:

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump - watch more funny videos

TV Talk

1. Lost is back tonight.  It's striking how a once big and beloved show has become so underrated.  During an admittedly weak stretch in the second season, fans started whispering that the writers were just making up the plot as they go along, whereas, more than any other recent serialized show, they were actually responsibly biding their time.  Heroes blew its entire load, if you will, in the first season.  Friday Night Lights and Veronica Mars, two of my absolutely favorite shows, burned through their complete organic story progressions in their first years and were left scrambling for second season plots.  Lost knew where it was going; it just didn't know how long it had to get there.  Around two years ago, the writers got their end date - 2010.  The third season, especially the second half, returned to the quality of the first one.  Four was great.  It's gotten a little too sci-fi for my usual taste, but I'm excited as hell for tonight's premiere. 

2. Bill Simmons recently devoted an entire podcast to Friday Night Lights.  It's always been a hard show to market.  Ostensibly a show about football, it's really about life in an American town.  It's got the best married couple in TV history.  The rare middle-class, lower-middle-class characters outside of the dumb fat-guy-hot-wife-bad-multi-camera-comedy-sitcom genre.  "QB One" has an absent mom, a dad fighting in Iraq, and a grandmother with dementia who's supposed to be his guardian - but he has to take care of her.  The football games have always included too many last-second comebacks and shocking endings.  The second season opened with a killing that was universally decried by fans as a venture too far into soap territory.  There was a handful of characters who were, by inference and I think some actual dialogue and plot, seemingly seniors when the show started three years ago who are only now officially seniors.  But it's absolutely wonderful storytelling. 

3. True Blood, the rural Louisiana vampire HBO series, was decent but vastly, vastly overrated.

4. Leverage, the modern Robin Hood-esque Timothy Hutton new TNT series, is serviceable. 

5. Top Chef, the best reality show going, is boring this season.

Tokyo Police Club

Speaking of excellent concerts, I saw Tokyo Police Club while in Vancouver last month.   A sampling: 

MSFW goes celebrity gossip

When Joaquin Phoenix announced he was quitting acting to pursue a music career, I assumed folk rock.  Then it came out that he wanted to be rapper.  Well, a video of his first performance came out.  It's bad, as his increasingly Charles Manson-like appearance. 

Scott Weiland

Over the weekend, a friend and I roadtripped to Houston to watch Scott Weiland, who's touring behind his second solo album. I don't think I can possibly do the experience justice by describing it here, so I'll just say that if you have any inclination whatsoever to see him live, or if you just like rock music, please do whatever you have to to make it. I've been to lots and lots of great shows, but this one blew them all away. Wow.

-T

Sports, Slow Claps, Snot Balls, and Green Pidgeons

Sports - Before the 2007 NFL season, my wife and I painstakingly studied every NFL team to try to settle on one that we could adopt as our own. The hypothesis was that since I like to watch sports and she can't stand them, if we chose a team together and became emotionally invested it would allow us to spend quality time together and watch sports at the same time. The details of the process can be found here, but ultimately we wound up settling on the Arizona Cardinals. Despite our best intentions, however, we never quite turned into the superfans we intended to become. In fact, I don't think we ever watched a single game. The biggest problem that we neglected to consider was that Arizona Cardinals games are never, ever televised in Dallas. Anyway, some 20 months later the Cards are on the brink of a Super Bowl appearance, and we missed our chance to go along for the ride. The rules of being a respectable sports fan prohibit us from rooting for them now no matter what we intended two season ago because that would be egregious bandwagonning. Damn.

Slow Claps - My wife has a student in her second grade class who she is sure has autism. He displays all of the classic signs, repetetive motions, an inability to adjust to the unexpected, obsessive compulsive tendencies, difficulty communicating, etc. For example, if the classroom computer goes to sleep, he is unable to continue with whatever he is doing until it has been woken up. The other day, however, his bizarre behavior took a turn for the hilarious. The class had been especially wild throughout the day, and they were eventually sat down by my wife for a little talk. After she had gone through her whole spiel about how she expects more from them and that they know better and whatever else teachers say when their students are being pains, the entire class sat silently, thoroughly repentant for their wild behavior. Then from the back of the class came that staple of all bad eighties movies. Her autistic student had begun a slow clap to show his appreciation of her speech. The whole class immediately fell apart laughing, and the student was so proud of the reaction he got that he was smiling from ear to ear even as he was being removed from the room to learn his punishment. I wish I had been there.

Snot Balls - Last Saturday was the first pre-school testing day for my school. I've been an observer for these sessions ever since I've been a teacher, and they are invariably wildly entertaining. I've seen all kinds of things over the past few years, but an applicant last weekend set the bar for grossness, which is saying a lot for four year olds, a group known for their incontinence and rampant booger eating. At the start of the morning session, a few students were coloring gingerbread men when one of them let out a massive sneeze, during which a marble sized ball of snot shot from his nose and landed smack in the middle of his artwork. The kid, already painfully shy, was clearly embarrassed by this and quickly went about trying to cover it up with the first thing that came to mind. He began to smear the snot all over his paper with his blue marker, trying to disguise it by coloring it into his art. I can't wait to have kids.

Green Pidgeons - I saw two green pidgeons outside my classroom today milling about with the other pidgeons. I've done some research, and it appears green pidgeons live exclusively in and around Indonesia. I want answers! I've also been wondering if the other pidgeons are confused. Do they think it's odd to have green pidgeons in their midst, or are they totally oblivious?

-T

So...I'm Married

Yeah, it still feels wierd to say, though I am beginning to get used to it. Just a month ago I had no plans to get married beyond the vague, but growing notion that it would be sometime in the not too distant future. My girlfriend wife and I had been together for three years, and between years two and three I had reached the point where I felt reasonably confident that we would wind up together, but I still wasn't comfortable with the thought of betting on forever in a general sense. How the hell is one supposed to feel certain in this age of the 50% divorce rate?

Anyway, around October I began to graduate from that stage into the "I think I may actually be ready" stage. I don't know how long people usually linger in this middle ground before finally taking the leap, but that's where I stood for about two months. The problem was, now that I felt ready to commit to the idea of us, I realized I had significant doubts about myself as a partner. I began to dwell on all of the reasons why by marrying this person, I could be condemning them to a lifetime of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. I'm not someone generally crippled by self doubt - I think I know my shortcomings and am mostly at peace with them - so this experience was new to me, and it wasn't fun. Ultimately I expressed my fears to my wife, and by working through them with her I began to feel reassured.

Since our talk, I had felt increasingly comfortable with the idea of marriage. We started talking about the future in terms of "When we get married" rather than "If..." much more so than before, and it wasn't accompanied by a wave of anxiety like it had been before. I thought marriage was close at hand, but no plans had been made or even serious discussions had.

So fast-forward to December 19. I had just found out that my grandparents would be in town over the holidays, and with my grandmother's health in steady decline, it may be the last time I get to see her. Then a thought occurred to me, since my grandma may not get a chance to see it otherwise, why don't we get married while they're here? And since I was ready for the committment and planning ahead has never been my strong suit, I picked my girlfriend up from work and began driving to the county clerk without telling her where we were going.

The drive itself was less than fun. My wife was exhausted from a long week at work and was far from enthusiatic about endulging me with whatever nonsense I was up to. The drive was peppered with complaints such as, "Just tell me where we're going!", "We better not be going to look at another house!", and "I just want you to take me home!" As my wife grew ever more annoyed, we finally arrived at the clerk's office, which caused her to turn and stare at me in utter disbelief, as I hadn't prepared her even for the possibility of this happening so soon. Fifteen minutes later we had finished the required paperwork, confirmed that we were not brother and sister, and were officially licensed to marry (pending the three day waiting period).

Originally, my plan was to wait until we returned from our holiday trip to Key West, and then head back to the county clerk to get married. But after receiving our license and seeing how generally depressing the atmosphere inside the clerk's building was, my wife suggested we find someone to marry us on the beach in Key West instead. So on December 23, a Unitarian minister pulled up to our hotel wearing a Santa Hat and driving a car covered in bumper stickers that said things like "Visualize Whirled Peas," and proceeded to marry us in a ten minute ceremony on a public beach. 

Though I am thrilled to be married to my wife, my strongest emotion in the aftermath of all this has definitely been a profound sense of relief that we went about the whole affair in the manner in which we did. One of my wife's friends is currently planning a wedding with nearly 400 people on the guest list. I'm telling you, if I were her fiancee and the planning didn't kill me, standing before four hundred people in full wedding regalia while gazing into my wife's eyes in some manufactured moment of sentimentality, and then reciting vows guaranteed to make my stomach turn with their saccharine sweetness would have done the trick. I would have fucking died. Cynical? Maybe so, but I'm still counting my lucky stars that ours was so quick and easy.

-T

Dogs: Greyhound Edition

I have some serious reservations about dog ownership related to the roles canines play in our society.  And I, prone to impulsive moves that might include a same-day purchase or immediate adoption, have instituted a self-enforced 10-day waiting period for all major life moves and buys.  Being a good dog owner requires a considerable amount of discipline, sacrifice, and forethought.  I have been interested in getting a dog for awhile but have these restrictions:

1. Hypoallergenic or close to it.  I'm mildly allergic to dogs and cats.  There's a woman at work who has multiple cats and frequent medical problems.  I rarely even have reactions to heavily shedding dogs but almost needed my own emergency medical attention after responding to a call in the woman's apartment. 

2. Not a tiny dog but one amenable to apartment or condo life due to an undetermined future.  I don't want to put a dog that needs space and fresh air into a confined life.  However, I am not interested in the really small canine. 

3. Not a boutique breed or designer puppy.  Hopefully a dog that really needs adoption.  That a rescue dog is the right ethical move has become mainstream.  But people are waiting for "labradoodle" rescues or wheaton terrier rescues.  Dogs that cost $1300 from a breeder.  Such dogs in need of "rescue" are few and far between and present themselves rarely as many, many animals in need of a home are euthanized. 

Fitting even two of the three requirements is pretty rare, but I've been patient.  A coworker adopted a retired racing greyhound.  He's awesome.  And, surprisingly, the greyhound fits.  They don't shed much.  Despite being big dogs who used to run mile-long races, they're lazy and suited to apartment life.  And once they're determined to not be competitive enough for racing or to be too old to race, they have a good chance of being gassed.  It's not a boutique or accessory dog.  I went to a few local adoption events, and the greyhounds are wonderful.  Sign me up. 

Of course, I should have probably checked to see if my apartment had a "weight limit" for canines.  I see dogs that surpass the set 30 lbs. all the time, but they're taking an irresponsible gamble, according to the lease, which I only looked at after being 75% of the way through the adoption process.  I suck.  It doesn't help that most condos seem to have  fairly low weight limit for pets as well.  This has led to the inclination to purchase a home, a really, really cheap one.