who wanted to know, while watching Lost, why fickleness is always presented as a “female” quality.
First she wants to get rid of it, then halfway down the page she’s amazed by it.
May
22
has replaced deadspin as the one place where I read the comments. The first 100 or so in the earth-shatteringly important Square Pegs review are terrific. I’m guessing it’s as much a function of being close in age to the majority of the posters as it is any great coming together of Internet humorists. I’m basing that assumption on scant evidence: the number of people who remember an 80s show and the fact one of the posters has a nick based on a MC Paul Barman line. Speaking of MPB, he has new tracks out but they didn’t do it for me on first listen. Don’t take my word for it though; I tend to immediately stop listening whenever someone on the ‘net starts a foreskin debate.
May
17
There are a zillion stupid things I’m going to run into that make me realize how much I’ll miss my mom (yesterday’s twin headlines blared at me from the Foster’s paper box: “Super Mom” and “Secrets for a Long Life”), but the thing that’s got me right now is I’ve lost someone who enjoyed bitching about For Better or For Worse as much as I do. If she’d been more computer-literate, I’d have loved to send her this. I can’t decide if it’s horrifying or reassuring there are people willing to argue about the lives of a bunch of fictional Canadians.
May
14
Lays’ (Ruffles?) Bacon and Cheddar Potato Chips, as endorsed by Mark Messier (though not in the commercial seen here):
7up Gold, for obvious reasons:
Bring them back.
May
12
My mom died. I write this, not because I want to bring down the legions of people reading this, but because I need to write about it. Because it sucks, but it sucks in all sorts of weird ways. Some of it I can’t process yet, more than a week later, some of it I want to crate up and never hear from again, but some of it sucks actively, rightthissecond.
It’s a bitch to be outside. Ever since Saturday, when she finally, truly “lost” (as far as the rest of us are concerned), there’s been this overwhelming sense of otherness. Driving home I wanted to shout at people in other cars, send them back to their houses to grieve, to mourn. Instead they just went about some personal business that required over-sized, novelty, shit-eating grins. It’s a pain in the ass: to explain to neighbors where you were, to business contacts why you were out of reach, etc. All of it requires giving up a piece of knowledge that serves only to depress them and me to have to rehash.
I’m hoping it ends, feeling like an outsider. It’s not that crazy to be short a parent. I got four more years of my mom than she did of her own mother whom she loved dearly. But I keep thinking of a kid I went to school with who lost his mom in second grade. For the next six years we treated him with kid gloves, never picked on him, never teased him, not out of any goodness, but because he seemed fundamentaly broken and maybe we could catch that disease too.
I don’t write this because I want to or because I want anyone else to read it. I’m writing it to divest myself of it. I want my goddamn memories back. When I walked into the hospital room on Thursday, I couldn’t come up with any specific memories of she and I. It’s a stupid game to try to play because of course you wind up with a huge mental block right there. It’s like trying not to think of a blue-eyed polar bear. But I was ok with it, because those memories that I couldn’t recall in specific still coalesce into a warm fuzzy feeling in general. So I was ok on Thursday. After Saturday, I’m freaking out that all of those memories, all the warm fuzzy will be forever replaced by a series of very visceral, very recent, very ugly memories of what it looks like to die. Fuck me. It’s a damn fine test of religious faith and not much else. The cancer that had put her there, it feels like it sat and waited for me to get there. And then it started beating on her even better than ever before. It beat her until she couldn’t speak words anymore. It beat her until the sounds she was making turned into simple grunts. Then it beat those out of her too. It beat her badly enough every touch was pain to her. It set her on fire, it made her throw up a river of shit and then throw up a goddamn eel of coagulated black blood. I think my faith in anything went into one of those pink sick buckets with the eel.
When she was lucid I managed to choke out that it was the bravest thing I’d ever seen. She’d always told us, “No life support,” but that’s an easy thing to say in abstract conversation. To act on it, or for my dad to support her doing that, I can’t ever imagine being that strong. She said, “I’m a yellow-bellied coward. If there was something else I could do, I would.” We stood there, we sat there, we laid there, my dad, my aunt and I in a weird sort of sentry duty. There was no way to win, no way to protect her or save her, but there was no question one of would always be standing there when her eyes opened. It hurts now, but I’d be heart-broken forever if I thought she’d ever have woken up in that room alone. When the actual, for-reals end came, it was obvious. Her breathing, which had been a lurid imitation of respiration, ripping air into her body through her mouth (twisted into a sort of maw), changed into a different sound, like someone using a hand pump on a bike tire and getting tired of the job.We all stood up, a dozen or so of us, and stood around her in a semi-circle and watched the breathing end. It was fifteen minutes if it was a second and it was a mean joke: there had to be twenty or thirty breaths where everyone thought it was the last. No one spoke, but people gasped and shoulders shrugged, stomachs knotted and just when you wanted it to be over, it was and you realized you fucked up and should have wished for the opposite. Except that’s not really true. We were going to lose her no matter what and we were going to get hurt and oh well. All that really matters is she doesn’t hurt anymore.
Apr
16
Unbelievable for a Reality TV hater, but I want to talk about Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Such a revelation. Both Fox and BBCAmerica have spent a ton of time making Gordon Ramsay look like a gaping asshole. I finally tuned in like you do passing a car wreck. No bodies. No blood. Very little ego for a celebrity chef turned emperor turned TV host. And he seems to legitimately care about the people he visits, a cardinal sin in reality TV (there’s a fantastic recurring bit on That Mitchell and Webb Look where viewers are encouraged to tune into what’s ostensibly a serious science program but is in reality an excuse to “have a good stare at” freaky disabilities).
Story Engine
I’ve been following a comics blogger who breaks books down (there’s a nice link list in this MetaFilter post) into what he calls their “storytelling engines”, the simple theme that runs through a book which all stories revolve around. Having found Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, my concern now is that we’ll be burnt out on it within a couple of weeks, because there’s not a lot there. I hate to admit to being of the hoi polloi, but theres not a ton of conflict. Sure a cook or two might leave, but the shows always end happily with the place back on track after basking in the genius of Gordon Ramsay. Then again, we’ve only seen a handful of shows scattered across Seasons 2, 3 and 4, so maybe they’ve had fist-fights and grease fires galore in the ones we’ve missed.
Knife Sharpening
I worked in a restaurant for six or seven summers. We had three or four head chefs over that time (the turnover wasn’t as bad as it sounds— it was a seasonal place). This gives me just-a-touch more than 0 experience to relate while watching the show, but I think the lessons are applicable outside a kitchen. This is what reality TV should do, present a mirror for us to examine ourselves, rather than a chance to watch those worse off (or so much better off) than us and gawk. In the episodes we’ve seen, there aren’t horrendous health code violations; incompetence is present at some restaurants, but it’s yet to be the underlying problem. The problem is stasis. Comfort. People get into the business, find a way to survive and then stay in their rut. Some even succeeded for a time: the chef at what was Rococo (you can see the first 10 minutes of the episode here) made it into the Michelin Guide and achieved a star back in the ’90s. A decade later, he was serving the menu that had earned him a star. It’s an understandable bit of self-doubt to think the menu is what made the restaurant great. He refused to believe the success was a result of his desire to learn, to invent, to grow. It must suck to wind up being a drudge slaving away at the same mechanical process every day when the person who designed the process was you.
Working for myself now, this scares the shit out of me. How do you prevent that? Being part of a group of even semi-competent co-workers helps to keep you fresh, exposes you to new ideas. Having to solve other peoples’ problems whether I wanted to or not kept me learning. Now that I’m my own head chef*, it’s up to me to keep learning, to keep tossing successful projects in the trash and moving onto new ways. It’s terribly easy to find a computer language, master a framework in it, churn out the same menu for years and then find there are no customers for the one dish you know how to make. The trick is remembering that every day.
* Mature, I know, but I can’t hear the phrase “Head Chef” without thinking of a fellow busboy shouting, “I’ll give you head, chef” just as he exited the kitchen back into a dining room full of elderly patrons.
Oh, and I like posting from Textmate a damn sight better than the Wordpress client, mainly because of my super-slow Textdrive hosting.
Apr
14
I always take a peek at the people who add me on Twitter to see if it’s someone I know, someone from the area (I’m interested to see how meatspace communities can spring up around virtual ones; hashtags is a great way to create brand-new communities on-the-fly*) or just a spambot. I just ignore the spam, life’s too short to get fired up about it. But don’t tell that to people who get added by BeerOfTheDay:
- “but beer looks and tastes awful. Give me wine, a mellow cider or a cocktail anytime. I’d rather pour beer down a drain.”
- “Why are you following me? Clearly you don’t know me. If you did then you should know I don’t drink beer. Blocked!!!”
- “seriously? you’re following me? clearly you don’t know me. block.”
I can’t decide if I like #2 or #3 better. #1 is standard Internet eltisim, but the other two seem to suggest a cognitive disconnect, like there was a fifteen second span after they opened the email where they thought, “I wonder who I know that joined Twitter and called himself BEER OF THE GODDAMN DAY.” Hmm, Pete Coors? Nope, he’s more of a mimeographed screed sort of guy. Adolphus Busch? Dead. Sam Adams? Fictional. It’s a wonder anyone makes it out their door in the morning.
* #completeperverts still available
Apr
10
I know summer’s coming and so, apparently, do you. However, I’m not willing to even nominate this as spring yet, so let’s hold off on the getting up at 5:30 for a while. Also, that deal where we let you in the bed so you go back to sleep for an hour or so? That’s weekends only, since that was the one time you got up before us. Remember winter, when you were less mobile than a piece of furniture before 8am and we had to beg you to get up so we got the honor of meandering around the freezing ‘hood with you? Given your habit of (and I don’t want to be harsh here) sleeping the better part of the day away, how about you pretend there’s a big, fat sunbeam on your bed until 7am or so and we reschedule your appointments with the squirrels?
Sincerely,
Your Pal
P.S. It’s a queen-size bed and you’re a pint-sized beagle. Any idea how come there’s no room once you show up?
