“Broken Down Piece of Meat”

I just got back from watching The Wrestler. I got in for forty cents – don’t ask me how. I have connections.

It was good, but really kind of depressing.

I think I’m going to watch The Simpsons in order to feel better. Season 5, anyone?

The Life Playlist Meme

Hide and Seek – Playlist idea stolen from my friend, Chris Ivanovskis

I have this idea about a story called The Soundtrack of Me. It is an ever-evolving idea that I’ll one day write. But for the time being (and since I’m tired and kind of missing my girlfriend), I will write this instead of crafting an actual post going into any creative ideas that I may have bubbling on the back burner. So, the rules are as follows:

1. Put your IPod on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!

*PS: Be sure & write down your responses to your results!!!

Before I go on, I will alter the rules slightly. Since I have a lot of stand-up comedy, spoken word tracks, and audio books on my iPod, I will automatically skip such a track should one shuffle on. The very next musical track that plays will be my answer.

Obama’s Super Bowl Pick: The Steelers (VIDEO)

Obama’s Super Bowl Pick: The Steelers (VIDEO)

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Hell yeah, B! Just over a week into the job and I can honestly say that I love our president.

Also, you have no idea how hard it is to be a Steelers fan in Seattle. None, whatsoever.

Bourne Disses on Bill and Degrades Bond

Matt Damon:  Bill Kristol “An Idiot,” Bond a “Misogynist Sociopath”

(via HuffPo)

You know the accent, so everyone say it with me – MAHH DEHHMUHH recently let loose on his opinions regarding Bill Kristol and James Bond.

During the campaign, Damon issued a highly quotable bit comparing Sarah Palin’s story to a “really bad Disney movie.” While most people can surely agree with this sentiment, and it is more descriptive than John Cleese’s sober discussion regarding her status as the person one heart beat away from a potential president who would be a “72 year old cancer survivor,” it’s apparent that Damon, at least in this interview, is a bit less humorous and a bit more out of touch with the current state of Bond movies.

First of all, calling Kristol an idiot, while true, is just plain lazy. You need to dig, Damon. Come up with something witty, and then get all self-referential when you ask the interviewer “How do you like them apples?”

But the real problem I have with this article is his lack of Bond knowledge. To wit, check out this quotation:

”They could never make a James Bond movie like any of the Bourne films…because Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He’s repulsive.”

In the past, Damon was asked about the differences or similarities between Jason Bourne and James Bond, and he said that the difference is that Bourne is basically a highly skilled former assassin who is hell-bent on revenge and cannot stop thinking about his dead girlfriend.

Has he even seen the latest Bond film? It’s basically about a highly skilled current assassin who is hell-bent on revenge and cannot stop thinking about his dead girlfriend.

The two aren’t alike. No, not at all.

It’s clear that Paramount likes the grittier action-hero Bond and are playing down, to a small degree, the philandering nature of the character. Espionage takes a back seat to fisticuffs, car chases, and explosions – all of which were present in the Bond series before, albeit the volume was lower.

And gone are the days of character names like “Christmas Jones,” the sole purpose of the name being the set-up to this exchange that viewers had to have seen coming (pardon the pun) a mile away:

James Bond: [in bed with Jones] I was wrong about you.

Dr. Christmas Jones: Yeah, how so?

James Bond: I thought Christmas only comes once a year.

Hoho! Wit + Pun, ftw!

Anyway, I don’t think Mr. Damon is heading to the movies very much any more. Perhaps he’s feeling the pressure of the ever-worsening economy. Is he feeling the money pinch? Is that why he didn’t drop all that money for Inauguration tickets?

Maybe he should have taken Ben Affleck’s advice in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:

“You gotta do the safe picture. Then you can do the art picture.”

HFCS + Hg = WTF?

Leslie Hatfield: Our Melamine: There’s Mercury in High Fructose Corn Syrup, and the FDA Has Known for Years

This is comforting. HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is incredibly pervasive in our food supply. Plus, the body doesn’t digest it in the same way that it does sugar. HFCS is a sort of unwanted house guest lingering around your body for a few days, trying to convince your body to do bad things. In this way, HFCS is not unlike Gale and Evelle from Raising Arizona. Only, instead telling you to rob banks, HFCS tells your body to store fat.

Now, on top of all of that, this persistent pest not only is kicking it in your liver and small intestine, but it more than likely is carrying Mercury with it – a substance that is terribly, terribly virulent.

Add this to the list of reasons to be dubious of the big corn industry in the US. As if it weren’t enough that they were making cattle sick with corn feed while simultaneously contributing to the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, now they have to ensure that the taxpayers that subsidising their product are thoroughly poisoned.

That takes moxie, yo. Almost as much moxie as the Auto Industry, who will be using their government bailout money to continue to sue the taxpayers that have bailed them out.

Anyway, here’s a WikiHow article on how to avoid HFCS.

PETA’s Veggie Sex Super Bowl Ad Rejected By NBC (VIDEO)

PETA’s Veggie Sex Super Bowl Ad Rejected By NBC (VIDEO)

Okay, so… I get it. The people who came up with this ad basically thought they could use sex to sell the idea that going veg would lead to a better sex life. They thought that since every other ad during the Super Bowl uses scantily clad women and sex to sell products, they should do the same. 

I just want to say that just because everyone else does it, that don’t make it right, ya’ll.

Furthermore, I think that they should cut to this scene from Face/Off in order to even out the girl to guy stuff at least a little bit.

And since these girls are getting lewd with food, perhaps they could tie it all together with a little Flight of the Conchords.

Gran Torino

Here’s an article about the film and its Oscar trials from Time.

Go see that movie.

Remembering the Where and the When

The problem with wanting to keep a dream journal is that sometimes you have to wake up at 6:27 AM, shower, and run out the door to catch a bus, leaving you with no chance to write down just what it was that you had dreamt the night before.

So what do you do?

You write about it on your blog, that is what you do.

I had odd dreams last night all centered around my dad’s house. I spent most of the dream in my old bedroom. The room was set up exactly as it was when I moved out. In this dream, I visited with people from my past. 

What’s interesting is before I fell asleep, I was talking to Trina about the stuff in the past and how I am “working through my shit.” When you are super-sensitive (which I most certainly was), the bad events in your past leave bruises that run deep, and you can still feel them at times.

I suppose this is how I know that therapy is working – because I am dealing with these issues right now in order to put myself in a better place mentally and emotionally. I am dealing with them, and more importantly, I am dreaming about them. The anxieties, frustrations, sadness, and regret are working themselves out through my subconscious. It makes my sleep less restful, but it ultimately leaves me healthier emotionally.

Depending on how you look at it, I am either blessed or cursed with a somewhat elephantine memory. I remember the where and when of what was done or said, or what wasn’t done or said. I remember who. I always have had trouble with why - and there’s the rub.

The thing that I need to remember is “Why?” dosen’t matter. Where, when, and who doesn’t matter either. What does matter is that I recognize and accept the past, realize that it brought me to this point, and work hard at dealing with the way that it has affected me so that I can deal better in the future.

Rubbernecking at the Abyss

There were 71,400 jobs lost today. Earlier this afternoon, that number was only 40,000.

Those, apparently, were the “good ol’ days.”

I began working for the bank in March of 2004, and it is scary how quickly I saw the cracks forming in our economy. I watched people living outside of their means via credit, trading equity in their homes for shiny new status-symbol cars. Still to this day I get depressed whenever I think about the parade of people who would come in with payday advance loans to cover overdrafts on their checking accounts – overdrafts caused by too many trips to Wendy’s or McDonald’s and any number of other fast food places, or worse, casinos.

Over my three years at the bank, I was told on a near daily basis to try and push credit cards on customers as a means of overdraft protection. They would tell me to tell the customer that they should make their purchases with their credit cards and then just pay off their bill in the branch every month. This is all well and good. However, these people were already spending money they did not have…so how could they pay off their monthly credit card statement?

I shuddered every time the bank pushed ARMs on people (adjustable rate mortgage loans). While in theory the loans were a good idea in that they got a lot more people into houses, they were absolutely HORRIBLE in the fact that they gave the borrower the option to pay less than the amount of interest accruing on their loan. The debt to the bank, in theory, could continue to grow. Call me cynical, but I think part of the appeal to big banks was that once the borrower became so weighed down by debt, they would have to re-negotiate their mortgage with the bank. When they did so, they’d owe more and therefore the bank would make more money off of it at a higher rate of interest.

There should never have been a NegAm option. I understand that the banks are not completely culpable here. Yes, there is a certain level of responsibility that people should have taken in order to live within their means and to ensure that they were at least keeping up with the interest that was accruing on their loan. However, when you take into consideration that many lenders were okaying bad loans based on borrower income guesswork, or worse still, that they were actually approving NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, No Assets), then I think the balance of blame tips more toward the financial institutions.

So, here we are, sitting at the edge of the abyss and peering over. We are tip-toeing here, and we did it to ourselves. Whatever stuff that holds our country and our financial system together is fraying badly, and when it snaps, if it snaps, then the ramifications will be far more widespread than what was experienced during the Great Depression. The world’s financial markets are tightly tethered to those of the States. That was not the case in the 1930’s. Sure, Europe was effected by the Depression, but the Asian markets could not have given a fuck.

I feel as if we are all rubbernecking while passing a particularly bad car accident. However, in turning our attention toward the wreckage trying to spot the injured and dead bodies, we are, in fact becoming oblivious to the fact that we are all about to crash and burn just as hard.

I have had a few discussions with Trina about the privilege of living in the present. Even with all of the mess that our foreign policy has dredged up around the world, we can still essentially move about at will in most parts of the planet. We have access to so much information without getting up off of the couch. You can access whole libraries online, and learn a second, third, or fourth language at the same time. It’s really rather amazing. But this privilege comes with a price – watching this most grand economic collapse.

The job losses, nationalization of banks, government handouts to get consumers to spend…all of those things make my knees buckle. I get woozy if I think too much about it. This is an amazing and horrifying event. Maybe this is all just a massive regression to the mean. Maybe this is Tyler Durden blowing up the credit card companies in order to reset everything to zero. Whatever it is, I cannot lose sight of the fact that we are witnesses to something BIG, historically speaking.

I wonder what I will tell my grandkids someday.

Shame Can Be Funny

There is a rather remarkable event that occurs here in Seattle every three months or so. That event is called Salon of Shame. The gist is simple:  you stand on stage and read from the journals and diaries that you kept when you were 10, 13, 15-and-a-half. You read them straight, without any overly dramatic interpretation, and you limit your reading to about five minutes. The more embarrassing the entry, the better. Tickets for this event sell quickly, usually in less than 20 minutes. My girlfriend is going to try and score some tickets when they go on sale. I have already put this in my Google calendar.

Today, however, Trina is partaking in a mini-Salon of Shame session with her friends from work. There will be crafts, some snacks, and a lot of embarrassing past moments recounted.

There is a definite market for this stuff. I have yet to attend an SOS event, however I cannot shake the feeling that the atmosphere inside the little theater would be a cringe-worthy mix of embarrassment, sympathy, empathy, and amusement. Most of us have all lived through remarkably similar awkward and angst-riddled experiences, so naturally we would have a sense of solidarity when reading and listening to one another.

I kind of wish I still had all of my old journals. There are so many silly moments – such as when I had my first kiss. I was worried because I had convinced myself that her dad would know that we had been smooching as soon as I got downstairs. Plus, she had a boyfriend…who she dumped over the phone right before leaning in for the kiss. And somehow, when we finally did kiss, the tip of my nose became lodged in the left nostril of my would-be girlfriend.

There are other stories, too. A lot of frustrated and angsty prognostications about the futures of the people in my school peppered those pages along with disclosures about crushes. But the thing is, I can remember the last time I came across a couple of my old journals. And while there were certainly reams of teenage melodrama penned by me, there were also touching and bittersweet observations and confessions that I would not share with anybody – not even my closest friends. Sometimes, I wish I could go back and give 15-year-old me a hug and say “It’ll be okay and things’ll work out.” But, considering the mess I was in at that time in my life, it is probably for the best that I cannot do that. Instead, I can just think back to those moments, smile, and shake my head.