I got tired of the Superman thing. If anyone out there is dying to know the ending, then let me know and I'll follow through.
Now we're onto a more grown up topic, profiles of the Disney Princesses. Daughter is just at the right age to be entranced by Disney's Princess marketing campaign. So that means that on most days I'm knee deep in fairies, musical numbers, and puffy dresses. As a coping mechanism for this, and every other little jab life sends my way, I twist things around in my head until they amuse me.
Daughter and I are watching a Disney Princess Sing Along thing and the narrator, a kindly old grandma type, says, "a place where everyone's dreams always come true"
So, in my ongoing effort to educate, I say to Daughter, "You know that really can't work. See, what if my dream is that everyone else's dreams never come true? That's a logical flaw in her plan."
Daughter looks back at me, "Shh, Cinderella."
Continued from this:
We left off with Punchy McSpikyhead (Doomsday) facing off with the army and a sexually frustrated Superman flying back to the city with Lois.
Superman's trip takes just long enough to let Doomsday demonstrate how little he cares about being shot in the face and how much he cares about administering punches to everything in sight. Superman gets there just as the army is pretty much punched out. What follows is about 15 minutes of back and forth punching. It's actually a pretty decent scene. I know I enjoyed it the first time I saw it when it was in the Matrix. One high point was Doomsday's use of the patented Kirk double-overhand-chop. Aside from that, lets cover some of the fun stuff.
See, Superman can shot beams out of his eyes. Depending on what the plot needs at the time, these beams either cut, burn or just blast things. These beams worked pretty well against Doomsday. Which kind of makes you wonder why Superman didn't actually USE the damn things more than twice. Maybe he liked the sensation of his super-kidneys being forced into his super-spine. Either way Superman was kind of getting his super-ass beat. The climactic moment in the fight came when Doomsday used his fist to convince Superman to cough out his stomach. Superman collapsed, no doubt regretting not ignoring the sex-interrupting robot-roommate.
This is about as much fun as it looks.
Yes it's dramatic, but where the hell did the stick come from?So I'm watching a Superman cartoon on netflix online. This is about the time when Superman dies, but, like soap operas, no one in comic books ever really dies. So don't get all weepy.
There are more absurdities than you might expect.
We start out with Lex Luther (bald white guy who's the standard villian) set up as a philanthropist. Don't worry, comic books don't bother with multi-dimensional characters. We quickly learn that Lex is a bad guy when he randomly kills subordinates, is rude to old people, kicks puppies, etc.
Superman's been busy since the last time I saw him. He's dating Lois Lane, a mini-skirt wearing reporter. I mentioned the mini-skirt right? I'm kind of uncomfortable with how much I liked that on a cartoon. She either has or hasn't figured out that Superman is actually Clark Kent. The story meanders around that point. While Superman and Lois are vacationing in Antarctica with Superman's gay robot pal, Lex is busy tunneling down to the center of the earth. To be perfectly clear, he's got a full company of no-name flunkies drilling for him, and we all know what happens to no-name flunkies performing esoteric tasks while the hero of the story relaxes...yeah.
So they're drilling away, complaining about the heat, when DUN DUN DUN, they find something. Being flunkies, they establish the dramatic video link to Lex, then promptly decide to shoot the big scary looking thing with a fucking laser. So it starts spraying some strange gas and a goofy hologram movie of an alien pops up. It's screaming gibberish at them, which everyone but the flunkies are smart enough to figure out means, "You dumb fucks. Why the hell did you shoot this thing? You idiots are screwed now."
Sure enough a big spiky thing punches its way out of what we now know was a prison and kills all of the flunkies in the exact same way. Seriously, like 20 flunkies get done in with punch after punch. Seems like we could have expressed that more concisely. It's like making brownies. The instructions say, "Stir until evenly mixed." They don't say, "Stir. Stir. Stir. Stir. Stir..."
Anyway, flunkies are dead, and Lex's view screen has dramatically gone to static. The big bad thing 'Doomsday' wanders out of the cave and starts killing everything.
I can't emphasize this point enough.
It kills everything. It stops to kill a deer for Christs's sake. Now here's the first big absurdity. This thing is literally trying to kill every living thing it see's, and it's doing it with its signature punch to the head.
I figure it could have kept itself busy in the forest for months. Rabbits, squirrels, beetles, worms. He's an unstoppable killing machine, but he has no ability to prioritize.
In spite of that, Doomsday somehow makes it to the city overnight. Somehow or other the army has decided to stop him with a whole bunch of tanks even though no one else seems to know he's coming. Right about now Superman should be getting nooky, which you can only assume he has to realllllllllllllllly careful about, but his robot friend interrupts them to let them know that the city's being a little messed up. Here's absurdity number 2. We learn that in addition to basic butler and sex-interruption skills, the robot knows everything about everything. He tells Superman all about Doomsday.
Doomsday was created as a super-weapon as an alien race, but it turns out that he couldn't tell friend from foe. Can you imagine being on the engineering team that developed this guy?
Project Sponsor, "Hey I hear you've got some good news on that teleportation system you've been working on."
Engineer, "Well, we went another way. We actually created a weapon."
"Like a teleportation gun? That'd be cool."
Engineer, "More like a guy."
"I don't really..."
"Here, just take a look. It's really great."
Sponsor, "Wow, he's big... and blue...and he's a little spiky. He's supposed to be spiky?"
"Oh yeah, we calculated that it makes him look 14% scarier."
"So he carries the teleporter? I'm still a little confused on that."
"Oh no, he's the weapon. He's completely unstoppable and he punches really, really hard."
Sponsor, "That's ... well that's ... you know that we as a society evolved past the need for war like, 10,000 years ago right? What are we supposed to do with this thing?"
Engineer, "Oh god, you can't 'DO' anything with it. The thing's crazy. See, it can't tell friend from foe, so it will just kill everything it sees."
Sponsor, "There has never been someone more fired than you are right now."
Back to the robot who knows all this. Somehow he decided not to let Superman know. They've been roommates for who knows how long and he never mentions that the one thing in the galaxy that can kill Superman is buried under a farm in Jersey?
To be continued...
I started this post in a completely different direction. It was going to be about how I generally manage to keep my weirdness pretty well under wraps, but that it sometimes sneaks out at odd, no pun intended, times.
There's a problem with that though. See, I think I'm 100% wrong. Not the "I'm an odd duck" part, that's definitely true. I really don't think I keep it any where nearly as subdued as I thought.
I think what I really manage to do is to make my weirdness more amusing than creepy. So, it looks like those times I was going to use to illustrate my odd-duckiness getting out, was really just a list of times that it got out without a filter.
I was watching Finding Nemo with Daughter today and I remembered something from when I was a kid. This was remarkable in two ways:
1. I hardly ever remember anything from my childhood. I really can only remember a handful of stuff before I was 17.
2. Pretty much anything I actually do remember is the kind of thing that, while I can make jokes about it, most people find pretty horrifying. This memory was Beaver Cleaver compared to everything else.
So, here's the actual memory. In the movie, two bully fish had stolen a young sea snail's shell and were playing keep away with it. Basically throwing it back and forth to each other over the head of the snail. Two kids did that to me one day.
Now before I get into details, lets do a little background on the situation. You're thinking, "Poor Mikey being bullied all through his young life." Well, not so much. I got some shit of course, but I was always tall for my age and I never really stayed in any one place long enough for the kids to work up any kind of bullying project-plan. So I didn't really have a big issue with that. Also, these kids were smaller than me...and I'm fairly sure they were younger. I'm positive I was smarter.
Anyway, they'd kind of randomly been pestering me. I'm fuzzy on details but I remember waiting in one line while they were waiting in another. One of them walked over behind me and pushed me, then ran laughing back to his place in line 20ft away. It took me a second to figure this out. Not the mystery of being shoved and oh the cruelty of man and all that fun stuff, but why the little dumbass decided to piss off someone bigger than him, then run away only to stop 20 damn feet away. Once I was able to assimilate the stupidity, I walked over to his line, smacked him in the head a couple times and walked back. Honestly, what the hell was he even thinking?
I also can't remember why they even want to to start up with me in the first place. I've never been the kind of person to pick on people and I can't remember pretty much anything about these guys. I'm really at a loss for their motivation, but their astonishing lack of skill and judgment is kind of funny in spite of that.
Ok, so back to the first memory. I was playing basketball I guess, or at least I had a basketball and somehow one of them got it. They started doing the keep away thing. After a couple half-hearted attempts to get the ball I ran at the guy holding the ball. He, all smiles, threw the ball over my head to his friend. His smile broke when he figured out that I wasn't going to change direction. I grabbed him before he had a chance to get away, pushed him into a fence and smacked him around. His friend ran away and dropped the ball. I'm not sure how they saw that little adventure ending, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it. I guess they weren't really thinking that far ahead anyway.
I'm proud of that moment. Not because I smacked a kid or overcame some personal demons, but because I found what is probably the optimal solution to the 'keep-away' gambit.
Also, before anyone gets too upset about the graphic violence contained herein, please note that when I say 'smacking around' I mean that. These kids were smaller than me and just little idiots. I wasn't even using closed-fists. It was more of a physical form of punctuation on the backs of their heads.
I don't think women appreciate how hard it is not to be 'the creepy guy' at the gym. The biggest problem is that there is a large enough number of creepy guys out there to safely assume that any male who glances at, talks to, or comes within 15ft of anything resembling an attractive woman, is in fact, a creep.
I've become infinitely more comfortable around women since being married. See, pre-marriage I figure there was maybe a 1 in 10,000 chance that a woman would actually want to sleep with me. Now, for the woman out there, you're thinking, "Well, if the chance is so small, couldn't you just forget about it and relax?" But the men are more familiar with this kind of algebra and realize that the 1 in 10,000 chance doesn't come along very often, which means you better not screw it up. Which means pressure. Which means awkwardness. Which means that your 1 in 10,000 chance for sex just walked out the door laughing at you... again. Post-marriage the world is completely different. I'm off the table. I'm locked up in the Disney vault along with 101 Dalmations. Now there's a 0 in 10,000 chance. So, since there isn't even the remotest possibility of sex with someone non-wife, I'm relaxed.
Not at the gym though.
Things are a little different there, especially in the pool. You've got women in necessarily tight and skimpy outfits, and they're wet. It's basically a big creep magnet. Also, people just do odd non-sexual things in the water anyway. Like the guy who decided to play-dead in the warm up pool by floating face down without moving for as long as he could hold his breath. Repeatedly...for around 15 minutes.
Anyway, I show up at the pool and there's only one free lane, right next to the only youngish woman there. Normally you have to go at least one lane away from her. Why? Because the creeps will pick the lane next to her no matter how many others are open. I get in the water as she starts a kick-drill, and sweet zombie jesus she is fast. My kick is pure crap and she's moving faster than I can swim. It would be helpful to watch how she's doing it, but do I? No, because that's what the creeps would do.
I'm just getting back into swimming after a couple months of run/bike focus, so my stamina doesn't exist. I start with 50's (2 lengths), then 75's (3), then mix up 100's, 200's, etc. She's evidently doing the same because she'll sometimes take her rest on the near side and sometimes on the far side. I start my first 75, which will have me finish on the far side of the pool, as she's still in a cycle of resting on the near side. I pull up to the wall for my stop, and guess who's switched and has stopped on the far side now? Yeah. So can I, who have been resting on the near side this entire time stop there, just at the same time she did? Nope, because that's what the creeps would do. I had to finish out the 100.
What do I want for Son and Daughter? That's complicated, but I can make even the simplest things complex.
I want them to have a good sense of perspective. I want them to be able to objectively come to the conclusion that lots of the people they know are hopelessly dim and narrow. We're going to travel with the kids which will help this, and Daughter's already gone more places than most people I know. I'm also going to teach them about why people do the things they do. All the absurd, destructive, and bumbling actions that people take have some kind of motivation behind them. Example, if in 15 years Daughter says, "Steve invited me to a party, but he's just trying to get me in bed. He's a fucking idiot anyway.", then I'll be thrilled.
I want them to run with their curiosity. I want them to follow up those little flashes of curiosity with more investigation. That's something I can work with a lot. They ask a question about something and we'll figure out how the hell it works.
I want them to want to do well at whatever it is they choose to do. Not much else to explain there.
Daughter and I made cookies. There was a point where things got out of hand as so often happens with cookie making.
Forgive me. I'm still not feeling very funny. Maybe I'll have some better stuff closer to New Years.
I just watched American Psycho again and it got me thinking. Not about the directly correlated stuff like vapid materialism and lust and rejection of core humanity either. Instead, I ended wondering about how to convey a story like this without the blood.
Well, of course it's possible, but I guess I should ask; Is it possible to convey an interesting story like this without the blood?
Everyone knows the phrase, "Who, What, Where, When, and Why". It's the foundation of storytelling. Different types of stories focus on different components. Your more popular fiction is pretty centered on the What. What happened, the story, the plot. The more literary stuff coasts between the Who and the Why. These are the stories that bore the hell out of people because, generally speaking, no one cares that Rosebud was a damn sled. The Where and When are really more details. They can definitely be important details, but they aren't the core of the story.
So, continuing to reframe my question; If you've got your Who and Why, your Patrick Bateman as the sociopathic golem driven by everything that was wrong with 80's America. That's a great Who and Why, but no one's going to read about his fastidious morning beauty ritual alone, at least no one who doesn't bring a MacBook to Starbucks. That's where the What comes in. An engaging, and maybe a little outrageous, What can sell stories, so why not bolt some titillating story onto your beatifully crafted Who and Why?
Bottom line, I think it is possible to create a more prosaic What and still sell your Why and Who, but it's pretty damned hard. Lost in Translation is a good example of this. Great Why and Who, kind of a boring What though really. Still, the Why and Who were so well crafted and the slow What was both well made and 100% supportive of the theme, that it still achieved some popularity.
I'm pretty sure it made less money than Titanic though.
I'm doing something dumb, which is hardly unusual. At least this time it doesn't involve power tools or the local electric-grid.
I'm making Ning run. Not through chasing her or anything, but that's not off the table. I've gotten a little concerned about her bones lately. See, she eats well, better than I do really, but her calcium +D intake might be a little low. Combine that with the fact that she's been cooped up at home with the kids for a while now, and you get a lack of stress on those bones. Bones are like muscles, they get stronger when you use them. Interesting little fact, "The dominant arm of a tennis player has 35 percent more bone than the non-dominant arm" (MSNBC). That and all the general benefits of a healthy level of activity pushed me into starting her on running.
So why is this dumb? Well, making someone exercise is something that's almost always doomed to failure. Most people who start exercising do it because they want to look better in a bikini, god knows that's why I did it. That's kind of a tricky thing though. It's like wanting a sports car. Most people are going to go buy one, but some guys with the right background are going to build one from scratch. Building a car is a long process that some people will enjoy and most people will dislike and see only as a chore. Here's the rub, you can't buy fitness. The only way to get it is to put in hours of hard and mostly painful effort.
Unless you actually enjoy exercising, then you need an extraordinary level of discipline to slog through it.
What I'm gambling on is that I can tap into something that will hook her and keep her going on her own. Competition, achievement, hell even habit can work.
The holidays drastically reduce my net weekly output of "The Funny". So my apologies for that.
Here's a poorly spaced sign instead.
Daughter has started to fear things. She'll grab my hand and hold it in front of her face if any scary parts come up on one of her dvds. Now, the 'scary' is relative of course, so I'm often shielding her from something like an ogre doll in Little Einsteins.
It makes me wonder how she processes fear at this age. She hasn't exactly had anything happen to be scared of, so it's strange how she can associate these things with fear. I know she has nightmares, but I really wonder what happens in them.
I've been busier than usual lately. Standard workload for the normal job, and I've got a pretty full load of contracts on the side. I've managed to mostly keep up with training, though swimming is way behind.
Christmas is coming fast, and, thankfully, Thanksgiving is behind us (see what I did there?). I don't like the holidays very much at all, but with Daughter and Son around I'm trying to do a good job of hiding that. They'll probably see through the act when they're older, but by then it won't be as big of a deal for them.
It's kind of hard for me to put together something cohesive right now with how fragmented my focus is. So, hopefully throwing out this grab-bag crap of a post will help clear out the pipes.
The alphabet pisses me off.
I realize that this statement might need a little more explanation than most of my random declarations, so first, some background.
I have kind of an arms-length relationship with reality. The world that exists in my head is a nifty place, full of well-formed theories and concepts that aren’t sullied by all that nastiness that floats around the real world. Try sending me grocery shopping for a good example of this. You want me to get eggs and milk. Those are what I consider ‘implementation details’. In my head I’m going to the store to get ‘food’. So when I come back with a sandwich no one should be surprised. That’s if I even manage to make it to the store without forgetting where I’m going and autopiloting to work.
Concepts are obviously a big deal to me, so things get a little sticky when certain concepts are implemented poorly in reality. For example, the horror that is the English alphabet. See, an alphabet is supposed to be a way to break down phonetic components of language to allow for transcription. The English alphabet technically does this, but that’s like saying that a drunk guy pissing on your lawn is fulfilling the responsibilities of a sprinkler system.
The letter C is a great example. It makes a sound like K or sometimes, for no appreciable reason, it sounds like S.
So why in the name of all that’s holy do we have the letter C at all? USE K OR S DAMNIT!
I get angry thinking about vowel ambiguity and the ‘silent e’ pisses me off to no fucking end. I remember very little of my childhood, but I know I learned to read pretty early, so I think that might have spared my kindergarten teacher being yelled at by a swearing five year old about conceptual clarity. Since then, I never really gave it much thought except when I’d typo an ill-constructed word and the rage would briefly flare back up. But now that we have two kids I’ve had to teach Daughter this abomination and I’ll be taking Son through it soon. When I was teaching Daughter phonics, I’d have to stop and explain that C says Kuh or Ess because somewhere along the line an idiot was put in charge of something that they shouldn’t have been.
I use that as an important life-lesson for her.
She’ll have fun with her teachers.
So will I.
In case you haven't noticed, and no one really has, I've generally focused my melancholy, laser like, onto punishing my body through constant exercise.
So this leads to some delicious irony when I say that I'm in the best shape of my life.
Side note, you might notice a large gap between this and the prior post. Well I was in another country with a slightly authoritative bent, and blogspot access is a no-no. On the plus side, I did start Daughter in on minor harassment of the local authorities.
I did another race a while ago. It was a very short one because there were some guys from work doing it for the first time. I did better overall and actually got second in my age group, but I'd blame that more on the less competitive crowd at these shorter races.
So that pretty much ends my season. I've got maybe one more in mid-October that I might do, but other than that I'm aiming for next year's ice-breakers.
Since everyone is just salivating over the thought of my training plan, here we go:
For running I'm putting in miles and doing a 5k training plan. I'm at < 20 miles a week right now and won't peak much higher than 25. Depending on how I'm doing with this I'll probably go to a 10k plan early in 08. I won't do anything other than distance for at least a month. I just need miles now to get my legs ready. I'm going to start the running portion of the coaching in a month, so hopefully that will help.
For biking, miles miles miles. I've upped to 90minute rides, and I'll probably peak at 2 hours. Then I'll work in hills and speed.
I've started seeing a swim-coach, and that's working out well. Swimming is absolutely about technique. They guys working the hardest are usually going slowest. From what the coach says, I wasn't 'horrible' but I've improved a hell of a lot, so I think that translates to me actually being something close to horrible.
For next year I want to drop 15 minutes off my sprint time, which would put me competitive in my age group.
I'm not a terribly domestic person. Like most statements, a lot of the actual meaning behind a statement like that depends on the precise definition applied to a single word. So 'domestic'; We've got kids, so we spend a lot of time at home, but I don't pay a lot of attention to the environment itself. Some people pride themselves on having a spotless kitchen, which is fine as long as they stay this side of OCD. I don't even really notice that I have a kitchen unless I'm hungry or it's caught fire in some small way. That's the way I'm using domestic.
Now given that I pay as much attention to household appliances as my cat does to drywall texture it might be a little surprising to hear how excited I am about a blender. Blenders are the cock-teases of the kitchen appliance world. A bold and moderately frightening statement, I know. They promise so much. They've got 30 different settings to pulverize food most of which have names that sound like sound-effects in a second rate comic book. So you buy one, or more likely get one as a wedding gift from an aunt that you forgot existed, and your happy little head is filled with visions of low-cost frappuccinos and smoothies and, if you swing that way, margaritas. Seven months later your wife has figured out that condoms aren't normally needed for most business meetings and you've been given 12 hours to clear your stuff out from the house. You find the forgotten box behind the also unused punch bowl, and you decide to give the thing, no pun intended, a whirl.
This is a spur of the moment thing, so you don't actually have all the ingredients for a smoothy, but hell, you're bored and hungry, so good judgment be damned, the apple sauce is going in there. You throw in whatever fruit you've got and ice that's been in the freezer trays for nine years. Since you really only want a drink for yourself you end up using about a 17th of the capacity of the damn thing, but hey, you're still craving the fruity goodness of a smoothy so you bravely continue on. You fire up the beast, put it on frappe or fricassee or whatever the hell the middle option is and watch the ice cubes bounce around for a few minutes while the rest of the mixture turns a color you wouldn't think possible from fruit.
Now you're thinking, well that's the hard part right? Wrong. Trying to pour that lumpy sludge into your cup is one of the most surprisingly frustrating things you've ever tried to accomplish. Only about a quarter of the stuff actually pours into the cup easily. You manage to scrape out another quarter before learning one of the fundamental truths about blenders, you can't get a god damn thing out of a fucking blender. Half of your already small portion has chemically bonded with your blender. Remember those commercials where they superglued a hard hat to a beam and then hung some dumb son of a bitch over certain death. That's what your smoothy is doing in the blender, only it's not kicking and wetting itself like the dumbass in the commercials, no, your smoothy is making rude comments and using surprisingly inventive hand gestures to communicate unflattering facts about your genitalia.
Wisely, you give up and try to drink the portion that you've gotten out. I say 'try' because that's precisely what you're doing. The ice is still in chunks that are the perfect size to block the straw and you keep running into chunks of half-frozen bananas, which is odd, because you didn't actually have bananas in the blender. So, now you're still hungry, you've eaten some chunks of unknown things, and you've got an hour less to move the contents of your life to your mother's basement.
...oh but now you've got the clean up the blender. You poor bastard.
How in the holy hell are you supposed to clean out something that's a funnel shaped container with blades at the bottom. Cleaning a blender is like trying to give a suppository to a cat. Neither of you really want to do the task, someone's going to get scratched up, and the job's going to be half done at best.
Obviously I have issues with blenders that, are, frankly, a little surprising even to me. So when a friend recommended a thing called a 'magic bullet' to me I was resistant. Well, first I kind of thought it was a sex-toy and I was a little confused about his motives. Flattered, but confused.
He explained that a magic bullet was, in fact, a blender. It's a fundamentally redesigned one though. Really, they took all the evil and hateful problems right out of a blender. It's like they took Satan, and got rid of the all the goat killing and fire and stuff, and just left a guy who really throws kick ass parties.
Just go buy one.
Now a word of warning to consumers on both sides of the perversion aisle. The 'magic bullet', as you might expect, really is the name of a sex-toy too. So I just want you to be sure which one you're ordering. The little sex-toy wouldn't make a good smoothy, and while the blender could probably be converted to a sex-toy somehow I really wouldn't recommend that unless you consulted with a certified and bonded electrician and follow proper safety guidelines.... and pick an easily remembered and pronounced safe word.
This is bound to piss people off, but I may as well come out with it.
I have to eat constantly and I'm getting sick of it.
I started out skinny, and I've dropped almost 10 pounds in the last 5 months. I've upped my intake a hell of a lot and I'm trying to load up on the heavy calorie foods, but I've really only managed to hold steady. On top of that, I'm looking to up my run distance over the winter, so I'm going to have go up even more calories a day just to hold even.
Now if I wanted to eat crap-food this wouldn't be a problem. Hell, two poorly chosen meals at just about any fast food place would take me over my quota. But no, I get to try and eat relatively healthy which means I'm eating all the god damn time, which gets old.
Here's a tasty after dinner snack.
Brown half a pound (I use ~.6 lbs) of extra-lean ground turkey
Put in a big bowl with a full can of vegetarian refried beans
Add enough cheese to make tasty, but not enough to clog the arteries
Microwave until the cheese melts, add some salsa and you're good to go.
That's a little less than 1000 cals.
I just finished one of those babies, and I'm probably going to have a bowl of cereal in a while. The whole evening I've also been snacking on raisins. This is another good reason why I shouldn't go beyond Olympic distance, aside from the fact that my joints would basically secede from the union of my body if I tried Ironman distance I'd literally never be able to stop eating if I wanted to stay above skeleton body weight.
