Monthly Archives: December 2012

Shots! Shots! Shots! Shots!

I just got the flu shot today. This year’s shot hurt so much more than all of the other years combined. I hate shots. I hate the idea of somebody puncturing my body with a needle. How do they know exactly where to stick it? Isn’t my arm just muscle? So are they really just taken all of that liquid and squirting it inside my muscle? How does that get to where it needs to go inside of me?

I figured I’d write something all about shots. Mostly complaints. Mostly out of order and out of context, little sentences and anecdotes that don’t really have anything to do with each other. Like when I was a little kid and the nurses had to hold me down in the doctor’s office so the doctor could inject me. Or about those crazy moms and dads in America that think that the US government is injecting autism into their children via regular immunizations.

I’ve gotten tons of shots. When I was in the Peace Corps, the first three months were devoted to basically receiving vaccines on a full time basis. We got the flu shot. We got the swine flu shot. They gave us vaccines for everything. And we couldn’t opt out of anything. Not that I wanted to opt out of any shots. I’m not a huge fan of communicable tropical diseases. But there were some other people that put up a big stink.

Some of those shots were harmless. Whooping cough. Yellow fever. But I remember that everybody got the Typhoid shot and felt really sick the next day. That was kind of an unsettling thought, that this preventative injection gave us all a twenty-four hour bug. But whatever, I’d rather be sick for a day than to have Typhoid. I don’t even know what Typhoid is. I don’t even know what yellow fever is.

And I don’t want to know. I don’t know if anybody else feels the same way, but whenever I look up diseases or infections, I get crazy, I get to thinking that I have magically contracted whatever it is I’ve looked up. Or worse, I’ll know that I don’t have it, but I’ll be reading the symptoms and imagining what they’d feel like if I did have them, and a lot of the time that’s even worse than actually being sick.

Because really, what are the symptoms for most diseases? Chills. Headache. Fever. Aching. That’s why whenever somebody tells me that they have the flu, and this totally depends on who tells me, but usually I’m going to call bullshit. Really? You have the flu? I’ll be talking to somebody one day, and they’re fine, and then the next day they have a fever, and it’s automatically the flu.

You know the flu kills tons of people every year, right? Maybe you do have the flu, I have no idea. But I’m just guessing that you don’t. Every once in a while I’ll get sick for a day or two, and I’ll have a fever. I’ll take a bunch of Advil and hopefully after a few days I’m good. But the flu? I’ve always imagined the flu, for an adult in his twenties, to be two weeks incapacitated by a virus that would kill a man in his seventies. This is something that’s going to confine you to your bed, that’s going to put pain and pressure on every bone in your body.

Most every day that I have to go to work, I think to myself, man, I wish I were just sick enough to warrant staying home and calling in sick. I picture the flu to be you stuck in bed wishing that you could work indefinitely for little to no pay only for an hour’s relief from the hell that this virus is wreaking on your whole body.

And that’s why I get a flu shot every year. I’m in my prime right now. I know I probably don’t need it. Whenever I talk to people my age about a flu shot, nobody ever gets it. Nobody takes the flu seriously.

But I get it every year. And getting back to where I started, I think that there has to be a bulls-eye in your arm, the sweet spot of where that needle is supposed to hit. Because sometimes the needle goes clean in, like you’re waiting for the nurse to give you the shot, and you’re clenching your teeth and holding your eyes shut, but the nurse goes, “OK, that’s it,” and you don’t even need that band aid, like it’s totally not necessary.

But then you get days like today, where I got my shot and I not only felt the needle pricking my skin, but I felt it enter, I could tell ever millimeter of the way how far it had penetrated into my muscle. And I could even feel the liquid vaccine being pressed by this person’s hand into my arm. And now my arm’s very sore, like I can’t even lift it up all the way.

Why can’t we do it like they do it in Star Trek? Seriously, you ever see that? It’s called a hypo-spray. You can inject it through the clothing. That would make my year so much better. Because even after this sore arm heals, I’m going to have to deal with emotional trauma for months, of being pricked, of being hurt.

You know what? I think next year I’m going to ask that nurse if they have any sort of a vaccine that can stop me from constantly whining about all the shots I have to take, from complaining about how the band aid used after the injection, about how it hurts so much when it’s on my arm all day and I have to pull it off at the end, and it’s all stuck to my skin. But I’m going to ask if they have an oral vaccine because, I don’t know, after today I really don’t feel like getting any more shots, not for a while anyway.

Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises: Part 2: Of the Review

I wrote last summer about how obsessed I was with the new Batman movie. It’s been a while now, but the obsession hasn’t diminished. In fact, I think that I’m even more obsessed with it now than I was when I saw it the first time. Or the second time. Ever since movie theaters stopped showing it, and because I haven’t yet bought it on DVD, I have no way to satisfy the gaping hole in the core of my very being that cries out on a daily basis for more Batman. Seriously, that movie was f’n ridiculous.

You remember the beginning? That airplane scene? I can’t think of any movie that’s had a more gripping or a more dramatic opening. Remember when they dragged those hostages onto the plane and the CIA agent pulls off the one hostage’s mask, and it’s Bane, and he’s wearing his breathing mask, and the CIA guy says to Bane, “Will it hurt if I take off this mask?” and Bane goes, “Yes … for you!” Seriously, remember that scene? Right before he somehow gets out of his handcuffs, and then the other plane comes out of nowhere and somehow Bane escapes? I think I actually passed out from excitement during those first five minutes. I must have, because when I saw it the second time, I was like, wait a second, I don’t remember exactly what happened. I have a sense memory of euphoria, followed by a warm and fuzzy sensation, so yeah, I must have fainted. I can’t wait to see it again because, maybe I lost consciousness during the second viewing also, and so it’ll only be after repeated viewing that I’ll be desensitized enough to actually make it through the entire movie awake. I’ve never been more hopped up on visual stimuli than I was when I saw Batman.

Seriously, sometimes when I’m sitting around with my friends, I’ll just go, totally unprompted, into the whole, “Yes … for you!” bit. And maybe nobody will get it. Maybe only some of the people will get it. Even if you get it, it’s a pretty random thing to just say, totally out of context from whatever else we might be doing or talking about. But it’s so awesome. Bane was such a badass bad guy.

And if you haven’t seen the movie, one, I have a little piece of advice: go see the movie. It’s so amazing. I’ve tried watching other movies since I’ve seen Batman, but they’ve all been terrible. That’s not to say that they’re terrible movies, although they might be. All I’m saying is, Batman is such a good movie, hold on, such a good film, that it’s going to ruin movies for you for the rest of your life. And films. It’s like that whole every square is a parallelogram but not every parallelogram is a square thing, but with movies and films, and Batman, and Batman is the film. Get it? What I’m getting at here is after you watch Batman, you realize that nothing else is ever going to come close to making you feel the way you did when you saw Batman for the first, second, third, five-hundredth time.

So you might be saying to yourself, why would I want to go see Batman? If it’s going to ruin the movies for me altogether, why bother? Because. It’s so fucking awesome. Even though you’ll never be able to watch another movie again, it’ll totally be worth it, to see Batman, to see The Dark Knight Returns. And besides, you won’t ever have to go see another movie again. Because eventually it’ll be released on DVD, or Blue-Ray, or whatever format happens to be the current standard, and any time you hear colleagues or family members talking about how much they loved a recent picture that came out, you can just go home and pop Batman in, and I’m serious here, I guarantee that you’ll be having a better time watching Batman over and over and over and over again than all of your friends and family watching all of those other movies combined, at the same time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense until you see it. I hope you already saw it.

And that opening scene? The whole “For you!” part that I was talking about before? It only gets better. I remember when I wrote my original Batman review, I was still a little bitter with my wife, because she made me wait to see Prometheus with her, but then she quickly lost interest in seeing Prometheus all together, and so we never wound up seeing it. I thought this was a bad thing. I thought I was being held back. And that’s one of the reasons I went to see Batman by myself, behind my wife’s back, while she was at school.

And when I finally did see Prometheus, I was left totally underwhelmed. Angry, even. It was more of a confusion that gradually built up to anger as I contemplated what Ridley Scott had just snuck up from behind and shoved my face in, but this is all really small minded of me. Now that I’m a couple of months removed from Batman, I can safely say that God himself purposely made Prometheus turn out to be a totally terrible movie, if only to show me that my wife wasn’t about to let me see a huge summer blockbuster by myself, and when I missed the Prometheus train entirely, I realized that I couldn’t let the same mistake happen with Batman. And so, if Prometheus hadn’t sucked so bad, maybe I would have waited for my wife to take a break from her books to see Batman with me, and in this scenario, maybe we would have never seen it, and I’m forced right now to contemplate a reality in which I’ve never seen Batman. And I can’t stand to even think about it. But then I think about all of the other alternate realities, universes in which I’ve never seen Batman, and it makes me crazy, to try and imagine a version of me that hasn’t seen Batman, that doesn’t recognize it as the greatest film in the multiverse, and that thought makes me insane with despair. And so if somebody ever invents a machine to travel to parallel universes, that’s going to be the only thing that I’ll want to do, to hop around from Earth to Earth, warning any potential Rob’s to see Batman immediately. But I’d also need a time machine, so I could first travel to the alternate world, and then go back in the past, back to this summer, when Batman came out, and I’ll grab myself by the collar and say, “Go see Batman, now!” But what if he’s like, “Batman? What? Who’s Batman?” And I’ll have realized that maybe I’ve accidentally travelled to a world where there is no Batman. And that’s too much. It’s too much to even think about. And so I’ll have to travel back to my original reality, kidnap Chris Nolan, and take him with me, to that and every other parallel universe where Batman doesn’t exist. And I’ll threaten him, scream at him “Make the Batman movie! Or I’ll never take you back to our Earth! Now!” And he’ll have to. And I know, it’s crazy, because there are probably an infinite number of worlds out there, and so I probably won’t have time to take Christopher Nolan to every single alternate reality. But I’ll try as hard as I can. Because that movie was so fucking sick, so unbelievably amazing. And so if all I’m doing is just increasing the number of realities where Batman exists, even if it’s just a handful of worlds, then it’s all worth it. I just … I just … I just, really, really, really, really love that movie.

Going to jail

I always wonder how I would get along in a maximum-security prison. We have one of the highest prison populations in the world, and it’s growing. Assuming this rate of growth continues, it’s not totally unreasonable to think that I’ll eventually wind up in the slammer at some point in my life. And I’m not planning any violent crimes or anything, it’s just that, you never know how things are going to play out.

Like maybe one day I’ll be walking down some street. Across the way there might be three guys having what appears to be a friendly conversation. But just out of my earshot, they’ll be having a really serious, really sinister discussion. Two of those guys could be in the mafia, and the third guy might be one of most corrupt cops on the force. They could be talking about a jam they’re in, how thanks to some mob stooge the Feds are on to something.

The cops says that what they need is a patsy, someone who they can pin all the blame on, diverting attention away from the real crooks. But who would they frame? “Anybody,” the cop would say, “Literally, any nobody walking down the street. Like that guy. That guy right there. Yeah, he’s perfect. Wait here.”

And then that cop, he’ll be undercover so I won’t immediately recognize him as an officer, he’ll come up to be and say something like, “Hey wait a second buddy.” I’ll turn around, not suspecting what’s about to go down. “Yes?” And the cop will look me in the eye, take a big bag of cocaine out of his pocket, hold it up in front of him, drop it on the ground, bend down to pick it up, look me back in the eye and say, “All right pal, freeze, you’re under arrest.” Oh yeah, and he’ll push the bag into my hand before I have a chance to react, just to get my fingerprints on it.

While I’m awaiting trial, all of those mob guys will make up a bunch of nonsense, a whole fake back story, about how I’m in the mob, about how I was the head of all of these drug deals and gun smuggling and arms deals with Colombian narco-traffickers. And something about a bunch of stolen cars. And something else about racketeering. They’ll throw the book at me. They’ll write up another book because the original book won’t have enough dirt, and they’ll throw that one at me too.

The judge won’t even want to look at me. He’ll be like, “I’ve never been so disgusted with a human being as I am with you. You don’t deserve a trial because there doesn’t exist anybody low enough to consider you a peer. I don’t care if it’s unconstitutional. I’m sending you away for life. Bailiff, get this piece of garbage out of my sight.”

And I’ll struggle, I’ll beg for some further consideration, but the mob would have spent so much money and time and resources really fabricating such an intricate story. Nobody would believe me, not even my family, not even my wife. I’ll lose everything. All in exchange for a bright orange jumpsuit and a pair of government-issued laceless shoes.

Sure that’s kind of an unlikely scenario, but it’s a specific one, and it’s one that I just came up with right this second. I could think of hundreds of other random potential storylines all sharing the outcome of me be locked up for life. Maybe I’ll be lured into a pyramid scheme, and when it all comes crashing down, the guy running it will have it made to look like I was the brains behind the operation. Maybe there’s somebody out there who looks just like me, exactly like me, but he’s crazy, like really crazy, and he’s a cannibal, and just before the cops get to him, he commits suicide, but a bunch of wild animals eat the body, and so the police never find out what happened to him. Thinking he’s still alive, they keep the case open, and it eventually leads back to me, back to being wrongfully accused, back to jail.

My point is, I think that if I had to go to jail, I’d probably do OK. I’m really good at getting along with all different sorts of people, and while the other prisoners might be skeptical of me at first, I’m confident that I could win them over with my offbeat charm, magnetic personality, and award winning smile. Maybe during arts and crafts hour I’d lead everybody in making homemade replicas of some of America’s favorite board games, and then I’d organize a massive prison-wide board game night. And they’d become so wildly popular, everybody having so much fun, that in-prison violence and rape would drop dramatically, almost to zero. No, definitely to zero. The whole place would turn around.

And then the warden would be doing a tour of the facilities, and he’d say to himself, “My God, this prison has never looked better, and all thanks to what, a couple of board games? Just imagine what we could do if we gave them board games, real board games, not just those rudimentary homemade copies. Let’s do it. Somebody go out and buy me three hundred Scrabbles. And get a couple of Monopolies while you’re at it.”

And eventually that judge that sentenced me to life would hear about my impact on the prison. He probably wouldn’t hear about it directly, but one day his wife will be watching the Lifetime channel and there’ll be a made for TV movie about me inspiring the whole cell block to get along. And the judge will be so moved that he’ll reverse the sentence. I’ll be a free man.

But I’ll choose to stay. Why leave such a close knit community? I’ll have made some real friends behind bars. And the judge will look at the warden all confused, shaking his head, “Well if he wants to stay, I guess there’s nothing we can do.”

And everything will be going great, until one day I’ll get a package. It’ll be a cake. I’ll be so excited I’ll dig right in. The other prisoners will try to stop me, which I’ll think unusual, because jealousy and fighting will have been eliminated completely. But they won’t be jealous, they’ll be warning me, because every prisoner knows that all cakes sent to inmate have little saws baked inside, to use for escape plans. But I won’t have known, and I’ll have been so hungry I wouldn’t have noticed it going down.

And after I die all of the guards and staff and the warden will expect the prison to descend back into chaos without my soothing effect on the population. But everything will be OK. They’ll remember, the board games, the game nights, it’s going to stick, it’s going to be a permanent solution. And so, yeah, I don’t think it would be so bad if I got sent to prison. I mean, I wouldn’t want to go to jail, but just in case I ever found myself locked up, I think I would do fine.

Internet overload

I think it’s been about a month since I’ve written something about not being able to think of anything to write about. I set myself a totally arbitrary once a month limit, because stuff like this, it’s kind of boring, it’s totally unimaginative. But I think it’s necessary sometimes. In trying to write everyday, I feel myself going through cycles, patterns. I’ll have a couple of weeks where I’m feeling really strong about my writing, where I sit down and these blog posts and whatever else I’m writing just kind of write themselves. And then there’s the flipside of that coin, where each day is much more of a struggle, where I think that I’m just out of ideas, with nothing to write about. And it’s not a switch, it’s not like I’m on and then I’m off. There are all of the different in-betweens.

So then I’ll just get to the point where I’m like, all right, I might as well at least get some content out there, even if the only thing that I can say is that I have nothing to say. And I know everybody has to deal with this to some extent, but it still deserves mentioning. It’s really, really hard to get work done thanks to the Internet. It’s unbelievably difficult for me to try to focus on only Microsoft Word for however long it takes to write a whole piece without desperately wanting to click on my Internet browser every ten minutes or so. I guess I can’t just blame the Internet; there have always been distractions. TV, video games. I could always just take a nap.

But the Internet is unavoidable. It’s ever present. And it’s new. This is totally uncharted territory for our species. What are going to be some of the long term effects of how we deal with such constant access to unlimited quantities of always up to date information? I don’t want to just talk like my experiences are how it’s like for everybody else, but I do have experiences, and I know that I’m not totally alone in dealing with them.

It’s not just writing either. Take office work. After I graduated, I worked two office jobs for about eight months each. I literally didn’t do any work. And I’m not even trying to exaggerate. At both jobs I spent at least ninety percent of my time sitting at a desk surfing the Internet. If the phone rang, I answered it. Maybe I’d have like twenty minutes of data entry to complete on some spreadsheet. I was constantly haunted by thoughts like, man, somebody’s going to fire me. Somebody’s going to come up to me one day and say, Rob, what do you actually do here? What do you provide to the company? Why are we paying you?

But nobody ever did. And so I’d go to work and look at web sites. And then I’d go home and watch TV. And it took me forever to even identify what I was feeling going through that existence. And people have to be better at it I am. They have to be out there. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a functioning economy. But I couldn’t do it. It’s hard enough trying to write, something that I really like doing, without getting sucked into the Internet. It’s almost impossible for me not to give into temptation if my alternative is something that I despise.

The thing about the Internet is that you can’t escape. It’s like, if I have a party sized bag of Twix in my house, I’m going to gradually eat every single candy bar over the course of the day, well past the point to where I’m not enjoying them anymore, but I can’t stop, because something inside has taken over, something that craves sugar, calories, whatever. But it’s easy enough to fix that. I don’t buy giant bags of Twix. The bag is gone and the temptation is gone. I won’t sit around thinking about all of the Twix that I could be eating if only I got up, put my coat on, and walked to the store.

The Internet is in my pocket. I have a faster Internet connection on my cell phone than I did on my actual computer when I was in high school. And that’s only really a backup Internet. I’d only have to rely on cell phone Internet if my house Internet went out. But I’ve been living in this house for a year and it’s only been out once, for like an hour.

So back to writing. I’m writing every day. I’m setting up quotas for myself, how much work I want to get done. These are all goals that I aspire to. Sometimes I fall short. I just can’t shake the feeling that I should be getting more done, that I should have more to write about, but a big part of my consciousness is constantly wanting to be on the Internet. I’m always tempted. My phone beeps every time I get an email. I’m writing on my computer but I can see the browser icon at the bottom of the screen, just begging to be opened up. And if I give in to temptation, hours just vanish. And then the day is over.

This is all way too dramatic. I’m no Luddite. But I just feel like, since this is such a new phenomenon, there’s no way to really assess how I’m doing. I just always worry, is it holding me back? Whenever I can’t think of anything to write about, is it because I’m just constantly distracted, in a way that twenty years ago I wouldn’t have been? If I worked at an office before computers, worked eight hours a day somewhere without any access to distraction, would I have done a good job? Learned a business? Taken pride in what I do for a living? Or would I have been the same exact way, unable to sit still all day, finding something else to pass the hours, taking breaks every hour to head over to the drug store, to buy that giant bag of Twix, the big one, the party sized bag full of little chocolate covered caramel cookies?

Four-arms

So I’m taking this writing class and we had this assignment to come up with a character sketch, something based on an original creation, something along the lines of a Frozen Caveman Lawyer or a Chicken Lady. As usual, I put off writing until the night before. As I sat down I thought, OK, this’ll be easy. I write stuff every day. How hard can it be to come up with a decent character?

It was much harder than I thought. Part of why I like this writing class is because I’m really pushed to get past my own writing style, past what I’m used to doing everyday. And character work? I never really make up characters. I make up a lot of bullshit, sure, but characters?

So I sat down at the computer and the first thing that pops in my head is a guy with four arms. I was immediately put off by the idea. Is that all you’ve got brain? A guy with four arms? I sat there for another ten minutes. Nothing. It was going to be one of those nights, spent staring at the screen, watching the seconds tick by.

I had prepared for this. I spent the entire day writing blog posts, tons of them. I just wanted my fingers and my mind really nimble and warmed up for this assignment. Part of the pressure, I think, is that I’m forced to come up with something funny, something original, and then it’s read in front of everybody in the class.

It’s a part of the learning process, trying and failing. I know that. Still, that doesn’t make it any easier, getting in there, passing out copies of your sketch to everybody, assigning different people to read different roles, and then hearing it out loud. I’ve botched it before, and it’s not fun, the sitting there, pretending to act natural while everybody goes around the room reading out loud what you’ve written, completely stone-faced, absolutely not entertained.

So I wanted something good, something original, something funny. I thought about time travel, a classic, a standby, something I’ve written about extensively. OK, let’s do a time travel guy. Would he be from the future? OK sure, he’s from the future. And what’s funny about this future guy? Hmm. Yeah, that’s not really inherently funny, the future.

Maybe he could be from a parallel universe. And what would he say? Maybe he’d say stuff about how different everything is in his reality. And in the course of the sketch you’d find out that his universe is only marginally different that our universe. But, that doesn’t sound funny either. That just sounds like a bunch of boring sci-fi nonsense that wasn’t that interesting when I wrote about it on this blog months ago.

Finally I got to the point where I was staring at a blank screen for the better part of half an hour. I had somehow managed to keep my urges to check the Internet at bay, but I knew that if I didn’t start writing something right away, my sorry excuse for self-discipline would erode and I’d be lost on Reddit in no time.

I couldn’t believe I was about to do this, but I really didn’t have much of a choice. Four-arms. I was going to write a sketch about a guy with four arms. Just get something on paper, I told myself. Who cares what’s it’s about. Just get it down, hold it in your hand, and you’ll see that you’re capable of writing this sketch. That made sense, kind of. If I could just write something, I’d ease a lot of the pressure, the anxiety and the worry that I might have nothing.

I named him Four-arms. If I’m going for this terrible idea, I might as well embrace it. It turned out exactly as you’d imagine. Terrible jokes about the neighbors asking Four-arms to help carry in the groceries. Bits about specially tailored shirts, all of the extra money you’d have to spend on deodorant. I reached the page limit and read it back and knew that it wasn’t even close to something I’d like to present to a roomful of strangers.

I just needed an ending. Some ending, anything, something stupid, whatever I just wanted to be finished with Four-arms and forget about him. But I had this ridiculous scenario pop in my head where all of the sudden a lady would scream from a top floor apartment window because her baby was falling out of the building. By this point Four-arms wouldn’t have any free hands, because they’d all be carrying groceries. But just before the baby hits the ground, two more arms rip out of Four-arms’ shirt, and he saves it. And everyone looks around and says something like, “Wow, look everybody. He really has six arms!”

It’s so bad, I can’t even explain how embarrassed I am that I put it down. Worst of all was, whenever I thought of the scene, and how ridiculous it was, I started giggling involuntarily. I couldn’t stop it. And nothing was even that funny. I just had this laugh stuck inside somewhere and those two arms busting out of the shirt got it going uncontrollably.

I wound up actually bringing the sketch in, only because I had no alternative. I couldn’t think of anything funnier. So my turn came around and I just kept thinking to myself, just keep it together Rob. Nothing would have been more awkward than a room full of silence interrupted by a guy laughing to himself at his own unfunny joke. And sure enough, when somebody read out loud, “Look! He actually has six arms!” I couldn’t take it. I felt it bubbling up. So I tried to make it sound like I was coughing. But I think that all the fake coughing did was bring more attention to the fact that I was smiling, and the whole thing snowballed out of control, to the point where I had to interrupt and apologize, for laughing, for making a scene. I know it’s not funny everybody, but for some reason, this image of a six-armed man carrying groceries and catching a baby, it sets me over the edge. Man, I was so embarrassed. Everybody probably thought I was nuts.