Monthly Archives: July 2013

You have to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables

I saw this commercial on TV the other day, it was some public service announcement reminding Americans that we’re supposed to eat a certain number of servings of fresh fruits and vegetables every day. And right at that moment, I was halfway down one of those new oversized Slim Jims, like it’s just like an original Slim Jim, but it’s about as thick as an Italian sausage. I had a pause, I thought, yeah, I don’t eat any fruits or vegetables.

So I went to the grocery store and picked up a little basket, committed to buying lots and lots of fruits. What a selection! I can’t remember the last time I went fruit shopping, so many different varieties. I bought like four bags, full of fruits, and that wasn’t even counting the watermelon, which didn’t fit inside a bag at all. And yeah, I probably should have listened to the cashier, she was like, “Honey, that’s not going to fit in there,” as I was trying to get it in.

But I don’t know, I’m defiant sometimes, and that whole honey business, please, I’m not you’re honey, all right toots? And to my credit, I did eventually get that watermelon inside, although, it didn’t do any good at all, because the bag was so stretched from the melon that there weren’t even any handles to grip anymore, it was just a giant watermelon half covered in tight plastic. Still, I acted like that was what I was trying to go for all along.

I got home and started to dig in, but the first thing I went for was this box of blackberries. It was like, eh, maybe one out of every ten blackberries had a nice taste. The rest were all like way too sour, and not in a cool Sour Patch Kids way, this was like biting into something and then immediately having a sense memory of being a two-year-old and putting something in my mouth that I definitely shouldn’t have, like a sour bar of soup.

Also, and this was the same with the raspberries, you really can’t just throw them in your mouth. I don’t know where, because I’ve opened a few up and tried to find the source, but there are always like three or four really small, really hard little seeds. And if they don’t hurt one of your teeth as you accidentally take a bite, they wedge themselves right inside your back molars, like they perfectly conform to the shape of whatever’s back there. And so for the rest of the day I was just feeling it with my tongue, I couldn’t do anything to dislodge it, dental floss wasn’t doing the trick. It was just torture, this one spot on the side of my tongue got raw from trying to play it out.

I thought, OK, blackberries, maybe there was a reason my mom never bought blackberries when I was a little kid. What about kiwis? I always love it when there’s a fruit salad, something you get at the deli, or one of those prepackaged breakfasts they hand out at some of the nicer hotels, there are always like one or two slices of kiwi on top, and it’s delicious.

But having a nice precut piece of kiwi is worlds away from actually buying a whole kiwi, bringing it back to your house and thinking, OK, how am I supposed to get those slices out of this fuzzy little ball and into my stomach? Because how are you supposed to peel a kiwi? I tried cutting the skin off with a knife but it’s so delicate, I was hacking away chunks of flesh. I found a potato peeler but that was also a no-go. You squeeze the fruit hard enough to work the peeler and it just collapses, there’s juice everywhere, your hands are getting sticky.

I was getting frustrated, looking at this whole bag full of fruits that I realized I had no idea how to eat, even hungrier, I was getting desperate enough where I started looking for the other half of the Slim Jim, the one I threw away before I had the bright idea to go out to the grocery store. And why didn’t I pick up some regular food while I was out there? Now what, if I want to get something else to eat I have to go back? Two grocery store trips in one day? I can’t.

I went for a banana but they were still way too green, the inside tasted like a potato. My ruby red grapefruits were so riddled with seeds that when I went to cut it down its equator, the knife slipped on a seed cluster and I almost cut the tip off of my left pinky off. Does anybody else have an allergy not to mangoes, but to mango skins? Is that even real? I didn’t notice a problem until I put my lips to the outside because, how are you supposed to get the fruit off of around that huge pit? And come on, where does all of that mango string come from? It’s worse than eating a pulled pork sandwich found under a heat lamp at some gas station on a highway rest stop.

The peaches were too sour. The seedless watermelon must have gotten lost in the seedless bin on its way to the extra seeded bin. The plums were rock hard and the apples way too mushy. Apricots, pineapples, oranges … my stomach was starting to hurt from too many little bites of under-ripe produce.

Forget the fruit, thanks, I think I’ll just move along to veggies if that’s all right. That’s what I hoped. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. Like, what the hell are those little spikes on top of every artichoke leaf? And what about that prickly thing inside? Come on, a guy can’t even make himself a healthy bite to eat once in a while. Maybe these stores could have a little sign next to whatever it is they’re selling, like I don’t even know what Okra is, how am I supposed to get it into my mouth? Is this really too much to ask? Is this really supposed to be this difficult?

I miss summer vacation

What am I supposed to do for the rest of the summer? The Fourth of July is long gone. There aren’t really any holidays to look forward to until Labor Day, which in my line of employment, it’s more of a joke than an actual holiday, because I always work Mondays at the restaurant, and especially on holidays, especially on holidays that don’t really have anything to do with anything real, it’s like people go out to eat in droves. Personally, I’d never wait on line for more than ten minutes to sit down and eat, but I’m clearly in the minority here, because on any sort of a day off, it’s like, let’s go out to a restaurant everybody.

Labor Day, it’s an actual day of labor for me. So I’m not counting that as a holiday. And then Columbus Day? Again, it’s the same. Most jobs still make you come in anyway. I think it’s just banks that take the day off. But that’s not until fall. I’m losing track of where I was going with this. It’s still technically summer, and I can’t think of anything special to do.

And I don’t know what the problem is, really, because when you think about it, there’s nothing really at all different about July or August than there is February or March. They’re all just regular months, go to your regular job, wait for the next holiday, which is always way too far away. It’s just the weather that changes. I’m freezing, and then the next thing I know I’m way too hot.

It just sucks because we spend the first twenty-two years of our lives having summer as a vacation. Even if you had a job growing up, which I always did, you still got two months where you didn’t have to go to school. When I was in high school, and then during those summers in between college, I’d love to work some crappy job. One, regardless of how pointless the work might have been, it was all very temporary. And two, it was a break from the normal routine. No school, no classes, something different.

And then you’re an adult and the weather starts getting warmer and there’s still that expectation that something different is going to happen, that for two months anyway, even if I’m not going to be able to sit around and do nothing, I’ll at least get a well needed change of scenery.

Now I’m twenty-nine, so I’m still at this point where the majority of my life experience is telling me something different than what I’m actually experiencing: a life of going to work over and over again, maybe I don’t hate it, maybe sometimes I do hate it, but it’s something that I have to deal with, because it’s never going away, there’s no rest at all. Once in a while maybe I’ll take a day off or a couple of days, a week or two once a year, but that’s it.

It’s just so soul crushing. And I hate sounding like such a whiney little brat, I totally realize how entitled this all sounds. But I just hate the fact that we have this warm weather, that all I really want to do is just go outside and run around and relax and play with my dog and cook a nice meal. I’d get my writing done when I felt like it, I’d have plenty of time to read the newspaper or some books, all of the stuff that I never get to do.

Because my real life is just waking up, struggling to get a run in, making myself sit down to write all of this stuff out, why? Because I want to be a writer. Why? So that way I could do all of this fun stuff that I’m talking about without having to sacrifice seven hours a day at a restaurant. And again, I don’t hate it. I definitely don’t love it, but in terms of a job that I have to do to pay my bills, whatever, I could have it a lot worse.

But all of that stuff, the reading, the cooking, more exercise, more time to just take a walk with my dog, maybe do a little gardening, there’s never enough time. I always go to bed at the end of the day thinking that there was so much more that I wanted to do that I wasn’t able to because I had to go to the restaurant and run around like a crazy person getting this, doing that, and by the time I get home, I always tell myself, you can do it Rob, you can stay up a little bit longer and get some more work done. But then I’m asleep. And then I’m waking up again. And it’s the same old, same old, every day, winter or summer. I just want to go outside. Just give me two months to go outside and hang out. That’s not so bad. We’re a pretty rich country. This is a pretty advanced society. Can’t we make it so we take turns working? Right? Wouldn’t that be nice?

Movie Review: The Conjuring

I saw the trailer for The Conjuring early last spring, you know the one I’m talking about, with the hide and seek, the clap, clap. Whatever movie this preview was opening for wasn’t even scary, and so I found myself totally unprepared for the terror that I was about to experience. Sure, and without giving too much away, the essence of that scene is mostly shock, or as they refer to it in that South Park episode, being startled.

But that’s exactly what you go to a horror movie to feel. A good one, anyway. The Conjuring is definitely a good horror movie. I felt like I was clinging to the sides of my seat the entire time, the sides of my seat, the bottom, I’d grab onto any part of the movie theater seat and clench my hands, my arms, everything, and I’d realize that it wasn’t really helping me manage the terror. So I’d shift, I’d grab something else. I wound up spending most of the movie sitting there with my arms wrapped tightly around my chest, exercising basically every muscle in my body.

So you get the picture, I was scared, I liked it. But why does this movie work where so many horror films fall flat? It’s all about pace, especially with a movie like this that doesn’t really stray too far from the time tested forms of the genre. There are creaky stairs, doors opening and closing by themselves, there was definitely a lot of stuff that we’ve already scene before.

But the pacing was perfect. It’s the kind of very slow, things-slightly-start-to-go-wrong mentality, an ominous build up that lets you know something very sinister is going on. That’s easy enough, at least, they made me scared during that trailer. But how would this idea play out for an entire movie?

We all know that there are going to be things popping out at you, lots of slow camera shots that just beg to be interrupted by a scary ghost-lady close-up, but at what point to you sit back and go, OK, this isn’t scary anymore? A lot of times whatever is being used as a plot gets too convoluted, like maybe they’ll look in the history books and figure out the origins of the paranormal activity, and they’ll have to return an amulet or something to set a certain spirit to rest.

So to me, the perfect horror movie never lets you go. Even as whatever is going on is brought to a climax, you’re still sitting there in your seat trying to find that magical position that might make the fear somewhat more bearable. That’s what this movie achieves. You’re never comfortable.

There’s a little side-story opening, involving a doll, which almost made me check out ten minutes into the film. Then we dive right into this family moving into this house somewhere in New England. It looks like it might have started falling apart a hundred years ago. They don’t waste time on too much backstory, and it’s not one of these things where only one person can tell there’s something wrong here.

And equally as important, there’s also not that one idiot character that, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, remains firm in his or her conviction that there’s absolutely nothing going on here.

Oh yeah, and it’s in the seventies. I’m telling you, the seventies are fucking scary. So are the sixties. The eighties are just this big neon joke and the nineties, well, I grew up in the nineties, so to me, it’s all a little too familiar. And go ahead trying to make a horror movie set in the present. Whenever I get scared in my house, I turn on all of my TVs, my lights, and I start streaming as much music and video from the Internet at the same time. There’s too much distraction in our modern world to get really scared of anything.

But the seventies, man, you’ve got a problem with ghosts? You can’t just send an email to some random ghost hunters you found on the Internet. No, you have to stalk them at some college hours away where they happen to be giving a lecture. And what if you need emergency clearance from the Vatican for a last minute exorcism? Sorry pal, we’ll see if we can’t get in touch with Rome tomorrow morning. And by the way, that call’s going to be expensive, so we’re going to need a deposit.

Also, the kids say stuff like groovy, and far out. Yup, that’s pretty much how I imagine the seventies, no cell phones, lots of creepy black and white TV static, groovy. I’m terrified.

The Conjuring is fantastically scary. Seriously, I’m still shaking. And no, nothing especially new happened, no envelopes were pushed or anything like that. It’s just a very well put together horror film. It’s like a really catchy summer pop song that the entire world gets stuck in its head. No, there’s nothing especially revolutionary going on here, but something’s been tapped, something universal, and it’s been executed almost flawlessly.

A semester at sea

When I was in college I spent a semester at sea. I thought it would launch me into the fields of like marine biology and aquatics and stuff. I imagined myself really learning the nuts and bolts of life out on the open ocean, but it wasn’t anything like I had expected. Nothing I could have read or studied would have helped prepare me for the challenges of living on a boat.

Like, for example, I thought that there’d be like a big disembarking, like a “Bon voyage!” type of farewell. But no, they kept us in this stupid inflatable room on campus inside the Olympic sized swimming pool for two days straight. “What’s the point of this?” we all asked, “When do we get to go out to sea?”

The faculty explained that they were giving us a couple of days in a controlled environment to develop our sea legs. I told them that this was unnecessary, that I’d been on a boat several times. I was lying, of course, but come on, people have been travelling on boats for forever. Do you think that the pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic were forced to sit on some glorified pool toy for two days straight?

The worst part was that the swim team still had practice. The inflatable only took up like three lanes, so we had to just sit there and watch them all staring at us like this was the stupidest thing anybody could have ever decided to come to college and actually pay to do.

I was just about to give up, thinking about all of the regular classes that I’d have to sign up for after I backed out of the whole semester at sea, but one of my classmates, or shipmates, or potential shipmates, he backed out. I thought to myself, what a wimp, I can’t believe he quit. And then I realized how ridiculous I sounded, criticizing this guy for a decision that I was just about to make, so I doubled down on my commitment. I was going to earn those sea legs.

We finally made it to the boat and everything was just, again, not at all how I had imagined it to be, certainly nothing like the brochures from the student center made it out to be. I was pretty sure I’d have a roommate. One roommate. Not three. And I hesitate to even call them roommates, because it was hardly a room that we were forced to share.

These guys were a bunch of total nerds. Everybody had the same pair of knee high rubber boots from the first day, I was like, “Guys, what did your moms all go shopping at the same boat store?” and I turned to the first mate, he was checking us all in, and that guy was a huge nerd too, he hadn’t even cracked a smile. One of the nerds was like, “These are the boots they told us to buy. You don’t have any?”

And I don’t know how it was possible that I was accepted into this program, how they let me sit on that tube in the pool for two days, but nobody sent me like a checklist of stuff to buy. “They sent it to our campus email,” one of the dorks said, but I didn’t even bother replying, I never set up my campus email. I was still using my AOL email at the time, I’m not going to bother sharing my old screen name, but it was something lame, childish, you know, I can say that looking back now. Fine, it was SpleenHarvester6834. I don’t know. I thought it was badass at the time. I think I just saw the Hellraiser movies or something.

So I was totally underprepared without the waterproof shoes. But that’s OK, because I bought this pack of novelty eye patches and pirate swords from a party goods store. “Come on mateys!” I passed around the plastic trinkets, nobody took any, what a bunch of weirdoes, seriously, you’re going to spend a whole three months on a boat out on the open ocean and you don’t want to have even the slightest bit of fun?

And that’s what it was, three months of no fun, of performing a bunch of boring calculations. All of the ship’s work was mostly done automatically and, I guess reading the brochures would have helped, but it was all just lab work, just pointing stuff at the sky and taking seawater samples and eating this disgusting packaged food. I didn’t have a cell phone yet, so it didn’t matter that there wasn’t any service, but no TV, just a deck of cards that I brought that got wet with sea spray almost immediately after I busted them out.

I didn’t do anything, not that it mattered, you pay the price for a semester at sea and you don’t do any work, apparently the price tag has an included C+ minimum grade. I’ve never since spoken to any of my shipmates. It’s like, you know when Facebook came out and all of the sudden you start reconnecting with kids you went to Kindergarten with? There was nothing from any of those guys. Maybe they’re all back at sea, back at the open water, who knows, bunch of nerds, I bet you they have no idea what Facebook is. Still, I always find it strange that there’s basically no digital record I ever even boarded the ship.

The absolute worst part was, while I didn’t have any seasickness at all while on board, as soon as I touched dry land again, I started to feel the waves. After a couple of weeks I went to the doctor and he diagnosed me with Phantom Wave Syndrome, something about the brain and waves and, I have no idea, but everything’s always a little wobbly. I asked him, besides medication, is there any relief? “Well,” he told me, “You could always get back out there, back out to sea, I’m sure you wouldn’t feel anything if you were back on a boat.”

But fuck that, fuck the sea, fuck marine biology. I put my heart and soul into the water and it just sank, like it was encased in a cement defibrillator, a whole big vast ocean of nothing.

First things first

Prioritization, it’s one of the cornerstones of getting stuff done. Maybe it’s the only cornerstone. But I guess then you’d have to imagine everything that you’re getting done as being in the shape of a giant capital L. It doesn’t matter, I said the word cornerstone, I don’t know why really, why do I pick any word over another word? It’s all just some unoriginal way to say something unoriginal. I could have said bedrock, foundation, you know.

But I’m talking about getting your priorities in order. It’s essential, before committing to any task, to figure out what you’re going to do first, then what you’re going to do second, right? All the way until you’re finished. But even then, you’re hardly done prioritizing. Because that thing that you just prioritized, that’s just step one in a multi-stepped process which all culminates in everything that you do, your life.

And it’s why I can’t get anything done, I’m terrible at prioritization. I wake up in the morning and I try to just will myself to get things together. I sit straight up out of bed and I say, “First things first,” and I say it with meaning, hoping that that meaning will kind of launch me into the day, like I’ll intuitively know what I’m supposed to do next.

But, and I’ll take yesterday as an example, I woke up, I said, “First things first!” but then I started thinking, well, shouldn’t I have gotten out of bed first and then said first things first? Come on Rob! Get your priorities together. And so I decided I needed to reset the day, so I laid back down and told myself, fall asleep Rob, go to sleep and wake up again and you’ll have a clean slate, a brand new opportunity to really put things in order.

But I should have set a cell phone alarm. You know how it is when you first wake up, right? For me anyway, until I actually get out of bed, go downstairs, and have a cup of coffee, it’s not like I’m really awake, awake. What I mean is, until I have that caffeine pumping through my system, I could at any time hit my head to the pillow and resume sleeping as if I had never woken up in the first place.

Which is what happened, and this is just stupid, typical me not setting out my priorities in a prioritized fashion, I woke up to my alarm clock, I turned it off, there was the whole, “First things first!” followed by everything that I just talked about, and then I hit that pillow, I went back to sleep. The next thing I know I’m sort of waking up naturally, really almost groggy from what I’d soon discover after looking at the clock was way too much sleep. What time was it?

It was almost eleven thirty. Talk about not having my shit together. My dog was whimpering at the bottom of the stairs because he had to go to the bathroom, so I threw on some shorts and took him out, all the while squirming because I myself hadn’t even gone to the bathroom yet, and so I felt bad, I didn’t give him a chance to really get out there, to really sniff the ground or pick a spot, and it’s that whole thing about, priorities man, your plane’s going down, you make sure that oxygen mask is on you before you start helping out the little kid sitting next to you, in my case, the dog who just refused to go to the bathroom, and yeah, maybe I was pulling his chain a little too hard, but man did I have to pee, and it was this whole thing with me not having my keys in those pants, so, and I’m such an idiot, I tied him up front while I hopped the fence in the back. I couldn’t get into the house, but at least I could pee in the backyard, but as soon as I unzipped my fly I hear, “Rob! What the hell are you doing?” it’s my wife, I’m like, “Baby! What are you doing home?” and she’s like, “It’s Saturday! What the hell are you doing? Where’s the dog?” and I’m like, “He’s tied up out front!”

I’ll cut to the chase. She got up early, it was Saturday, I had just forgotten, I think I forgot to add keeping track of what day it is in that list of priorities, and she took the dog out already, that’s why he wasn’t peeing. It was almost lunchtime. “What if the neighbors see you?” she was screaming out the window, and I was like, “I don’t know, why don’t you scream a little louder and maybe they’ll look out back to see what’s going on!”

And I was starving. I wanted a bacon egg and cheese but it was almost lunchtime, and come on, what kind of a prioritizer am I supposed to be, eating breakfast for lunch, on a Saturday, I think I work on Saturdays, I should have checked my schedule, maybe that’s what all of those missed calls were. It’s about understanding the importance of getting up on time, returning phone calls, man, priorities, right? First things first.