Tag Archives: video

Reconnecting with my old friend Andre

It’s like, sometimes things have to get really bad before they start to get good again. That’s what it was like for Andre and me anyway. I’m telling you, we had like a whole year of fights and slights, the last time we got together, it wasn’t even a get together really, I wound up kind of just bumping into him by a fro-yo place. Whatever, it’s unimportant who ignored who. All I’m saying is, I thought that was it, I thought we were done.

wmtewal

But then a few weeks ago I got a notification from Facebook. Apparently Andre put some video online from when we were right out of college. Andre had just gotten the Nintendo Wii, and I had just bought one of those Flip cameras. What a waste. Man, if I had only waited like a year or two, it’s like, everyone has a Flip camera on their iPhone.

Anyway it’s this video of me playing Wii bowling, Andre must have been shooting the whole thing, and right as I go to line up, I fling the Wiimote, it flies out of my grip, out past the little string thing that’s supposed to attach it to my wrist, and it smashes right into the wall. I remember that happening too, which totally sucked at the time, but man, it’s like you totally blow things out of proportion, the stuff that seems like such a big deal at the time, but I mean, man, I couldn’t even tell you where any of my Wii stuff is now. I bought my own Wii after I broke Andre’s remote, and I think I wound up buying like three extra remotes, just in case there were ever four of us that wanted to play Mario Party or some other four-player multiplayer. I think we did it like once or twice.

Anyway, he tagged me, which was cool of him, and all of that animosity I had built up toward my old friend, everything kind of melted away. It was just like that remote, it was like, why did we ever let ourselves get so bent out of shape in the first place? I liked his photo, then he sent me a friend request, which, I didn’t even know that we weren’t friends. Did he defriend me? Whatever, I could have defriended him. Either way, that meant that someone else must have tagged me in the video, which, if it was from my Flip camera, how did he get it on his computer?

It didn’t matter. I reached out with the like, he reached around to me with the friend request, and so I figured I’d take it to the next level with a message. “What’s up man? Long time. You wanna grab a drink some time?”

To which he replied, “Sure man. Sounds good.”

And we did, we met up that Thursday for drinks after work. And seriously, it was like all of that stuff from the past year, the fishing trip, his grandma dying, it was all like it never happened. Or like it happened, but neither of us was thinking about it. I mean, I was thinking about it, but not in any way harboring any sort of ill will or anything, I was just thinking about how I wasn’t thinking about it. And sure, I couldn’t tell exactly what he was thinking, but he was smiling, and so was I, and it was good. It was good enough.

“How did you get that video?” I did wind up bringing it up after we had a couple of beers.

“Oh, the Wiimote?” he said, “I found my old Flip camera lying around, and there it was.”

Did I want to get into it with him? That it was my Flip camera? That either I left it over his place, or he borrowed it and must have forgot to bring it back? You know what? I really wanted to, I really just wanted to get in there and be like, Andre, dude, that was my Flip camera. But like I said before, this thing was useless to me now. I have a better camera on my phone. Why risk getting into it with Andre over something so stupid?

We had a great time, catching up, laughing about old memories. And then I went home. I went back to Facebook to check out that video again, only, it wasn’t posted directly to Facebook, it was linked to Facebook from YouTube. Andre must have posted this clip online like six years ago. And I couldn’t believe it, but it had something like seven hundred thousand views. Was this one of the original Wiimote to the wall videos?

Were there any ads embedded to this clip? There were. So I did a quick Google search on how much Andre could be looking at earning just on ads, and it was pretty substantial. Nothing to retire over, but still, I could use an extra couple thousand dollars.

I sent him a long message, it was nice, I made sure to write out everything very nicely. I explained to him that I was pretty sure that it was my Flip camera, that I wasn’t looking for all of the ad revenue, but just a cut.

He shot me back a message saying how it was my camera, but after I smashed the remote, that I offered him the camera in exchange. Which, I don’t remember that, at all. If I remember correctly, a brand new Wiimote was something like fifty bucks, whereas the Flip camera was easily over a hundred.

I closed my laptop and tried to cool off, remembering that I didn’t want to ruin our barely reestablished friendship over what was clearly a simple misunderstanding. But later that week I went home to my parents’ house and I started telling my dad about it. He seemed kind of uninterested, but I didn’t let it go, insisting that he watch the video. Only, when I tried to pull it up, it wouldn’t show me the video on Andre’s profile. It didn’t show anything, just his photo and the “add friend” button.

Did he really defriend me? Over a couple thousand dollars? What the hell man? What are you trying to hide? Are you seriously just going to hope that this all blows over? Because that’s not cool Andre, you can’t just keep ignoring my calls and my texts. Dude, I thought we were friends, again. That’s not cool dude, I deserve a little cut. You can’t just post stuff on the Internet and keep all of the profit to yourself.

Come on man, seriously, not cool.

I tried to control a swarm of bees

I saw this clip on Reddit of a guy approaching a whole swarm of bees attached to a tree. He slowly puts his hand through the mass of squirming insects and removes it a few seconds later, totally unharmed. The next time, he goes back in, he pulls off a huge of bees, almost like the whole cluster was a liquid, like he was running his hands through a loosely cohesive whole.

bees

Scrolling down through the comments, I hoped to find some sort of an explanation. And I found it. Someone wrote about how when you find bees attached to a tree or some other object, it means that they’re swarming, that they don’t have a queen to protect, and that they’re incredible docile. It all made sense as far as I could tell, I mean, I’m no beekeeper, but this was proof, right?

So when my wife called me outside a few months later, she was screaming, “Rob! Come outside, come quick!” I went out back and she was standing twenty feet away from the garage. “Look Rob, there’s some sort of a beehive.” And it was just like I saw on the video, there were tons of them, all clustered in the top left corner.

I said to my wife, “You want to see something cool?” and I was just going do it, like I’d run my hands through and my wife would be all scared but after a while she’d see that I wasn’t being hurt. How would she react? She’d probably start asking a bunch of half-questions, like, “But … how? This … what?” and I’d just laugh, making up some nonsense answer like, “It’s all about confidence. These bees are more afraid of you than you are of them. You need to project strong vibes, and they’ll understand that. They don’t speak English, but body language a universal means of communication.”

So I calmly walked toward the hive. “Rob? What are you doing, Rob?” to which I replied, “Hey, I’ve got it. Don’t worry.” And that whole confidence, posture, body language thing, it totally worked on my wife. She saw me chill out, she started chilling out herself. “All right, just be careful. What are you going to do?”

“Watch,” and, you know, even though I was fairly certain that this was going to go just as it did on the Internet, there was still a palpable sense of fear. I mean, even if you’re positive that something doesn’t pose a real threat, a swarm of bees is still pretty scary. I’m not even used to dealing with like one bee, but this? This was hundreds of bees. I got close and the buzzing, which I could hear from back at the house, it grew louder, deafening, I could feel it like a cloud of vibration surrounding the periphery of my being.

I raised my hand toward the swarm and I realized that I was fighting my bodily instincts. It was same feeling I had when I went to this adventure park over the summer. One of the attractions was called the Mega Jump, basically, you climb up to a really high platform, they attach you to this rope and pulley thing, and you jump off, confident that whatever it is they’ve tied you to will slow your descent before you touch ground. Again, even though I knew it was this controlled thing, I still experienced a very physical reaction, a terror really, as soon as I stepped up to the edge.

But this was all in my head, I told myself, and I knew that I couldn’t stand there hesitating for too long. I’d psych myself out, or worse, my wife might get the impression that I didn’t know what I was doing, she might get hysterical again and I’d back out if only to keep her from freaking out. I swallowed the lump down my throat and I reached into the mass.

And the stinging was immediate. I recoiled my hand instantly, it was covered in bees, they were all stinging me. The outer layer of the swarm broke off and started circling my body, my face. I wanted to swat them away, I instinctively started flailing around, hitting myself in the head, which, with my one hand still covered in bees, it was just spreading them to my head, my scalp, the ones that had already stung me and died, it was like they were glued on, and I crushed some of them against my skull.

My wife came over with a bucket of water and doused me, but it did little good. In a brief lapse in between bouts of panic and terror, I regained control of my faculties and ran toward the hose, sprayed as many of them as I could away from my body, and followed my wife who had escaped inside the house.

There were like ten or twelve bees that had made it inside, and right outside, it was just this cloud, a whole nest of angry pissed off bees looking for some revenge. My hand was bleeding, everything was starting to swell, my wife was swatting at the few intruders were still circling our heads trying to exact revenge. I looked at my ballooning hand, she looked at me, she said, “What the fuck Rob? What the fuck?”