Monthly Archives: May 2013

That’s the best part!

In my house growing up, it was a common trick amongst my parents, my grandparents, any adults really, to try to convince us kids that something undesirable was actually “the best part.” One of us would experience a natural aversion to something, to anything, and instead of being like, “yeah, sorry you found out the hard way, that sucks,” the answer was always, “What are you talking about? That’s the best part!”

Like chocolate pudding pie. My grandmother always made it. So did my mom. The graham cracker crust, the whipped cream on top. It was an almost perfect dessert. Almost. But I could never just dive right in. Because after the pie chilled in the fridge to solidify, to set, it would always develop this thick skin on top. Whereas the rest of the pudding was smooth and consistent in texture, this skin was hard, coagulated, nothing at all what you’d expect out of a pudding.

So after I’d be given my slice but before I could bury it under a pile twice its size of whipped cream, I’d get a butter knife from the kitchen drawer and start performing my carefully practiced chocolate pudding pie surgery, a skin-ectomy if you will. I’d have to be ever so careful, keeping my instrument precisely parallel to the table, to the crust, so as to extract the skin and only the skin, leaving as much delicious pudding as possible. Depending on how long the pie sat in the fridge, this task might range in difficulty from pretty easy to moderately challenging. Thick skin was easy to pull off. Any thinner and it might start breaking apart in clumps. Nothing was worse than thinking I had removed all of the skin but after a couple of bites coming across a crumb of that pasty, hardened goo top layer.

And every time I’d go through my routine, I’d have to sit there and be heckled by all of the adults. “What are you crazy? That skin is the best part!” I never understood this line of reasoning. Did they think that I was that stupid, that I’d fall for the most rudimentary reverse psychology? It’s like, well I don’t like it, but everybody else is claiming to like it, so I guess I might as well like it too. What, are they just teaching me to blindly conform to whatever anybody else is doing? How was this logic supposed to play out if I saw people smoking cigarettes? “You don’t like emphysema? That’s the best part!”

Besides, and this is how I know everybody was full of shit, if I were in their place, if I were the adult watching a little kid eat a piece of chocolate pudding pie, and if the skin really were the best piece, I’d gladly watch that little kid peel off that top layer. I’d wait for the successful skin extraction and then I’d take it for myself. “Oh you’re not going to eat that? Here, give it to me.”

Nobody ever ate my leftover skin. If it truly were the best part, somebody would have made a move for it. People should have been fighting for it, my extra skin, all of my discarded pizza crusts, those hard crunchy burnt parts from the corner of the lasagna tray, that pool of colored milk after I finished eating all of the cereal. But aside from my grandmother or grandfather occasionally finishing the scraps off of my plate – and I feel like that was more of a survival instinct left over from the Great Depression than it was an actual enjoying of food – all of that stuff went straight into the trash.

I’m an adult now and I pride myself on eating anything. And so now I eat the crust, I eat everything. I don’t want to be picky and I don’t want to miss out on anything because of some irrational likes and dislikes. Maybe my parents and my grandparents were trying to instill upon me a lesson, that it’s easier to go through life without being too selective, without trying to control all of the tiniest aspects of every single dish.

But I still won’t eat that pudding skin. I’ve come pretty far, but I’ll never be able to do it. I look at the pudding, the top layer, that’s what glue feels like, like other gross stuff. And I just hear everybody’s voice in my head, “That’s the best part!” It’s not the best part! It’s the worst part! Stop lying to me!

My compliments to the driver

I read this article in the newspaper a few weeks ago about people who call up New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission to take the unusual step of complimenting their driver. I say unusual not because it should be unusual to commend someone for a job well done, but because, as the article even points out, most people in this city, all they ever do is complain, about everything. There are like eight million people here trying to coexist on top of one another, but if your taxi driver doesn’t feel like making the trip from midtown Manhattan to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, it’s straight to the TLC web site where, “filing a complaint about a taxi driver” is searched for so frequently, it’s earned a spot prominently on the home page.

But compliments? They’re apparently few and far between, but they do happen. And so I decided, from now on, every time I take a cab, I’m going make a point to go to that web site and give that person a compliment. Why not? I can imagine how awesome it would be to get a random compliment from a total stranger, a “job well done” message from somebody that took the time to pass on a little positivity.

Anyway, last week I took a cab. It was fine. I’m not one of those cab passengers that gets in the car and tries bonding with his driver. Every once in a while I’ll be in a taxi with somebody else, and they’ll be all like, “Hello! How are doing today? That’s wonderful! Where are you from?” and they continue to force conversation out of this weird social hostage situation. I always feel bad because, look, there’s nowhere for this guy to go. And besides, shouldn’t you be leaving him alone to concentrate on his driving? What if he’s new to the city? Do you think he really feels like regaling you with tales about his homeland? Of course not. He wants to drop you off, as soon as possible, so he can repeat the process as many times as his shift will permit.

Like I said, this cab ride was fine. I got in the car and made sure to say, “hello.” Nothing bothers me more than when you’re forced to have an interaction with somebody, and instead of saying hello, they just start barking orders at you. Like if I were a cab driver, and some guy got in, and he just, right away was like, “Take me here,” I think it’s the equivalent of a waiter going up to a table and saying, “Hello, how’s it going today?” and the person won’t even look up, they’ll just snap, “Diet Coke.”

He was talking on his cell phone. He didn’t acknowledge me when I said hi. I wasn’t even sure he heard where I asked him to take me, but I got there, so it didn’t matter. Of course I was a little bothered about the cell phone thing, but I tried not to rush to judgment, mainly because he was talking in a foreign language, and for all I knew, he could have been on the line with his wife overseas, maybe she’s on a boat somewhere, and the boat just collided with another boat, a bigger boat, and they’re in the middle of an ocean somewhere. And it’s certain death, so right before she gets dragged down to the abyss, she calls her beloved in America, and he’s like, shit, I can’t stop working, I can’t, I’ll get fired, my mother will starve to death, all of my brothers and sisters, I can’t stop. And so he’s on the phone, telling his dying wife that they’ll be together in eternity, all while he’s trying to act natural in front of me, in front of his passenger, nervous that I’ll send in a complaint to the TLC, that he might get reprimanded, or fined.

And that’s just one potential legitimate reason for talking while driving. I could come up with at least ten more, right now. I won’t get into them, but they’re all at least somewhat valid. He dropped me off. I left a good tip. And then I went home and logged onto the city’s web site. Damn, it was hard to locate the compliment form, but I found it. And it was kind of tough actually, to come up with convincing praise, seeing as how most of what I knew about this cab driver, it wasn’t based on any actual relationship with him, but mainly a result of my wild imagination, me dreaming up various reasons as to why he’s in this country, why he’s driving a cab, again, why he was on his cell phone.

I don’t remember what I wrote exactly, because it was one of those form boxes on the web site, and I didn’t copy and paste it, and so once I submitted it, that was it, it was gone. And then like a week later I got an email from the TLC, it said, “Thank you for contacting the TLC. Your complaint has been filed, and disciplinary action will be taken immediately.”

I was just like, did I leave a complaint? I thought I concocted this whole story about him stopping on the bridge to help another motorist change a flat tire. And I wrote that he was very apologetic, to me, but I said, hey man, it’s cool, you go do what you got to do, and he was cool about it too, like he turned off the meter while he was helping out, and then when we finally got going again, he continued to apologize, but I was like, no man, it’s good, I get it, you’re a good guy, and then he reached over into the glove compartment and took out a pack of these chips, they were definitely foreign, like maybe he bought them at some ethnic grocery store, but I accepted them, they weren’t bad, they were crunchy, interesting flavors. Again, I don’t remember the specifics of exactly what I wrote, but I don’t know how the TLC would’ve misinterpreted anything that I said as a complaint, as a reason to take disciplinary actions. Fucked up, right?

These comic books don’t make any sense

I’m always thinking about comic books, about superheroes, and I know it’s really nerdy to ask questions, to point out inconsistencies, but sometimes I’m just like, I can’t take it any more, I need to bring this stuff up, I can’t enjoy the stories because these glaring problems are just stuck right in the center of my mind.

Like Spider-Man, right? Just try gettin past the fact that if he wanted to do some serious good, he could’ve sold his webbing device to a huge company, he could have made billions on his inventions. With those profits, he could have financed like a professional crime fighting operation. Think about what Batman did with his billions. He bought all sorts of ridiculous stuff. But Spider-Man’s always thinking small, just using his webbing to get from point A to point B, living in poverty, barely scraping out a living.

OK forget about that, just accept the fact that he’s this scientific genius that can’t figure out how to make any money. What about his wall-crawling powers? How are those supposed to work? Like, in the Spider-Man movies, it’s these little microscopic spider claw things that come out of his skin, which I don’t buy, because if I did buy it, what happens when he puts on his costume? Those micro-claws are supposed to be able to get through the material and then cling onto whatever it is he’s crawling up? Sorry, I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense.

Let’s go back to Batman for a second. Don’t think he’s getting off just because I was commenting before on how wisely he spends his money, buying all of his bat-equipment, his bat-planes, and bat-mobiles, and bat-cycles, and bat-copters. My problem is, OK, sometimes the police are after him, like think about the second Batman movie. Right? And they’re like, “Who is Batman? Why can’t we figure this out?”

And I’m just like, are you serious? Get a police helicopter or a police plane or something, or call up the army and have them put one of those drones in the sky, right? And just point a bunch of cameras or satellites down at the earth, and the next time Batman takes his giant car or plane or experimental waterskis out for a spin, just follow it wherever it goes. It’s not that hard. We live in a really sophisticated world. The police could watch the bat-mobile driving away to some hole by the road. OK, now go check that road out. Now call for backup. There you go, that’s the bat-cave. It can’t be that hard.

Like it’s the same with the X-Men. Where the hell are you going to get some giant invisible supersonic airplane? And the air traffic controllers, what, they don’t see any blips on their equipment when they’re directing traffic? Cyclops, like what kind of flight training does this guy have? How come he’s never crashing into any other planes? And again, the military doesn’t notice these jets everywhere? You’d think they’d see it immediately and get on it, find out where it is, who owns it. Is it the Russians? The Chinese? Terrorists? No, it’s the fucking X-Men, but still.

And while I’m on the X-Men, come on, so Cyclops can blast laser beams from his eyes but what, his eyelids don’t get blown off? And Wolverine, whatever, you’ve got metal bones, you don’t age, fine. But what’s with that haircut? What kind of a person wakes up in the morning, sees that both sides of his hair stick straight up in these weird spikes, and thinks to himself, huh, OK, that’s a pretty good look. What, and then he designed his costume to make sure that those spikes stayed in place? What kind of a statement is he trying to make? I don’t understand.

I don’t get why the Green Lantern’s powers don’t work against the color yellow. Isn’t the color green just a mix of the colors blue and yellow? So how can green even work at all then if it’s really just half yellow? And what about orange? That’s half yellow also. What about when he has to pee, that’s yellow, does it hurt coming out? Does it take away from his powers? The sun’s yellow. How is he able to walk around outside during the daytime without getting hurt?

How is the Flash able to breathe when he’s running so fast? How are his shoes not wearing out every time he runs a couple of laps around the world? How is Mr. Fantastic’s costume able to stretch exactly like Mr. Fantastic stretches? What is it painted on? How come Ice Man isn’t soaking wet every time he de-ices? What, does it go from ice to air? How does it do that without going to liquid first?

And what about Superman? He never makes a mistake? He never gets bored, or lazy? What’s the super-equivalent of throwing a gum wrapper on the ground because nobody’s looking and you just really don’t feel like holding that wrapper anymore, looking for a garbage can, never finding any garbage cans? You don’t think he ever makes a mistake like that? Like, OK, I just saved this rocket from crash landing out of orbit, but I don’t feel like figuring out what I’m supposed to do with all of this debris. Do I have to bring it to the government? Are they going to ask me to just hold on a second while they figure out which branch of the military has to take care of this? Or is it more like, jeez, I’m tired, I just caught this rocket, and I’m really hungry, and I don’t feel like dealing with this anymore, so nobody’s looking, I’ll just toss it in the ocean. Come on, somebody make a story like that, give me something to relate to. Everything’s just so unbelievable.

Movie Review: Iron Man Three

For those of you not too familiar with the Iron Man comic books, The Mandarin has served as one of Tony Stark’s archenemies for about half a century now. He’s a pre Communist Revolution Chinese scientist, who turns some discovered alien technology into ten magical rings, each one providing him a different evil superpower. In the 1990s animated adaptation, the Mandarin was green. In this movie, he’s not green. He’s Ben Kingsley. And let’s just say that the character has been reimagined slightly.

Now go see Iron Man Three, because it’s f’n awesome. Seriously, I went in kind of skeptical. There are so many superhero movies out there that it often seems like the market is oversaturated, like there’s really not much more we can do with good guys vs. bad guys. I don’t really remember watching Iron Man Two, probably because I saw it on a cheap Russian bootleg copy while I was living overseas, but I definitely remember feeling underwhelmed, not really enjoying it that much.

Which, after really, really enjoying Iron Man Three, I kind of want to go back. Maybe I did like the second part. Maybe I liked it, but then immediately read one of the big reviews, the Times, the New Yorker, some piece where all the author does is bemoan the state of current cinema as having lost something in its quest to ride out the superhero wave. I get it, there are a ton of comic book inspired movies coming out. They make tons of money. They motivate Hollywood to take the easy route to a quick buck.

And I constantly read stuff like this and, you know, I like to consider myself a sophisticated guy, somebody who knows what’s going on, and so for some reason I went into the movie theater this morning not really expecting anything much. In fact, all of my notes that I wrote down during the first twenty minutes or so were generic complaints, like “This is too over the top,” or “That scene was too slapstick.”

But I had an out of body experience in the theater, I saw myself from above, sitting in this darkened room wearing a pair of ridiculous black glasses (yeah, I went for the 3D) scrawling notes on a piece of paper and shaking my head in disapproval. Before I realized that I was looking down at myself, I thought, jeez, look at this miserable excuse for a human being, he’s out at the movies, at an Iron Man movie nonetheless, and he’s spending half of his attention writing down pithy complaints in a cheap notebook that he really can’t even see.

And then I saw that it was me, that I wasn’t letting myself enjoy a fucking Iron Man movie. Me, the guy with over five thousand individually bagged and boarded comic books taking up way too much primo real estate in my tiny New York City residence. If me from ten years ago were to catch a glimpse of me at this movie right now, cynical, bitter, not truly enjoying what was unfolding before my eyes, that younger version would have probably committed ritualistic suicide rather than slowly being consumed by this empty shell of a man who can’t get pumped up about a three-fucking-dimensional Iron Man movie.

I realized my error, my taking myself too seriously, trying too hard to be a film critic, a real film critic. Real film critics don’t like superhero movies, right? I don’t know. I don’t care. I floated back down into my body just as things really started heating up, and I’m glad I did, because, like I said already, Iron Man Three is fucking awesome.

Tony Stark is back from his adventures with the Avengers (another fucking awesome movie) and he’s not really dealing too well with his world-saving experience. He copes with his PTSD by not going to sleep, by holing up in his basement and by building new armors. The Mandarin is a threat. He’s like Bane from The Dark Knight but even more over the top. There’s the whole military industrial complex, weaponized terror, politics, foreign policy, and it all takes place amongst a backdrop of cutting edge science and a personal grudge carried over from the twilight of the twentieth century.

Just like in the previous Iron Man movies, and just like in The Avengers, this movie is at its best when the characters exchange dialogue apart from the action. It’s funny without being goofy. It’s real and natural in a way that most other big budget action movies never are. The film is surreal in its humor. It doesn’t feel out of place when Iron Man, not just Tony Stark, but the actual robotic suit, sits on his leather couch and gives his girlfriend a shoulder massage. I imagine other big, bulky machines, like a motorcycle. If you put that on a piece of furniture, wouldn’t there be like tons of stains and grease spots? Nor is it totally crazy when we see a depleted Iron Man lugging around a car battery hooked up to his chest, “Power levels only at 92% sir.”

These movies have made Tony Stark as a much cooler Bruce Wayne. He’s Batman, the genius scientist, detective, billionaire, but with none of the sadness, absolutly no guilt. In fact, it’s like if Instagram were to come out with a superhero filter, take a picture of The Dark Knight, and then keep running it through the filter, over and over again, each time everything coming out a bit more exaggerated, and you’d have this movie, Iron Man Three. It goes beyond over the top, and then looks you right in the eye it acknowledges itself, it says, man, wasn’t that so over the top? Imagine Air Force One getting blown up, fourteen passengers in free fall, and Iron Man trying to figure out how he’s going to save them all. It’s fucking awesome.

Oh yeah, and don’t leave after the credits. That’s like a Marvel movie staple now, right? I like it, I like surprises. What I don’t like is actually having to sit through the credits. Do you know how boring that is? Just lines and line of text moving too fast for me to read all of it. Not that I want to read a bunch of names that mean absolutely nothing to me – good job Jimmy Smith, Best Boy Grip – but even if I wanted to, it wouldn’t be possible. So I just have to sit there, after I’ve already sat there for like two and a half hours, and I have to listen to the score again, and wait for that surprise. It’s not a surprise anymore. Just shorten the credits or something. Come on, you’re killing me Marvel.

The magical properties of crystals are real

I was never one of those people who believed in crystals, in minerals and rocks. I mean, I believe that they exist, but, you know what I’m talking about? How some people really believe that certain rocks have like special properties? Yeah, I always used to think that that stuff was pretty wacko. I used to. Now I actually believe in all of it, because it’s all true. I’ve had some real experiences, some really real experiences, and it’s all totally real.

Like one day I was out taking my dog for a walk in the park. And I came upon this rock, I mean, yeah, rock, crystal, I’m actually not too sure of the exact terminology, mineralology. But it was shiny. On one side it was shiny. But I couldn’t see the shiny side, not yet. The shiny side was down, and on the face-up side it just looked like a regular rock.

What am I doing, just randomly turning over rocks in the park? No, this one had a ten dollar bill sticking out from underneath. I thought, jackpot. Or not jackpot, but, you know, bonus. Definitely bonus. I went to reach for it and, I don’t know why I didn’t just pull the bill out from underneath, because I didn’t, maybe I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, I don’t know. I decided to kick the rock off of the bill and then pick up the money.

And when I kicked it, it flipped over, and that’s when I realized that it wasn’t a rock, or, whatever, again, not too sure on the specifics of what you’re supposed to call it, but it was really shiny on the other side, like a crystal, like a magic crystal. I immediately thought of all of those crazy minor celebrities that you see on TV all decked out in rocks, and they’re always like really wide-eyed and saying stuff like, “No seriously! This stuff is seriously, seriously magic! Not magic, but spiritual! Like powerful!” and you just think, wow, that person is nuts.

But I was picking up this ten dollar bill and I caught myself just staring at this crystal lying now face up like two feet away from me. And my dog was staring at the crystal also, and my dog never stares at anything, because he’s so stupid. Or, that’s actually kind of harsh, he’s not stupid. Well, by human standards maybe he’s stupid, but that could be intelligent for dogs, I don’t know. You know how they’re always just like digging and sniffing and stuff? Not this time. This time he was just staring at the magic crystal.

And I never like jumping to conclusions, but this time it was like my mind was operating on a different frequency, and so jump to conclusions I did, and the conclusion that I jumped to was: this is a definitely a magical crystal. I had to stop myself from staring, because I started to worry that somebody else would see it and that they’d maybe make a move for it or try to fight me for it or something. I’d have fought me for it.

So I picked it up and the magic started coursing through my veins. I looked down at the ten dollar bill and it wasn’t a ten dollar bill at all. It was a twenty. Did that really just happen? I couldn’t be sure. Did the crystal change it to a twenty? Or did I just kind of shove the ten in my pocket, and then maybe when I took it out again, because I don’t really have a wallet, because I’m just always shoving money in my pockets, loose, maybe I accidentally grabbed a twenty? I don’t think that’s what happened.

I ran home and decided to turn it into a magical crystal necklace, so the power source could be close, to me, to my heart, so maybe I’d be like projecting magical energy out into the universe, and then back into me, like a conduit, like a spiritual, magical magnet. But I walked in my house and realized that I didn’t know the first thing about making jewelry out of rocks. I didn’t even know where I could find a pair of scissors. Like, I must have had scissors somewhere, maybe, like in a desk drawer or in the back of a closet. But I can’t remember the last time I needed scissors. Usually I’ll just rip whatever I need to cut, a piece of paper, some cardboard, or if it’s too hard, like a piece of plastic used to keep the price tag on a new pair of pants, I’ll just get a kitchen knife and slice it. Or, one time I used nail clippers, and that worked, like it cut the plastic, but it ruined the clippers, there was this groove in the blade, and every time I cut my nails it made a little bump. I had to throw them away.

That’s beside the point. I forgot about the scissors because my mind started to wander. How am I going to attach this crystal to a necklace? I found some shoelaces. Well, I didn’t find them, I used an old pair of shoes and took the laces off. Should I wrap it around the crystal? I tried that but it looked terrible, it covered part of the crystal, and there wasn’t any string left over to wrap around my neck.

I took out my drill. I actually have a pretty nice drill. I never get to use it because, I don’t know why, I just never need it, but I was pretty glad that I had it right now. I figured I’d make a tiny hole through the top, just so I could string the shoelace through. But as soon as I started to drill, a huge chunk broke off the crystal.

And I was like, shit, did I break it? Obviously I broke it, physically, but did I break the magic? Were the special properties still intact? I looked in my pocket but all I could find were a bunch of five dollar bills. No twenties. Not even any tens. I must have pissed it off. I tried gluing it back together but no dice.

So now it’s just like, I feel unluckier than ever, like even further removed from the natural spiritual powers of the earth. And I keep taking my dog for more walks, trying to find more crystals, but he’s even wilder than before, almost feral, he keeps pulling at his leash, digging holes furiously, and one time this park ranger came over and was like, “Hey buddy! Get your dog under control! Stop letting him dig like that or I’ll write you up! I’m serious!”