Monthly Archives: July 2013

Come on, one more third chance, please

I’m not asking for a second chance here, I’m asking for a third chance. Another third chance. How was I supposed to see that guy pulling out of his driveway? And why didn’t he stop? You know it takes two to tango, right? Well, I’m just saying, you’re backing out of your driveway, you give a little honk, a little, “Honk! Honk! I’m backing out here!” Nothing.

Come on, you don’t really need brake lights. Hand signals are still perfectly acceptable. Why do you think they make you memorize them in driver’s ed? Because you don’t need brake lights. You don’t need turning signals. You stick your arm out of the window and it’s either up, down, or something else, I think it’s like if you point left, that’s left, if you point right, that’s a right turn, and then if you point down, or … wait, if you make a fist, but downward, then that’s braking.

It doesn’t matter, you can look them up online. But just let me borrow the car one more time. I’ll run some errands for you on the way back. Oooh, sorry, I’m coming back way too late to make a grocery store run. Yeah, I know that Key Food is open twenty-four hours, but, well, I can’t show my face in Key Food anymore. It’s not even the manager so much as it is the deli guy. We had this incident in the parking lot, but I’m telling you, I promise, it wasn’t with your car. It was somebody else’s car. And if that idiot manager would just hand over the surveillance tapes, I’m almost positive, no not almost positive, I’m positive positive that we’d have video proof that it was the deli guy’s fault. He should have been behind the counter anyway, what kind of hours are they keeping? That was like primetime sandwich hour.

But yeah, no Key Food. And I think Stop-and-Shop closes at midnight. Well yeah, I was planning on coming back at three. Well yeah, Trade Fair is open twenty-four hours, but there’s never anybody there at that time of night, you know, you have to walk in the exit, and the deli section isn’t open. Don’t you want cold cuts? It’ll just be easier to do one complete grocery store trip during regular business hours. Come on, just let me have the car, and then let me have it again tomorrow and I’ll do your errands, although I’m just saying … wait.

Wait, I’ll pay for gas for tonight, fine, but I’m not filling her up tomorrow if it’s just a regular run. And get off my case about the receipts, all right? Like if you say you want a pound of turkey, I’ll get you a pound of turkey, don’t worry about how much you think a pound of turkey at Trade Fair costs. Like I’m just saying, if I find it somewhere else for a little less, well … look, you weren’t planning on spending that much money on turkey anyway. It’s like, if you call up a delivery service and the guy says it’s going to be ten dollars, you’re paying ten dollars, right? You don’t have to ask for a receipt, right?

Well, I don’t know, I guess you could ask for a receipt. Well, like for example, if I find a coupon, right? Like if you want something and are willing to pay x amount of dollars, and I find the coupon, that’s my savings. You give money to me, I find coupon, right? Don’t you get it? Like find your own coupon.

Well I don’t have my own car, that’s why I’m here. Come on, mom always told me to share my stuff with you when we were little kids, don’t you think she’d want you to let me borrow the car? And what about those scratches from last month? Didn’t I tell you I’d take care of it? Yeah, well, it’s a similar shade of red. I don’t know why you insisted on buying red anyway, mister flashy over here. You know cops are more than ten times a likely to pull over a red car, right?

And that basically takes care of that first third chance I was talking about earlier. Fourth chance, third chance, whatever, sorry I’m not writing down every number that I ever come in contact with like you do. Do you need a receipt for this conversation? What are you, an accountant? I’m just saying, the cop pulled me over not because of my driving, but because of your fancy-pants red car. Maybe if it were gray, blue even, maybe he would have let it slide.

And nobody drives just the speed limit. And you should have reminded me where you keep the insurance. No, I don’t think it’s an obvious place, the glove compartment. Excuse me for not wanting to snoop around your personal glove compartments. And what if there was something in there that shouldn’t have been, a gun? I have no idea. I don’t know what your position is on weapons, on guns in the car. You’re a good guy and everything, but I don’t really know you. How well should I know you? What kind of a guy gives out a car and doesn’t think, oh yeah, here’s a little something you should know about registration, about insurance.

Just, I’m tired, yes or no, car or no car. No car? Fine. Can I get a ride? No? Well, if I’m in trouble later, will you pick me up? Well can I call you? I don’t know, maybe you’ll be in a better mood later. Just, mom, stay out of this all right? If you’re not going to help me out, just don’t say anything, because I thought at least you’d at least be on my side, it’s totally not fair, remember the time I was playing Nintendo, and I was on the last level of Super Mario World, and he comes down, he’s like, “Mom! I want to play too!” and you were like, “Let your brother play too!” I don’t care if that was twenty years ago! I never got back to that boss level. You could at least tell him to let me borrow his car. Well you don’t have to force him, but you don’t have to side with him either. You could’ve just said nothing. Didn’t you used to say something like that? About not having anything good to say so you don’t say anything? What the hell?

I’m in a New York State of State

New York is the greatest city on Earth, that’s just a fact. And everybody knows it. Maybe there exist other great cities equal or superior to New York somewhere else in the universe, maybe on some futuristic planet, galaxies away, but I have no idea, I have no way of knowing if that’s true, and to be perfectly honest, I doubt it. Ask anybody from any other city, “Hey, you, what’s your favorite city?” don’t even bother sticking around to let them answer, because they’re going to say New York. You add up all of the other cities in the world, they don’t even come close to being one percent as great as the shittiest of city blocks in New York.

Like I said, everybody already knows this stuff, so I’m not going to spend any more time spelling it out. What a lot of people don’t know is that New York also happens to be the greatest state that has ever existed in this, or any other country. Yes, that includes provinces or whatever it is that other countries call their states. New York State is the greatest state there is.

And, yes, a lot of New York State’s greatness is due to the fact that our greatest city is New York City. So, right, that already gives New York State a ridiculous advantage. But there’s more than just NYC. There’s Albany, that’s our capital. And if you’re like me, you might be thinking to yourself, Albany? Really? Like maybe you’ve had to drive through or past Albany once, and you might have had to go to bathroom really bad and, yeah, you were running a little low on gas, but you just couldn’t get yourself to spend another minute there, that hopefully you’d have enough fuel to make it to Schenectady.

But therein lies Albany’s, and thus New York State’s, greatness. You see, I always look at inferior states, states like Massachusetts, or Georgia, when they were planning out their state hundreds of years ago, some genius legislator or state planner had the bright idea, “Hey guys, let’s make our biggest city the capital!” And that’s what you call putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Here in New York, we took all of the politics, all of the grimy, dirty business of state government, and we put it far away from our (and the world’s) greatest city. Let’s let New York be New York, (I’m talking about the city) and we’ll let the state legislators and assemblymen fight amongst themselves up in Albany. Because let’s face it, somebody’s got to gerrymander districts and dole out liquor licenses. Why pollute such a great, great city with such petty nonsense when we can remove it to somewhere two or three hours away?

New York State has so much more than just New York City. Like Niagara Falls. Or half of it anyway, I’m not sure what the Niagara Falls sharing agreement is with Canada. But we’ve got a border with Canada. We’ve got some other cities too, like Buffalo, and Rochester, and Binghamton. I’ve never been to Rochester or Binghamton, but Buffalo is awesome. Instead of Taco Bell, they have this chain called Mighty Taco. I don’t think they have Doritos Locos Tacos though.

And do you know what our state motto is? Excelsior! How cool is that? Do you know what excelsior means? It means, “Yes!” It means, “Let’s do it!” It means “We’re number one!” It means all of these things and more, basically it’s just a blanket word used to express any positive sentiment. I think about other states and their state mottos, and to be honest here, I don’t think I know any of them off of the top of my head. Wait, I just remembered, “Live free or die,” from what, New Hampshire? Vermont? It’s cool, don’t get me wrong, but it just doesn’t pack the same wallop as “Excelsior!”

I’m trying to think if I know of any other state mottos, but I think that’s it. Isn’t one of them like, “A great place to live!” or something like that? Like Maine? I have no idea. I’m getting bored just trying to think about all of these other states. More New York State. It’s the greatest. We’ve got like a hundred sports teams. We say hero instead of sub or hoagie. Whenever I go out of state and I order a sandwich, I always make it a point to say hero, and if somebody behind me orders a sub, I do a really dramatic laugh, like I point in their face, and if they say, “What the hell?” I’ll be like, “Ha, you called it a sub.”

It’s just the best, New York State. We’ve got the greatest city in the world housed inside the greatest state in the world located in the greatest region of the country, that country being the best country on the planet. Again, maybe there are some other cool planets out there, but based on the other planets that I know of, like Saturn or Mercury, Earth is definitely the absolute best.

Excelsior!

Reader mail: Toilet paper

Today I’m going to respond to some reader mail. I’d do this more often, but nobody ever sends me any anything. And so when I got this email today, I wasn’t going to ignore it. No, I want to encourage stuff like this, right? So here it goes. Julie wrote me:

OK so I think you should write a blog post about toilet paper. People seem to have a very strong preference for whether the toilet paper roll should be put in so that the paper is pulled from the top or the bottom. Random, I know.

Julie, thanks again for writing. I’m really interested by your email because, up until now, I’ve never even considered what you’re talking about. It’s always just there, the toilet paper, except when it’s out, obviously, but now that you mention it, yeah, I guess the paper does dispense itself from a particular direction.

And now that I’m thinking about it even more, things are starting to click, like I’m thinking about all of those times growing up when my mother would get really upset with all of us every time we, “put the toilet paper on the wrong way.” I don’t know why I never made the connection before.

Yeah, and, also, every once in a while, not always, but sometimes, I’d say like half the time, my wife comes up to me and she’s like, “Rob, what’s wrong with you? Why is this so difficult?” and, you know, statistically speaking, I’m bound to get it right half the time. And half the time I’m getting scolded for doing it the wrong way, but I’m not getting it, that there’s even a difference, so I guess nothing’s being reinforced, nothing other than, well, sometimes I’m just going to get yelled at about the toilet paper.

Because, yeah, sometimes I deserve to be yelled at about the toilet paper. I’m not trying to make the argument that I’m the perfect housemate, that I’m just this guy minding his own business, keeping his side of the street clean, every once in a while getting ambushed about the direction of the toilet paper.

No, a lot of the time I totally deserve it. Like, if there’s not really any left, and I’m upstairs, I know that I should go downstairs to where we keep the big package of toilet paper, I should go down and get a new one. Since I’m down there already, I might as well get two, you know, consolidate the trips downstairs. Right?

Right. But a lot of the time, even though my intentions are good, if there was enough toilet paper to satisfy my toilet paper needs, I’ll often get distracted before or during the act of going downstairs to get more. And again, why are we keeping all of our toilet paper so far from the toilet? I know the answer to that. It’s because there’s no room to keep all of the toilet paper in the bathroom. That’s the answer.

I’m constantly trying to insert a different answer into the conversation, like, well, let’s just keep it in the bathroom anyway, even though there’s no room for it. But there’s an answer for that too, it has something to do with adults not living that way, like you can’t just keep things out, like a giant bulk thing of toilet paper that you bought at the bulk store.

And then I would argue, well, why are we shopping at the bulk store? To save trips that we’d have to make to buy more toilet paper. It’s great. And it’s a great answer, at least I think so. Those super bulk packs of toilet paper, they last my wife and me like four months. That’s four months of never having to leave the house to buy toilet paper. Everybody can get behind that.

So by that same logic, I would then say, well, why only go ninety percent of the way? I’d like to not only save trips to the store, but I’d also like to save trips downstairs. If the overall goal is to cut down on time getting up to get toilet paper, then why shouldn’t we just keep that whole big thing of fifty plus rolls of toilet paper on the bathroom floor? It’s a bathroom. I don’t think it’s totally out of the ordinary to expect to find toilet paper in the bathroom. And again, I’m not an architect, sorry I don’t have a time machine to travel back to the past to convince the architects who built this two-bedroom to maybe build a closet, maybe a tiny closet, something that could fit a big bulk object, maybe like two feet by two feet.

But why am I wasting my breath? You don’t think I’ve gone through this, and many similarly convincing arguments, hundreds of times already? I just can’t win. The end result is always the same. And it’s like, whenever I take stock of my life, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m constantly walking up and down the stairs to either go get or to come back up with a roll (or two) of toilet paper.

Julie, I hope that answers your question. I was a little reluctant to get into the whole toilet paper subject, because the way my mind works, one thing often leads to another, and I didn’t want the conversation naturally steering toward, you know, like what do we use toilet paper for? Like poop and stuff. Ugh, gross. I just mentioned it. I just mentioned it in a half-assed attempt to congratulate myself for not mentioning it. I was so close.

Keep those emails coming!

RobG@strictlyautobiographical.com

Andre and the big race

I was training for this race for, I don’t know, for forever, a marathon, and the big day was fast approaching. I saw on Facebook a few days before, it was Andre, we had since reconnected, you know, on Facebook anyway. He put up this status update, “Getting pumped for the big race!” and there were something like a hundred and twenty likes. No way, I thought, I didn’t know Andre was a runner.

So I sent him a private message, I was like, hey man, are you running the big race? The same race I’m running? I didn’t know you were training. And he responded back, but not on a private message, he wrote on my wall, “Yeah man, it’s my first race! I’m getting really pumped up!” It was basically identical to his own Facebook post, the one that he written earlier. And still, his comment on my wall got something like sixty likes, like people that only I knew, like my mom and cousins and stuff.

Which, whatever, I wasn’t going to let it piss me off. This was about me, about my training, about me hitting my personal best, my goals, my time. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from hitting refresh on his page, all of these, “Good luck tomorrow!” wall posts, after somebody would write something, somebody else would write something else, and Andre would go down the list, liking every single comment.

“Really feelin’ the love!” he threw somewhere in there. It didn’t matter. I had to focus on envisioning my goals, stuff like that. The big day came, I got up early, I tried to keep a low profile at the starting line. I wore this hooded sweatshirt and huddled in a corner somewhere to wait for the announcement for the runners to line up.

But I couldn’t help but notice to my right, there was this group of runners all wearing bright yellow team jerseys. And wouldn’t you know it, Andre was in the middle of the pack. I had to see what was going on. They were all like singing these songs, something about a team, I don’t know, there was a lot of chanting.

“Hey Andre, what’s up? What is this, you’re part of a team?”

“Oh, hey man! Yeah, you know, no big deal, we all donated a bunch of money to kids with cancer. We figured, might as well run for a cause, right? Try to make a little bit of a difference, you know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what he meant, “Jesus man, those charity teams, what are those like a couple grand?” I had considered trying to get a spot in the race through a charity, but two thousand dollars, even if I did hit up all of my friends and family, would I be able to make it happen? And if I didn’t, I’d be liable for that amount. I couldn’t do it.

So I went on craigslist and bought some guy’s ticket for four hundred bucks, still a lot more expensive than it would have been had I just qualified or won the race lottery. It’s so tough, these big races, they make it impossible for regular runners to run. And I’m better than regular. I think so anyway. I’m just not good enough to qualify on my own. I’m just short, just a little.

And this guy, he contacted me, I said, where’s a good spot for us to meet up so I can grab the ticket? And he tells me to come by his office in Midtown. Well, I asked, can we meet somewhere a little in between? It’s kind of tough for me to get all the way over there. What about, where do you live, could I swing by your neighborhood? And he repeated the same email, to meet him by his office.

So I showed up and there were like a thousand people outside of his office building. I called his cell phone, he told me to wait outside. I waited like fifteen minutes, I couldn’t tell who he’d be, what he’d look like. I called him again but he didn’t answer. Finally he showed up, he just kind of stuck his hand out, like give me the cash. I gave him the cash, he handed over a manila envelope with the race number.

“Hey man,” I asked, “What about the race t-shirt?” Every race gives you a race t-shirt. It’s awesome. It’s great to wear it around town afterwards, it’s like the next best thing to wearing the medal around your neck. He started walking back toward his office, without even turning around, he was like, “No race t-shirt.”

Whatever, I ran the race, it was great, a personal best. I was still a little shy for next year’s qualifying time, but I’d get there, I was improving. Still, I went onto Facebook that night, Andre had posted tons of pictures, like during the race. Like he must have stopped several times along the course to have conversations with friends. He posted his time, something like just under six hours.

“Congrats Andre!” “Way to run buddy!” Like. Like. Hundreds of likes. Hundreds of comments, dozens of “Thanks guys! Just trying to make a difference!” My mom, I don’t know, Andre must have friended her on Facebook, she wrote something like, “So proud of you!”

And I saw him running in the park later that week, he was wearing the race t-shirt. He gave me a wave. Two other runners ran by, they were wearing race t-shirts too. They passed Andre and they all gave thumbs up, “Way to go!” “Great race!” and then they ran by me, and one of them spit to the side, toward me, I don’t think he saw me, it didn’t get on me, but it was close enough.

Movie Review: Pacific Rim

Throughout the entirety of Pacific Rim, all I could think about was stuff like, wow, this is such an awesome movie. It keeps getting better and better. Not once am I finding myself even remotely bored. I cannot wait to go home and write about how much I loved this movie.

And I did love the movie. But I saw it with my wife and the first thing she said upon exiting the theater was, “Wow, that was dumb.” How could we have arrived at two dramatically differing opinions after sitting next to each other for the exact same two and a half hours? Worse, why couldn’t I really mount a defense?

Because, look, I know when I’m defending movies that shouldn’t be defended. Like when I write about how much I loved Iron Man 3 or Thor, yeah, it’s probably because I’ve spent over fifty percent of my life reading comic books, that it’d have to be a really bad comic book movie for me to admit that I didn’t at some level at least enjoy a little bit what I just saw.

Like Daredevil, or Spider Man 3. Go ahead and start throwing eggs, I know that I’m broaching a very sensitive subject here, but were those movies really that bad? I haven’t watched them in a while, but I remember enjoying them. I liked the first Hulk movie. I always default back to the twelve year old me growing up on Long Island, no Internet, no cable TV, I used to get a thrill just from watching Fantastic Four cartoons on Sunday mornings. Never in my wildest imagination would I picture myself as an adult presented with dozens upon dozens of full-length comic book motion pictures featuring B-list superheroes.

I’m getting a little sidetracked from Pacific Rim, yes, but this is all adding up to a huge disclaimer, that in an attempt to review movies, I’m trying to go for an unbiased reaction after having seen one. I don’t know what the opening weekend numbers are, and I’ve yet to read any professional reviewers. I just want to go see a movie, and try as best I can to call it like I see it.

But it’s often the case that something cool like this will come out, a superhero movie, or in this case, a robots vs. alien monsters movie, and I can already picture exactly how the naysayers will react, similar to how my wife put it, that it was dumb. That it was just a bunch of fight scenes linked together by a pretty cheap plot.

And yeah, I guess, if you want to get all cynical and scientific about the movie, I suppose there really isn’t a whole lot more to it than that, alien monsters invade the earth through a portal deep in the Pacific. In response, we build a bunch of rock-em, sock-em robots to beat them all up.

But whatever, those feelings I was experiencing in that theater were real. It was pure joy. And I’ve sat through movies that should have been catered to me, like the new Superman, and I’ve been put to sleep. There was seriously no down time in the fun and excitement here. The score was a movie length fight song. The battle scenes were pure chaotic euphoria.

Did I mention that the pilots of the robots have to link their minds via something called a neural handshake? And that’s not like a colloquialism, the scientists say stuff like, “Neural handshake complete.” That’s what I’m looking for in a big action robot movie, people maintaining a straight face while talking about a neural handshake. The side characters, the almost unnecessary plots and asides and conveniently placed toilets that made up the caulk to this movie’s tiles, everything was fun, ridiculous, everything was insane.

And it’s a good concept. When was the last time we’ve had a really crazy monster movie? All I can think of are the old Godzilla films from decades ago. I know that the series has been rebooted several times in recent years, but nothing sticks, because everything tries too hard to be serious, to depict a modern world where big monsters wreak havoc.

This isn’t that world. It’s just further enough in the future to where the world resembles the one we live in, but all of the backstory is explained in the first ten or fifteen minutes, so everything is alien, fresh, reminiscent of the real but not even close to anything we’d be able to mistake for reality.

It’s just, my heart is still pumping, there’s still a surplus of adrenaline coursing through my veins. I really did love this movie. It’s fun, it’s pretense-free, they laid out some very simple rules that guide the course of the film and they rarely stray from the formula. It works. It’s pure hyper energy, it’s like an amusement park, one built entirely out of crazy roller coasters, and there are no lines, and they just let you keep riding everything over and over again for as long as you want. For like two and a half hours, anyway.