Yearly Archives: 2013

Reflections on the 2013 VMAs

I meant to write this yesterday, but for the love of sweet Jesus, I’ve been too shocked to manage to get myself to sit in front of a computer. And can you really blame me? After Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards, there’s no telling what’s going to pop up at me when I put any sort of screen in front of my face.

I’m horrified by what I saw. Horrified. Ever since Sunday night, I’ve been planted in the corner of my bedroom, rocking back and forth catatonically, unable to answer my wife as she stood panicked in the doorway, “Rob! What is it? What were those screams? Are you OK? Rob? Answer me! Somebody call an ambulance!”

I’m such a stupid, naïve, idiotic fool of a moron. Was it really that simpleminded of me to think, OK, MTV’s putting on an award show, maybe I’ll make a bowl of popcorn and see what’s going on? Maybe Beavis and Butthead will present another award this year.

Why didn’t anybody warn me about what my innocent eyes were about to bear witness to? Did I mention that I’m still horrified? I am. And disgusted. Disgusted. I’ve brushed my teeth like twenty times already and I can still taste that throw-up taste in the back of my throat. Because that’s what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-four hours, trying not to think about the indecency that went down, fighting the images popping up in my head, and dry heaving as I transitioned from rocking in the corner to lying fetal position under the bed.

I couldn’t face the light, not after the VMAs, not before I had a chance to call my pastor. Several pastors. How can I look the world in the eye? How can I walk out of my house and pretend like everything’s OK, like what happened on Sunday night didn’t happen?

I didn’t even know twerk was a word. And it’s bad enough as a word, as letters on a page. But the action to which it’s referring to? Hold on, there’s that throw up again. I can’t. I can’t talk about Miley Cyrus anymore. I didn’t know that human bodies were capable of such … I shouldn’t. It’s just … oh man. I’d better call my pastor. Out of everything that I’ve seen in my entire life, that Miley Cyrus dance was definitely the most outrageous. There’s nothing in this life that could have upset me more than watching that woman do what she did on stage. Even in the darkest crevasses of my mind, I’m unable to come up with any scenario, real or imagined, that comes close to equaling even half of the depravity evidenced upon that stage.

And let’s talk about NSYNC. You call that a reunion? That was it? I’ve always been a huge NSYNC fan. It’s probably one of the only reasons why I decided to watch this year’s VMAs in the first place. I kept hearing everybody at work talking about it, “Oh my God! NSYNC is having a reunion at the VMAs!”

But it was just Justin Timberlake singing a bunch of Justin Timberlake songs. And I was like, where’s Lance? Where’s that other guy? I swear when I was thinking about writing this I was able to name three NSYNCers, but it’s slipping my mind right now, jeez, this is kind of embarrassing. Well, I’m just drawing a mental blank, I assure you that I can name three of them. If it comes to me later, I’ll let you know.

And then finally after like fifteen minutes of solo JT, he gets on the stage. He’s like, “You wanted it!” and I was like, “Yes! I want it!” and there they were. NSYNC. But it was just a tease. They sang like one line from two songs, cracked a pose, and that was it, back to the Timberlake one-man show.

I was upset. It was like if I happened to come across two guys in a random bar that I went to high school with. I wouldn’t take out my phone, shoot a picture, post it to Instagram and label it, “High school reunion!” I’m not even entirely convinced that all five of those guys knew exactly what it was they were doing. Didn’t Lance look a little lost? Maybe he just took a wrong turn during the JT performance. Maybe the NSYNC reunion was just a weird coincidence.

And I loved how they cut to One Direction several times throughout the performance, each one of those kids had the same blank expression, the same panicked thought going through their minds: “Jesus Christ. I hope that in twenty years I’m not that guy, the one two to the left of Justin Timberlake. That guy just looks really sad,” before reassuring themselves, “Nah, I’m the real talent of this operation. I am One Direction,” and then they all started smiling that nervous smile again.

But back to the shame. MTV should be ashamed of itself for the “show” it put on Sunday night. But I doubt MTV is capable of such serious self-reflection. No, the US government should shut it down. Congress should pass legislation ensuring that what went down two nights ago never happens again. And everybody involved in the VMAs should be sentenced to life in prison. And Miley Cyrus should be publicly executed. I’m still just so … just so shocked. Shocked.

Push button for green light

The other day I was driving my car and I saw this lady at the corner. She didn’t have the light so she put down her grocery bags and walked to the pole at the intersection. And then she started pushing that button, the one that I forgot was even there, it says, “Push here and wait for green light.” Not just once, she kept pushing it, over and over again, I imagined her saying in her head, green light, every time she pushed, green light, green light, green light …

I don’t know why, I couldn’t stand watching her do it, I know I should have just minded my own business but something about that push, push, push, I rolled down my window, “Hey lady! What the hell are you doing? You really think that button’s connected to anything? You really think the light’s going to change faster because you’re standing there pushing it again and again?”

And she looked at me, she was definitely pissed off. I shouldn’t have said anything, it was totally pointless. And I wanted to say so much more, I wanted her to respond, to tell me that it does work, that I should mind my own business, and then I would have kept going, I would have been like, oh yeah? Well why do you keep pushing it then? Shouldn’t you just have to push it the one time? What do you think, it’s a button designed to speed up the changing from red to green based on how many times it’s pressed?

She was just staring at me, still pressing the button at the same frequency, but not paying attention to the light, it changed to green, she ignored it, she was locked on me. I felt kind of bad, but I didn’t want to let her know, I was hoping that she’d maintain eye contact long enough for the light to change again from green to red, and then I could really point out to her the futility of pressing the button.

So I engaged her a little more, this time in a more contrite tone of voice, again, I was feeling bad, she reminded me of my grandmother. Not my grandmother exactly, but somebody’s grandmother. She was old. And I thought back to how I started the conversation, well, it wasn’t a conversation, not yet, she hadn’t said anything back yet, although I could tell she was trying to communicate something with her eyes, but man, finally I was like, “What the hell lady?” I didn’t really need to say hell, that was a little harsh, I wouldn’t have said hell to my grandmother.

So I started again, “Excuse me, ma’am, but you can’t really think that that button is actually connected to anything, can you? I mean, it doesn’t do anything. All of the lights in this city are timed out, like a grid, it’s all measured out in even intervals, to help traffic maintain as good of a flow as possible. And again, I’m sorry I said hell before, but I just hate to see you standing there, pushing it over and over again, and why push it so many times? When you’re at home watching TV, how many times do you push the on button? That’s not really the same, I get it, like with the TV you’re getting an instant result, whereas here … well just imagine if that remote didn’t have any batteries, and you stood there pointing it at the TV, click, click, click, nothing, how long would you keep that up?”

All the while, the light hadn’t changed back to red, I couldn’t believe it, it was actually taking forever, and the lady was still just staring at me, totally giving me the stink eye, so, whatever, I told her, “You know what? I’m sorry lady, just, be careful with your groceries on the floor, someone might knock them over.” And I rolled up my window.

But I couldn’t go anywhere because the light in front of me was stuck on red. One minute, two minutes went by, this thing wasn’t changing. And then I realized why. It was the lady. She was still clicking that button, click, click, click. It must have actually been connected, and her constant pressing was keeping the light green, for her. For me it was red. I was stuck.

I rolled down the window, “Hello? Hi, hello,” she was still just staring at me, unwavering, “Yeah, look, I feel really bad, and I’m actually thinking that maybe that button does work, and listen, I feel really terrible, coming at you like that, berating you, you’re clearly in the right here, I think the button does work, obviously it works, that light hasn’t changed in a while now. Anyway, you’ve proved your point, and I’d just like to … I’m sorry again, I’d really like to … yeah, so.”

But she didn’t stop. Now I was getting pissed again. But what was I going to do, knock her groceries over? Force her to stop pushing the button? I looked left and right, making sure no other cars were coming, and I inched into the intersection. Immediately I saw the red and blue lights behind me, a cop car perfectly hidden from view, watching me run the light.

“Officer, I’m really sorry, but that lady, she kept pushing the button, the light wouldn’t change. And I was going really slow, come on, I’m sorry.”

And the officer was like, “What are you stupid? Those buttons aren’t connected to anything. Nice try pal, now hand over your license and registration.”

But that lady, I turned around, she was gone, no lady, no bag of groceries, nothing. What was she, a ghost? Was this like some sort of a haunted intersection? Am I really going to have to go down to City Hall to fight this ticket? Because there’s no way that the judge is going to believe any of this. I guess I could just hope that the officer never shows up, and I could just make up some other story. Or maybe a reduced fine, something. I’m telling you, I know it sounds crazy, but she had to have been a ghost, because how else can you explain any of this stuff?

Breadmaking: A skill worth pursuing

While I was living abroad in Ecuador, I got really into cooking. After the culture shock wore off, after the initial feelings of exciting and new wore into the normal rhythm of daily life, I started to feel a rumbling in my stomach, a yearning for the tastes and comforts of what I was used to back home. Without access to what I would consider normal groceries, I had to learn how to make what I wanted with the ingredients at my disposal.

Whereas Ecuadoreans receive the majority of their carbohydrates from rice, I was longing for my North American diet of bread, the thick, crusty loaves that I took for granted back home. So I learned how to bake. Everything boiled down to trial and error. Sure, I could read a recipe, watch videos of people kneading flour and water into dough, but it was only after doing it myself that I began to understand what a lot of people talk about when they describe bread making as a Zen-like, almost spiritual experience.

It’s something that I could only learn to appreciate by making it into a daily practice, by starting out with words on a page and developing those recipes into my own muscle memory. Again, trial and error. Like two cups of flour, that sounds simple enough, right? But the cookbooks never explain that flour scooped out from a sack with a spoon tends to measure out to a greater volume than that same flour packed into a measuring cup.

Stuff like that makes a big difference in the end product. So do variables that nobody could ever teach me, like the discrepancy in what my oven thermometer assured me was the inside temperature compared with the undercooked doughy loaves suggesting a different level of heat. Or the fact that on humid days, I found it necessary to keep a bowl of flour next to my counter space, to prevent the dough from sticking to my hands and the work surface.

When I took my first really good loaf out of the oven, I’m talking a deep brown, crusty bread, steaming from the inside out, I knew that this was a skill worth pursuing. After a few months, bread making became almost second nature. I knew how to make a dough without even using a measuring cup. Judging by touch and texture, I could tell if a little more water was needed, maybe an extra blast of heat at the end to really give it that golden finish.

After I had a comfortable handle with the basics, I was able to start experimenting, adding different ingredients, molding the dough into various shapes. My understanding of the leavening process allowed me to craft baguettes or custom cakes. With just three simple ingredients, I was able to create an endless amount of goods I’d normally buy prepackaged at the grocery store.

If I flattened out the dough, I had pizza crust. If I made those crusts a little thinner and cooked them on top of a hot skillet, my rounds inflated into perfect pitas. By adding some sugar and eggs and frying my dough in hot oil, suddenly I had fresh donuts. I found that all of these tricks could be applied to everyday dishes I hadn’t before considered, like yeasted pancakes, or by eliminating yeast all together, by replacing wheat flour with other grains, I could fashion my own tortillas.

After reading something online about sourdough bread, I decided to capture my own wild yeast, to leaven my bread without the use of the dry-active prepackaged convenience. The process was slow, starting with a tablespoon of flour and water, leaving it in the kitchen to attract the myriad microscopic organisms floating invisible through the air. I’d add a little more water and flour each day, giving everything a stir whenever I happened to pass by.

There was life inside of that cup. In that controlled environment, although I couldn’t see it, there was feeding, there was reproduction. Eventually my starter bubbled with visible proof of success. I poured a little into my next bread, and it actually rose. When I pressed my hands to the dough, I can’t explain it, but the texture was slightly different. I’m having trouble describing the difference, but it’s something that was noticeable only because I had become so familiar with my everyday process.

The finished product was denser, it had a definite sour taste, and as I took a few bites of what I had baked, I thought about the microbes and yeasts unique to that region, to my kitchen. I had made something distinctive, and this was the end result. How did human beings come up with this process? Without an Internet or cookbooks to consult, who thought to grind up grain into a flour, leave it out for days to moisten and rise, and then bake it in the oven?

It’s all too common to lose myself in the contemporary world, with the comforts of our modern food system, the many shortcuts available to every home cook. But I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn how to bake bread, to really make it a part of who I am. When I’m in the moment, when I have my hands in that dough, when the mixing turns to kneading and the mass becomes something real in my hands, I imagine the generations that came before, I feel the whole of humanity behind me, the future stretching out endlessly in front.

Originally published on HonestBlue.com

My broken bicycle chain

The other night I was riding my bike home from work when I started to hear this clicking sound. I couldn’t tell what was wrong exactly, but every three or four pedals, it was this noticeable click. One block away from work, two blocks, I started building up some speed and the clicks came at shorter intervals. Part of me thought, OK, something’s definitely wrong, like I know it’s not supposed to be making those sounds, but what was I going to do? It’s not like I had any tools on me, and even if I did, I wasn’t really in the mood to start pretending to be a bike mechanic on the side of East Fifty-Fourth Street.

So I started changing the gears rapidly, like maybe that would fix it. You want to something to click about? I’ll give you something to click about. Only, and this is totally speaking in retrospect, but I wish I had just left it in that one gear, because after a few turns of the shifter, the pedals jammed like the chain got stuck. I looked down, and it actually came apart, one of the links broke, and I watched the line of metal wind its way through the derailleur and then drop onto the floor.

This all happened within maybe ten seconds. It was like I was watching it, but I couldn’t really comprehend what was going on. My eyes saw the chain leave the bike, but my legs kept pedaling futilely, with nothing to give them any resistance, it was just this hollow motion, all while my brain simply could not make sense of the visual, the tactile, finally my momentum came to an end and I had to get off the bike.

I walked back and found the chain. For some reason that stupid, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” saying ran through my head, and it got me really annoyed. I had just worked a double, my back was killing me. All I wanted to do was get home and watch some TV before I passed out for the night, but now I really was going to have to pretend to be a bike mechanic on the side of the street.

The thing about bike chains, you touch them once and that’s it, that’s the last thing you can touch until you have a chance to get to a bathroom sink. Whatever bike chain grease is made out of, it gets everywhere. And of course I didn’t think about that, I just picked up the chain, and then next thing I knew I had grease on my shirt, on my backpack. I looked down and my left hand was in my left pocket looking for keys or something I might use as a tool.

I wasted twenty minutes looping the bike chain back through the system, and then I tried my best to hammer the chain back together with my bare hands. I stood the bike back upright and took off. Unfortunately, my fingers weren’t able to do the trick like a bike chain tool does, and so it was click, click, and the whole thing fell apart almost immediately.

It was close to midnight. I didn’t know what to do. Finding a cab that would let me shove my bike in the backseat would have been a long shot. Then again, I was kind of far from the subway, and at this time of night, I had no idea how much time I would have spent waiting for a train. I finally decided that I’d sit on the bike and push myself home, like a scooter.

It was one of those ideas that sounded great in my head, but halfway across the Queensboro Bridge, way too late to turn back and figure something else out, I realized what a strain this was on my system, my chest muscles felt like they were supporting my arms holding onto the handlebars, pushing my torso outward while my legs took turns alternating between standing on a pedal and pushing off the ground like I would a skateboard.

And I woke up this morning and my right foot was all swollen, like I could feel my actions last night aggravating muscles that I probably don’t use much while I’m walking or running, but I had stubbornly kept at it, refusing to let any more of the night pass than it already had. And now I’m sitting here looking at this bike with no chain, totally useless.

I love riding a bike because I’m free to go anywhere in the city without ever having to spend any time waiting around for buses or trains. And usually it’s great, I have my commute timed out to the minute, I save a lot of money on not having to buy a monthly MetroCard. But every once in a while something like this happens, something breaks, or it starts raining, or the bike lane on the bridge gets shut down for repairs. And then I’m stuck, I have to figure something out, I can’t take a cab, I can’t even run. In these moments, no longer is my bike a key to freedom, it’s an anchor, weighing me down wherever I happen to be, I’m mercilessly bound to the present.

Pogo sticks are lame

When I was a little kid, I wanted a pogo stick so bad, bad enough that one year I got one for Christmas. I can’t describe to you my disappointment when I finally stepped on to jump up and down. In my little kid head, I imagined it to be like this magic bouncing stick, that all I would have to do was hold on as this tool took me on a wild up and down bouncy bounce ride.

But pogo sticks aren’t really bouncy. They’re springy. It takes a lot of muscle and weight to slam that thing down hard enough on the ground so that it’ll launch you even an inch or two upward. I think if I had to blame someone for my misconception, yes, I’ll take part of the blame, but there was also this popular toy when I was in first or second grade, the Pogo Ball, that I feel deserves most of the credit for leading me to put any hope of fun into a boring pogo stick.

The Pogo Ball was essentially a volleyball sized thick rubber ball with a little circular platform wrapped around the middle. Imagine what the planet Saturn looks like, and that’s basically the shape of the Pogo Ball. I had one of those as a little kid, and while I didn’t really have the motor skills necessary to actually bounce around, that was the idea behind this toy. All of the commercials showcased kids my age flying around town, dramatic leap after ridiculous bounce.

I couldn’t get it right, and so I assumed that it was because the Pogo Ball was a poor man’s pogo stick. All I needed were handles, and I’d be able pogo with the best of them. But that Christmas morning, one look at the pogo stick had me realizing that I’d been fooling myself all along. The dead giveaway was the solid bottom, the fist shaped piece of hard black rubber on which ground would meet stick.

How was this thing supposed to bounce? I’d been picturing some sort of an ultra bouncy inflatable ball, or maybe something like flubber. And again, those springs, it’s so hard to get that thing to want to go.

A couple of years ago I was at my parents’ house and, for some reason or another, I wound up snooping around the garage. Hanging on the wall was the old pogo stick. I figured, I’ve got the weight now that my ten-year-old self lacked, let’s see if I can’t get this going. And while I did manage to successfully pogo, it wasn’t all that fun. I mean, maybe it would have been fun if I could have made this thing work twenty years ago, but now, I don’t know.

I guess bouncing up and down isn’t as fun as it used to be. I always used to love jumping on trampolines. One of my friends had one when I was high school, and we’d spend hours catapulting ourselves as high as we could, catching each other’s bounces, trying not to break our arms on the sides. But ten years later I remember being at someone’s house, also with a trampoline, and the up and down motion made me instantly uncomfortable. It wasn’t nausea, and it wasn’t a headache, not really. I don’t know how to describe it other than I felt like I was losing control of my eyes, like they were slowly drifting out of orbit, that if I didn’t stop bouncing, they’d roll up to the inside of my head or cross permanently. It was just really disorienting I guess.

And it was the same with my adult pogo stick experience. Sure, I was going up and down, but I couldn’t really stay focused, I kept pogoing in a circle that I couldn’t control. The springs were really, really loud, and the nails-on-a-chalkboard screech only added to that vertigo effect.

I’m still blaming the Pogo Ball. If it wasn’t for that cheap piece of crap, I would have never got it in my head that pogo sticking was something worth wanting to do. Man, I think about a lot of the popular toys from my childhood, all of them stupid pieces of plastic that never really delivered on the advertised experience. Skip-it was basically a wheel attached to your leg by a piece of nylon string. What a piece of junk. It never even stayed on the ground, so the counter never counted anything. Skip-it. They should have called it Don’t-buy-it.