Yearly Archives: 2013

So many possibilities

You, give me five dollars. Go into your pocket, find five dollars, and then give it to me. I’ll make change. I’ve got change. And I’d like more change. More money. Yours. It’s either give me five dollars willfully, or face the possibility that I might go ahead and demand ten dollars, this time a little bit more aggressively. I’m not threatening. That’s just a possibility. The universe is full of possibilities. I’m just pointing out one rather peaceful possibility, you giving me five dollars, in contrast to a slightly more violent possibility, me taking ten dollars. Who am I to say what’s going to wind up happening? I’m no fortuneteller. I’m just a guy, standing in front of another guy, asking him to give up five dollars. Does that really sound like such a big deal?

And you. I’d like five dollars from you also. In addition, I’d like you to walk over to that deli and buy me a sandwich. Peppermill turkey on a hero, lettuce, tomato, mayo and mustard. And a soda. If it comes with a pickle, great, if not, I want a small bag of chips. And don’t think that I won’t be waiting outside, because I will be waiting outside. Again, I can’t predict the future, I mean, I can predict it, I just can’t tell how accurate those predictions will wind up being.

You. You heard all of that stuff I was saying to those other two guys, right? Well, I want all of the same stuff from you, but pick me up a couple of scratch-offs while you’re in there. Listen, you can put away that cell phone or you can keep dialing whatever number you’re dialing. I can put down my fist or I can clench it even tighter.

It’s crazy, all of the possibilities, all of the different scenarios I can imagine. You ever hear about any multiverse theories? Like just because something’s not happening in this universe doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening somewhere else. Actually, I think that it has to be happening somewhere else. Like there are an infinite amount of universes, one for each possibility. So while it’s almost crazy to think about me getting very, very violent over you not giving me five bucks, a sandwich, some Lotto tickets, and a ride home, it’s even crazier to think that somewhere in some parallel universe, that’s exactly what’s happening.

I’m no scientist, but if I were in your shoes, and I did subscribe to this multiverse mumbo-jumbo, I’d be doing everything in my power to make sure that this universe doesn’t wind up turning out to be that universe, the one where I start going off-the-wall nutso just because some knucklehead won’t hand over what amounts to less than twenty dollars worth of deli purchases, a quick ride home, and a very brief stop in your bathroom.

Because who’s to say, right? Like who’s to really say that I will or won’t do anything? You. Go over to that guy in the deli and tell him that I forgot to ask for onions on my sandwich. You. Make sure that that other guy over there is buying me the good scratch-offs, not those cheap-o dollar tickets. Because that wasn’t the deal. And if I wasn’t specific in this universe, well, I’m sure there are a near-infinite number of me lookalikes somewhere out there that would beg to differ.

And not the five dollar ones either, make them the tens, the big ones, the ones with thirty-two chances to win. That’s a lot of chances. Think about me maybe winning the jackpot. Somewhere it’s got to happen, right? I mean, statistically speaking, I should be rich somewhere out there, you know what I’m saying? Like, what’s thirty two chances times infinity?

I’m frugal

My SonicCare toothbrush doesn’t hold a charge anymore, but I don’t want to buy a new one. It was hard enough spending a hundred and forty dollars on one toothbrush, but two? That’s insane. That’s not happening. So brushing my teeth has become such a chore. I hit the button, it buzzes for like fifteen seconds, and then I have to plug it into the charger and wait something like four hours for another fifteen seconds. Right? That’s a lot of time just to brush my teeth. And those fifteen seconds are getting shorter every day, each time just a fraction of a second less charge.

What can I say? I’m frugal. I bought this messenger bag three years ago, and one of the straps doesn’t work at all. I say it doesn’t work, but you know, it’s just old. It’s an old bag. Still, when I bought it, I kept getting all of these unexpected compliments, like, “Hey Rob, that’s a really sharp messenger bag,” stuff like that, which wasn’t even my intention, I think I just bought it because it was the first one that I saw when I went looking for a messenger bag.

That strap I was talking about earlier actually fell off, but I replaced it with part of an old belt I had lying around. People kept telling me, “Rob, you’ve got to get rid of that old belt, it’s disgusting.” But look who’s laughing now? Me. Because I saved that belt, it was exactly the type of thin material I needed to help strap down that second side of my messenger bag.

But it didn’t really sew correctly. I mean, my sewing abilities are fine. It’s just that, I’ll never buy a real sewing kit. I’ve been to about six hotels over the course of my life, and you know what that means, right? Six travel-sized sewing kits. Why spend money on stuff when you don’t have to?

The only thing is, six mini-sewing kits, while it’s a lot of string, it’s not a lot of plain black string. They always give you a little bit of every color. The first things that I sewed, like holes in the armpits of my t-shirts, stuff like that, it was great to be able to use black thread. But by now, for that messenger bag, I think I only had a choice between turquoise or pink.

Do you know how hard it is to really sew an old piece of belt onto a canvas bag with hotel thread? It’s not easy. But nothing in life is easy. Like brushing your teeth. Sometimes if I don’t have four hours to wait for my battery to charge up, I’ll just use the SonicCare as a regular toothbrush, like actually manually brushing it back and forth across my teeth. Tell me about it, it’s humiliating. Especially considering the fact that I haven’t changed the toothbrush heads in over a year. Those things are such a scam. Shouldn’t it be around the cost of just another regular toothbrush? Like come on, I already spent one hundred and forty dollars on your device. Now I have to fork over twenty-five ninety-nine once every four months just to keep this thing new?

And explaining to everybody what’s going on with my messenger bag, like sometimes I’d just like to be able to leave the house without people handing me spare change, or saying, “Hey Rob, when are you going to get a new bag?” or, “Hey mister, you dropped a shoe out of your bag. You should really get that strap thing fixed.”

It’s not even a strap at this point. But I’m still laughing last, at everybody who called me crazy along the way, “Throw this away, waste more money on that,” it’s like, who’s the sucker spending sixty dollars a year on belts? Not me. And not anybody I know. And actually, I have no idea how much belts cost, because I haven’t bought one in forever. And also, I wouldn’t have anybody to ask, my breath has been so bad since my SonicCare stopped working, nobody lets me get a full sentence out without running away. And so, what, I’m out of touch? Or everybody else is out of touch. Either it’s me or it’s everybody else. One or the other.

Pass the paella, por favor

Man, I just love paella. What a treat, a real Mediterranean treat. Spain’s Mediterranean, right? I mean, yeah, I know it’s Mediterranean, it’s right on the sea. But paella, is that like a coastal thing? Like do the people in northern Spain eat paella? How often, daily? Do the northern Spanish consider themselves Mediterranean? Or when they eat paella, are they thinking to themselves the same thing I am, the whole, “Wow! Paella! What a Mediterranean treat!”

It’s just so good. I wish I could be eating some paella right now, like right as I’m typing this. Which, yeah, I know it’s not possible. It’s hardly possible to eat paella when you’re sitting down at a table with a whole place setting. And don’t get me wrong, the fact that it’s not the most convenient dish to eat takes nothing away from its flavor, its subtle elegance and accessibility to a wide audience of diners.

But yes, a total pain to eat. There’s always rice everywhere by the time you’re done. And it’s not like I don’t know how to eat rice, I do. It’s just that, you sit down to that pot of fresh paella, and it’s always stuffed, overstuffed I would say. You try to make a clean spoonful, but your utensil hits some sort of clam, or mussel, and it’s not just the meat, it’s the whole shell. The imbalance sends everything flying, rice everywhere. There’s a piece of sausage in there somewhere, but it fell along with the rice onto the floor.

It’s OK. It’s paella. It’s a colorful dish, very Mediterranean, loads of flavor, of different flavors, did I mention clam shells? So your kitchen’s going to be a little messy. Have you ever been to the Spanish Riviera? Well, I haven’t. But I imagine it to be full of vibrant people eating paellas, rice and little tiny chopped up pieces of chicken (impossibly tiny, maybe not even there at all) flying this way and that.

You don’t see paella everywhere, which is a shame, because I try to order it wherever I go. “I’ll take the paella, please,” I inform the hostess before she even has a chance to bring me to my table. She’ll say something like, “Well, your server will be right over,” and then when the server does show up, I say something like, “Oh, it’s OK, I already ordered the paella from that woman over there.”

Yes, I understand that it’s a little loco to just assume that every random restaurant is going to carry paella. It’s a total crapshoot. But I’m hoping that by the time the server goes over to talk to the hostess, “He said something about paella?” they’ll be confused enough to maybe get a manager involved, perhaps a consultation with the chef wouldn’t be totally out of the question either.

Of course, the manager is going to try and be outright dismissive, “What the hell is this guy talking about? Paella, please, this is a barbeque restaurant,” but I’m hoping that one day this discussion is going to be happening in front of a chef who happens to be from Spain. From the paella part, the Mediterranean part. Maybe he’s not from there, but he definitely lived there. And he definitely loves paella.

And so he interrupts the manager, “Wait,” and as everyone stops to hear him out, he just kind of does this subtle nod, almost too subtle, the manager has to have it spelled out for him, “Hold on a second, you know what this guy is talking about?” Again, the chef just nods. He knows Spain. He knows paella.

And as everybody else in my party starts in on their ribs and brisket, all of the sudden the chef will appear with this cast iron pot. He’ll set it down in front of me and lift open the top. Before me, once the steam clears so I’m able to see, it’s going to be the perfect paella, a paella to end all paellas.

“Buen provecho,” he’ll toast as he watches just long enough to see me take that first magical bite. The perfect paella. Man, I was hungry for paella when I started writing this, but now it’s like, I need some paella. It’s the best meal. Like yes, every once in a while you’ll get a bad mussel, like it hasn’t opened up, and there’s a slime kind of oozing from the sides of the shell, a shell that definitely doesn’t smell right, and the smell sort of infects the rest of the paella in an almost insidious way. But when it’s right, like when it’s on, it’s paella all the way, I’m always ordering paella, more paella, please, pass the paella.

Let’s have some frank discussion

It’s about time that we, as a society, had a frank discussion about cutting boards. Everybody’s got a theory. I’ve heard people say to use one board dedicated for meat and one for vegetables. Someone else gave me some story about how chopping onions will make everything else taste like onions. And then you’re supposed to find one that doesn’t slide around, something that’s big enough to chop lots of stuff but compact enough to tuck away into a cupboard.

How about, enough with cutting boards all together? Am I the only one thinking that we, as a species, we’re supposed to have been evolved past the need to slice everything up on some stupid flat surface? When I was a little kid, I watched all of these old cartoons, like the Jetsons, stuff that imagined how the future would make everything easy, especially all of the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, the cutting and chopping.

Never mind the fact that I don’t have a robot housekeeper to make my bed and prepare my meals, shouldn’t I at least have some sort of a futuristic appliance that slices my vegetables and meats without the need of a cutting board? I always thought I’d have maybe like a light saber knife, or I don’t know, foods that come pre-sliced, everything should grow pre-sliced, man, it’s the future already, at least, from the time I was watching stupid future cartoons, shows that were already dated by the time I was watching them, whatever, twenty years later, now, this is the future. Why is everything basically the same?

Another frank discussion, this time about cotton swabs. I remember one time like five years ago I had this really bad earache, so bad that I finally had to go to the doctor. I’m not going to get into the gross details, but I left his office with some very explicit instructions: nothing in your ear smaller than your elbow.

And I was like, what kind of medial advice is that? It was some sort of a joke, his way of telling me to stop using Q-Tips, that it was pushing everything deep inside, making it easier for ear problems to develop. Well how about we just come up with some safer Q-Tips, cotton swabs that, instead of having cotton at the end, they have maybe like a hundred tiny little claws, and they’re robotic, so they keep opening and closing?

But yeah, it’s probably a little more complicated than just having a robot arm open and close at random intervals inside your ear. No, you’re going to need someone to pilot the futuristic Q-Tips. Again, it’s simple. The technology is available. You get one of those very small cameras, that goes at the end. Then you have one of your friends pilot the robot arms, collect the earwax, deposit it outside. If you’re on really good terms with whoever you’re living with, and you guys get in a good groove, it really shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, fifteen, tops. But you live by yourself? No problem. You could go on the Internet and find another loner to help you out. And you’d help them out. It’s a win-win.

It’s like shampoo. Let’s do it, let’s have that frank discussion about shampoo. Why does it sting your eyes? Do we really need it? Why do we still have hair anyway? If you ever look at that drawing, that illustration of the monkey that turns into a caveman that turns into a human being, there’s a definite progression, a loss of hair. You go from monkey, he’s covered in hair, and then caveman is only kind of covered in hair. As humans we might think, we’ve arrived, finally, we have hair only on our heads and on certain parts of our body.

But we should be even further evolved to have no hair at all. And that way if you walked into CVS and asked someone, “Hey man, where’s the shampoo?” they’d look at you like you were crazy, like what are you talking about? Shampoo? You mean that stuff that we use to clean the hair off of our less evolved animal cousins? I don’t know, maybe you can find some over in aisle eight, right next to ear care, right by those mechanical non-cotton swabs. And hey man, are you single? Like, I’m not trying to ask you out, it’s just that, would you pilot my Q-Tips? My Internet’s out and I’m having trouble finding someone to man the controls. What do you say, it shouldn’t take more than fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. Cool?

Movie Review: Elysium

It’s the end of the twenty-first century. All of the big problems that kind of threaten us in a vague maybe-ish someday way today have blossomed into a full-scale dusty global cloud of sepia toned urban smog. There’s overpopulation, pollution, and poverty on a mass scale. It’s an authoritarian state, everything enforced by robot police officers. You can’t even talk sarcastically to the droids or they’ll beat you up and maybe send you to jail.

But if you’re rich, everything’s fine. You live on Elysium, this giant Halo-like space colony orbiting the earth. Not only is the scenery lush and green, the citizens well-dressed and manicured, but health care has reached its apex: the elites lay down on these medical beds where everything from cancer to radiation poisoning can be almost instantly cured.

Elysium, to me, is the reason why we elect Democrats to office. All of the current social and political debates of today are embellished, exaggerated to such effect that the world in which this film takes place is at times totally alien, yet sometimes hauntingly a reflection of the present day. The disdain that the upper class exudes toward everyone else boils the blood, “Don’t breathe on me,” a corporate executive interrupts an underling for talking to his superior without covering his mouth.

The rich relax in the skies with their “I’ve got mine” security separated comfortably by the planet’s own atmosphere. Everyone else on the ground is a means to an end, to higher profits and revenues. I think about all of the fast-food workers holding these one-day strikes for a livable wage and I see the factory workers in Elysium get bossed around, threatened with their jobs, exploited for as much work with as little compensation. Profit, profit, profit.

Everyone’s desperate to get to Elysium, to use the medical beds, to escape what the previous generations – our generation – have left of the earth. We hear the words “illegals” a lot, “security,” “liberty,” it’s all of the same issues that we debate about now, how much to give to what people, do people truly deserve anything in this life?

Matt Damon’s character, Max, grew up in Los Angeles, and due not so much to character defects than the simple fact that the circumstances of his life suck, he’s in and out of jail, getting beat up by robot cops for no reason, working on the line at a factory that manufactures the same robot cops that then patrol the streets looking to beat him up again.

When he’s involved in an accident at work leaving him with just five days to live, his yearning turns to desperation as he agrees to wear a surgically attached robot exoskeleton with orders to fight his way to survival. Fortune winds up turning a simple heist into a political battle for control of Elysium, and Max finds himself being hunted down by Kruger, Sharlto Copley, the same South African guy from District 9 (also written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.) He’s traded in his bureaucratic government shirt and tie for a beard, cloak, and a giant sword. Kruger is a highlight of the film. I don’t know if it was his relentless cannot-be-stopped character or his creepy almost unintelligible accent, but his very presence on the screen made my skin tingle with static-like charge.

Elysium is over the top, but it’s everything that true sci-fi aspires to be. Like Alien, like his previous District 9, Blomkamp has taken all of the negative aspects of modern society and imagined them to run their course for about two hundred more years totally uninhibited. The result is everything that us liberals are afraid of: corporate supremacy, misery, dystopia, the haves and the have-nots on an extreme scale. It made me think about justice, about distribution, about the fact that we currently have the means to feed the world’s population, but we lack the political will to spread the wealth. How is this all going to sort itself out? In which direction are we headed as a species? I certainly hope that our future resembles nothing like the world of Elysium.