Hath not a pseudo-Jew eyes?

When I was growing up, there were basically three times during the year that actually felt Jewish -- Rosh Hashannah, Yom Kippur, and Passover ... and that last one is a bit sketchy, seeing as how my family tended to skip straight to the wine-drinking, food-eating parts of the seder. Now that I've escaped the evil clutches of my semi-Christian synagogue from my youth (home of the "holy muffin"), there's really only one ocassion for which I feel Jewish: when people put up Christmas decorations.

Well, today I'm Jewish.

As I mentioned in my previous post, today has been rather slow...to the point of stopping, actually. It's 1:30 P.M. here, and I've gotten no calls so far. That's 5 hours of sitting on my ass doing nothing. On an average day, I usually get a call every 10-20 minutes. So the "social committee" of the office, led by this idiotic sack of cow pies by the name of Chris -- the same name as the aforementioned signing idiot who works with me (note to self: don't name children Chris) -- put people to work decorating the office for Christmas. No big deal, really, just cutting snow flakes out of construction paper. Chris (cow-pies, not singing-idiot) put up this little Christmas tree made out of some weird combination of pipe cleaners and something like a garden hose. Then she started putting up Christmas lights. Well, I just sat at my desk, contentedly cutting little snowflakes (not much else to do today), feeling more Jewish by the second. It's been a while since I've been in a place that didn't even make an attempt at respecting the diversity of its inhabitants -- I mean, schools pretty much have to do that nowadays, I just kind of assumed offices would be the same. So after a while, Chris (cow-pies again) came over to my desk, inspected my pile of 8 or so snowflakes, and said, "Now you're getting into the Christmas spirit!"

I couldn't help myself. Without looking up from the snowflake I was working on, I said, "Hannukah spirit."

She kind of looked at me for a second, then said, "Hannukah, Christmas, whatever. Do you want us to get a little menorah for you?"

Me: "Nah, it's not a big deal. I'm just sayin'."

Cowpies: "No, we'll do it. No problem."

Score one for the pseudo-Jew, huh? A few minutes later, she and another coworker of mine were getting ready to go out and buy some more decorations (as I said, it's hella slow today). They were discussing briefly what they were going to get. Since they were only about a foot away from me, I could overhear the conversation quite well. The tail end of it:

Cowpies: "...Oh, and we need to get a little menorah. That way we'll have all the big [holidays]."

Other: "A menorah?"

Cowpies: "Yeah, you know, for Hannukah."

(Both turn to glare at me. I just kind of grin and wave. If there was an internationally-recognized hand signal that meant "Jewboy here!", I would've done that.)

By the way, how interesting is it that Cowpies thinks that Hannukah and Christmas are all of "the big holidays"?

So now I'm the schmuck that made them spend more money on decorations. And I'll probably have some lame-ass plastic menorah sitting on my cubicle. Shoulda just kept my mouth shut.

yawn...

So I had to drag my ass outta bed today and come to work. The day after Thanksgiving. On the bright side, traffic was very smooth. On the not-so-bright-side, I have some doubts as to whether we'll be getting a whole lotta calls today. Y'see, the beginning of our voice menu says, "Our offices are closed in observance of the holiday". Whoops. This didn't stop my supervisor and coworker from prank calling me, however. They actually went through the phone tree, and then when I picked up the phone, they went "GOBBLE GOBBLE!" and hung up. I only knew it was them because I heard them laughing. Oh, those wacky office folk.

I managed to make the much-dreamed-of (by me) sweet potato casserole. It was the most delicious thing I've ever made. I think I'll make one a week. I would have eaten all of it by myself, but I want my roommate to taste it so he'll acknowledge my culinary genius. Plus, with all the leftover ingredients I have, I think I can make brownies. Well, actually, I guess I'd need something chocolate for that. But I could probably swing pancakes.

When Steve Martin was funny...

What with "Bringing Down the House" and all, it's hard to remember that there was a time that Steve Martin was actually funny. Really funny. And smart, too. I say this because I've come to the decision that "L.A. Story" is the best romantic comedy ever made. Well, the best romantic comedy on film. After all, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (which the movie is loosely based on) is pretty damn good, too. My absolute favorite scene of all time: when Sara is on the plane to go back to England, and that Enya song is playing, and Steve Martin is all sullen, and then the fog comes in and the airplane's compass goes crazy and they can't take off. Gives me chills. And this coming from someone who hates the whole "romantic comedy" genre. Gigli was supposed to be a romantic comedy (it was actually just a hunk of poo on cellulite). Need I say more?

Oh, and I won PoP: SoT (see previous post to decipher abbreviation). I don't mess around when I get my game on. I was a little disappointed with the last boss fight and ending, but it seems that every game ever made has an unsatisfactory final boss fight and ending -- except for Final Fantasy IV - VIII (although I didn't personally care for the ending of Final Fantasy V, I'll let that one slide). And even with those, people tend to think the final boss fights are too easy. Regardless, the ending to Final Fantasy VIII is the best ending ever. Yes, you have to slough through 60+ hours of tedious and obnoxious gameplay to get there, but man, is it worth it.

And speaking of Final Fantasy, what the hell is this? According to gamespot, it's a screenshot from Final Fantasy X-2, but I think that's a big fat lie. That, or someone pulled an "All Your Base" on the site and screwed with the screenshot. In any case, I still want to play that game -- it's gotten high-good reviews, which is prety typical for the Final Fantasy series. At least, it's typical nowadays. I remember a time when every Final Fantasy game that came out was "the best game ever made". No such praise here, but what can you expect from a thinly-veiled ploy to cash in on name recognition?

Singing idiots and princes

First of all, I have to say this to someone, or I may go on a homicidal rampage*: the idiot I work with is using his computer to log on to an internet radio station and sing along with the likes of Neil Diamond and Elton John. Not only does he sing exceptionally poorly, but I'm pretty sure that anyone who happens to call in asking me about their benefits can hear "Rocket Man" in the background. Oh, and he hacks up phlegm a lot, too. Someone fire this stupid son of a bitch.

*Note to any FBI agents reading this: I'm not really going to go an a homicidal rampage. Please don't arrest me. Thank you.

Now renting: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It is pretty badass, I must say. I can understand my brother's problem with using one move to kill 80% of the bad guys, but really, that only works for the first 20% of the game or so (I know the percentage because the save files list your percent completed). After that, if you try that shit, you get smacked. However, there are other "one-hit-wonder" moves that still work ... wall rebounds tend to be pretty successful. In any case, I think the game is pretty damn cool. The whole "time reversal" bit is a very nice way to cut down on the tedium that these types of games sometimes fall victim to (see "Lara Croft: Angel of Darkness"). I only wish there were parts where you took control of the princess or something, or at least interacted with her a bit more. It would also be nice if your control of time had other practical purposes like, say, causing a wall to age rapidly and crumble or something. But then again, how many ways do you need to knock down a wall? Oh, and speaking of my bro, thanks for that link to the post describing how to unlock PoP 1. Turns out old-school games like that are really friggin' hard to play with a PS2 controller. Especially with a somewhat jerky framerate.

Kai yi yi

Those of you who know me and are my age have probably already heard about this. For the rest of you, read this. Seems a producer at CNN, for their "Rock the Vote" deal, asked a froshie at my alma mater to ask the Democratic presidential candidates, "Mac or PC?" Apparently, they thought this would be funny. The aforementioned froshie was not amused and wrote a scathing editorial in the school paper. How the AP found out about some crappy editorial in the Brown Daily Herald, we'll never know. Maybe they were Lexis-Nexus'ing for "David Horowitz AND pot AND communism".

Interview with my chest pains

Now reading: Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice). Never read it before, and I was curious. Unfortunately, I can only read about 20 pages at a time and then I have to take a break. It's actually causing me physical discomfort. I don't know why exactly, but reading that book just makes me feel ill. Maybe it's the needlessly over-dramatic prose she uses to describe everything. Shit like, "The night was as dark as my soul". Actually, that's not from the book, but it could have been...

"We rushed through the early evening city, the sky overhead a pale violet now that the clouds were gone, the stars small and faint, the air around us sultry and fragrant even as we moved away from the spacious gardens, towards those mean and narrow streets where the flowers erupt in the cracks of the stones, and the huge oleander shoots out thick, waxen stems of white and pink blooms, like a monstrous weed in the empty lots." (page 114)

Wow. That's some mother-fucking sentence, huh? I think she's trying to do that 19th century thing in which writers make sentences really long when they want to create a sense of urgency or some crap. It just gives me chest pains.

And another thing...

Just thought of something else I want to add, but it's kind of random, so I decided to put it in another post.

A while back, I signed up to be on this email list for news about "The Matrix Online", the MMORPG continuation of the Matrix franchise scheduled for release in Q1 2004. I finally got the first email update about it, and the gameplay does not sound promising. They wanted to keep the whole "bullet-time/wire-fu" feeling of the fighting, but also wanted it to be playable over a modem. So the compromise was what seems like a completely awful combat system. Basically, the player chooses what set of tactics he wants his avatar to use: aggressive, defensive, or some other thing I forgot. Then he sits back and watches as his character goes to town/fails to go to town on his/her opponent, determined by a D&D-esque system of dice-rolling (all invisible to the player, of course). Sounds kinda lame, huh? I don't really need to pay $20 a month to watch CG characters do crazy kung-fu crap.

In other MMORPG news, I saw a report on the local news last night about Everquest. Apparently, people are losing their jobs, their families, and even killing other human beings (in real life, mind) over this game. One guy was convicted of murdering his three-year-old son after he started crying while daddy was playing -- daddy squeezed the kid so hard, he punctured his heart. What I thought was odd was that this news report seemed to be blaming Everquest. Now, I haven't played that game, but I have played another MMORPG (Earth & Beyond, which begins to suck ass after 4 weeks). I never felt an urge to kill anyone (except myself, after the ass-sucking commenced). However, I did feel a strange urge to smack everyone who uses Internet lingo -- the next person who says "u r l4m0x0rz" will feel my wrath.

That is all.

Teaching dreams

Heh...if you read the title of this post differently, it might sound like I'm talking about a class in which dreams are taught. Well, that's not actually what I'm talking about, but it sounds pretty cool.

I'm talking about the dreams I've had about teaching recently. I keep having this recurring dream in which, out of the blue, my mentor teacher from when I was student teaching calls me up and tells me I have to come back and teach for a week. It's always a week -- I'm not sure what the significance is of that time period. Anyway, I immediately start dreading going back to teaching, partly because it's been such a long time since I've done it that I don't really remember how to teacher, but also because I just plain disliked the whole teaching experience. Well, hated, actually. This dream was unusually vivid last night -- I actually dreamed that I went through about half the week, and I felt the passage of time dragging sooooo slowly (kind of like when I was teaching in reality). And it was ridiculous, because I only needed to teach one class, but it still felt like hell. After Wednesday's class, I feel like crap, so I decide to go out and party or something. The next thing I know, it's Thursday evening, and I forgot to go to school. And I get really anxious, and then I wake up.

So what's it all mean, huh?

I think it's just reaffirming my absolute hatred of my teaching experience. Man, did those three months suck. I remember one of the people that I got a ride with said something that I really think summed up my feelings about my foray into the world of secondary education: "Another day, another dollar that we're paying to come here." I remember that the most happiness I felt during teaching was on the drive on the way to school, because none of my plans for the day had screwed up yet. I can hear my mother saying, "Come on, not everything you did was a failure." Yeah, but a lot of things were. Too many for me to feel any satisfaction. Teaching for me was definitely not joyful or transformative or any of those other happy adjectives that good teachers ascribe to teaching. It was painful, tedious, humiliating, and, worst of all, a waste of my students' time. I'm pretty sure they didn't learn a damn thing from me. And as much as I like to blame the system -- which, don't get me wrong, is unbelievably screwed -- a good chunk of the blame falls on me. I guess I'm just not cut out to be a teacher. I don't have the ability or desire to sell stuff -- and that's basically what teaching comes down to: salesmanship.

Which I think might explain why I like "Speaker for the Dead" (Orson Scott Card) so much. For those of you who haven't read it, firstly, go read it. Actually, read Ender's Game first, then read Speaker for the Dead -- Ender's Game is a bit more action/adventurey than Speaker for the Dead, but you need to know the plot in Ender's Game to fully appreciate its sequel. It's hard to explain, so I won't try. Suffice to say, when I die, I want someone to speak my death. Larissa'll know what I mean.

On a different note, I'm comin' to San Francisco, baby! I've already picked out the flowers I'm going to wear in my hair. I would ask my brother for his, but he's bald. And satanic-looking, apparently. By the way, bro, remember when you posted that link to the "G.I. Joe recontextualized" stuff? I loooove that crap. It cracks my shit up. "Nice catch...but too bad yer ass got saaaaaaaacked!" Comic gold, it is.

The Matrix: Revulsions

As you might have guessed from the title, I was a little disappointed with the grand finale of the Matrix franchise. Maybe "revulsion" is a bit too strong a word to describe how I'm feeling right now, a scant hour after the fight between Smith and Goku -- er, Neo. "Disappointed" is more apt. Disappointed, and just plain sad.

When you've been talking, thinking, dreaming about a movie for five months, of course the reality isn't going to be as good as you'd like; if you read The Great Gatsby in high school, you know what I mean. But this was just ... not right. Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of things I liked -- the aforementioned fight scene, the first 20-or-so minutes when I thought this movie was going to live up to my expectations, even the overall way the plot wound down kind of made sense. But there was simply too much stuff for one movie to handle.

There's work to be done.

We're going to have to pick up the pieces of this film and try to make it make sense, to make it into the film it should've been. The only way this movie is going to be what it should have been is if we push it along. We need some fan fiction. That, or the DVD of this movie better have 2 hours of unreleased footage dealing with the half-a-dozen or so characters that got introduced and then thrown away in the first half hour. Maybe there's some "Dune"-like deal waiting for us in a few months. A 4-hour long version that develops slowly, patiently, and with all the care that needs to be taken. I doubt it, but I can dream.

The worst thing, though, is that this movie ruined the entire seires for me. How can I watch the first two parts again knowing how it's going to end?

Big up to Ishmael

This started out as an email to Katie, but then it got a little long, so here it is.

So I've been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's about ... stuff. Science 'n philosophy 'n motorcycles and such. Larissa should read it -- there's a lot about how the "classical" (i.e. scientific) and "romantic" (which he defines as the opposite of scientific, but whatever) types need to be friends or some shit. Anyway, there's a quote in here that made me think of Daniel Quinn...

"It's sometimes argued that there's no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that polutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this argument, though romatically appealing, doesn't hold up. The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification wthan modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life -- the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself."

Wow. This is some really flawed logic for a guy who's supposedly so intelligent that he had a schizophrenic break from reality. Let's break it down, shall we?

First of all, notice how he doesn't deny that "modern society" has problems -- ecological, social, and otherwise. Basically, he's confirming what Daniel Quinn has been saying, that we haven't manage to "invent" a way of living that works for people. It has nothing to do with one society being more or less "complex" than the other. It does have to do with the fact that tribes had a way of living that did work for people (as opposed to working for businesses). I don't think anyone is arguing that we should surrender all our marvelous gadgets and return to being farmers. Well, maybe some people are arguing that. But a far more effective argument is to focus on the fact that tribes had a way of living that worked, that wasn't ecologically destructive, that didn't force the majority of its members to live a "mechanized existence" with little or no dignity. "Hard labor needed just to survive"? Pain? Disease? Famine? Yeah, it's a good thing we got rid of all that, huh? And I don't think any sarcastic commentary is required regarding "wars committed with moral justification". Plus, I don't know what schoolbook this guy's been reading, but in all the schoolbooks I've seen, "primitive" man is described in exactly the same way old Pirsig described them -- living lives that are nasty, brutish and short, to coin a phrase. Again I say (sarcastically), I guess it's a good thing we did away with that kind of business, huh? So that leaves us with his argument of "individual freedom", which also doesn't really make sense. So we have more individual freedom to lead lives that are mechanized and without dignity? Community spirit should not be viewed as the confinement or restriction of indivudal needs. In fact, any community that attempts to function in this way will inevitably fail -- how could it succeed? A community continues to exist solely because the people in it want it to exist. Who would want to live in a commnuity where their individual needs couldn't be met?

So now we're left with the biggest lie of all: that "reason" is what led us out of the darkness of primitive man and into the light of modern society. So members of tribes lacked "reason"? They weren't able to make tools, buildings, etc.? Really now. If that were true, we wouldn't be here. Our ancestors would've died a long time ago.

Yep, this sure did piss me off.

Oh, and in case you haven't heard of Daniel Quinn, check out his site. Then read his books. Now.

I have a blog?

The fun thing about never posting on yer blog is that when you finally do go back and read the last entry, it's like opening up a time capsule.

I guess it hasn't been THAT long. I'm now "on the floor", as they say -- which means I'm answering the phones. Freaky thing is, I actually enjoy this job. I enjoy knowing all this random crap about insurance, and then enlightened the poor confused masses that call in. My favorite question so far: "I just got this kit from you guys that's asking me to make choices for my health care... should I fill it out?" I wanted to say no, but I also wanted to not get fired.

I'm ready to see The Matrix Revolutions now. I just re-saw The Matrix Reloaded yesterday, and today I watched the Animatrix. I know all there is to know about every damn subplot ever conceived by the Wachowski brothers. Remember that annoying kid in Reloaded who followed Neo around like a lost puppy? ("I told you, kid, you saved yourself") I know all about his ass. I know all about how Zion found out the machines were digging. As someone once said, I have all the facts I need. But why is it premiering on a Wednesday? I understand that they wanna do some lame-ass "zero-hour" nonsense, but why? The movie wasn't hyped-up enough?

Ok, not much else to say at the mo. The 'rents are coming into town this weekend. You know what that means...the best meals I've had in five months!