FaceBook (aka Legalized Stalking)

There was no FaceBook when I was in college. You actually had to go out and meet people. I didn’t even have a computer in my dorm room freshmen or sophomore years, so my instant messenging was limited to when I went in the computer lab to write papers. Now, I am as bad as the kiddies just entering college. IM has become a staple of my life, and I am even now a FaceBook-er, having joined this past year when I was in grad school. There is saying that most of the grad school girls fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, so my grad school friends and I joined FaceBook so we could meet the cute undergrad women…just kidding (or, maybe not).

I admit, there are some advantages to FaceBook. Like, in college, there is always That Guy who you say hi to, who knows your name, and you have that 5 minute conversation about school, the weekend, yada yada, and you don’t even know his name, and are afraid to ask, so you always just say “hey, it’s you again” or something. It would have been nice to look up That Guy on Facebook, just so I could have said “Hi Earl” the next time I ran into him. Or, there are always those really pretty girls that you notice from a distance, but never actually go up and talk to. If FaceBook was around, I probably still never would have talked to any of them, but at least I could have learned their names, and seen the size of the arms of their probable meat-head boyfriends, just to know the pummeling I’d get if I ever did make a move.

Keanu Reeves--The Best Bad Actor

The other day I decided to pop in my DVD copy of Point Break, the movie that I believe was Keanu Reeves’s coming out party as the worst actor of our generation. True, more people may know him from the two Bill & Ted movies, and now from the Matrix, but Point Break was his real breakout role. In Bill & Ted, Keanu plays an idiot; i.e. he plays himself. The real comedy comes when he tries to act in serious roles, beginning with his star turn opposite Patrick Swayze in Point Break.

There is no getting past the hilarity in a preposterous movie that tries to take itself seriously. Keanu Reeves stars as Johnny Utah, a Midwestern boy two years removed from leading his college football team to the Rose Bowl as the star quarterback. He has just set foot in Los Angeles to begin a career in the FBI unit that investigates bank robberies. He is assigned to partner with 20 year veteran Angelo Pappas, who is annoyed to be “babysitting some quarterback punk.” Pappas is played by the immortal Gary Busey.

When you cast Keanu and Gary Busey, you already know that the movie is going to be ridiculous. Gary Busey is known as That Guy who was the bad guy in Under Siege, the crazy army guy in Black Sheep, the aging Cubs pitcher who dates Henry Roengarter’s mom in Rookie of the Year, and also formerly known as That Guy who looks like Nick Nolte, although now I would say he is more famous and more entertaining than Nolte. Busey has gone from “That Guy” status to “Caricature of Himself” status, and to completely do him justice, he would need his own column.

Before moving on, we need some Gary Busey quotes from this movie:

“When they run they dump the vehicle and they vanish... like a virgin on prom night. I mean they vanish, swishh...”

“Listen you snot-nose little shit, I was takin' shrapnel in Khe Sanh when you were crappin' in your hands and rubbin' it on your face.”

“22 years. Man, L.A. has changed a lot during that time. The air got dirty and the sex got clean.”

“Let me tell you something, Harp. I was in this bureau while you were still popping zits on your funny face and jacking off to the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.”

“I'm so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a dead rhino, I should have had you get me three of these things!”

Anyways, there is a group of bank robbers called the ex-presidents. Gary Busey thinks that they are surfers, since they only rob during the summer months, and one of the guys mooned the security camera during their last robbery, and he has a surfers tan. So, Keanu goes undercover and heads for the beach, to learn to surf and try to get in with the surfer dudes, with the hope of finding the bank robber gang. Of course, there is a girl (That Girl who plays the younger sister in A League of Their Own) who teaches Keanu how to surf, but more importantly, become the token romantic interest who of course has a tie-in to the bad guys.

Or, are they bad guys? We meet a band of surfers, with the leader a dude named Bodhi, played by Mr. Dirty Dancing himself, Patrick Swayze, with a little facial stubble and blond curls. There is the requisite male bonding between Keanu and Bodhi, mystical bullshit about being one with the waves, and the movie forgets that it is starring Keanu Reeves, and tries to be deep with Bodhi (after we find out—as if we didn’t know—that he and his buddies are the Ex-Presidents) giving a speech about how corporate America is the real bad guy, and they are the ones who are really living life by being rebels, searching out the next wave, and blah blah blah.

It won’t be giving anything away to say that Bodhi and his boys find out that Keanu is an undercover cop, so they take him along for sky-diving (cue cheap symbolism) and let him join in with the Ex-Presidents on their next robbery; a rush Keanu won’t pass on since Bodhi has the girlfriend under captive somewhere else. Things go bad during the robbery, and Bodhi and his two surviving bodacious dudes are on the run, with Keanu and Gary Busey on the trail. Busey (the real star, in my opinion, not only of this movie, but of every movie he graces his over caffeinated [over-coked?] self in) gets killed as Keanu won’t allow him to shoot Bodhi, since he knows Bodhi must be kept free until the girlfriend is found. We have another skydiving scene, this time with Keanu not using the brain he doesn’t have and jumping out of the plane without a parachute and catching onto Bodhi. We have reached our climatic moment—will Keanu, holding onto Bodhi, drop his gun and pull the parachute string at the last minute? A good movie might have allowed us to doubt what would happen.

Bodhi goes on his way, and releases the girl to Keanu. The movie can’t end here, though. We have to jump ahead 6 months to an approaching tsunami in Australia. Bodhi is ready to ride the wave of the century, and Keanu arrives on the scene to arrest him. Keanu cements his place as the worst actor of our generation with lines such as “You crossed the line. People trusted you and they died. You gotta go down” and THE line that shows Keanu’s (limited) acting rang and (sadly) his jump into stardom, “I’m an EFF BEE EYE agent!” Will Keanu arrest Bodhi and bring him in, or let him have his one shot riding the wave of the century? Once again, this movie leaves no doubt.

Point Break was terrible, yet very entertaining. Like the ghettho-ized Bad News Bears rip-off Hardball, and the so bad and clichéd its unintentionally funny The Replacements, Keanu Reeves always manages to make movie-going quite an experience. I’d like to say to you, Keanu, and I think I speak for many, vaya con dios, bro.

San Dimas football rules!!

Pet Peeves

We all have those little annoyances that just get us going. Someday, when I am President, I will make laws to outlaw my pet peeves.

The first thing to go is new fangled toilets. Both those supposedly enviro-friendly low-flushs, and those auto flush toilets. The low flows don’t save the environment. They are actually worse, because they always overflow, so that you have to do like 15 courtesy flushes to avoid a wet bathroom floor. And, those auto-flush ones; every time you shift your butt, they flush on you.

Next to go are those ketchup packets. They make such a mess, and each packet is good for about 1.5 french fries. At Catholic U, they had buckets of those ketchup packets, and for a plate of fries, you need literally a buckets worth. Only in my last semester did they switch to the ketchup bottles. However, they always ran out and never were refilled, so maybe the ketchup packets weren’t so bad.

The last to go in my America (until I think of others to add) is the popped collar and other metrosexual crap. That frat-boy popped collar look has got to go. And, along with it, this desire by men to look like boys. Guys, you should not be shaving your chests and armpits. If you have a hairy back, fine--you can shave that, but its normal to have chest hair and armpit hair. Unless you are a competitive swimmer or something like that, don’t shave your body. Men used to be able to look like real men, when the idealized man looked like John Wayne, Robert Redford, etc. Now, the “models” are Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Leo Dicaprio and others who strive to look as if in perpetual adolescence. They don’t even look like they are capable of growing facial hair, let alone chest hair.

Broken Flowers

Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray. Movie Review by me.

In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is focused on the idea of intoxication, of being intoxicated, filled up, and engulfed in a passion. Nietzsche contrasts the the Dionysian impulse and the Apollonian. The Apollonian is the visual arts, and gives an appearance of form and stability. The Dionysian is intoxication, and its representation in the arts is music. Like music, the Dionysian is constantly moving through time, whereas the Apollonian, like sculpture and painting, is stationary, forever present in one form. These two impulses represent, for Nietzsche, the “origin and essence of Greek tragedy.”

For Nietzsche, tragic plays were the high point for Greek culture. The Dionysian spirit embodied them, since it is out of music that tragedy emerged. Tragedy was great because it moved beyond a moral and ethical interpretation of the events described in the play. The world of tragedy presupposes that there is no objective order. It is not evil or wrongdoing that causes suffering. It is just part of the chaos of existence. Meaninglessness is inherent to existence. In tragedy, the Greeks showed how one could confront this, by recognizing the Apollonian images of reality, and surviving the meaninglessness through a Dionysian “intoxication” of life.

The golden age of tragic plays would end with the birth of Euripidean drama, where the Dionysian impulse is disavowed, and the hero has a connection to virtue, knowledge, and morality. In Broken Flowers, the recent film starring Bill Murray, Murray’s character, Don Johnston, must decide whether to continue and bask in perpetual intoxication, or attempt to get a clear, ‘sober’, look at his world.

Don Johnston is a self made rich man, preferring to remain in the comfort of his living room. He seems to be unfazed even as his latest girlfriend decides to leave him and move out. Don, whose fortune has come through his knowledge of computers, leaves his house—a house without a computer—to help his neighbor, Winston, fix his computer. Don decides to read an anonymous letter he has received. It is shockingly revealed that he has fathered a son 20 years ago, and that this 19 year old boy is out searching for his father. Since no name is written in the letter, Don enlists the help of go-getter friend Winston, an Ethiopian immigrant holding down three jobs to support a wife and five kids, to help him figure out which of the five women he was dating around that time could possibly be the mother of his son.

Winston researches and plans the trip, and Don sets out on an adventure to reconnect with his old flames and come to grips with his past. Connected often with tragedy is irony, such as the confusion by those he meets over his name, mistaking Don for Miami Vice actor Don Johnson, who in real life is not half the celebrity of Bill Murray, or girlfriend number one’s daughter Lolita, often naked and always suggestive around Don, to the chagrin of mother Laura, herself not afraid to jump into bed with Don after a 20 year break.

The visits to each successive old flame get worse, leaving us, and Don, to wonder whether his effort to move from the Dionysian to the Apollonian is worthwhile. Should Don have stayed in his home, with the blinds down, the lights off, in his comfort, if not happiness, zone? Does Don receive the answers he is looking for, and in turn, the peace of mind that has not come with what the film suggests are his numerous sexual conquests as he lived a life of Dionysian intoxication?

Spoiler Alert! I think the greatness of this film is that it gives us the struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses, without showing its hand and revealing where it stands. The movie concludes with the young man that Don believes may be his son leaving him, and Don is as confused as when he first opened the anonymous letter. We are left wondering whether, as Nietzsche claims, tragedies are the highest apex of the beautiful, offering us a respite from meaninglessness, with Don’s despair resulting from his attempt to leave the Dionysian for the Apollonian, or if, as Socrates suggests, the beautiful is something that can be comprehended and seen as true, with Don’s despair the result of not finding an answer that he knows is out there.

The Mets--Ya gotta believe! (yeah riiiiight)

It’s approaching October, which means that yet again the Mets appear to be looking at another post-season from the outside. I truly believe that the Mets are under a curse. Sort of like the Red Sox and their just ended curse of the Babe, and the Cubs's billy-goat curse. And, no, I am not talking about a “Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry get hooked on coke and throw away sure-fire hall of fame careers” curse, or a “Keith Hernandez being more famous for dating Elaine on Seinfeld than playing on the ’86 Mets” curse. I am talking about the Bobby V Curse. I know you haven’t heard of it, because I just made it up. Bobby Valentine. Former Mets manager. Once put on a fake mustache and sunglasses and came back in the dugout after getting thrown out of a game. The Mets never should have fired him.

Think about it. 5 years ago, in 2000, the Mets made the World Series. With an outfield of Benny Agbayani, Jay Payton, and Timo Perez. Who!? That’s right, who. Only Mets fans have ever heard of these guys. And, we had the not-quite-hall-of-fame-quality Mike Bordick at short, filling in for the injured and worse Rey Ordonez. Our ace was Al Leiter. We had quirly guys like Turk Wendell, the relief pitcher who would jump over the foul lines, and had a necklace made of alligator teeth or something. Our only really good player was Mike Piazza (back when he was good...I think he has lost his edge since marrying that former Playboy supermodel. He played better when the tabloids were all calling him gay). The point being, save the anti-clutch closer Armando “hasn’t met a meal he doesn’t like" Benitez, we easily could have beaten the Yanks in the Series. The next time someone argues he doesn’t believe coaching matters, he should spend an eternity in the 7th circle of hell, where Dale Sveum will be eternally sending you home as you round 3rd, with the ball already firmly in the catcher’s mitt.

Life of Pi--Which Story Would You Rather Believe?

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. Book review by me

I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted to doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Piscine Patel, Pi for short, is a religious boy, but the piety he expresses is one that pleases neither his family nor his spiritual leaders. Pi finds beauty in all traditions that see the world as awe inspiring and filled with meaning. He meshes his native Hinduism with Christianity and Islam, considering himself a follower of all three faiths, much to the chagrin of the Imam and priest, each of whom thinks he has converted a Hindu, or his Hindu guide, viewing Pi’s syncretism as beyond even Hinduism’s collection of various gods. Pi’s parents and brother, culturally Hindu but practically non-religious, see his religiosity as a silly side hobby for a sixteen year old boy.

Is our world filled with beauty, wonder, and the transcendent, or is it one of cold, logical, calculation? If we go by the evidence, we remain static in doubt. Like Christ in Gethsemane, doubt is okay as a stage, but we must leap past the evidence and make a choice. Which story would you rather believe? The reader will explore this question with the sad turn of events in the Life of Pi.

Pi’s father runs a zoo. He decides to move the family from India to Canada. On the ride across the ocean, with the animals on board, the boat sinks. One lifeboat makes it, and surviving is Pi, with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger, Richard Parker. It becomes a game of survival, as our animal friends are dispatched one by one, until only Pi and Richard Parker remain. Can our deepest fears be transformed into our greatest loves? Can we see our lives as part of a greater tale? We all go through doubt. How we come to decide which story to believe at the conclusion of Pi’s epic journey, I think, is a window into which direction we go on the question of the transcendent after we each pass through our own personal garden of Gethsemane.

Montreal

It seems like I can never go for a walk without someone pulling over in his car and asking me for directions somewhere. I never know what to say. Either I don’t know how to get to the place, or I do, but I don’t know how to explain it. Like, I know how to drive to Saranac Lake, or Burlington, or a number of other places, but I could not give you directions. I don’t remember the names of the roads, or even when to turn left or right. When I am driving there, I just know when and where to turn and don’t even think about it. I have always been bad with directions. Like senior year in college, when I took an 8 hour shortcut to get back to school from Montreal, a trip that usually takes 1 ½ hours.

It was a Thursday in March, and Matt, Kirk, Brian, and I were sitting around in our townhouse, probably watching a Real World Las Vegas re-run or something (that was one of the shows we made sure to watch every week—don’t ask). The phone rings and it’s Tim. He says that Lincoln’s brother is in town from Cleveland to visit, and he has never been to Montreal, so tonight’s the night to take him. So we start to think about it. Everyone is bitching about needing to get back the next morning, not having enough money to get a room there for the night, so I decide to be the DD. Brian can’t go, because he is in charge of the big brother program, where students hang out with a mentally handicapped adult every week (it’s really a nice service/volunteer thing. Brian’s buddy was this guy named Paul. He was really fun. He was into wrestling and stuff, and we would all go bowling sometimes, etc). This night, Brian was hosting a pizza party at our townhouse, where all the students in the program and their buddies came over. So, it was just Kirk, Matt, and I who went up to Montreal. Of course, we stuck around to have some pizza before leaving.

So, we get up to Montreal around 8pm, and head to Peel Pub to meet up with Tim, Lincoln, Lincoln’s brother, and two other guys who came with them. Peel Pub is the place where drunk American kids go to hang out. Complete tourist place. They do have real cheap food, a great exchange rate on the American dollar, 69 cent shots, and 120 ounce (you read that right) pitchers for $15. So, around 9:30, everyone is trashed but me (I had 2 beers, since I won’t be driving home til much later). Lincoln’s brother starts asking about the nudey bars, since they are legendary in this city. Just mention Montreal pretty much anywhere, and you’ll get this knowing glance. St. Catherine’s street, Montreal’s version of Times Square, has strip clubs interspersed between McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Macy’s, etc.

So, we hit up the most famous place (and probably the least sketchy), Club Supersexe. By least sketchy I mean it was still reallllly sketchy. It was filled with drunk teenagers, and middle aged weirdos who looked like Milhouse's dad. Lincoln’s brother is over in the corner getting a lapdance. Matt decided to go to the bathroom and he is really drunk at this point. One of the strippers says to Matt, “hey baby, do you want a lap-dance”, and Matt, immediately, comes back with “do you get paid by the dance or by the hour…”. Before she can mutter a response, Matt finishes, “…Either way, you’re still a whore.”

It was probably good that Matt said that, because we felt like cheap trash in there, and were ready to get out anyways. So Matt, Kirk, Tim and I left Lincoln and his friends in there, and got the hell out before the bouncers could kick our asses.

We wandered around until we found some Cuban place. It was a chill atmosphere. Latin ladies doing the cha-cha; Matt was loving it, since he speaks Spanish, has studied abroad in Ecuador and Costa Rica, and knows how to talk with these women.

We hit up about 3 more bars, plus a stop in McDonald’s for some fine drunken dining before it was time to leave. One of the bars had a breathalizer machine, I blew a .0, so I knew I was good, Kirk was around a .13, and Matt and Tim both blew .20, since that is the highest the machine goes. We walked back to the car, which was quite the adventure. There was still ice and snow on the ground, it was freezing out, and by this time, Tim had slipped a few times and sprained both ankles, so he was hanging on me for support, telling me how such a great friend I am.

I never had a car in college, so I rarely drove anywhere. I had never driven to Montreal myself, or driven home from there. Matt had actually driven up. So, I asked for help getting out of the city and finding the highway. Tim was half drunk, half awake, Kirk and Matt were passed out in the back. Tim was directing me. Mainly, he was saying, yeah, uhuh, and so on when I asked questions. I was like, “Tim, do I turn here," and he said yes, so I turned. He wasn’t paying attention to me, though. He was just ready to pass out.

So, I am driving for over an hour, and I’m wondering why I haven’t come to the border yet. I speed up, and am going about 85 or 90. Once it gets to be 2 hours, I wake everyone up and we realize that instead of heading south, I had driven north. Its now about 3 in the morning, and we are almost on E, so the first thing to worry about is finding an open gas station. Kirk is still toasted, so he stays passed out, other than waking up every 15 minutes or so to smack me across the back of the head and say, “you’re a fucking idiot” or “Sean! How could you not know you were going north!”

We finally find a gas station up in the middle of nowhere. The lady there only spoke French and had never heard of America. We headed back South on a different road, and came across the border around 7am on the other side of Vermont, and had to cross the state. By this time everyone was awake, and I never heard the end of it for the rest of the ride home. We got back at 8:30am, I went to bed only to wake up to my alarm at 9:45, and rush off to my Philosophy of Mind class at 10. I stared at the professor the entire class and did not take a single note, knowing that looking down at my notebook would cause me to close my eyes.

I never had to DD the rest of the year.

Friendship

I have lived in Burlington, VT, Washington, DC, Saranac Lake, and good ole Rensselaer. Lots of people come into and out of my life. I have had some really good friends; yet, how many will be lasting? How many will I stay in touch with as the years go by? Chances are, only a handful. That does not mean that I have only had a few good friends. I think that is just the nature of life in our increasingly globalized world. Modern transportation affords us the opportunity to connect with people on every corner of the earth. I have friends from all parts of New York, throughout New England, and the rest of the country, as well as from places like Montreal, France, Ireland, and elsewhere. If I lived a century ago, I would probably only have friends within 100 miles of where I was born. Now, people come into and out of lives at places such as college, and also for me, summer camp, where you spend so much time together that you closely bond, yet after the experience, we each go in our separate directions, only catching up once every few months, then every few years—each time meeting up, knowing that things will never be the same, never be as good as they were; also knowing that you are not the same person as before, bringing to question whether had our initial meeting come now rather than the past, and in this situation, if we even could have been as close of friends.

I am not a big fan of Nietzsche, criticisms of which I will get into some later date on this blog. However, he has a passage on friendship that I find beautiful; one that nails the existential angst at our fruitless attempt to hold onto what may only be meant to be fleeting rays of sunshine.

Star friendship – We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did – and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path; let us rise up to this thought. But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility. – Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies. Nietzsche, "Human, All Too Human" II: I, 231

Let's Get Started

This is the beginning of my blog. First ever entry. I’ve decided to write down my thoughts as they come to me…who knows, maybe someday I will want to write a book, and it will be good to have a place to draw from, for stories, anecdotes, and the like. This thing is gonna be completely random. I’ll talk about anything and everything from politics to philosophy to religion; sports to pop culture to pointless trivia, and probably throw stories in from college and other past events. As of right now, I have just started my “adult” life, college and grad school are done. My new job is great, but don’t expect to hear much about it here, beyond an occasional banality, a la spilling coffee on my tie or something…I don’t see any reason to get myself fired for commenting on work, etc. Besides, my stories from the past are more interesting (plus there is enough distance to allow myself a better perspective on it).