October 30, 2002

Many of us—maybe all of us, but I certainly hope not—have that one person in our past. The person who fucked us over so completely, so callously, and with such selfish disregard for propriety and honesty that we're angry about the indecency of the offense far after we no longer care about the person. The person whose treachery forever becomes the metric by which all lesser treacheries are measured. For me that person is, and hopefully will always be, Fucking Amy. (A few years ago, confused friends asked that I so refer to her, by her full name, in order to differentiate her from my current friend Amy.) I resent her for my anger. Why should I give a rip about what was done to me eight years ago? Yet give a rip I do, for unpunished wrongs gnaw at me so. For the most part, I view this gnawing as a bad thing.

For the most part. It turned out there is an up side to Fucking Amy after all. Whenever I need a boost, all I have to do is click here, and voila! Instant warm and fuzzy feelings! Shallow? Crass? Amorally bankrupt of substance? Yes, yes, and yes. But when in Rome...or when damning Romans.

October 29, 2002

Random thoughts:

• The other day, I was sitting in the hot tub when a gigantic bald eagle glided not 20 feet over my head. Definitely one of the top 20 cool moments of my life.
• My anti–Melissa Stark rant is one of my most popular ever, judging by the number of responses and the peroxide-phobic vitriol therein.
• When updating someone's info in my address book this morning, I also permanently deleted my dad's entry. Stop and think about how weird that is. Poof.

October 28, 2002

My friends and their children are gone, and I'm left with a renewed appreciation of my life and the choices that led me to it. In a nutshell: my friend unthinkingly plays the roles prescribed for her by others—married, Mormon, Mom—and I've winced as I've seen this homogenization calculatedly hunt down and slaughter, one-by-one, the qualities that made her special, that made her interesting, that made us friends a decade ago. I love her still, but rather in the way that Nancy still loves what's left of Ronnie. It's mostly homage at this point.

Gone are the conversations of yesterday, in which we compared our very different approaches toward our respective lives. Now she's clearly on the outside of life, looking in. Tell me about life, John, is her modern refrain. Tell me about traveling and reading and hobbies. Tell me about developing interests and friendships of your own. Tell me about work. Tell me about play. Tell me about music and art and beauty. 

While I mourn my friend  to the point of feeling survivor's guilt, I can't help but feel relief that I took the less traveled, independent road. I see little point in marriage. I see even less virtue in raising kids in this overpopulated world. I see no one made happier and more interesting by taking on roles as unremarkable as carbon. Rather, with very few exceptions, I see this as a personal degeneration, rote conformity that supplants everything unique and redeeming about many of my friends. I realize that playing prescribed roles is comforting and affirming, especially to those lacking in imagination, courage, or energy. But it sure ain't living.

October 26, 2002

No time to post, 'cause I have company this weekend. More later after the Mormon horde departs.

The sorely missed Leslie Visser

October 24, 2002 See Melissa.  See Melissa fluff herself. See Melissa's makeup be applied by her handlers with a putty knife.  See Melissa's chest, always in frame.  See Melissa ignore the game—and I mean completely, for three hours—to read what question her network pimp wants her to ask next.

Melissa Stark and her ubiquitous chest

Far be it from me to agree with Andy Rooney, but Melissa Stark is the antichrist. Hired to replace brilliant yet fired veteran reporter Leslie Visser, 20 years her senior, mindless robohoochie Melissa is all the rage amongst the beer-swilling, cheerleader-ogling set. To that extent, I suppose ABC's crass attempt at titillation worked. The network, of course, would argue that Melissa's credentials are impeccable and that I'm a sexist for suggesting otherwise. In that case, I say by all means, put her the announcers' booth, where she and her rack will be unseen. Go ahead, ABC. I won't wait up.

October 23, 2002

I just got back from five days in Columbus, Amish country, and Pittsburgh, where I saw the Steelers kick the Colts' dicks in on Monday Night Football. Ahhhhhhhhh. I'll post pictures of my painted face later, but for now, suffice it to say that a great time was had by all.

October 16, 2002

Has it really been three days? Trust that you've missed nothing save lengthy permutations about the splendors of phlegm.

October 13, 2002

Robitussin doesn't do squat. It's a six-dollar, taxi-smellin' placebo.

The directors' commentary on the new Beauty and the Beast DVD is worth checking out, but the new scene they added should have been left on the cutting room floor. Apparently they thought the film wanted for manic, Tex Avery–style slapstick. It didn't. Fortunately, they included the undesecrated, original version of the film, too. I wondered if the film would hold up. In 1991, it was an astounding, original piece of work. In 2002, its winning formula has long since been exhausted by imitators. I'm happy to report that B&B is still the class of the Disney stable; even if "I want" songs have since become animation clichés, at least we care what these characters want. As for the DVD's bonus features, they're awkward and irritating, with two exceptions: the aforementioned commentary and the rough cut of the film, which in 1991 they showed at a film festival to much acclaim.  

October 11, 2002

I've had either a nasty cold or a mild flu for the past couple days. The upside of this is that I've been able to watch a lot of TV. The downside, of course, is TV. P-U. I found myself watching I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel—because there was more to the story that needed to be told, dammit! It starred Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts and Freddie Prinze Jr., the former showing considerably more dramatic range than the latter. 

October 9, 2002

Christ, there's been an apostrophe error on this page for two days and no one told me?

There's something about the stench of death that compels you to tell everyone you love that you do, in fact, love them. As stenches go, I don't think this is a bad thing.

October 8, 2002

Spirited Away is worth seeing. Written and directed by the creator of Princess Mononoke, it's comparably lush visually and even more inventive. Truly, nearly every frame is worth hanging on the wall. Its characterizations are thin; unlike in Mononoke, we don't really care what happens to the characters or their story arcs, as they're secondary to the visual concepts this time. But the film's is still a fascinating experience. Even if it doesn't engross us, it's got a museum-like cross-cultural appeal. There is substantial entertainment value in seeing what entertains and delights other cultures. And delight this film did. It beat Titanic to become the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, and it's the first film in history to gross $200 million before being released in the States. Overpraised? Yes. By a long shot.  But it's still worth ruining the seat of your pants on the Neptune's Coolidge-era seats. 

October 6, 2002

And just like that, I am without a parent. It happens that fast. 

The call came in the early morning last time, too. This glum, not-unexpected conversation came at 5:30 this morning. My dad had had a stroke last week, leaving him alternately demented, numb, forgetful, thrashing, unconscious, and fleeing to the elevator (and then down to the lobby, before finally being caught). I'm not going to pretend that I cared for the man, but I likewise don't feel compelled to bash his memory on this occasion. Suffice it to say that he would be pleased to have met his maker on a Sunday morning after Penn State won.

In lieu of attending his funeral in Ohio, where I'm flying in 10 days anyway, I sent flowers. Classless, I know, but I don't exactly want a second helping of the spiteful, whirling familial acrimony that so defined my mother's death. Flowers, I realized, must come with a card, and I hemmed and hawed on what to put on such to commemorate the death of a man who, after all, I intensely disliked. Quoting an appropriate scripture or a proverb occurred to me, as did "Say 'hi' to Hitler for me." But none of that seemed appropriate. And then it hit me. "Love, John" is the only message that can possibly commemorate the death of a man whose annual two words to me (on my invariably religion-soaked Christmas card) were always "Love, Dad." 

•    •    • 

My sister Julie has been workin' me all week, trying to talk me into going to his funeral. "I don't want to," I'd say. 

"Everyone would like to see you," she'd reply. 

"Exactly," I would say, imagining the knives sparking off the sharpening wheel as we spoke, "I don't exactly wanna spend a lot of money to witness the carnage. I don't need this in my life." There are lots of reasons not to go: my family conducted themselves deplorably at my mother's death; hypocrisy; the unseemliness of appearing for the reading of the will of a man who I've ignored for five years; I just got back from a cross-country flight and time off work, and I'm about to take more of both; and of course, I'll be in Columbus in 10 days anyway and can pay my respects then. "Everyone would like to see you here," she'd counter. 

So anyway, at 5:30 am today, I staggered downstairs to the ringing phone, knowing full well what awaited me. "John," an exhausted Julie said in a legato, numb whisper, "Dad passed away just a few minutes ago...and you can get a discounted bereavement airfare from the airlines so it won't cost too much money for you to be here."

Such awful news has been delivered to offspring for millennia, but only Julie could do it in such a way that I laughed.

October 4, 2002

God, work is full of posers. Or poseurs. However it's spelled, we're chock full of 'em. We spend a year talking about implementing a process, filibustering so that we never actually have to follow one.  We buy advertisements for our company from our company and proudly display them on our cars and persons. Our every sentence strains and creaks from having heavy pretense awkwardly affixed to its frame. ("In doing my charity work, I noticed that users like wizards," we say nonchalantly.) We send broadcast mail announcing that we're leaving at the normal end of the workday and oh, by the way, attending an event afterward that's both valued and trampled by other lemmings. 

It's so much less work to portray a personality than to actually have one.

October 1, 2002

I don't typically like to bitch about work here, mostly because my co-workers occasionally amble through this page. But I can't take it anymore. My happy little group has been re-org'd straight into the panels of Dilbert. Only without the humor. Today's entry: a half-day "offsite" meeting, conducted just down the hall, in our usual meeting room.