Tuesday, February 27, 2007
I don't want to bitch and moan about the shittiness of my weekend, but I have another story that does perfectly illustrate the shittiness of my weekend (have I mentioned, by the way, that I had a shitty weekend?). And before I start this story, let me mention that I'm not looking for sympathy, because when I am truly and honestly down about things, I will reach out to those who I know are there for me. What I will not do is post about it on my diary, because I am private about those kinds of things, the kinds of things that can make me really and truly sad The things that happened to me this weekend are stupid and annoying and ridiculous, but not sad, at least not for me. But anyway, the other stupid, ridiculous, annoying thing that happened to me this weekend besides my car accident is that I thought I was going to go out on a date on Saturday with someone I met on match.com, and she ended up blowing me off instead. Last Saturday, she emailed me and asked if I was doing anything that night. And I emailed her back and said, "Hells no I'm not doing anything, let's do something!" And I gave her my phone number to call me. But she thought I had her phone number, and she wanted me to call her, I guess. I don't know. But I didn't have her phone number, so the whole thing fell through. So we kind of decided to do something next time she was back in town. She's a flight attendant, so she's usually out of town for four days a week for work, and then back in town for the other three days. So she came back into town this past Saturday, and I gave her a call, but she wasn't home so I left a message on her voicemail. Shortly afterward, she wrote me a message on match.com telling me that it turns out she didn't have time to date because she was "so busy with work and jury duty." Yeah she really said she was too busy to date because of jury duty. Unless it's 1995 and she's a juror in the O.J. Simpson trial, I'm pretty sure that jury duty lasts at the very most a couple weeks. I don't mind that she blew me off. I just wish she wouldn't have blown me off with such a lame excuse. She could've used a little imagination. "I can't date because I have leprosy-- the bad, contagious kind of leprosy!" That would've been interesting. Or maybe a non-sequitur: "I can't date because I think my dad got abducted by aliens. Either that, or my cat can speak Chinese." A haiku might've been nice. "The sun shining bright / Breathless beauty of life lived / You and I won't date." For the record, I think she really does have jury duty. It's just too random an excuse to come up with out of the blue. I suppose that she figured if she was telling the truth about jury duty, she shouldn't feel bad about blowing me off. Just one of those psychological rationalization-type things we do to make ourselves feel better. Well, not to be completely sour grapes about it, but she's a Mitch Albom fan, and I hate every little bit of the mindless, treacly, syrupiness that defines his work, so it's probably for the best that she blew me off, since I could've kept my intense hatred for Mitch Albom bottled up for only so long.
My poor car. I was going to the grocery store this morning, and I had a little fender bender. I'm fine, and the lady in the other car didn't get hurt at all, but my car is going to need some body work. It's the first car accident I've been in, in my whole life. Or at least the first accident where anything got damaged. I've spun out on icy roads before but didn't hit anything, and, when I had my learner's permit, I jumped a ditch and ran the car into a hill, but somehow the car was undamaged. I called up my insurance when I got home (neither of us had a cell phone at the accident), and they're doing whatever they do. Hopefully it'll be pretty painless. I'm as sure as I can be that the accident was the other person's fault, but it'll be a he said/she said thing if she disagrees with me, and there were no witnesses who stopped, so we'll see what happens. I'm not even really worried very much about the repair costs; mostly what I want now is just to avoid as much hassle as possible. I already missed out on hiking today. I was going to go out to Section 16, but instead I was on the phone with insurance claims people all afternoon. It especially stinks because it was a really nice day out today. Well maybe next week.
Several years ago, I came across some hilarous movie reviews of ET, Wizard of Oz, Star Trek, and Star Wars. What made the reviews so funny? Well, it was because the movies that were being reviewed were not the original versions of these classics. Instead, they were cheap, bizarre, nonsensical Turkish knockoffs. As one of the reviews put it, "Turkish cinema has proven time and time again that whatever we can do, they can do much, much worse." Posted below are links to each of the reviews, all of which come from The Wave Magazine, and some brief excerpts. Enjoy!
Turkish Wizard of Oz:
"The two make fast friends and skip off together. Once they get to a clearing, they start dancing. And oh God, this does not stop. In normal musicals, the songs, although lame, explain areas of the plot. Not in The Turkish Wizard of Oz. Here, the story just stops for 20 minutes so we can watch Dorothy and the Scarecrow jig to instrumental music. The only pause from this is an awkward point in between line dances and curtseys where Dorothy slightly lifts her dress and, if I’m not mistaken, tries to seduce the Scarecrow. He prances a step forward and points toward her crotch, saying what I’m positive is Turkish for, 'I’m not getting anywhere near that horrible thing.' Before long, they hear the muffled voice of the Tin Man, who is rusted in place. The rest of the sequence is similar to the American version, except that while Dorothy is oiling the Tin Man’s joints, the Scarecrow, and I’m deadly serious here, humps him. He just interrupts their rescue attempt to ram his crotch into the Tin Man. They soon skip off to dance."
Turkish Star Wars:
"My next best guess is that they’re hit by lasers since they both fall down when a man in armor shows up. Turkish special effects are not what you’d call an exact art, and here the picture is severely scratched up, which I think indicates a failed attempt at scratching a laser-like beam onto the film itself. They’re captured and taken to a cruel gladiator arena where Darth Vader’s water cooler robot proves its evilness by swinging a screaming child around by its neck. Luke and Han watch for what seriously has to be three solid minutes of noisy kid dangling before they start another karate fight. Darth Vader comes out of a cave, and as soon as he does, most of the rest of the scene is viewed through the eyeholes of his helmet, including shots of Darth Vader himself. This could have been another massively insane mistake by the Turkish production crew, but I like to think it was a profound metaphor about how karate fights make Darth Vader take a careful look at himself, through the evil-shaped helmet eyeholes in his mind."
Turkish E.T.:
"While running from E.T., Elliot sprains his ankle. The next morning, his mother cares for the wound with the ancient Turkish remedy of slapping a steak on it and wrapping the whole thing in toilet paper. Elliot then stays home from school, probably because the smell of rotting meat is emanating from his ankle. He climbs out of bed and limps through the mangled ruin of his house to find E.T. in a doorway. There’s an awkward silence as the two stare at each other, which is suddenly and insanely broken when E.T. launches a blast of smoke from its crotch. I have no idea if this was some sort of miscue with the fog machine or if E.T. comes from a race of creatures that has developed fire-extinguishing groins to be used as greeting devices. Either way, it made me rewind the tape many, many hilarious times."
Turkish Star Trek:
"Spak finally comes to his senses after the evil licking shapechanger leaves, and Kirk is strangely uninterested in why he just tried to kill him. They avoid discussing it as they walk to the next wasteland where they get attacked by 20 Tarzan karate bots. That’s what I said. This sets off a chain reaction of stupidity with naked robots kicking and punching in random directions and Omer almost pulling a face muscle with his mugging. Professor Krater built these robots for love, not karate, so the fight mostly consists of them rushing Kirk and Spak then stopping just short of them to scream 'YAAAHHH!' and dance."
Turkish Exorcist:
"After the doctors rattle her skull at incredible speeds and it fails to remove the satan from it, the girl’s mother calls in a hypnotist. The girl pretends to follow his watch, then with comic timing beyond that of normal non-demons, she punches him square in the balls. He crunches into a standing fetal position that is so well-acted that it’d be impossible to duplicate without actually ramming something dangerous into your groin. The only reason this film didn’t get the full four stars for Comedy is due to the lack of him waddling out of the room and saying something retarded in a high-pitched voice."
The movie is about a British schoolteacher (Cate Blanchett) who has a sexual relationship with one of her 15 year-old students. Another teacher (Judi Dench), a deeply-closeted lesbian loner, uses her knowledge of the relationship to blackmail Blanchett's character into being her close friend. There are so many reasons why this whole plot is just nauseating and hateful. For one thing, cinema has a long and shameful history of portraying queer characters as perverted, violent, and pathological. As this article says:
More cruel than kind, such dramas as "The Sergeant," "The Killing of Sister George" and "The Fox" portrayed gay life as a shadowland of despair and pathology. There was usually a suicide at the end, and the more "questionably" gay protagonist often waltzed off with a straight partner -- "saved" at last.
As Shirley MacLaine's schoolteacher (just moments away from the self-strung noose) succinctly put it to bewildered Audrey Hepburn in "The Children's Hour" (1962), "I've ruined your life and I've ruined my own... Oh, I feel so damn sick and dirty I can't stand it anymore!"
Even if one grants that the "pathological queer" stereotype is no longer as prevalent or as dangerous as it once was, the "demented loner" stereotype is still very much in play in our society. There is a book, Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto by Anneli Rufus. I heard about the book from Catherine; I have yet to read it, but I have been reading a lot about it. The book talks about the extremely negative portrayals of loners that occur all the time in popular culture. It also talks about how loners feel constant pressure to abandon their perfectly happy solitary lifestyle to join groups and become a nonloner. In her description of the book, Rufus says:
Mainstream culture loves nonloners. Joiners, schmoozers, teamworkers, congregants and all those who play well with others scoop up the rewards. Meanwhile, loners get dissed. All the time. At school, at work, at church or temple, in movies, loners are misunderstood, misjudged, loathed, pitied and feared. Reporters and profilers calmly and constantly call us perverts, losers, stalkers and serial killers... Nonloners call loners crazy. Cold. Stuck-up. Standoffish. Selfish. Sad. Bad. Secretive.
Needless to say, I was coming into the movie with a pretty strong bias. But it's still possible to enjoy a movie while loathing its politics. Gone with the Wind, after all, strongly implies that African-Americans were much happier as slaves before the Civil War than they were as free citizens after the war. Notes on a Scandal, however, was a poor movie even if you forget about its politics. The movie is told from the point of view of Dench's character, as, in a voice-over, she reads from her diary entries that describe her innermost thoughts as events progress. This is problematic because we start out knowing that her character is a needy, amoral manipulator who has her sights set on Blanchett's character. This has the effect of sapping all suspense from the plot. We know that this is a movie in which lots of dramatic stuff is going to happen, so we know that the evil, manipulative character is going to be manipulating the pretty, naïve character. The deus ex machina that allows this to occur is the young teacher's affair with her student. There is no particular motivation for this affair to occur. It's presented as if any flighty, pretty, woman teacher who is moderately unhappy with her marriage is bound to have an affair with her student. The movie could have been an entertaining film noir if it had been told from the perspective of the young, pretty teacher. For one thing, there may have been some justification for the disastrous affair, rather than having it just be a plot device. For another thing, Dench's character, the manipulator, would have been seen through the trusting eyes of Blanchett's character. Rather than an evil crone, Dench's character would have appeared as a kindly, older mentor who takes pity on the young, overwhelmed teacher. Later in the movie, when her true evil motives become evident, it would hit the viewer hard, both in the realization of the true nature of Dench's character and in the realization of just what a pickle the young teacher has gotten herself into. Alas, that is not the movie I watched. The movie I watched is a run-of-the-mill, connect-the-dots, pseudo-intellectual pulp horror. More simply, it was a reprehensible, bad, crummy movie.
Hmmm, I've been thinking about how I'm going to talk about what's going on with me on match.com. I'm not hesitant to talk about myself here, obviously, but when you talk about someone else you have to be a little bit diplomatic, which I'm not so good at doing all of the time. Obviously, I won't be using anyone's name unless things start to get serious, but it's not hard to recognize yourself in a description, and anyone who knows my email address can find this website pretty easily. So I don't want someone whom I think I might like coming over here and reading something stupid I wrote and taking it the wrong way. I don't mind embarassing myself here, but other people may not appreciate it as much. Allison did a much better job handling this than I'm sure I will, which is probably one of the reasons why she's married and I'm still single. Anywho, my plan is that if I do mention anything about someone whom I'm currently interested in, it will only be a quick blurb, e.g. "I went on a hiking date today. It was lots of fun." But as for people whom I'm no longer interested in or people who are obviously no longer interested in me, I don't think there's any harm in my giving a more thorough description of what happened with them. And so that leads into the date I went on this Thursday.
This date was with someone who winked at me on match.com about two or three weeks ago. We exchanged a few emails, and we seemed to have a rapport, so I asked her if she wanted to go out for coffee. And for future reference, like Alicia from Season 2 of Survivor who will always be waving her finger in your face, I will always be going out for coffee if I choose what to do on the first date, because I'm unimaginitive like that. Anyway, this woman I went out on a date with, she's a graduate student in psychology. And I got the distinct impression from our date that she suspects that I have mental problems. Not really bad mental problems, but mental problems nonetheless. And while I certainly would never hold myself up as the shining example of mental health, I think I'm doing OK. But anyway, on to the specifics of what happened. So we're sitting there and talking and having our coffee. And the subject of the conversation turns to Arkansas. The state, that is. And I told her about when I moved down from Pennsylvania to Texas for grad school and I had to drive through Arkansas in the middle of the night. And it was the scariest damn drive I've ever been on. (Seriously, if you don't believe me, it's I-40 I think, go out to Arkansas, wait until the middle of the night, and get on it and see what you think). There were no street lights, practically no shoulder on the road, and the forest comes right up to the side of the road, and you're surrounded by huge trees and darkness and swarms of bugs hitting your windshield. When I told that story, she said, "Wow, you're a little bit paranoid about driving aren't you?" And I said "What?" and she said, "Well, you told me that when you were out in San Jose that you were really scared of driving around because you were afraid you would get lost." And the thing is that I do get lost when I drive on strange roads. I also get lost when I'm hiking on strange trails. Getting lost is one of the things I do. So like that old saying goes, you're not being paranoid if it's really happening. Anyway, I said something to that effect, that I'm not really paranoid, I just don't enjoy getting lost or driving down backwoods Arkansas freeways in the middle of the night... Later on in the conversation I mentioned about how I have a lot of trouble sleeping sometimes. The thing is, I'm a very finicky sleeper, so if I don't keep a regular sleep schedule and if I don't sleep in the same bed and if the temperature in my bedroom isn't just right, then I can't sleep. So that's how come whenever I go out camping on the night before I'm going to climb a 14er I pretty much get no sleep. Or even when I stay over at John's and Sheila's on the nights before we hike, I usually don't get much sleep. It's not a major inconvenience in my life, but it's something I have to deal with now and again. Anyway, when I started saying how everything had to be perfect with my bed and bedroom for me to get a decent night's sleep, she said, "Do you have to always have everything really clean in your apartment and arranged perfectly?" I asked, "Do I need to do that to sleep?" , and she said, "No, in general." And I said, "Like a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder." "Not necessarily," she said. But from my expertise on obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is based on watching many episodes of Monk, I know those are classic symptoms. So I said, "No, my apartment doesn't have to be spotless. It gets messy. And then I clean it up. Like a normal person." So yeah, that was my night. I guess there are an infinite number of ways to have a bad date, but I never imagined that I would have to spend a night trying to convince my date that no, in fact, I am not a crazy person. And to be fair, the rest of the conversation was really pleasant besides those couple things. We talked for an hour-and-a-half. I would even probably consider going out again if she asked me. But I don't see that happening, and I'm certainly not going to ask her.
Besides the girl I went out with on Thursday, there's only one other person I've been talking to on Match. And she has visited this website, so I definitely don't want to say anything to mess things up with her. I'll just say that we've exchanged a few emails, and so far so good. Actually, it's not just good, it's been pretty wonderful. But like I said, we've only exchanged emails, so we'll see where it goes from here.
What's wrong with being single? A whole lot if you go by what you see around you. Whether you visit a bookstore or a library, watch television, go to the movies, listen to friends and family, adopt the values of society, or read the newspaper, messages about couplehood prevail. Little is spoken about being single, except as a condition to avoid like the plague.
...(B)eing single affords each of us the opportunity to discover who we are, what we do and don't like, how we deal with things, what we want out of life, what our expectations are, what our potentials and limitations are, what energizes and empowers us, and what discourages and disappoints us. The goal of being alone should not be to prepare us for couplehood. Rather, the goal of being single should be to learn to fulfill ourselves, to meet our needs, and to develop as a human being regardless of whether or not we choose to enter into a relationship. By learning to love and care for ourselves, we diminish the risk of starving for someone else to fill the void within our souls; a void that only we can truly fill. The purpose of entering into a relationship should be to share oneself with another person as opposed to trying to get from someone what is lacking in ourselves. Expecting someone else to fill in the gaps usually results in grave disappointments , a sense of failure, and endless resentment.
Anyway, I say all of that as a lead-in to mentioning that I now have a profile posted at match.com. So obviously I'm a terrible hypocrite. I hate being single. Being single sucks. No, I don't really think that, but a couple of things happened to me in the last month to make me think that while there's nothing wrong with being single, there's also nothing wrong with putting a little bit of effort into meeting people. The first thing that happened was when Tiffany helped me out at Denver International Airport when I was flying home for Christmas. My first instinct, which I think is a result of my INTJ nature, is that meeting new people is painful and tedious and involves hours upon hours of small talk about the weather and hobbies and it's just so painful for me to even think about it. And when I do think about that and have that pain, I end up forgetting that I sometimes display a strange talent for meeting new people and enjoying myself around them and generally having a good time. And although there were many aspects of my Denver airport experience that most certainly were not a good time, meeting Tiffany and hanging out with her was pretty fun. And I did all of it without even realizing I was doing it, which kind of showed me that I need to get out of my head a little more and stop thinking so much about wanting or not wanting to meet people and just letting it happen. The other thing that happened to me that made me decide to try out match.com was my experience on this past New Year's Eve. When I was over Sheila's aunt's house for Thanksgiving, Sheila's cousin invited me to spend New Year's Eve with her and her friends in Denver. I said yeah that sounded nice. Well I said it kind of half-assedly since New Year's Eve was still over a month away. I thought that John and Sheila were going to be going up to Denver as well for this shindig, so I figured that it'd be no problem tagging along with them. But when New Year's Eve day came, I called up John and Sheila and found out that, number one, they weren't going up to Denver for the party and, number two, that the party wasn't going to be a party at someone's house or at a hotel room, that it was going to be a club-hopping party. And the thing is, I'm not not interested in club-hopping, but I'm at an age now where I hear the words club-hopping and I let out an exasperated sigh. Going to one club is loud, crowded, and expensive enough for me. I don't really need to have the experience multiplied. So, I found myself on New Year's Eve intensely disappointed that I wasn't going to be doing something that I didn't really want to do and disappointed that I wasn't going to be hanging out with people whom I didn't really know. And I said to myself that maybe it was time to try to socialize with new people and to maybe not be so stubborn and full of myself. So, I decided to give match.com a chance. One of the reasons that my hiking friend gave for Colorado Springs being such a bad place to meet women is that the presence of multiple military bases skews the man/woman ratio so that there's many more single men compared to single women. And the first few weeks I was on Match, I got the impression that the women were extremely uninterested in me. I sent out a few messages, but didn't get any replies, and nobody was looking at my profile either. So, I would like you to take a few moments right now to have your own personal pity party for sad, sad lonely me. OK, now that that's over, I'll give you the happier news that I have gotten a few replies, and I'm starting to get cautiously optimistic about the whole thing. Whenever I am at an important formal event with my old friends from Pennsylvania, a wedding or graduation or something like that, one of them always says, "Please everyone try your best not to make a total debacle of this whole thing." So I'm trying to follow that advice and not make a total debacle of the whole thing. Well, not exactly, I'm not that worried about it, but I am trying to do my best to just get to know people without, on the one hand, falling madly in love with someone just because she is pretty and says or does something that gets me all butteryfly-y in my stomach, because I do have a tendency to do that and it never works out well, or, on the other hand, dismissing someone for silly or superficial reasons. So, we'll see how it goes.I was all right for a while Yo estaba bien por un tiempo
I could smile for a while Volviendo a sonrier
But I saw you last night Lluego anoche te vi
You held my hand so tight Tu mano me tocó
As you stopped to say hello Y el saludo tu voz
Oh, you wished me well Y hablé muy bien de tu
You couldn't tell Sin saber que he estado
That I'd been crying over you Llorando por tu amor
Crying over you Llorando por tu amor
When you said so long Luego de tu adiós
Left me standing all alone Senti todo mi dolor
Alone and crying, crying Sola y llorando, llorando
Crying, crying Llorando, llorando
It's hard to understand No es fácil de entender
But the touch of your hand Que al verte otra vez
Can start me crying Yo seguiré llorando
I thought that I was over you Yo que pensé que te olvidé
But it's true, so true Pero es verdad, es la verdad
I love you even more Que te quiero aún más
Than I did before Mucho más que ayer
But, darling, what can I do? Dime tú qué puedo hacer
For you don't love me No me quieras ya
And I'll always be crying over you Y siempre estaré llorando por tu amor
Crying over you Llorando por tu amor
Yes, now you're gone Tu amor se llevó
And, from this moment on Todo mi corazon
I'll be crying, crying Y quedo llorando, llorando
Crying, crying Llorando, llorando
Yeah, crying, crying Llorando, llorando
Over you Por tu amor