At Hornby’s Suggestion, #2

Romeo & Juliet versus Jeopardy

Entertainment: I love Jeopardy, but I’ve noticed that I never watch an entire episode – I start thinking about what’s on the other channels (The Simpsons, actually), and who cares about Medieval Art, and Trebek’s talking to the contestants again, ugh. It’s great commercial break fodder, though, and I like getting to yell “Mandible! The Yangtze! 1066! David Duchovny! Lasso!” and so on. Plus, I am the world’s greatest guesser. I don’t know anything, but in front of Jeopardy I am a genius. I suspect it’s because I have exactly one piece of information for each category. For any question involving the word “boxer” I will said “Mohammed Ali,” and I will be right 9 times out of 10. This gives me an edge because I can answer right away without any of that messy thinking that the contestants waste time with. I know exactly one thing about China, and one thing about baking, and one thing about Ancient Rome. My brain is very simple.

             Romeo and Juliet is entertaining, yes, but it’s very familiar. I read something somewhere (reason #18 I am not an academic – all the plagiarism) about how the great movies of the 1970s don’t play as well nowadays when we re-watch them because every movie since has taken all the innovations and run them into the ground. So the nifty camera angles are unimpressive because Michael Bay looked at that, said, Hmm… and then ran a camera underwater, through a shark’s digestive track, into a working cell, and then into the viewer’s own mind, you know? The same thing is true with R&J (as we theater buffs call it, when we feel like getting punched in the eyes) – Shakespeare wrote this story a million years ago, and basically every romance since is based on it. It’s like vanilla ice cream: it’s a little boring after the New York Super Fudge Chunk. Also, the ending is kind of an eye-roller. Hee!

Art: While I might be able to argue that the escalation from the first round to Double Jeopardy to Final Jeopardy has a certain mathematical beauty to it, I’m not high right now, so…

Desert Island: I’m going to assume that I would get a fresh episode of Jeopardy every day, or at least enough that I wouldn’t remember the questions by the time it cycled around again. But even with that caveat I think Romeo and Juliet still wins.

            For one thing, questions about civilization would be kind of a tease as I sat there staring at the endless expanse of deadly ocean. Also, one of my greatest fears about being on a desert island is thinking of some question and not being able to ever think of the answer and slowly going mad. Like who was the other guy in WHAM!, and which Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights, and what year did E.T. come out. Can you imagine if you could never find out? I worry that Jeopardy would create this problem every day.

            Also, I could act out R&J with coconuts and palm tree fronds and horseshoe crabs, after I go crazy because I can’t remember the words to Karma Chameleon (it’s just “karma chameleon over and over, right?).

Winner: Romeo & Juliet. Loser: Pop culture, for once.

At Hornby’s Suggestion

In one of his "What I’m Reading Now" columns in The Believer, Hornby argued that books are better than other media in almost all cases – like War and Peace versus Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Tolstoy’s taking that one home. Hornby admitted a few exceptions, like maybe The Sopranos beats The Good Earth or whatever. But mainly books are tops. Or are they?

Howard’s End versus Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)

Entertainment: First, Buffy has vampires, which Howard’s End sure could have used. Second, Howard’s End was slow-going for the first 150 pages or so, whereas Buffy starts with the kicky theme music.

Art: A close call, actually. Howard’s End is clearly art, but Buffy was about death and loss, corruption, inner strength, hope, good and evil… Howard’s End was often about the stresses of the idle rich.

Desert Island: Definitely Buffy – more hours, more shiny, more characters, more stories, plus I could learn kung-fu, probably.

Winner: Buffy. Loser: No one loses! Even E.M. Forster would have loved Buffy! It’s got everything!

The Great Gatsby versus Law & Order

Entertainment: L&O is entertainment crack. I watched 13 episodes in a row once.

Art: I don’t think anyone has ever referred to L&O as art, artsy, artistic, artish, artlike, or artastic.

Desert Island: Well, my first instinct was Law & Order, but I worry about getting bored. Every episode is basically the same. And by "basically" I mean "exactly, right down to the commercial breaks." Then again, I think Gatsby is probably just as boring after the third time you read it that first week on the desert island. And the symbolism is clunky, and it’s overrated entirely, and I kind of hate everyone in it.

Winner: Law & Order. Loser: My high school English teacher.

The Babysitters’ Club versus Saved By The Bell

Entertainment: Yes.

Art: No.

Desert Island: Saved By The Bell, for the Zack.

Winner: Saved By The Bell. Loser: Stacy’s stupid diabetes.

Dear Only if We Can Keep the To-Scale Model of the Acropolis Made from Cheese. Stinky Cheese.

What a coincidence, I am also about to have a roommate again. I REALLY liked living alone, and my pet snakes liked it, too. It will certainly be an adjustment.

I would start off by trying to be the first one to move in. That way, you can put all your crap in your roommate’s room, and hide stuff in her closets. Snakes love closets, for example. You can also paint all the rooms the colors of your choice, and put up your naked paintings everywhere – that way, it will feel like home to you, and your roommate won’t have a choice because it will already be done.  You should find a nice, central location for your model of the Death Star, like right in the middle of your roommate’s living room.  She’ll appreciate the gesture.

Since you hate human contact, you should make sure that all doors shut well, and just slam them in your roommate’s face whenever she so much as walks by the door.  In no time, you will have her trained to avoid coming anywhere near your rooms.

I find that cooking strong-smelling foods that other people find disgusting is an excellent way to make your new place feel like home while driving your roommate out of the kitchen, thus leaving you plenty of room for your housewares.

Finally, you should set the thermostat to the temperature you find to be the most comfortable, then break the thermostat.

Hope this helps!

Ta

Stuff I’ve Eaten

I was planning a 30-day vegetarianism experiment. It will have to wait until I move, because here’s what I’ve eaten this weekend:

Bacon

Bacon again

Hamburger

Chicken

Tuna

Slim Jim (meat content questionable)

Ham

A whole pig’s foot

A flamingo’s heart

The eyes right out of a living cow

A puppy

Dear Ta,

I’m about to have a roommate again after two blissful years living alone. I know I’ll miss some things – cooking naked, cleaning naked, watching TV naked, and so on. And I’ll have less space for my stuff – the model I made of the Death Star from beer cans, my "potted plant," my self-portraits (naked), and my power tools. Plus, I hate all human contact.

Any advice on how to make a smooth transition?

Sincerely,

Can We Keep The Death Star?

Commute

As you may know, I take the commuter rail to and from work every day. All told, I spend about 3.75 hours commuting every day. I expected this to be awful, but it’s really not so bad. I can read, and knit, and listen to music on the train, and the 20 minutes of walking in the morning and after work are probably good for me. I’m trying to stave off that mid-20s heart attack I so richly deserve. BUT! Some days the commute tries to kill me. Examples:

The train doesn’t come.

The train and the train before it don’t come, and the platform fills with disgruntled, chatty people.

The woman next to me needs a breath mint and she’s breathing through her mouth while she sleeps.

The man next to me has B.O.

The person next to me is dating the person across the aisle, and they talk the whole way.

The people behind me just met, but are both small talk aficionados, and they talk the whole way.

These things happen. But yesterday was really terrible. It was in the high 90s, and quite humid. I walked 20 minutes through the city, dodging the sun and my sweaty sidewalk companions. I was really looking forward to the icy cold train ride (I bring a jacket every day, otherwise I’d shiver). But the first car I hopped on wasn’t air conditioned. Odd! I walked through to the next, which was also un-air-conditioned. How peculiar! And the third? Hot as hell. Finally, the last car was not too hot. It clearly had a fan or something going. It was an old car, of a style I hadn’t seen before. The other cars had been empty, and this one was completely packed. I found a seat – one of those where you face another person, and right up against the window on the sunny side of the train. Still, better than those other cars, which might have qualified as ovens.

Only, here’s the thing: there was a bathroom on my train car. And the AC stopped as soon as we left the station. I sweated the whole way home, as did all the smelly people around me. And the smells from the bathroom would waft down the aisle whenever we stopped, or someone opened the bathroom door.

There was one guy who got off after a couple of stops. He’d sweated through his t-shirt, and when he got up he left a moisture mark on the bottom of his seat. Bum sweat.

But after all this – the ripe smell of sweat, the stifling air, the air like that in a port-a-potty, people wiping their sweaty faces on tissues and the backs of their hand, the best part was the man next to me, who stayed in his three-piece suit the whole ride.

Sightseeing

Ta’s mention of her view of that storm has prompted me to write down a few things I’ve seen in the last 24 hours. In haiku form, of course.

A giant ant crawls;
My pillow crisp, clean, and white
No longer: black smudge

Look, another ant!
Quick, he’s on the alarm clock!
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

My brother’s leg:
Three bruises, two scrapes, swollen toe,
"What happened?" "Nothing."

Global warming threat
Robots farting towards the sun
Ah, Futurama

Notes from a High Rise

I am having a slow day at the office. This always stresses me out, because I work at a place where working A Lot is valued. I don’t work A Lot, relative to my colleagues. Most days, I work Enough. Which is good enough to keep me from having to work A Lot. If I worked Enough consistently, I would, over the course of a year, be quite average and not noteworthy. As is my constant and only goal. The problem with my job is that the work, in terms of hours required, is not consistent. If I work Enough on 90% of my days, but then do virtually no work on 10% of my days, it really drags down the average. Hence, the stress. I don’t like work, but I think I like fired even less.

But today it was alright, because I had all sorts of things to keep me busy. Mostly cleaning my office and preparing to move. Move where? I can’t tell you. More-or-less secret identity and all that. I can tell you that Ro and Ta will be together, again, under one roof. Not only will it be, as you surely expected, glorious, it should lead to all manner of humorous posts.

I don’t like very much about moving (controversial stance, yes), and in particular I dread calling people to cancel things or move things. Only because it usually goes so poorly.

"I’m moving, so I’d like to move my phone and DSL service. I’ll be moving to 18 Generic Street, Apt. 1, in Springfield."

"Ok, I’m showing an 18 Generic St., but no apartment 1. Do you mean apartment 4?"

"No."

"Hrm. I’m not showing that."

Hate. And I know that is how it will go when I call Verizon. Nice people, not always so bright. The computer is going to tell them my apartment, she does not exist. I know this, because I already tried to move the phone service using the wonderfully impersonal Internet. It told me my apartment did not exist. My building exists. Apartments 2 and 3, also exist. Mine, not so much. I am sure that my apartment is represented in their system by just the building’s street address, but they won’t be. It’s going to be GREAT.

On the other hand, Comcast, usually my go-to company for an experience that makes me want to drive nails into my tongue then swallow, was a delight. My transaction was smooth, my contact polite, and I didn’t have to do anything that made no sense whatsoever. (I fully expected them to demand that I return my cable box to them so that they could then bring it right back to me at the new address. They did not.)

It is imperative – IMPERATIVE – that there be no interruption of my cable service. With Ro’s DVR capabilities temporarily suspended, I possess the sole means of recording anything. And this week begins a sweet new season of SciFi Friday wonder. If I miss even one second of Daniel Jackson’s geeky hotness, I shall be very put out.

I don’t like much about working, but I do like my office. I just got to watch a very cool storm from very high up.

Counterpoint: You Are the Enabler and Your Points Reveal Your Greater Dorkiness

I didn’t believe you were the bigger dork until you wrote your Point entry. Now I do.

1) Your first point shows that you are the greater dork. You say that every time you do something dorky, I follow. This is true, as I am certainly a dork, but if you didn’t come up with all these dorky things to do I’d probably do cool things instead.

2) I concede your point about video games, and also your point about the DS Lite. HOWEVER, I imported that DS more out of impatience than dorkiness. As to video games, it is true that one time I bought Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones solely so that you would play it and I could watch, but you were the one who though to leave it at my apartment for the summer so you could play it when you were visiting. That was an awful lot of forethought, DORK.

3) Knitting books. Lots and lots of knitting books. As well as knitting blogs, paraphernalia, and oh so many knitting discussions. And you knit the very legwarmers you disparage.

4) I only relate to plots of sci-fi books to you because you want to know but don’t want to actually read the books, as they are not particularly well-written.  Lazy, book-snob DORK.

5) I think you just read a book with a dragon on the cover.

6) You tear up if you think too hard about how difficult Peter Parker’s life is.

7) You are always the first to alert me to new developments in the world of television dorkiness, most recently, the possible development of a new Stargate series.

So there.

Point: You, Ta, Are Just As Dorky As I Am

Sometimes I get the feeling that you believe I am a bigger dork than you. In this, as in all things, you are wrong. Here is my evidence:

1. Nearly every time I start doing something really dorky, you soon follow. For example, see previous conversation regarding our love of Boy Meets World. I think a Venn Diagram of our dorkiness would show yours almost entirely overlapping with mine, then also taking up the rest of the page.

2. You are often the dork vanguard. I’d say you are responsible for all videogame-related dorkiness, for example.

3. You can set up a home network, even if there are three computers. Also, you can set up my TV, DVD player, VCR, Tivo, and GameCube so they all work neatly together and I don’t have to unplug anything. You know your way around Radio Shack. You once said, "I’m so happy I got this S-cable."

4. You spend 5 hours each day peering out your curtains and making tut-tut noises at the goings on.

5. You willingly relate to me the entire plots of sci fi books.

6. Legwarmers.

7. You imported a DS Lite from Japan. FROM JAPAN.

At this point I’d like to engage in a little preemptive self-defense, since I can imagine a little of your response. But I’ll follow the rules. I demand a time for rebuttal, however.