Elevator Action

Continuing our theme of things that occur in my building's lifts, this past Saturday evening I saw a note posted in the south elevator of our building. I must admit that I sadly did not record the exact text, but the following approximates it reasonably well:

Hello ladies,
We are two men in our 20s who have just moved here from Indianapolis. We are lonely and have no plans for tonight.
If any females are interested in hanging out, please contact us.
*names*
*apartment number*
*phone numbers*
*email addresses

This note was written on a torn-out piece of notebook paper, and posted next to the floor number buttons in the elevator. With duct tape.

Did it work? Did this missive ensare any hapless, lonely females in the building who have a thing for desperate mid-western men? As of now, I don't know. But I just staple gunned a notecard to the alarm button asking what ended up happening. I'll update you when I get a response.

Why I Am Awesome: Unlike these two zeroes, I don't damage my soul rooting for a team led by the insufferable Peyton Manning.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I have not found a way to get a referral bonus for pointing sad, pathetic men in the direction of Craig's List.

A Pursed Incident

When Lisa headed down to her car to meet her friend for lunch today, she forgot that she had left her credit card in a different purse. Because I have a history of never being able to find anything in even the smallest of her handbags, it made the most sense for me to just bring her whole purse down to the garage after she called requesting plastic delivery.

As the elevator chugged to a halt on the second floor, halfway down my journey to the garage, I realized the sight that whoever came on board would see: me, wearing a white t-shirt, red shorts, and slippers, leaning against the wall with unwashed hair and half-asleep eyes, a gold Coach bag clutched to my side. Sure enough, the lady who came on gave a very subtle double take, her second one lingering on my temporary man-bag. I almost explained the situation, but didn't for fear that excuse making only would make it look weirder. I just kept my lips shut. An awkward silence hung the rest of the ride down.

Why I Am Not Awesome: despite a generally progressive and forward-thinking world view, I still felt a strong desire to explain my non-traditional fashion accessory. I should have felt comfortable enough in my own identity to not even worry about it.

Why I Am Awesome: the bag totally matched my new yellow slippers.

The Flyer Remained Unforwarded

Tonight I will be doing my first reading. Not that this will be the first time I've read; I've been doing that since I was 4 or 5 years old. (Or 3, if that makes me sound like a baby that would hang out with Christopher Lloyd.) Nor will this be the first time I have performed in public. I've been in plays and I've taught classes. I'm performed improv to a crowd of over a thousand people.

But this will be my first public performance-type reading of a piece that I have written. It's going to be strange to so openly and nakedly present my work. Not something that I came up with on the spot, or interpreted through someone else, or a vague lesson plan I'm trying to get through. But my words and thoughts and ideas, constructed in what I apparently think to be the best possible way to get them across.

To be honest, I feel some serious trepidation. But I know it will go fine. I'll be as excited and happy about it afterward as I was nervous beforehand. And next time, when I do one of these things, I'll have this experience to recall and bring to the table. When I go next time, I'll enjoy it more. And next time I might even tell people about it more than a few hours before it starts.

Why I Am Awesome: I've got all the voices down and the story flows nicely when I practice it. I'm gonna kill it when I get up there.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I'm still bringing out the "crowd of 1,000 people" line even though that happened almost a decade ago and they were freshmen required to be there. I need to get over myself.

Something To Make Us All Happy

Tomorrow evening, I will attend my fantasy baseball draft. Except I won't really. For the first time in the five year history of this particular league, I'm not on the same coast as the other members. I will participate via an online chat.

As always, I do not feel prepared for this draft. And as always, I will be really happy with my team once I've chosen it. And, again, as always, I will hate it within 30 minutes.

While cosmically unimportant, I put a lot of weight on how my team does. Yes, it's just a compilation of statistics from a bunch of random players on teams I don't care about. But it's a fun social distraction, a chance to banter and bitch and have fun with some of my friends. It's a good part of my life, and I'm always glad when everyone gets together because of it.

Except this year, I won't be there. Sure, I'm glad for the L.A. Adventure I'm having. Sometimes, though, I miss things from back home, and wish I could easily transport myself back there. Alas, science continues to fail me in that regard, and I will stay stuck here.

So tomorrow night I will boot up an online chat and curse quietly yet forcefully as my laptop continually drops my wireless connection. It will be a good time spent with good friends. But it won't be the same.

Why I Am Awesome: With a championship and three semi-final appearances in the past five years, I have shown that I am quite adept at running a fake baseball team.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I occasionally cannibalize my material.

Actually, I Got Them All Cut

On my way home from work today, I stopped in at Rudy's and got a haircut.

Why I Am Awesome: I look fly.

Why I Am Not Awesome: At the end, there was enough hair scattered around my chair to make three Trump toupees.

Would "Detailitated" Be More Accurate?

While on the aforementioned trip to San Diego, I got to get my first experience of their world-renowned zoo. I was especially excited about going because I hoped to see at least one animal that had been on the Tonight Show. If it's been on television, it must be famous!

I, of course, had a really great time. The place is huge, and there are tons of ridiculous animals there. I saw a gorilla mom holding its baby, camels nuzzling, and something that looked like a weird half-pig/half-deer. (That may have been a holdover fever dream, though.) It's such a sprawling experience, we spent almost five hours there and somehow missed the giraffes and the elephants. And those are big animals to miss.

The two biggest highlights:

1. Seeing the cuddly panda bear wandering dope-ily around his enclosure in front of a hushed crowd of huddled spectators - and then watching him stop, look up at us, and poop. (Panda poop is bright yellow, by the way. Must be all the bamboo.)

2. The random grotesque sight of a decapitated / shedded lizard tail flopping around on the sidewalk. The stump was still bloody, and it twisted and twirled in its death throes. This was right in front of the camel enclosure, with no lizard displays around. I have no idea where it came from. (I have a video of it on my camera - when I figure out how to upload it, I'll add it here. I promise.)

Why I Am Awesome: In my continuing battle to overcome my fear of heights, I rode the somewhat rickety Skyfari with relatively little complaint. Victory will be mine.

Why I Am Not Awesome: The money I spent on ticket purchases pays for animals to be imprisoned and traded, not rescued and rehabilitated. Or so I've been told.

Thanks, Lots

Lisa and I took a trip down to San Diego this weekend. (Sadly, I did not utilize a for-hire vehicle designed by Knight Industries.) Because she was working during the day Thursday, we didn't leave L.A. until almost 9:30pm. That led to an 11pm arrival in "America's Finest City."

The late hour and the not-insubstantial drive left me susceptible to crankiness. This came into play when we pulled up to the entrance to the two self-parking lots for our hotel. The setup was simple: press button, get ticket, gate rises. Thank you, now go park your car.

So I drove up to the machine and pressed the button. A brief whirring, and out rolls the ticket. Grab the ticket and start moving the car forward. The gate, however, does not move. Another car has moved in behind me already, so I can't back up and try again. This leaves me stuck with nowhere to go, trapped with a useless ticket in my hand.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I may have loudly spent a few minutes turning into a totally crazy conspiracy theorist, loudly blaming Marriott for intentionally using a faulty device to force us to pay extra for valet parking. I may have made this argument to the valet who was trying to help us.

Why I Am Awesome: L.A. to S.D. in an hour and a half? I drive to win.

Has "Anti-Social Networking" Become A Cliche Yet?

Tonight, I logged onto my Facebook account for the first time in almost two days.

Why I Am Awesome: I don't need to constantly check my online profiles in order to feel validated as a human being.

Why I Am Not Awesome: My friends, family and random acquaintances had to go almost 46 hours without a single update on my status.

A Shadowy Flight Into The Dangerous World Of Livery Vehicles

While riding down the 5 south of Los Angeles at night, on an empty stretch of road where only headlights illuminate, I noticed a blue taxi cab. Across the trunk, in faded letters that almost looked like a whisper, was written a name: Knight Rider Taxi.

I immediately imagined myself stepping up to the front of a taxi stand and the theme song surrounding me. I saw a hack triggering oil slicks and turbo boosts to survive the freeway. I pictured rides to LAX that began with a soothing Mr. Feeney voice greeting me with, "Good morning, Michael." I wanted us to drive ahead quickly, so I could look over my shoulder to try to make out a red whoosh-whoosh "scan bar" in the front.

I didn't have the chance, though. Almost as soon as I saw it, the KITT cab turned toward an exit ramp and was gone.

Why I Am Awesome: I may have caught a fleeting glimpse at something kept secret to the general public: basically, the greatest cab in the history of all private hire vehicles.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I succumbed to Google's temptation and destroyed the illusion for us all.

Not-stalgia

When I was a kid, I played video games.¹ I spent way too many hours playing on my Nintendo Entertainment System. Here's how nerdy I was about it, and how far removed we all were from the internet age: there was an 800 number you could call that, if you waited through a long pre-recorded message, would lead to a Nintendo of America representative who could look up information for you. I would call semi-regularly in order to ask when new games were coming out. The thought of a wiki list of upcoming releases would have blown my mind.

In 1991, after I had enjoyed the hell out of my NES for a few years, the word came out that a new system would be coming out: the Super NES. Since everyone knows "super = better," people were hyped up for this. It was going to launch with a new Mario game, entitled Super Mario World. And it would have face-melting 16 bit graphics like this:

(hat-tip to ps3gamelist.com, a PlayStation site that for some reason has this Nintendo image. I apologize if your face has suffered any harm from seeing this.)

I, however, was realistic, and knew that I would likely not be able to convince my parents to outlay some cash for a whole new system when I had a perfectly functional one up in my room. That's fine, I thought - I'll just get the watered down NES version of the game.

Then I spent about 16 minutes on the phone one day, waiting to ask someone when the NES Mario World would come out. And some guy in Seattle told me, "Uh, never." To get the new Mario, you had to get the new system. Feeling this was completely unfair, I wrote off Nintendo and Mario games for 16 years.²

After all these years, I have buried the hatchet. Using my Nintendo Wii, I paid eight dollars to download Super Mario World. I sat down and spent today exploring the Donut Plains and Yoshi's Island, spin jumping and cape-feathering, enjoying the revolutionary (for 1991) parallax scrolling.

I don't know if you can feel nostalgic for something you never actually had as a child. But if I could go back to that smaller me ending a sad phone call to Nintendo from my parents' kitchen, I can tell him that we finally got to play this game.

Why I Am Awesome: I never got shaken down for a Super NES. Principles: stuck to.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I am terrible at this game. I ran into a shell-less Koopa twice within the first two minutes of playing. Really, just embarrassing.


¹ I do not mean for that statement to imply that I no longer play video games just because I'm older. In fact, you would already know that if you read the full post instead of jumping down to this footnote.

² Even from a young age, I had a very particular belief in consumer fairness when it came to my toys. I swore off Transformers after there was a TV ad that, I felt, encouraged kids to steal toys from their friends. And at the age of 5 I was banned from FAO Schwartz in downtown Boston for standing in the main aisle and telling customers what suburban stores had better prices on action figures. I was like the Ralph Nader of cheap plastic trinkets.

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Basic Human Necessity: Conquered

I may have previously been a little too cocky about my presumed victory over illness. After that post, I found myself unable to sleep. Lying down led to a vicious cough that kept me from rest.

Eventually, I slumbered for 45 minutes by sitting in a living room chair with a blanket wrapped around me. After that, it was time to wake up and face a full day. Work at 9am straight through a class which ends at 10pm. I should have been completely wrecked by the end of the day - coming off an illness, getting next-to-no sleep, and carrying on living the up-tempo, swingin' life that I lead.

Yet, when I was parking the car (the furthest away I've ever had to, natch) tonight, I felt strangely calm, and not all that tired. While I had every right to just collapse upon getting inside, instead I opened up the computer to tool around online for a bit. Heading to bed did not stand out as a top priority.

Why I Am Awesome: I have evolved past the need for sleep. I am better than such trifling matters now.

Why I Am Not Awesome: .... Nope, there's no downside here. I truly have moved beyond all human understanding, become one of the greatestzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Out Here They Could Call It A Slightly-Chilly

After circling around me for about three weeks, causing a little extra fatigue here and there, the occasional headache, and some extra morning nasal congestion, the cold finally pounced on me yesterday. Which isn't really that surprising. While I don't consider myself to be particularly sickly, I recognize that every once in a while I'm going to get sick. I usually have to deal with a cold or two as the winter months progress.

(I do know people that consider their immune systems impenetrable to illness. They're the kind of people who would show up at work with 103 degree fevers and insist they just had the heat up too high in their car. They, in turn, got everyone around them sick due to their stubbornness. This would be fine, if they didn't then turn around and say that anyone who got sick in their wake was "weak" for letting an illness affect them. These people are jerks.)

The strange thing about this was the context. I've never gotten a winter cold when living in a place that has no winter. Sorry, Angelinos, but having to wear a sweater because it dips into the 50s at night doesn't cut it. It felt strange stumbling out of bed at 1:30pm today to see blue sky and palm trees still existing outside my window. Maybe I had just had a good run through the fall and early "winter" months - but I think part of me really thought that by avoiding snow and slush, I would sidestep these annual bouts of infirmity.

Alas, that was not to be. So Tuesday morning I banged in the day at work and slept until 12:30pm. Then I went to bed at 11 (you may not know that's early if you haven't yet received a nocturnal email from me) and slept for 14 and a half hours. In the meantime, I spent my waking hours zoned out in a Snuggie, watching random soccer matches, World Baseball Classic games, and reruns of various Vh1 countdown shows. I felt so lethargic, I didn't even get around to completing a shower for over 60 hours.

(In my defense on that point, I started to bathe myself Tuesday morning, but it was showerus interruptus because my building shut off the water mid-day to do some maintenance. Just my luck.)

My throat remains scratchy and if I take too deep a breath I start coughing - but I think we're on the downslope of this thing. Thanks to copious amounts of DayQuil, Zicam and special deliveries of Yogurtland by Lisa. Hopefully, I've successfully served my Sick Duty for the season, and can avoid a relapse. If I don't, well, cable and the Snuggie are always there for me.

Why I Am Not Awesome: Given that I had two solid days with all mundane commitments pushed aside due to this cold, I could have gotten a solid chunk of work done on my various writing projects. Instead I loafed around and accomplished nothing. Sure, I have the mild illness itself as an excuse. Nevertheless, I find that I never spend as much time as I should dedicated to doing that which I want to dedicate myself to (if that makes sense). Somehow, it's too easy for me to kill time instead of being productive. I've gotten better at this, but it remains an issue I have to consciously deal with in order to improve myself.

Why I Am Awesome: I rooted for Liverpool, Netherlands and Josh - everyone I support wins! I also took a shower tonight, which is awesome for us all.

Patterns

A blogging compatriot mentioned to me recently that she didn't like the structure of the posts in this blog. "You put the 'Not Awesome' sections at the end," she said. "I walk away with a negative impression. I think it might be better for everyone involved if you put the 'Not Awesome' stuff first and closed the post with the 'Awesome.'"

Why I Am Not Awesome: I bristled at this recommendation. Didn't she see that I have clearly established a pattern here, and that to break it would be to ruin the whole structure of this endeavor? I then spent a few minutes inside my head, conversing with myself about how such a drastic change, even just once in a while, would destroy the central integrity of my blog, eventually vowing to never do as she had suggested.

Why I Am Awesome: Sometimes I'm flexible.

If Plants Had Emotions, They'd Feel Fear

At one of my previous jobs, I sat at a cubicle. Actually, at almost all of my past workplaces I have been in a cubicle. Sometimes I've been at an actual hardwood desk, but out in the open along with everyone else around me. Once I actually had an office, with a door that closed, a window that opened and a thermostat that worked. Then the people in charge of the building realized I had an office and they kicked me out so a tenured professor could move in there. I ended up in another cubicle.

But I'm thinking of a particular cubicle. It was the middle one in a row of three cubes. Undergraduate student workers sat in the one in front of me, running interference with anyone who wandered into our office from the main lobby. The cube behind mine nominally also sat waiting for a student employee to work on "special projects." But since we never had anything special to do, it mainly held reams of paper and boxes of Starbucks grounds for the nearby coffee machine. To my right, a row of tall gray file cabinets, all of them holding sensitive information on individual students, none of them locked because no one knew how to fix the electronic combinations. To my left, a bare blank wall.

Into this cubicle came a cactus. A co-worker friend (thankfully, I had a lot of friends amongst my co-workers) gave it to me as a birthday present. Or maybe a Christmas present. Or maybe it had just been on sale and she bought one for me. I don't really remember. But she got it for me, and I set it up in my cubicle. It looked a lot like this:

(image courtesy of Desert Canyon Gifts, which is not where my friend bought my cactus)

I really liked having it around. It was a pleasant little green beacon on top of the yellow-brown formica desk where I kept my stacks of gray folders. (I'm not exaggerating the drabness here - the branch of the department I worked for had gray colored files. Other people worked with the purple, red or green cases. I had the gray ones.)

I didn't have much access to anything that you could classify as not "office oppressive." Fluorescent light twitched above me all day. The nearest window peeked out of the conference room door to the right of the front student cubicle. Having the cactus gave me a little dose of nature, without all the pressure of something you have to take too much care of. The little instructions card stuck in the dirt it came in said to water it once a week. So I did, every Thursday at 2pm. I set up a reminder on my Outlook calendar and everything. What could go wrong?

After a few months, a small brown spot appeared on one of the folds. It didn't seem like a big deal, I didn't pay much attention to it. After a week, it grew bigger. It looked like I had a battle-damaged cactus. Nevertheless, I still didn't think it was a problem. Plants get things on them all time, and eventually they go away. Besides, a cactus can live in the desert for decades - surely it can survive a stretch of time in my field of gray.

Once the third splotch had appeared and the needles started to sag, I began asking people around the office for their opinion. "That don't look right," was the general consensus. Everyone agreed that they had never seen anything like it. No one had any ideas what I should do to fix it. I kept watering it every Thursday, hoping that regular hydration would allow it to gather its strength and overcome its situation.

During my cactus' final week, it slowly collapsed upon itself, like a poorly made souffle. By the last day, it lay deflated, almost completely flat in its pot. I honestly don't know what's inside of a healthy cactus, but whatever it was had rotted away. Its vibrant green completely replaced by ugly brown. You could barely tell where the dirt ended and the cactus began. Knowing we had gone beyond the point of no return, I unceremoniously dumped it into the trash can next to my desk. I never got another companion, plant or animal, to help spruce up that drab cubicle.

Why I Am Awesome: Someone thought of me while doing some horticultural shopping and picked up a gift to help brighten my day. Such a gesture seems small, but I'm lucky to have people who think of me and do nice things for me.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I killed a cactus. This was a plant designed to live in the harshest of conditions that nature can concoct. Death Valley can't kill cacti, but I can. Just remember this if you ever ask me to pet- or baby-sit.

Dead In Your Tracks

Out at a local bar recently, Beyonce's song "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" started playing. This prompted every single woman in the establishment to whoop and leap to their feet. Pushing aside the small-hat hipsters and the tattoo-ed bouncer/empty-glass-picker-upper, they rushed to the middle of the bar to create a makeshift dancefloor. Once there, they flung their bodies around, drunkenly trying to re-enact the choreography from the video. They were generally unsuccessful, though they did get a lot of the hand gestures down.

In the moment, my friends and I had three sequential reactions. The first was to question whether this song was going to replace "I Will Survive" as the tune that galvanizes all the unattached women and gets them to stand in a cluster on the dance floor shouting along loudly. The second was to question the songs central thesis. (You should put a ring on it if you love it; if you only like it, you should just stop sleeping around with other people.)

The third was to discuss the hotness of the aforementioned (and aforelinked) video. Surely, it is a well done clip, and one that must have been successful on whatever television outlet that still plays music videos. But while Single Ladies hypnotizes you, it doesn't have the power to stop you dead, demanding you do nothing but pay attention to it.

We talked about this for twenty solid minutes. The consensus examples we came up with:


Chris Isaak - Wicked Game
(Does anyone even remember that Chris Isaak is also in this video?)


Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time
(Remember when finding school girls attractive wasn't OK?)


Beyonce - Crazy In Love
(Back when this came out, this video not only stopped a conversation between myself and a friend of mine, but when the song was over we couldn't remember what we had been talking about.)

D'Angelo - Untitled (How Does It Feel)
(This one caused every straight woman and gay man I knew to completely lose their mind.)

Now, could we have brought up more artistic videos, or ones with a better thematic consistency, or even classic ones from our childhood days? Of course. But these have just too much raw sexual power, in a way that make you unable to be distracted even when you just hear the tracks on the radio. And that's an even stronger legacy than bringing all the adamantly unattached women together on the dance floor.

Why I Am Awesome: I suggested and pushed for the D'Angelo song, because I didn't want the conversation to be completely heteronormative and sexist. Plus, I've given you all these videos in one place, so you can enjoy them without having to do any more work.

Why I Am Not Awesome: Despite such intentions, there's no way that such a conversation can't be deemed sexist. Discussing what fits into the upper echelon of videos automatically reverts to choosing what clips best objectify people, especially women. There's something inherently demeaning in this exercise. In other words, I'm part of the problem.

A Poor Seating Layout Brought It To This Point

I went to dinner yesterday evening with Dave, a friend of mine who is visiting L.A. for the week. We went to a restaurant in Los Feliz called Home. Seeing as how that morning he had woken up in 10 degree weather in D.C., he thought it would be fun to sit outside. The extensive availability of patio dining is a unique feature of southern California living that I had never expected. Not to say it lacks logic; it makes perfect sense. I just never pieced together the fact that constantly temperate weather, combined with well placed propane heat lamps, would allow for increased al fresco opportunities.

The seemingly-stoned waiter waved vaguely at the area around him. "Anywhere you like." In response Dave and I bounded across the patio, looking for the best of the surprisingly diverse options. High stools? Low table? Curvy booth! Curvy booth always wins.

The problem: the only curvy booth available was in the corner of the patio, right next to a small table where a lone man sat reading a Philip K. Dick book. That in and of itself isn't a problem - there's no shame in dining alone, and what kind of person hasn't read Do Androids Dream In Electric Sheep? No, the issue stemmed from the fact that neither Dave nor I realized that once we sat down at the booth we would be practically hovering over this guy. His chair, not pushed back remarkably far from his table, stood almost flush against the side of Dave's booth seat.

While recognizing the potential awkwardness, Dave and I acted as we would normally. Which means conversing about life fragments both critical and banal. And our volume - well, neither of us frequently get asked, "Can you speak up? I couldn't hear you." As we got into a perfectly acceptable, PG-rated conversation, the guy shot a glance, but didn't say a word. After a few minutes, he called the waitress over, asked if he could move, trundled up his bag, book and beverage and moved to a small empty table near the patio's central fountain.

While I had a good time and really enjoyed seeing Dave, I spent the rest of the meal thinking about how this had shaken down. Which is sort of stupid. I mean, so what? We weren't being rude. We didn't arrange the tables this way. And this was the only curvy booth available. There were plenty of two-person low tables for the picking. If we bothered him (and we did), he could just move (and he did). No big deal.

But then again, I couldn't help wanting to apologize. All this guy wanted was to read his science fiction and have a quiet meal in peace. Instead, he got shuffled out of his chair and displaced across the patio. Sure, he could just slide back into his book after a couple of minutes of internal fuming - but I still felt bad that I had interfered with his solitude. We all have moments when the last thing we want is someone intruding into your life.

I spend more than enough time complaining about jerks acting jerky, reciting laments of how their random jerkitude ruined something for me. On this hip L.A. patio on this particular March night, with absolutely no intention whatsoever, I felt that I had become the person that I complain about. And that's unfortunate, no matter how good the waffle fries were.

Why I Am Awesome: The fact that I spent any mental energy feeling bad for this guy and wondering if I had committed some sort of passive offense in this situation shows that I have more empathy and self-awareness than most people. Also, he moved and I didn't, and I got to enjoy a curvy booth. Two points for ptm.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I have never read Do Androids Dream In Electric Sheep?

A Very Particular Set Of Skills

Over the weekend, myself and a few of the nearest and dearest gathered together to watch a fun cinematic romp called Taken. For those not aware of the plot, you can pretty much get the entire thrust of it from the trailer:

(the trailer is slightly better without the the annoying pop-up ads.)

Usually, I'm indifferent to these types of movies. But I found myself completely sold on this movie from the first time I saw that trailer on a TV screen in the lobby of a movie theater (because, apparently, we can't travel more than 100 feet without having something projected at us). I mean, how can you say no? First off, you have Liam Neeson filling the Steven Seagal role. The trailer hints (and the movie confirms) that this gave Neeson the chance to do some respected-actor-genre-movie-slumming and have fun with it.

(As opposed to the respected-actor-genre-movie-slumming he did in Phantom Menace, which only provided him with months spent in front of a green screen followed by a lifetime of having to curse silently to himself everytime a fanboy approaches him and earnestly says, "Qui-Gon, man. Qui-Gon.")

In addition to affording us the chance to watch Oskar Schindler let loose and kick some ass, the movie also promised a clear, defined thesis: "If you don't [let my daughter go], I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." The entire plot and narrative thrust of the movie encapsulated in a sentence. Syd Field would be very proud.

Now, the movie has its negative points. Specifically, the potentially "borderline racist" depiction of Arabs. I don't know if I'd go right to the word "racist," but it does have some very cartoon-y portrayals of various Middle Eastern stereotypes. In addition, it goes without saying that the "white American breaks faces, tortures and kills to get the information he wants" / 24 vibe of the film is worth questioning in today's world.

The bigger issue for me was the "ZOMG THA WORLD IZ SCARRY!!!" vibe. I understand that, for plot purposes, the daughter has to get kidnapped once she decides to travel to Europe. (Otherwise, it's 90 minutes of Neeson smashing noses as he works his way up the Wal-Mart customer service chain to get a full refund on a busted karaoke machine.) Still, I figured she would travel to a couple of countries, or at least go see some sights in Paris. Nope - within 15 minutes of landing at Charles De Gaulle, she's scooped up. The movie made it look like customs had three lines: "E.U. Passports," "All Other Passports," and "White Girls Headed For Sex Slavery." The big takeaway? Never travel outside the U.S. or else you. Will. Die.

So perhaps xenophobia is the proper social disorder on display here. Still, it seems strange for "all non-Americans stink" to be the intended message, as almost every member of the behind-the-scenes creative team are from France themselves. There's no way the movie was set up to be a right-wing screed to scare off any potential Parisian visitors from leaving America. No, it's much more likely that this was an attempt to show American audiences why the French hate Algerians so much. Maybe that's why it doesn't feel so bad - when surrendering to entertainment through prejudice, at least have said prejudices be a different culture's.

Or maybe the dinner scene is just too great to let politics get in the way. I'll get back to you on that after I watch it again.

Why I Am Awesome: I am confident that I am not racist and that I fully support the quest for universal human rights.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I nevertheless enjoyed watching Liam Neeson jam electrodes into the legs of a "shifty Arab dude" and flick a light switch until he got the information he wanted. Looks like I might have to return my Amnesty International membership card.

I Am Becoming One Of Them

The other night, while driving home from campus, something happened. After it had happened, I said to the next person I talked to, "When I get home, I'm going to blog about this."

Why I Am Awesome: When I got home, I blogged about it.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I said, "When I get home, I'm going to blog about this."