I’ve Had More Fun – Part 2

Jim pounded more slowly now.  The endorphins were wearing off, and his hands finally began to hurt.

He couldn’t stop watching her–watching them–lay there, likely dead.  His tears ran dry and his wail fell silent as he let his forehead come to rest on the bloody glass.  He shut his eyes and hoped to wake up from a nightmare.  Opening his eyes, he was surprised to see the pink cloud rapidly ascending to towards the ceiling and then towards the two vents that were specifically designed to be used if there was a mishap.  Not entirely the same as waking from a nightmare (though a close second), he saw the light over the door turn green and heard the familiar click of the door unlocking.   Not waiting for anyone or anything to stop him, he opened the door and rushed to where Tara lay.

He reached for her suit and in touching it, he collapsed in immobilizing pain.  The chemical agent was out of the air, but not out of the suit, it seemed.  He kind of wished he hadn’t destroyed his hands as he stared up at the ceiling, becoming the sixth victim of the mishap.  What can only be described as the friendliest looking firemen imaginable suddenly appeared.  To Jim, who laid there in agonizing pain, they looked like a cross between his childhood mother and Kurt Russell from Backdraft, shaky cheeks and all.  Jim counted at least fifteen of them as he was lifted onto a gurney and rolled from the room.

The last thing he saw as they wheeled him away from the danger was the glove-wearing rescuers cutting Tara and the others out of their protective suits.

I’ve Had More Fun

“I’ve had more fun in my life,” she said, attempting to rise from the prone position in her XB-2134 chem-warfare suit.  She understood why it had to be so heavy, but at the moment, she couldn’t believe they never trained for this.  She was on her back and knew she couldn’t sit up.  That meant she needed to roll over.  The trouble was that the arms of the suit were so heavy that the designers built into the suit a feature which took some of the weight off of the wearer’s shoulders.  The feature prevented the arms from lowering past 45 degrees.  In effect, they were sticking out, both to the side and front.  Through her helmet’s face shield, she could only see a slight cloud of pink smoke thickening and the ceiling.  “No more effing around, Tara, you have to get out of here,” she told herself.

Up until she found herself on her back, she had been working on a new chemical weapon and been payed very well to do so.  Rocking back and forth, back and forth, she finally made it to her stomach.  She was on her stomach, arms extended over her head.  “I’m not sure this is any better,” she thought.  For the first time since she was knocked off her feet she felt a pang of fear.  And now on her stomach she couldn’t see anything but the floor.  It was smooth cement.  She had never really looked at the floor before.  It reminded her of the skating rink where she used to play roller hockey with her brothers.

Deciding that perhaps her side was a better position to start from, she rocked and rocked some more, gaining more and more momentum.  She did it.  She made it to her right side and was able to use her extended right arm to keep her from rolling back on her stomach.  It was then that she noticed no one had said anything over the suits comm system since she woke up.  Scanning the room from her new vantage point, she saw her four co-workers struggling to stand back up just as she was.  There was no noise beside her own breathing. And the pink cloud was not only thick now, but starting to attack the suit.

“Jim!  Jim, do you read me?” she shouted, hoping that anyone listening could hear her distress.  She realized what part of the room she was looking at, and quickly decided to at least turn towards the containing door, with its one small window.  She had to rotate clockwise about her right shoulder or else she’d end up back on her stomach.  Feeling as foolish as she imagined she looked, she began to make progress.  But not faster than the pink cloud.  As she began to make out the hinge to the door, the chemical came nearer and nearer to eating a hole in her suit.

“Help!  Anybody!” she screamed, totally aware of what was coming.  She kicked her feet harder and harder.

Outside the door, Jim’s hands bled.  It wasn’t until they smashed against the program director’s teeth over and over again that he even became aware of the blood.  But now that he heard the squishy sound of pummeled flesh smacking against an immovable object, he realized the deep red substance that obscured the window he watched her through was his own blood.  He frantically tried to wipe the blood away with his fingers.  Making little progress, he saw Tara and the others speed up their movements the way ants walk faster on a frying pan over a flame.  Then, just like the ants, everyone stopped moving at the exact same time.  Everyone except Jim.

Caught!

“Heyyyy!” said H-, her head rotating up in order to look him in the eyes.  Slowly peering into his soul, she couldn’t stop her bottom lip from quivering.  Her face flushed red, and she loosed a single, crippling tear.  “Why did you do that?  Why did you take off my band-aid?”

“H-, come on now.  You saw that it was already starting to come off on its own.  How long had it been on for anyhow?  Two days?  You didn’t even have a bleeding oww-ee,” he said, meeting her eye-contact and rubbing her shoulder.  “Plus, I keep telling you that band-aids aren’t stickers-”

“Look!  It’s red.  Can I have a band-aid to put on it?” she asked, her tone revealing that she believed she had presented sound reasoning.

“No, H-, you cannot have a band-aid to cover the mark left by leaving the last band-aid on for too long,” he winced.  “Can we stop talking about band-aids for the rest of the night at least?  Please?” he asked, appealing to her well-developed sense of give-and-take.

“Okay.  But tomorrow morning I want another adult band-aid,” she asserted, her persistence approaching a level generally reserved for the possessed children in career-making horror classics.

“We’ll see.  For now, let’s get back to bed so we can continue reading about King Aaathuh,” he said.

****

“Daa-ddy!  Daa-ddy!” sounded his own personal alarm clock exactly twenty minutes early.

Climbing out of his bed, he opened her door and let her know that it wasn’t quite time to get up yet.

“Can I play quietly for a little bit?” she offered.

“Sure.  I just need twenty more minutes,” he said.

Only a minute passing until guilt overcame him, he reappeared in the living room, much to her surprise.

“I’m going to rest a little out here while you play,” he informed her.

“Rest a little?”

“Yeah, rest a little.  Here on the couch.  It’s not time to get up yet, but when my phone goes off, I will.  You can play though.”

“Okay.”

No sooner than he had closed his eyes, he heard her walking towards the bathroom.  Eyes still closed, he asked, “H-? Where are you going?”

The entire essence of her being still moving forward, her corporeal body came to a halt.  He opened his eyes just in time to see an empty face betray that all available energy was being redirected into deciding how best to play this one out.  No less sudden than when light vanquishes darkness, her widening eyes and resultant raised eyebrows signaled that she had made her decision.  Turning towards him, she slowly nodded her head in the vertical plane, raised her index finger, and casually informed him, “I’m just going to get one band-aid.”

Winn the Great, Redux

“Of course he’s a doctor.  Of course,” Pete thought to himself, the online search result’s reflection illuminating his glass’s lenses.  As he thought back to first meeting Winn, now Dr. Winn, all those years ago, shame overwhelmed him.  The poor kid had done nothing wrong, unless taking an elective math class two years earlier than normal was a sin.

He remembered seeing Winn sitting alone on the first day of statistics class.  An elective, the class’s description and teacher only seduced enough students to fill just over half the seats.  This made it all the more easy for the band of underachieving smart-ass seniors to gain the strength numbers offer so readily.  More than in response to the layout of the room, though, these students acted in response to the primal fear of the unknown, a fear provoked by a spindly limbed, one-size-too-big-t-shirt wearing, buzz-cut sporting, wire-rimmed-glasses-at-the-time-of-contacts bearing pasty white kid who didn’t seem even remotely aware that he would always have the upper hand.  He would always have the upper hand not because of his intelligence, though his brain always operated near-capacity notwithstanding it originated from a culture infatuated with lowering standards, no.  It was because he was free.  Free from posturing, free from politicking, free from maneuvering.  While everyone around him struggled to fit in, he simply stayed the course.  He embodied Mark Twain’s “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

Despite having to display his driver’s license to prove the spelling of his name to the groupthink, Winn never lowered himself to counter-attack.  And his focus never faltered.  Almost a machine, one day he was tasked by the seniors to further elucidate a particular problem’s solution.  He approached the chalkboard as if unaware that public math was never good math, and proceeded to slowly draw a for-all-intents-and-purposes perfect circle with the chalk.  The display silenced everyone, until the sound of two palms rapidly and repeatedly coming together overwhelmed the smack that accompanies jaws quickly dropping.

The highlight of that semester, however, came when Winn surprised everyone, including Mrs. Tietz, with a piece of mail.  Antagonistic, he was not.  Yet, when the opportunity came to prove that Nielsen ratings did not come from set families as she thought, but instead from invited and bribed self-reporting as Pete knew, Winn took the side of the truth.  And in presenting the envelope, dollar bill still packaged within, he not only climbed the social ladder, but advanced hope.  Long live Winn!

Winn the Great

A kid who could draw a perfect circle free-hand on a chalkboard deserved better.  But we were bad and he was good, so he pulled it out for everyone to see.

Holding his driver’s license in his right hand, he said, “See.  Told ya.”

Winn’s problem was not so much his weird first name, but talent.  He had too much of it.  As only a sophomore, there he sat in our senior level math class.  This was high school.  Applying oneself was never a good idea.  I often wondered how many of us really saw how special Winn was.  And I envied Winn for his patience with us, with the morons.  But that didn’t stop me from seeing only a nerd.

The teacher, Mrs. Tietz, naturally defended him from any attacks.  Little did she realize that rather than protecting him, her efforts only further marked the target.

This was a lady who publicly professed that using Rain-X eliminated the need to turn on windshield wipers while driving in the rain, a lady who believed the Nielsen ratings were gathered by specific families with special boxes hooked up to their TV sets which automatically recorded which stations were being watched.

How did we know these things about her?  Because she didn’t like us any more than we liked her.  And one day, for some appropriate reason I’m sure, I volunteered to the class that years earlier I had used the time my family got to submit our watching habits to help tilt the scales away from Rosie O’Donnell and towards Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series.  After all, Nielsen would never know the difference.  They just trusted that one dollar would acquire honest reporting.

Mrs. Tietz wouldn’t budge.  Believing me to be a liar, she maintained that there really were specific “Nielsen Families”.  To this day, I don’t know why he did it.  Maybe he saw through me.  Maybe he didn’t like her, either.  If push came to shove and I had to guess, I’d say that he did it because he was noble.  He was righteous, in the purest sense of the word.  So later that semester, when his family happened to be mailed the paperwork and accompanying one dollar bill, he brought it in to class the next day.  And in doing so, he redeemed not only me, but hope.  Long live Winn!

Review of Grudge Match

I will cry when Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro die.  In the past I have thought about celebrity deaths that will be difficult to stomach, but only after watching Grudge Match am I sure that those two will cause a genuine sense of loss.

The movie is easy.  The story is straightforward.  And as a bonus, a black man and an old man use their societal advantages to provide the audience with guilty laughs.

The movie is almost good enough to be called “good” even if the viewer hasn’t seen Raging Bull or any films in the Rocky Saga–almost.  Then again, no movie would be comprehensible if all context could be removed.

It’s humorous the way each fighter is equally the underdog.  We have underdog versus underdog.  Luckily, the respective underdog attributes are acted well-enough to birth some curiosity.  By the time we find ourselves calling the filmmakers names for not having the courage to use Rocky’s theme song one last time to accompany the mandatory training montage, we do wonder how the fight will end.  And we nurse a hope that it will end the way we want it to, whichever way that is.  Surprisingly, the film’s writers and director are more on point than we ever could’ve imagined.

In the final round of the fight we arrive at two specific moments that explicitly reveal the film’s theme, and whether these moments are taken together or individually, that theme proves to be well worth the, at times perfunctory, 90 minute commute.

In short, if you remain undecided about watching it, watch it.

She Can Hurt You

Who are these men?  Where do they come from?  What forces form them?  Is it nature?  Is it nurture?

Is there a specific set of childhood variables that must exist in certain quantities in order to produce these men?

We must admit that one attribute that these men have in common is ignorance.  As children, during the formative years, they must have been ignorant and unaware of situations where women hurt men.  Oh sure, we’ve all heard of poor John Bobbitt’s pain, but, seriously, what man considers amputation a likely outcome that need be guarded against?  In fact, there’s probably a man somewhere who has created some statistic which proves that the chance of a woman cutting a man is less than getting struck by lightning.

And men are proud creatures, the lot of them.  And rightfully so.  Is that it then?  Can we point the finger at an adult man’s pride?  (A father’s pride?)  Is pride the causal factor?  Is pride the reason that he wouldn’t share with young men that a woman had hurt him?  Or maybe he, the adult man, had never owned up to himself that she had hurt him?  Is this whole mess created by a simple lie?  Is it created by simple denial?  A virtual, “She didn’t hurt me.  I wanted to break up.  I hadn’t liked her for a while anyhow.  I can do better”?

Whatever the causes, I haven’t been able to figure out what words would get through to these men–or as Heat puts it, “All you are is a child growin’ older!”–these men who rush into relationships with women.  And no ‘mounta nothin’ cn talk ’em outta it–don’ matta who doin’ da sayin’.  I know, because I was one of them.  And then I almost repeated the mistake.  And then almost repeated it again.  And if I didn’t have such a hatred for patterns, I probably would’ve rinsed and repeated for the rest of my life.

Enter “old people”.

Turns out, they can hold their own in conversation.  And they’ve got, by definition, no shortage of experiences to back up the talk.  And I was looking for answers, ready to try anything.

So after a lot of listening, and a lot of thinking, the answer finally appeared.  I believe that I am invincible to women.  Or, rather, I believed I was invincible to women.  No longer.  Now, I know the truth.  Women are just as capable of hurting men as men are of hurting women.

So fellas (you know who you are), I have broken down the (our) problem as simply as I know how.  We need to acknowledge the simple, unbearable truth.  This truth is captured by four words, though I think its most effective delivery comes with repeating the words four times in a row, emphasizing a different word each time.

She can hurt you.  She can hurt you.  She can hurt you.  She can hurt you.

What’s the rush?

PS – As a reminder, hurt doesn’t feel good.

Pizza

But what is it?

Not just bread and cheese and sauce, no.  This meal fit for God himself is so much more.

It is the sound of the loveliest doorbell.  It is the acceptable apology for the mealtime “oops!”  It is the welcoming party when the vacation ends.

It is the taste of summertime birthdays.  It is the texture of picking which movie to watch first.  It is the height of soda can towers.

It is the singing clock’s twelve chimes reminding all that Friday is gone.   It is the placing of a small hand into a big one.  It is the compromise between parents and children.

It is soda’s groom.

It is breakfast.  It is lunch.  It is dinner.  It is the substance of every moment in between.

It is nourishment.  And as nourishment, it is life itself.

Is it worthy of worship, this pizza?

Yes.  An unapologetic, unabashed, unable to understand yes.

Review of Quiet, by Susan Cain

The film V for Vendetta has a line which goes, “Artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up.”  Growing up, I was under the impression that internalizing the latter sentiment was required in order to call yourself an American.  In other words, when I heard the line, the idea that politicians lie was nothing new.  But I can’t say I had ever heard the first part, the part about artists deliberately using lies for good, until I watched that movie.  Neither a politician nor an artist, Susan Cain attempts to simply tell the truth in her book Quiet.  However, Fyodor Dostoevsky (artist) has this to say about telling the truth in his classic Crime and Punishment: “If there’s the hundredth part of a false note in speaking the truth, it leads to a discord, and that leads to trouble.”  My experiences have convinced me that Dostoevsky speaks the truth.  What we want to know, though, is how does Susan Cain do?

As best I can tell, Cain’s thesis in Quiet is that between the two major and decidedly different personality types (extrovert and introvert), in America the extroverts have convinced everyone that their type–their personality–is the ideal personality.  More simply, Cain would like to be Luke Skywalker for introverts and return balance to the force.  Unfortunately, there is quite a bit more than a hundredth part of a false note in her book.  Two of them warrant attention here.  

First, there is a section where she attempts to demonstrate that The West has a history of valuing extroverts, while The East has a history of valuing introverts.  How does she go about this supporting this claim?  Like any rhetorician, she uses proverbs.  One of The East’s proverbs she provides comes from the reputable founder of Taoism, Lao Tzu, and reads, “Those who know do not speak.  Those who speak do not know.”**  Fair enough.  The provided proverb for The West, on the other hand, comes from Ptahhotep.  What Westerner doesn’t have a few ol’ Ptahhotep’s sayings memorized?  For the fuzzy, Ptahhotep said in 2400 BCE, “Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.”**  With writing being a relatively new form of communication back then, this guy may have just been saying the what-might-actually-be-a common western proverb, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”  And, from where I sit, that has nothing to do with extroverts or introverts.  

Maybe Cain just made a little mistake, but still understands the big picture?  I wanted to believe so, too.  But then she added, as her concluding proverb for the perpetually extrovert-loving West, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”  Now, I am under the impression that a proverb is prescriptive in nature, not just a true, clever sentence.  I have never heard anyone use that truism in a genuinely prescriptive manner.  Maybe I’m sheltered.  I’ve told people, mockingly, to squeak if they want something, sure, but I’m pretty sure they understood the tone of my advice included that I thought they’d lose a part of their soul for doing so.  I think the bigger problem is that, by definition, there aren’t any proverbs that advise self-promotion and talking endlessly.  Quite the opposite.  The thing about proverbs is they have to stand the test of time to earn the title.  In her research for western proverbs promoting extroverted characteristics, I find it hard to believe she didn’t stumble across “the empty can rattles the most.”  But, then, had she included that one in the book, her thesis would’ve lost some bite, I think.  

The second false note, which is not exactly false, though it definitely calls into question the gravity of the entire supposed problem, is deep into the book.  We find ourselves in the midst of a lover’s quarrel.  It seems that extroverts and introverts are often attracted to each other, which can sometimes result in marriage.  This causes problems, it seems.  For Greg and Emily, the problem is dinner parties.  Greg wants to host them.  Emily does not.  As it turns out, once Greg and Emily learn that Emily’s introversion is not wrong or bad, a compromise can be struck.  Cain’s advice?  Don’t focus on the number of dinner parties, but the format.  She says, “Instead of seating everyone around a big table, which would require the kind of all-hands conversational multitasking Emily dislikes so much, why not serve dinner buffet style, with people eating in small, casual conversational groupings on the sofas and floor pillows?”**  A friend of mine recently enlightened me to a witty phrase that defines Greg and Emily’s situation and I think fits here: White whine.  Seriously though, ladies, if you have multiple sofas and throw pillows that you don’t mind replacing every other weekend after your friends prove they’re not the refined diners you’d like to believe they are, then I can already tell you’re beautiful–we should chat.

Is there an extrovert ideal in America?  Has a (perhaps unintended) consequence been that introverts get lost in the shuffle, or worse yet, believe they should strive to change a part of themselves which cannot be changed and live with the resultant shame?  Susan Cain believes so.  I’m not convinced.  Maybe I’m not her target audience.  In any case, I’m attempting to navigate life using something a good friend taught me recently: “Every person has a story.  If you listen to it, you just might avoid judging them.”  When that doesn’t work, I fall back on Billy Joel’s, “Don’t take any shit from anybody.”  But a bibliography containing only two entries probably isn’t robust enough to get published and entice readers.  I guess if I hope to ever be published, I’ll just have to make it up as I go.

****

*Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Print.

**Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012. Print.

 

How ‘Bout?

A strict father, though one who exercised a parent’s hypocritical initiative frequently, he never let her watch television.  And his list of approved-for-her movies included only three titles: Holiday Inn, White Christmas, and The Lego Movie.  She fell asleep during the first two, and, much to his chagrin, she lacked the context–not to mention the capacity for abstract thought–requisite to enjoy the third.

But every once in a while he would hear her say something that beckoned the playing of a song.  Not just a song, but a music video.  This evening was no different.

Instinctively these days, she knew to flip up the paper-thin seat cushion, so as to not ruin anything if she spilled, before assuming her oddly favorite eating position–one that had the left-half of her body sitting on the chair, while the right-half stood on the creaky hard-wood floor.

“You’re the greatest, daddy,” H- said, much to his delight.  “You’re the greatest, not mom.”

“Hey!” he said firmly, not wasting time on a crescendo, “that’s not true H-.  You’re mom’s the greatest, too.  I’m the greatest dad, and she’s the greatest mom.  Understand?”

“You’re the greatest dad and mom’s the greatest mom,” she recited.

“That reminds me of a song H-.  Have I ever played R. Kelly’s “World’s Greatest” for you?  The song he wrote about the boxer Muhammad Ali for the movie Ali?” he asked, making his way over to the laptop.

“World’s greatest?” she asked, in kind.

“Yeah.  I didn’t think so.  It’s a good one, just give me a sec to pull it up,” he said, trying to remember if the video contains anything a three year old shouldn’t see.  “Okay.  Here it is.”

“Is it the rainbow song?” she asked.

“No, it’s not the rainbow song,” he answered, chuckling as he tried to remember what past video had a rainbow in it.

Like most R. Kelley videos, there was a touch of a melodrama before the music began.  Finally the music started.  Memories and feeling flowed as Kelly sang, “I am a mountain.  I am a tall tree, oh-oh-oh, I am a swift wind, sweeping the country.”  Searching for any sign of understanding or enjoyment on her face, he couldn’t help but get caught up as the song built to the chorus.  Soon he found himself singing along.

“If anybody acks you who I am, just stand up tall, look ’em in the face and say-ay-ay-ay-ay-ee:  I’m that star up in the sky.  I’m that mountain peak up high.  Hey, I made it.  Mmm.  I’m the world’s greatest.”  

“How ’bout-” she began.

“I know, I know, you want the rainbow song,” he interrupted, breaking from the song.

“How ’bout you not sing it, so I can hear it?” she finished.

“Oh,” he said, laughing. “I suppose I can try.”