Month: October 2008

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Political tricksters

I know, I know, I try to avoid talking about politics—there are a couple million people in the proverbial blogosphere who love to rant and rave at length (whether they know what they’re talking about or not) and you can go ahead and read that stuff if you’ve got way too much time on your hands. In my case, I was inspired to write something because I saw a TV news clip tonight about a bunch of kids going door-to-door encouraging people to vote in this year’s election. The title they adopted? Trick or Vote ’08.

Personally, I think that’s awesome. Not the degree of activism being shown by young people in the community, just the phrase. Kids walk up to people’s doors every Halloween and say “Trick or treat!”, which is essentially a threat of “Gimme some candy or I’ll leave a bag of flaming dog poop on your doorstep!” With these older kids wandering through the neighborhoods telling people, “Trick or Vote!”… it’s pretty much equivalent to “You better be at the polls on November 4th or we’ll toilet paper your house with unused ballots!”

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Wristband colors of the rainbow

Ever notice how quantity often has a converse relationship with quality? If someone screams “Fire!” at random times in a movie theater, people will eventually start punching him in the face to shut him up. But if on the 47th time, there actually is a fire, someone will punch him in the face and he’ll be unconscious while everyone gets burned alive.

Okay, so maybe that’s not the best example, but my point is that when there’s a lot of something, each item tends to lose its individual significance. If everyone is different, then being “different” doesn’t mean anything anymore. The same idea applies to all of the colored wristbands that are supposed to grab people’s attention for various causes, diseases, etc. For example, when people see a yellow wristband, they’ll probably think of Lance Armstrong and cancer of the nuts, but there are a limited number of colors of the rainbow and the various causes, diseases, etc. start to double up. (You can check out a loooooooong list here.)

Personally, I’ve been wearing a lime green wristband for a while now. (It’s been at least six months because I currently have a really odd-looking tan line on my left wrist.) For me, it’s meant to signify non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but for others, it may refer to Lyme disease or muscular dystrophy.

More recently, I visited a friend and we traded: I gave her a lime green wristband in exchange for a purple one, which was labeled “Someone You Know Has LUPUS”. Guess which disease it’s referring to… Then I went to that website link above and was blown away by the list of items under purple. I saw Epilepsy and thought, “Cool, it’s twice as significant for me!”

But then I scrolled down the list and found No Unattended Kids in Cars and Pagan Pride as well. Lord knows I love the Pagans, but supporting their cause on my wrist? Seems a little too close to yelling “Pagan Pride!” in a movie theater and getting punched in the face to me…

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PTRSD

I’ve taken some time the last few days to watch the first season of Beauty and the Geek again since my mother purchased it on amazon.com. It’s been slightly reedited—they added about two minutes of extra footage per episode—but I’m not sure if that warrants the price tag of $1.99 each or $11.14 for the season. (That’s my opinion, but if you’re a rabid fan… keep your foamy mouth to yourself.)

So I was going through, seeing how they added a few seconds here and there. For example, when I got to Episode 4 and they were showing us trying to get phone numbers, it revealed that my full quote was not “OOOHHHHHHH…”. It was “OOOHHHHHH, I got snubbed!” That’s how illuminating the new edit was at times.

But much like previous viewings, each time I watch myself wandering through that outdoor mall, thinking about the horrors of approaching random women and interrupting their routines to get the phone numbers for no reason… it still makes me cringe. Giving Caitilin a really bad massage? “Oops.” Throwing up on TV? “Man, that sucked.” Trying to get digits? It hurts to think about. Seriously.

I came up with the answer while chatting with someone online the next night. We’d turned our webcams on so we could see each other and every time I looked at my face on the screen, copying my every movement, every expression, everything that flashed across my face… it had an unreal quality to it. Then I had a flashback to watching myself on TV and it finally clicked.

I was suffering from PTRSD: Post-traumatic reality show disorder.

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Happy 2 to the 5th power-th birthday!

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 32 (unless my math is off, in which case someone should take my junior high math team trophy for 4th place in state and smash it 2 to the 5th power-th times). That number was really the most special part about it. Well, that plus my first time going dumpster diving.

My mom has been doing a lot of cleaning around the house. And when I say “cleaning”, I mean “throwing out lots of random crap that we don’t want or need.” Consequently, there have been a multitude of garbage bags that she’s asked me to toss into a local dumpster. That in itself generally isn’t a big deal. It’s only when she realizes there’s a bag in the corner that should have been tossed, which means there’s a bag in the dumpster that isn’t supposed to be there. Yeah, that’s a big deal.

So there we were, driving off into the distance at 10:00 at night—after all, we had to go out to a restaurant for my birthday dinner. I don’t really need a party with gifts and balloons, but those little ice cream sundaes with candles on them? They’re like heaven with whipped cream on top. Upon arriving at the dumpster, we turned on the headlights, grabbed a flashlight to shine inside and went digging. (Technically, I’m tall enough that I wasn’t actually diving in there, but grant me some creative license, wouldja?)

Thankfully, only a few more things had been added since I’d made my initial drop. Even more thankfully, none of those things tried to bite me or emit noxious fumes to knock me to the ground, twitching and foaming at the mouth. Nope, I just lifted a few things, saw the bag that shouldn’t have been there, switched it with the bag to throw out and headed home.

Admittedly, it wasn’t terribly exciting—not much of a story for the grandkids—but at least I can tell people that I have gone dumpster diving. On my birthday. After eating an ice cream sundae. And I never felt the urge to heave it back up into the dumpster 2 to the 5th power-th times, either. My junior high math teacher would be proud.

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Nintendo Wii: You got served!

I visited my older brother Brent earlier today and Gemma, his daughter, introduced me to Wii Sports for the first time. Also for the first time, I was destroyed playing sports against someone who’s about 1/4 my age.

For those of you who don’t know, the Wii operates by using some funky motion sensors that allow it to detect when you move your hands, thus swinging a racket or a bat or throwing the controller through the TV screen. I’m sure the game interprets that last one pretty badly, but it’s hard to tell when there’s no screen anymore.

So during the course of our gaming, I was swinging myself around, getting all hot and sweaty and nasty, and I had very few positive results to show for it. Some of my not-so-shining moments included winning points in tennis because Gemma helped me win—she’d hit the ball when it was out of bounds because she wanted to play to deuce—I managed to get one hit out of the infield playing baseball and I discovered I’m very adept at rolling gutter balls when I’m bowling. The worst, though… I need to work on my boxing skills.

Or perhaps I just need to work on my Wii technique. Brent explained that not only do the sensors detect motion, they detect the way you’re pointing the controllers. Thus, when you’re pointing your hands forward instead of holding them upright, the punch will land lower on the target, which would explain my difficulties with one of the training exercises. The Nintendo trainer has a pad on each hand and holds them up one at a time for you to punch. Each time you hit a pad, you get a point. Each time you hit the trainer, you get minus one point.

Because I was having trouble with the controllers… I think a real trainer would have been a little pissed off. During the course of a minute, I managed to hit the pads 14 times, but I also punched him in the gut 24 times. That’s when I started to wonder if I might have been better off just throwing the controller at the TV screen—at least I would have only missed the pads once.