Eyesore

I went to dinner with a friend last night. While we waited at the bar for our table to be ready, she began telling me a story about something or someone, but I was having trouble paying attention, because I was distracted by the woman sitting behind her, a couple seats down the bar.

This woman, while otherwise attractive, had a hideously disfigured eye. She reminded me of one of the zombies on The Walking Dead. She wore glasses, which masked it a little bit, but it clearly appeared that her right eyeball was rotated about 75 degrees backwards, into her skull, and what was visible of her iris was clouded over with a milky blueish cataract. It was, in a word, disturbing.

I interrupted my friend in the middle of her story. "I'm sorry," I said. "I can't really focus on what you're saying, because the woman behind you has the creepiest eye I've ever seen."

"I have to see it," my friend said.

"No, it's not possible for you to just turn around and look. We have to somehow switch places so you can see it from where I'm standing."

She casually pretended to drop something, I shuffled over so she could pick up this imaginary object, and a few seconds later we had switched positions. I saw her face register mild horror. "I don't know how you were able to listen to even one word of my story," she said.

"I didn't," I said. "I couldn't."

The woman was with a man who, god bless him, did not betray anything out of the ordinary while he was conversing with her. I don't know if they were married or if it was their first date, but I felt bad for him. You can't avoid looking at something like that; it's not like a cauliflower ear or a hook-hand: you look someone right in the eyes when you speak to them.

This woman knows full-well how off-putting her zombie eye must be; the least she could do for her date, and the rest of society, is wear sunglasses, or an eye patch. That's what they make them for.

Mea Culpa

"I love the Niners. But we're going nowhere. There is simply no hope for this team."

-Me, July 30, 2011

With the 49ers sitting comfortably atop their division at 6-1, having won their fifth straight game yesterday, I think it's safe to say that I may have been a bit premature in writing them off this summer. It's possible I don't know quite as much about running a football team as Coach Harbaugh and the Niners' front office. Hey, I was wrong. And never been happier to be. GO NINERS!!!

You Can Judge a Book by its Chapters

Right now I'm reading Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, one of the most highly acclaimed books published in recent memory. Oprah Winfrey loved it. So did Barack Obama, as well as pretty much every book reviewer in the world. So I was convinced I should go out and read it.

Well, I'm about a third of the way through. And although it is a pretty good story so far, I'll tell you one thing it definitely sucks at: having chapters. In 170 pages, there have been like three chapters. That, my friends, is simply unacceptable.

Chapters are necessary components of books. They represent story breaks, and thus, logical places to pause your reading experience. When I start a new chapter, I can refer back to the table of contents to see how many pages it is, and thus know how much time to budget for reading that day. This book doesn't even have a table of contents, leaving me to flip through page after page, growing anxious with despair as I realize there will be no natural story break for some 90-plus pages. That's a stressful feeling, which is the opposite of how I want to feel when I try to relax by reading.

When I find myself adrift in an ocean of pages, no island of a chapter in sight, I am left to have to try and determine to stop reading wherever it will be the least jarring. But when I pick the book back up again, I inevitably have to scan the two pages between which I put my bookmark, trying to find where I left off. This is confusing and irritating. It diminishes my reading enjoyment.

I also find this is a bit pretentious on the author's part. What, does he expect I have whole days and nights at my disposal to just do nothing else but sit and read his stupid highly acclaimed novel? He's an author; he's probably read books before. He knows they're supposed to have chapters. News flash, Franzen: even your brilliant prose can get a bit heady after awhile. It's not exactly light fare, with all your depressing relationship dynamics and whatnot. It's not Harry Potter. Which, by the way, kicks your book's ass in the chapters category.

Things You Should Not Hear at a Library

1. Loud talking
2. Babies screaming
3. Sawing through plywood
4. People yelling "Miss? Excuse me? MISS???"
5. Someone pounding a hammer against a counter
6. A man violently coughing incessantly
7. A doorbell
8. "When the Saints Go Marching In" cell phone ring

Contagion

I just went to see a movie. Per usual, I stopped at the refreshments counter beforehand and got a small popcorn and small diet Coke. After I paid, as I was gathering my movie snacks, the young lady behind the counter - I believe her name was Jaeshida, if I'm recalling that correctly (which is coincidentally my great-grandmother's name) - said to me, "The garbage is behind you."

"Okay, thanks," I said. "Where's the butter?"

She pointed. "The butter's right there. The garbage is behind you."

"Great," I said. I went and buttered my popcorn, then turned to walk into the theater.

"Are you leaving this?" she called after me. I turned around. She was pointing to the counter, where there was sitting the crumpled up straw wrapper I had unsheathed from my straw and left there while I had been ordering, without it even registering as a thought blip on my brain radar.

"Yes...?" I said, kind of confused as to why she thought I might be taking it with me. She looked back down at the wrapper and scowled. And when I mean "scowl," it was a full on, corners-of-the-mouth-turned-down-frowny-face. There was disgust on her face, as if a homeless guy had just ejaculated on her toes.

That's when it hit me: she had repeated telling me where the garbage was because she had anticipated me leaving my straw wrapper there on the counter, dozens of seconds earlier in the conversation. In that instant I felt horrible. I apologized, grabbed the wrapper, threw it away, then apologized again. She smiled, satisfied, and told me to enjoy the movie.

Only a minute later, when I sat down, did I start feeling angry. How many times had I left a straw wrapper on any counter, let alone a movie theater refreshment stand, and not given it a second thought, because it's a totally acceptable thing to do? I just gave this girl $10.75 for popcorn and soda; I'm totally within my rights to leave my crumpled up smidgen of paper on the counter. What, should I not leave my garbage on the theater floor when I'm done? You want me to pick up all the popcorn I've dropped and throw that away too? Blow me.

Jaeshida may not enjoy picking up my straw wrapper and throwing it away. It may not be a dignified responsibility. But you know what? That's part of her job. You don't like throwing away people's refuse? Great. Then don't be a garbage man, don't work at McDonald's, and don't work behind the counter of a popcorn stand at a fucking movie theater.

Shmecmology

Say what you want about the iPod; I never had a Walkman that suddenly changed songs at the slightest dove's whisper grazing its sensitive surface.

Cursing: An Endorsement

The other night I caught the end of the movie THREE KINGS on TV. I don't remember what channel it was on, but they had commercials, and it was edited. This meant that all the swear words were replaced with more suitable words that would, I assume, be deemed less offensive to a mass audience.

While this may be true on one account, the dialogue they chose to censor the cursing with was, to my ears, exponentially more offensive. For example, in one scene an American soldier drags George Clooney to the ground and screams, "You frag me? Now it's my turn to frag you!" A few seconds later, another soldier shouts "Bullsquat!"

Let's put aside for a moment the insult to my intelligence that is asking me to accept that a soldier in the midst of a war would actually yell "Bullsquat!" instead of "Bullshit!" Go back to the first example. "Frag you" is supposed to replace "Fuck you"? "Frag" is barely a real word! No one says "frag you"! This otherwise ordinary piece of dialogue has been rendered completely ridiculous.

All you overprotective parents out there: is it really that important to shield your children's delicate ears from the word "fuck," to the point where you want them picking up vocabulary that has virtually no real-world meaning? Wouldn't you rather they go around sounding somewhat normal, as opposed to saying "frag you" to some kid at school and getting ridiculed all the way home?

It's sadly comical that we're permitted to watch Mark Wahlberg blow the top of an Iraqi's head off in the very first scene of this movie, but must be protected against hearing swear words by having them replaced with nonsensical impostor words. If you really must censor our cinema, just mute or bleep the curses, so we at least know what the intention was. Pretending we live in a world without swearing is just fragging bullsquat.