Monthly Archives: March 2013

Bonjour Montreal

I just spent the weekend in Montreal. Everybody speaks French. They speak English also, but French is the primary language. Someone told me that there are all sorts of strict laws mandating everything to be written in French in an effort to preserve its identity, I guess from being swallowed up by the rest of the mostly English speaking continent.

You walk into a store and it’s bonjour, and I never know just how to respond. Because everybody speaks some English, I don’t want to respond back with bonjour, because I don’t want to then give the impression that I speak French. They might then say something else in French, probably more than just a hello, probably a whole sentence. And I don’t know any French, none at all. So then I’ll have to get all awkward and say something like, “uh … sorry, I don’t speak French,” and they’ll be thinking, “Well, thanks for making me waste a whole sentence in French. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

And sometimes they never even give you the opportunity. Sometimes there is no hello, it’s just right into the French. Like somebody might approach me on the street and ask me a question. What’s the best way to respond? It’s definitely not to make a pained face and then stutter something out in English.

But I really don’t want to come across as arrogant. Even though most of the people there know English, I don’t want to just barge into a situation and impose my language. It all just stems from the fact that English, my native tongue, it just happens to be this quasi-universal means of communication. So where it would be crazy for somebody to approach me in New York and start talking in a foreign dialect, that’s eventually what I’m going to wind up doing abroad. Because yeah, it’s an advantage, and yeah, ultimately it’s the only way I’m going to be able to communicate.

On previous trips to Montreal, I’d get a little anxious after a while, like I’d rather not talk at all. But what am I going to do? It’s not like I’m going to stay totally silent. This time around I practiced a trick, where if I were greeted in French, I’d respond with the same greeting in French, and then immediately start talking in English. “Bonjour/Hello,” like so fast that the other person wouldn’t really have a chance to make it awkward or difficult.

I figured that I covered all of the problems that I was talking about earlier. I wouldn’t be ignoring their French but I wouldn’t really be participating in it either. I guess when I say it like that it still sounds kind of arrogant, but definitely a little less arrogant. It’s kind of like I’m acknowledging the French, paying my respects.

I’ve also heard that if you’re from the US and you speak French, if you try to speak French to a French Canadian, they’ll just switch to English. But that seems like a huge stereotype, and even as I’m writing this paragraph it sounds like a stupid generality. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s true. I don’t know French.

Also, how big is the difference between French spoken in Canada and French spoken in France? When I try to look for an answer on the Internet, it’s always people writing stuff like, “There’s a huge difference,” without really elaborating. Is there an equivalent in English? Like American English as compared to New Zealand’s? Like how dramatic are we talking?

I’d like to abruptly end by talking about how cool Montreal is. The food’s great. The people are really friendly. And yeah, even though it sounds like a foreign country, everybody speaks English. It’s a real win-win-win. Go see for yourself. Tell them Rob sent you. Tell somebody that. And they’ll just stare at you and say, “What?” but they’ll say it in French.

Racist fishing trip

When I was in seventh grade, I went on a fishing trip with my friend Jeff and his racist uncles who were visiting from upstate. It was one of those deals where they load fifty onto a boat and head three hours out into the Atlantic Ocean. I think we were fishing for bluefish. Or fluke. I can’t remember. Even if I caught any fish, I didn’t feel like I actually accomplished anything, because the uncles did all of the baiting, the rods were firmly secured to the side, and once I started actually reeling something in, the adults promptly took over to wrestle the animal to submission.

Whenever you go on one of these fishing trips, they always offer seasick pills. Every time I’ve opted out, and every time I’ve been one of the only people not to get seasick. Obviously this isn’t much of a scientific study, but still, I’ve always been wary about taking loose medication from strangers.

At one point, when my friend and his cousins and most of his uncles were busy throwing up in the bathroom, it was just one of the uncles and me standing over my line. I got a tug. I pulled and two seconds later the uncle pushed me out of the way and took over. Out from the ocean came, not a fish, but a giant crab. And I really hope I’m remembering this right, because I was a little kid, and more than a decade later, I’ve since learned that memories like this often prove more unreliable than not.

But the crab was huge. Scary even. It was almost daring us to pull it up. All I could think was, wow, my parents are going to be so impressed when I come home and show them this giant crab. How’s my mom going to cook it up? But I was also kind of skeptical about my friend’s uncle’s maritime skills. I think he already had like eight beers. And I’ve already mentioned how not scared the crab looked.

Because it wasn’t even really hooked, it was holding onto the line with its claw. Some other adult came over with a net. The crab was maybe like two feet up from the side. And I’m looking at it. All of its spider legs are moving seemingly independent from the rest of its body. And just like that, just when the net might have been able to capture it, the crab opened up its claw from the line and dropped right back into the ocean. Bye-bye. Plop.

The crew cleaned up all of our catch and at the end of the trip some guy wearing a rubber suit handed me a really dirty plastic bag with some fish filets. My friend’s uncles decided that the day was still young, that we should all go bowling.

We got to the bowling alley and the racism, which had been so far limited to off handed comments and weird innuendos, it sort of ratcheted up a notch. I don’t even know if I should call it racism or prejudice, it was definitely racist, but it was so lame, it was like these guys were the token racists on one of those PSA episodes of the Fresh Prince. It was bigoted. It was nasty.

And I’m like twelve years old. Black people this. Mexican people that. I’m aware that this is probably my first conscious real taste of any of this stuff outside of TV. I grew up in a pretty sheltered white suburban life. There were maybe like two or three minorities in each of my elementary school classes growing up.

But in defense of that suburban white bread life, nobody in my family or my friend’s families said stuff like these guys were saying. And say whatever you want about how cheesy all of those TV shows were, the Fresh Prince, Family Matters, they gave a kid like me a pretty good idea of what’s right and what’s not right to poke fun at with your white friends and their uncles. So when one of the uncles said something about the physical characteristics of a certain ethnic group, I replied, “That’s not true. That doesn’t even make sense.”

And I definitely remember this guy’s response, pretty much as clearly as I remember the whole crab thing that happened a few hours earlier. He leaned down and kind of got in my face and said, “Oh yeah? Well how many (ethnic group)s do you know?” And that shut me up, the way any adult can kind of impose himself upon any little kid and shut them up.

I went home feeling stupid. I handed my mom my bag of fish filets. “Huh,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever cooked fluke/bluefish.” She put them in the freezer. Months later I remember her cleaning out the fridge, finding the still frozen bag and tossing it straight in the trash.

Operation: Cookie Sandwich

I went to the mall to go to one of those cookie stores. I wanted one of those giant cookies, you know, the ones where they take two giant cookies and make them into a really giant cream-filled cookie sandwich. But I got lost trying to find the cookie place. My first stop was the food court, because that sounds like a reasonable place you’d expect to find it, right? Wrong.

There was the food court proper, like it was this big oval in the center of an indoor atrium. Around the perimeter of the oval were all of the food court stalls, shops, whatever you call them. Why am I describing what a food court looks like? Everybody knows what I’m talking about.

Whenever I’m at the mall, I make it a point to go to the food court. It’s like stepping into a parallel universe. Every type of food and restaurant is represented, but it’s never anything you’ve ever heard of. It’s like, sure, you want Chinese food? We’ve got Chinese food. But it’s not a regular Chinese place. It’s some place called Wok around the Clock, Wok it like it’s Hot, or Rock Out With Your Wok Out. And whereas most Chinese places in the US sort of sell the same stuff, food court Chinese places make it even more derivative, every dish has even more of a generic flavor.

I always get mildly tempted, like maybe I might just get some Chinese food. But, and I don’t know why they do this, they always have a guy standing outside of the counter holding a tray of little Chinese food bites skewered with tooth picks. I guess I don’t blame them for trying, but you try a little taste and you figure out immediately that there’s something off about it. It’s not bad. But it’s not really that great either. Also, you wind up with like forty high school aged moochers hanging around trying to fill up on free samples, even though it’s never going to be enough to satisfy a teenage hunger, and eventually that guy’s going to get pissed off, he’s going to say something to the kids, and they’ll all turn on him brutally, instantly, taunting, jeering, one of them flipping the tray out of his hands, Chinese food bites everywhere. Man, high school kids are mean.

But the cookie place. I couldn’t find it. This food court was especially big, so big that, after having explored the entire perimeter of the oval, I couldn’t tell if I’d successfully made a full revolution. Some of those places look nearly identical. You’ll get some Cajun kitchen on one side and then three stalls down there’s a Mongolian BBQ place. The food is all the same: chopped up pieces of heavily sauced up chicken.

Pizza place. Pasta bar. Salad works. Gyro factory. No cookies. I finally noticed that, over to the corner, not in the food court proper, there’s a pretzel place tucked away in a corner just outside from the rest of the vendors. Maybe they’d be able to steer me in the right direction.

But there was such a long line. Could I cut? Probably not. I was hanging back toward the end of the line and I was starting to think that maybe they wouldn’t help me find the cookie place even if they knew where it’s at. But as I was debating my next move, my cookie craving started getting attacked by all sides from the aroma of pretzels.

They had regular pretzels, yeah, some salt, they had these ones with cheese. Whatever. Those are OK. But the ones that are really dangerous are those cinnamon sugar guys. It’s really not even a pretzel. It’s a pretzel-shaped cake that’s drenched in that crumbly, sugary, just perfectly cinnamony powder. And they give it to you with a big cup of warm white icing, whatever it is, it’s probably just confectioner’s sugar and water. I was sold. I needed one, or two, or a whole box of mini cake pretzels.

But just when I got to the front of the line I noticed the huge vats of “fresh-squeezed” lemonade. Practically drooling in anticipation of my sugary treat, I thought about how even a drop of that sour lemonade would wreak havoc on my icing-coated palette. The imagined clash in flavors was enough to jolt me back into reality, back to why I was really here, the cookie place.

I made a break for it, got away from the food court entirely. I remembered the movie Mallrats, I hadn’t seen it in forever, but I remembered the two main characters fighting about whether the cookie place counted as an extension of the food court or if it was something different entirely. On a total lark I decided to check the mall’s second floor, on an opposite wing.

Bingo. Mrs. Cookie Place, or Auntie Cookie. I forget what it was called. “Give me the cookie sandwich. Please.” The lady just stared at me for a second.

“Are you sure you don’t want to try our new cookie pizza?

Cookie pizza? No. I had to stay focused. Just get the cookie sandwich and go. But a cookie pizza looked unbelievable. Instead of dough, obviously, it was a giant cookie. Where a normal pizza had sauce, the cookie place used vanilla icing instead. It looked almost like the same icing from the pretzel place. Was it warm? Was the whole thing warm? But it got better. There were toppings. They used regular sized cookies on top of the icing, making it almost look like little pepperoni. And then the whole thing was topped with grated chocolate.

But then say I ordered the cookie pizza, would she asked if I wanted it cut like a pizza? Because I didn’t. Would she automatically cut it like a pizza? Like maybe that was the default option. But I didn’t want to say, “don’t cut it,” because then it would look like I was just going to eat this thing by myself, which I was.

“Just … just give me the cookie sandwich.”

It was … it was OK. It really was just OK. After the second bite, it all just started to taste the same, like sweet, like sticky and sweet mush. I should have bought a bottle of water.

Why did I come to the mall in the first place? It couldn’t have been just for this cookie sandwich. Shit. Pants. My wife sent me here to get pants, something about a dinner tonight. Damn it, I can’t buy pants now, I feel gross. I feel sick. I feel like I’m going to puke. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ll just tell her they didn’t have my size, and that I’m sick. Cookie sandwich. Shit.

Movie Review: Olympus Has Fallen

What is Olympus Has Fallen about? Because the commercials don’t really tell you anything, other than that it’s an action movie. It’s a big action movie, true to form, never straying at all far from the tropes of the genre. It’s about the President, kind of. The opening scene is of the President boxing one of his secret service agents at Camp David. It’s a big action movie.

I think it’s President Asher or something like that, but that kind of stuff never matters. In fact, just hearing “President Asher” only serves to remind the audience how not real any of this stuff is. Which to me is fine. You go to see an action movie, you have to suspend your belief in lots of things if you want to have a good time. But hearing stuff like “President Asher” kind of messes with the illusion somewhat.

Whatever, that’s a small point, Aaron Eckhart, who plays the President, is hardly in the movie at all. The boxing scene at the beginning is about as good as it gets, because almost immediately after, his wife dies in a freak falling-off-a-bridge accident.

The movie isn’t really about the President. It’s about the Koreans. And Gerard Butler. But really the Koreans. They don’t tell you any of that in the commercials. Because the Korean people are not well represented in this movie, that is, coming from this non-Korean’s perspective. I’m assuming it’s why it was left out of any advertisements.

They’re going for a good old-fashioned America vs. movie. America vs. what? You had Red Dawn in the eighties, but now there’s no Soviet Union anymore. And didn’t they just reboot that movie also? I can’t imagine how the story stood up to the geopolitics of 2013. So no Russia, no Middle East, I mean, those actions movies are all too depressing, too weighed down in the realities of the past decade.

North Korea. It just might work. There’s a sort of real threat coming from that direction. Technically we’re still at war, right? Brilliant, North Korea it is. Without ruining the movie, I’ll tell you that a rogue group of North Koreans stage an all out assault on the White House, capturing the President and some other senior officials in an underground bunker.

Before you say, “But, how? That doesn’t make sense,” the movie already has it answered: “It takes fifteen minutes for the armed forces to get to the White House. We took it down in thirteen.” Actions movies like this don’t have to rely on making sense or logistical plausibility, as long as they keep the helicopters crashing, the knives stabbing, and the Abe Lincoln busts bludgeoning, the audience will accept that the terrorists somehow got their hands on a prototype US antiaircraft gun. “How they hell did they get that?” somebody screams in the situation room, to which some general responds, “It doesn’t matter how they got it!”

After the White House is in enemy hands, our nation’s only hope lies in Gerard Butler, a former secret service agent who had a little something to do with the first lady falling off of that bridge. He sees the White House under attack, and he runs there, making it inside, everybody else dead, just he makes it, on foot, and eventually he finds a conveniently placed Bluetooth cell phone that somehow maintains constant communication with the situation room.

Also, Morgan Freeman, in a surprise move, is demoted from Hollywood’s favorite black President to America’s first fictitious black Speaker of the House. I was like, what the hell? How can you have a table full of fake officials and not automatically defer to Morgan Freeman? But it’s OK, because after the Vice President gets executed, Freeman gets to be acting President for the rest of the movie. That’s more like it.

Olympus Has Fallen was entertaining, although not as entertaining as say The Rock, or Con Air, or Apocalypto. I feel like six months from now we’re all going to be watching it on USA or TBS. This movie looks like it was made specifically for strategically placed TV commercial breaks. The pace definitely slowed down toward the end, and I didn’t have that same sitting on the edge of my seat feeling that I usually get toward the climax of good actions movies. But that’s because I think it was a relatively safe film, a pretty safe script, a safe cast, a safe time of the year when not a lot of cool stuff is playing in theaters.

But it’s an OK movie, if you like over the top action flicks. I don’t want to spoil anything, but somewhere around the middle, Butler tells the main villain, Kang, that he’s going to “stab you through your brain with my knife.” Who do you think wins in the end and how do you think he does it?

I’ve got nothing

I’m constantly trying to cultivate this habit, that whenever I have an idea for something to write about, for this blog, for something else, whatever, that I’ll immediately write it down so that I don’t forget about it. But I’m not there yet. I’m only doing it like twenty-five percent of the time.

Sometimes it’s a logistical thing. Like I’ll be riding my bike on my way to work and something will pop in my head, and I’ll think, OK, I better write this down as soon as I get off my bike. But even that’s too much. It’s more than likely that, even if I’m only five minutes away from my destination, I’ll get distracted during those five minutes, my mind will wander, and my idea for whatever it was that I was thinking about, it’ll be gone.

Maybe I’ll be out for a long run. It’s whenever I’m out there, using my body in a repetitive action. It’s like after I’m physically engaged my mind is free to wander in a way that’s impossible to do while I’m standing still. But it’s not like I leave the house with a pen and paper.

A few times, usually when I come up with something that really captures my imagination, I’ll get worried that, just by the nature of where this idea was born, that it’s already doomed to be forgotten. Like in the middle of a long run. So I’ll start repeating it over and over in my head, trying to keep it fresh in my consciousness, so that I’ll be able to come home, head right to the computer and write down what I’ve been mulling over.

But a lot of the time it’s like a game of telephone. It’s just the nature of our brains, I guess, that it’s really hard to control our thoughts, to take an idea and to hold it down long enough to make it something that you can then shape and cultivate. The few times that I’ve successfully held an idea in my head, say for half an hour, I’ll come back and write it all up, but there’s that part of me that’s thinking, something’s different here. Something’s changed in between the instance of inspiration and the moment where I’m able to try and hash it out.

It’s the same process even if I’m out somewhere and I have the foresight to write down a good idea. How do I capture a whole idea in just a few words? Often times I’ll look at my notes later in the day and I’ll be like, what was I getting at here? What was it that inspired me to write this note in the first place?

The inspiration for this piece is my frustration of having lost too many good ideas. I’ll be nodding off to sleep at the end of the day and two or three sentences might jump out in my mind. My brain automatically starts piecing together a story or a joke or something, I won’t really be able to tell where it’ll all head until I sit down at the computer and start typing. But then I’ll fall asleep. I’ll wake up the next morning and I’ll have the residual feeling of having had a good idea, but now all I’m doing is drinking coffee and writing something about not knowing what to write about.

I’ve never been sailing, but it’s how I would describe what it feels like to sit at my computer and write. I’m out there in a boat on some body of water. I’ve got the sail up and I’m hoping to catch some wind. Where is it going to take me? Once I’ve got a nice gust, can I steer it to take me in a different direction?

I don’t know. I’ve got to practice. I guess I’ve got to be willing to sit in that boat even if I don’t feel any wind. I’ve got to write bullshit pieces like this every now and then about not knowing what I’m doing or not having anything to write about. But look at this, I’m done. Here I am. Is it my best piece? No way. But I’m somewhere. It’s definitely satisfying to imagine how much worse I’d feel if I hadn’t written anything at all.