I'm going to bitch. I'm going to bitch because it will temporarily relieve me of a bit of writer's block. I am mentally constipated right now, and I say constipated because even if I could get the ideas out of my head, I'm pretty confident they are shit anyway. So I am going to bitch.
I bought an Xbox 360 in June of '06. I'd saved money for this purpose since it debuted at the end of '05, and for over a year, I only had one game for it. It was a nerdy Adventure/RPG called Oblivion, and it has consistently held my interest FUCK I CAN'T FUCKING THINK!
I could go back and edit this and make it all clever, but Junior is here right now with one of his friends and they are sitting in the living room blasting away at Halo 3. Who cares right? Well I do because I am having a hell of a time tuning out the digitized grunts, explosions and machine gun fire murmuring through the wall. I am having a hell of a time tuning out the audible side of a moronic phone conversation being held by his friend, and I am having a hell of a time getting over the fact that I am exiled to my bedroom because of a couple 19 year olds.
"Hey, maybe you could grow up a bit. Aren't you almost thirty or something? Yeah, I am, but here's the thing:
I bought Halo 3 shortly after getting the internet, because I thought playing online would be fun. And for a while it was. But then Junior got a hold of it and totally ruined it for me. Now I don't even like looking at the box. I know that sounds ridiculous, but bear with me for a bit.
Getting the internet wasn't a huge ordeal, and neither was getting a subscription to Xbox Live. The thing about Xbox Live is that you can subscribe to it for free, but in order to take advantage of its best features, you have to pay fifty bucks a year. I think that's pretty reasonable, especially when one of the key features is a sort of gamer-matchmaking function that pairs you up with gamers of comparable skill. In other words, when I logged on to play Halo 3 multiplayer, I was matched with people who were just as bad as I am. So I forked over $50, and I bought a year's subscription to Xbox Live Gold. Junior promised that when he had extra money, he'd pay for his own account so he wouldn't have to use mine. I knew that the likelihood of $50 extra dollars appearing in his wallet was on par with me riding a magic elephant on the moon, but I didn't really care. I didn't see it being that big a deal.
I held that opinion for almost an entire month.
As you may recall (assuming you read the super-sad post from a month or two ago about how I felt lost and more like a dad than a brother), Junior was smoking a lot of pot. And all that pot smoking was really fucking annoying by itself, but what made it worse, though, was that around this time, all Junior did when he wasn't working was get high and play Halo. And this was okay for a while, but then one afternoon I picked the controller up, logged on and got my ass kicked consistently for a good hour and a half before I quit. Now I know I suck, but the last time I had gotten around to playing online, I wasn't terrible--I probably had a pretty even win/loss ratio. What happened was that because Junior has played so goddamn much, my gamertag (what Microsoft calls your account) was under the impression that I was really good at Halo, and as such, I was matched accordingly. Now it is no fun for me to play.
Truth be told, it's not that much fun anyway. The single-player game is short, until the end where it gets tedious. The multiplayer is mostly fun, unless you're bad and made to play against people who aren't. Then it totally blows. If you've read stories about how Halo is easily ruined by racist jerks, well, they aren't too far off--I didn't encounter too many racists (on the contrary, I seemed to play with a lot of black dudes), but I did find a lot of jerks, especially after turning up in last place every time I played. But I didn't buy it so I could shoot computer-controlled opponents by myself. I bought it in order to shoot real people on a team.
If you reread the paragraphs above, you'll notice that I have written "I bought" two or three times. I know that's not a lot, but with a bit of backstory, you'll begin to see why counting that phrase is relevant.
See, in order to get internet, as you are probably aware, you have to pay extra to get it set up. And even though he works two jobs, Junior never has any money, so I paid for it to get set up. And so we could both use the internet at the same time, I also paid for wireless router. Not the cheap one, mind you, but the one that was made for gaming. I also paid for Halo 3.
As you may have guessed, I am chafed because despite the fact that I paid for the fucking game, I have played it the least. This really pisses me off.
But then again, how can I be mad at him, really? I mean, he's not doing anything wrong. In fact, he's pulled a 180--he stopped smoking pot and will be enlisting in the Navy in a couple weeks. I'm very proud of him and the choices he's made of late. But fuck, man, am I sick and tired of hearing that goddamn game!
I complained about this to Kerry a while back, and he figured out what my problem is: I don't like to share my things.
I honestly couldn't argue the point. As evidence:
I miss my one-bedroom apartment.
I miss being able to use my Xbox whenever the fuck I want.
I miss jumping in the shower and finding my body wash was right where I left it (rather than in, say for example, Junior's bathroom).
So in other words, I'm kind of a jerk.
Sharing. Sheesh. Maybe I need to go back to pre-school.
--Steve the Fucking Jerk
Showing posts with label steve the jerk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label steve the jerk. Show all posts
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Telecommutathy
A few weeks ago, I managed, via foolishly clicking an unloaded link secreted within a MySpace message, to fill my computer with over 30 trojans and viruses. There are several lines between which you may read, but whatever. What this meant was that the IT guy at work had to spend two days trying to figure out what to do, ultimately settling on wiping and reloading everything, which was fine, since it works moderately faster now. However, during those two days without my work computer, a wonderful thing happened.
I got to work from home.
Now, before you assume that I hate work and my company and my colleagues and am just another person who didn’t date enough skanks in college, I want to be clear on a few background details:
- My company, while not as fun as it was three years ago, is still Hella Fun. The reason why it is less fun is that it has nearly tripled in size.
- I am very lucky to work here, and I have a position that makes use of my most prominent aptitudes. So for that I am grateful.
- Most of the people here are a joy to be around all day, and even the ones who aren’t 100% fun 100% of the time are still pretty cool.
- I don’t have to tuck in my shirt or even wear real shoes if I don’t want to, and the three people I am directly responsible are awesome and I love them.
- I’ve been here three years, and I’m still allowed to be hourly, but with benefits. So really, this place is pretty awesome.
So, I like where I work, but here are a few key differences between unfolding my laptop at my desk at the office and unfolding onto my coffee table at home:
- If I work from home, I don’t have to drive there. I hate driving to work because I hate stoplights, and I swear, Fort Worth seems to have stoplights every twenty feet. And I’ve mentioned before that pretty much every place I go regularly is narrowed at some point by orange cones, so that also beats me down. Never mind that driving to work means rumbling over two sets of brick-paved roads, behind pokey work trucks, behind pokey day laborer trucks and occasionally behind pokey cattle.
- At my house, the only traffic past my workspace is me. For whatever reason, out of the three different rooms I’ve been in at the office, two of them have been high traffic areas. Now, I am out of my seat a lot, and I know where I’m going, which is no where important. But most of the other traffic is all busily work-related, and this annoys me. It’s pretty much “CHOO CHOO! OFF TO ANOTHER MEETING!”
- The other thing that fills my office during the day and eventually causes me to go outside is the constant VOO! VOO! as people are paged over their speakerphones. I’m sorry, but I cannot ignore this. My brain won’t let me. My apartment is for all practical measurements devoid of ringing phones. No one really calls me, and I enjoy it. But up here, man I can hardly think for all the fucking phonecalls.
- At home during the day, my complex is mostly silent, and I have the sliding glass door to look out of. Now granted, my view contains some old lawnchairs, Junior’s friends’ cigarette butts, but it’s a lot of natural light, and this makes me happy.
- I honestly get more stuff done.
Basically, the things that stick in my craw are the sort of things that would stick at my craw in any office. I mean, how many businesses never get phone calls? If you answered ones that are out of business, that’s probably the best answer. But man, I am pretty distracted anyway, and all the interference makes it all the more difficult to focus.
I don't know if it's ADD or if I was supposed to be autistic but my wires crossed correctly at the last possibly instant, giving me a brain that developed mostly normally. But I am highly susceptible to the sound of other people's voices, and it takes all my focus (or a really compelling Wikipedia article--say, one about G.I. JOEs, for example) in order for me to ignore it. Other people's voices, combined with incessantly ringing telephones, combined with what is probably waiting to be spoken on the other end of the ringing telephones makes me fucking crazy sometimes.
Anyway, I like working from home.
--The Robo-Pirate
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Bet you really wanted to know this.
You know why I liked living by myself? Because a closed door and drawn blinds ensured that alone time meant that I would actually be alone. Now, I have to apparently lock my bedroom door.
On a different note, how do you get someone to stop smoking? At this point, I'll tolerate Junior's weed if it means he ditches the Marlboros. In addition to his failure to recognize that no lights and a closed door is the universal roommate sign for don't-come-in-here-or-else-we're-going- to-have-an-awkward-rest-of-the-evening, he's raised my ire tonight by constantly hacking and coughing. Here's the conversation I had just now:
"Are you sick?"
"No, I just had a cigarette."
"Junior, why do you smoke."
"Because there's nothing like having a cigarette when you come home from work."
I should point out that he is highly susceptible to the sort of phrases and ideas that are bandied about as part of a lifestyle conceived by a marketer in order to sell something. Throughout his life, this has ranged from breakfast cereal to toys to Marlboro Lights.
"Do you even want to quit?"
"Eventually..."
"What have cigarettes ever done for you?"
"KOFF KOFF HACK KOFF KOFF"
And that was the end of the conversation. So it goes. The problem I have is that from time to time when I get hammered, I think that a smoke will go with those 7 or 8 beers just fine. In its temporarily pickled state, my brain gleefully follows the dubious logic that if my exterior smells like a bar, my interior might as well match. And then the next morning, I always think jeez that's the last time I do that, because I totally feel nasty. So in other words, I'm that guy. The guy who rails against smoking but who is ironically a social smoker. So I have a problem effectively yelling at him. The difference is that my tobacco missteps are so occasional that they're hardly worth mentioning beyond barely founding a case for my own hypocrisy. Same with the dope.
But all the same, I wish he'd knock off that goddamn coughing.
One night, I think this was the first or second night after we moved into the new place, I came home from bartending to find him camped out on the balcony getting high. And camped out is barely an exaggeration. He had a chair. And a black light. And a reading light. And his iPod and its speakers. And a towel. And his bong (on a side note, he refers to all of his paraphenia as his "pieces." We used to just call them pipes). And I went through the roof. Why couldn't he just smoke a joint in a chair on the balcony without making it such a big production? Why did I have to come home to find an array of blown glass drying on a towel on the kitchen counter? Why did I have to find a copy of High fucking Times in the bathroom?
In other words, I wanted to know why he couldn't just smoke pot instead of being a stoner.
I explained to him, with the rage of a 1,000 sitcom dads, that it is stupid to see this chunky kid who used to be a D-1 athlete take the time to set all this shit up on a balcony just so he could get baked. He, of course, didn't see what the big deal was, and as I realized immediately, I didn't actually realize what real big deal was either. I didn't catch it until afterI had explained to him, this time with saltwater running down my cheeks, that it was weird and sad for me to see this chunky kid all chinese-eyed and addled, talking about "pieces," and "baba kush," when what I remember when I look at him is the 7 year-old who fell asleep in his Sonic the Hedgehog costume after trickertreating. Or the 3 year-old who thought that the pregnant cat my dad brought home from work would eventually lay eggs. Or the four year-old who fell asleep on my dad's shoulders during the Electrical Parade at Disneyland.
In other words, what I really wanted was for him to be a kid again. And I say this with complete sincerity, unsmirking, without a gram of smarm: my heart broke.
As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself able to empathize with my parents over a whole catalog of hurt feelings. I could now appreciate the anger and disappointment they felt when I came home from my first semester of college, reeking of Keystone light and a 2.4 GPA. I understood the resignation in my dad's voice when I told him, no I'm not going to quit the band. And finally, the defeated sadness in my mom's eyes when I told her I had foregone with saving myself for marriage no longer looked like martyrdom. In these instances, I bristled at all the various manifestations of parental disappointment, because every fuck up seemed to be a matter of how I was reflecting on them, not how I was reflecting on me. At the time, I always thought, fuck, it's my life and my mistakes, and you guys weren't perfect either. I'm pretty sure this is exactly what goes through Junior's head the instant I begin to pontificate.
Once again, I wish I could be a big brother. I feel like I don't know how. More than that, I feel a little lost.
And by a little, I mean a lot.
--The Robo-Pirate
On a different note, how do you get someone to stop smoking? At this point, I'll tolerate Junior's weed if it means he ditches the Marlboros. In addition to his failure to recognize that no lights and a closed door is the universal roommate sign for don't-come-in-here-or-else-we're-going- to-have-an-awkward-rest-of-the-evening, he's raised my ire tonight by constantly hacking and coughing. Here's the conversation I had just now:
"Are you sick?"
"No, I just had a cigarette."
"Junior, why do you smoke."
"Because there's nothing like having a cigarette when you come home from work."
I should point out that he is highly susceptible to the sort of phrases and ideas that are bandied about as part of a lifestyle conceived by a marketer in order to sell something. Throughout his life, this has ranged from breakfast cereal to toys to Marlboro Lights.
"Do you even want to quit?"
"Eventually..."
"What have cigarettes ever done for you?"
"KOFF KOFF HACK KOFF KOFF"
And that was the end of the conversation. So it goes. The problem I have is that from time to time when I get hammered, I think that a smoke will go with those 7 or 8 beers just fine. In its temporarily pickled state, my brain gleefully follows the dubious logic that if my exterior smells like a bar, my interior might as well match. And then the next morning, I always think jeez that's the last time I do that, because I totally feel nasty. So in other words, I'm that guy. The guy who rails against smoking but who is ironically a social smoker. So I have a problem effectively yelling at him. The difference is that my tobacco missteps are so occasional that they're hardly worth mentioning beyond barely founding a case for my own hypocrisy. Same with the dope.
But all the same, I wish he'd knock off that goddamn coughing.
One night, I think this was the first or second night after we moved into the new place, I came home from bartending to find him camped out on the balcony getting high. And camped out is barely an exaggeration. He had a chair. And a black light. And a reading light. And his iPod and its speakers. And a towel. And his bong (on a side note, he refers to all of his paraphenia as his "pieces." We used to just call them pipes). And I went through the roof. Why couldn't he just smoke a joint in a chair on the balcony without making it such a big production? Why did I have to come home to find an array of blown glass drying on a towel on the kitchen counter? Why did I have to find a copy of High fucking Times in the bathroom?
In other words, I wanted to know why he couldn't just smoke pot instead of being a stoner.
I explained to him, with the rage of a 1,000 sitcom dads, that it is stupid to see this chunky kid who used to be a D-1 athlete take the time to set all this shit up on a balcony just so he could get baked. He, of course, didn't see what the big deal was, and as I realized immediately, I didn't actually realize what real big deal was either. I didn't catch it until afterI had explained to him, this time with saltwater running down my cheeks, that it was weird and sad for me to see this chunky kid all chinese-eyed and addled, talking about "pieces," and "baba kush," when what I remember when I look at him is the 7 year-old who fell asleep in his Sonic the Hedgehog costume after trickertreating. Or the 3 year-old who thought that the pregnant cat my dad brought home from work would eventually lay eggs. Or the four year-old who fell asleep on my dad's shoulders during the Electrical Parade at Disneyland.
In other words, what I really wanted was for him to be a kid again. And I say this with complete sincerity, unsmirking, without a gram of smarm: my heart broke.
As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself able to empathize with my parents over a whole catalog of hurt feelings. I could now appreciate the anger and disappointment they felt when I came home from my first semester of college, reeking of Keystone light and a 2.4 GPA. I understood the resignation in my dad's voice when I told him, no I'm not going to quit the band. And finally, the defeated sadness in my mom's eyes when I told her I had foregone with saving myself for marriage no longer looked like martyrdom. In these instances, I bristled at all the various manifestations of parental disappointment, because every fuck up seemed to be a matter of how I was reflecting on them, not how I was reflecting on me. At the time, I always thought, fuck, it's my life and my mistakes, and you guys weren't perfect either. I'm pretty sure this is exactly what goes through Junior's head the instant I begin to pontificate.
Once again, I wish I could be a big brother. I feel like I don't know how. More than that, I feel a little lost.
And by a little, I mean a lot.
--The Robo-Pirate
Thursday, October 04, 2007
My Life has Turned into a Dorm Room from 1997, Minus the Bob Marley Poster and Curlies All Over the Floor.
Let’s see here. Last post prior to the last post was in uh… February. Pretty terrible. You didn’t miss much, though. Band played some shows, I saw Valient Thorr a couple more times, got a new amp, my brother moved in with me…
Obviously, that last one is sort of a big development.
If you dropped by this spot often enough, you might dimly recall that my brother, who I’ll call Junior, was going to college and playing water polo (or wasserball, in German, apparently). Well, that didn’t work out. If you believe that marijuana (or, let’s face it, booze) is not a gateway drug, well, I have some bad news about the tooth fairy, too. Long story short, he moved here in August in order to grow up a little (and by a little I mean a lot) and get back on track. Results, as they say, may vary.
Now, I don’t care if he smokes weed. We’ve all been 19, and some of us have clung tenaciously to 19 for over a decade. But there’s a line (and not a fine one, I think), between recreation and self-medication. I mean, yeah he’s working two jobs and he’s sort of figuring out that life for most people is not an episode of Entourage. But the one-dimensionality of it all is wearing pretty thin. I don’t know. I hate saying that I took him in, because it makes him sound like he was some sort of junkie everyone had given up on, which wasn’t really the case. I suggested he move in with me so he could get a taste of living on one’s own, and how it sucks when you have to work crap jobs in order to barely have enough to pay rent and fill up your gas tank. And more than that, our parents needed a break.
He’s doing okay. I think he’s learning a little about gratitude (which in my mind has been the most egregious offense to our folks—he treated them like ass in exchange for free room and board, car insurance, a cell phone, etc. etc. etc.). And moreover, he’s a good kid with a good heart. I feel bad for being hard on him. I just don’t want him to echo the same mistakes I did. And he’s putting down the bong (or rather, leaving it alone) more and more.
What I was initially worried about when he moved here was not having his head in the proverbial clouds. It was him getting depressed and lonely because we are ten years apart and I don’t know too many people under 21. Fortunately, he met some kids at one of our shows with similar interests, and now I routinely come home to an apartment full of 19 year olds. This is good and bad. On the upside, he has people to hang out with, and they’re pretty cool kids. Junior and his new buds smoke Marlboros and what, if I had to guess by the smell, might very well be dirty diapers. I’ve never been a gourmet when it comes to dope, but whatever they’re buying is definitely shitty. They also play a lot of video games, which as Jackie pointed out, is adorable. Prior to getting Xbox Live, this was Mario Kart and Goldeneye (Junior is, without a shred of irony or kitsch, an old-skool gamer, which is one of the many things I love about him—in fact, he is almost completely devoid of irony. This is a subset of his personal naïveté, a character trait that is simultaneously endearing and worrisome). Now they stay up until 4am playing Halo 3. And this is what's annoying, coming home yet again to a bunch of kids who don't have to get up and go to work.
In the latter activity, I wish I could hang with them. If not for the ol’ dayjob, I’d love to stay up drinking beer and shooting red or blue iterations of Master Chief with Junior and his friends. But I can’t, on account of the frustrating advance of adulthood. And this is currently the big sticking point between him and me.
For several years, my mom has complained that Junior “rats around all night.” And I never thought it was a big deal until I discovered that he slept in until the mid afternoon because he’d been up until four doing whatever the fuck he does. I don’t care about the staying up late. But I’ve been of the mind that the price for staying up late having fun is suffering through the morning of the following day. Even on weekends, I am out of bed before noon, and usually I’m out of bed before 11. And this also was the case during college, when I had marginal jobs and no places to be. Yet Junior has an entirely different philosophy. And so we go round and round; I fulminate and sermonize, he makes promises, and then when he gets up an hour before he has to go to work in the afternoon, I shake my head and think up a big sarcastic speech to deliver the next time we have some time together. Repeat. I can’t say that he’s as lazy as he used to be, but the constant sleeping still pisses me off to no end. And yes, I’ve considered that he’s depressed, especially when you couple the sleeping with a constant cannaboid fog. But lying in bed in hot bedroom that smells like burned Pampers is no way to pull yourself out of a funk.
Still, the whole process seems to be moving forward. He owes me money, and I’m being a jerk about it, and when he can’t afford to buy crappy shwag maybe then he’ll really get what I was talking about when I said, “my life really isn’t as big a party as you think it is.”
And then, what would be really great, is if I could start to feel more like a big brother than a parent.
--The Robo-Pirate
Obviously, that last one is sort of a big development.
If you dropped by this spot often enough, you might dimly recall that my brother, who I’ll call Junior, was going to college and playing water polo (or wasserball, in German, apparently). Well, that didn’t work out. If you believe that marijuana (or, let’s face it, booze) is not a gateway drug, well, I have some bad news about the tooth fairy, too. Long story short, he moved here in August in order to grow up a little (and by a little I mean a lot) and get back on track. Results, as they say, may vary.
Now, I don’t care if he smokes weed. We’ve all been 19, and some of us have clung tenaciously to 19 for over a decade. But there’s a line (and not a fine one, I think), between recreation and self-medication. I mean, yeah he’s working two jobs and he’s sort of figuring out that life for most people is not an episode of Entourage. But the one-dimensionality of it all is wearing pretty thin. I don’t know. I hate saying that I took him in, because it makes him sound like he was some sort of junkie everyone had given up on, which wasn’t really the case. I suggested he move in with me so he could get a taste of living on one’s own, and how it sucks when you have to work crap jobs in order to barely have enough to pay rent and fill up your gas tank. And more than that, our parents needed a break.
He’s doing okay. I think he’s learning a little about gratitude (which in my mind has been the most egregious offense to our folks—he treated them like ass in exchange for free room and board, car insurance, a cell phone, etc. etc. etc.). And moreover, he’s a good kid with a good heart. I feel bad for being hard on him. I just don’t want him to echo the same mistakes I did. And he’s putting down the bong (or rather, leaving it alone) more and more.
What I was initially worried about when he moved here was not having his head in the proverbial clouds. It was him getting depressed and lonely because we are ten years apart and I don’t know too many people under 21. Fortunately, he met some kids at one of our shows with similar interests, and now I routinely come home to an apartment full of 19 year olds. This is good and bad. On the upside, he has people to hang out with, and they’re pretty cool kids. Junior and his new buds smoke Marlboros and what, if I had to guess by the smell, might very well be dirty diapers. I’ve never been a gourmet when it comes to dope, but whatever they’re buying is definitely shitty. They also play a lot of video games, which as Jackie pointed out, is adorable. Prior to getting Xbox Live, this was Mario Kart and Goldeneye (Junior is, without a shred of irony or kitsch, an old-skool gamer, which is one of the many things I love about him—in fact, he is almost completely devoid of irony. This is a subset of his personal naïveté, a character trait that is simultaneously endearing and worrisome). Now they stay up until 4am playing Halo 3. And this is what's annoying, coming home yet again to a bunch of kids who don't have to get up and go to work.
In the latter activity, I wish I could hang with them. If not for the ol’ dayjob, I’d love to stay up drinking beer and shooting red or blue iterations of Master Chief with Junior and his friends. But I can’t, on account of the frustrating advance of adulthood. And this is currently the big sticking point between him and me.
For several years, my mom has complained that Junior “rats around all night.” And I never thought it was a big deal until I discovered that he slept in until the mid afternoon because he’d been up until four doing whatever the fuck he does. I don’t care about the staying up late. But I’ve been of the mind that the price for staying up late having fun is suffering through the morning of the following day. Even on weekends, I am out of bed before noon, and usually I’m out of bed before 11. And this also was the case during college, when I had marginal jobs and no places to be. Yet Junior has an entirely different philosophy. And so we go round and round; I fulminate and sermonize, he makes promises, and then when he gets up an hour before he has to go to work in the afternoon, I shake my head and think up a big sarcastic speech to deliver the next time we have some time together. Repeat. I can’t say that he’s as lazy as he used to be, but the constant sleeping still pisses me off to no end. And yes, I’ve considered that he’s depressed, especially when you couple the sleeping with a constant cannaboid fog. But lying in bed in hot bedroom that smells like burned Pampers is no way to pull yourself out of a funk.
Still, the whole process seems to be moving forward. He owes me money, and I’m being a jerk about it, and when he can’t afford to buy crappy shwag maybe then he’ll really get what I was talking about when I said, “my life really isn’t as big a party as you think it is.”
And then, what would be really great, is if I could start to feel more like a big brother than a parent.
--The Robo-Pirate
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Would you guys just stick to conspicuous consumption and hos, please?
I'm in week two of my attempt to shrink my beer gut. I've been eating much better (a lot of shrimp, beans and trips to this vegan restaurant), and since the 6th, I've had little more than a couple beers and a few shots of rum. This is in tandem with speedwalking for an hour every day (except for yesterday, due to MLK Day closing a lot of stuff down) at the gym.
As such, I've started watching TV again.
Now this is not to say that I am one of those effete, artistic people who proudly proclaim how they don't watch television. As proof, below is a short list of my favorite TV shows of all time:
G.I. JOE
Roseanne
The Cosby Show
Jeopardy
The Simpsons
Futurama
King of the Hill
Entourage
Firefly (though sadly, I never watched it on TV)
Heroes
In Search Of... (that show with Leonard Nimoy talking about mysteries such as Stonehenge and Shatner's hairpiece--heyo!)
See? There are eleven shows there! So I like TV. I just that I don't have cable and my reception is bad. But since the gym is on TCU's cable network, I end up watching about an hour of TV a day.
Mostly, I watch the news or Simpsons/King of the Hill reruns. If there is a compelling car-rebuild, I flip between Pimp My Ride. On Sunday, I was lucky enough to find Sinbad and That One Time When He Looked for Fabulous Treasure While Fighting Awesome Ray-Harryhausen-Monsters on Turner Classic Movies. This was especially great, because TCM doesn't run commericials during their features (I think--I haven't had cable for a couple years now). Typically, I stay away from music videos,though; this has a little bit to do with the artists but a lot more to do with the fact that it's mostly hip hop videos and hip hop videos are almost universally similar and dumb.
As a case in point, I watched the video for "Cupid's Chokehold," the new single from Gym Class Heroes. Now I like Gym Class Heroes. It's mostly clever hip-hop made for Fall Out Boy fans, which I am not, but whatever. They're cool. And the song is fine. It's basically a grass-is-greener-as-relating-to-girlfriends public service announcement, but the video bothered me because it features perhaps the most irritating trope in the entire history of rap and hip hop videos. I'm talking about the totally lame old white guy trying to prove otherwise.
In this case, the Totally Lame Old White Guy is represented in the visual narrative by the MC Travis McCoy's flashy new girlfriend's (not the original, dependable one he reunites with fifty seconds later) rich, white, turtleneck-and-blazer-wearing father. The poor guy, who looks a little bit like Marvin, Vince's accountant on Entourage, is sitting there having to pretend to like with this pierced-faced, parka wearing, hip hop guy dating his daughter. All he really wants to do is enjoy his martini. And then Travis's boys come in, and they're of course loud and disruptive, and the poor Totally Lame Old White Guy grimaces, and the music switches to some freestyling and beat boxing. But then, when the music switches back, Totally Lame Old White Guy is irrhythmically nodding to the mad beats.
Old Rich White guys aren't that funny, and they're even less funny while trying to be anything other than old, rich and white. In fact, they're really more like the enemy of everyone, from golf caddies to goonies to pants-peeingly hilarious rappers. They are a joke that's been tired at least as long as the old lady mewling out "Rapper's Delight" in The Wedding Singer.
I'm just saying is all.
--The Robo-Pirate
As such, I've started watching TV again.
Now this is not to say that I am one of those effete, artistic people who proudly proclaim how they don't watch television. As proof, below is a short list of my favorite TV shows of all time:
G.I. JOE
Roseanne
The Cosby Show
Jeopardy
The Simpsons
Futurama
King of the Hill
Entourage
Firefly (though sadly, I never watched it on TV)
Heroes
In Search Of... (that show with Leonard Nimoy talking about mysteries such as Stonehenge and Shatner's hairpiece--heyo!)
See? There are eleven shows there! So I like TV. I just that I don't have cable and my reception is bad. But since the gym is on TCU's cable network, I end up watching about an hour of TV a day.
Mostly, I watch the news or Simpsons/King of the Hill reruns. If there is a compelling car-rebuild, I flip between Pimp My Ride. On Sunday, I was lucky enough to find Sinbad and That One Time When He Looked for Fabulous Treasure While Fighting Awesome Ray-Harryhausen-Monsters on Turner Classic Movies. This was especially great, because TCM doesn't run commericials during their features (I think--I haven't had cable for a couple years now). Typically, I stay away from music videos,though; this has a little bit to do with the artists but a lot more to do with the fact that it's mostly hip hop videos and hip hop videos are almost universally similar and dumb.
As a case in point, I watched the video for "Cupid's Chokehold," the new single from Gym Class Heroes. Now I like Gym Class Heroes. It's mostly clever hip-hop made for Fall Out Boy fans, which I am not, but whatever. They're cool. And the song is fine. It's basically a grass-is-greener-as-relating-to-girlfriends public service announcement, but the video bothered me because it features perhaps the most irritating trope in the entire history of rap and hip hop videos. I'm talking about the totally lame old white guy trying to prove otherwise.
In this case, the Totally Lame Old White Guy is represented in the visual narrative by the MC Travis McCoy's flashy new girlfriend's (not the original, dependable one he reunites with fifty seconds later) rich, white, turtleneck-and-blazer-wearing father. The poor guy, who looks a little bit like Marvin, Vince's accountant on Entourage, is sitting there having to pretend to like with this pierced-faced, parka wearing, hip hop guy dating his daughter. All he really wants to do is enjoy his martini. And then Travis's boys come in, and they're of course loud and disruptive, and the poor Totally Lame Old White Guy grimaces, and the music switches to some freestyling and beat boxing. But then, when the music switches back, Totally Lame Old White Guy is irrhythmically nodding to the mad beats.
Old Rich White guys aren't that funny, and they're even less funny while trying to be anything other than old, rich and white. In fact, they're really more like the enemy of everyone, from golf caddies to goonies to pants-peeingly hilarious rappers. They are a joke that's been tired at least as long as the old lady mewling out "Rapper's Delight" in The Wedding Singer.
I'm just saying is all.
--The Robo-Pirate
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