View from the Top

Right now, I'm writing from the top floor of one of America's ugliest pieces of architecture. No, not Anna Nicole Smith's cleavage. Ha ha ha ha ha. No. Ha ha ha ha. Um, seriously, way no. I'm at University Hall setting up AV equipment for my role as technologist for the University of Illinois. Adding to the mystique and glamor of my job: playing chicken and pressing a button when prompted during this morning's presentation. Time to buy a remote for the office, I think.

Still, check out that view. Even the Sears Tower's weird boxy shape looks good measured against the ribbon of highway. I'm lucky I get to have these kinds of views. Even though I'm usually the guy hidden behind the curtain and today was the only guy in the room wearing less than a two piece suit (I had on khakis and my very newest sneakers), and even though I make about a third as much as these guys in a given year, I can still enjoy the view from the top.

Ha ha ha. I had you going for a minute, though, right? She's the dumb playmate who married the millionaire on his deathbed. Ring a bell? A bell that goes, "ha ha ha ha ha"? Okay, whatever.

Go, view.

Mighty Movie Magic - or - I really did believe a man could fly but then it was boring and after a while I was just hungry

I'm hitting the movie theater opening night to confirm or deny Ebert's two star assessment of the alien in blue and red, Superman Returns. Unluckily, work held me until late, so with a two plus hour running time I'm going to be home with my Earthling darling (and occasional Kryptonite, especially when she melts my heart) Brandi. Luckily, I've got a seat at the rail. It's twenty more minutes until they even start rolling the ads and I'm within striking distance of the skinny comic book kid who thinks he's hilarious because he can quote the entire Superman oevre and blend it seamlessly with his infinite Simpsons wisdom. Even his voice sounds like it has braces. Do other people see me like that? I swear all the reference comedy comes from a less arrogant space. Really?

Oh, now he's telling his date (again, really?) that he can show her all his downloaded, pirated movie clips except that she would have to spend the night in his bedroom. Boy, silk gets jealous that he's so smooth.

"I read enough comic books that I've learned something: my life is a comic book..." ==> direct quote

Good gravy, he's talking about and handing out tips on dating now. Apparently, when he starts seeing women, they can't stick to his plan of keeping things casual and they wind up seeing each other every day. He's looking for a middle ground between friends and marriage. Actually, I think he's looking for middle ground between World of Warcraft and Tomb Raider, a mythical paradise that might also include real live girls wearing revealing outfits.

More pearls of wisdom. How can he still be talking such pap? This time it's Miss Manners' guide to the teenage social scene: "I'm sorry, but texting me on the phone is the least-appropriate thing to do." Okay. Somehow, waxing poetic about how awesome he is with women to the woman he's with falls outside of his irony radar.

"I would rather a singer do bad acting than the other way around." Our friend weighing in on the age-old debate of singing versus acting.

"When you talk about puppets, I'm saying to myself, 'You and I miss marionettes...'" I can't even guess at the context.

I understand at last, what makes bullies go nuts around guys like this (me? Less so, now that I work out.) This guy seriously needs to get hit in the face with a dodgeball. Speaking of! ComedySportz held a "Sportz" rehearsal last night where we played, some of us for the first time since middle school humiliation. Yes, people got hit in the face... accidentally, the thrower felt really bad. Yes, I throw ridiculously bad and catch worse. I'm still replaying the movie in my head of the moment when someone in front of me stepped to the left, dodging/revealing a ball too late for me to do anything. Nailed. Someone on my team caught a ball. Back in, I threw a ball. Caught, handily. Out again. Friend, that is the circle of life. The only thing that suxors about it is that I wanted to be so much better at the game. I've spent more than half of my life since training for some sport or another. It should carry over.

Ads have started. Movie ads are looking more like movies, but they still suck. I can see why people want to move the movie back to the living room. It's sort of a reverse Catholic church. (Footnote: in the early days of Christianity, back when it was a flavor of Judaism and a little after, services were held in the home. How much altar do you need to speak to an infinite being who knows your every movement, hears your every thought? It wasn't until the Council of Nicea when St. Nick consolidated power specifically into churches, in the process deciding what exactly was Jesus' mix of god and human. Churches sprang up.) Okay, you probably should punch me in the face now. I deserve it.

AFTERMATH

The move is sawn. Seen. Whatever. It's over.

Funny moments:
1) Between preview and movie, two guys wedge into the two courtesy seats I left between me and the couple next to me. They talk through the entire movie. But that doesn't bother me because...
2) A family sits down in the seats in front of me about two minutes after the movie starts. They obviously have nowhere else to sit. Also important: they're not that into the idea of sitting still and not talking through the movie. I think the youngest slept through the whole thing. I'm not sure the movie is appropriate for the under-six crowd. There probably should be an age cutoff for Kevin Spacey movies. Otherwise I'm worried they're going to change all the packaging to "Se7en": starring THAT GUY from "Superman Returns". No, not the Namibian love child guy. Not the guy with the freckles. Head guy. Now you're talking.

Anyways, they didn't bother me that much because...

3) Some guy next to me wouldn't stop sneezing/coughing and he wouldn't cover his mouth. And any fan of Kevin Spacey movies remembers that moment in "Outbreak" when you follow Ebola-esque germs from cougher to all the other people in the movie theater. Remember? Anyone?

Anyways, that didn't bother me that much either because...

4) The movie deserved two stars, maybe less. Ever have a talented friend take himself way too seriously? He's a good artist but all of a sudden he treats every napkin doodle like the Sistine Chapel? That's this movie. To Brian Singer's credit, I think he faithfully reproduced every iconic Superman comic book moment from 50 years of comics, and that's pretty much every frame, but oh! that dialogue stank. We get that Superman is terse. He's not Spider-Man with a quip for every villain vanquished. He's a little nerdy. But Singer took so many colors away from his word palette that we weren't looking at a barebones black and white so much as just white... like the bread but less filling.

Even worse was the way the powers played out. Perhaps it's five years of Smallville talking, but once you establish limits, even simple ones, like, "Superman can be harmed by and has reduced powers in the proximity of kryptonite" should be abided by. Also, once you have (metaphorically-speaking) fired off a gun in a scene or at least revealed that something is a weapon, leaving it unfired for the remainder of the movie because you want to show the heroism of ordinary people is just hack. Everything becomes a matter of convenience then.

Finally: Kryptonian technology made from crystals? Cool. That it always makes the same crappy seventies chandeliers in small, medium, large and continent-sized? Not so nifty. Also, if water makes it grow, what's it take to make it stop growing? How can Lex chart that? And even if it's growing a new continent on the eastern coast of North America, how does that take away from the coastlines of all the other continents? Is there only so much basalt to go around?

I'd give you the answers, but then I would have to invite you into my bedroom, place of Geek Mystery, and we all know what that can lead to.

Babies? Somehow?

Frankenstein Helps the Plants to Grow

In the foreground: my brandywine tomato plant, raised from seed from a kit bought by my lovely wife, Brandi, and just starting to sprout some serious leaves. I should have tomatoes by, oh, about fall.

But what's this? In the background? Something green and decidedly not leafy! Something with scars at its temple, the strength of many men and the simplicity of a child. Something not alive, but not dead, either, not a Spring but certainly not an Autumn and absolutely out of place with that weird orange and purple jumpsuit. It's... Toy Frankenstein's Monster!

Our downstairs neighbor makes our lawn look like a putting green, but he also gets pretty excited when it comes to garage sales... to the point where he beings home and decorates the yard with creatures like Adam here. Downstairs, we've got robots, gondolas, potted plants, some of which I suspect are weeds that just sprouted in the right place, and of course about forty clocks set to go off every hour, forty-three minutes past the hour.

I'm fine with it all as long as it makes the plants grow. Which, somehow, it does, as evidenced by my amazing, now flowering squash plant:

Switcheroo

It's not funny to me now, but I hope it will be ten years down the line. Work has me switching offices. I work two half time jobs that add up to a full time paycheck. Too bad one of the half time jobs doesn't realize it's half time. I talked to my boss to the problem. I'm being transferred to a new office. Problem solved? Uh, no, because the half my bosses transferred is the easy half. Now I'll be working for an office that I've had the pleasure to support a handful of times over the last couple of years.

This office is trouble.

Put yourself back on the playground. There's a kid sitting on the swings, not swinging, staring at you. You think, "Hey, maybe he thinks I look like someone he knows. He wouldn't want to beat me up. People just don't do that." So you run around with a couple of your friends playing tag. You look up. He's closer. More, the look on his face is one part Freddy Krueger, one part shark maw, frozen mid-bite by the magic of digital video. Someone calls your name. You turn and trip. Was that a leg?

On the way back into class he points you out to his friends. Your velcro wallet goes missing after gym. He drops something nasty and green into your milk at lunchtime. When you complain about it to the teacher, she sits everyone down for a conference and the kid says it was all a big misunderstanding and how a lack of familiarity can turn even friendly faces into scary creatures... in short, all of the crap he's learned to shovel over the years to avoid having to fess up over his bad attitude. At the end of the conference, you shake hands and he smiles just as wide as the teacher wants him to, only you can't: as he shakes your hand he's digging into your wrist with his fingernails.

When you walk home, you realize he lives three doors down from you. His mom and your mom really, really want you to be friends, because then they can send one over to the other's house and halve those pesky babysitting bills.

You don't even know his name and you know it's not going to work. Worse, you feel bad for your mom. Money doesn't grow on trees and you need to get out of the house once in a while.

Yeah, well, it's still not going to work. Can we call it at that?

Not today.

I first found out I would be transferred when my on-site contact told my boss that she didn't like my personality. Sure, sometimes I try to cultivate a hard nosed character on stage, but at work I try to be earnest and interested, if slightly worn out from my extracurriculars. My boss had the answer, and that answer was transfer. I got confused and asked my on-site contact what she meant and she could give me no good answer. When I got upset she said the transfer could happen then (end of February) or now (end of June). I didn't want to leave at all. I picked later.

Well, I thought, maybe I'm not giving them a fair shake. I'll probably like the new office.

No. I did not like the new office. Not at all. I told the outgoing tech support guy about this. He told me why my experience was unusual. See, even though the people I had not liked had behaved badly towards me, misunderstanding me, interrupting when I was trying to explain, sending out emails to complain about the work when I was halfway through and forced to move on because at that point I was supporting three offices while the outgoing tech was on vacation, all of the bad feelings I felt didn't matter because that was them being them. Sure. My point exactly. His advice: don't let it make me act nasty toward them.

I'm a ComedySportz ref. Until you've played target to a houseful of drunken twentysomethings out to prove that they're funnier than the show they paid to see, you don't know the meaning of the word patience.

I know how to take it and smile. It doesn't mean I want to. And just because I can doesn't mean I should, or that anyone should, but since I own my skin, I'm the one who has to look out for it.

I spoke to the on-site contact about establishing parameters of service, things that I can and cannot do. I want to establish to everyone that I am half time and that there will be some times I can't immediately see to their issues because I've got a line of issues as long as my arm on a good day. He said it would undermine my position. I think he's right. I wish it would undermine it. Some offices come to depend on a network admin to the point of addiction, where they stop caring whether they click on an infected file. Who cares when someone else can clean up your mess? Why learn when you've got someone else to do your learning for you? Isn't that what money is FOR?

Bless you, Mr. President.

I've complained a lot lately. It bugs me. Maybe I will like the new job better. Maybe the new kid's not so bad. We both like Spider-Man more than Superman. He stole my super-poseable, but he let me play with his Legos. Sure, it sucks, but patience is its own reward. Besides...

I dragged that Spider-Man through the poison ivy behind the tracks. I hope he puts it in his mouth.

I'm sending out resumes. Today.

Hi, my name is Matt and...

..I once bought a pound of chocolate covered pretzels before seeing a show at Second City. I thought I was going to share.

I ate the entire bag.

..and suddenly knew what it was like to TASTE through TIME.