Bourne Again

My friend Natalie asked me to tape her sketch comedy show, "Mass Hysteria" Friday night, and so I showed up with my camera and tripod slung across my back like an A/V assassin. The show was fun and hopefully I kept everything in focus enough to produce an entertaining and instructive 30 minutes. Instructive because she, her cast mate Vinney and her director will be reviewing the DVD tonight. In order to get the disc in her hands, I made arrangements to meet her mid-day by her office. Natalie, being by far the funnier of the two of us, joked that we should call it vague names like "the stuff" and not look each other in the eye when we handed it off. Since I'd just watched "The Bourne Ultimatum," I was more than game, and planned for a full scale police chase across LaSalle and into the subway tunnels. As evidenced by this photo, I wore gloves to prevent fingerprints, and disguised my hair using a special graying formula that, used properly, takes years to put in. When I got close, unable to trust voice communications (okay, I was having problems with my cell phone), I texted Natalie, and hid behind a light post.

Well, imagine my disappointment when after handing it over, no sirens went off, and we wound up chatting about the show and how dumb it is when people tell you to do two things at once and, when you ask which is the highest priority, respond with, "They're BOTH my highest priority." Since my deep cover continues to be successful, I will retain the identity of "Matt Larsen," a person who does not know karate, or car-fu, and who, when surprised, tends to scream like a nine year old girl. I do, however, make really great stuffed peppers.

Dangerously great.

Heart Model

Yesterday, I drove to the suburbs so my heart could audition for a modeling gig.

You heard me.

A couple of years ago, I learned from my friend Shad that the companies that manufacture ultrasound scanning machines periodically hold trade shows to sell their machines to the doctors, hospitals and Tom Cruises of the world. At the conferences, they employ tall, fit men for the simple expedient that there are fewer layers of flesh between paddle and the organs. The job of the models is to lay there and be scanned, and, by the way, not talk. It sounded too close to my ideal job of getting paid to eat to pass up, and, when Shad's agency called to offer me a position, I happily accepted. What I didn't know at the time, though, was that I didn't have the job yet. They were actually giving me a chance to audition for the part, in the middle of a conference. More challenging, I couldn't get into the conference until someone from inside it let me inside. Surprisingly, it gets worse. I was not the only person trying out. Being a nice guy, I let the other guy go first, taking the one badge that was available and heading inside. Outside, I waited. And waited.

Turned out, the guy went in there and said I never showed. The machine scanners pretty much just needed whoever turned up first, and, because I was a nice guy, I lost out. The agency took a little pity on me, and paid me a token amount just for showing up and getting dumped on, but it was still a major blow to my finances to miss out on that kind of opportunity.

When the same agency called again, I took it with a grain of salt. I drove out to the suburban office still carrying a little baggage in my heart, which I hoped they would detect.

It came as no surprise that the security girl at the front had no idea what to do with me. I came with a contact name and a phone number, and they still managed to bungle it. A gentleman named Dave came out, shook my hand, and guided me to a room just off the reception area where they had a machine set up. He apologized for the chilly room and the chillier ultrasound gel, had me peel up my shirt and started scanning my abdomen. At that point, I probably should have asked more questions about why he was scanning my belly instead of my heart but, hey, I'd never gotten one of these done before. It tickled. Like a fifties housewife, I lay back and counted ceiling tiles. He complimented me on my pancreas, which, I was told, had a nice tail. He was also impressed that I had come without eating breakfast, since it left my gallbladder full of gastric juice and prevented pockets of gas from bouncing back to the ultrasound paddle and ruining the image.

Flattered into silence about the heart scan I'd been promised, I said I rarely ate breakfast. Dave continued on, noting one healthy kidney and the other, both in the right place. (Apparently, unbeknown to the owners, kidneys may or may not rise to their proper positions; one man Dave had scanned, a prisoner at a facility in Joliet, found out inadvertently that he had what was called a pelvic kidney. Mine was fine.) At some point, he showed the image of my heart, and I relaxed a bit. What I knew about ultrasound was confined to friends' pictures of their unborn children--"Skeletor babies" they call them--and Dave seemed pretty knowledgeable.

Did I mention that while all of this was happening, caterers were setting up for a meal?

Finally, a woman came in and started comparing names to lists. When she couldn't find mine, she realized I was with the OTHER unit, for cardiology, and I was politely asked to wait once more in the lobby. Dave seemed vaguely sad that he had learned how to operate the machine on me and would have to soldier on without, but another model was there and more than willing to help calibrate. I went back to the lobby, to sit and ponder the irony.

Eventually, I noticed a minor hubbub at the check in desk. I walked over, remembering the penalty one pays for timidity, and was rewarded when I looked at the name badge of the woman there and saw my contact. This was it! There was another heart model there, also named Matt, and if I hadn't come by when I did, I might have been sitting on that couch still. Luckily, they took us both into a different, less chilly room, where they gently scanned our hearts and noted the results on a piece of paper. As a bonus, the woman who scanned me also did my carotid artery, so by mid-morning I'd had everything from neck to belly button scanned and logged. I joked with her that I'd hoped Dave did a good job cleaning off the ultrasound gel, lest the cardiology folks get jealous. I was met with weak laughter. What can I say? I'm a heart model, not a comedian.

My telekinetic wife

Okay, I guess you could argue she was having a bad hair day. Or maybe the atmosphere was charged up just prior to a thunderstorm. Maybe she just walked too fast across the carpet.

But I'm still sure we never should have let the government experiment on her using the same drugs they used to create Project: Akira. That was just one of our bad ideas. We probably shouldn't have bought that motorcycle, either. It just wasn't in our budget.

I knew we never should have moved to Neo Tokyo.

(Hop over to Being Brandi to see the original.)

Link to AKIRA!

Babyshop

With apologies to dearest friends Clair and Shane, I am posting this adorable little throwback to 1998 with an animated GIF of their son, who is adorable even as he gazes upon you with the intensity of Goldfinger. A site I stumbled upon last week offered up fake 3d images created with animated GIFs shown at slightly different angles. It tricked the brain into seeing depth. I wondered if I could do the same using our friends' baby as a test subject. I think he made it through okay, except Blogger seems to have stripped out the animation. So it goes...

Next baby test: the Milgram experiment.

It's St. Patrick's Day and it's no joke...

Just like the joke goes*, it's Saint Patrick's Day and we really did get patio furniture. We had to travel to two different Targets this weekend to find what we were looking for: a love seat glider plus ottoman. Here it is, weatherproof and everything. Doesn't it look simply lovely? Since stores nowadays don't actually trust you to be able to get the thing you're purchasing, we looked around the outdoor furniture section, looking fora Target team member, but apparently the humanity-reducing plague struck there first, because there were none to be found. (Brandi and I are robots, and therefore immune. Thanks for asking.) We then made the mistake of going to the front of the store, where we found a cluster of red-shirted Target team members and one slightly-less-red-shirted, harried Target team member. This turned out to be a manager who, when we asked about the lovely outdoor love seat, grew irate that nobody was on call in the section we had come from, then grew more irate that the item we wanted was out of stock in the store room. He apologized profusely, after reaming out his underlings over his headset, and offered us two alternate Targets.

On a whim, we headed to the northernmost Target, at Logan and Elston, in part because we were already driving that way to avoid the drunken spectacle following the parade on Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. At first, it seemed like they didn't have it there, either, as the team member we approached began using stockroom lingo that fooled nobody (and certainly not two intelligent, virus-immune robots). "It's a ghost," he said into his walkie talkie. Then, following another search, the love seat was found, sans ottoman, which would have to come from the warehouse. It was a shock to find out that Target stores are that large and yet much of the inventory must come from a warehouse EVEN LARGER THAN THAT. Did we want to come back? (No, not really.) Wait. It would only take ten minutes or so. Did we want to wait? (Yes, okay...)

When we brought the box out to the car, we knew we would have another problem. The team member who helped us (our fifth or sixth of the day; apparently, buying furniture, like raising a child, takes a village) thought we could just shove it in the back of our Scion xA, but, having moved 12,544 metric tons of stuff in that car, I knew exactly what would and would not fit. Also, as Brandi pointed out, the box was clearly larger than the opening. Still, he thought it worth a try. No go. So we pulled the love seat out of the box, and, lo and behold, everything fit.

I told our helper, "Give that box to a kid who wants to build a fort." Probably, it got crushed. Hopefully, it was empty.

We are finally ready to celebrate spring in style.

* Classic ComedySportz groaner.
Ref: "Hey, Mr. Voice, how are you tonight?"
Mr. Voice: "Oh, I'm okay. There's this Irish guy on my porch who won't leave."
Ref: "Oh, really, who?"
Mr. Voice: "Patty O' Irish Stereotype."

Team Armsen-Larsbruster

My mom called me the other day to let me know that my sister, who ran the Cincinnati Flying Pig half marathon last year, would be doing the full marathon this year. I almost cheered. My sister is a full-time mom of three who has hardly enough time during the day to take a breath. For many years, while the kids were very small, she hardly had time to walk, much less train for a marathon. Brandi and I asked her to stand in our wedding about a month before she found out she was pregnant with child number three. My sister had a little more than eleven months to be pregnant, get fitted, have a baby, and lose the baby weight to fit the dress again. She did, and it amazes me, and I'm a DUDE.

It amazes me even more that we'll be running this race, kind of together. Heather has a group she runs with, and of course we're at completely different paces, but with any luck afterwards we can get into a fight over who is more sore, and where. She is my sister after all.

What are you doing... Dave?

One of my duties as a network administrator is to set up the videoconferencing equipment for communications between Chicago and Urbana. In other offices, this would be as mundane as turning on a switch and a couple of TVs, laying microphones out on a table, and bidding everyone a good session as I walk out the door, humming to myself and counting the days to my retirement. At least, that's how it would work in the magical fantasy office that I've built out of the sad reality of our Rice Building office. For starters, the machine, a Polycom ViewStation FX, is at least a decade old, probably older, having sat in the Office of the President's conference room for that long before being shipped to us in a big cardboard box as part of a spring cleaning program that netted them two flat screens and us this machine plus two CRT televisions only slightly lighter than a Volkswagen Beetle. The TVs perch precariously atop steel carts, waiting, I believe, for the smallest tremble to hurl themselves face-first into the floor, where their weight will carry them, China Syndrome-like, to the center of the earth while the rest of us scramble to get the hell out of the way. For obvious reasons, we don't move them around very much.

The ViewStation, which is basically a mysterious streamlined base station with a disturbingly HAL-like eye poking out of the top and a few triangular microphones emerging from the station like Martian tentacles, also acts just like a Martian in that it's mostly dead or at best hibernating in anticipation of warmer, wetter climes. The on/off switch at the back works about 50% of the time, resulting in an amber light at the front of the unit. DO NOT BE FOOLED by its yellow glow! Anything short of solid green means the machine is cycling endlessly through its "clicking phase," a term I just pulled out of my ass to describe the faint humming emanating from inside of the plastic beast. Sometimes, in its cleverness, the amber/green diode won't light at all, then suddenly blink amber a couple of times, and shut off again. To solve this, I shut it off and turned it on again, repeatedly. Sure, occasionally, I would experiment with holding the only other button on the right side of the machine, but it usually amounts to nothing. I usually start off with a half an hour to do a setup that should take less than five minutes. As the failures mount, I start to hit that power button with increasing desperation. My boss usually shows up about five minutes before the scheduled meeting. She has less interest in videoconferencing than I do, and sometimes offers to hook up the speaker phone, but usually she makes fun of me first. It's hard to sit there, moronically hitting the power button over and over again, waiting desperately for the Polycom logo on the TV, and argue that I'm doing the best job I can.

For a long time I thought it just hated me, or I was as retarded as my sister thought I was growing up. But, no. Last month, I found a post on older Polycom equipment, and the silver soldering they used to connect components. Over time, the silver corrodes, leaving an insulating surface, and the machine stops working. They've since switched to gold, which is great, but they're expensive as hell, which is not. So, I continue to sit there, at first confidently, but slowly moving into begging and eventually all-out prayer to the machine god to stop hitting the snooze button and get to work. It's only a matter of time before I punch that thing in its goddamn HAL 9000 eye and set up the speaker phone. Which is also Polycom, but it works.

Looking at the world through rose-colored...

I wore glasses to work today. It's been ages since I wore them last, and my co-worker Scott observed, "You just don't see glasses that big anymore." True, I'm desperately out of fashion. I got these glasses a little bit less than a decade ago, when I was at work and started getting an ocular migraine. At first, it looked like a tiny spot of static in the corner of my eye, then it began to spread, taking over my right eye and the periphery of my left. Then the headache hit me. Apparently, the optometrist told me, I was compensating for 20/25 vision in my right eye with the muscles around my lens, which had gotten fatigued and decided to stab me through my nerve endings. So I bought glasses, nice ones at the time, ending a two-decade era in which I also wore glasses, but fake ones, since I had 20/20 vision in both eyes.

Now I'm older, but apparently my eyes aren't getting significantly worse, despite the fact that I a) read pretty much all the time, b) work on computers, c) draw with my face about 2" away from the paper. I wonder if the extra muscle strength is due to the fact that I punish them, and if one day they won't just pop out in search for a better owner, like pugs, except without the smashed face.

I never noticed it until now, but this face looks an awful lot like my "Sling Blade" pose. Some call it a kaiser blade. Mmmn-hnnh.

Moo

I got a call yesterday that a telecommunications company is holding a look-see audition, and would I be so kind as to attend? Since I have a pretty paltry acting resume at the moment, and can always use the money the gigs bring, I excused myself from my day job and headed over to the photography studio. It was pretty far west, so I had to take the train to a bus. A couple of other riders, it turned out, were headed to the same audition. I should have realized. Most people riding the CTA in the middle of the day don't bother looking too glammed up. When we got to the door, the four of us went inside to a proper cattle call.

Times past, I've gone to auditions and been pleased to find that the casting people grouped me among the "attractive, tall, full-head-of-hair, Caucasian males," which flatters me even as it assures me I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting the part. Face facts: I'm mostly a "comedic type" with a decent, if not 0.8% body fat, physique. They come taller, broader-shouldered, lots less gray. Whatever group they add me to, it's usually pretty narrow. For a photo call, I come in, fill out a card with availability, sizes (I'm never sure of "shirt"--medium? Do I need to know my arm lengths? Chest? Neck? Taper?), conflicts, get set up, flirt with the camera under bright lights and flashes, then go. This, by the way, makes me seem a lot more prolific than I am. This happens every couple of months at best. Acting for me is a part, part, part, part time job. I usually can get away with sneaking out on a lunch hour. Once, I went out while it was raining heavily and convinced my visiting boss that the massive
wetness staining the shoulders of my blue dresa shirt was part of the shirt's pattern, and that I hadn't gone anywhere. I got that part, perhaps due to sheer brazenness.

Today, though, the place is packed. People, pretty people of all stripes, ages and ethnicities, sit on every available horizontal surface. I don't know how I'll make it back to the office in time for
an early afternoon meeting, or the audition at my agent's offices afterwards. Really, this kind of logjam only happens once every couple of months. I'm happy that I was honest, this time at least.

My smiling headshot looks up at me, mocking, from my knee. I got a seat by default, in the same meritless way you get one on the CTA: someone got up right behind me. A slight awkwardness as he came back afterwards and asked for his coat, which I was slouching against. He held no grudges. In fact, seeing me type on my iPhone, he held out his own and said, "You should watch out for those soft cases. A friend of mine had one and dropped his phone, and his headphones stopped working." I pointed out that my silicone case helped me run with my phone. "Cool," he said. Neither of us were auditioning for AT&T. Potentially awkward? Only if they catch me!

Does it count as a white lie if you make money off it?

Hardened Criminal

I moved a lot of stuff this weekend, wearing nothing when I should probably have invested 1.5 seconds putting work gloves on. My hands are a mess of nicks, scratches and splinters in need of pulling. Still, looking haggard in my hands doesn't bug me as long as you leave alone my pretty, pretty face.

That ended last night.

We went to bed early, around 9:30, still groggy from weekend drama. The cats, as usual, found warm spots on top of the covers and we cuddled up. Rio, our orange demon furball, sometimes feels unsatisfied with the top of the covers, and will climb underneath in order to snuggle closer to our--to her--giant, warm, pillow soft and pajama-clad bodies. Most nights, it's like wrapping your arms around the ideal stuffed animal. She goes to sleep. We go to sleep. At some point in the night, she gets hungry, bored or rolled-over, and clambers out with tabby stealth. Not last night. Something in our configuration upset the cat, and she climbed out hastily, pausing to land a back claw directly in my temple.


"Are you okay?" Brandi asked.

"I think I'm bleeding," I said. Awake, now, and no longer warmly cradled in the arms of sleep, I went to the bathroom and peroxided my face. It could have been worse and no malice was intended, so I shrugged it off and went back to bed. It took another 45 minutes to get to sleep, then my dreams were weird, and I got up very early in the morning to eat Girl Scout cookies. I wish they had healing properties. If I'm 50 pounds too heavy to run the marathon in May, Thin Mints are to blame.

Wilmonts Are Go!

Adding to the drama of the weekend, our delightful friends Clair and Shane introduced us to the most marvelous, and certainly the youngest fellows it has been our privilege to meet, their son. Though a quiet, studious type, it is clear from the full head of blond hair and the fisticuffs maneuver which involves raising his hands to calculatedly cover his face that he has great potential for rogueishness. That, and the fact that he is, as his father says, "The most beautiful baby in the world. I'm not kidding. Absolutely beautiful."

Shane also said of his son, "NOT to eat."

Plans to build my candy home proceed apace.

Congratulations to Shane and Clair. Thank you for letting me hold "DC."

The cowboy rode yesterday and it was a hell of a ride. Ryan Dee Gilmour and I started moving props and the set out of my basement at 3:50 AM Sunday morning, and worked until 7:00 PM. The cast was great. Director Kevin Chatham kept his cool all day long and took in stride the two parking tickets the city of Chicago issued his car, several of which came minutes before his meter ran out. Some of them run fast, I don't doubt it.

Typically, we ran very behind at first, caught up with ourselves, got ambitious, ran behind again and several things failed completely. I beat myself up that I thought cranberry juice would work as a substitute for real fake blood. It just ran too clear on camera. Those will have to be re-shot, in close-up, with the sets we saved, unless people accept that being shot results in a massive loss of lymphatic fluid. Perhaps it's innovative?

At any rate, many thanks to the talented cast, my patient and lovely wife, and chief set designer, architect and builder, Heather Elam, who amazingly juggled time between job, partner and young daughter Daphne to do something nearly impossible.

I'll post more as we near a final product.

Busted

So, this post may appear very derivative, especially if you like me are an avid reader of the blog of Tim Ryder, but I'm going to take part in a very special forward, called the 123 Meme. The rules:

123 Meme Rules: (1) Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating! (2) Turn to page 123. (3) Find the first 5 sentences. (4) Post the next 3 sentences. (5) Tag 5 people.

Now, here's where my nerdiness is revealed. Because I have the option of either: a) MCSA/MCSE Exam 70-290 Training Kit: Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment, or b) an ebook by Charles Stross called Scratch Monkey that I've been reading on my iPhone. I'm rejecting choice (a) because its pages are numbered in maddening non-linear chapter-pages, meaning there is no page 123, nor is there a 1-23 because chapter 1 ends at page 22. Other chapters might go as high as 60. Also, who really wants to read sentences like, "The DSADD command, introduced in Chapter 2, is used to add objects to Active Directory." Boooooring.

So here's Charles Stross, who is anything but...

Oshi came to her feet suddenly, felt her blood pressure drop and blipped her adrenal glands into play -- aren't military bionics wonderful -- and looked round. Green contours of light tracked through every surface, revealing and concealing the secret life that surrounded them. She pursed her lips and whistled, experimentally; in one corner a cobweb flickered lucent blue.

Now comes the viral part. I'm tagging Brandi, Ryan Dee Gilmour, Mom-in-law Eileen, Dave Maxwell, and Shane Wilson, to hopefully kickstart him off this blogging dry spell that recently culminated in the birth of his delightful son, Dashiell.

Luck to you all.