Archives for the month of: January, 2006

I blame Khaled for pulling me into this meme craze.

  • Bowl­ing Cen­ter Ser­vice Engi­neer: I spit-polished bowl­ing shoes (okay, maybe not), prepped lanes for play (say that ten times slow) and basi­cally stood behind the counter at a bowl­ing cen­ter pre­tend­ing to actu­ally know what I was doing.
  • Retail Mon­key: I think we’ve all done this at one time or another. For me, it was work­ing at a local “Orga­nize Everything”-type store. At one point I was actu­ally design­ing clos­ets using an in-house CAD pro­gram, but mostly I was lean­ing on a lad­der while tak­ing items from over­stock and shov­ing them onto the shelves.
  • County Worker: At one point in my ever so illus­tri­ous career path I worked for the County Gov­ern­ment as a “Com­mu­nity Ser­vices Assis­tant”, which meant go-for-in-training.
  • Amuse­ment Park Ride Oper­a­tor: I read some­where that Howie Man­del held the cov­eted posi­tion of Ride Oper­a­tor at a Cana­dian amuse­ment park. This was prob­a­bly one of the eas­i­est jobs I’ve ever had in my life. It was part-time and con­sisted of push­ing a green but­ton to start the ride and a red one to end it.

Four movies I can watch over and over

  • Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan: For one, it’s Spiel­berg, one of the only direc­tors of whom I have the utter­most respect for. That and it’s a World War 2 movie. For some rea­son I’m drawn to that era and the war which defined it.
  • You’ve Got Mail: Admit­tedly, this shouldn’t be here, but it is, so let me explain. There are only a hand­ful of chick flicks that I actu­ally like and this is one of them. Oddly, when­ever it’s played exces­sively on HBO, no mat­ter how many times I’ve seen it to date, I’m right there with a bowl full of popcorn.
  • E.T.: This is my favorite movie of all time. It’s got an alien who gets drunk on screen, hides among a col­lec­tion of dolls and forms a friend­ship with an awk­ward kid. What’s not to like?
  • Back to the Future (1−3): I snuck the sequels in there just because I enjoy them as much as the orig­i­nal. Another one of the my favorites due to the theme of time travel and the poten­tial to change the past and future.

Four places I have lived

  • River­side, CA
  • East Moline, IL
  • Rochester, NY
  • … and that’s it.

Four TV shows I love to watch

  • Ever­wood
  • Lost
  • Smal­l­ville (when it’s more about Super­man and less about being a soap)
  • Scrubs (frick!)

Four places I have been on vacation

  • Canada
  • Mex­ico
  • Bishop, CA
  • Morro Bay, CA

Four web­sites I visit daily

Four of my favourite foods

I love pasta. That’s about it.

Four places I would rather be right now

  • New Zealand
  • Italy
  • Aus­tralia
  • Nor­way (uff da!)

Four peo­ple I’ll pass this along to

As I’ve done in the past when I’ve expired my resources or just don’t know who to send it to, feel free to steal this meme.

There’s been some­thing on my mind lately and it now feels like a good time to finally reveal that to you, with­out feel­ing com­pletely embarassed. There’s noth­ing quite like a nag­ging thought, jump­ing up and down in your mind like that ener­getic class­mate who real­ized the answer just before you did, remem­ber that kid? Fran­ti­cally wav­ing his hand, while try­ing to main­tain a sense of men­tal sta­bil­ity, yeah, that’s how I feel right now so let me just spill it.

We need another 80’s movie.

I know, you’re prob­a­bly think­ing to your­self right now that I’ve com­pletely lost it. After sev­eral weeks of silence, my mind has come to a screech­ing halt and I’ve crashed landed in Crazy-go-nutsville, Pop­u­la­tion: Me.

It’s pos­si­ble that I might’ve agreed with you prior to my writ­ing this, but at the moment I’ve con­vinced myself that this might save Hol­ly­wood from the mediocre scripts that are some­how green­lighted before some­one real­izes that Wil Fer­rel and Ash­ton Kutcher have not only jumped the shark but they are now flee­ing said shark in a fran­tic craze.

Let me break this down into a few thoughts wherein I hope to redeem my reveal­ing this absolutely insane suggestion.

Fea­tures of a Typ­i­cal 80’s Movie

Think back to films like ‘Six­teen Can­dles’, ‘The Goonies’, ‘Back to the Future’, ‘E.T.’, ‘Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off’ and flops like ‘Wil­low’, ‘Howard the Duck’ and those Ewok movies. What did these all have in com­mon, despite awful hair styles, awk­ward act­ing and pseudo-electronic music?

All of the films men­tioned above ulti­mately have that “feel good”, slow-clapping emo­tion that’s hard to repli­cate in mod­ern films of the early-to-mid 90’s and now the 2000’s. I’m sure you’ve seen some extra­or­di­nary films in your life­time which com­pletely changed your per­spec­tive and out­look about the enter­tain­ment indus­try, but why is it that even today we can’t help but quote 80’s films in every­day conversation?

Lost Sin­cer­ity

Do we need to thank the writ­ers of 80’s movies for breath­ing life, albeit sappy life, into the films which we remem­ber? Or, is there some­thing else at work here?

I’ve often thought about the impact 80’s films have had on my life and why I’m con­stantly reflect­ing to an era that many peo­ple are glad is over, but there was a sin­cer­ity that’s miss­ing in recent films and we need that back in order to close the book on a chap­ter of film that never felt resolved.

End of an Era

To me it just kind of abruptly ended with movies like ‘Bat­ter­ies Not Included’, ‘Who Framed Roger Rab­bit’ and ‘UHF’ and to this day I half-expected some­one like Billy Barty or Weird Al to hit a enor­mous golden gong dur­ing a live telethon to mark the end of 80’s enter­tain­ment (Farewell to the 80’s: Celebs on Call) and announce to the world that the cur­tain would be lifted and the spot­light would be shone on films of the new era; the 1990’s.

There was never such an occas­sion. Never a slow clap that would grad­u­ally increase into a full applause with a freeze-framed end­ing cou­pled with the awk­ward laugh that would tran­si­tion to a quick thumbs up from the jock or beauty queen who learned to accept those who were different.

Never once did I hear the likes of Depeche Mode, ZZTop, Ste­vie Ray Vaughan or Oingo Boingo fad­ing slowly away in the back­ground as the lights dimmed and the cur­tains fell mark­ing the end of an era.

Instead, we were lin­ing up for Dances with Wolves and yet another Pauly Shore movie, look­ing for­ward with the movie-going blind­sights on and for­get­ting why 80’s movies were so endear­ing, sen­si­tive, funny, sappy and sin­cere in that “feel good”, slow-clapping kind of way.

We need another 80’s movie.

Zoe, Two Years Old

Even though this is slightly belated con­sid­er­ing your birth­day was on Decem­ber 30th, 2005 thank you for the last two years of absolute joy and remind­ing both your mother and father that a child exists in all of us and all it takes is a small bit of laugh­ter and curios­ity of the unknown.

To all of you who have emailed me or sent a mes­sage via the more tra­di­tional and yet slug­gish snail mail, thank you and yes, I am alive and breath­ing. Let me backpedal about two (or three) weeks ago to fur­ther explain why the dust gath­ered here and god will­ing has “finally” settled.

Around the begin­ning of Decem­ber I was regret­fully let go from my pre­vi­ous posi­tion as a Graphics/Web Designer after three years of a solid work ethic. The rea­son for my pre­vi­ous employer’s deci­sion in let­ting me go had to do with “con­flict of inter­est” and more specif­i­cally the fact I would occas­sion­ally free­lance on the side, some­thing that they were well informed of pre­vi­ously but I always felt it would come back to haunt me and it did.

All said and done, words were spo­ken and a feel­ing of relief was felt on both ends and less than 20 min­utes after being ush­ered into a small meet­ing room I was silently putting my cubi­cle toys into a card­board box, ready for a new adventure.

Here I am, almost three weeks later, work­ing two jobs and enjoy­ing life with a fresh per­spec­tive on the path ahead of me. By day I’m a free­lance designer, cur­rently employed with a 3-month con­tract job on my plate and when the morn­ing sun meets mid­day I’m a “late night envi­ron­men­tal engi­neer” with a local school dis­trict, which really means a second-shift “cleaner” or “janitor”.

It’s truly one of the more inter­est­ing employ­ment dynam­ics I’ve ever expe­ri­enced, con­sid­er­ing that dur­ing the first part of the day I’m design­ing some truly unique and yet chal­leng­ing web projects and when the after­noon rolls around I’m load­ing a jan­i­to­r­ial cart with clean­ing sup­plies and prep­ping myself for rou­tine work that at times gives me that sat­is­fy­ing feel­ing that I’ve accom­plished some­thing. Maybe I’m loopy, but I’m extremely con­tent right now, even if I’m work­ing close to 70 hours a week, on top of doing the young, mar­ried, daddy thing.

Life couldn’t be better.

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