Soda Craze

Q: How do you fix a really bad week?

A: Watch a movie about someone having an even worse week.

Holy crap.  I knew it was going to be bad, but ‘10,000 B.C.’ is a trainwreck.  It was so horribly, terribly, gloriously bad that I thought I died partway through and went to Hell (and finished watching the movie, because Hell must produce a lot of these types of movies).

I watched most of it with both hands clamped over my mouth so the rest of the theater couldn’t hear my hysterical laughter (resulting in a lot of “Mmf!  Mmph!  Mmph mff mmff!”-type laughter) but at one point, there was a moment so bad that I burst out laughing.  (As did the guy behind me, and the girl he was with whispered very loudly, “Matt, shhh!”  I admit, it would have been kind of a touching scene.  If it wasn’t SO BAD.)  There were a couple of lines where it was like… OK, somebody sat down and wrote this dialogue.  Fair enough.  But then somebody approved it - someone chose not to edit it out - it was given to the actors - and they said it and it was recorded and we’re now watching it.  At any point along that line of events somebody could have just said no.  But here we are.

It also needed more giant killer birds.  “Moa please!”  Ha.

My final comment regards the ending, which was the kind of runny, smelly, silly cheese that the rest of the movie is composed of.  And like everything else that happens, you can tell what’s coming next anywhere from twenty to forty-five minutes in advance.  But still, well worth the free movie ticket.  One and a half stars out of five.

The cognitive-behavioral therapy I’m working through right now is all about memories, bad, the calling up of (and repair of delusional thinking regarding).  One worksheet I had to do the other day was about frustration.  “Describe a time that you felt frustration at a situation (not yourself or another person).”  I was like, Uh, my entire education? But frustration can be entertaining, let’s face it.  (’Night at the Roxbury’!)

My brother and I were talking the other night before he left for the Toronto Design Show, and he brought up this speech-recognition software that a friend of his uses at school because of a learning disability that screws up his understanding of writing (I knew exactly what he was talking about because I used to scribe exams for students with that disability when I volunteered with SSDS), and then he was asking me about old text-to-speech programs and didn’t I think it was amazing how far they’d come.  “God, yes,” I said.  Frustrating?  I was remembering the stupid text-to-speech program we used to play with in grade 9.  An unnamed friend and I tried to teach it to sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ since we already knew you could change the tones of each syllable so it sounded like singing.  After about two weeks of work we ended up with “Happy (incorrect phoneme)day to (incorrect phoneme), happy (incorrect phoneme)” ad infinitum.  And totally out of tune, too.

We also tried to bother a friend of ours with a bunch of pre-written lines that we planned to play into the phone.  ‘Encyclopedia Salesman,’ I think we called it.  He was a good sport about it, but it took like a month to write the lines.

M:  Now put in “Sure, we have those.”
P:  OK… there.
Program: “Sewer, we hayev thoss.”
M:  What?  Try ‘haff.’
Program:  “Sewer, we haff thoss.”
P:  This is the stupidest thing in the world.
M: No it isn’t.  Try ‘thoes.’
Program:  “Sewer, we haff toes.”
P:  Did it just say ‘toes’?  Why is it saying ‘toes’?
M:  Minor setback, minor setback.
P:  Yeah, at least it’s saying ‘we’ right.
M:  Let me try something here…
Program: “Sewer, we haff thoooos.”
P:  Turn down the length!
M: It sounds better now, though.
P: It sounds stupid.
M: Why can’t it say ’sure’?
P: It’s not a common word.
M: What?  Yes it is.  Why isn’t that in the memory?  Look, spell it differently.
Program: “Shower, we haff thoooos.”
P: Let’s give up.
M: No, no, it just needs the right spelling.
P: All right, let’s try…
Program: “Sore, we haff thoooos.”
M: ‘Sore’?  No, that’s nuts.  There’s got to be a way to spell it so it can say it.
P: No there doesn’t.  It just won’t say it.  How about we re-write the line?  We already know it says ‘Yes.’
M: Who says ‘yes’?  No, it’ll work with ’sure.’
P: (typing)
Program: “Sir, we haff thoooos.”
M: I can’t even understand it any more.
P: Now can we give up?
M: No, no, let’s just leave it at ’sewer’ and call Mirko already.
P: This is -
M: No it isn’t, and stop giggling, he’ll hear us!

Ah, the great days of my youth.

I was having fun yesterday morning taking photos of the pretty frost… till I realized that all the frost was on the inside of the window.

Then I said some bad words.

How cold is it where you are?

(Actual e-mail exchange)

Me: These career placement bastards would have me believe that my life to date is completely bereft of accomplishments.

“And what was your major achievement in that position?” they’ll ask encouragingly, fingers poised over their ultraslim laptops.
“It was a summer job,” I say.  “I didn’t have any achievements.”
“But what did you do?”
“Um, I carried equipment and analyzed samples.  That’s what I did while I was there.  Sometimes I had to move the truck from one pasture to another.”

It’s terrible to watch their faces fall, then watch them rally.

“So what did you accomplish while you were there?”
“I don’t know.  Nothing.  Unless you count carrying seventy-five pounds of fragile rhizometer parts over nine-foot chainlink fences while occasionally running from research buffalo.  Or unless you count doing like two thousand carbon analyses in one day.”
“We don’t.”
“I see.”

None of my jobs have passed muster so far.  My heart, it sinks like a stool-pigeon wearing concrete overshoes.  I’ve never had anything except a temporary job, with a well-defined end date, till now.  And there’s still nothing left to show for it.  I’ve never accomplished anything because I never had a job that accomplishment would be allowed in.

“What about this stint at the research centre?”
“It was a government project.  It had been running for eleven years.  I was there for eight months.  So no.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.  Oh, wait.  I fell asleep in an incubation chamber once and woke up wheezing with allergic pollinitis.  Nobody missed me.  It was the government, dammit.”
“So your accomplishments were…”
“Look, can I go yet?”

They’re convinced they can make something of me if they just try hard enough.  But I’m coming to the nasty realization that I may just be unemployable.  The only thing I want to do is terraform Mars.  And nobody will give me a job in that.  Unemployable!

 Dr. Strange*: Bad news then, When I asked a prof about terraforming mars he informed me that due to its lack of a magnetic field an atmosphere will never form.

Me:  New plan:

1. Invent molten core.
2. Insert into Mars.
3. Start to terraform.
4. Discover Martians, panic, run away, realize lack of options vis-a-vis possible escape routes, return dejectedly, become Martian slave.

 Dr. Strange: Martian slave girl? Can we paint you green?

Me: Yes, but only if you leave a small spot exposed at the base of my spine so I don’t get skin suffocation.

If James Bond says it, it must be true.

* Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

OK, it’s not the hippest advent calendar out there.  But we’re three days in, man!  Get on it!