You probably already know that I like the Marx Brothers. My favorite is definitely Groucho, or "Julius" as he was sometimes known. Clever man. Always up for a good laugh, and if there wasn't one handy, he'd supply it. My favorite Marx flick is 1933's Duck Soup, where Groucho plays Rufus T. Firefly, the dictator of a small European country, Freedonia. (Don't that beat all?) For various uncomplicated reasons, Freedonia is drawn into a war with a neighboring country, thanks to the double-dealing ambassador, Trentino, who has secretly been trying to subvert Firefly's power.
Firefly's having none of it, though.
Then it's war! Firefly commands the troops in the field, keeping a Thompson submachine gun in a violin case by his side. A soldier comes in and hands him a message from the front.
"I'm sick of getting messages from the front," gripes Firefly. "Why can't I ever get a message from the side?"
Fine, fine. Go ahead and groan. Jeez, nobody appreciates intelligent humor anymore. Nowadays it's all bathroom humor and sex jokes and flatulence.
Soapboxes aside, I have some news for you.
I want to apologize for tapering off from my current spate of blogging fervor. Several things have come up. Firstly, I finally have a second job. The proprietor of the small café down at Apple Valley Airport, Mack, keeps asking me if I want to wash dishes for him, only half-jokingly. Since none of the bars in the area are hiring, I finally decided to take him up on it. I've read Bill Gates's 11 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School. Number Four is as follows:
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren't embarrassed about making minimum wage, either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.
That's telling 'em, Bill. For what it's worth, I agree with him. Work is work. I need the money, I'm able-bodied and capable, and it's not embarrassing or degrading. (Heck, more embarrassing yet would be sitting around my parents' house all day blogging about how broke I am.)
So I've taken the job and am working towards my goals with added zeal (and increased income, hallelujah!). I've survived the first weekend, so I think I'll be fine. It was tough, make no mistake. Mack runs a catering service on the side, and in addition to the café's dishes, I had all the catering trays and pots and pans and bowls to do. Saturday was ten hours and Sunday was eleven. Thank goodness for rubber gloves or the skin would've been sloughing off my dishpan hands.
So that took up Saturday and Sunday. The other thing that's been going on is...girls, dude.
I've gotten myself one.
Sorry ladies, the Postman is now taken. He's been reserved. Snatched up. Diverted by a wonderful lady. I'll call her Miss H. She's an old high-school friend. We had quite an amiable relationship in class, went our separate ways during college, and met up again one night back in August. What with one thing and another, we decided to go steady. So here we are, having a ball. We're an old-fashioned couple: we go to movies at the drive-in theater, sit out on hilltops and stargaze, or go prowling through used bookstores. We're both taking enormous pleasure in each other's company. I'm feeling much more sanguine about life in general since Miss H and I took up together, let me tell you. It's as though this void in the center of my chest has suddenly been filled up. Something's back in my life that's been gone for too long, and it's the grandest thing. She's a classy lady and a real kick to be around, cute as a button, easygoing all get-out, and shares a lot of my interests. What more could a guy ask for?
And last...did I tell you I sent a story off to Fantasy & Science Fiction? Well, I most certainly did. It's a 3,500-word humor/science fiction piece concerning two Earth astronauts who are trying to communicate with an alien life form—and failing miserably. Science believes that we may discover sentient crystalline life on exoplanets with odd geological makeups. So my question was, how would we communicate with them? How do you talk to a crystal? My two astronauts are trying some unusual methods: interpretive dance and impressionist art, for starters. If this story gets published, you'll see the results.
That's about the news. I've been trying to finish and finalize two of the other stories I've been working on, both much longer (in the novelette range, 10,000+ words). One of them needs to be rewritten; I've decided that this first draft is rather puerile and doesn't explore the themes fully enough. The second isn't finished, but I've got a handle on where it's going.
This just in: I had jury duty today, but I called up the automated hotline just a minute ago and it said it was canceled! So now I've got the rest of the day off, thank goodness. Looks like a busy week ahead, though. The chase program is finally starting up again on Thursday and there'll be another load of dishes to do on the weekend...but Miss H and I have a nice trip to the bookstore planned for later this afternoon. Maybe I'll pick up yet another forgotten sci-fi classic like The Escape Orbit. (Which, by the way, is turning into such an excellent work...the plot has gotten more convoluted than I ever would've imagined. Full review coming later.)
I think the secret to happiness is being happy. It's just that simple. To be contented inside, you need to actually be contented. One of the ways to do that is to surround yourself, as much as possible, with things that make you happy. I'm not talking about being a materialist and buying yourself a bunch of plasma TVs and expensive tequila. I'm talking about appreciating the little stuff. When the little things make you happy, you'll never be unhappy for long. And you'll live a longer life because you'll enjoy more of what's in it.
Now, not to brag or anything, but I'm one of the people who does that. I appreciate the small stuff, I mean.
I mean, take Friday, for example. Got up in the morning and had a beautiful flight to Barstow-Daggett. Got informed by my instructor after landing back in Apple Valley that I'd be soloing the next time out. Went home and had my favorite sandwich ever for lunch. Got invited to a party that evening and had a marvelous time. Came back and listened to my new favorite Led Zeppelin song. (Just when I think those guys couldn't possibly get any better, I go and find another tune of theirs that I've never heard before that breaks all previous records for awesomeness.) On Halloween I got up and went shooting, played 36 holes of mini-golf with a couple of good friends, then went to my best buddy's house, sat around the fire, sipped some 14-year-old Clynelish, and got to try smoking a pipe for the first time.
Now, some people might frown on this kind of lifestyle. Some people might not see anything exceptional in it. But I see happiness, the simple happiness that comes from taking time to enjoy the little things, to be with friends, to have some clean fun, to surround yourself with what you like, making your life a hodgepodge of cool stuff. The scrapbook of your life should be full of images that, viewed side-by-side, make you (not anyone else) pause and think, "Yeah, cool." I look back over the past few days and see pipe tobacco, Scotch, mini-golf, philosophical talk, bad jokes, friends, Led Zeppelin, costume parties, delicious sandwiches, flying, and good news.
Have I got a good life or what?
For a guy who's always tried to hold himself to the highest standards of behavioral rectitude, never allowing himself become dependent upon any substance or practice that might inhibit his higher brain function...I have a lot of secret, stupid addictions.
Take Bleach, for example. I swore to myself that I'd never become a fan of it. Heck, I swore to myself that I'd never become a fan of anime at all. That was for those creepy social misfits in high school who couldn't get enough of Japanese culture, and were always going to Comic-Con, and all that kind of escapist weirdness. Not me—I'm doing just fine in my favorite corner of the library with my dogeared copy of Watership Down, thank you very much.
But then it happened.
I was channel-flipping one becalmed afternoon back in college, bored out of my skull, and I ran across Cartoon Network. They were broadcasting an episode of One Piece (which I've mentioned elsewhere), dubbed into English. It struck me as inextricably weird at the time. Huh? What kind of show is this? A 17-year-old boy with a body made of rubber on a quest to become king of the pirates? What's going on? Is this a joke?
But the idea—like so many ideas habitually do—grew on me.
Hey, I eventually came to think. That sounds pretty cool, actually. Kind of like 'X-Men' meets 'Pirates of the Caribbean.'
So I started watching the anime. I found a site (many of them, actually) where you can peruse anime shows for free, dubbed or subbed. And in the dimly-lit sanctum of my parents' basement in Wyoming, I started down the dark path.
And I haven't looked back since. To date, I have watched all 423 aired episodes of the show (and counting) and own 21 of the 22 translated graphic novels currently published. And it's been a blast, let me tell you.
It was inevitable that I should broaden my horizons. Soon I started turning to other anime shows. Not all of them, mind you, but quite a few...The Last Exile, Trigun, Rurouni Kenshin, Samurai 7...whatever sparked my interest. And that led me to Bleach.
Now, ordinarily I'm not too deep into magic, the supernatural, the afterlife, spiritualism, or anything goofy like that. But as I've said before, if the concept of a book/movie/comic strikes me favorably, I'll often overlook the quality of the content (or lack thereof). Fortunately, though Bleach is often slow, repetitive, or overly complex, the idea of the thing (and the lovable cast of characters) are enough for me.
I won't go into a hefty description here, because this post is not about anime and I don't want to sound like some kind of fan boy. More than I already have, anyway. But let me just say that I have become addicted to Bleach. Since HughesNet's bloody stupid bandwidth limit prohibits me from watching any video longer than 30 seconds until after 11:00 p.m. at night, I have lately been staying up until ridiculous hours getting my anime jollies out.
Yes, I know, I'm a loser. But I make it a point of honor to do at least one useful thing during the day prior to this surreptitious late-night anime-viewing, like studying my pilot's textbooks, or learning Korean, or submitting another article, or editing ten more pages of my novel, or brushing the dog, or taking a long walk. That way I can justify my addiction to my entirely-too-anal conscience.
Next most prominent on my list of stupid addictions are pizza-flavored Goldfish. You know, the little goldfish-shaped snacks made by Pepperidge Farm. I love the darn little things. I could eat a whole bag of them at one sitting. In a world of deplorably bland munchies, the pizza flavoring in Pepperidge Farm Goldfish is right on the money. It's like crack to me. It tickles the pleasure centers in my brain just right.
Goldfish have been my favorite snack since time began. My mother always used to put a little Ziploc bag of Goldfish in with my lunch when I went off to school (those few days I actually attended public school). And she always kept a bag or two of them in the pantry for afternoon snacks. Nothing cheered me up more when I was a kid than the sight of a full plate of fish-shaped pizza goodness (or one of my mother's ham-and-Swiss sandwiches).
And now, of course, they seem to have taken that flavor off the market. (I'm not even sure if they have the Flavor-Blasted Xplosive Pizza Goldfish anymore.) Just as the most welcome guests always leave first, the best snacks are always phased out before the others. Why couldn't they have ditched Parmesan-flavor Goldfish, eh? Who the hell buys those? Or what about the pretzel flavor? They could've deep-sixed those, easy. No self-respecting snacker wants to eat bite-sized morsels of pretzel. They'd rather buy one hot from the bakery and sink their teeth into it, obviously. But no. One of those fumb ducks in the marketing division decided that the fourth-quarter sales of Pizza Goldfish weren't up to snuff, and signed a kill order. Blast his pasty hide.
On a related note, I've lately gotten back into Cheez-Its. And when I say "gotten back into" I mean I've taken a running jump into an eight-foot heap of them. I bought a couple of boxes for a cocktail party, remembering vaguely that I liked them at one point. With the first bite, I remembered that no, I didn't like them; I would marry them if they walked upright and had boobs.
Third, and likely the most esoteric of the lot, are World War II-vintage warplanes. If Pizza Goldfish are my drug of choice, then pictures and paintings of warbirds are my porn. I have had a long, sordid love affair with the fighter, bomber, cargo, and reconnaissance aircraft of the Second World War since my freshman year in high school. I don't know exactly how it started. I used to be into model-building, and maybe that was when I gradually began to notice the subtle beauty and inherent coolness of these machines. Maybe my mother bought me a book about aircraft, with a few strategically-placed images of fighters and bombers inside, and that planted the seed. But however it happened, it happened, and how. Soon I was in possession of Enzo Angelucci's Encyclopedia of Military Aircraft, 1914-Present ("present" meaning 1986), and was poring through it every chance I got, memorizing the armament, effective range, engine type, service date, and crew number of every airplane in sight. Even now I can remember the manufacturer, numerical designation, and nationality of pretty much any World War II plane you'd care to name.
Come on, try me, I dare you. Post a picture link or something in the comment box and I'll see if I can identify its subject.
This love of airplanes hasn't faded...in fact, I'd say it's what started me off in my pursuit of aviation in the first place. I was always one of those kids that had his face glued to the windows of the airport terminal (and subsequently, the airplane) when my family and I flew anywhere. (My mother recently informed me that, even as a baby, I had never, ever cried on board an airplane, not even once. This sent a chill down my spine.) Later on I got into warbirds, and then gradually I began to notice the beauty in contemporary aircraft, which I had previously scorned. (Even today I'm not too keen on jets, preferring the old-fashioned attraction of propeller-driven airplanes.)
Now, at airshows and air museums, or even just standing out on the flight line during a preflight check, I can barely restrain myself from running from plane to plane and devouring them with my eyes, inside and out, like a kid in a candy store.
And here I am learning to be a pilot!
I'd say this might be one addiction which proved to be healthy in the long run. But I feel sorry for my future wife. She's probably going to feel put out when I meet her at the airport and she gets off the plane wearing the most beautiful, flowing, radiant dress that was ever created, and I, drooling slightly, have eyes only for the airplane she's getting out of.
And you know how most women are said to "lose" their husbands once football season rolls around in fall? Well, my wife's going to lose me a little earlier.
My fourth stupid addiction is science fiction, but whether science fiction is actually stupid or not depends on who you talk to. My dad says "Yes, it's dumb." My mother says, "No, it's not dumb," but that's only because she likes to see young William Shatner with his shirt off. So I won't mention science fiction here. Oh, wait...I just did. Whoops.
Number 5 is beyond contestation. I am addicted, mind, body and soul, to bad puns. I am constantly on the lookout for any turn of phrase which I can pervert into a punny one-liner. Often what I come up with is quite awful. I became infamous for this in high school. Teach was talking about decorum, and he asked us what it was. I raised my hand and said "Isn't that what you do to apples before you eat 'em? You decorum?"
In college, I worked briefly with the campus ITS (Information Technology Services) department as a technical writer. At one staff meeting, during a lecture on safety, the topic of asbestos came up. The department head asked if there were any questions.
"Nope," I chimed in. "We'll watch out for that asbestos we can."
But I don't care how awful 95% of my puns are, because the remaining 5% are pure-D humdingers. None immediately come to mind, however, so we'll move on. Needless to say, as a fan of silly puns, I am a devoted follower of the jokes section in Reader's Digest. Not to mention the Marx Brothers...
Number six: cool breezes. Enough said. There's just no beating the feel of a cool, crisp breeze running through your hair and brushing you gently on the face. It's like the caress of a caring mother rewarding you for a job well done. I can't get enough. Speaking of natural phenomena I can't get enough of, I also like sunny days, fog, stargazing, snow, and the occasional cloudburst.
Jeez, I'm kind of rattling on here, aren't I? Can you believe I started this entry with only Bleach in mind? The rest of it just sort of came to me as I went along (of course, I did write this over the course of several days). I have more than this, many, many more, but they are all in the same vein as those I've listed above.
I suppose everybody has a few secret, unhealthy, or embarrassing likes; I just happen to have more than my share.
And I like it that way.
To conclude, I'd like to tell you a little story. There was once a man who went to the dentist. It was the height of the holiday season, and the dentist noticed that the man's teeth were in bad shape. He told the man, "It doesn't look good in there. I'm going to have to put a plate in your mouth. Just what have you been eating, anyway?"
The man thought for a moment and then said, "Well, my wife always puts a lot of Hollandaise sauce on whatever she cooks this time of year."
The dentist nodded knowingly and said, "I see. Well, then I'll have to put a chrome plate in."
The man asked, "Why a chrome plate?"
"Because," the dentist said, "there's no plate like chrome for the Hollandaise."
Symbolic convergence theory has got nothing on my Korean sojourn. There are dozens of inside jokes that my students, my fellow expatriates and I have cultivated over the course of this year, none of which would be in any way comprehensible to an outsider or a non-Newbie.
Consider, for a moment, the term "monkey test."
Our semesters at my hagwon are three-month blocks. At the end of every month we have what are imaginatively called "monthly tests": standardized progress tests to check comprehension and retention. On a whim, to brighten the prospect up for some of my younger students who didn't like taking these exams, I referred to them (pseudo-mistakenly) as "monkey tests." They cracked up. I did it all my classes, even the older ones. The older kids seem to have less patience for it, but the younger ones love it. Even now, months later, it never fails to get a grin out of them. It's really quite heartwarming to see their little faces break into grins and hear their voices sound in a chorus of "monkey test!" when I walk into the room on test day.
"Chopstick wars" is a slightly more nebulous term. We don't call it that; we don't have a set name for it, so I made up this phrase just for reference. Down the street from Reading Town is our favorite sogogi restaurant. To be clear, so is the Korean word for "cow" and gogi is the word for "meat." Sogogi is just beef, fried on an open grill at your table, dipped in salted sesame oil or ssamjang, put onto a leaf of mustard or lettuce, covered with marinated onions, greens, fried kimchi, mushrooms or garlic, and then wrapped up and eaten. The meat is brought to you, raw, on enormous platters, which you personally transfer to the grill and cook up. Inevitably, when there are four of us, there's an uneven number of meat slices, so one of us has to polish off the last one. The tradition is set in stone: Elaine grasps the bit of meat and holds it roughly a foot above the surface of the grill. Adam, Jeff and I poise ourselves for action (Adam and I use chopsticks; Jeff sometimes uses the cooking tongs). Elaine counts off and drops the delectable slice of juicy beef onto the grill, whereupon we three rapacious meat lovers dive for it. Whoever snatches it away eats the spoils. So far the score stands thus: Adam - 2, Andrew - 1, Jeff - 1 (with one assist). It's a refreshing little tradition we've started up that will likely last long after we leave here.
Korean children are clever. Once they get the general rules of the language down, they're quick to spot opportunities for comedy. By that I mean puns.
Some months back I was standing in class, argumentatively trying to get the class to realize some salient fact or other, and when one of them finally got it right (intentionally) I hissed out a long "Yessssssssssssss."
At some point after that the occasion arose to answer one child with the word "yesterday." I don't remember what the question was; maybe I was assigning homework and he asked what the date was and it was yesterday. Chris, a burly elementary schooler who has a body like a tank and the brain of a puppy, took the obvious phonetic similarity between the words "yes" and "yesterday" and ran with it. From there until the class ended whenever I said "yes" he'd finish with "...terday."
"Johnny is going to..." I'd say.
"School!" Carl, the brightest but noisiest kid in the class, a cute little kid with a flat top and a perpetual grin, would yell.
"Yessssss," I'd hiss.
"...terday," Chris would finish. Everybody would giggle, myself included.
Soon Chris has the entire rest of the class doing it. From now on whenever I hear somebody hiss out a "yes" like that I'll automatically think "...terday." Thanks, Chris. That's a phonemic snippet I'll remember until the end of my days.
Then there's the lengthy list of monikers that Adam, Elaine and I have developed for certain "special" students. All the kids are unique (if that statement makes any sense at all) but some of them are uniquely unique, if you take my meaning. They stand out, either due to their mental prowess, their cooperative attitudes or (quite often) their debilitatingly annoying or obstructive behavior. To name a few:
Stony-Faced Laura: She's now left Reading Town, but while she was here she might as well have been an ornament on the wall. In class, she used to sit in the rear row, in the very last seat, way back in the corner. She never spoke, not even a single word, and if she ever did, her voice was inaudible. Her face was like a stone statue's: devoid of life, eyes downcast, mouth fixed in an immovable line. She looked absolutely miserable. It was perhaps unkind of us to bestow a waggish nickname like "Stony-Faced" upon her, but given the profusion of other Lauras, we had no choice. That was her distinguishing feature.
Reliable Sandy: She's a little gem, and also quite cute. Her mother always dresses her in skirts and knee-socks and buckled shoes. She's awfully soft-spoken (I can barely hear her above some of the wackos in her class) but her answers are always dead on-target. She always does her homework, and that's rare: even some of the diligent older kids "forget" theirs once in a while. What's more, though, she has integrity. She forgot her book once and I forgot to take the necessary ten vouchers from her. As I turned away, I felt a tug on my arm. I looked down and there she was, her big brown eyes staring quizzically up at me, holding two five-voucher bills in her hand. What an honest little girl. Right then and there I bestowed her moniker upon her.
Sinister Jim: James is a good guy, and he's knowledgeable for never having done his homework, like, once. But still, he gets in the way of the class sometimes. He, like 80% of the other Korean boys, is always making extremely off-color jokes. You ask the class why Strega Nona punished Big Anthony, and Jim will say "Because he needed to die." You ask why King Lion summoned the Iguana before him, and Jim will say "Because he was going to kill the iguana." You ask why Goldilocks went to the Three Bears' cottage, and Jim'll say "To kill the three bears." Kill, kill, kill. Die, die, die. That's all it is. I nicknamed him "Sinister" because he's always making death-related funnies.
Little John: Tiny little boy, but with as much energy as a pocketful of firecrackers. I knew he was going to be unique right off the bat. Picture this three-foot tall munchkin with a gap-toothed smile on his kisser, his shock of black, wavy hair sitting tousled on top of his head, making blub-blub-blub noises with his lips all during class. That's when he deigns to actually sit in his chair: usually he's up and running around, climbing over desks, peeking over people's shoulders and whatnot. I can't get angry at him for this (I was the same way at his age). He's a cute kid, light as a feather and as happy-go-lucky as you could want. He's easily the smallest kid in the entire hagwon, hence his nickname.
Amy of the Opera: A somewhat spoiled girl...with a voice like a screech owl. Amy (bespectacled and stringy with a fringe of brown hair reaching to her shoulders) is not accustomed to being quiet, and as such will offer her opinion on whatever subject is at hand, curricular or no, stridently as a bullhorn. Of all the kids in that class whom I've told to be quiet, I've told her at least three times more. Unsurprisingly, she's also one of the worst at raising her hand. Like the rest of the "spoiled" crowd, she'll just shriek your name until you give her your attention.
Some of these shared meanings that have been created aren't even jokes, but are no less memorable. I think I've mentioned before what my job description is. I spend my afternoons being a jungle gym and my evenings combating mood swings. The little kids who come in first at two o'clock just love to climb on me. I think I started it. I invited John (Little John) to hold onto my arm, then hoisted him into the air. The other kids were wowed, and soon enough I resembled an ape-monster in one of Robert E. Howard's stories, warriors clinging to every limb, a colossus covered with tiny scraps of humanity. Bella and Angel learned to latch themselves around my ankles and sit on my feet, like two little legwarmers with earrings and ponytails, as I waddled down the hall.
Then I began giving them "assisted jumps": I'd hold the kids' hands, count to three, they'd jump into the air and I'd lift them really high. These caught on like wildfire: particularly with one little girl, Leslie. She's just about the cutest little girl I've ever seen, and working where I work that's saying something. She's got almond-shaped eyes (always half-closed, like she's planning something, or about to give you the mother of all dirty looks); a little round nose; and a squeaky voice. Whenever I give an assisted jump we always count off thus: "One, two, THREE!" So now when Leslie pokes her adorable head in the door, she holds up three fingers and says "Teacher, one-two-three!" (Only with her Korean accent, it sounds like "One-two-thlee!") Anyone else would be mystified as to what she means. Now I know that I must get up and go into the hall and give her a jump (or six) or else she really will give the aforementioned mother-of-all-dirty-looks. She's good at them, too.
On a final note, I'd like to leave you with the Newbies' Official Induction Ceremony. You must be burned with Elaine's cigarette, slip on the ice and fall flat on your face. Jeff started off this time-honored tradition on the roof of my apartment building one ill-fated cocktail party a while back. We'd all joined hands (this is when we were too drunk to care about how nerdy we were being). Elaine neglected to notice she was holding a lit cigarette. The next thing we noticed was hot ash on our hands. Jeff sort of sprang back to dust himself off, encountered a patch of black ice on the dark rooftop and collapsed instantaneously into the push-up position. Some good-natured laughter and bruises later we decided to incorporate the proceedings into our initiation protocol. Some good came of it after all.
When I leave here, I'm going to have some killer stories to tell...which nobody will understand.
