Acting vs. Nerdiness

Last night I joined 11 other Highrockers in going to see Hero on opening weekend.  The best two sentences written about the movie are from James Bernadelli’s reelviews:

In this film, when characters are stabbed, they die but don’t bleed. It’s a conceit that has as much to do with maintaining the film’s strict adherence to color schemes as it does to avoiding copious gore.

The cinematography, swordplay, and thousands of arrows are impressive.  Makes me want to skip Alien vs. Predator and jump straight into Qin Imperial Army vs. Saruman’s Orcish Hordes.  But I also can’t help marveling at the acting.  Maggie Chueng can — without seeming to move any facial muscles — cast a withering glance of bored disdain.  And Tony Leung just radiates a haunted integrity.  If I tried that, my friends would ask if I was constipated.  Because dark and brooding is not my thing.  (“I’m Batman.”)

Analyzing is my thing.  And lately I’ve been thinking about, “what is a nerd?”  (Some would say it’s anyone who tries to analyze that question.)  And my conclusion is: it’s not the abundance of technical skills, but rather the deficiency of social skills.  Especially in the area of reading and conveying information through facial gestures.  So the opposite of a good actor would be a nerd.

The exception to this rule is Keanu Reeves.  He coveys nothing besides “I’m confused, but I’m hot.”  And yet he is not a nerd.  Strange.

I think this is why there are more guy nerds than girl nerds.  Girls are always saying to each other, “You look upset.  Are you feeling ok?”  While the same situation might lead a guy to ask, “Can you cut out of the funeral early to play ball?”

I wonder if self-awareness is an essential part of this definition.  Because then you could come up with a cruel nerdity test: “Pick any four random people plus yourself.  Do you know which one is the nerd?  If you don’t, then it’s YOU!”

Al Gore is not a nerd because he invented the internet, haha.  He is a nerd because during the campaign, 74% of the adjectives used to describe his speaking style were variations on “wooden.”

Intermediate Cooking Skills Quiz

Your fiancee’s parents are coming over for dinner, and you need to choose a dish to make. Your three options are:

• bouillabaisse
  
• risotto
  
• pad thai

You have never made any of them. Which one should you choose? Answer given in the first comment.

Babies “R’nt” Me

This Saturday I’m going to a baby shower for spekkle and his wife.  Normally, I would avoid anything to do with babies and showers, and especially the two together.  But my guy friends strad and eshuang are also committed, and I feel obliged to endure it with them in a show of masculine solidarity.

The lucky couple registered at Babies “R” Us, so the lucky attendees got to visit the store to buy gifts.  Prior to this experience, I always wondered about geographical gender distributions.  I mean there are supposedly more women than men in the world, and yet places like Alaska and the Bay Area have a disproportionate number of men.  So where are the women?  The answer is: they are all at Babies “R” Us.

The store itself is unfriendly to bachelors, though.  Allow me to elaborate in painstaking detail.  Last night I went to the store and even before entering, I was confronted with this confusing sign:

Growing up in the States, I’m conditioned to interpret a red circle with white bar as “Do Not Enter.”  (Except perhaps in Boston.)  But babies evidently aren’t born with those prejudices (the tabula rasa argument) so they have no problems entering the store.

Once inside, I was overcome with a wave of pastel but managed to find the Baby Registry computer.  Computers cannot hide from The Machine Master, no matter how cleverly disguised (a la Apple).  There two women were waiting for a printout.  And waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting.  The “printer” was slower than a box of underfed dyslexic gremlin monks.  Pages per minute?  Shoot — I could have had my own babies by the time that registry was done printing.

Finally they collected their 9-page registry (9 pages???  When all babies want is a warm blanket and a full nipple, only one of which is sold in the store?).  Then I went to the computer, only to find out it was out of paper.  And how did it tell me it was out of paper?  It waited until I went through all the menu screens and hit “Print Registry.”  Then without any message or warning, it cleared the info and went back to the home screen to lure the next unsuspecting customer.  Imagine going to the supermarket, filling your cart, and going to the checkout only to find that the cashier was a cardboard cutout of Bill Clinton.  Who designed this interface — the Inquisition?

So I decided to go with a gift card instead, and went to look for a card to enclose said gift card.  They didn’t have any such greeting cards (though I’m sure I could create a wildly unsuccessful line of baby greeting cards myself) so I decided to go all Martha-Stewart-like and get a picture frame to house the gift card.  I picked up the frame, brought it to the cashier, and watched her ring it up with the gift card.  The frame rang up $3 over.  I pointed this out to the cashier, who came with me to the display.  She didn’t believe that the frame was the one with the listed price, though it clearly said “Teddy Bear Frame” and there was a teddy bear on that frame.  But she gave it to me for the Teddy Bear Frame tag price.

Finally, the credit card touchscreen was miscalibrated.  So you have to tap the leftmost quarter of the OK button to confirm your transaction.  Leaving me to tap on the button repeatedly, worrying that I’m racking up multiple transactions of gift cards and Teddy Bear Frames.

Maybe for the next baby shower, I’ll knit some socks instead.

Summer Flame

It was always there, dry tinder and heavy timber.  But as Spring turned to Summer, something — a spark, maybe sunlight focused through a broken bottle — something started.

It caught quickly.  Leaves of protocol withered away, leaving nothing to slow the searing bandwidth.  Lines were drawn, a wide moat filled to contain the conflagration.  Time stretched, time compressed.  And too soon it burned out, with starts and stops and gasps and sputters.   Learning from history, the grace to let go.  The grim task of rebuilding the wall.

Hot fires leave warm embers, perfect for the hearth.  Winter’s coming.

Every five years or so I look back on my life
and I have a good laugh.

– Indigo Girls

Giantsuper wrote a terrific post about looking back at old email with horror and embarrassment.  If we are really developing as people and growing more mature each year, then naturally we’ll look down at our past selves.  I guess it’s best to not take ourselves too seriously now, knowing how our future selves will see us.  And hopefully we can get to the point where we no longer cringe about our pasts but accept them with mirth and laughter.

Hello, my name is Ed Chang.  I used to poop my pants.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Still sick — Strange!  (Stuffy sinuses)

I’ve been sick for over 3 weeks now.  It started as a head cold, but I think turned into something else.  My only symptoms are stuffy sinuses and some aches in my face.  No fever, no throat soreness, no hacking cough.  I did some snooping on the web.  Looks like it’s pretty common — a cold makes your sinuses stuffy, and that creates an ideal environment for bacteria to flourish and begin sinus infections.  The sinuses, I learned, are pockets of air in your head.  Then I know some people with much larger-than-average sinuses, ha!

I am a little miffed at the Creator for making the human body like this.  So vulnerable to such a combo attack.  Or maybe the body is fine, and the cold viruses are in collusion with the bacteria.  Who knows what kind of kickback the viruses get.

After the first two weeks I talked to type5, and he prescribed Amoxicillin for me.  After 8 days of that, the treatment was declared “ineffective.”  Now I’m on Augmentin, which sounds like a metal used to forge Elvish swords.  It’s supposed to be harsh on your stomach, but I had my first pill with half a tunafish sandwich, and no problems at all.

And now a picture that has nothing to do with my sinuses:

One problem of the internet is that when you think of something clever, you’ve found that lots of people have beaten you to it.  I was just thinking that “Between Iraq and a hard place” would be a great title for a xanga post.  But I googled it (by the way, do not get suckered into its IPO just because people use it as a verb — search nytimes.com for more details) and found an amazon link to a band called Capitol Steps.  They have some other gems for album titles, too, including:

• When Bush Comes to Shove
  
• Sixteen Scandals
  
• It’s Not Over Til the First Lady Sings
  
• Unzippin’ My Doo-Dah
  
• First Lady and the Tramp

Speed Dating: He Said (15 dates in 90 minutes)

Last night I went to my first-ever speed dating event.  I had no idea what to expect, except for an ominous comment on lcshih’s post about how brutal the women could be.  “No problem,” I thought. “I can handle mercenaries.”

Prior to the event, marmite and I conspired to go together and write a He-Said-She-Said xanga post.  So her version is here.  Fatfreemayo (she of the well-formed clavicle) also wrote up a report here.

Weirdness: the number of women I knew who were going (5 Highrockers and 1 friend) vs. the number of men (0).  Highrock guys lost out by not coming, since there wasn’t much competition there in the studliness department.  Jesusfreakyi himself could have raised the average by a good 15%.

So we came in to Vox Populi as a pretty imbalanced group.  The first half-hour was just a few appetizers and random socializing.  After a few minutes, the Highrock women kicked me out of the nest to make me meet other women.  That turned out to be surprisingly hard, as most of the women clumped into close huddles of 2 and 3, which was beyond my mojo to break into.  And I was saving it for the main event.

Soon it started.  Every girl had a number from 1-27, and every guy did also.  Both the guy and girl sat down at the table marked with their number.  After 4 minutes, a whistle was blown to indicate a 1-minute warning.  After 1 more minute, a double-whistle indicated the time to switch.  Then all of the guys got up to do a mating dance — no, I’m kidding.  Then all of the guys got up to move to the next table.  I was guy #4, so I started off with girl #4, and 5 minutes later I moved to girl #5.  By the end of the evening I had finished talking to girl #18.  Unfortunately I never had a chance to talk to girls 19-27, nor 1-3.

But during the intermission, girls #1 and #2 came up to me and said, “Are you friends with kaykai?”  They recognized me from K’s giveaway party.  So we chatted a bit, and I invited them to Highrock since one of the girls was amazed at how many friends kaykai and jkoolayd had.

During the speed dates, both men and women used a scorecard to keep track of the people they had talked to, and whether they wanted to keep in contact.  At the end of the event, we were to go home and email the organizers the name and ID# of the people we wanted to contact again.  The organizers will sort through the emails and let us know if there are any matches.

In summary, I had a great time and met some women I’d like to stay in touch with and get to know better.  The process seems odd but efficient at forcing people a bit out of their comfort zones to break the ice and meet each other.  I like Lance’s suggestion on an earlier comment that we should do this to make Highrockers from different life stage groups (college / young adult / family) meet each other.  Maybe at an upcoming retreat or even Soul Food.

Epilogue: Afterwards, some of the Highrock women left early, but I took fatfreemayo and marmite to Marche’s, and convinced three of the women I’d dated (haha) to join us.  It was a great time comparing notes about the event and hanging out.  One of the women is a friend of bostonmisslee’s and has actually visited Highrock a few times!  But she always left before Soul Food so I’d never met her.

Give God Your Worst

U_G_N preached a great sermon this Sunday on King David’s life and being a man or woman after God’s own heart.  One memorable incident was when David celebrated the return of the ark by dancing before God.  Dancing like a madman, flashing the whole city, and scandalizing his wife.

What can we learn from this?  Two lessons come quickly to mind: 1) We should value the opinion of God more than that of other people, and 2) God wants us to love him so much that we are willing to do crazy things for him.  Like breaking an expensive jar of perfume on his feet.  The same way men will do crazy things to propose, writing poems and spending thousands of dollars on rocks.

There is another subtler lesson I got: God wants our worst as well as our best.  David’s dancing was not a premeditated, well-practiced, and artistic movement.  It was not synchronized swimming or ballet.  It was more like a guy in his underwear, whooping it up, hooting and hollering because his team has just won the Superbowl.  Raw and real.

For me personally, that’s kind of hard to swallow.  Because I’m all about excellence, and doing things right, and giving my best to God.  For me to get out of that performance mindset, to give something unprocessed and un-thought-out — that’s not very comfortable.  But the same God that asks for the sacrifice of the fattened calf and the firstfruits of the harvest also seeks out the lepers, the outcast, and the rejected.  Maybe many of us — myself included — need to learn to give God not only our best, but also our worst.

Car Batteries

Everyone should know this about car batteries: they die.  Not only that, but they have an expected lifetime, about the length of the warranty.  And if the battery dies before the warranty expires, then the amount you get back is prorated.  Meaning you only get back the part that wasn’t used, kind of like a magazine subscription.

Example: Your battery had a 5-year warranty and costs $100.
It dies after 4 years.  You get back the remainder — 1 year –
in the form of a $20 rebate.

So if you’re driving on a battery that’s past warranty, you’re living on borrowed time.  A low-quality battery can last an average of only 2.5 years.  A high-quality battery can last 5 years or more.  For this and more information than you ever wanted to know about car batteries, go to the Car Battery FAQ.

This morning I found my battery dead, 10 minutes before I had a meeting at work.  AAA takes 20-60 minutes, and taxis are unreliable (that’s a whole ‘nother post).  So I walked to work and was 15 minutes late.    But I should have expected it; my battery came with the car, which is now 7 years old.

Now I think I’ll replace my batteries every five years, before they die.  Except I don’t know if I’ll keep my car that long.  Or my Palm PDA which tracks my appointments.  Maybe with my next car, I’ll extrapolate how many miles I’ll drive in 5 years (about 40k), and put a post-it on my maintenance record booklet to replace the battery at the closest mileage service checkup.