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American Sniper – Movie review

January 22, 2015 6:49 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Standard spoiler alert here.  This post will go into details about the movie “American Sniper“. If you don’t want to know what happens in this movie you better stop reading now.

 

Growing up in a conservative family I’ve watched my fair share of war movies.  Everything from old-time classics like “The longest day” and “Stalag 17” to modern war pictures like “Platoon” and “Saving Private Ryan“ so I think I know a thing or two about war pictures.

The essence of a good war movie involves a large dose of violence, a personal storyline, and a clear story arc that guides the viewer from one end of the picture to the other resolving all the issues brought up during the movie.

But of course war movies have evolved in the last 50 years and are now more complex and less clear-cut.  As the viewing public has changed its collective opinion about war, movie makers have had to adapt their stories to suit the general public.  Stories are no longer as simple as they once were.  Plots are more nuanced and they often take multiple points of view in order to be more balanced and not make war look so idealized.

That’s why American Sniper was a bit of a surprise to me as it seems to return to the model of a fairly straightforward and simple narrative.  The movie is based on the novel by Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle.  The story follows Kyle as he grows up in Texas and has a somewhat aimless existence as a rodeo cowboy.  One day after hearing a news report about a terrorist attack Kyle decides to join the military.

After successfully completing SEAL training he meets his future wife, Taya, in a bar and after a brief courtship they decide to get married.  During their courtship 9/11 occurs and the happy couple realize that their lives have just become more complicated.  On the day of the wedding they receive word that Kyle will be deploying to Iraq.

Once in Iraq, Kyle has to use his skills as a sniper to stop threats to the common foot soldiers patrolling the streets.  Sometimes this involve shooting women and children carrying bombs or grenades.  He returns home from his first tour and seems to be more withdrawn from his wife and son.  He watches YouTube videos posted by terrorist snipers shooting American soldiers and calls them “savages”.

On his second tour he becomes involved in the search for a terrorist leader called “The Butcher”.  He finds an informant with a possible lead on the Butcher.  He reports this to an intelligence officer and on their way to question the informant they run afoul of a terrorist sniper called Mustafa who has built his own impressive reputation.  While Kyle and his team are pinned down by the Mustafa, the Butcher murders the informant in public and drives off.

After his second tour he returns home to see his daughter being born in the hospital.  He becomes quite agitated and angry that the natal nurse is not paying sufficient attention to his newborn daughter.

Chris returns for a third tour.  As he arrives he runs across his brother as he is shipping out back home.  His brother tells Chris that Iraq is the worst place on earth and he’s glad to be going home.

During another mission to find the Butcher, Mustafa badly injures one SEAL and kills another.  Kyle finally manages to kill the Butcher.  The injured SEAL later dies during an operation.  Kyle deploys back home and Taya and Chris attend the funeral.  Taya doesn’t want Chris to return for a fourth tour but he says he has to.  He believes that it is his obligation to his fellow soldiers to continue fighting.  She tells him that she may not be around if he goes back again.

When Kyle returns to Iraq he finds that Mustafa has been shooting engineers at a construction site.  Kyle and a team of snipers set up on a roof top to find and kill him.  Mustafa predictably shows up and Kyle makes an impossibly long shot with his sniper rifle and kills Mustafa but this draws a small army of terrorists to attack the snipers on the roof.  During the ensuing battle, Kyle finally decides that he has had enough of war and that if he survives he will go home for good.

Back home things don’t improve.  Kyle has problems keeping his anger in check and is totally withdrawn from his family.  He meets with a psychiatrist who encourages him to meet with wounded veterans and to address his own issues as he helps them.  The therapy seems to help Kyle deal with his problems.  In the last scene of the movie Kyle meets with another troubled veteran at a gun range.  For an unknown reason the veteran murders Kyle.

The story itself comes from Chris Kyle’s point of view and how he saw the war as it unfolded around him.  but Directors regularly take scripts and expand out stories to give the viewer more context and to help them understand what’s going on.  I find it difficult to understand why Eastwood didn’t do that here.  He certainly did this for his movies “Flags of our fathers” and the companion piece “Letters from Iwo Jima“.  The two movies provided viewers with context and helped them understand not just what soldiers on the American side felt like but also on the Japanese side.

The thing that bothers me is that everything in “American Sniper” is told from one side.  The “bad guys” are amalgamations of different real life people.  They have few to no lines at all, and all of them wear black. The terrorists, or insurgents, or whatever you want to call them are all portrayed and called “animals” or “savages”.  No thought is given to examining what these people are thinking or why they may have been driven to do such terrible things.

The political situation that led up to the war in Iraq is never explored and the course of the invasion is never really discussed.  The Chris Kyle character remains steadfastly in support of the war and never questions whether they should be at war in Iraq or what the purpose of the war really is.

The home front is barely touched upon except when Kyle is home between tours, which I find odd as Chris Kyle’s widow was heavily involved in the movie.

Overall I find that Eastwood could have done a much better job on this movie.  He has certainly directed much more involved and complex films in the past and in war pictures as well.  So I find this to be a somewhat unsatisfactory effort from a great Director.

Posted in: movies, review , Tagged: ,

Trying too many things at once

January 20, 2015 6:25 AM , Leave a Comment ,

The year began with a flurry of activity on all fronts.  I wanted to make 2015 a better year than 2014 was.  I planned it out before the start of the year, I got things lined up, and was all set when January 1st rolled around.

But then a couple of things hit me by surprise and I had a rough start that got me all panicky. I’ve now settled down and am trying to make the plan work.

The main issue now is trying to get everything resorted and going again.  I went back and reviewed my goals for the year and came to a couple of realizations.  Firstly that it’s 18 pages long.  How did I get that complicated? So many goals and sub-goals and extended goals.  Looking at the totality of it all it seems daunting.

Secondly that although the plan is overly detailed in some ways that in other more important ways it’s totally not detailed at all. Things aren’t organized by priority or have specific dates or have specific goals or targets.  As a consequence I’ve been trying to do it all at once and I don’t think I’m utilizing my time to the best advantage.

With everything that’s happened already I feel like it should be February but I look at the calendar and it’s barely the middle of the month.  At the same time I feel that I am falling behind.  I am definitely having to review my goals more than last year.

But I think if I am going to make any progress at all that I have to step up and stress myself.  I don’t mean failure stress, that is to stress the system till it breaks down but definitely stress the system more.  Only in this way will I make any forward progress.

I have to remember that I have the whole year to get some of these things done and that things will get done.  Things are getting done.  I just have to be more patient.

Posted in: activities, goals, schedules, thought, time

Are we closer to or further from racial equality?

January 18, 2015 7:15 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is the next in a series of writing challenges first proposed to me by Leslie Farnsworth.  Leslie has organized and expanded the challenge to include a larger group of excellent blog writers.  Once per month, one member of the group will propose a topic and we will all give our own unique take on the subject.  I proposed the latest topic.  You may want to look at the other bloggers listed below to see what they came up with.]

I suppose that I am fortunate that I’ve only really felt the sting of prejudice a couple of times in my life.  Most of the people who I know or associate with are open-minded individuals that look past the outer shell of their fellow human beings and don’t care what the outside looks like.

But I also know that my experience is for the most part unique and I am aware that in some situations that my race will come into play.  Every Latino or Black male knows what to do during a traffic stop.  Hands firmly on the steering wheel or on the front dash-board, no sudden moves, always answer “yes, sir” or “no, sir”.  Never give them a reason to hold you or to draw their weapon.  Police interactions with minorities have been unfortunately too well documented in the last year.  What you look like does make a difference in the way that an individual policeman or the justice system in general will deal with you.

But that could just be outdated attitudes within governmental structures and those kind of structures take time to readjust and change.  In general are we as a society or just as individuals beginning to get past racial differences and treating each other equally?

On the surface I would say yes.  I mean you really have to search hard and roam far and wide to find the most backward and out of touch corners of the country with people who openly use racial slurs and pridefully display their prejudicial attitudes.

For the most part people who engage in reprehensible bigotry in our day and age are routinely pilloried and lashed by public opinion.   That type of racism is a dying institution.

But does that mean we’re there? Do we live in a colorblind society? I wish I could say yes but I routinely encounter what I term “passive racism”.  I’ve been in office buildings where I was mistaken for janitorial staff just due to the way that I look or sometimes people will assume that I don’t “hablo Ingles” and start speaking to me in a pidgin English to try to communicate with me.

Are these people doing these things in a mean or spiteful spirit?  No, of course not.  But they have been raised in and live in a system where they see a particular skin color and make some assumptions based off that and sometimes the results are not as benign or merely annoying as the above examples.  Sometimes the results of this type of attitude can mean that certain opportunities are closed off even before anything happens or sometimes the consequences can even be deadly.

Will it get better?  I think so.  More than ever before mass media is homogenizing the culture and its message reaches out in every direction.  The message being broadcast is that despite any outward differences that we are all humans and carry the same type of problems around and are all looking for the same type of solutions to those problems.  It will take time of course but given time and honest effort I think that it can happen.

 

 

 

Posted in: life in general, prejudice, racism, thought

Staycation 2007

January 16, 2015 6:49 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is a reprinted blog from 2007.  Sorry about doing 2 reprints in a row.  I had a late meeting (ironically about blog writing and one of the topics was how to plan my blog more efficiently) and had to scramble for a filler post.]

September

Work piles up. It always does no matter how far ahead you think you are, you’re never really ahead. Clients in Canada, Germany, India. All of them want their products and want them now. The boss wants a proposal ready for one of the companies biggest clients and wants it today so you drop all the other urgent projects and work on that.

22 miles to work and 22 miles back and always traffic, always, no matter if its 4:30 AM in the morning or 4 PM in the afternoon. 240 hours driving per year, which works out to 10 solid days of nothing but driving.

It all boils down to stress and plenty of it. It’s been a rough year. Not financially but physically and mentally. Specially mentally. I’ve gotten to the point that I sometimes try to open the office door with my house keys. A Freudian psychologist would call that a slip and a sign that I have begun thinking about the office as my real home.

Whereas last year I was excited about exploring New England, this year nothing appealed to me. When the word vacation came to mind all I could think about was plane schedules, taxi cabs, hotel checkout times, renting cars, all the garbage that comes with a trip.  Made me exhausted just thinking about it. I put it off and waited till finally I said “Screw it. I’m having my vacation at home.”  A new trend becoming more and more popular.  The staycation.

Houston: The new capital of the southwest

I usually make fun of tourists that come to Houston. It’s not much of a touristy city. Oh sure it’s as modern as any in the US. The hospital system is the best in the world, giant buildings downtown, hundreds of miles of freeways, and it has all the requisite major sports teams. But when you come down to it, that s all it has. There’s no Hollywood hills(there’s no hills period), or Times Square, or Golden gate bridge or anything.  We ourselves don’t have a beach or mountains or hundreds of years of accumulated charm and history. It’s a modern factory town (with office buildings replacing the factories). A nice place to live but you wouldn’t want to visit.

But like any big city dweller there are things out there that you could do but somehow you never end up doing.  I suppose you take them for granted and tell yourself that you will do them another time.  So I had that in mind for my staycation.

My body woke me up at 4 AM Monday morning as it always does. I tossed and turned but it’s no use. So I wandered round the house and finally decided to get breakfast but not in the house somewhere that I would never go on a weekday. I went to the 59 diner on highway 59 and Kirby, about 15 miles from where I lived in the suburbs.

If you ever saw the movie pulp fiction, the diner scene, you got a pretty good idea of what it looked like. Mid century design and lots of memorabilia from that era.  A 50’s menu that hadn’t heard of low-fat diets, and waitresses that were probably here when the diner opened up so long ago.  A large and filling breakfast but nothing special.

Returned home around 8:30, and I saw a pack of teens and pre-teens kids hanging around near my house. At first I thought this was a group of gang kids but then I saw the backpacks and books and it dawned on me they were waiting for the school bus. Then I noticed a lot of people were just taking off for work. How odd I thought. All this stuff happens here while I am at work.  Back at the office I would have been working for over 3 hours by now.

I took the money I was going to spend on the trip and put all of that into my savings account. After that I was out of ideas for the day, so I watched TV and tried to lay around. Suburbs are eerily quiet during the day. I would look out the front door and see nothing going on, and I would listen to the house creak every now and then. Not a healthy situation (from a mental health point of view), so I decided to find something to do.

I took a spin around Loop 610, the main bypass freeway that rings most of inner Houston.  Not just part of it but all of it.  Seeing parts of town I hadn’t seen for ages.  The Astrodome, the east side of Houston, passing by north end and then back by the Galleria.

Wednesday on a whim I went to the Galleria. This was the premier mall of Houston. Other malls were larger but the Galleria was the “it” place to shop in Houston. In the well to do part of town. Back in the oil boom days, the well to do of Houston would come here as they do now and put in a hard days shopping and lunching.

I though it odd since I remembered a story I had heard years back when I was a stock boy in a supermarket. An old Mexican that worked with me told me back when he was a kid in the 40’s that the land where the mall lay was all bayous and forests and his dad used to take him hunting rabbits. Now its all concrete and steel, Jaguars, Beemers, and Mercedes.

Back in my high school days the truant from my school would head here to basically loiter round the mall till the school day was done. I hadn’t been to the Galleria in about 8 years, and I wasn’t prepared for the changes. I always knew it had been a high-end mall but this was pure culture shock. They had expanded the mall, added tons of new shops. It was all gleaming and shiny.

Clothing boutiques of all sorts, jewelry stores with more gold, silver, and gems than was ever dreamt of by any pirate. All the old stores like Foley’s and Joske’s were gone replaced by Macy’s and Nordstroms. And people, tons and tons of people. What were they doing here? Didn’t they have jobs? It was 11AM, why weren’t these people at work? It was a mixture of culture shock and outrage. Was I really so out of touch?

Dining

My life is fairly regimented.  Go in to work, do your job, go home.  Every week day and then on the weekends you can do something different.  Always the same thing every week.  When you have this siege type mentality about your daily life you dream about simple pleasures.

Going out for a simple steak dinner is one such pleasure. The Outback steakhouse is just a step above Chili’s really. But since I hadn’t been to one in so long it was like an oasis for me. The steak was tough and ridiculously over salted, the baked potato was a cluster bomb of sour cream, bacon, and butter but I didn’t care. Such a long-long time. And that was the problem. A couple of hours passed and my stomach wasn’t doing so well. Maybe its eating the same bland diet month after month or just overdoing it. Close to losing it but I didn’t.

Kaneyama, a wonderful sushi place with Miso soup to die for, colorful and tasty sushi and sashimi, and teriyaki steak that seems to melt in your mouth. Kasra’s Persian grill with light pillow bread and a Persian salad. The Palm Club, another steakhouse with over the top prices but with a classic atmosphere that makes you swear you were in a Fitzgerald novel in the 20’s.  So many good places to eat yet I never go to them.

Liquor. My drinking days are past me. I had some wine during the week but nothing else. Back in my heyday I could down a Long Island Ice tea, a couple of shots of three wise men, and a flaming Dr. pepper (remind me to tell you bout that one day), Nowadays….I had a couple of glasses of wine Wednesday night and had a mild headache on Thursday morning.

People Watching

People watching is a bad habit of mine. Whether it’s at a mall or a park or at the museum like I did this week. Always on the outside looking in. Hordes of school kids at the museum being chaperoned by a frazzled school teacher and a curator who seems like she’s past the point of total boredom.  Cliques of upper class ladies at lunch in some fancy restaurant in the Galleria next to the skating rink, complaining about how rough life was while next door at a pizza parlor there’s a young couple trying to make lunch out of a single slice of pepperoni pizza for them and their 5-year-old kid.  Little vignettes of life.

Epilogue: Thoughts and plans

This type of vacation gives you a lot of time to think. Is this the type of life I want for myself? Am I just going to count down the weeks till next year’s vacation? Why was it that I took things so seriously while others just seem to cruise through life without a care? After seeing all this can I really go back to the 10 to 12 hour work day with nothing waiting for me at home?

Posted in: Houston, thought, vacations

Drive with attitude

January 14, 2015 6:43 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  A little disclaimer first.  Nothing below is intended to be driving advice or advice on how to conduct yourself on the roads.  Driving is both a responsibility and a privilege that you should exercise maturely and as carefully as possible.  Everything presented below is purely for entertainment purposes.]

When you get a car that has something better than a 4 cylinder engine you naturally have the urge to see how fast and how far you can push the envelope. Specially when it comes to young men and cars.  Something stirs within them when you hear about 2 or 300 horsepower.  “How fast would that go?  Will the engine rumble?”

so innocent looking

so innocent looking

I mean let’s be honest.  There’s no real practical purpose in a sports car or any car with more than 150 horsepower.  They drink gas like crazy, they don’t carry much in the way of luggage or groceries, and their chairs really aren’t that comfortable.  They’re made for one reason and one reason alone.

So, let’s say that it’s 2006 and let’s say someone was driving highway 71 between Bastrop and La Grange.  Headed back to Houston from a conference in Austin in a brand spanking new Dodge Charger.  That’s innocuous enough, right?  Happens every day I suppose.

Let’s say then that while driving along, under the speed limit naturally, that a similar state patrol Dodge Charger pulls even next to this blue Charger.  Inside is a young state trooper taking out his interceptor for the first time.  Looking over as the patrol car surges ahead slightly as if making a dare or some sort of challenge.  A reasonable fellow might be enticed into reciprocating, right?

Then with the challenge seemingly accepted the police Charger goes flat-out soon followed by the civilian Charger. With all restraints removed, how hard might the average person stamp on the accelerator?  Just miles of open road and farmlands surrounding and 2 cars at the top of their form.

Over 90 miles an hour the power steering doesn’t help as much and you have to tussle with the steering wheel to keep control. Speeds going over 120 miles an hour and still accelerating.  Not another car in sight to get in the way and nothing but the curving roads to keep you company.  The police officer doing his level best to keep ahead.  In such situations you would have to admit that the thought comes to mind that if the police officer loses that he will retaliate with a hefty traffic ticket.  Just the chance you have to take, right?

 

Speed limits ought to be respected under most circumstances but these were ideal driving conditions.  The thing is though that at those speeds that the distances between small towns evaporates and all too soon you’re back to regular traffic conditions.

Just as La Grange comes into view the police officer signals wildly to slow down.  All too soon the adrenaline rush is over and normality re-establishes itself.  With a wave the police officer heads down another road and this other fellow continues on to Houston as if nothing had ever happened.

I’m not saying or legally admitting that something like that once happened.  But it might have, right?

 

Posted in: Automobiles, driving

Charlie

January 12, 2015 6:22 AM , Leave a Comment ,

It bears discussing because the whole Charlie Hebdo attack opens up a whole series of issues and questions concerning our support of free speech, the necessary steps to provide security for citizens of a democratic state, and just how we plan to balance the two.  I don’t propose to solve anything in this post just to raise some questions and maybe spark some conversation.

I deliberately said “we” up above as I think it’s understood that the attack on this small newspaper in France is really more than just an attack on a provocative publication in another country.  The attack was meant to do more than just murder a few reporters and editors.  The attack was an attempt to muzzle free expression and to dictate what could and could not be published.

In that aspect I think the attack largely failed.  The feedback and public outrage over the past couple of days has if anything strengthened the convictions of most of the public and the publishing world to continue freely publishing whatever they want in whatever manner that they want.

Some argue that Charlie Hebdo brought this upon themselves by not moderating or minding who they offended.  But honestly that’s part of the point of such publications.  They exist to elicit a reaction, to bring up a mirror, perhaps a warped mirror, to a situation and ask the public at large to look and discuss.

Charlie Hebdo is an extreme case of course but they act as outliers for mainstream publications that print less provocative material and who would be the next targets of terrorists if the Charlies of the world did not exist.  I don’t like everything that Charlie Hebdo publishes.  I’m not a regular reader but I’ve found some of the things that they have published to be vulgar and offensive.  But it is in guaranteeing their right to exist and to work that we safeguard the right of the rest of the news media to operate.

The attacks may have had some negative effects.  The security agencies in the West will look at this and pronounce that this perfectly illustrates why they need to have more latitude in how they deal with the general population and that personal liberties concerns have to become secondary at least “temporarily” while the terrorist threat is sorted out.

Unfortunately temporary measures seem to have a way of morphing into permanent measures with a disturbing regularity.  I can still barely remember accompanying a friend at an airport while she waited for her flight and seeing her to the very gate before she left.  All I had to do was pass through a very basic metal detector.  Nowadays I couldn’t even go through that metal detector without a valid airline ticket and picture ID.  It will certainly be interesting to see how the security apparatus tries to use this incident in the next year and how far the public will let them go.

An even less savory aspect of this whole mess is how it will affect the religious and ethnic minorities in the West.  People are tired of terrorism and war.  Incidents like this work well for hate mongers and bigots that want to restrict immigration and curve discussions between radically different groups of people.  These hate mongers will inevitably point to something like this and say “See, this is what happens when we open up our borders.”

But I think the counter argument to this is “see, this is what happens when we close our minds, when we stop empathizing with our fellow human beings in other parts of the world and treat them as different people to be feared.”  More communication, more discussion, more freedom is what is ultimately needed here.  Not less.

We cannot and should not let incidents like this close off our minds and make us live in fear of our fellow human beings.  The only way we can solve problems like terrorism is by opening ourselves up to others.

 

Posted in: current events, thought

The path of wisdom

January 10, 2015 7:07 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I recently finished Cheryl Strayed’s travel memoir, “Wild“, and I thoroughly recommend it.  Just a very brief synopsis, it recounts her 3 month-long journey along the Pacific Crest Trail after the death of her mother.

I also saw the movie and both the book and movie made me realize that I kind of miss camping and hiking; two activities that I used to do quite a lot in my younger days.

These activities combine a couple of aspects of life that I enjoy.  First is a feeling of freedom that is hard to match in any other setting or situation.  Out in the wilderness you are no longer bound by the labels and situations that might define you in the “real” world.  A person can leave behind the labels of office worker or family member or that person at the book club and become just an individual human being.  You define yourself as who you want to be and as you are able to.  Which leads me to the second aspect that I like.

In the wild you survive as you are able to.  Without any supporting structures or artificial constructs.  Whatever you need to live you either bring with you, make, or do without.  Kind of harsh?  Of course! But that’s why it’s called roughing it.  Not only do you pit your physical strength, but your ingenuity, and your mental toughness against the environment to come out on top.  It’s like an all body and all aspect workout.  If you do it right you end up moderately comfortable, if not you end up uncomfortable and maybe miserable but you learn something about yourself along the way.

Which goes into another aspect about camping and hiking which is that it really does stress you and bring out hidden strengths and weaknesses out to the surface and you are forced to exploit those newly revealed strengths or have to deal with these hitherto unknown weaknesses.  These newly found skills and strengths can be put to use immediately or saved up to take advantage of at a future date and the newly discovered weakness can be purged before they become  a problem in your normal life.

Sitting in front of a fire late at night is a meditative experience. None of the distractions of life, the noise, the superfluous and banal thoughts of daily life are filtered out by the physical experience and get left behind.  The more important, primal, and central thoughts of your existence take center stage.

Solitude has the effect of acting as a catalyst for original thinking.  You are left with only your own mind and your own self to keep you company and you are forced to come up with new ideas and new thoughts to keep you occupied.  You begin to realize what the important parts of your life really are.

The concept of physical privation and struggle to attain a higher state of either greater mental or spiritual strength is not new nor unique to any particular culture or time and place.  Many cultures in the past have had something similar either for young individuals to experience as an inauguration into adulthood or for the philosopher or shaman to act as a revelatory episode and step into the next world.

In the post modern and more urban world that we inhabit however this becomes harder if not impossible for an individual to experience anymore.  Not only are the locations for such experiences becoming harder to access but the tradition and structures that encouraged and guided such meditations are really becoming rarer and harder to find.  Being alone and contemplative is passively if not actively discouraged in our society.

We just don’t seem to have time for this anymore. Which is a shame really. For such experiences are necessary at least for some individuals to realize new truths and to think new thoughts.

Is it for everyone? No. Some people are just not cut out for this type of journey. Maybe they’re not up to it physically or maybe they would find it mentally daunting. But I think for some people it is something necessary to experience from time to time to give their lives some clarity and focus.  A literal and figurative path for their lives to follow.

Posted in: activities, outdoors, thought

Reminders of the past

January 8, 2015 7:13 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Rainy, cold days are made to tie up loose ends and clean up the past.  But sometimes you forget what you had in the first place and it really makes the mind work when you find it once again.

All the holiday decorations and presents and boxes and gift wrap all make for a huge mess.  Even for someone like me that doesn’t really do all that much in the way of decorating.  My garage was piled high with open cardboard boxes and Christmas light strings and bits of tinsel and whatnot on the floor.

Trying to organize and stuff boxes wherever they would fit I went rummaging round and found an old footlocker that I hadn’t bothered with since college.  I dragged this along with me when I left for school back in ’89.  Mostly it just got in the way in the tiny little dorm room that I shared with my roommate.  Then I dragged it along to a couple of apartments  while I was at school to store the miscellaneous junk that one acquires but doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

After college it just automatically followed me wherever I went.  Finally I brought it to this garage when I moved in six years ago and I stacked boxes on top and forgot about it till just now.  The lock was broken.  I broke it years ago when I lost the key.  Took all of two seconds to break with a screwdriver which tells you how good a footlocker it was.  The hinges were rusty but they opened up easily.  A musty damp paper smell blossomed out from within. Not a good sign.

Inside I found everything wrapped up in a bed sheet from some twin bed that I no longer owned.  What was the great treasure within?

Big surprise.  Books.  paperbacks. My original copy of “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy“. All the pages yellowed with age. College textbooks that I must have thought would come in handy in my career or were just interesting.  FORTRAN 77.  Probably out of date even back then.  Hand sketched blueprints for a gear assembly, something I’d done for engineering drafting class.

Three wire bound notebooks.  Notes from classes, sketches, doodles, whatnot.  On one page two columns of numbers.  The first, a set of dates.  The second column of numbers steadily decreasing in value down the page.  A budget that I’d written down one day.  I could make a twenty-dollar bill last all weekend long back then.

My handwriting sucked even back then but compared to now it looked so professional.  I need to practice my handwriting more.

Four hardbound books with silver bindings.  “How things work”  Examples of all sorts of mechanical and electrical devices all laid out in pieces.  Beautiful acid free end papers.  My old man bought these for me before I went off to college. Still in good condition.

Boardgames that I hadn’t played in ages.  A deck of cards used to play Hearts and Spades in the Commons lobby on many a night.

An old hard plastic bag full of rulers, pencils, erasers, and a drafting brush.  All the supplies needed for engineering drawings.  The plastic bag now hard and brittle after so many years in the heat.

A cheap little sake serving set, a rice bowl, plastic chop sticks, a tatami mat, a bokken, and an incense holder from my “japanese” phase.

Wires, extension cables, 5.25″ floppy diskettes none of those newfangled 3.5 ” diskettes for me, thank you very much.  Some old landscape sketches I’d done for art class in high school.

An envelope from Fox photo labs spills out and the garage floor is covered with glossy photos. Sitting on the cold concrete as I look them over.  Some trip photos from here and there, blurry and dark bonfire pictures from some November night, some photos of old friends and people who I haven’t seen since school.  A photo of Mark, my best friend in college.  Rest well, old friend.

It’s getting cold out here.

A different life.  I find it hard to connect the person that I am now with the young man who stored all of this stuff back then. Less idealistic?  Possibly.  Much less naive?  I certainly hope so.  Definitely more banged up. What do these items say about who I was back then?

I try to think back, try to consider why it was I stored away some of these items.  I must have thought that there was real value in hanging onto these trinkets, that maybe one day I would need them.  No easy or obvious answers come to mind.

Most of this stuff ends up in a pair of garbage bags.  A few items I hang onto and bring into the house.  The footlocker itself isn’t in that good a shape.  Made from light metal.  Cracked in a couple of places, it’s still serviceable but it’ll fall apart one of these days.  So out it’ll go on heavy trash day.

If I had to put some things away from my present life and store them for some future date, what would I put away.  What would these items say about who I am now?

Posted in: activities, aging, life in general

My cooking nightmare

January 6, 2015 6:45 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is a reprinted article from Thanksgiving 2007.]

Well my parents are out-of-town for the holiday but of course everyone expects food and no one was making the offer to cook so with less than a week to go I made a decision.  On an errant whim (and fueled by overconfidence borne out of watching too many episodes of Gordon Ramsay’s Cooking nightmares on BBC) I decided to fill in and cook the family Thanksgiving dinner this year.

A totally traditional menu.  The turkey of course, homemade stuffing, freshly made cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, veggies, gravy, cornbread muffins, and pies.

I got a thanksgiving cooking book and started shelling out big bucks at the local supermarket for the best stuff I could get my hands on.  First thing to look at was the oven.  Which I didn’t.

Wrestling a 20 pound turkey into a tray and tying up the legs and buttering it up and hoping that it doesn’t fall on the floor.  Keeping it cool but not cold overnight.  I got up at 5 and started the day.  The oven turned out to be underpowered. Luckily I started the turkey at 6.  Lucky cause at noon it still wasn’t done.  Didn’t help I suppose that I was looking in on it every five minutes.

The cranberries were the best.  Cranberries with raspberry preserves with a hint of lemon, and cinnamon.  Well worth the couple of bubbles of cranberry sauce that burped and scalded my arm with blazing hot cranberry goo.

The potatoes were another matter.  My level of respect for my mother took a huge leap.  It’s no wonder that peeling potatoes is a punishment in the army.  I find it remarkable that I didn’t slice my fingers up with all that peeling.

The stuffing was touch and go.  I added the bread along with poultry spices, chicken stock, pecans, raisins and sausage.  It looked like old oatmeal, but I gave it a stir and it passed it through the oven to give it a golden brown color.

Around noon I got desperate and cranked the oven to 500 degrees.  After half an hour I took the bird out and made the gravy.

Ideally the veggies were supposed to have been freshly chopped and prepared but while I was shopping I looked and considered and I knew I wouldn’t have the time.  Frozen.  Hopefully fresh next time.

The pies, jeeeeeez, the pies.  One can of pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, and brown sugar.  The sweet potato pie.  Yet more peeling.  Boiling them and then mashing them.  More spices but with orange juice added.  They took so long I was jumping up and down at the dinner table checking on them and they came out just in time.

By comparison the cornbread muffins were a breeze.  They had to share the oven with the pies but they got done faster.

In between everything running into the dining room and setting things up.

Round 5 in the afternoon running to change out of the food smeared clothes and washing up cause promptly at 6 everyone arrived.  Three brothers, my sister, my sister-in-law, and 4 nieces and nephews.  My sister and sister-in-law helped clean up and I lucked out that the dishwasher didn’t have a mental breakdown.

I don’t know how mom does this every year, and I can understand why she gets touchy afterwards.

Maybe pizza next year.

Posted in: activities, cooking, food and drink, holidays, life in general

Plans and goals for the new year

January 4, 2015 6:03 AM , Leave a Comment ,

2014.

I had a good year.  No doubt about it.  I had it laid out and planned and it worked.  Not to perfection, no.  But a good-sized chunk worked out for me.

Now how do you top that?  The fear, the doubt in the pit of my stomach is that you can’t.  I’ve been planning, dreading, stressing about this off and on since around October.  Before, during, and after my vacation I devoted a lot of time to this and finally round the end of December I got it all together in a master document.  Even typed it out, which I normally don’t.  Normally I write it all out in handwritten form in a notebook.

Here we are 4 days into the new year and already a couple of key aspects of the plan have been radically changed by events in the last few days.  Goes to show that you should always make plans and goals as flexible as possible.

Wouldn’t go as far as saying that things are wrecked but it definitely needs a radical rethink on my part.

Some things obviously will stay on track.

My health goals are going to move forward.  It’s weird.  In the last month I’ve met up with five people who I haven’t seen in over a year and they all remark on how much weight I’ve lost.  Gratifying, but I know that I have a long way to go yet and that I can’t let up.  If anything, this year I intensify. So that’s the most solid part of the plan.

But my career and financial goals need to be reconsidered.  I have to be vague here, sorry.  Partly because it is a private matter but mostly cause I haven’t worked out the dynamics of the situation yet.  I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten about 6 hours of sleep for the entire weekend and I’m writing this around 2 in the morning on a Sunday morning cause I couldn’t get to sleep.

I worry that if I don’t get this settled quickly that the rest of the plan will unravel. Writing this out in the blog helps me think though honestly no great pearls of wisdom have emerged thus far.  2015 could be such a huge success or a huge disaster depending on how things play out.  Maybe a more conservative strategy and hold some things off till 2016 or maybe “risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss” and see what happens.  Hopefully I’ll come up with some answers soon.

Posted in: activities, decisions, goals, plans, thought