I Work Out

Special thanks to my sister for taking this (amazing) photo!

Recently, in an effort to become the best possible version of myself, manage my struggles in a productive and positive way, and mostly to fit into last year's shorts, I decided I needed to work out.

About five years ago, I had a fairly regular workout routine.  I would go to the gym once a week, and while I don't know that I was ever working particularly hard, I was also growing a lot and was just more physically active in general.  It was effective enough.  Since then, things had slowly been going downhill.  When marching band season would roll around, I would get reasonably in shape.  I would go to the gym just often enough to quell my mom's threats to cancel my membership.  I liked the idea of being physical and healthy better than actually putting it into practice.

It's not that I have an aversion to physical activity, it's just that I really love good food.  And maybe some not so good food as well.  The problem with living in a first world country is that there's usually an abundance of good food available for me to stuff into my face.  Plus, my sister, who is supermodel skinny and has concerning affinities for cheese, chocolate, and steak (usually not at the same time), only ever works out when forced, and never gains any weight.  She's not exactly the best motivation for getting off the couch.  She just makes me angry that I don't also magically look like that.

So I've discovered that I really love granola, yogurt, and yogurt with granola in it.  I'm also a big fan of fruit and fresh veggies.  It's not necessarily a chore to eat healthy; it's a chore to avoid eating everything else.  I am usually an equal-opportunity eater.  I don't like to discriminate against a food just because of its fat content.  That's just unfair.

But I've learned a valuable lesson in the past couple of weeks.  Perhaps it was something of which I was always aware, but never really found application for until now.  Whenever a tasty and gloriously unhealthy something enters the house, all I have to do is debate eating it for a day or two, and my 12-year-old brother will usually have consumed all of it before I can decide that I really did want some and decend upon the sugary morsel of goodness in question like a swarm of locusts.  It's working so far, except that when my brother has finished devouring all of the sugar in the pantry, he turns his preteen appetite on my granola bars.  There will be a throwdown one of these days, and since I'm basically ripped now, he won't stand a chance.

John Carter

I was excited for John Carter after I saw the very first teaser trailer, which provided infuriatingly little information about any plot or even basis for the story, but it looked completely bizarre and so, naturally, I was hooked.  I went on Saturday.  In short, it did not disappoint, although comparing it to the epic film and special effects pioneer Avatar or the brilliantly and artfully executed Cowboys & Aliens would be a mistake.

The movie is based (I don’t know how loosely) on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, the first in an eleven-volume series written between 1912 and 1943.  Why they just now thought to make a movie out of it is beyond me, although I am glad it was done now that CGI and other special effects meld darn near seamlessly with live-action content.

Image... uh... borrowed from IMDb

Something that often suffers when writing plot-driven books (and suffers again when adapting them for the big screen) is character development.  Perhaps John Carter’s writers used this to their advantage, because the only character who really needs to be developed—the titular hero himself—is surprisingly deep.  His backstory (fought in the war, family died, nothing left to lose, etc.), albeit not the most original of them all, is valid and emotional, not fully revealed until he relives it himself in flashbacks while slicing and dicing aliens in a slow-motion rage.

The plot felt a bit crammed in places, which is often the result of trying to fit too much book into too little movie.  When you’ve got a few hundred pages and a committed reader, sub-plots are delightful.  But when you have 120-or-so minutes with an audience constantly trying to pick the next scene to skip for a popcorn refill or bathroom run, sub-plots become incommodious, and a couple of them—such as one of the tharks’ (a race of Martians) discovery that she is the leader’s daughter—could have been sacrificed for the sake of development more integral to the overall plot.

Undue emphasis was placed on the war between the two cities, when the really interesting stuff (like the conflict between John Carter and the supernatural therns who seem to be the real antagonists) tended to slip between the cracks.

The film draws a few giggles, and convincing the audience to like—adore, even—a downright ugly monster that looks like a very large frog. It panted and whined like any earth dog, and I even think I heard it bark once.  According to John Carter, if you’ve suspended enough disbelief to handle civilizations on other planets and magical drinks that translate alien languages, Martians are not so alien.  In fact, they could have been made to act a little more alien, if you ask me.  And not so British.  There are apparently a lot of Brits on Mars.  However, the damsel in distress—who, to her credit, does an impressive amount of butt-kicking—does literally shake John Carter’s hand, jiggling it by the thumb, which was pretty funny, if predictable.

The end was well done, though I suppose I won’t talk about it too much.  Based on what the rest of the Internet has to say, it doesn’t look good for a sequel, but if they make one, I’ll go see it.

All Tired Out

This weekend I went snowboarding with a couple of friends.  Yes, friends.  Well, most of them were people I'd never met before.  Regardless, I went snowboarding.  We stayed for free in the house of a guy who was out of town, which was nice because I recently went broke buying a snowboard.  However, he lived a good two and a half hours from the ski resort.  So we beat the sun out of bed by a couple of hours to hit the road as early as possible and get the most out of our one-day lift tickets.

We weren't fifteen minutes down the road when things started to go wrong.  We noticed that the car was making a weird whack-whack-whack noise and pulled off the side of the highway to investigate.  We didn't even have to get out to know what it was; as soon as we stopped, the smell of burned rubber filled the car.  Flat tire.  No, busted tire.  The rip was probably eight inches long.

No problem.  We're all reasonably intelligent people.  Plus, the car had a full-sized spare tire, so all we had to do was change it and be on our way.  Turns out removing the decorative wheel cover is easier said than done, especially when you're missing the tool that the manual refers to.  And a bent coat hanger just wasn't an adequate substitute.  We were sitting in the car trying to warm up and find instructions on various so-called "smart" phones when a cop pulled over.  Relieved, we explained our problem.  It's a little sad when the solution is just to yank harder, but we hadn't wanted to break any part of this otherwise very nice Audi  Quattro.

Things went relatively smoothly from there (except for the "alignment pin" which we deemed useless until we realized we needed it).  The cop was helping us lift the new tire onto the wheel, and none of us had been hit by the traffic, despite the fact that the busted tire was on the left and we could feel the breeze every time an eighteen-wheeler passed us.  Then the only other girl in our group goes, "Wait, what's that?" which are not words you want to hear when you think you're about to resume your cruise down the highway with only a forty-five minute delay.

She pointed to a giant crack in the spare tire.

We were devastated.  The cop basically told us we were on our own and bailed.  We drew the conclusion that the previous owners of the car had replaced the tire once already and had not gotten a new spare.  Having decided, therefore, that the dealership owed us a tire, we called them.  They offered to tow it.  Unless they were going to tow us all the way to the ski resort, that wasn't helpful.  So we started calling other people.  (And by "we" I mean the only guy that actually lived and knew people in the area.  The rest of us sat and listened supportively.)  Our other car group never actually stopped and were already an hour ahead of us.  The guy who was driving just needed someone to take him to buy a new tire.  He called his mom on speaker.

"Mom I need help I'm in trouble."

"Tell Momma where you're at."

"I'm on the side of the highway.  My tire's busted."

"... Call your dad."

"I can't call him I don't have his number."

"706--"

"Mom, can't you just come get me?"

"I'm at the beauty salon, baby."

So we called someone else.  Meanwhile, another cop pulled over.  We helpfully suggested that he give our guy a ride to the nearest tire place.  "I can't really do that... I'm working by myself today and that would tie me up..."  Well, thank you, officer, for pulling over with no intent of actually helping us.  We would hate to inconvenience you in case you have to fight real crime.

Finally we got a hold of someone.  Three hours behind schedule, but we were back on course.  And the rest of the day went really well.  I love my board, and I did make a few new friends.  But every time we saw a cop pulled over behind someone we said, "Uh, I'm sorry, I can't help you man..."