Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Diet? I Don't Buy It

I tend not to talk about diets, largely because talking about them leads to one of two scenarios. Talking about your own always feels preachy to me, like you’re constantly pitching it to other people, and asking about somebody else’s feels like getting too much into other people’s business. Especially the more diet-of-the-week types, where people can speak out in the interest of the dieter’s health. It’s a dangerous road and therefore one I avoid.

But sometimes, though, the conversations get weird. For example, I let slip that I’m a pescetarian (I eat fish but no other meat) at work and, because of how word-of-mouth works, now it gets brought up frequently, mostly in a joking “Oh look at him. He’s a pescetarian” sort of way. The weird came in the other day, though, when more or less out of nowhere, a coworker got it in their head that I only eat fish. And that train of thought lead to that I was some sort of connoisseur.

“Have you had halibut?” they said.

“I dunno, I guess,” I said. Which would have been fine if the conversation ended there. But that only opened the floodgates.

“What about cod? Salmon? That weird Japanese fish that swims around a lot?” And so on. It felt like a reverse Cheese Shop sketch. Like Monty Python, I wasn’t even sure some of the fish I was being asked about even existed. They stopped rather quickly, but it was the barrage that stayed with me, not the amount of time it took.

I couldn’t help but think about what would have happened without the diet conversation involved. Like, would I have been able to respond with my own questions about eating Serbian pigs that waddle around all day, or French cows that walk backwards and say “Oom”? It just got me thinking is all.

-F

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

If You've Got Cooking Problems, I Feel Bad For You, Son. I've Got Ninety-Nine Problems But A Grill Ain't One

It’s just one of those moods you get sometimes. You’re walking across the parking lot to work and you see a piece of paper stuck to the inside of the door. It says, “Unfortunately our grill is down so we are unable to make Parmesan-Crusted Chicken or Potstickers.” Once you read it, you get this sort of premonition. Today is going to have one of the busiest work shifts of your life.

I’ve mentioned this before, this superstitious rule I’ve developed working in the foodservice industry. It states that whenever something goes wrong or breaks, that’s when a rush happens. So the logical follow-through would, of course, be that with a broken grill, the entire day is going to more or less be one entire rush.

There’s a similar rule that says if we run out of something, the demand for that skyrockets. Now, in the kitchen, this is a little harder to track. Unless you manage to hear the customers give their orders ten feet away through the sound of two fans, an oven, and some vents, you can’t really know if the cashier had to explain why they couldn’t have their eighteen potstickers so was there anything else they would rather instead? Sometimes, though, you’d get an order online, where people not in the know spoke to other people not in the know and somehow we were the ones who had to apologize and ask for substitutes.

There are some other considerations too. Instead of chicken -- that’s the normal kind of chicken, not the parmesan-crusted kind that we can’t make -- taking two to three minutes to grill, now they take six or seven minutes in the oven. Which on paper should be fine; we’re expected to get orders out six minutes after they’re placed, but there is some wiggle room occasionally, especially in circumstances like these. But we only have one oven, and there are enough other menu items that require it that throwing the frequent six-minute periods where it’s helping restock just throws the whole system out of balance.

Finally, here’s the worst part about all of this: the grill has been fixed. Multiple times -- with presumably different repairmen, though I can’t say for sure on that front -- has someone come in and fiddled around with it, and we’ve dutifully waited with the signs already taped to the doors. Then it’ll start working, and we take the signs down.

But then it doesn’t. It just stops. The grill breaks again. Thankfully, these times have been just after a rush, so there’s a bit more time to prepare for the next one, doing things like calling who we need to call and taping up new notices. The end result is the same, though: we’re back to where we started.

Maybe it’s fixed now. Like, actually fixed instead of temporarily fixed. I guess we’ll have to see.

-F

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Raindrops on Roses (Part Nineteen): Frances Ha


The coming-of-age genre has always felt to me like it’s deliberately tearing itself apart towards two extremes. At its core, it breaks down childlike wonderment, presenting a cynical view of reality with a very firm “This is the way the world is” message. But it also -- more often than not, it seems -- comes with a happy ending attached. The “comer-of-age” grows up and adapts to the world, finding things to replace the ideals they left behind.

By those metrics, Frances Ha would be a relatively standard coming-of-age film. But there is a key difference here. The protagonist of these sorts of stories is normally a teenager, matching their mental turn towards adulthood with their physical one. The titular Frances is twenty-seven. This may not seem like much, but it means Frances has wildly different issues she has to overcome. Compare this film, for example, to writer and star Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film, Lady Bird. While Saoirse Ronan’s character is dealing with the trials and tribulations of her final year of high school, from friendship drama to relationships to her equally strong-willed mother, Frances finds that all of her friends are moving away while she’s trapped in a career she no longer finds satisfying.

One might note, though, that the basic structure remains the same. Despite her age, Frances Halladay still has a lot of ideals that just don’t work in a cynical world. Some might read that as a failure on the part of the writing, creating a woman-child who might as well be just out of college if she’s going to act like she does. But that’s part of the point, I feel. One of the major lessons that Frances needs to learn is that life is perfectly fine moving on without her.

There’s also a charm that goes into the various episodes of Frances’ life, another thing that extends to many coming-of-age stories. There isn’t really an antagonist. There are low points, yes, and characters fight, but everything is mended by the end with that same resolution I mentioned at the beginning: Frances grows up. And yes, there’s some melancholy attached to that. But there’s a hopefulness to it as well. She’ll figure it out.

-F

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

One And Done

This is going to be another one of those “I think it’s interesting that this phenomenon exists but I don’t have too much more to comment about it other than saying, ‘Look at this cool thing.’” But its neatness is also why I’m talking about it. So temper your expectations, I guess, but not too much.

I think it’s weird how often I go one-and-done with movies. Like, I go to a cinema, stare at a screen for two hours -- maybe more, maybe less -- reflect on my experience a bit, and that’s it. That’s the entirety of my experience with a movie. Sometimes I’ll talk about it later, generally in a, “Oh, have you seen this,” sort of way, but once I’ve left the theater, it’s very likely I’m not going to see that movie again.

Take Madeline’s Madeline from that top five/six I did last year. Or even The Proposal, which I just wrote about. I found both of those movies to be very affecting and occasionally technically impressive. Both of them are also ninety minutes I’ll never experience again unless I get exceedingly lucky and come across them by chance. It won’t be by myself, either; I’ll be forcing these movies on a friend or family member.

I bring these instances up in comparison to a similar phenomenon: the idea of “wanting to unwatch something so as to experience it for the first time again.” How I understand this concept (to be really clinical about it) is people yearn for their stronger positive reactions to things, given that they’re impossible to recreate even on a second viewing. Their glee at a season or series finale, for example, or their shock at a particular twist.

This isn’t something I’ve experienced myself. Not because I’m not really into certain pieces of media, just because, well, I don’t know. Maybe because of how seldomly I rewatch things? But even in terms of music, songs that I listen to over and over, I don’t think I have thought of any of that. As rad as the intro to Justice’s Genesis is, I don’t ever think I’d wished it was the first time I’d heard it.

I also don’t think I don’t have very strong reactions to things. I mean, I spent almost an entire blog post selling The Proposal to anybody who would listen. Every post on my now-defunct review blog was about a film that I enjoyed. What I like, I really like. The only other cause I can think of, though, is just because of the number of movies I’ve seen over the course of, say, a month has only increased. The idea there being that each viewing of a new movie is a new chance for those highest of high moments.

But that seems a little elitist when read like that. It reads like, “Oh, you people just need to watch more movies/read more books/listen to more music.” And I don’t think that was my intention at all. If anything, I’m all for that feeling. The way I experience these movies, I wonder if there’s a hint of “art is disposable” mixed in there in a way that I don’t think was intended by the artists. Not everything has to be a complex sandcastle just waiting to be washed away by the waves, right?

Like I said at the beginning, I don’t know what any of this really means. I just think it’s a neat dichotomy of ideas. It’s always useful, I think (and if you excuse the pretentious phrasing), to consider just how one goes about consuming media.

Come back next week to, ironically, read about a film I have watched a couple times.

-F

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

The Moving Experience

I guess after mentioning last week that I was helping a friend move I should talk a little bit more about it here, huh?

I’ve noticed a sort of apathy towards helping a friend move that I’m not entirely sure I understand. Like, I get the “waste of a Saturday” sort of deal that I guess if I was working a nine-to-five I might disagree with, but on the other hand, like, they are still your friend, right? There are literally t-shirts and jokes to that effect. “A friend is someone who helps you move a sofa,” they all say.

The punchline generally is, “A true friend is someone who helps you move a body,” and maybe I’m not entirely comfortable with that, but I think my overall point still stands: one of the key features of friendship is that friends help each other. There’s value in that relationship. So yes, I did spend my Tuesday last week hauling a mattress and some chairs and a desk or two up a flight of stairs.

But at the same time, maybe there’s such a thing as too much help? I’m not trying to suggest that (a hypothetical) someone doing all the work while everybody else can only look on helplessly is a good or bad thing, no. Instead, I noticed that there wasn’t always something for me, personally to do. Once all the boxes had been marched up, it slowly became more of a “waiting to be told what to do” sort of deal.

And maybe that’s my fault for not taking the initiative. But if that’s the case, there was a whole lot of not-initiative-taking going on. A lot of the moving-in process was deemed by the tenants as “something we’ll do tomorrow/later” so trying to find something, anything to do became a bit of a process. You couldn’t ask, “What do you need me to do?”, you had to outright state, “I’m going to do this.”

Eventually, I helped build a bookshelf.

Look, I don’t want to be completely negative about the whole thing. Like I said at the start, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also wonder about the experience. When I left that evening, exhausted though I was from the work I did do, it seemed like there was a lot more that needed doing.

-F