The Way to Heaven

Scene: A blustery Incheon sidewalk. Empty coffee cups and discarded flyers dance across the stage. A car honks its horn in the distance. Two Korean men in medical pajamas, one of them also wearing a back brace, smoke cigarettes in the alley between two buildings.

Enter Stage Left: our hero, Wayne. A youngish, curly haired, pensive, and rotund lad from America. He is lost in thought far away, as if he'd just returned home on his break to find out that the electricity in his apartment was still off and now he has to confront his boss about why the fuck he hasn't paid the bill yet and taken care of this. He is walking quickly.

Enter Stage Right: An elderly Korean couple, probably in their 60s or 70s. The man is smiling perversely and carrying a leather bound Korean bible. The woman walks a little bit behind him and nods at whatever he says.

The three meet.

Korean Man: Hello? Hello? Anesayo?

Wayne: Yes? Yes, hello.

KM: Excuse me...are you...Christian?

Wayne: Yes, yes, I am a Christian, yes...I am Christian.

<KM extends his hand, and the two shake hands conventionally, but at the last second when the embrace would normally end the Korean man grabs hold of Wayne's thumb for a few seconds too long>

Wayne: <twisting away from the man> I'm sorry, but I-

KM: Do you know the way to heaven?

Wayne: I'm sorry, but I have to get to work...

KM: Do you know the way to heaven?

Wayne: Yes...I am Christian...but I have to go to work...

>Exit Stage Right

You Got To Have Powaaa!

There's this part in Back to the Future II that Lee and I always thought was funny, where MJ Fox is trying to get his hoverboard to slide across the water and the battery dies or something, and one of Biff's gang, this Asian guy living in the far distant future (was it 2005 or 2015? I can't remember) and who's decked out in a helmet and a flashy jacket and all that jazz yells at his would-be prey: "You got to have powaaa!" in a really funny Asian accent.

I was reminded of that scene when I came home today.

No power.

Fuck.

The delightful soul who lived in my apartment before I arrived wasn't a big fan of things like, oh, I dunno...paying bills. So since I've arrived I've received several stern-looking letters with Korean versions of 'past due' and 'delinquent' written all over them. Everytime I get one I just pass it on to my boss, Jason, and hope he takes care of it. Well, apparently he didn't...

Jason assured me earlier tonight, when I called him from a pay phone in front of Wal-mart, that the power would be back on tomorrow morning or tomorrow night, at the latest...of course there's a problem with that, you see, I still have to deal with to-night, b/c, you know, it's not yet tomorrow night...nice.

Whatever. I can deal...and I slept a coupla nights sans power when I first arrived, anyway. I have Jenn to thank for that, too, btw. And the hot water worked then, so I was still able to take a shower.

I guess I'm just glad I brought a battery powered alarm clock with, or, well, maybe not. At least then I'd have an excuse for oversleeping manana...

Korean Candor

Koreans can be refreshingly/disturbingly candid about a stranger's physical appearance...I knew that already, but had it reinforced today.

One of my co-teachers said that she had been called 'the ugly teacher' today by one of her kids, and I'm not sure but I think I may've gotten that once before myself...it's hard to tell sometimes what the kids are saying b/c of their accents...'ugly' could just as easily be 'angry' or 'crazy' (one of their favorite words b/c it's a curse word here in ROK) or a million other things. She didn't seem to care, and that's the right attitude to take.

My honor's kids love the fat jokes, and I don't really mind b/c it's not like it's a revelation to me, and I even encourage it sometimes, but if my skin wasn't kinda thick already (from all the fat, natch) it could get old, fast. Today we were talking about the innumerable ways in which a pencil is different from an eraser, and we were doing a Venn diagram on the board.

One of the smarter kids chimed in with the fact that pencils are 'not fat' (he later was introduced to the term 'thin') and that erasers are. I wrote 'thin' on one side of the diagram and then wrote under erasers on the other: 'fat like Wayne teacher.' They got a kick out of that.

But anyway as I was leaving class I said my usual 'goodbye munchkins' and the ones that like me said something to the same effect, and then as I was opening the door to walk out June-Sung, probably the brightest kid in the class, says 'Goodbye fat man.'

I did a double take, froze in my tracks, chuckled and then turned to him and tried to communicate that that wasn't the politest thing to say, all self-effacing and our congenial relationship aside. I'm not sure if it got through, but, well, welcome to Korea, baby, or rather: 'Fat Man.'

So, what's an average day at SLP like?

Tuesday, March 21st:

9:30 (that's AM, folx) - I arrive and start trying to put together the shit I'll need to teach my pre-schoolers.

9:40 - Sophia, one of my fellow teachers and the sort of 'pit boss' of our crew tells me that Joanne-teacher, my co-teacher, won't be here today b/c she's sick. One of the experienced afternoon teachers, Joey, will fill in.

10:00 - I go upstairs and try to lasso a bunch of little crazy gremlins and get them to change theirs shoes, put their bookbags away, and sit in their seats.

10:10 - I'm halfway through the ridiculous morning song/'warm up' routine, in which I and one of the kids leads the rest of the class in a mostly mumbled rendition of various kids' songs. If video of this ever surfaces I may have to move away from civilization.

10:30 - I escort the kids, in a semi-line, to the bathroom for the first of what will be many bathroom breaks during the day. We do this like every half hour, for four hours, seriously.

10:45 - I realize that the struggle to teach the kids how to act out a scene and introduce their friends with the complex phrase "Hi, this is Myung bin," has been in vain.

11:00 - 11:25 - Break Time! Fuck yeah! The kids get to play for a bit.

11:15: I'm watching my class as well as Joey's b/c he has to go get some material ready. Yoon Hee rushes out to me in the hall, gives me a pathetic and desperate look, and then proceeds to pee all over the fucking place. Shit no! At first I start to walk her towards the bathroom, but that's quite a hike and she's dripping the stuff everywhere, so I let her finish, then we stroll over. I leave here there and grab a mop to go clean up.

11:45: My kids definitely know the difference between p/q, b/d, m/n, etc. So how to spend the remaining 10 minutes of Activity time?

11:55 - 12:40 - Lunch/play time. Fuck yeah!

12:40 - 1:10 - I repeat the same boring activity, but in Horse (Joanne's) class. These kids are pretty dumb and they're all riled up after lunch, so it takes a good bit before I get some response on the b/d question...

1:10 - 1:40 - Instead of story time today we have a birthday party! Fuck yeah! It's graham crackers and tangerines for everyone, plus a pretty sweet chocolate cake with these kiwis on top...nice.

1:40 - 2:00 - I try to clean up after the munchkins, get them to put their shoes, coats, and bags on, and of course I forget to do the wrap-up (summary) for the umpteenth time in a row. Then I escort them downstairs where they line up to board their bus and also to run around, kick and punch each other, and scream at the top of their lungs.

2:10 - 3:40 - I spend 10 minutes prepping for my afternoon classes, walk down to the corner Tostore with AJ and get something to eat, then spend the remaining hour or so figuratively twiddling my thumbs.

3:40 - 4:20 - My honor's 2.1 course. For level two these kids are fucking Einsteins. But they can also be little bitches, too, and today I'm being observed by Julia, one of my bosses. The lesson today's not that interesting, either, I mean you can only talk so long about the different kinds of clothes you wear in the different seasons. I thought I did pretty good based on what I had to teach, and Julia did too thankfully...she said to me later "It seems...you are, very patient teacher." I didn't know whether to take that as a compliment or not, so I did...but maybe I do put up with too much shit from the brats. You gotta slap em around (figuratively speaking) every now and then or they won't be afraid of the hammer coming down sometime. Something to work on, I guess...

4:20 - 5:00 - A regular level 2 class, with only 5 students, but it's still a bear to teach. These kids are soooooo dumb and soooooo afraid to talk...the only two who do pipe up like to fight with each other, too...but today it went ok. We played a game, they were happy, I was happy b/c things went a little more quickly...

5:00 - 5:50 - I spend 15 minutes planning preschool for tomorrow and then dick around on the computer, stare at the wall, or count the hairs on my arm...anything to pass the time.

5:50 - Quitting time! Fuck yeah!

The Japan Visa Run

Well I did the Japan visa run this past Thursday & Friday, and I actually made it back with everything I needed, didn't really get lost on the way, and didn't lose anything valuable. Maybe optimism IS the way to go.

I wasn't feeling too optimistic when I boarded an overheated bus early Thursday morning which I hoped was bound for Incheon airport. Of the four teachers at SLP who'll be doing the visa run, I was the first to go, so I had only the reticent Jim and a packet of documents/instructions to guide me from my little corner of Bucheon all the way over to the Korean embassy, excuse me, consulate in Osaka. The SLP 'guide to the visa run' seemed to tell me everything I needed, and Jim was full of his usual soft-spoken and world-weary advice on the day before I left (example: "don't get in the taxis unless you absolutely have to. The first thing Japanese taxi drivers do is lock you in and put 5,000 yen up on the meter (that's about 45 US greenbacks)." <--actually that was good advice, I didn't get into a taxi in Japan but from what I could tell by observing others, what Jim said was true), so I had some reason to feel like I might pull it off Thursday morning when I hopped on the old 302.

But I had a feeling something would go terribly wrong, and I'd wind up in Singapore or something and have to pay for a ticket back. But nothing like that happened. The 302 dropped me off at Incheon just as planned, I got on the right plane, and when I got to Osaka it was reasonably easy for an English speaking gaijin (I think that's the right word) to navigate around.

All of the Japanese people I met/asked for help were very kind and knowledgable, which is a good combination, and with their assistance and the aid of a couple of maps I found the train which took me downtown, and the Korean consulate, without a problem.

Finding the hotel was a bit tougher, you see, a lot of the part of Osaka where I stayed is criss-crossed with these narrow one-way 'streets' (actually they're more like alleys). There are a few large thoroughfares but these little one way backroads dominate the landscape...I didn't realize this going in, and based on the brochure the SLP people gave me I was sure the hotel would be on a large city street...it wasn't, and so I got a bit confused and even briefly lost. But I eventually got there and everything was ok, and after I got settled in I set out to explore.

Unfortunately it was raining, which made night-time walking a bit of a hassle, and I of course didn't know a soul in the city, so I didn't stay out late. I did have dinner at this little cafe and was served some sort of spicy meatball dish with mustard on the side which was really good...I don't know if it was worth 900 yen, but it was good.

The next morning the sky had cleared and I wasn't due at the embassy until 1:30, so I set out pretty early with big plans explore the city. I saw a lot...I guess, though I didn't see what I wanted to...what I mean is that I meandered up and down these aforementioned alley-streets for hours, without really taking much in even though I passed by a lot. There was just so much, and I didn't have much time. The few sights that I did set out for, the Sony building and the Art Museum, well, I got mixed results. The Sony building was this white, futuristic, seemingly-windowless building that was cool enough to look at, I guess. The art museum I know I got close to, but I couldn't find an entrance, and so that was a bust. I saw the 'Namba Walk' which is this enormous underground shopping mall that seemed to stretch for miles...but I wasn't really interested in shopping for clothes and everything was so damn expensive, anyway.

I don't really know how to effectively communicate all the shit I saw, so as I did with an earlier post, I'll just go through some of the notes I took down in my nerd-notebook I carry around with me.

"8 minute walk" - the hotel brochure said the hotel was this far from the nearest subway station. I just thought it was representative of a different mindset out here...

'Smoking areas/vending machines' - smoking's as big in Japan as it is in Korea, maybe bigger.

'Street walking on left' - in Japan they drive on the wrong side of the road, just like the Brits, and as a consequence they tend to walk on the wrong side, too. I noticed while walking that I kept running into crowds of people on the right side of the sidewalks, and realized why. When I shifted to the other side things went a lot more smoothly...

'2x the cost' - shit is fucking expensive in Japan. The aforementioned plate of meatballs, which was far from filling, cost 8 or 9 bucks, and later that night when I ordered room service (score!) to fill my fat ass up, it was another 12. Oh, and the food sucked, of course...

'ALL the women are gorgeous and whores' - probably the best part about walking down the street in Osaka was the eye candy. I think maybe b/c I was hanging out in a rich section that I had access to more high class scenery than, say, on a farm in Hokkaido or whatever...or maybe Japanese women are just all beautiful. I only saw one fatty, and dare I say it? I woulda hit that. And to top it off, they all where short skirts and low cut blouses in the middle of fucking winter. You see that in Korea sometimes, but everyone in Osaka was wearing that sort of outfit.

'completely Wester - uber-Western' - I didn't feel like I was in the 'East' at all...I mean it felt just like New York or Chicago, only the people looked a little different and the architecture was different. I don't know if that's a revelation for you, dear reader, but Japan is definitely part of the West...or at least downtown Osaka is.

'ABC stores sell shoes' - I kept seeing these signs for 'ABC Shop' and of course if you're from where I'm from you know what that meant to me...actually they sell shoes. Not that liquor was that hard to find, if you wanted it.

'Bon Jovi look' - apparently the hip look for Japanese teens is to channel Bon Jovi circa 1985 with the shaggy red hair. I musta seen hundreds of these guys...things went from funny to pathetic pretty quickly.

'people still stare but there are no little girls saying "hi!"' - when I walk down the street in Korea I'm quite the spectacle...it was basically the same thing in Osaka, but people only looked, they didn't speak. Of course I wasn't there very long, maybe if I'da stayed longer I would've heard those little 'hi!s' that I get here all the time.

'McDonald's everywhere' - seriously, everywhere. I also saw a coupla KFCs.

Oh yeah, one more thing. On the second day, after I'd picked up my visa and finalized all the paperwork to make me legal in Korea for a year, as I stepped outside the consulate the wind picked up. I started down the stairs that lead back to the street, and as I was descending the giant Korean flag in front of the building got caught in the wind and was blown over towards me. Before I could do anything about it, the flag had wrapped itself around my head, and I had a humiliating moment or two as I un-furled myself from it. Dare I say it? Another of God's little jokes.

For good or ill, it's official: I'm caught up in Korea for a year. More soon, I hope.

More From Korea

It's Quiz Time, kids!

1)When you order a pizza in Korea, what gets served with it on the side?
a)kimchi
b)sweet pickles
c)cocktail onions
d)a smaller pizza

2) "Goose Goose" is
a)an expression meaning "unwelcome foreigner"
b)a bar
c)meat served on sticks which is sold on the street
d)the name of one of my students

3)There is a TV channel devoted to...
a)Chinese Checkers
b)cheap porn
c)Korean televangelists
d)all of the above

The answers are forthcoming, but if you're dying to know I guess I'll put them in at the end.

My first week here has gone pretty well. My plane touched down at Incheon Airport about this time 1 week ago, and certainly I feel a lot better now than I did then. As I wrote before, the first couple of days were pretty crappy...I was still suffering through my jetlag, everything at work seemed baffling and overwhelming, and I didn't really know anyone. But all that has changed, for the better.

The first day of classes was Thursday, and it was not fun. The preschoolers are just horrible, they have at best a minimal understanding of English and of course they're more interested in playing or talking to one another in Korean than listening to me. But it has to get better, right? And besides, as one of the other teachers told me, for them we're basically just babysitting for a few hours and hoping that some of what we do gets through to them...the theory is that just some exposure to English will be good for them.

But my afternoon kids, for the most part, are just great. Maybe it's b/c I contrast them with the morning brats but for whatever reason I actually look forward to seeing them. It's just getting through the morning that's tough.

Ever since I've arrived I've been scribbling down in a notebook these things that strike me as comment-worthy, and here's what I've got so far:

"Bizarre red crosses everywhere" - there are apparently a goodly amount of Christians out here, and I remember on the ride from the airport last week that as I looked down into the valley I saw dozens of these glowing red crosses jutting up into the sky...for whatever reason Koreans keep the crosses illuminated and don't realize how tacky it looks...whatever, it's their country.

"bad drivers" - maybe I'm seeing it b/c I expected it, but no one here knows how to drive. You have to be really careful when you're crossing the street.

"smells in the hall" - I remember as I walked to my hotel room the first night I was here I was suddenly overcome by this incredibly strong and pungent odor coming from one of the rooms. Korean food stinks, or, well, it can stink, and I've crossed into these pockets of poison many times since I've been here...but what compounds the problem is the Korean system of ordering deliveries, which works the same way in America except there's a pick up service the next day, so after the person has finished their kimchi or whatever they put the bowls outside of their room in the hall. This compounds the problem.

"highways are still highways" - my apartment overlooks a freeway and every morning when I walk to the window to look out I'm greeted by a traffic jam. It's nice to know there's traffic everywhere, I guess.

"kids are still kids" - before I left a lot of people made comments about how Asian kids are better behaved than their American counterparts...complete and utter bullshit. If anything they're worse - I've never had an American kid say "I hope you die" to me, for example.

"woman's voice on elevators" - there's this one woman's voice who's constantly talking to you when you're on the elevator. She says "mushi mushi mush" or whatever very reassuringly over and over...it's weird.

"everyone is well traveled but me" - everyone I meet regales me of their trips to Mexico, Australi, S Africa, whatever, and I feel like a loser when I have to say New York and Chicago are as far away as I've been from home...but you have to start somewhere, I guess.

"a country w/o deoderant" - Koreans don't sweat. Ever. Never ever. And they don't get cold, either, but that's beside the point...they're like robots...but anyway, not sweating and not getting overheated means you don't need things like deoderant, right? So when I run out of the stick and a half I brought with me I'm fucked, b/c one of the teachers assured me I couldn't get any in the whole country...I guess I'll have to have it shipped from home.

"staring at me" - This is starting to get old. When I'm walking with other people, it doesn't happen, but when I'm alone on the street everyone has to look at me, and some people are downright gawkers. You'd think they'd never seen a roundeye before...like I said it's getting annoying.

"Kimchi everywhere. everywhere." - One week and I've already had enough kimchi for a lifetime. They serve it at every fucking meal, and I always try to eat it for some reason, I guess I think the locals will like me more if I do, whatever, but it is always disgusting...no mas, por favor.

"Worst couch ever." - I thought my old couch sucked, Christ, I'd give anything to have couch dread here in Korea. The one in my apartment has a bar sticking out from the back cushions and it makes sitting a living nightmare...it's about as comfortable as sitting on coals.

"Achilles' pain"- no, I don't mean the pain of being far from home, I'm talking about my Achilles heel(s), which were both scraped and cut and abused during my day of travel by a new pair of shoes that don't fit and caused extreme pain...and ever since that happened the wounds on the back of my feet have yet to heal, and they hurt everytime I take a step...yeah, it sucks, but what can you do? You wait for it to heal.

Alright, that's about it for the latest dispatch from Bucheon...my eyes are starting to get dry and I feel myself becoming less and less coherent...

Answers: B,B,D

First Impressions of Korea

Wow, what a week.

I'm writing from one of the thousand or so PC cafes that litter the landscape of the city where I live here. You seriously cannot go a block without seeing one...they're everywhere, but here people use them mostly to play World of Warcraft or whatever...I'm gonna try to use this one to record my thoughts on an incredible week.

Well, I left Raleigh Friday morning, and, well...the flight was hell. I was dreading the actual flight more than the transition from home to here, the struggles with a new job and with meeting new people, and with all the other shit that comes up when you move...and I was justified in that dread. It was absolutely horrible. The first leg of the flight up to Detroit was ok, I was a little cramped but the AC worked and I had a window seat so I could deal. And when I got to the airport there I didn't have any trouble moving around, getting something to eat, and boarding my next flight like I feared I might. But then the real shit began.

The middle portion of my trip was scheduled to last 14 hours, and to the credit of Northwest Airlines it and all of my other connecting flights were on time...but efficient or not 14 hours in a hot, smelly tube with ~400 or other pissed off and tired people is not going to be fun. For starters, my seat sucked, it was a B which means it was on the port side of the plane in the middle of two other seats. To my right was an incoherent, drunk, and sleepy Japanese man and to my left was a taciturn and immovable woman who also slept most of the trip, often with her feet propped up on mine. I didn't really bring anything to read and what I had I couldn't get into, so for most of the flight I either a)stared straight ahead into space and tried to avoid thoughts of suicide or b)watched the in-flight movies, which were - The Mask of Zorro, Yours, Mine, and Ours, and some other shitty movie. Now, you might be asking, why not just get hammered and go to sleep? I had every intention of doing so, and the guy with whom I'd spoken before I left for Korea, who was/is a fellow teacher at my school, assured me that international flights served booze for free. But for NW...this doesn't apply, and I sure as shit wasn't going to pay 5$/can for some crappy Japanese beer. And to top it off I've never been able to sleep just laying on my back, and since I was between two other people I couldn't lean to one side or the other, and for 14 hours I didn't get a single second of sleep.

By the time we touched down in Tokyo I was dead, but the excitement of being so far away from home in such a (relatively) exotic locale revived me, somewhat, and I was successfully able to navigate through the Tokyo airport and board the last portion of my flight.

The last portion was far and away the best, I slept for most of my trip, the food and beverages didn't suck, and I was comfortable. So when we touched down in Incheon I was feeling pretty good.

Of course, I still didn't know if the bags I'd checked back in Raleigh had traveled with me all the way to Korea, I didn't really know how I was going to get through customs and immigration, and all I knew about who I was meeting at the airport was that his name was Jae Sung and that he'd find me, not the other way around.

Well, my bags came through, thank God, and though passing through immigration and customs was time consuming, it wasn't too much of a hassle. But then I was directed to this sort of loading zone outside of the customs area, where all the other Koreans were heading, and so toting three pretty heavy bags I lumbered outside into a flood of people.

Obviously I didn't know a s(e)oul. There were plenty of folks holding signs which read things like "Jason Chan" or "Michael Wilson" or whatever but there weren't any with my name on it. After I'd traipsed up and down the line of people I paused for a moment to get my bearings, and just a second or two later I met my first cabbie. I didn't know who he was at first, and he was very helpful, and I thought he might be Jason, but it soon became clear he didn't know who I was and he wasn't from the school. I know now that he just wanted to give me a ride to Bucheon, where I'd be living, b/c Americans are apparently the only ones who tip out here and of course he could use the fare...but at the time I thought he and all the succeeding cabbies that accosted me there had more sinister intentions...Lee's joking comment about the "white slave trade" didn't seem quite as amusing anymore.

But eventually I met Jason. I was again skeptical and asked a lot of annoying questions, I'm sure, but after he pulled out my itinerary and introduced himself so I could understand through the accent I knew he was the guy, and we left.

The trip to the hotel where I'd be staying that night was fairly short and peaceful, the only harrowing moments were the coupla times Jason tried to go the wrong way down one way streets (I kept the comments floating through my head about a nation filled with Asian drivers to myself). Jason told me everything I needed to know about my situation and he told me that since the girl who had been using my room wasn't leaving until the next day that he'd be putting me up in a hotel for the night.

And what a hotel! It's probably the nicest I've stayed in, and certainly is the nicest I've stayed in by myself (I stayed in one in Atlantic City with LBJ a while back that was really cool). The mattress was as hard as a rock, but I slept fine...after staying up an hour or so to watch the shitty porn on Channel 2. The engrish in the brochure was a fun icebreaker, too, let me quote:

"Morning furnitures in your room is not allowed." WTF is morning furniture?

"Please keep away our child from playing in labby." And so on...

The next morning Jason picked me up and drove me across the street, basically, to my new apartment building. The teacher who was vacating, Jen, was still there and cleaning up when we arrived...to be honest she didn't exactly finish the job, and my apartment is still pretty dirty, but hell, I'm used to living in my own filth so why not someone else's? That day, that day...let's see, that was Sunday, yeah, Sunday night I met Joey, the guy I'd spoken with over the phone.

He and his girlfriend/boss Sophia (that's her Korean name - she's my boss too, btw) took me out to this OK spaghetti place in a mall somewhere and then to a bar near her apartment. They were both pretty cool people and they put me at ease.

The next day, Monday, after a fairly sleepless night due to jetlag, I went in for 'training.' I used the quotations b/c, well, it seems like at SLP they don't really understand that it's best if you train the teachers to do their job before you force them to teach. On Monday morning one of my new co-workers, James, this middle-aged guy from Canada who's been here for 10 years and at SLP for 8, walked me through the SLP manual. I honestly don't remember much of what we discussed, I was so out of it...but it didn't matter b/c by that afternoon I was teaching my first class.

When Julia, my boss' boss, came to me that day and asked if I could cover a class that afternoon I was surprisingly non-plussed. I'm still not sure I can describe it, but maybe I just have had a 'fuck it' attitude about this whole experience...what I mean is, my thinking is something like "Fuck it, I've come this far, how much harder can it be?" And it really wasn't that hard and in fact my first class that afternoon went really well. I just wish they could all be like that one...

Gosh, there's so much more to post about this past week but it's gonna have to wait. With the promise of more to come, I bid my fair readers adieu...

"One more weekend..."

Maybe all of my titles will be quotes from Dylan from now on, who can say?

Wow. My last weekend at Roadrunners. Looking back, I see years and years of Friday and Saturday nights in servitude to the man, eschewing any ambition of a normal-time social-life for the hit-and-miss life of the pizza tip, looking forward, I see a murky somethingness across the seas in Incheon which despite its ambiguity seems certain not to involve working till midnight on the weekends. What will I do with all my free time, what will it be like to have an actual weekend? Christ, I dunno...

Friday night was pretty busy but I got caught in a rut and kept getting the crappy runs. It started off reasonably well, my first delivery was to this gremlin sized guy at 410 Ranch Farm (why bother blacking out the street names? it's not like this guy reads blogs...). He always tips, and sometimes he tips well (when he's drunk) but it was still too early in the day when I got there so he only gave me 2 bucks. What was remarkable about the trip was that he had two of his buddies over with him, and one of them was this guy I'd encountered before.

I can't remember if I saw this guy at the same address, or if I saw him at his own home or somewhere else, but I'd definitely seen him before. I didn't recognize him when I looked at him, but my memory was jogged when he said to me what he'd said before:

"You got any red pepper in yow car there, boy?"

Like I said I can't remember where I've seen him, but I remember being asked this question several times over the last year or so, and it was always this jackass doing the questioning. Now, you may be thinking that that's a reasonable enough question (even though it isn't - c'mon, it's not like we delivery drivers carry around gobs of pepper and parmesan just in case someone asks for it, it's not prudent) but what makes this guy a "major league asshole," to quote the president I believe, is that he's asked me several times before and every time I respond in the negative, and when I do so he gets downright indignant with me.

On Friday he asked about the pepper and I said no, then he asks: "you got any parmesan cheese in dere?"

Seeing that this could be the beginning of an endless sequence of questions about what I do or do not carry around in my Corolla I cut him off and said "no, I've got nothing in there."

He grunted in disgust and walked away while his height-challenged friend paid me. But as I was leaving I had to pass by him and the 3rd friend and he half-grunted/half-articulated some sort of sentence that was ostensibly directed at his pal but was really directed towards me, something like "Grunt dang dern peppers in dang ol car dere, parmesan grunt grunt in the car grunt grunt dang grunt."

I just ignored him until I reached my car, but by the end there it was obvious he was trying to get a response from me because his tone kept on elevating as he approached the end of the sentence like you do when you're not sure if you want to mumble something or scream it, and then you decide halfway through...I opened the door, stood in the partition between it and the opening it created, and sized him up.

I knew I could take him if it came to that, and though a physical confrontation wasn't really something on the ol conscious-radar when guys get into confrontations that's the first thing we consider, whether we realize it or not. I also knew that it was one of my last days at work, and fuck it, I could be disrespectful to this fucking prick if I wanted to be. And maybe waynepast would have been, waynepast might have said something like "Dude if you don't shut the fuck up about the fucking red pepper I'm gonna rip that goddamn hick mustache off your face and feed it to you," but waynepresent, or, to be more accurate, wayne near-past is more mature than that, and he said only (with just a hint of sarcasm) "thanks for the advice, I'll take it under advisement" and drove away.

Another interesting delivery that night was when I went to this mailb0x-less trailer park where it's always hard to figure out which house is which. A lot of times in places like this you just have to do your best and guess, and pull in and out of driveways with your brights on until you spot the numbers on the door...and sometimes when there are no numbers you just pick one and knock on the door. Anyway on Friday I get there and I was actually talking on my cell as I pulled onto the street, and so I drove up and down it one time looking for the number, but I didn't see anything. As I was coming back up the street again I notice that there's a guy outside and he seems to be looking at me. I ended my call and stopped in front of his yard, rolled down my window, and asked him if he ordered the pizza.

He considered it for a moment and then said that no, he had not. "Oh," I said, "well then are you number 9? I'm looking for number 11 and maybe that's your neighbor." The guy considered that question for another moment and then said "I don't know...I had a stroke."

"Oh, OK," I said and got back in the car. Now, I'm not one to make fun of stroke victims...my dad had a stroke about 10 years ago and I know how difficult they can be. But for whatever reason his answer amused me...I guess it's what he says whenever he gets befuddled...but seriously dude, you need to re-learn what your address is.

Saturday night was slow and dull and I can't think of any stories that could even be slightly interesting...of course if you've read to this point you may think that was true of Friday night, as well...all that's left is Sunday to complete the final weekend trifecta for me at Roadrunner's, and though I can't know for certain I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict more tedium. To quote another musician: "I could be wrong, but I'm not."

To Quote Dylan: "Things Have Changed..."

Wow, a lot has happened in the last few days.

On Friday I finally got my diploma from UNC, which for whatever reason does not have them ready for the December grads when they graduate.

I emailed the Korean recruiter I'd been working with and let her know I now actually had my physical diploma and could prove that I had my degree with more than just a transcript...I did this on Sunday I believe.

Monday, last night, she calls me and says she has a position lined up for me in Incheon, which is a large city (mid-sized, by their standards) just to the South of Seoul. Think Philadelphia:New York::Incheon:Seoul. She says all I need to do is speak briefly with the principal at the school and with this guy named Joey, who is another English teacher and who's been in Korea for a few months after likewise being recruited by the same person. I did so, liked what I heard, and accepted the position.

Today, this morning, I received the contract via email, looked over it and talked about it with my recruiter, and signed it. Tomorrow or the next day, after I've got all my shit squared away, I'll send it off to Incheon.

Next Friday, the 24th of February, if all goes as planned, I'll board a plane and head off to the other side of the world...where I'll land in the famous and architecturally interesting Incheon airport, featured above.

Holy Shit I Can't Wait For This

Bob Dylan's back in the studio; album will be released in the next few months

I am really, really excited about this. It's been a long time since 2001's Love & Theft, but if the new album is anything like that one then it will have been worth it. Dylan seems to be taking his time with new releases in his old age, 1997's Time Out of Mind jump-started the whole Dylan-revival that got me interested in his music, and then Love & Theft confirmed that the old man still has it, in spades, but it took four long years for the sequel to come out. I've heard rumors that this could be it, that he may release this album in May and then walk away from music for good...I don't believe that, he's been doing the Never Ending Tour for almost 20 years so why stop now? But I don't know what it's like to be 65 anymore than the next 23-year old, so who can say?

Whatever happens, I'm just glad to have one more new album from the master, even if this is it. Now if we can just get a NET bootleg series going, then we'll have something...

The Superbowl

Sorry for the generic image, but until I get myself a digital camera these pictures that have been culled from the internet will have to do.

Everything went surprisingly well yesterday, much to my surprise. Charley didn't break down into tears because of the enormity of it all, he didn't call James in on his birthday, Leah and Charley didn't start cussing each other out over who was the laziest, and Abdul and I didn't threaten each other with violence b/c someone took the wrong run.

As in Superbowls past, James overscheduled a bit and we weren't quite as busy as we expected to be. It shouldn't come as a surprise, part of the reason the big pizza stores are so busy on this day is b/c they advertise like mad before and during the game...and of course my little store doesn't do TV advertising. But there was still something of a bump as compared to normal Sundays, that's for sure.

People were tipping well, for the most part, although I did get stiffed at one house. I should've expected it but for whatever reason my mind was elsewhere and I wasn't anticipating a no-tip as I drove to 2328 _____ St. If you know it's coming then you can deal, but when you pull up to the driveway and then realize who the asshole is that you're about to meet then sometimes you don't put your best face forward. I'd been to this house several times, usually in the early afternoon and usually to deliver to a few kids who order a sub or two and a dozen wings as an afternoon snack, I guess. Being teenagers, of course they never tip. But when I pulled up last night there were a few more cars in the yard and they had a relatively large order coming their way, so I thought maybe, just maybe, the kids' mother/father/guardian would be more generous.

This older black lady comes to the door, I smile, still thinking I might get tipped, and tell her the price (22 something). She takes the pizzas and hands me a twenty, then says hold on a second. She calls to her friend/child/miserly companion, who dumps something into her hands just beyond my scope, then she returns. "Here ya go," she says kindly, all smiles, and she holds out her hands which're cupped together. I extend mine in the same way, and she dumps a sweaty glob of change into hands.

I take a quick glance, see that it's about $2, and turn and walk away without any sort of parting phrase or gesture. I normally say to the tippers "Thank you, have a good night" and sometime I'll even extend the courtesy of the latter half of that phrase to no-tippers, just as a reflex, but when someone really pisses me off I say nothing and just walk away, doing my best to scowl. I've been tempted in the past to say "Thanks a lot" but I could never quite bring myself to be that rude to a customer.

Well, this behavior just stunned this old woman, and she calls out to my back: "aincha gowna count it?!" I said nothing and walked to my car, she mumbled something about "dat boy" and went back into her house. Fuck her.

Old bitch at 2328, you now join Eric Bana on my shit list.

Thursday 2/2

Except for the last hour, last night was just another really slow weekday. I did 8 runs in 5 hours, which is...not good. But the tips were excellent, for the most part, and this weekend should be busy, especially Sunday with the Superbowl and all.

We did have a late night rush in the last hour, right as the rain was picking up, of course. I had taken a close run and returned to the store as Mo was leaving with another. There were two deliveries, neither of them that far away but in opposite directions, and the first one, which would belong to me, was the better of the two. So I was looking forward to taking that one and leaving the shitty one for Mo. Naturally, James asks me: "you want to take both?"

Of course the subtext here is: "please take both. I can't trust Mo yet with an after-hours delivery like that one." You see it was getting close to closing time and whoever took the second run would have to deliver it some time after 10. Neither James nor Charlie ever stay a second past closing time, unlike managers at, you know, real stores, and so when a late delivery is taken what happens is the driver has to pay for it in advance and then he pockets what he collects from the customer. A whole helluva a lot of time something goes wrong on these, and why we still do it I don't know (it seems like hundreds of times I've done it and people have called the store b/c they think their delivery's late, and there was no answer, so when I get there they say something like "I ain't payin fo dis! I dun called de stow an dun noone ansaad!" and I'm out there without a lifeline) but anyway the point is Mo is still inexperienced with that sort of thing and to top it off he is cell-phone-less, so it wouldn't be a great idea for him to take it.

I said yes, and then b/c another call came in I had to wait until practically 10 before I left with both deliveries. Both were a hassle - there's just something about these late night deliveries after closing time, it's like the customers know they can give me a hard time - but they weren't as bad as they could be.

At the first one the total was ~25 or so, and the asshole comes out (after I have to knock three separate times, by the final knocking my hand hurt coz I banged the door so much) and wants to pay with two twenties. I had a five and five ones for change, normally I would have more but 1)I had no cash in my wallet and 2)I had to borrow the ten for the bank from the store in the first place, and for some reason I didn't take the usual 15, which would have sufficed in this instance.

"Do you have a ten?" I asked. "You see I only have 10 in change."

The guy snorts and then says no. He leaves me with one of the twenties and heads back into his trailer to "look for some change." Meanswhile I stand outside for 3-4 minutes while he looks...when he comes back he says "just give me the ten and we'll call it even."

That's not the way I usually get a $5 tip, but I'll take it. Of course, now I had no change for my next stop, so I had to swing by a gas station and make change.

When I finally arrive at my second stop, a full 45 minutes after they'd ordered, I was sure they'd called the store by then. You see we tell everyone when we take the orders "it'll be there in about 45 minutes" which is a safe time to give b/c it's usually pretty accurate and gives us a good plus/minus range. But nobody listens anymore, we all just wait for our chance to speak, and pizza patrons are just like everyone else, only worse.

It had been drizzling, but as I pulled up onto this guy's street the bottom fell out and the rain really started to come down. I know (b/c I took the order over the phone) that this guy ain't gonna tip, but I do the honorable thing and keep his stuff in the bag so it won't get wet, and I rush up to his door like I give a damn. He sees me and opens it, but of course he doesn't invite me in, and since he lives in a fucking trailer there isn't any covering on the porch. So I'm standing there getting drenched, handing him his pizza, and he gives me a twenty for his $18.77 order. For a quarter of a second I thought he might pity me and let me keep the $1.23, but well, I could take one look at him and tell he was much closer to the ideal no-tipper than he was to the ideal great-tipper. I guess I'll go into pizza delivery profiling later, but he was a young, semi-poor, black man. That does not translate into good tippage.

As I pulled away the rain abated. Another of God's little jokes.

Weekend Adventures

It was a good weekend to be a delivery driver. Friday was wonderfully busy, I think I did 20 runs which is about as good as one can do at my store, and I crossed the $70 plateau which is always a cause for celebration. Even the no- and low-tippers were giving that night.

Saturday was slower but still steady, and I did well again. The most interesting thing that happened wasn't on a delivery but was inside the store. I took a run around 8 to this trailer in a notorious no-tip zone. They had a big complex order with all kinds of shit on the side, they had two or three pizzas, cheesestix, wings, salads, you name it they got one of it. Well somehow in the bustle I forgot the dozen wings. That hadn't happened with me in a while but sometimes you just miss something...well anyway by the time I got there it was too late to go back and they didn't want a refund, so someone was going to have to bring the wings out to them. I knew it would probably be me, b/c no one likes doing the redelivery shit b/c it is a guaran-damn-teed no tip. I've only seen someone tip on that once in 4 years - not that you should have to, when we fuck up it's not like you should be obligated to be more generous. But anyway that's why no one wants to take it.

Well I call the store and talk to Charley and ask if there's anyone coming back out this way with another run, and if so could they please bring along my wings. Abdul was apparently the only one in the store, and I hear Charlie yell out something to him in Arabic (there is only one way to speak Arabic, and that's by yelling - you start from there and then gradually escalate until you're screaming your fucking brains out at each other) about the street I was on. "No," I hear Abdul say, and the Charley repeated it and I said "alright, I guess I'll come back and get it."

When I got back to the store Abdul was still inside working the oven, which was a little odd b/c I thought he'd be off on his run by now. I go over to where the wings are reposing on the top of the oven and as I do I take a sideways glance at his slips hanging on the wall. Sure enough, the one on top was a different direction and so if he was taking that he wouldn't be obligated to do the redelivery. But something seemed a little off so on my way back out of the store I glance over at the order list by the phone, and I see that the only two orders to come in are the one that I saw he was taking and another, earlier order which would have belonged to him, which was going the opposite direction, and which would have gone along well with the redelivery.

I knew then that he was violating the unwritten rules of our store's delivery system: he was taking two orders simultaneously that went in opposite directions, and he was doing this to make it seem as if he couldn't be bothered by driving out of his way on a redelivery.

I was pissed, but I didn't say anything right away. No one wants to have to fix someone else's mistake, and so I couldn't be angry at him for trying to avoid the redelivery, in fact I'd consciously avoided them before, as well. But I never went so far as to blatantly flaunt the rules. Of course all of this sounds silly and petty, and it is, but I only now realize this in hindsight...at the time I was steaming mad.

So I take the wings back and return to the store and Abdul comes in shortly after. He starts talking to me but I'm giving him terse answers that would communicate to anyone with a basic grasp of English that I was pissed off, but of course Abdul don't speaka tha English that well, so he completely missed it. Then he starts joking around with me, ok, this is going to require me to back up-

Have you ever seen that commercial from a year or two ago that was selling car insurance, I believe, or something like that, and which was a takeoff of an 80s metal song? There was this band that bizarrely followed this guy around and would start into this song: "Roy! Roy Roy Roy! Roy Roy Roy! He's the man, going to work, got a job got a mission...he knows one day he just may become...a supervisor!" Well anyway a few months ago when it was popular there was this guy working at my store named Danny. He was a really hyper but cool pothead, I liked him, and we talked about music and movies and stuff and got along well. He had been singing the first few words of that song while we would clean up the store late at night, b/c people got a kick out of it and laughed. One day outta the blue he substitutes my name for Roy's, and sings "Wayne! Wayne Wayne Wayne! Wayne Wayne Wayne!" It was funny and everyone liked it and it sort of became Danny's way of greeting me. Everytime I saw him he'd break into that. Anyway it didn't really bother me and people thought it was funny, so who cares?

Well Danny was subsequently fired, which is a real rarity at my store, believe me you have to be a real fuck up to get fired by James. But anyway after he'd been gone a few weeks Abdul and I were working together cleaning up the store one night and out of nowhere he breaks into: "Wayne! Wayne Wayne Wayne!..." Now if it was funny when this longhaired hippy born too late did it, it was trebly funny when this imposing six foot something irascible deep voiced Syrian with a perpetual scowl. So it sort of became a running joke, Abdul would do it occasionally and everyone would get a kick out of it.

But by Saturday night, for me at least, it was getting a little old. For one thing Abdul is a loud talker among a race of loud talkers - anyone who knows me knows I respect Arabic people a lot, but let's face it, they like to scream - and whenever he would start singing it would be like a shot went off. He would wait for the quietest possible moment and then lob that verbal volley out there. I jumped b/c it startled me at least a half-dozen times, and that can get old fast.

So on Saturday night, after he'd broken the rules and pissed me off royally, while we were together in the store cleaning up he launches into the song. He surprised me again, and I jumped a little like you do when you see a scary movie, and I said "Hallas" which means something like "enough" or "that's it." He seemed a little stunned, and I walked away to do something else. When I returned and he saw me come into view, he said prominently to Charley "Hallas Charley." He was picking on me, trying to be friendly probably, but my thought then was "it's on now bitch."

So we're going about doing our chores and he strikes up another conversation. "Why you say 'hallas' man?" he asked. "Because that song thing is getting annoying," I answered. Charley had to interpret. "Oh, ok man," he said, meticulously washing his hands - a lot of Arabs probably spend half their life cleaning themselves. "Thank you, Wayne," he says, sarcastic. I didn't respond. After a few tense moments: "Why you no say 'you're welcome?" "Because you're being sarcastic," I said. Charley again translated. He moves away, still rambling about how grateful he is for my clarity and how wonderful it is to hear the truth from me, and finally I turn and say "Abdul, why don't you just shutup, and when you need more advice you can come to me." He said something sarcastic and I said "look, just be quiet or else I'm going to say something you don't want to hear" and then I turned and said more quietly "like how you're a fucking asshole." Charley, who was working beside me, told me to be quiet b/c he could still hear me and I indicated that I didn't care, and called him a "fucking asshole" again for good measure. By now Abdul knew I wasn't joking and he shut up.

Of course things were tense for the rest of the night while he was still there. Charley, Mo, and I stayed late and shared a six pack and we talked about it, and I could tell that in his private conferences with them post-confrontation he had been really pissed at me, and rightfully so. I had let my temper get out of hand and though he had dong something wrong it wasn't that big of a deal, and when we had been talking he was just playing around until I took it to another level.

So all day Sunday I felt like a jerk. When I got there Sunday night Abdul was in the store but we didn't exchange our usual greetings and I could tell he was still angry. I pretended to be, too, but after a while I just couldn't take it anymore. After an hour or so of standoffishness and frowns I went up to him and said "Abdul, I'm sorry about yesterday, I was having a bad day (not true, but that's the sort of justification people insert into apologies) and I didn't mean what I said." He accepted my apology and said something about us being 'brothers' b/c we've worked together for four years, and that even though we may have been briefly angry at each other we would get over it. He then extended his hand and I shook it, and I said "Anna meniac yesterday" which means "I was an asshole" and he laughed as the Arabs always do when I speak their language and things were back to normal.

I was glad I apologized (it was hard, believe me, b/c part of me still thinks he bore a lot of the blame) and I'm glad things are back to normal. But if he starts into that "Wayne!..." shit again I might just have to punch him in the mouth...

Ann Coulter Eats Babies

She also jokes about poisoning justices according to this article.
That doesn't really bother me, and I don't think Ann's a malicious or evil person, I just think she's a hideous self-absorbed bony moronic nutjob who as poster-girl for the Right embodies all that is wrong with most of the people on that side of the spectrum.

But, at least she's interesting...so keep writing, Ann.

Adventures, continued

Last night was deadly slow, and considering it was a Thursday that's pretty troubling. But maybe the weekend will redeem us. I did 8 runs the whole night, and that was only because I closed, which is ridiculous.

Meth-boy had called again, during the day shift, Abdul told me. He said that when he went to 'his' house he was there dutifully standing by the mailbox, shivering in the cold. Abdul laughed at this, and I'd feel sorry for him if he wasn't such a prick and a persistent no-tipper.

News to the customers of the world: if you don't tip, we hate you. And if you're a regular customer, and never ever tip, our hatred is limitless. It's irrational and silly, we know, but we don't care, we despise you with every fiber of our being. We will do whatever it takes to frustrate you, screw up your order, ensure it's cold when it arrives, make you stand in the freezing cold to get it, whatever. We may smile to your face but you can rest assured that when we turn our backs we're cursing you and yours.

Now it doesn't take much to avoid this sort of enmity. Just give us a couple of bucks. That's all it takes. The average tip for a pizza delivery is 2$ and if you give that every time I can assure you that your delivery guy will do his best to get your stuff to you hot and on time. If you want to give more, great, 3, 4 even 5 bucks are all of course appreciated and will only increase your standing in our eyes.

Of course there are the weirdos who tip more than that. I'm not talking about big tips on large orders, that's understandable and expected. If you have 100$ worth of pizza coming give 10 or 15 when it arrives. But we have a couple of regulars who order a standard amount of pizza, 20-30 bucks worth, and then will tip 7-10 dollars. Of course everyone wants to take their runs, but I can't help feeling that there's something wrong with these guys...like they expect a little more for their generosity. I'll let my dear readers look between the lines for their answers, but let's just say that in the summer these guys always answer the door shirtless.

But to sum up: just tip people. What you give will be returned to you ten-fold, or something like that.

Two Days, Two Great Movies

In the past coupla days I've seen two great films, both of them Oscar 'contenders,' to use the parlance of our times. Both of these were officially released in 2005 but since I don't live in New York, I have to wait a few weeks for them to trickle down to my local googa-plex. Fortunately it was worth the wait.

Match Point was easily the better of the two, and was probably the best 05 movie I've seen, with the possible exception of Sin City. My only complaint, and it is a very minor one, is that it felt like Woody had gone over some of this ground before...in fact Match Point in some ways was a sort of Crimes & Misdemeanors 2: Younger and Hotter. Just as in that earlier Allen film there's a philandering hero who gets more than he bargains for and gets himself out of a tough situation by making some serious moral compromises, and yet, he's able to get away with it and move on. In Crimes & Misdemeanors the moral compromiser, played by Martin Landau in what I believe was an Oscar-winning role, sits down in the end and makes it manifestly clear that he doesn't care that he's murdered his lover and that he's happy to get on with his life with the knowledge that his success and wealth is secure. The ending of Match Point is more ambiguous, and I like that, the final shot is of Chris gazing out on the Thames from his gazillion pound flat looking serene but contemplative, surrounded by his family and all that he's 'earned.' We know that he's escaped, and that evil will go unpunished again, but we're less sure of whether or not the hero will be able to live with that.

I suppose that takes away some of the bleakness from what is an otherwise morally bankrupt picture. I don't use that phrase negatively, because that is part of the point of the film, morality is an illusion, 'faith is the path of least resistance' as the hero says and those of us who believe that in the end good will win out and evil will be punished are just deluding ourselves and are making ourselves sheep to be led to the slaughter by the supermen in society who see beyond all of the illusions. Of course that's complete nonsense...I think, but at the very least it's damn interesting and that's part of what makes Woody's films so exciting and memorable.

Of course it's well shot, but that goes without saying. It's written even better, but again that's no surprise. All of the little tricks and symbols worked for me, especially the match on action from the opening shot with the shot of Chris throwing the ring into the river. All of the Dostoyevsky allusions were great, especially the inspector scenes at the end. The middle of the film drags a bit, but is redeemed by its ending. The actors all worked for me, too, but honestly the strength of the performances has never mattered in great films, in my opinion, a talented director and storyteller overpowers poor acting...and Woody is certainly talented.

Syriana was also good, if not great. I think part of my problem with the film is that the revelations weren't really all that revleatory. Oh, you mean the American government engages in all kinds of shady dealings and illegal military operations to protect its interests in the Middle East? That protection of the powerful costs innocent lives, destroys the would be reformers, contributes to terrorism and extremism, and corrupts our own values? No way!

I also kept reading about how complicated and confusing the film was, but I think those reviewers were just reflecting how so much of American film has gone to shit, and how short the average attention span is. Syriana is not tough to follow if you are, to paraphrase my dad, smarter than the chair you're sitting in.

But is it really worth paying attention? Yes and no. As I said it didn't really cover any new ground for me. I didn't care that much about any of the characters, in fact in the end when one of the 'heroes' returns to the wife and child he'd abandoned for his cause I just asked myself: 'who cares?' When another ends his life in one of the final shots of the film by blowing up an oil tanker I didn't really give a damn. I did, however, care about the pretender to the throne played by my old friend Siddig el Fadil (you won't get away with a name change here, buddy) and I didn't like the way his story ended. Of course a lot of that affection was just carried over from DS9, I'm sure...

So if the characters don't work, and there really isn't anything to learn, what makes it good? Well, it's hard to say...there's a certain grittiness to the film that feels honest. We aren't manipulated by soaring overtures, the characters feel real and so does the situation, and it's shot in a Soderbergh sort of way that reminded me a lot of Traffic. Like Traffic, this film is trying to look at an issue from a lot of different viewpoints, and we do get some greater sense of the whole as a result of it. Syriana worked for me, even if it was not a complete success.

Adventures in Pizza

After an AP story directed me to this blog I had an idea, why not do something similar? For the past ~4 1/2 years while I've been in and out of college one of the constants in my life has been my part time job delivering pizzas, and like the cab lady I've seen a lot of weird shit that strangers might find interesting. So why not?

Let's start with tonight. Well, for starters it was slow for some reason. January usually is, but James had sent out some advertising last week and the weekend had been reasonable, so there was cause for hope, but for whatever reason that didn't pan out. In 4 hours I took six runs, but they were fairly good ones.

The best tip of the night was from a pregnant woman who ordered two calzones. I pull up and walk to the door and at first her two little toddlers come and press their faces against the glass, and then she appears in all of her knocked up glory. I'm smiling at her from outside in my usual faux-oh-i'm so happy to see you-pose, and she starts talking to me. This totally threw me off for a second because she hadn't opened the door, but then I realize that the upper half of the screen door is missing and that she can communicate with the outside world through the opening while at the same time feel safe that her children won't scamper off. Anyway I hand her the credit card slip and she quickly signs it without glancing at the tip part, and I'm already thinking my usual hateful thoughts about ungrateful bitches and so on, but then she hands it back to me with a fiver and all is forgiven, naturally.

The other interesting delivery was to this blacklisted cat who lives out on this country road where we're the only ones who deliver there. I instituted the black list about a year ago after becoming fed up with people like him who are constantly pulling crazy shit and trying to get free pizzas, falling asleep right before we pull up with their stuff, calling the store and complaining when we don't give them the last 20 cents of their change, that sort of stuff, and I'm quite proud of it. There was some hesitation at first, in part because James absolutely hates to not give business to anyone, I swear he would serve the Devil himself after he'd cheated him 20 times, and also I think something may have been lost in translation to James and Charlie b/c they'd never heard of a 'blacklist' before and maybe thought there was some sort of racial connotation involved (of course the majority of the blacklisted folks are of that persuasion, but I digress). Anyway in the end I prevailed, and this guy was one of the first to appear.

He always took hours to come to the door, several times he wasn't there, a few times he claimed he didn't have the money, and to top it all off he was just scary. He lives in this old ramshackle place with a bunch of mean looking dogs, there are never any lights on in his house, and let's just say he has the face of a meth addict. But after several months of not calling, today he calls, not once but twice. He had called during the day shift and had asked to have something delivered to 4905, which was right next to where he lived and which was the address of an abandoned trailer. Abdul took the call over the phone and knew what was going on but because of James he decided to take down the order. He knew the guy was actually calling from 4891 but when he delivered it he feigned naivete and pulled up to 4905, knocked on the door, and when no one answered he left. Of course, he told me, as he was pulling away he sees the guy bust out of his house and start running down the street chasing him, but Abdul said he just laughed and kept on truckin'. Well the guy called the store before Abdul could return and James called Abdul and made him go back.

Right after Abdul tells me all of this the guy calls, and I have to take the run. Charlie, who took the order, had heard everything about what transpired during the day and as such asks him if he's going to be there. The guy assures him that he'll wait by the mailbox. So I take off with the run, get there in under 30 minutes probably (which was fortunate for meth-boy) and sure enough he's dutifully standing by the mailbox at 8:30 at night in the dark waiting for his two lasagnas to arrive. Now after hearing the story of his daytime humiliation I was a little bit concerned that this might be a revenge call and that he might be plotting something, but if anything I robbed him coz his order was 15.30 and I gave him 4 back from his 20 then hopped in the car like the thought of pocket change never occured to me. Fuck him, anyway, he never tips and yet he is relentless in his calling and now that he's found a way back into the system I know he'll be a daily fixture on the sheets. Whatever, I'll just do what I always do with the no-tippers: whenever possible I'll get there as late as I possibly can, I'll let their shit slide all over the place in my car without concern for the structural integrity of their pizza or whatever, and I'll try to find some way to get them blacklisted, or, in his case, re-blacklisted.

The 'Why the Hell Not?' Approach to History

I just finished Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln's seminal work in the history of fringe conspiratorial pseudo-history, 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail,' which I had received ironically enough as a Christmas present. First let me say that I was really eager to get into this. I reread Foucault's Pendulum right before Christmas and really enjoyed it all over again, and again had my interest piqued by historical conspiracies, the Templars, the Cathars, Jaques de Molay, Rene D'Anjou, the Comte de Saint-Germaine, etc etc. And though I haven't read The Da Vinci Code [a)it's way too popular now for me to deign to pick it up and b)I can wait for the summer movie, anyway] like many Americans these days I too have been swept up in the swirling rip-tide of secret societies and ancient conspiracies.

In some ways, HBHG doesn't disappoint. It doesn't lack in ambition, and it certainly is grand enough to be interesting. I think that if the authors had constrained themselves a bit, or if they had had someone playing devil's advocate, they might have come up with something a bit more reasonable and concrete albeit a bit less grandiose. But like Belbo in Foucault's Pendulum, one gets the impression that the authors here started off as skeptics who wanted to believe but couldn't, and ended as believers-at-all-costs who ignored evidence to the contrary and who stopped asking the hard questions. Of course they were at a deficit from the beginning because they weren't historians, they were trained as writers and/or journalists, and HBHG never really feels like a serious work because of it. Certainly the authors explored a lot of primary sources and had a good understanding of their topic, but it feels like they were more interested in their story than in the truth.

But what a story. Honestly, I'm pretty forgiving because 1)the authors seem to have looked at a lot of sources and 2)regardless of whether it's true or not, it sure is fun. Here's the best summary I can give:

-~100 or so years ago a poor unspectacular priest in southern France named Sauniere, in a very small town called Rennes-le-Chateau, seems to have uncovered something underneath/inside of his church which gave him a lot of power.

-In the course of his life he spent more money than could have been possible for a small town priest, and he was also visited by a number of very powerful people (including the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty). Why?

-Well, maybe because what he discovered there was evidence that:

a)Jesus was not celibate, but in fact was a father (via Mary Magdalen)
b)The Holy Grail, which is often viewed as a receptacle for Jesus' blood and thus often is depicted as a chalice or cup of some kind, was actually his bloodline, or his heirs, who were secreted away to southern France soon after the Crucifixion was staged.
b1)That's right, with the complicity possibly of Pilate and others, the Crucifixion was staged and Jesus did not die, but rather someone died in his place, possibly Simon.
b2)This explains how the Resurrection was later staged.
c)Jesus and his heirs went on to spread the 'family' cause, which was basically the argument that the 'Second Coming' of Christ would be the return of his heir to the crown of Jerusalem. They weren't popular with the proponents of the 'message,' those who believed Jesus literally died and was reborn, was truly holy and not symbolically so, and who would definitely return some day from Heaven to reclaim his throne in Jerusalem.
d)Because the 'family' was threatened they had to go into hiding, which they did under the protection of a bewildering sequence of royal families in France in the early Middle Ages...what's important is that they eventually were united with the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled France for a few hundred years around 1000 AD.
e)The Merovingians seem to have been connected to a group of warrior monks called the Knights Templar who led a series of Crusades to recapture the Holy Land from the infidels, presumably so that when they did so they could put Jesus' heir back on the throne.
f)Eventually the Templars fell out of favor with both the Roman Catholic Church (those old proponents of the message and adversaries to the family) and with the clandestine group that had been functioning behind the scenes and secretly controlling them all along - the Priory of Sion. When they lost the protection of the Priory of Sion they were vulnerable to the Church and its pretender to the French throne, Phillipe IV, who had Jaques de Molay (23rd and final Grandmaster of the Knights Templar) and his cohorts brought up on charges and executed in 1314.
g)What then had seemed to be the end of the family cause was just a diversion, the Knights Templar had been a red herring of sorts meant to distract the family's enemies from the true conspirators, who continued to operate in secrecy for the next 700 years through a series of sometimes obscure but sometimes ridiculously famous Grandmasters (among them da Vinci, Victor Hugo, Newton) and whose aim was to restore the Jesus/Merovingian line to the French throne and to reconquer Jerusalem. Along the way the Priory of Sion was in some ways connected to practically every well-known conspiracy theorist group/secret knowledge advocates, among them the Freemasons, their counterparts in France whose name I can't recall, the Rosicrucians, the publishers of the Secret Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc etc. But these were probably all still more distractions meant to conceal the real truth.

-Sauniere died still claiming he had a secret, and his companion made the same claim after his death, even though she died in poverty. No one really knows what he knew.

Which is a big part of the problem with HBHG. The authors never really provide an answer to the mystery that began their entire investigation! Sauniere is the starting point, but then he's discarded and forgotten while they traipse around European history in search of clues for the secret society they believe he uncovered. I would be a lot more satisfied now if they could have simply answered where Sauniere got his money, what he uncovered in Rennes-le-Chateau, and why he was so popular with so many powerful people. Of course they imply it was because he knew the truth about the conspiracy theory I've laid out above, but they can never demonstrate that connection existed; they have no proof, only conjecture.

And as for their conjecture, well, there are a lot of holes in the theory. For starters, the list of the supposed Grandmasters of the Priory is obviously a ridiculous farce. Don't you think that in the volumes of research done about great men like da Vinci and Hugo and Newton, in the countless hours spent researching their lives, that legitimate scholars would have found some connection among these men and a secret cult? And yet the authors of HBHG offer no such reference, the best they can muster is the association these men had with well known occult figures and imply that they probably had deeper ties. And I don't even want to get started on their Biblical theories. Of course the Gospels have holes in them, contradict one another, seem to imply things that aren't explicitly said, were arbitrarily chosen by members of the early Church at the exclusion of others, yadda yadda. But asserting that the Gospels are unreliable evidence doesn't then give you the power to cherry pick stuff from other, equally unreliable Gospels (like the Gospel of Thomas and of Mary) and from the four canonical Gospels to buttress your own theory. And the connections are strained, at best, for example there is apparently a scene in I believe Matthew in which Jesus attends a wedding, and the authors suggest that because his mother just happened to be there and because Jesus seems to be in command that it must have been his own wedding, not one of a stranger. Even if you agree that the incident is a curious one, that doesn't mean that your own theory about what happened is true. Just because Magdalen was associated with Southern France, with carrying a child, and with a sort of intimacy with Jesus does not mean that she bore him a family that gave rise to the greatest conspiracy the world has ever known.

But with all that said...I enjoyed it. Conspiracy theories are the new religion, I think, they give the faithless something to cling to, some sense of design and order that is just beyond our ken but which isn't necessarily divine, it's just mysterious enough to seem that way.

Munich, or, Spielberg: Still Good, Not Great

I liked Munich, liked it a lot actually, and I like most Spielberg movies. Of his later efforts (with the exception of The Terminal, which I never saw) I've liked everything: War of the Worlds was competent and exciting despite being plagued by an anti-climactic ending (the aliens get sick? c'mon...) and the presence of yet another bug-eyed child actor in distress for which he seems to have a penchant for inserting into his films, I thought Minority Report was near-brilliant and one of the best films of its year, I had fun with Catch Me If You Can, and I even liked the mostly-panned A.I. even though I believe if it had ended a half-hour sooner it would've been a masterpiece. I think Spielberg's responsible for two perfect films: Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark. And he gets a lot of credit for trying to tackle the big issues in films like Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and Amistad, even if he doesn't always completely succeed.

He's back trying to tackle the big questions again in Munich, and certainly that's to his credit, but his reach exceeds his grasp here, again, I believe. Munich tries to be two movies simultaneously and yet it's never really fully one or the other. Is this an action/chase movie about a band of assassins chasing down bad guys, or is this an introspective drama about the nature of nebulous concepts like revenge, honor, justice, etc?

As an action movie it is a partial success, even though it succumbs to the old cliches and plot contrivances - try and guess what's going to happen after the aloof veteran finally opens up to Bana's character and they share a moment, and then separate...do you think maybe that might be his last night on earth? And if you think the sensitive toy/bomb-maker who doesn't really want to be killing people in the first place is going to survive to confront some sort of moral quandary akin to the one Bana experiences, well, welcome to your first movie.

And as a thoughtful drama the movie is even less of a success because, well, for starters the acting isn't that great. Bana's been on my shit list ever since I suffered through The Hulk, and as I watched him trying to emote and struggling to contort his face into some representation of the inner struggle it felt like I was watching a Jewish Ben Affleck trying his best to cry his way through the climax of Armageddon. There's one especially dreadful scene near the end of the film when Bana's home with his wife in Brooklyn and they're making love, and as he's going through the motions he keeps having these images flash in his mind of how the Munich athletes suffered and how they died and his face looks like he could be watching a baseball game, or horses fucking, or a plane crash, or...anything but what he's supposedly imagining. The introspection also fails because Spielberg thinks the best way to get us thinking is to hit us over the head with these thoughtful images. I liked the pan to the World Trade towers in the final shot, but Golda Meir's soliloquies, the scenes with his mother, the comment that 'your mother is Israel,' shit like that just had me rolling my eyes. "Every civilization finds it has to negotiate compromises with itself," Meir says early on in the movie. "Oh really," I thought, "do you think that's what the film is supposed to be about?" I don't know that subtlety is something that lends itself naturally to film, it's a demonstrative art form and subtext isn't always as important, I recognize that, but Stephen, at least try, mmkay?

But with all that said, Munich is a good film. In my last semester at UNC I took an English course that was popular with all majors, Southern Lit, and I was one of the handful of English majors in a class of 30 or so. I always felt the prof was being a bit harder on me b/c of that, and it feels like I'm being harder on ol' SS, here, too, because I expect more from him. Munich is not bad, it is by no means a failure, and it is worth your time. But I don't know if Spielberg can adequately tackle the serious stuff. His best films have just been fun popcorn flicks, and it is this viewer's hope that he returns to that genre.

No, I have not seen Brokeback Mountain

So I played tennis with Lee today, in Cary, and after I'd beat him (surprise! 6-0, 6-1) we hit up the nearby Dairy Queen for some Asian-made patties and syrupy treats. That's how we roll. We walk in and are greeted by this snaggle-toothed black guy who's running the register. He was missing like the right half of his upper set of teeth and as if in compensation his remaining teeth on the other side were all oversized and jagged and pointing in odd directions. He reminded me simultaneously of two things from the Simpsons (again, surprise): the projections of how Lisa would look if she never had braces and Gummy Joe. Anyway, I order my #1 combo with a Mello Yello (no ice) and he processes it and instead of announcing the total he points to where it is displayed on the register. Maybe he was sensitive about talking because he'd have to show off that mouth straight outta the Big Book of British Smiles, I dunno, but I was a little put off by the gesture and gave Lee a look that said something like "what a prick." I think he sensed this, and as he was waiting for me to get my cash out he tries to strike up a conversation to make amends.

Register Dude: "So, have you seen Brokeback Mountain?"

Me: "Um, no, can't say that I have..."

Internal Dialogue: "Are you hitting on me?"

RD: "Yeah, it was nominated for like 4 Golden Globes I think and it was directed by Ang Lee, the guy who directed Crouching Tiger"

-me getting cash-

RD: "and it's supposed to be really good, and..."

-him taking cash-

Me: "Yeah, that's cool man, but I can't say that I've seen it."

Where the fuck does this guy get off asking me a question like that? Do I look like someone who would go see Brokeback Mountain? If anything Lee's the Brokeback Mountain watcher, with his operas and his Guys and his Dolls and his knowledge of cheeses. I was really disturbed by the whole encounter.

At least for a moment...turns out the guy was full of non sequiturs, coz after Lee orders he just starts babbling about some girl who used to work at the DQ and who knew all this shit about medicine and herbs and shit, and believe me, Lee had said nothing to prompt this. So I didn't feel quite as emasculated after I realized he was just some crazy toothed loon.

Gummy Joe: