Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, March 28, 2012 Back from the Dead Don't get me wrong, I like my new car. But I wouldn't have it if my old Saturn hadn't blown up and forced me to buy it. There was really nothing else to be done. As the guy at the shop told me, a hunk of the engine was catapulted across the shop when the started it. It was its time. In fact, as of just a few weeks ago when I drove by, it was still on their tiny lot. I would have felt bad about it taking up space if I hadn't signed the wreck over to them months ago so they could junk it. It was bad enough experiencing the ambivalent feelings I had just seeing it sit there, idle for months with no one driving it. Missing the open road. Missing me, the only one who ever truly loved it. Like I said last week, M. Edium not only didn't like my old car very much, he took to openly mocking me about it near the end. And he still mocks me sometimes for having driven it as long as I did. It wasn't exactly the fanciest car in the pickup line As far as he's concerned, the destruction of its engine was the best thing that ever happened to our family. So I was a little surprised to get a call from the car repair shop last week, asking me to bring by some lien release paperwork to show the loan had been paid off (which it had, years ago). That wasn't the surprising part. I knew the junkyard might want that before cubing it. No, what surprised me was that he needed the paperwork so they could get tabs for it. Yes, the impossible had happened. My car had been repaired. I felt a little weird about this, obviously, because they hadn't repaired it for me. Even I wouldn't have paid what they invested in buying and installing a whole new transmission in it. But it's not like they were going to sell it and keep all the money; no, they were going to use it as one of their loaner cars. If I thought it was weird seeing my old Saturn sitting at the repair shop for months, it's going to be even weirder seeing it being driven around the neighborhood by someone else. It must be like having a loved one in a coma from which it seems they'll never recover, and you move on with your life and get a new loved one to replace the broken one, and then that old loved one gets up and starts walking around. With a bunch of people you don't even know. It's not like they got a free car for nothing. They made the investment in parts and labor on their own behalf, and the owner has promised to work out some arrangement with me for credit for work in the future. As a matter of fact, I kind of can't wait until my new car breaks down some time. Because then I can drop it off and use the loaner car that used to be mine, for old times' sake. And for the sake of pure meanness, I'll probably also pick up M. Edium from school in it without ever telling him it's back on the road. posted by M. Giant 12:23 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Heh. I'd probably use my "credit" just in loaner car usage to pick up M. Edium every once in a while. Just to keep him on his toes, you know.
By Wednesday, March 21, 2012 Bumper Car As much as M. Edium likes my new car, it took him some time to get used to some things about it. Like getting in and out. He may have been annoyed and occasionally even embarrassed by my old Saturn station wagon, especially when I picked him up at his elementary school in a chi-chi suburb, but at least it had smaller doors and a lower drop to the pavement than the new vehicle. Now, getting out of the Equinox, he's in the habit of facing the back, bracing one hand on the edge of his seat and one hand on the door handle, and swinging his feet down to the ground. Naturally, this has the side effect of swinging the car door open as wide as it will go. And one day, probably, even wider. Which can be a problem if I park next to anything, which I find I frequently do. It's not always convenient to do otherwise, however. Not long ago we went to the grocery store to pick up just a couple of things, and the only spot on the first two levels of the parking ramp was next to a support column on M. Edium's side (he sits behind the shotgun seat). I went ahead and parked just inches from it, since I'd decided that M. Edium wasn't going to get out that way this time anyhow. I told him to wait and get out on my side. There was a bag of stuff on the back seat on the driver's side that I was going to put in the cargo area in back, but then his path out of the back would be clear. I told him to wait while I did that and then I would help him get out so as to protect the car next to us, and I closed the back door again, until I could be there to keep it from swinging wide. Even with the tight fit at the car's right, there wasn't a great deal more space on the left between my car and the one parked next to me. If he did his Cheetah-swing from the back driver's side door it would surely hit that car. So while I was moving around to the back, he opened the door anyway. A toy of his fell out onto the ground, and with the unthinking reflex of a child, he swung right down after it. Putting half his weight on the partially open car door and causing it to swing open as far as it could before hitting the car I'd parked next to with a blood-freezing thunk. I was upset. Things happen, especially with kids, but when you warn them not to do something, and you explain why, and they do it anyway, it's a little tough to let them off the hook. "Dents cost hundreds of dollars to fix, do you realize that?" I said to him in the store. "Do you have hundreds of dollars?" "No," he said plaintively. "I only have thirty." He was only referring to his cash on hand, but it still made me feel bad for him. Somewhat. So of course I was tempted to just drive off after we were done shopping. Technically, it wasn't my fault. But that wouldn't have been right. And what kind of message would I be sending my child? I couldn't let him see me do something like that. Maybe I would have given it more serious thought if he hadn't been with me, but then if he hadn't been with me, the dent wouldn't have gotten made in the other car anyway. I'd also been texting Trash during this time and we were in agreement on doing the right thing. Meanwhile, the other car blossomed in my memory from just the ding on the door to an entire silver Mercedes shining otherwise pristinely around it, a typical vehicle for the suburb we were in. We were screwed. When we returned to the parking ramp, I was all ready to leave a note, but the car's owner was returning at the same time, with her friend. This was going to be awkward, to be sure, but I saw that her friend was carrying something that told me we might be all right after all. Her first words to us were, "I'm sorry," meaning she was sorry she'd crowded our space so much. I said, "No, we're sorry." And then, without missing a beat, without anyone prompting him or even looking at him, M. Edium bravely piped up, "I dented your car with my door." I was almost as proud of him as I would have been if he hadn't just caused potentially hundreds of dollars in property damage. The other car's owner came around to the other side and looked at the ding, which was certainly visible but nowhere near as large as I remembered it. I looked at the thing in her friend's arms, a long, puffy, white bag with a hanger sticking out of it. "Oh, that's no big deal," she shrugged. "It's an old car anyway." Sure enough, as I looked for myself, the sparkling Mercedes I thought we'd ruined was a lightly pre-battered Mazda. "Let me give you our contact information anyway," I said. But no, she didn't want it. It was no big deal. She was impressed with M. Edium telling the truth, and to be honest I think she and her friend were both in a really good mood after buying that wedding dress. So with more expressions of contrition and gratitude, I let them squeeze into their car and waved as they drove off. M. Edium and I followed. But we'd both learned an important lesson. M. Edium learned to be mindful of the cars next to him when he gets out of mine. Nothing like this has happened since. And I learned to always park in the middle of at least three empty spaces when he's with me. Unless of course we park outside a bridal shop, but we don't make a lot of runs like that. posted by M. Giant 8:52 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Isn't that what the child locks are for? And what would you have done if the other car left before you got out of the store?
By I have always enjoyed your tales MBig but I have to agree with anonymous number 1.
By Tuesday, March 13, 2012 Summer Cool It was time to plan how M. Edium was going to spend his summer. At seven years old, and more than halfway through first grade, he's at that awkward age. He's too old to go back to Montessori or day care for the summer, and he's too young to be allowed to hang around the house all day driving his mother and me crazy for three months while we're trying to do our work-from-home day jobs. Last year wasn't so bad. He'd been going to half-day kindergarten the previous school year, filling the other half-day at the same Montessori school he'd been going to since he was three and a half. The problem with that was he'd been going to that Montessori school since he was three and a half, so he pretty much knew all the stuff they taught there. We kept him there for the balance of June and July, ignoring his increasingly strident complaints of boredom, then winged it for August, which proved less than ideal. He spent some time at a couple of camps and at my parents' house and even at their cabin up north, but that only took us so far. Not that he minded getting to watch a DVD or two a day when he was home, but too much screen time turns him into a recidivist felon on crack, just like all the studies say. So this summer, with three months to fill instead of one, Trash knew she was going to have to get a head start on getting him into the various programs. We're lucky to have access to plenty of resources where we live: the local community center, the community education department of the adjoining affluent suburb, the Science Museum of Minnesota, the YMCA, and most of all, Trash. She'd learned from experience last year that the good stuff fills up in advance, and quickly. So she's been interviewing M. Edium all year on what kind of activities he'd like to do. Which, given his eclectic tastes, made him seem like a rich kid from the Upper West Side when taken all together. Still, last Sunday Trash sat down with her laptop and what catalogs we'd received up to that point and started sifting through all the various programs available this coming summer. Most of them go for a week, and many of them are half-day classes. And she was booking them all months in advance, on websites that didn't always function smoothly or over the phone with the weekend skeleton crew. As I said on Twitter at the time, it was a bit like using barbecue tongs to assemble a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces are made out of Jell-O. But after a long afternoon of clicking, calling, and summoning M. Edium in from his snow fort to ask him, "Would you like this?" Trash had constructed a summer that any kid would envy. Or at least, any kid that likes the stuff M. Edium likes. There were two immovable tentpoles to work around: one being his one-week karate camp in August, where he's all but guaranteed a belt promotion; and the other is the previously booked week at the cabin by the lake with my parents (and, part o the time, myself), which last year changed his life by introducing him to the joys of fishing. Sometimes things skip a generation, you know. So Trash went to work slotting stuff in. You may have seen the product of his "Jedi Moviemaking" after-school class on YouTube; he'll be taking a similar class with a Harry Potter theme, so you can look forward to the sequel. He's also taking a Wizarding class, so it'll be like a summer week at Hogwarts but with less death. Other classes include one on invention and one on spycraft, so we'll get to have our very own miniature Q from James Bond in the house. Or a q, if you will. We're returning to Renaissance Weekend, so he gets to do Camp Renaissance again, where last year he met in person a paleontologist, several NASA employees including an astronaut, and a one-time pilot of the Goodyear blimp. He's also looking forward to spending more time with his favorite babysitter, with whom he bonded so effectively last summer by making her do everything he wanted to do. And if that's not enough, he's also doing golf, sailing, fencing, and horseback riding camps. At this rate there's nothing left for him next year but polo. He also wanted to do something music-related, but we're just sticking with his regular weekly piano lessons. And his final request was for something with dance and gymnastics. Trash found him a dance, gymnastics, and cheerleading camp, which he resisted until we told him that a cheerleader once grew up to be the president of the United States. Which is the first and last time we ever point to that dude as a role model. Trash was so proud of her accomplishment that for days afterward she carried around the notebook listing all the classes and showed it to people. I would have referred to it in writing this post but she's out showing it to more people right now. The best part is that if he hates anything, he only has to stick with it for a week. But he could potentially discover interests that he might pursue for the rest of his life. We're happy to be able to give him this opportunity. Sure, all those classes add up, but they'll pay for themselves next summer. At which pointhe'll be old enough to not only stay home all summer, but spend it building a second story on the garage. posted by M. Giant 4:58 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, March 06, 2012 M. Ovie Reviews: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Much as I love Roger Ebert (and imagine my surprise at Google finding only eight instances of that phrase on the entire Internet), I sometimes weary of his vendetta against 3-D movies. Don't like 3-D? Don't see 3-D. I'm indifferent, myself. Of movies that have been available in 3-D the past few years, I've mostly stuck with 2-D versions and don't feel like I've missed much. And of the 3-D movies I have seen in the past few years, the only ones where 3-D was effectively used were Priest and The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy. But I had high hopes for SWE1TPM, because after all, 95% of it is as fake as Pixar. The limitations faced by other films that were shot in 2-D and later converted probably wouldn't apply here, right? I wasn't expecting to like the movie itself any more the first time, but at least the visuals would be more arresting. Right? Now, keep in mind that I wasn't actually expecting to enjoy Phantom Menace. Like a lot of people my age, I have incredibly vivid memories of the first time I saw the original Star Wars in the theater, and every time I watch it again I can remember what I was thinking during any given scene. I even remember the kid in the row ahead of us who kept bleating, "Is that a space station?" My memories of seeing Phantom Menace in 1999 aren't nearly as vivid. I recall a couple of dorks in Jedi robes lamely faking a lightsaber battle in line for tickets, and I remember thinking about my "favorite" scenes the next morning, but most of all I remember the friend I was sitting next to in the second or third row leaning over towards me early on and asking, "Why is it so…bad?" I actually spent half of the movie worrying that the people I was with would want to leave, and the other half worrying that I wanted to leave. Because it is a bad movie. Not just by comparison to the original trilogy, but on its own merits. The performances are wooden, the dialogue barely outstrips that of The Star Wars Holiday Special, and the plot has holes you can drive a sandcrawler through. But I was willing to give it a chance in 3-D, partly for M. Edium's sake, and partly because I hoped that maybe the new multi-dimensional experience would make up for some of what I knew I would still hate. In fact, it was a thrill seeing that dated old Star Wars logo recede into space, and the opening crawl looked so awesome standing out light-years from the starfield background that I could almost forgive the fact that it was telling me about the taxation of trade routes. But then that was it. As soon as the fake objects and the fake sets and the mostly fake characters were interacting with each other on the screen, it was all just a dark, muddy morass. I have crappy depth perception, I admit, but I also felt like I was watching it through sunglasses that I couldn't take off. Even the sequences I was looking forward to disappointed. The podrace, which should have been an immersive experience, was just as tedious as the first time. Even the candy-colored Gungan battle, the most ridiculously shot combat scene in the history of cinema, looked like a tray of besmirched watercolors. I admit there were some things I caught that I missed the first time, like the scene where Jar Jar inadvertently gives Queen Amidala the idea to ally with the Gungans. Every time I've seen it before, all I've ever thought was "ZOMG SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP WHY ARE YOU TALKING?" like I do in all the rest of his scenes, but this time I picked up in the reason for it. But sadly, that was the high point. I've gone to a lot of movies that I expected to be good and weren't. I've gone to a lot of movies that I expected to be bad and weren't. I've gone to a lot of movies that have met my expectations on both ends of the quality spectrum. I'm not some babe in the woods here. But I have to say, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace left me feeling something I've never felt before when leaving a movie: ripped off. posted by M. Giant 7:04 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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