(Click For Bigness)

This really shouldn’t need any further explanation.

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Directed at no one and apropos of nothing, let’s take a minute out of our day to look at the word bigot:

Main Entry: 1big·ot
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): -s
Etymology: Middle French, bigot, hypocrite, from Old French bigot Norman
1 obsolete : HYPOCRITE; especially : a superstitious religious hypocrite
2 : one obstinately and irrationally, often intolerantly, devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion

You’ll notice the definition lacks any mention of race or ethnicity.  Granted, you’ll find other definitions that include them, but they’re being used as examples.  I’ve been working my ass off today and haven’t had any time for distractions, which always ends up with me thinking about random shit like this.  It’s only February 2nd, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that knowing exactly what this word means is going to be more important than usual this year.

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Hey, look, it’s the first post of the year!  I’ve been putting off updating the site until I’d upgraded the WordPress software, which was so horribly out of date that some of my plugins had stopped working right.  So last night I decided to hang out at work a little longer and upgrade to the newest versions of everything I use and now everything is shiny and new and wonderful (on the back end, anyway).  I had to stay and do it at work because for two months now I’ve been unable to bring myself to do it at home.  That’s because after ten hours of sitting on my ass in a dingy office, I’m likelier to parade around the house in winged sandals and a feather boa than I am to sit back down in front of another fucking computer.

You know, about a year and a half ago, WordPress wasn’t working so hot in one or two areas and I decided to just go ahead and write my own blog code.  I spent months working on that shit and it worked pretty well.  But every time I wanted to do something new, I found myself having to spend a lot of time reading up on PHP or tweeking it just right and after a while it just got too frustrating to deal with and I decided to give the newest version of WordPress a shot and wow, what an enormous difference.  The old version I was using was good but flawed.  The newer versions have all been stellar.  It really is a kick ass program.  I’m glad I wrote my own code because it forced me to learn quite a bit but when you compare the time and effort between doing it yourself and installing a program and running it through some tweeks, it just becomes increasingly silly to do it yourself.

Anyway, this will be the first thing I’ve written in over a month.  I decided to ignore everything for the holidays and just goof off with friends as much as I could and it was every bit as productive as I knew it wouldn’t be.  I’m a slack ass.

New Year’s Day was mostly spent doing nothing.  I successfully avoided the Rose Parade and the various Bowls.  Unfortunately, it was after 3pm before I stepped outside and discovered that I’d missed out on an entire day of perfect, gorgeous weather.  It was that nice outside, and it has been pretty much every day since.  Hooray for January in Southern California.

You know what’s weird?  I’ve gone through mild depression every December 26 through January 1 for as long as I can remember.  Almost exactly two years ago I wrote about this and I haven’t experienced it since.  Last year, everything was just peachy and this year I had the best Christmas I’ve had in years and The Awesome continued right on through New Year’s Eve/Day to this very moment.

Then there’s work.  For a variety of reasons, I purposely try not to talk too much about work here.  If I do, it tends to be something I think is too funny or odd or sad not to mention.  This is one of those times:

My boss is a horrible person.  She’s like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory only with more severe temper tantrums and a cocaine problem.  Oh, and underneath it all, she’s not a troubled teenage girl, she’s a 51-year-old gorgon with a voice that sounds like cats having an orgy in an industrial mixer.  Never, in the almost 41 years I’ve spent meeting people, have I met anyone who has a less realistic idea of themselves.  She’s bitterly resentful that she’s in her fifties and runs around wearing shit she bought at Forever 21, which is simultaneously funny and sad, and she refuses to let on that she’s middle aged (though people seem to figure that out for themselves anyway…).  Part of my job is designing and maintaining web sites for her and she’s constantly giving me shit because the font size for the text is too small.  It isn’t, of course.  The actual problem is that her eyesight has turned to shit as she’s gotten older but her delicate ego won’t allow her to wear reading glasses.  I used to tip-toe around her ego every time she would complain but now I just tell her she needs get some fucking glasses because I no longer care if I lose my job.  I’m not joking, I’ve literally walked in on her reading web sites with a fucking magnifying glass.

Last weekend she bought a Teacup Chihuahua.  In a parking lot.  For fifty bucks.  Swear to God.  She bragged about this and then told me they normally go for $700 – $1300 and that there’s a good chance she bought a stolen dog.  She’s fine with this.  I’ll repeat that:  She does not have any moral qualm with purchasing a dog that might have been stolen.  Personally, I don’t think it was stolen.  I also don’t think she knows what she’s talking about.  I’m sure there’s a breed of Chihuahua that sells for that much and I’m also sure she doesn’t have one of those.  But that’s not why I tell you this.  I tell you this because she now brings the goddamn dog into work with her every day.  She walks around with the little fucker like she’s Paris Fucking Hilton…at the dildo factory.  Fucking ridiculous.  The goddamn dog looks like that “Yo quiero Taco Bell” dog.  And it’s so attached to her that it whines and cries and howls every time she walks out of her office without it.  And it’s not even dog enough to sound like a goddamn dog when it whines and howls.  It sounds like a fucking Seagull.  This is a new part of my every day life at work.  When she brought it into my office to introduce us, she told me I could pet it if I wanted to and I told her I couldn’t because I was allergic to dogs.  She asked if I was going to be alright if the dog was here and I told her I didn’t know but I hoped so.  She said, “You’ll be fine,” and walked out of my office.

I’m not even angry about it, I’m just kind of fascinated.  At this point, I feel like I should be keeping some sort of scientific journal like Jane Goodall:

1/12/2010
Coco seems to have befriended a small dog today.  The male still forgets to flush the toilet.

Anyway, it’s just amazing.  And bringing it into work every day is one of the most inconsiderate things I’ve ever seen an employer do.  Fortunately, I’ve never defined myself by what I do for a living.  And I’m married to the coolest wife ever, and my family and friends are all doing well and aside from the economic fisting this country has had to take, and the subsequent poverty, things have never been better.  But Jesus, I need a new job.  Here’s hoping 2010 provides that.

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I should confess from the start that I can’t fucking stand James Cameron and I like his films just about as much.  The last James Cameron movie I really enjoyed was True Lies, which was only enjoyable because it didn’t take itself seriously.  Prior to that it was Aliens and prior to that it was nothing because those are the only two movies of his that I like.

So I remember going to see The Abyss with my cousin, Mike, somewhere behind the Orange Curtain, probably the Newport Beach area.  As we left the theater we both agreed the movie sucked, though he thought it was a little too cheesy, whereas I felt like I’d just paid a dirty old man five dollars to check me for a hernia, which was hardly a rare experience, actually.  When I think of how callously I threw away precious hours of my life on dog-shit entertainment it makes me want to find an old picture of myself and piss on it.

Anyway, maybe five years go by before I start hearing about the director’s cut of the movie, which may have been the first time I’d even heard of a director’s cut.  I heard about this from half a dozen people, all of them making the same claims:

• It’s a completely different movie
• Studio assholes cut the film because they’re idiots
• The tidal wave.  Dude, the fucking tidal wave

Back then I’d have been more than willing to waste time watching a movie I hated for the second time, just to prove to myself that it still sucked.  Problem was, this cut of the movie was only available on laser disc imported from Japan and no one I knew was rich enough to have a laser disc player.  At this point I’m sure it’s been readily available to me for at least a decade, but I never even bothered to look for it because as I’ve gotten older I’ve found it increasingly difficult to come up with time to watch movies I think I’ll enjoy, let alone movies I know will suck.  And then, just the other day, I was flipping through the few dozen HBO’s we have and fuck me if it wasn’t The Abyss.  It was toward the end, where Ed Harris gets rescued by the aliens, who, even back then, just looked stupid.

So I keep watching and Ed starts talking to the aliens and they speak back to him via television transmissions because even though they have the technology for speed-of-light space travel and the ability to control water, they haven’t figured out English yet (it’s really difficult because we borrow from so many different languages…).  But then, the scene gets different and the aliens basically say that they’re here because – prepare yourselves for some groundbreaking shit – mankind is too violent.  They apparently don’t like how horribly we treat each other and they’re here to stop it.  And then they show news footage of various seaside communities running in terror as enormous tidal waves advance toward the shoreline, and this is when it hit me:  I’m finally watching the director’s cut.  And it sucks.  So then they show a text message from Ed Harris to his annoying-ass wife where he types the words “love you wife” (so apparently they can read English but not speak or write it) and then the tidal waves stop where they’re at and sink back down into the ocean.  From there, the rest of the movie goes just as I remembered it (shitty).

I have no idea if those few minutes of film are the only changes in the director’s cut and guess who doesn’t care enough to find out?  What I will tell you is this:  It is not a completely different movie.  It’s just longer.  The studio assholes are doubtless idiots and I’ll agree that they shouldn’t have cut any of the footage, but that has nothing to do with the footage being good and everything to do with the fact that money people making creative decisions is a bad idea.  And finally, the tidal wave just isn’t that big a deal.  Maybe it would have been more impressive to see it on the big screen back then, before I’d seen, say, The Matrix.  But watching it on my television today, it just looked like weak-ass, green-screen dog shit.

Story-wise, there’s one element that just annoys the shit out of me:  The aliens have been monitoring our behavior long enough to know they don’t like it.  They’re upset with us because we’re too violent and warlike and they want us to calm down and to treat each other with love and respect and kindness.  Or they’ll murder us all with the ocean.  Well gee whiz, thank you Space Jesus, you fucking hypocrite.

I am so sick and fucking tired of science fiction that falls apart the second you’re out of the third grade and I’m even more annoyed by the people who excuse it with insipid statements like, “Well, the special effects rocked,” or, “You have to remember, it’s an all-ages movie.”  Pretty lights aren’t a substitute for good story and “all-ages” isn’t supposed to mean stupid.

The Abyss (any cut you care to choose) is dog shit.

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I’m in the middle of editing the newest Spankland post, but fucked if I’m in the mood for it.  So I’m gonna just write for a little bit and clear some of the shit out of my head.  Read or ignore at your convenience:

The mood here at work is fucking grim.  Literally everyone is pissed off and ready to walk.  The only thing keeping that from happening is a fear of homelessness.  Today the factory workers had a Christmas potluck lunch.  One of the guys came into my office and told me Oswaldo wanted to talk to me.  So I went out to the factory and everyone was sitting at a table and eating and Oswaldo pointed to the food and said, “Eat some food, Tim,” and then handed me a plate.  I wasn’t even that hungry but anyone who passes up home-cooked Mexican food (or a genuine offer of friendship from good people) is an asshole.

Total foodgasm.

And for the first time in my life, as I sat with these people in silence, listening to conversations I couldn’t understand, I felt honest and profound regret that I didn’t pay better attention in my Spanish classes back in high school.  I realized today that by not learning to speak the language, I’ve really cut myself off from some genuinely good people and that is something that can only suck.  I was still able to talk to some of them in English but most of the conversation was Spanish and I mostly sat around wishing I could say something other than, “Donde esta la biblioteca?” or “Jirafa de Fuego.”  Still, it was a good time and, once again, a total foodgasm.

Congress can eat my balls.  That shouldn’t need any further explanation.

I’m currently reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and it’s really goddamn good.  It’s won a million awards this year, but it’ll be interesting to see if I wind up liking it as much as Coraline, which I just finished reading for the first time and is probably my favorite children’s book ever.

I just emailed my friend, Melinda, who is awesome and one of my favorite people (and I’m not just writing that here to score brownie points on the off chance she winds up reading it some day), and part of that email – well, most of it, really – contained an idea that I liked so much I figured I’d share with you (you lucky bastards):

I want to make two or three hundred bronze statues of myself and then I want to fly all over the world, burying them fifty feet or so underground.  Then, centuries later, when future architects are doing their thing, they’ll dig up one of them and wonder what the fuck that’s all about.  Then another one will be found and this will spark great curiosity in a very small community of scientists.  Then a third.  Eventually, someone will start actively looking for them, which presumably won’t be too difficult given the advanced technology.  Before you know it, statues of me will be unearthed the world over and the likeliest assumption will be that I was some sort of religious figure who was worshiped across the planet, transcending borders, politics, and race.  Because, even as I type this, it’s a far likelier scenario than some rich asshole wasting that kind of time and money on a practical joke.

The really interesting thing would be to see if there’s a “revival” of sorts and people start actually worshiping me, which would be even more ridiculous than running into a Zoroastrian today.  Goddamn that would be awesome.

Anyway, it made me laugh.  And that’s all for now, I should get back to editing…and, oh yeah, work.

Vaya con queso, amigos.

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