A Few Pictures from My Trip to Orange Beach

3 Cheers for Tyler Perry!

I meant to blog about this a while back. It's hilarious, a must-see. Warning: it's more of a drama than a comedy, though it was marketed as a comedy. Also, the message of the movie ends up being a powerful one: one of redemption and forgiveness. The 'mad black woman' is not the one pictured. Although I wish Madea were the main character, it'd be even funnier. Impressively, Tyler Perry plays a successful lawyer, the crazy old grandma character, and the old crazy Joe character. 3 roles in one movie! I have to include some of the best quotes from the movie...

Joe: [watching Madea butter her house arrest bracelet] You know, I was watching the Animal Planet channel and they say that when a coyote is trapped, it will eat its own foot off to get out of the trap. You want some hot sauce? In your case it wouldn't be a coyote, it would be an elephant. A big old giraffe.

Madea: Say one more thing, Joe.

[click of gun]

Madea: Say one more thing. I don't hear you. You're quiet, can I buy a vowel?

Brenda: Who are you?

Madea: Who you?

Brenda: I'm the owner of this house.

Madea: [buzzer sound] wrong answer, my grand daughter Helen is the owner of THIS house. You da hoe, you aint got no power or no deed.

Brenda: Did you do this? this is Vera Wang.

Madea: Who dat is? She do nails? I need to get my nails did.

Brenda: That's it I'm calling the police.

Madea: I aint scared a no po po. Call da po po hoe... Call da po po hoe.

Joe: Who dat is at the door?

Madea: Shutup Joe I got this.

Joe: I'm gettin' tired of all these people comin' ova here late at night, I'ma hafta put my foot down.

Madea: Kunta Kinte put his foot down and it got chopped off. now shut the hell up and go back to sleep.

Madea: Every time I try to read the Bible... and Jesus... the one with all the words in red... I open my Bible to that New Testimony and see all that red and I just give up. Jesus was talkin' way too much.

Madea: Mmmhmm... How long you do that fo'?

Helen: Eighteen years.

Madea: Okay.

[pulls out a calculator]

Madea: Let's see how much he owes ya then.

[types a bunch of numbers while she speaks]

Madea: Eighteen years. Cooking. Cleaning. Havin' sex wit him when he wanted it, was it good?

Helen: [shakes head in disgust] No.

Madea: *Major* deduction.

Brenda: If I call the cops, they will be here in *ten* minutes.

Madea: Good. Then that give me nine to beat the hell outta you.

Madea: Who is

[stares at a tag on a blouse and tries to pronounce it]

Madea: Dol-say and gab-anna, who 'dat is?

Madea: Rip it.

Helen: Rip it?

Madea: Rip it.

Helen: Rip it.

Madea: Rip it. Rip it.

Helen: Rip it. Rip it.

Madea: Rip it.

Helen: Rip it.

Madea: Rip it real good. Rip it.

Helen: Wait a minute. What is this going to solve?

Madea: Nothing. It's just gonna make you feel better.

Madea: [speaking to Myrtle] I'll be at church when they get a smoking section.

Madea: [after typing a bunch of numbers on the calculator, carelessly] Girl, that man owe you 64 billion, 283 million, 974 trillion, 5 thousand, and 20 dollars and 82 cents.

Helen: He put me out of the house.

Madea: Who house?

Helen: Our house.

Madea: Exactly, how's a man throw a woman out of her own house? No man would ever do that to me, he'd put me out half of the house, I'll go live in the other half.

La Playa...and stuff

I just got back from spending a couple days with my family in Orange Beach, Alabama. It was fun. I'll post pictures when I get the energy to. My life feels very mundane right now. I want to save a life. I want to uncover corporate fraud. I want to have a family of my own. I want to go whitewater rafting. I want to have a near life experience. I want to go train hopping across the U.S. I want to experience epiphany. I want to love God more than my own life.

That's one of the problems of human existence. Never being satisfied with the present. For now, I should be totally content waiting tables for one summer...just one summer. But then again, how can one be content with "the present"? What is "the present"? As soon as I finished typing "the present," the present had already passed. By the time you think of what is present, you've already moved on into a new present, and the old present has passed. The present must be some sort of intersection of the past and the future, where the two coincide. Think about it. How short a length of time is the present? Is it one second? A millisecond? A nanosecond? 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds? It's bananas! Ridiculous! The present and the past, however, can be measured. I've known the meaning of romance for 6.5 months now. I will turn 20 years old in a little over a month. We always dwell in the past and wish for the future, because these are the only quantities of time we can measure. That suggests to me that, yes, we have a "free will" endowed to us. But that free will is exercised in the present, which is apparently such a small quantity of time we cannot ascribe a unit of measurement to it. And the present and the past are infinite compared to the present. The past and the present are out of our control. Tying all that together, the past and the present form the majority of our existence, and they are outside our control, so the majority of our existence is outside our control. That is to say, that we do have free will, but compared to this other operation of Providence, our control over our lives is miniscule. It's only a concept, really. To quote Mel Gibson in Signs, "So the question is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind of person who sees signs, sees miracles, or do you believe that people just get lucky?" Do you believe you are all alone, there's no God watching over the affairs of men? If so, I pity you, for you must feel very very alone and frightened. Or I don't know, maybe you think you're All That and can handle life solo. Fare well.

Anyway enough psychobabble, I'm going to eat some biscuits and watch Maria Full of Grace. I hear it's a real smash-up, maybe i'll post about it some time.....in the future.

The Substitute People

Wow, it felt good getting that twenty-dollar tip the other day. But equally if not more satisfying was the time I had waiting on the four people at that table. It's times like that when I feel, "I'm really doing a good job, I'm really making someone's day, and it's worth it just for this." I even got a very nice written commendation on the receipt that they turned into the cashier. Then there's part of me that wonders, that has wondered for my whole life, "How can anyone be that impressed with little old me??" I guess I've always had trouble accepting accolades. Low self esteem? Maybe a little of that...or more than a little. One thing I trace it to, though, is realizing how cheap the opinions of others are.

I learned in my Management course last semester about Jelly-Bean Motivation. Certain managers try to keep their employees motivated by handing out compliments left and right. My professor described a manager he once had that simply walked around saying, "Super!" "Super job!" "Super job there!" "Super!" "Suuuuuuper." "Super job!" These compliments are compared to jelly beans tossed rather frivolously to employees. They have no value because everyone gets them. They're not meritorious. So those who do a truly outstanding job will never know it because their lazy-butt co-horts get the same encouragement they do. Of course, being too negative and yelling at everybody all the time makes people think they can never do anything right, so that's not the solution, either. The point of jelly bean motivation is that compliments can be really cheap sometimes...and meaningless, because they're rooted in a person's feelings, not in the absolute value of how good something is that someone else did.

I know I'm at least a halfway decent person. I've been getting compliments all my life, as we all do about something people recognize in us individually as outstanding. For me it's always been intelligence and sincerity. I was always the "smart kid," the 4.0-Grade Point Average wonderkid with a perfect academic record. Everyone wanted my homework. I was the pride and joy of all my teachers. Consequently, everyone knew me, but no one really knew me. It's sometimes the same thing I feel with my sincerity and my "personable" nature. Yes, I handle people well because I sincerely love people and make people feel happy, including my guests at Cracker Barrel restaurant, but at times, I almost wished it weren't so. I'm the token Mr. Nice Guy. But who wants to be the token anything? The token smart kid, token people person, token rock star, token politician, token supermodel, token white man, etc. Who decides whether or not you're the token person, anyway? What are the criteria? Inevitably, someone will disagree that you deserve that "token" status.

The actress Kirsten Dunst does an excellent job explaining how people like us feel in Elizabethtown. We're the "substitute people," she says. Everyone knows us and we have a special place in society, but it seems like we can never come close to anyone because of our status. There is so much that comprises you, that comprises me, that no one could adequately figure us out in one or two sittings. Therefore, what right does another person have to size up who I am in one or two impersonal encounters? Oh, and then you have impersonal encounters that pose as personal ones. Enter the restaurant industry. Make your guests feel comfortable and welcome, treat them as if they're your mates, your jolly good friends. And yet as a waiter, I often could care less about their long-term welfare. I am ever-conscious of the tip I hope to make. Tell me, when I'm schmoozing people to make a living, should it be legal to say that I handled myself in a PERSONABLE manner?!?!

Kirsten Dunst made it sound like "substitute people" are a specific group. That is where I will venture off and say we all are "substitutes." We substitute in when a character role is needed. We're all just actors, really. We perform the roles that society ascribes to us. That's not good, but at the same time, society would fall apart if we didn't. Doesn't leave much room for hope, I guess. At least, not for a Romantic like myself. Selah.

One of the Best Movies I've Ever Seen

"In LA, nobody touches you. We miss that so much, we crash into each other just so we can feel something." -Don Cheadle in Crash.

Crash is just the movie I've been looking for, maybe my whole life. I was browsing through movies at the store with my mother and complained to her that now I have this unlimited rental pass, there's nothing I want to watch. Sure, there are plenty of movies I have never seen that I could choose, most of them in the category of "everybody's seen that." For example, I passed by Predator and thought to myself, "I've never actually seen all of that," but still by-passed it. I told Mom, "I need something to deeply move me, to awaken me to some truth."

Crash is just that. It is the collision of the lives of a dozen or so people in Los Angeles within a 3-day period. The plot therefore, is almost impossible to describe. I can tell you it is a sociologist's triumph. It primarily concerns itself with personal fears and biases and how these feelings affect our dealings with other people. A theme of the movie seems to be that of communication breakdown. People say things they don't mean to say; other people understand things that aren't intended to be communicated. As a result, the single biggest issue in the movie is stereotyping, specifically, racial stereotyping. A man running for district attorney wants a picture with a black man to increase the black vote and chooses a man who is actually Arabic, merely dark-skinned, but not black. A woman concludes that a locksmith at her house will keep a copy of the keys to her house and share with his friends because he is a "Hispanic gangster"...who actually turns out to be a decent family man. A frustrated man on the phone with an insurance provider asks for the name of the lady he is speaking with; when she gives her ethincally African-American-sounding name, he says, "I should have known your name was Shaniqua."

I have never seen a movie to so poignantly display human conflict. I felt my muscles tense up because I realized how real these situations were. The movie shows how small misunderstandings can turn into deadly problems. What start out as minor altercations among characters eventually result in life-or-death situations. In the beginning of the movie, each of the main characters feels belittled, stereotyped, discriminated against, victimized, or otherwise abused. By the end, each character realizes ways in which he/she has belittled, stereotyped, discriminated against, victimized, or otherwise abused others. The line between victim and aggressor becomes blurred. Self-interest creates a world of chaos and clamor.

WARNING: PLOT SPOILER BELOW.

My two favorite situations (and the most emotionally stirring) follow below:

1. A white cop pulls over a black man and his white wife for performing a sexual act in their vehicle. The husband apologizes profusely, but the cop forces them to both get against their car. He then has his assistant pat down the husband while he pats down the wife for weapons. He uses this as an excuse to grope the woman, while she cries and her devastated husband looks on in humiliation. Back at home, the wife accuses her husband for standing up to the cop. The next day, the wife is in a bad vehicle accident in which the car overturns. The same white cop approaches the overturned vehicle and goes inside to pull the victim out. Soon he realizes who she is the woman he groped the night before, and she realizes he is the one who humiliated her. She screams for him to keep his hands off her. You can see the shock in his eyes as he says he's not going to touch her. There is no one else on the scene, so eventually he convinces her to allow him to help her out. As the car suddenly starts burning, other cops show up to pull the guy from the car, but he jumps back into the car and barely helps the woman escape in the nick of time.

2. A Hispanic locksmith tucks his daughter in bed late at night. She is scared because they used to live in a bad neighborhood where a bullet came through her window. To comfort her, the man tells her a story about a fairy who gave him an invisible bulletproof cloak when he was a child. He pretends to put it on her and tells her she will be invincible as long as she wears it. The next day the man tries to repair the lock at an Arabic man's shop. He advises the shop owner to replace the door, since fixing the lock is insufficient. The Arab accuses the locksmith of copping out and when profanity and epithets ensue, the locksmith, offended, leaves. Later that night, the shop owner's shop is broken into, and his livelihood ruined. He blames the locksmith for not just replacing the lock, finds his address and drives to the man's house. He points a gun at the locksmith, demanding money in payment for his loss. A heated altercation ensues, with the man's finger on the trigger. The locksmith's daughter, from inside, says, "Oh no, Daddy doesn't have the cloak!" She runs outside and jumps into her dad's arms to protect him, as the shop owner pulls the trigger. For a moment, the dad screams. It appears his little girl has been shot dead. Then she says she jumped in the way since she was wearing the cloak to save Dad. The Arab somehow missed when he shot. Coming back to his senses, he walks away in disbelief at his own actions.

Some characters are not so lucky...there are deaths. But surprisingly this violent film is an anti-violence one. One by one, we see the characters put their guns away (even policemen) realizing that violence really doesn't solve any problems. And neither does making unwarranted assumptions about another person's character.

3 days off and look what happens.

Tomorrow will be my third day off work in a row. See what happens? When I'm not working I'm bored and revert back to overuse of blog entries... Anyway back to work Friday for another weekend of dough raking.

Today I went to the chiropractor and got a massage / X-rays / counseling. The injuries I got as a kid only apparently aggravated the fact that I have something most people have nowadays. "Forward neck syndrome" or some common sense term like that. Basically in this computer age, everyone is always straining their neck all day looking at a computer screen. That's agitated by my constant (or supposedly constant) studying in college. Plus my neck is too straight. The neck vertebrae should have a slight curvature that is healthy, and mine is totally straight, creating bad posture where I'm kind of slumped forward (another feature common to tall skinny folks such as myself). Anyway, I go back again Friday for treatment. That massage with the Biofreeze stuff was heav-en-ly!

I went and picked up Matt from work to see how he's doing at his job. It's his first job ever; he works at Western Auto cashiering, doing inventory, etc. He's starting to enjoy it more now. We had some good bro-to-bro fun today at Wendy's and then at the mall. I was joyfully mystified...it seems like although both he and I get older, when we hang out together to have fun, it's the same kind of mindset and emotions as when I was 7 and he was 4 and we would build tents in the bedroom...or he was 7 and I was 10 and we would run around in the backyard having pretend wars with our pop-shotguns. I guess it goes to show that no matter how your dealings with other people mature you age, your childlike relations with your siblings can stay the same. No matter how mature I may act or seem to act from another's perspective, when my brother and I hang out with each other, I feel that little boy in me again, with wildlike eagerness, ready to overturn some new adventure.

We also went out to eat this evening at Schaeffer's, a seafood restaurant. I feel like I'm living life away in restaurants now that I work at one and eat out frequently (since I'm at home for the summer eating out on parents' money, not my own). Delicious. Then we watched Hoodwinked as a family. This is one of the most hilarious animated films I have EVER seen. It's a parody of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story. I'll leave it at that. It's totally clean and family friendly and just purely ingenious...so whoever you are, just go rent it. In other news, I bought Anberlin's debut CD today, which makes me happy. If you know me, you know that I'm daffy in love with that band. Almost more so than with my first ever band crush Delirious a few years back. Also, man I don't know why but I love DDR...danced it up at the mall today. I think I'm getting better, which of course isn't saying much.

...

Okay, I guess I'll update my blog. I've been making lots and lots of money at Cracker Barrel. The most I've made in tips in one night is $78 and the least is $37. That's of course at a minimum wage of $2.13...some people don't realize that the minimum federal wage for tipped jobs is so low. But the tips have been really good so far! I've also been hanging out with relatives. Amanda drove from Houston and stayed at my house Thursday through Sunday. She got to hang out with my siblings and parents more than with me since I was at work most of the time. My sisters adore her! I'm working on reading The Two Towers. Recnetly paid $25 plus tax for a month of unlimited Blockbuster movie rentals. So far I've watched the 3 Lord of the Rings movies, Good Will Hunting, A Time to Kill, and A Walk to Remember. Right now I've got Con Air and Collateral Damage checked out...great brain food movies. (wink wink). Amanda and I are finished with The Book of Acts and are starting Romans tomorrow. I really enjoyed this read-through of Acts...God is stirring some sort of vision that I have for his Church that is still crystallizing and I was trying to explain it to my grandparents today...stay tuned and maybe you'll hear it straight from the horse's mouth someday (the horse being me.) I'm going to the chiropractor tomorrow to find out why my neck hurts so much and makes popping noises when I stretch it. And oh yeah, I've been going through a phase of gel-ing my hair.

Pictures below from Amanda and I at Melting Pot and my family and I at Olive Garden!