Month: March 2012

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I Hate Ted Mosby

I hate Ted Mosby, but let it be known that I do not hate the actor who portrays him, John Radnor. Or Josh Radnor. Or whatever. And this is a valid point, because I do very much like the other actors on How I Met Your Mother. I absolutely adore Alyson Hannigan (who doesn’t? I kill them). Neil Patrick Harris is the man. Jason Segel’s got chops. I don’t know much about Cobie Smulders, but she’s good looking, and she’s Canadian (I have sort of a thing for Canadians. And Jewish girls. And Indians. Just don’t ever introduce me to a Canadian Jewish Indian girl. Just don’t).

I don’t know anything about John or Josh or Jack Radnor. When I Google him, his not-as-Ted Mosby face seems alright to me. So maybe he’s the greatest actor of all time. Because when I see his Ted Mosby face, I am filled with hatred. I just don’t like that guy. He’s smug. He’s arrogant. He’s lazy. He’s a misogynist (oh yes he is god damn it. Maybe you say Barney’s the misogynist? At least Barney doesn’t fool himself and others into thinking he wants more than what he wants).

Look, I’m not prepared to do a deep analysis of the character, or the show for that matter, because I really try not to watch it. My wife watches it. My sister-in-law and her husband watch it. Everybody watches it. The people who award Emmys watch it. And I’m not saying I’m better or cool or hip because I don’t watch this hit TV show. And I’m not trying to be secretly cool by saying I’m not cool. I know I’m a loser. But I’m no Ted Stupid-Head Mosby.

I don’t like Glee, either, cause I don’t like the singing much, although when they’re not singing, when Sue Sylvester’s on the screen, that show is awesome. I don’t like The New Girl, because it’s basically a one-camera sitcom painfully stretched to the multi-camera format. I don’t like Up All Night except when Maya Rudolph is on the screen, and of course I admit Christina Applegate is an amazing actress, and c’mon, Will Arnett is a genius, so okay, I do like that show, but I don’t like that I like it. I tell you all this so you can contextualize my dislike for How I Met Your Mother based on Ted Please Catch On Fire Mosby.

I also hate the theme song to the show. Which really sucks, for me, because pretty much the whole time I’ve been writing this, I’ve had it stuck in my head.

Did you know there’s a web site called tedmosbyisajerk.com? It was made by someone on the show, not a real person, so this is the writers themselves saying the man’s not worth a small pile of bee barf. Judging from the website’s content, it’s actually based on an experience someone had with Barney, but that’s not the point. The point is, I hate him.

And I am not alone. There’s Facebook pages dedicated to hating him, blogs, web content; they call him whiny, a schmuck, self-centered. The word that keeps popping up again and again is “douche.” Don’t know if I agree with that. I mean, I do– not in the same way Schmidt on the The New Girl is a douche (re: douchebag jar) but Ted Mosby is for sure a douche in that sense of I-don’t-like-him-so-every-bad-word-is-okay-to-use-to-describe-him.

Do you hate Ted Mosby? Think carefully. Search your soul, look deep inside your heart. You do, don’t you? You watch the show, but it’s despite, not because of, Ted Cracker Please Mosby. I knew it.

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White Noise– review on Goodreads

White NoiseWhite Noise by Don DeLillo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

White Noise is a post-modern novel. At least that’s what I was told, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to rebel against the label. What’s post-modernism? A reaction to modernism, which was a reaction to realism, which was a reaction to… I don’t know, God, I guess. And we only invented God as a way to explain death, to be less afraid of it. White Noise is about death, and how scary it is.

Don DeLillo’s post-modern novel “deconstructs” otherwise familiar institutions, such as the traditional family, for example. The main character is on his fifth marriage (although two of the previous marriages were to the same woman). He lives with some, but not all, of his children from those previous marriages, and some, but not all, of his current wife’s children from her previous marriage. But this is not a “dysfunctional” family, nor does DeLillo bother to show us how they’re oh-so functional. White Noise portrays things exterior to the labels slapped on them after the fact.

People argue with the main character about the meanings of words, the absurdity of accepting concepts merely as their given or shared by society. Folks are fascinated by trivia, ephemera, the detritus of desiderata. Subjects are taken out of their institutional contexts, stripped of judgement, and then reinserted to perform on their own merits. Or something. Look, I wrote a brilliant review just a few minutes ago, then accidentally deleted it without saving. I am not at all happy about this.

I don’t want to write some kind of critical analysis of the book, I just want to tell you whether you should read it or not, why I gave it four stars. I mean, Don DeLillo, right? He should get five stars, yes? Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get sucked into a book like this, maybe I need more plot, more character development. Usually in these reviews I rant and rave about how bad or good a writer’s prose style comes across. Don DeLillo’s writing is matter-of-fact, which is a good thing in this context. He doesn’t try to impress us with verbal brilliance. Or replace “impress” with “distract.” Or replace “distract” with “fool.” I don’t know if he set out to write a post-modern nove, or if that’s just how he thinks.

But it doesn’t matter what he thinks, but matters is what I think, and what I think is that nothing really matters. I can tell you this, after reading White Noise, I don’t know if I’m eager to read more so-called Post-Modern novels, but I do really want to go watch a few gorgeous sunsets. Not because they’re a symbol of anything. Just to see how beautiful they can be.

View all my reviews

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Running Knows

Who knows what it is to be running?
Only he who is running, running, running, knows…
Ru-u-u-u-u-un! Ru-u-u-u-u-un!
Ru-u-u-u–u-u-u-unning knows!
Run running knows! Run running knows!

Iphigenia in Brooklyn, P.D.Q. Bach, S.53162

As soon as I got out of the car and walked in the door this morning, I could smell that unmistakable aroma: ammonia. It meant only one thing, that I was burning protein on my morning (treadmill) run at the gym, instead of glucose. Not necessarily a bad thing, but in an amateur like me, it was probably a sign that I had been running too hard.

What’s too hard? I ran a warm-up mile at 6 mph (10 minutes per mile) then ran a “fast” 5k, the first half at 6.7, the second half at 7.1 mph. Over the last half mile I bumped the speed up to 7.3 and 7.5. The latter’s an eight minute mile pace, which I am capable of doing for about three miles, on a good day. And then a cool-down mile at 6 mph. Overall, didn’t seem too hard.

Heart rate on the warm-up: about 155, easily ten BPM more than it should be for me at the speed, suggesting a bit of dehydration. On the first half of the 5k: 165, also a tad high, but not horribly so. Second half: 175, approaching my theoretical “max,” and understandable at that speed (for me). On the cool down mile: 160, too high, definitely due to dehydration. Note that after the 5k, resetting the treadmill to get on the cool down, my HR dropped to 120, so that last 160 was not merely slow recovery. And after the second cool down, my heart rate dropped below 120 in just a few minutes. My heart’s good an healthy.

Every once in a while, as I ran, I did little cadence checks, and pretty much every time I was hitting between 90 and 94 strides per minute (per foot). That was at all the different speeds, which means at the high speeds, I was taking longer strides. And this is supported by my Nike+ device, which was behind by about 3/10 if a mile—it was counting my usual stride length.

So, I’m concluding that longer strides burned up all my available glucose, and once the fast-twitch fibers where engaged, they remained engaged, eating up protein, as evidenced by my high recovery HR. That’s not the most scientifically rigorous conclusion, but we’ll see if I can apply it to my next run: if I’m going to run long, I need to keep that heart rate from cresting. No long bursts (yes, that’s an oxymoron).

The good news is that at no point where my muscles too tired to sustain the effort, nor was I ever out of breath. My calves and ankles weren’t too happy, but that’s a different issue altogether.

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Airborne Toxic Event

My to do list says “blog!” and Mondays are for book reviews because I’m supposed to read one book per week. But I haven’t finished last week’s book, White Noise by Don DeLillo. I’m almost done, could probably finish it today and write my “review,” but I want to get my every-day to do list done NOW! Damn it! I could just fake it. No one reads these damn things anyway.

I’ll just go over to a few other websites, see what they have to say, see if it jibes, say something similar. For example, Wikipedia says:

White Noise explores several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century, e.g., rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty academic intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and reintegration of the family, human-made catastrophes, and the potentially regenerative nature of human violence. … The novel’s style is characterized by a heterogeneity that utilizes “montages of tones, styles, and voices that have the effect of yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America”

(quoting Frank Lentricchia, editor of New Essays on White Noise, apparently).

Now me, I’m a writer. Those of you who have waded through my self-indulgent pages know this. You know that a writer is someone who is compelled and accomplishes, as a reason for being, stringing together words in sentences in a chronic or at the very least pathological fashion. Nothing to do with being published, having readers, actually finishing anything. As long as I am wont to go blah bah blah, I’m a writer.

So, as a writer, I have to wonder, what’s the deal with themes? Do writers set out to have “themes” in their books? I never do. Not ever. I don’t say “I think I’ll write about the break-neck speed at which we’re forced to live these days, sacrificing sleep for sensation, the irony being that we’re dulled by stimulation, numb to anything except the joy of oblivion.” No, I just think it would be cool to write a story about 4 kids who decide if they can stay awake for 96 hours straight. And style? I can assure you, I don’t ever set out with a fixed style in mind. I just slap the words together in a way that seems to work.

But then, I’m no Don DeLillo. Thank god! If I was, and if I were ever published, I’d have to compete with the other Don DeLillo! Can you imagine, someone walks into a bookstore, says to the guy wearing glasses: “The latest from Don DeLillo, please,” wanting the book a friend of a friend of my mom told them about, only to get the other Don DeLillo’s book instead! Which is why writing should never be about praise. They’d read the book, find it excellent, tell their friend, who tells their friend, who tells my mom, who tells me. “They said they liked the theme of novelty academic intellectualism, and appreciated your montage of styles.”

And me, not knowing that’s what I’d written, I’d be all “Gee, cool!”

Anyway, there’s 500 words. Enough for a blog post. See what I mean about writers being those who just @#$%^&* write, and to hell with the results? I’m a god damned natural.

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Show, Don’t Tell

Fiction by Jason Edwards

I’m eighteen, my dad’s forty, his best friend Regal is also 40, and Regal’s wife just had their first baby. I used to look up to Regal. But I don’t anymore. A few months ago, he told me he was having an affair. He confides in me, the way my dad wishes I confided in him. But I don’t like my dad much. He’s obsessed with his dad, my grandfather, who never can remember my name.

It was Regal’s idea that I write a novel and I’m afraid I’ve lost control of it. I broke a few rules, but I was getting into it, really flowing. “Maybe that’s the rule you should have broken, Rigal,” is what my dad said. You see why I don’t confide in him. The novel’s about a guy who’s writing a book (I know, never write about writers) about a man who’s trying to form a fantasy tennis league. Everyone keeps telling the writer that people are going to think he’s copying David Foster Wallace, just because Infinite Jest is about a tennis player. I least I think it is. I’ve only read the first 40 pages or so.

Regal’s been sleeping with his wife’s sister’s best friend’s cousin. I guess they met at a wedding, and then at a funeral, and then at another wedding his wife couldn’t go to because she was sick. They didn’t know at the time it was just pregnancy sickness. He and this woman got drunk and made out and just like when you’re on a diet and accidentally eat one piece of cake and you decide, screw it, and eat the whole rest of the cake, he slept with her. And they figured, they did it once, might as well do it again. And keep doing it. They don’t even live in the same city.

My grandad’s weird. He’s an ex-navy pilot, used to teach new guys how to fly Mustang P-51s, using old PT-17 Stearmans. A few years ago at my 14th birthday party he announced to everyone, including my guests, kids he’d never met, that he was going to buy and build a kit airplane, an RV-6. My dad thought this was an amazing idea, and decided to photo-blog the entire process. And that’s all they did for three years. I asked a girl to junior prom last year, and she said “Thanks, but I’m waiting for someone else to ask me. Hey, did your dad ever finish that photoblog of your grandad’s model plane?” I wanted to hit her, but she’s bigger than me.

My grandad’s in my book, because I wish he could at least remember me. Once he came close, but he called me Regal, not Rigal. I said “Grandad, in the novel I’m writing, you’re the writer’s uncle, the one who tells him his book sounds too much like David Foster Wallace.” My grandad said back to me “Just make sure he doesn’t smoke cigars. I hate cigar smoke.” We were at a birthday party for my twelve year old sister. I was getting bored, so I went out back to sit by the pool, and there was grandad and my dad and our neighbor, the one with the one huge eyebrow, smoking cigars. My dad said “Yes?” and I looked at my grandfather and said “I thought you said you hate cigar smoke, grandpa,” and he said “Mind your own business, Regal.”

So in my book the uncle smokes cigars all the time. In the book he’s writing, the guy who’s trying to start a fantasy tennis league, his best friend is based on Regal. But now that I know that Regal is cheating on his wife, I don’t know if he should be a best friend or just a good friend. Regal and his wife named their new baby after my sister.

After grandad built the kit plane, he traded it to a friend of my dad’s boss for a PT-17, just like he used to train guys on. Then he had it painted in the naval camo of the kit P-51. He said what he liked to do was pretend that the Stearman was a P-51 given to him by an old naval flight instructor in trade for officiating his daughter’s wedding. My dad thought this was brilliant and started a fake blog by this fake flight instructor so my grandad would have something to reference whenever people asked him what he was talking about.

My sister asked my grandad if he would officiate her wedding if she ever got married. And he said no, of course not, he wasn’t ordained. The story about getting the airplane from an old navy instructor was just a story. So in my book, the uncle who tries to discourage his nephew from writing a book like David Foster Wallace’s, he smokes cigars all the time, and somehow he’s the in the book about the guy trying to start the fantasy tennis league, too. He’s the one who officiated at the wedding of the tennis league guy’s best friend, but it turns out it was a fake wedding, and so when he cheats on his wife with his best friend’s daughter from the book I’m writing, it turns out he wasn’t really cheating because they were never married.

Which is really confusing, I know, how people from my book are winding up in the book about the fantasy tennis league. I’m trying to fix it, but I’m too depressed about Regal’s affair. Last time that woman was in town, she and my sister and my dad’s boss’s wife went to the mall to buy my grandad a hat to match the one he has from when he was in the navy. That way, they said, my dad could take a picture of it for the blog. They wound up at a salon and talked about hair and boys and my novel. I know this because my sister keeps a blog and talks about everything she does. That girl, the one I asked to junior prom, she leaves comments on it all the time.

And I guess I should be sort of flattered that they would talk about my book, and that should motivated me to finish it, get it published and then send signed copies to my dad’s boss’s wife and Regal’s girlfriend. But I have this stupid fantasy where she reads the book and she loves it and she dumps Regal and takes me and then the writer’s uncle fake-marries us and my sister gets a number three seed in the US Open and at the last second the fantasy tennis league is a huge success. So I don’t know where to put Regal’s girlfriend into the novel, or which novel to put her in. I don’t know if I should tell my sister our neighbor, the one with the one eyebrow, used to be a tennis coach.

Well, it turns out that my sister didn’t put everything that happened that day in the salion in her blog. That fat girl who leaves comments all the time told me. She left a comment and my sister wrote her an email directly. She told me after lunch in school one day that my sister told her in the email that what they really talked about was whether the uncle who is based on my grandfather should actually be actually legally licensed to do weddings, and he just lies about saying he’s not licensed so that people who are married will think they are not, to see what they would do. The reason my sister didn’t put that in the blog is because she thinks that I should put Regal’s wife in the novel to impress her so that she’ll dump Regal and take me and then our grandad can fake-real-fake marry us.

But what she doesn’t understand because she’s so young and stupid is that if I marry Regal’s wife then I’ll be his wife’s daughter’s step-dad and since she’s named after my sister, in my novel I would wind up starting a fantasy tennis league that has a huge success because my sister-daughter gets a three seed at the US Open. And if anyone finds out, her career will tank, the league will tank, and then the cigar-smoking uncle will say something like “Your novel is failing– at least David Foster Wallace’s novel was a huge success, although he did commit suicide.”

I have that scene in my head, all the details, and it’s driving me mad. I don’t want to write it, but I have to. I have lost control of this novel. The writer has his laptop, on his lap, in the back seat of a RV-6, with his uncle up front, flying them around Pearl Harbor. They’ve just come from the writer’s daughter’s 13th birthday party, so they’re wearing party clothes. The writer’s neighbor gave his daughter a tennis racket, and she thinks it’s from her father, and she’s very upset, since she thinks her father is cheating on her mother with a tennis player (he’s not). So he’s upset, and he wants to throw himself into research, fly around and write about Pearl Harbor from about 500 feet because maybe the fantasy tennis league in his main character’s novel will have had a great grandfather who was a naval pilot there.

And this uncle, he says, “Your novel is failing– at least David Foster Wallace’s novel was a huge success, although he did commit suicide.” And this guy will consider committing suicide. Right there, jump out of the plane. But that obese girl who wouldn’t go with me to junior prom, the one who leaves comments on my sister’s blog, she was hospitalized when she passed out a few days ago from smoking too many cigars. And I don’t want Regal’s wife’s sister’s best friend’s cousin to think that I think she was trying to smoke herself to death.

Because she would. Because my dad’s boss has a daughter who used take tennis lessons from our neighbor, the one with the one large eyebrow. And they still write letters to each other, even though she’s married now and divorced although she left a comment on my dad’s blog about my grandad’s fake ex-flight instructor friend that amongst other things happened to mention about how the lawyer who did the paperwork for their divorce wasn’t a real lawyer so they’re not really divorced. After my grandad said “Mind your own business, Regal” to me, by the pool, at my sister’s birthday party, instead of leaving, I said “Can I try one of those?” And my grandad said “Why, you want to smoke yourself to death?”

And my neighbor wrote about it in a letter to my dad’s boss’s daughter, who told my dad’s boss, who told his wife, who told my sister and Regal’s girlfriend that day that went hat shopping and to the salon. I asked my sister if she told that fat cow about the smoke yourself to death comment, and she said no, but in my novel, she did tell her, although in my writer’s novel about the fantasy tennis league, she didn’t.

So you can see why I am so upset. I have completely lost control. I have scenes in my head I don’t want to write, and people are hopping from one book to the other and into real life and back again. My grandad doesn’t know my real name, my father won’t stop blogging, and my sister told me that that porky chunker sent her an email saying she knows I’m going to give her, my sister, a tennis racket for her birthday, and I swear to god I’m not. I don’t think I am, anyway. Maybe I should.