My "Battle of the sexes" blogs, hilariously highlighting areas where GF and I struggle to find middle ground, are among GF's favorites. Because in her mind everything she does differently than me makes more sense, which is of course utterly ridiculous! I'm clearly the rational one! I recommend anyone who hasn't read the others to go back and look; then judge for yourself.
Now on with the latest edition...
I grew up around video games
She did not and doesn't see the appeal
I never learned how to ride a bike
She just got a new one
My favorite TV shows right now: Justified, Hannibal and Game of Thrones
Her favorite TV shows right now: Hannibal, Game of Thrones and New Girl (One of these things isn't like the other)
What she listens to in the car: Country music stations or CD mixtapes
What I listen to in the car: Classic rock station or my Zune (Yes, I'm one of five people in the world who use a Zune)
Her favorite singer: Ingrid Michaelson
My favorite singer: Do you seriously not know by now?
Patience is my middle name
She dislikes my middle name
Places she wishes to travel to: Scotland, Sweden, India, Central or South America, Denmark, Africa
Places I wish to travel to: Back to San Francisco. Maybe other parts of California (I just don't have that urge like she does)
I never want to know spoilers. Maybe vague hints, but no details. I'm willing to give vague hints if asked, but dislike giving away major plot points
She always wants spoilers and demands to know what's going to happen ahead of time. I have to stop her from giving me spoilers if she knows more than I - she freely tells all
What she wants for dinner: A homemade meal cooked to perfection
What I want for dinner: Food
When she cooks: The kitchen remains tidy and clean
When I cook: Pots, pans, utensils, and sometimes ingredients scattered everywhere
When she washes the dishes: Dish rack is neatly organized
When I wash the dishes: Dishes are haphazardly assembled in dish rack; water surrounds the sink area (It's called Lake Dylan. I don't know how I do it every time)
I deal with any spiders in our apartment
She deals with any bees/wasps anywhere near me
My unhealthy obsessions: Bruce Springsteen (Answer your question from earlier?), Godzilla, MST3K, gangsters
Her unhealthy obsession: Serial killers (Should I be worried about this?)
My opinion on fictional serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter: He's a monster! Intelligent and charming, but a monster
Her opinion on fictional serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter: He's so cool! And he only eats people who are evil or just rude
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Monday, May 12, 2014
Back from the brink
I got to spend most of the past weekend with my mother. Sunday was Mother's Day, after all.
Two months ago I didn't expect I'd get that opportunity.
Friends and devoted readers (Which is basically two names for the same category) know my mother has incurable cancer. There's no going back for her, it's just a waiting game for us all. At the beginning of this year, I thought the waiting was over.
Mom's latest chemotherapy treatments wrecked havoc on her body. She couldn't keep any food down so she was losing weight at an astonishing rate. Fluid starting building up in her body, giving her a bloated look. Her strength rapidly deteriorated; her muscles couldn't support her. She was practically bed ridden, yet couldn't climb the stairs up to her room anymore - she moved into the downstairs guest room.
Mom spent roughly half of January and February in a hospital. Sometimes it would be just a night or two, other stays were for a week or more. She was in and out more times than I can recall - the trips became so frequent she and my stepfather would forget to tell me.
Doctors struggled to figure out the problem and put a stop to the fluid build-up. And all the while I planned for the worst. I awoke every morning expecting the phone call that she finally passed on.
But the call never came. The doctors isolated the fluid problem and now have it relatively under control. Mom is off the chemotherapy, and her appetite is slowly returning. She's undergoing physical therapy to regain her strength and has successfully gone from using a walker to a cane to move around. What's more, the doctors say her tumors, while still active, show no signs of growing.
Her doctors' best estimates are she should carry on for another two years. That might not sound like a lot of time to you, but it seems like an eternity compared to the amount of time I thought my family had left with her three months ago.
(The doctor's first estimated she'd be dead within five years when she was initially diagnosed, but timetable already passed. Then they thought, like everyone else, that she was on her deathbed at the start of this year. So they could easily be overestimating or underestimating again. I guess that last bit really isn't totally reassuring, is it?)
"I came back from the brink," was how Mom described it.
Yes, she did. But technically she's still clinging just out of reach of the jaws of death.
She's still very weak and frail, unable to climb the stairs on her own and always in need of sitting or laying down. Recovery is far away, and a full recovery is obviously impossible as long as the cancer remains in her system.
During this weekend, however, all I could think about was how good it was to see my mom again. Even as she nagged me about asking someone in town about a job, all I could feel was a sense of gladness that she was still here to nag (Plus, she actually apologized afterward. My mom apologized for something! That's a big deal!).
I live my life one day at a time. The future, for better or worse, is coming regardless what I do. I can prepare for it, I can even change it in small ways, but one way or another it is coming. If I spent every day mourning over my mother's impending doom, or my futile search for a career, or whether climate change will destroy humanity - I'd be in a state of perpetual depression and fear.
I don't do that. I live for today.
I recycle that plastic bottle, I keep sending out those resumes, and I enjoy still having my mother here. I can solve the problems directly in front of me, tackling bigger problems one day at a time. That's all I have any control over. That's how I can impact the future.
Obviously some problems are beyond my power to fix, but I can still focus on what I have now as opposed to what I may lose tomorrow.
For the present, I am glad. I choose to be glad because I know somewhere down the line, perhaps in two years or perhaps a little longer or shorter than that, my happiness will sour. But for now I'm enjoying what I have.
Two months ago I didn't expect I'd get that opportunity.
Friends and devoted readers (Which is basically two names for the same category) know my mother has incurable cancer. There's no going back for her, it's just a waiting game for us all. At the beginning of this year, I thought the waiting was over.
Mom's latest chemotherapy treatments wrecked havoc on her body. She couldn't keep any food down so she was losing weight at an astonishing rate. Fluid starting building up in her body, giving her a bloated look. Her strength rapidly deteriorated; her muscles couldn't support her. She was practically bed ridden, yet couldn't climb the stairs up to her room anymore - she moved into the downstairs guest room.
Mom spent roughly half of January and February in a hospital. Sometimes it would be just a night or two, other stays were for a week or more. She was in and out more times than I can recall - the trips became so frequent she and my stepfather would forget to tell me.
Doctors struggled to figure out the problem and put a stop to the fluid build-up. And all the while I planned for the worst. I awoke every morning expecting the phone call that she finally passed on.
But the call never came. The doctors isolated the fluid problem and now have it relatively under control. Mom is off the chemotherapy, and her appetite is slowly returning. She's undergoing physical therapy to regain her strength and has successfully gone from using a walker to a cane to move around. What's more, the doctors say her tumors, while still active, show no signs of growing.
Her doctors' best estimates are she should carry on for another two years. That might not sound like a lot of time to you, but it seems like an eternity compared to the amount of time I thought my family had left with her three months ago.
(The doctor's first estimated she'd be dead within five years when she was initially diagnosed, but timetable already passed. Then they thought, like everyone else, that she was on her deathbed at the start of this year. So they could easily be overestimating or underestimating again. I guess that last bit really isn't totally reassuring, is it?)
"I came back from the brink," was how Mom described it.
Yes, she did. But technically she's still clinging just out of reach of the jaws of death.
She's still very weak and frail, unable to climb the stairs on her own and always in need of sitting or laying down. Recovery is far away, and a full recovery is obviously impossible as long as the cancer remains in her system.
During this weekend, however, all I could think about was how good it was to see my mom again. Even as she nagged me about asking someone in town about a job, all I could feel was a sense of gladness that she was still here to nag (Plus, she actually apologized afterward. My mom apologized for something! That's a big deal!).
I live my life one day at a time. The future, for better or worse, is coming regardless what I do. I can prepare for it, I can even change it in small ways, but one way or another it is coming. If I spent every day mourning over my mother's impending doom, or my futile search for a career, or whether climate change will destroy humanity - I'd be in a state of perpetual depression and fear.
I don't do that. I live for today.
I recycle that plastic bottle, I keep sending out those resumes, and I enjoy still having my mother here. I can solve the problems directly in front of me, tackling bigger problems one day at a time. That's all I have any control over. That's how I can impact the future.
Obviously some problems are beyond my power to fix, but I can still focus on what I have now as opposed to what I may lose tomorrow.
For the present, I am glad. I choose to be glad because I know somewhere down the line, perhaps in two years or perhaps a little longer or shorter than that, my happiness will sour. But for now I'm enjoying what I have.
(The Wish - conveniently translated for all my Spanish-speaking readers for some reason)
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
King of the Monsters
As you already know, or should have picked up on from reading this blog, I am a nerd. Maybe not the bespectacled, Elvish and Klingon speaking, A.V. Club and Nerdist reading, mathlete, cosplayer you see at conventions; but a nerd nonetheless.
Star Wars, Star Trek, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Batman, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rooster Teeth, Game of Thrones, J.R.R. Tolkien, Harry Potter, the vlogbrothers (not to mention John Green's books), the superhero movies year after year, the list goes on and on...
My nerdy tendencies preceded all that, however.
Before my bedroom was filled with copies of Star Wars movies, books, and action figures. Before I waited in line at midnight for the latest Harry Potter novel. Before I riffed alongside with Joel, Mike, Crow, and Servo. Before I dreamed of living in The Shire or knew all the kingdoms of Westeros. Before I imagined my face under the masks of Spider-Man, Batman, or Zorro.
Before all that, I was the biggest fanboy of this guy...
Godzilla! The King of the Monsters! The biggest thing to ever come out of Japan! Toho Studio's greatest creation!
I don't know when exactly I discovered Godzilla, because it feels like I've been watching his movies all my life. By the time I was 7-years-old I had already memorized all of his classic films (Well...except for one. Somehow Godzilla Raids Again escaped my attention until a couple years ago) from Godzilla's golden age of 1954-1975. By the age of nine I was moving on to his more recent films, which at the time weren't readily available in America and none of which were dubbed into English.
Besides the movies, I had books about the Big G. My favorite for awhile was an encyclopedia of Godzilla knowledge called The Official Godzilla Compendium that allowed me to recite every little detail about the movies, the characters, and most importantly the monsters. I could give you the size and measurements of almost every one of Godzilla's friends and foes, and what kind of superpowers, if any, they possessed. I could recite monster stats like some people recite baseball statistics.
Throw in an assortment of action figures and cartoon series, and I had just about everything a Godzilla fan would want.
Godzilla was the unquestioned champion of my boyhood. I didn't want to be a firefighter or police officer when I grew up. I wanted to be Godzilla!
Even Roland Emmerich's disastrous 1998 American adaption didn't deter my fandom.
(Not to mention the unforgivable sin of casting Matthew Broderick as your lead character.)
Utterly unstoppable against the forces of man and monster alike, there was no hero more impressive to little Dylan. No other character on TV or film could get my blood pumping like watching Godzilla prepare to lay the smackdown on some unwitting foe.
When depicted as a terrible monster of destruction, however, there was nothing more dreadful to imagine than Godzilla coming to shore. I actively planned escape routes out of the city in case Godzilla attacked (Because he is obviously real). I still tended to root for him even as the villain though.
I bring all this up now because on May 16th my childhood hero returns to the big screen in the extremely original titled movie: Godzilla.
There's no way I'm not seeing this. Even though many of the Godzilla films are barely watchable as an adult (Especially if you watch with English dubbing), I fondly remember my former awe of his greatness.
It is hard to suspend disbelief with even the more recent Godzilla films. Trust me, I've re-watched a few lately in all my excitement for the upcoming film. There are obviously people in rubber suits or puppets playing the monsters, and the armies and cities are clearly models. You can see the strings in some movies. Combine that with how goofy most of them, especially the ones geared more for kids, and sometimes you feel like the best way to watch them is through MST3K.
Yet there is still something endearing about many of those movies. With limited special effects capabilities, ridiculous monsters, and unbelievable plots they really tried hard to make serious movies.
However, the aforementioned American-made Godzilla from 1998 puts even the worst of the originals to shame. It's not even a real Godzilla movie; the monster bears little to no resemblance to the classic Godzilla. The monster walked less upright, laid thousands of eggs, was easily wounded, ate fish instead of subsiding off radioactive fallout, barely used his radioactive fire blast, went from Japan to New York City instead of, oh I don't know, somewhere along the West Coast, and changed size from scene-to-scene (Great work from the continuity team on that last one).
That was not the real Godzilla. (My favorite scene from the last Japanese Godzilla film is when Godzilla OG battles American Godzilla...and it lasts like ten seconds before American Godzilla is blasted into atoms!)
So I have a lot of hope resting on his new film by Gareth Edwards. The director's only previous experience was a well-received small budget monster film that featured genuinely interesting human characters and storyline in addition to the monster effects.
I'm doing what I can to avoid spoilers, but judging by the trailers released and a couple interviews I've listened to, Edwards seems to have the right idea of how to treat a movie like this (Casting actors like Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe also helps).
Before Godzilla became a megastar that Toho cranked out year after year while turning him into a children's hero in order to make boatloads of money, the original film was a dark metaphor for the destructive capabilities of the nuclear era - produced by the only country ever attacked with atomic weapons.
Godzilla is a direct result of nuclear testing; a dinosaur mutated into an angry representation of what atomic weapons are capable of. He is a killing machine; laying waste to everything in his path.
Gojira is rife with images of sinking ships, crushed people, and burning cities. The scenes where a widow comforts her children that they'll be with daddy again soon, followed by the aftermath sequence showing a devastated Tokyo complete with hospitals filled with burn victims can be hard to watch even by today's standards.
Many of these scenes and the overall message were edited when Gojira first came to America. They were replaced with awkwardly interjected scenes featuring American actors explaining the story. I highly recommend seeing the film in it's original unedited Japanese format for all its moments of destruction and dark comedy. I took GF to see the original Gojira last weekend on a big screen at SIFF Cinema Uptown. It was GF's first experience with Godzilla, and I'm proud to say she enjoyed it.
Many other Godzilla films also contain important messages about topics such as corporate greed, environmentalism, and bullying. I'm hoping Edwards can instill that sense of destruction, but with a purpose, like those movies did.
Naturally, I have my concerns about this new film. The previous American attempt, the inexperience of the director, and my skeptical approach to films in general all weigh on my mind. But none of that will be enough to keep me away from opening weekend!
Godzilla has starred in 29 (Or 28, depending on who you ask) movies so far - this movie could bomb and still be objectively better than half the list. There have been some real duds in there (I'm looking at you, Jet Jaguar!) The question is can the film also succeed with purists like me, who still think Godzilla looks just fine as a guy in a suit.
Here's hoping this is the restart of a beautiful relationship between myself and a gigantic mutated reptile.
Blogger's update:
I have now seen the film, and I am satisfied with it. Not ecstatic, but satisfied.
My main critique is how little Godzilla action there is. You go through half the movie before seeing Big G, which isn't bad in itself, but you don't get to see him actually do much until the very end of the film. There are two incredibly frustrating cutaways from monster fights to boring human characters doing nothing of note.
Saving the big fight for the end is a tried and true Godzilla trope, but once you've unveiled Big G you have to give us a little something - not literally close a door in our face.
Second complaint, as already mentioned, is boring non-Godzilla characters. I couldn't care less about Elizabeth Olson and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The two characters I did feel anything for were played by Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe, but one of them was dead within a half hour while the other did little more than provide story exposition (Yet was still more interesting Taylor-Johnson and Olson).
Overall, however, Godzilla kept me entertained. I was grinning through half the movie at every scene with or even just hinting at Godzilla. None more so than the scene were they show his spikes glowing blue just prior to unleashing his fire for the first time - I almost popped out of my chair for that part! The inclusion of other monsters for Godzilla to fight was a nice surprise and Edwards did a great job in showing us how truly big and destructive giant monsters can be in the way everything reacts around them.
As I said weeks ago, even a mediocre film would technically be better than half the Godzilla movies in existence. This one pretty much fits the film - it's pretty standard as far as summer blockbuster movies go. But to a Godzilla fan, this goes down as a huge success and I look forward to the sequel.
Star Wars, Star Trek, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Batman, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rooster Teeth, Game of Thrones, J.R.R. Tolkien, Harry Potter, the vlogbrothers (not to mention John Green's books), the superhero movies year after year, the list goes on and on...
My nerdy tendencies preceded all that, however.
Before my bedroom was filled with copies of Star Wars movies, books, and action figures. Before I waited in line at midnight for the latest Harry Potter novel. Before I riffed alongside with Joel, Mike, Crow, and Servo. Before I dreamed of living in The Shire or knew all the kingdoms of Westeros. Before I imagined my face under the masks of Spider-Man, Batman, or Zorro.
Before all that, I was the biggest fanboy of this guy...
 |
| Oh yeah! |
Godzilla! The King of the Monsters! The biggest thing to ever come out of Japan! Toho Studio's greatest creation!
I don't know when exactly I discovered Godzilla, because it feels like I've been watching his movies all my life. By the time I was 7-years-old I had already memorized all of his classic films (Well...except for one. Somehow Godzilla Raids Again escaped my attention until a couple years ago) from Godzilla's golden age of 1954-1975. By the age of nine I was moving on to his more recent films, which at the time weren't readily available in America and none of which were dubbed into English.
Besides the movies, I had books about the Big G. My favorite for awhile was an encyclopedia of Godzilla knowledge called The Official Godzilla Compendium that allowed me to recite every little detail about the movies, the characters, and most importantly the monsters. I could give you the size and measurements of almost every one of Godzilla's friends and foes, and what kind of superpowers, if any, they possessed. I could recite monster stats like some people recite baseball statistics.
Throw in an assortment of action figures and cartoon series, and I had just about everything a Godzilla fan would want.
Godzilla was the unquestioned champion of my boyhood. I didn't want to be a firefighter or police officer when I grew up. I wanted to be Godzilla!
Even Roland Emmerich's disastrous 1998 American adaption didn't deter my fandom.
(Not to mention the unforgivable sin of casting Matthew Broderick as your lead character.)
Utterly unstoppable against the forces of man and monster alike, there was no hero more impressive to little Dylan. No other character on TV or film could get my blood pumping like watching Godzilla prepare to lay the smackdown on some unwitting foe.
When depicted as a terrible monster of destruction, however, there was nothing more dreadful to imagine than Godzilla coming to shore. I actively planned escape routes out of the city in case Godzilla attacked (Because he is obviously real). I still tended to root for him even as the villain though.
I bring all this up now because on May 16th my childhood hero returns to the big screen in the extremely original titled movie: Godzilla.
There's no way I'm not seeing this. Even though many of the Godzilla films are barely watchable as an adult (Especially if you watch with English dubbing), I fondly remember my former awe of his greatness.
It is hard to suspend disbelief with even the more recent Godzilla films. Trust me, I've re-watched a few lately in all my excitement for the upcoming film. There are obviously people in rubber suits or puppets playing the monsters, and the armies and cities are clearly models. You can see the strings in some movies. Combine that with how goofy most of them, especially the ones geared more for kids, and sometimes you feel like the best way to watch them is through MST3K.
Yet there is still something endearing about many of those movies. With limited special effects capabilities, ridiculous monsters, and unbelievable plots they really tried hard to make serious movies.
However, the aforementioned American-made Godzilla from 1998 puts even the worst of the originals to shame. It's not even a real Godzilla movie; the monster bears little to no resemblance to the classic Godzilla. The monster walked less upright, laid thousands of eggs, was easily wounded, ate fish instead of subsiding off radioactive fallout, barely used his radioactive fire blast, went from Japan to New York City instead of, oh I don't know, somewhere along the West Coast, and changed size from scene-to-scene (Great work from the continuity team on that last one).
That was not the real Godzilla. (My favorite scene from the last Japanese Godzilla film is when Godzilla OG battles American Godzilla...and it lasts like ten seconds before American Godzilla is blasted into atoms!)
So I have a lot of hope resting on his new film by Gareth Edwards. The director's only previous experience was a well-received small budget monster film that featured genuinely interesting human characters and storyline in addition to the monster effects.
I'm doing what I can to avoid spoilers, but judging by the trailers released and a couple interviews I've listened to, Edwards seems to have the right idea of how to treat a movie like this (Casting actors like Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe also helps).
Before Godzilla became a megastar that Toho cranked out year after year while turning him into a children's hero in order to make boatloads of money, the original film was a dark metaphor for the destructive capabilities of the nuclear era - produced by the only country ever attacked with atomic weapons.
Godzilla is a direct result of nuclear testing; a dinosaur mutated into an angry representation of what atomic weapons are capable of. He is a killing machine; laying waste to everything in his path.
Gojira is rife with images of sinking ships, crushed people, and burning cities. The scenes where a widow comforts her children that they'll be with daddy again soon, followed by the aftermath sequence showing a devastated Tokyo complete with hospitals filled with burn victims can be hard to watch even by today's standards.
Many of these scenes and the overall message were edited when Gojira first came to America. They were replaced with awkwardly interjected scenes featuring American actors explaining the story. I highly recommend seeing the film in it's original unedited Japanese format for all its moments of destruction and dark comedy. I took GF to see the original Gojira last weekend on a big screen at SIFF Cinema Uptown. It was GF's first experience with Godzilla, and I'm proud to say she enjoyed it.
Many other Godzilla films also contain important messages about topics such as corporate greed, environmentalism, and bullying. I'm hoping Edwards can instill that sense of destruction, but with a purpose, like those movies did.
Naturally, I have my concerns about this new film. The previous American attempt, the inexperience of the director, and my skeptical approach to films in general all weigh on my mind. But none of that will be enough to keep me away from opening weekend!
Godzilla has starred in 29 (Or 28, depending on who you ask) movies so far - this movie could bomb and still be objectively better than half the list. There have been some real duds in there (I'm looking at you, Jet Jaguar!) The question is can the film also succeed with purists like me, who still think Godzilla looks just fine as a guy in a suit.
Here's hoping this is the restart of a beautiful relationship between myself and a gigantic mutated reptile.
Blogger's update:
I have now seen the film, and I am satisfied with it. Not ecstatic, but satisfied.
My main critique is how little Godzilla action there is. You go through half the movie before seeing Big G, which isn't bad in itself, but you don't get to see him actually do much until the very end of the film. There are two incredibly frustrating cutaways from monster fights to boring human characters doing nothing of note.
Saving the big fight for the end is a tried and true Godzilla trope, but once you've unveiled Big G you have to give us a little something - not literally close a door in our face.
Second complaint, as already mentioned, is boring non-Godzilla characters. I couldn't care less about Elizabeth Olson and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The two characters I did feel anything for were played by Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe, but one of them was dead within a half hour while the other did little more than provide story exposition (Yet was still more interesting Taylor-Johnson and Olson).
Overall, however, Godzilla kept me entertained. I was grinning through half the movie at every scene with or even just hinting at Godzilla. None more so than the scene were they show his spikes glowing blue just prior to unleashing his fire for the first time - I almost popped out of my chair for that part! The inclusion of other monsters for Godzilla to fight was a nice surprise and Edwards did a great job in showing us how truly big and destructive giant monsters can be in the way everything reacts around them.
As I said weeks ago, even a mediocre film would technically be better than half the Godzilla movies in existence. This one pretty much fits the film - it's pretty standard as far as summer blockbuster movies go. But to a Godzilla fan, this goes down as a huge success and I look forward to the sequel.
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