The general category for posts on this blog.

Special Treatment

One of the things I have come to hate over the years is “equality”, mostly because people just don’t use it right. To me, equality means equal opportunity. The door is there, whether I open it and go through it is up to me, but the door is there. Too many people, however, see equality as meaning true equality. If there is a door, and I make the effort to open it and go through it, they should be allowed to go through it too, even if they don’t do the work.

Tied in with this is the concept of trust. Trust is something you earn by being consistant, and when you are trusted, you will be given benefits that less trust worthy people don’t get. Lots of people see those benefits as being “unequal” because they don’t grasp that if they work and become trustworthy, those benefits will be given to them too.

My rent is due each month by the 5th. If you are late, you have to pay a late fee… fair enough. There is a deadline, you miss it, you are penalized. However, since in the past they have run into deadbeats who bounce checks when they are late, my apartment complex requires that late rent must be paid with a cashier’s check or a money order. I’ve lived there for three years, and in three years I have never missed a payment until now. I’m perfectly willing to pay the late fee. I’m late, I don’t deny it. But I asked if, given my payment history, I could be allowed to just write a personal check. They said no. I asked why and they said it was policy, no exceptions. I could totally understand if they demanded all rent in certified payment, but its only the late rent. I tried to pursue it, since I’ve made the last 36 or so payments on time and never bounced a check, but she cut me off, said no again, told me to have a nice day and hung up.

On the other hand, I went to the bank to get myself a cashier’s check for the late rent and the bank manager said that since I’d been a loyal customer for over ten years, they would happily wave the fee for the cashier’s check. Meanwhile, the guy next to me, who was also getting a cashier’s check and was paying the fee, said he thought it was real nice the bank rewarded loyal customers and he looked forward to doing business there for a long time to come.

So today is a loss and a win. More loss than win though, since the late fee on the rent is much much larger than the fee for the cashier’s check. But hey, I’ll take my wins where I can get ’em.

Hollywood and Your Money

People often wonder why Hollywood keeps churning out crappy movies. The answer is simple… because you people keep paying to see them!

This past weekend approximately three and a half million people (3,500,000) went to see “Big Momma’s House 2” making it the number one film of the weekend with its $28 million box office draw. It also happens to be the second largest January opening in movie history.

Look people, we have to work together on this. You can not just go spending hard earned dollars on junk like this. You need to support quality films, and I don’t just mean Oscar winning crap, because lots of those films are garbage too. Sometimes you have to stop and think, and if there are no good movies playing, don’t go to a movie. Go home and watch a DVD or play a board game or go out drinking with some friends. Anything. Anything, that is, except settling for some movie that isn’t really worth your $8 but you don’t see anything better playing.

Support quality entertainment, not garbage. At least not at the theaters. Wait for DVD… or cable… or broadcast television… If you go to the movies and nothing good is playing, vote with your feet and walk away. If you stop paying Hollywood for making crappy movies, they’ll stop making crappy movies.

Another Year Over. . .

… and a new one just begun.

Well, it is 2006. Last year was a reorganizing year… put the debt under control, kick caffeine, stop weight gain, and lots more. This year is going to be the year that Fink beats the Stomach… I mean, the year that I start moving forward now that all the sliding backward has stopped.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. I’ve got an elliptical machine and a Total Gym, and I’ve done enough working out on both to understand them and to layout the exercise plan I want to follow. Thanks to the stomach flu, I’m already on the way to eating a bit less and I’ve already dropped to under 200lbs, something I haven’t been in probably three or four years. Now I just have to keep it that way. My goal is about 150 or 160, although if I end up higher because of muscle that’d be okay. I’ve had the bad mutha fukka haircut for a while now, so it wouldn’t be too bad if I got the muscled body to go with it.

Anyway, that all said, basically my resolution for this year is to keep on keepin’ on… work out, take better care of myself, read more, write more, play the guitar more, and maybe… just maybe… polish of the debt.

Happy New Year everyone!

Stomach Flu and You

The only good thing about stomach flu is that it usually lasts only 1 or 2 days, 3 tops. The bad things about stomach flu? One, its contageous, so Jodi had it first, then I got it. Two, you vomit a lot. A lot. Nothing really stays down long, and the longer it stays the more uncomfortable it becomes. Every time you vomit there is actually a euphoric feeling that finally the pressure is gone, or that could be oxygen deprivation since you can’t breath and puke at the same time. Three, dehydration. With all the vomitting, your body runs out of fluids fast, and the only way to get it back is drink a lot, which only serves to give your stomach more ammo to launch into the toilets, sinks and trash cans in your home. And you can’t not drink, because dehydration is bad, not drinking could land you in the hospital.

So there you have, in a nutshell, how I have spent the last twenty-four hours. I think I may be out of the woods as I haven’t thrown up in twelve hours, but I still feel crappy.

So This Is Christmas. . .

… and what have you done?

When I was a child, Christmas was just like this ultra fun super party time of year. School let out, the holiday TV specials would crank up, and the excitement would just build and build until Christmas Eve causing me to have a rough time getting to sleep, and then Christmas morning the bubble would burst and it was just awesome. Of course, these days I’m not in school and work doesn’t really “let out”, although one day I vow to run my own company that closes up shop before Thanksgiving and returns after New Year’s. Also, very few shows do a Christmas episode, and with all the money grubbing companies exercising their rights on their properties, most Christmas movies and specials only air once (I’ve written before about my disappointment that “It’s a Wonderful Life” only airs once a season now, instead of eleventy-billion times like when I was growing up). And with political retardedness… I mean, correctness at an all-time high, its getting to be where “Christmas” is a bad word and everyone is wishing everyone else a non-descript “Holiday” for fear of offending someone. What ever happened to wishing someone what YOU celebrate and if they celebrate something else they wish that back to you? Why must I change my well wishing based on the target?

Lastly, Christmas morning just isn’t the same old Christmas morning anymore… First of all, my family doesn’t all live under the same roof anymore, which is to be expected as people grow up, but we don’t even take vacation and move in together for a few days like in the movies. Second, since Jodi works Christmas day (5 am to 11 am) we won’t be congregating at the house until around 1 pm… Christmas Afternoon just doesn’t have the magic that Christmas Morning does. Third, well, everything is a little less special this time of year without my mom.

But I think what really does it for me, what really does in the Christmas spirit, is that Christmas morning means that the year is drawing to a close, and I start thinking about all the things I meant to do, wanted to do, and didn’t do throughout the year… So, in an attempt to get out of that funk, I’m going to list all the crap that I DID do this year, and how cool it is.

1. This year, for the first time since 2000, I worked full time the entire year, and therefore my salary will actually be “roughly my hourly rate times 2000” like I always pretend it is.

2. Thanks in part to working full time all year, and a bit of decent money management, I’ve gotten my monsterous pile of debt under control and by this time next year I might even be saying that my debt is all gone.

3. I went to a writer’s workshop and learned definatively that I am not alone. Struggling writers are everywhere. I feel better about it, and as a result I’ve actually written more.

4. I started reading books for fun again. Switching to public transportation this year has been the best kick in the pants for my flagging reading habit, and I’ve read fifty books… that is more than one a week (didn’t start until about April), and that is awesome.

I’m sure there is alot more stuff, but that’s enough for me as I’m already in a much happier mood. So, in closing I’d just like to say…

Merry Christmas!

Monday Morning Philosophy

Throughout my life, I have attempted to encapsulate large groups of my beliefs into one or two phrases that I feel sum up the whole of the thing. Religion is one of the places that I’ve done this, however whenever I say my summed up phrase to someone, they never get it.

“I don’t believe in God, but god believes in me, and sometimes that’s enough.”

The first part is misleading, intentionally, and loses a bit when its spoken because I can’t speak in uppercase and lowercase, I’m stuck with just speaking. I don’t believe in God, big “g”, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc… Organized religions, in my experience, fail, not because they accept certain limitations in their system, but because they preach and teach those limitations to others, and to a degree their structure is designed to support the continuation of the church, the physical buildings, over the continuation of the faith. But I do believe in a god. I believe that there has to be something out there greater than all that I can see, because if there isn’t… well, I don’t like the idea that this is it. Even if the “next world” is just another go round on this one, or its to spend a term as undefinable quantum energy sliding through the time space continuum until I pass through a singularity and report for my life in a negative universe… Doesn’t matter, I believe in “something”, some days its more definable or specific than others, but its always there.

The next part is the meat of it all… whatever exists out there, whether it be a scientist looking in his petri dish swirling around some chemicals or an undeniable force that guides and binds the universe, its smarter than me. And hey, I’m pretty damn smart, if not always the most intuitive. And since it created or guided or is the universe, it will never give to me more than I can handle. I might disagree sometimes, and there are days when I have broken down in tears because of the strength of my disagreement, but I do always manage to get back up, bear the new weight and survive. I even win sometimes and lighten my load. There have been times that solutions are a long time coming, or were obscured by other problems. But never, not once, have I, when it comes down to facts, ever been given a life that I cannot handle if I choose to handle it. God has given me this because it has faith in my ability to handle it.

That leads us to the final part… Given the other two parts, that I believe in something out there greater than me and that it will never burden me more than my ability to cope, my faith in those two tenets mean that no matter how rough life may get or how crappy a situation may be, I know that given effort and time I will be okay.

And sometimes that’s enough…

The Definition of Insanity

The clinical definition of insanity is the repetion of the same task expecting a different result. Like, if you have a button that turns on a red light, pushing it over and over again expecting one of those times for the light to be green instead.

So, at work, there is a woman who asks me to create an entry in our database. She does this about once a week. Every week she provides me with the name of the record. Every week, I ask her to send me more information and list about twenty fields that need to be filled out. Every week she replies with the information I need and says she forgot.

The question is, is she insane because she keeps sending me one piece of data expecting me to be able to create the record or am I insane for expecting her to learn and give me all the information in the first email?

Parents versus Parenting

Normally, I love kids. I even wouldn’t mind having a few someday. But there are also a great many times where I hate parents. If your kid wants new bike, and you say ‘no’ and he throws a fit, that’s understandable. If his fit includes running around throwing things in the store and kicking people and you do nothing, it’s no longer understandable.

Years ago, I worked at Kroger, a grocery store, and as a college student sometimes I worked day shifts (unlike the high school kids who all worked in the evenings and on weekends). During the day a grocery store gets a pretty large number of mothers with their children. Most kids are fairly well behaved, and when they do misbehave, most parents know how to punish the kid to make them, at the very least, sit in the cart or walk behind mom and pout.

Then one day I met the devil. Satan entered Kroger wearing a powder blue short sleeve shirt, a loose diaper and unmatched socks (one pink, one white). Mother grabbed a cart and began shopping. Satan took off. About five minutes later, the store is filled with a thunderous crash as Satan has pushed over an entire display of ketchup bottles. Satan starts screaming, everyone runs to make sure she’s okay. And Mother starts yelling at people about how dangerous it is to have broken glass around children, acting as though it wasn’t her child that broke the bottles. Clean up begins, Mother returns to shopping, and Satan disappears again. About five minutes later, yelling erupts from the cereal aisle. It appears that Satan has discovered that if you hold out one arm stiff straight out to the side and then run down the cereal shelf you can make all the boxes fall on the floor. Then Satan discovers that the same applies to the cookie aisle. When Satan turns her eyes toward the aisle with the wine bottles, the store manager steps in, sweeps Satan into her arms and seeks out Mother. Mother immediately starts screaming that the store manager let go of her child at once or she’ll press charges. Satan is set down and disappears again. Fifteen minutes later, it is discovered that Satan has been quite because she had to poop. After removing her diaper. On the floor of the magazine aisle. And is now content with rubbing her poop on the pretty people pictured on the covers of the magazines. I spot Mother, pull her aside, explain what is happening and say, “If you don’t spank your child, I will.” Needless to say, she was agast… stunned that I would dare make such accusations about her darling child who was so sweet and would never do anything to hurt anyone or anything. She’d simply had enough of our store’s lack of quality customer service, scooped up her child, and walked right out of the store swearing that she would never ever shop here again.

Later, I got called into the manager’s office. It seems the woman called back and claimed that I spanked her child. I explained that I didn’t, I’d only threatened to spank the child after discovering the poop incident. I got an official write up placed in my work file and told that it was against policy to threaten customers, and the only reason I wasn’t being fired was due to the fact that they were happy that I had insulted the woman and caused her to leave the store.

Two weeks later, Mother returned with Satan in tow. The store manager met her at the door and invoked the store’s right to refuse service. She was very upset, and I distinctly overheard her say that she didn’t know where to go shopping now that she was barred from all seven of her local grocery stores. She began to cry. Meanwhile, Satan was pushing empty shopping carts into the parking lot and two bag boys were desperately trying to stop them from hitting cars.

I often think back to that day when I see unruly children and the parents who have tuned them out, and I know, deep down where it really counts, that should I even become a parent I definately won’t be like them.

This rambling inspired by this article on CNN. Here’s to you Mr. Making Parents Take Responsibility For Their Children Guy. A real American hero.

Sex and Violence on TV

I stumbled on this article over at CNN. Okay, I didn’t really stumble on it, I read the Entertainment section over there a couple times a day and the picture of Emily Deschanel drew me in. First off, she’s cute. Second, she plays the lead on the TV show “Bones” that I happen to enjoy a great deal.

Anyway, the article points out that during the last week in September, if you watched all the shows broadcast by the six major networks in primetime, you would have seen 63 dead bodies, which is an increase over the 27 dead bodies in the same week in 2004. Frankly… so what?

I really don’t know alot of true couch potatoes, people who will watch anything that’s on TV with no regard to its quality. Most people I know watch a handful of shows or more, but if a show is sub-par they’ll stop. They may give it a few extra weeks hoping it gets better, as I often do myself, but can only take being slapped in the face so long before they walk away. That said, if people watch a show, it must be what they want to see… as long as its not grossly inappropriate (showing snuff films and real rapes to five year olds) why should anyone care what people watch?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for making “good, quality” television for the whole family, but I’m also very strongly for parental responsibility. Any kid who watches a TV show that his parents aren’t aware of or haven’t viewed themselves needs more parenting. If I had a kid, he probably wouldn’t be allowed to watch some of the shows I do, or at the least he’d have to watch them with me and I’d make sure we talked about any subjects that come up.

Here is a nice little quote from the article:

“Yet the PTC, which frequently files complaints with the Federal Communications Commission about network fare, admits that its focus has primarily been on sex, not gore. One reason is that there’s no government agency concerned with these issues, said Melissa Caldwell, the PTC’s research director.”

And it makes me ask, “Do we need a government agency concerned with these issues?” If there is something I don’t want to watch on TV, I won’t watch it. If there is something I don’t want my kid to watch on TV, I won’t let my kid watch it. The one thing I really don’t want is some tax funded agency that I pay for and have little to no control over deciding that I or my kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch a show. I think the government has gone about as far as it needs to in mandating that all TVs had to have V-chips in them to allow the blocking of TV broadcasts based on TV ratings. One the other side, I think the TV networks need to expand the ratings, make more levels and divide them up. Don’t just rate a show TV-MA because its violent or because it has other adult themes, rate the show TV-MA-Violence or TV-MA-AdultThemes, and then have the monitor software allow me to say, “You know, my kids can deal with all the sex on TV that can be thrown at them, but I don’t want them watching TV-14 or higher level violence.” or even “You know, guns and sex are okay, but no bad language in this house.” Basically, give me the tools to be as arbitrary as *I* want to be, but don’t try to force someone else’s arbitrary ideas on me.

TV to some extent, and movies to a large extent, need to take a look at the computer game industry ratings and head that direction, and all of them need to keep going, providing more tools for parents and other people. Then we just need to courts to come in and start legislating personal responsibility by throwing out any case where someone watched TV or a movie or played a game and accidentally saw something they didn’t want to see because they forgot to use the tools provided to them.

Yeah, it sounds nice… but I won’t be holding my breath…

Thinning the Herd

A couple weeks back ‘Night Stalker’, one of the TV shows I was watching this fall season, got cancelled. I really liked the show, but I could also tell why it wasn’t doing so well… it was a dark, slow show that was more mystery than action. What made it worse, however, was that the last episode they aired was the first part of a two part story. Son of a …

Today, word came down that ‘Threshold’ has been cancelled. If you look back a couple of posts here you’ll understand why I’m not surprised. I mean, the show had potential and I really wanted it to be great, but it was just so boring. As usual, the most recent episode was pretty good, and it ended with a good opening for stuff to finally happen, but it won’t… you can’t build a show anymore, you either are a winner out of the gate or they cancel you before you finish the first turn.

Fox has also cancelled ‘Reunion’ which was an odd little show… a murder mystery told over the span of 20 years, each episode being the events of one year that promised to eventually lead you to the 20 year high school reunion of six friends where one of them gets killed. It took them five episodes just to reveal to the viewers which of the six was the dead one, and that was my only complaint on the show… I think the story would have told better if we knew who the dead one was from the start because only now does the show become really interesting as lives unfold to show motive as to why one or more of the remaining five would want to bump one of their friends off. Only, we may never know. Fox hasn’t announced if the show is being pulled, only that it is cancelled. They might finish out the season, or they might do a couple episodes to quickly tie it up… or they might shut down production and never reveal the murder plot, which would completely suck.

Television Network executives probably wonder why sales of TV shows on DVD are so high, even for shows that didn’t do so well when they aired, but this is the reason… its almost not worth it to watch broadcast TV anymore, because no matter how good you think a show is, a focus group or the Nielson ratings might think its crap and it gets cancelled. So why bother? Why not just wait for it to come out of DVD in a complete set and then? At least you know what you are getting into.

Well, I guess on the bright side, I’ve got three more hours a week to do something else…