“Yeah, yeah… I’m not too worried about it. I’ll look into it,” I told my mom.

“Ok…” she said, “But you should do it soon.”

My mom called today to remind me to move my money out of Bank of America. My mom has a habit of taking the news very seriously, while I understand that fear mongering gets ratings, and thus pretty much abstain from watching televised news. My mom also has a habit of getting kind of worked up over things that I don’t think are too scary. I’ve thus trained myself, for better or worse, not to take her fears very seriously. The problem is, when she warns me, in hushed tones, about everything ranging from artificial sweeteners and sunblock, to mercury in tuna, horrific car accidents, and the implending collapse of the global economy, I don’t know what to believe. She has proclaimed the sky to be falling so many times, and I used to cling to every word, I just grew sick of living in fear. I made a decision to not be a codependent to her anxieties.

This information, though, she assured me was from a trusted source; she even sent me some supporting documents to read. She gave me a very descriptive Ragnarok-like prophecy in which mighty gods fell, and all humanity was destroyed. Soon, people would be lining up around the block to withdraw their money. Those who didn’t make it would have their funds tied up for months as they tried to collect from the FDIC. The only logical escape from this nightmare scenario was to move my money to safer institutions, like under my mattress.

I didn’t buy it.

Bank of America going bankrupt? That’s just crazy talk! Of course, she cited Washington Mutual, the so-called “largest bank collapse in United States history.” In my relatively sheltered ignorance, I in turn cited anecdotal evidence that my friends, who held accounts at WaMu, still had access to their funds. I didn’t really believe anything bad would happen.

I wanted to draw my own conclusions, so I told her I’d do independent research and get back to her.

In the meantime, I had far more important things to worry about, like getting a damn haircut.

“HoHO! Did you know that Vin Diesel is half black?” I asked her.

“Yeah, so?” she said.

“But did you know that he made this independent short called ‘Multi-Facial’?” I asked.

“No, what’s that?” she said.

“It’s this twenty minute film in which he explores his own struggles as an actor, trying to get roles, and being dismissed as being ‘too white’ or ‘too black,’” I said.

“Huh, you’ve got quite a man crush on Vin Diesel don’t you?” she said, jokingly.

“OMG, that is so not true!” I said, “I just get obsessed with things really easily.”

After learning about Mark Vincent’s upcoming cinematic masterpiece, I started clicking around on ‘kipedia, and eventually other sites, watching interviews, reading about his video game company, and other riveting details of his life. Before I knew it, an hour had passed, and suddenly my head was filled with entirely useful facts like:
a) he was a bouncer at a gay club, and
b) he wrote the foreword to the the 30 year commemorative book for Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s a crippling addiction, really, this hunger for information. I’m just genetically predisposed to becoming fascinated with details and minutia that most people are content to ignore. I take up hobbies, sometimes requiring a significant investment of startup capital, only to become utterly consumed by it for a few months, until I reach a plateau, at which point I promptly lose interest. This is a well established recipe, and I can cook it up almost on command.

Just take a look at the various poker related books on my shelf. I haven’t touched cards or chips in nearly a year.

Convinced that I was to lead the coming revolution of guerilla gardening, I had my friend pick up some seeds from Home Depot. I spent hours educating myself about growing cycles and irrigation techniques. I considered getting a set of sturdy tools and some work gloves.

The seeds are currently sitting on my shelf, still wrapped in their original brown and orange plastic bag.

The time I spent was not a waste. I got pleasure out of the very act of learning, and that knowledge is still with me. When I desire to, it will not be hard for me to pick up any of those hobbies again. I will come back around to all of them, I’m absolutely certain. They’re just not as high on the list as my other staples: writing, taking pictures, and productivity.

I’m serious about that guerrilla gardening though. You know, as soon as I’m caught up with my writing, and my room is organized…

I had heard about it about a week ago on one of my favorite online retailers. I relied upon them to seek out cool and rare artifacts that were relevant to my interests. Their hefty markup, however, encouraged me to shop around, and I had learned to use them as a springboard for finding cool shit, off of which I jumped into the vast sea of the global marketplace. Such was the case last week, when I saw something that I had to possess, and within minutes, I ordered it off another website for about 40% the listed price.

It arrived today in an innocuous manila envelope. Inside were two green boxes emblazoned with the pictures of ripe, red berries, and the slogan “Life can be sweeter!” Each package held ten foil-wrapped tablets.

I am, of course, referring to the marvel of nature known as Synsepalum dulcificum or simply the “Miracle Berry.”

When I first read that these things could make sour fruits taste sweet, I had to know for myself if it worked. I’ve never been shy about experimenting on my own body, and I will try almost anything once just to see the effects.

You know what they say, whatever doesn’t kill you…

The way that our pharmaceutical regulations work, drugs have to go through years (8.5 on average) of rigorous testing before they can be deemed safe by the Food and Drug administration. Only one out of a thousand submitted drugs makes it through this process.

This is one part of our not-quite-free-market economy that I can embrace. I am glad that only 0.1% of possible drugs are making it to the shelves. That gives me a little bit of hope that what I’m ingesting has gone through some quality assurance and is relatively safe.

It turns out “herbal remedies” don’t have to go through any of that. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration is not allowed to regulate herbal supplements!

Fortunately, this berry seems to have a limited sphere of influence, and my curiosity far outweighed my anxieties about side effects. With no hesitation, I popped one open and let it dissolve on my tongue. It had a faint fruity flavor that reminded me of those pink, disc-shaped candies I used to eat when I was a kid. I was at work at the time, so the kinds of foods on which I could test it were limited. I went downstairs and bought some lemonade. I took a tiny sip.

Holy crap.

It was incredibly sweet, cloying even, but still retained a distinctly lemon flavor. I took another bigger sip and was hit again by the overwhelmingly sugary taste. My tongue, throat, and lips could not lie though; I was still drinking acid, and my tongue still felt like it was being sliced by a million microscopic razor blades. Next up was some grapefruit cocktail from the break room. Miraculin does nothing to mask acerbity, and the bitterness of the ruby red was there, front and center. Even so, my taste buds were deluged by the concentrated sweetness of a thousand sun soaked pamplemousses. Gears in my head turned madly with the thoughts of what I wanted to try next, after I got off work.

I once assumed that experiences were universal. I thought that if there’s anything that I know is real and completely objective, it is the sensations in my body. Furthermore, I postulated that if you were exposed to the same stimuli, we would have roughly the same responses in our bodies, thanks to our analogous biology. It seemed like a pretty natural notion to me.

I quickly discarded this though when I realized that a colorblind person would see the world entirely differently than I do.

There is no way for me to ever know exactly how someone else experiences things. I can only assume that our experiences are similar, based on our shared genetics. Through training, I can improve my empathy and get extremely good at sensing what others might be feeling, but I can never be 100% sure.

I wasn’t unfamiliar with lemonade or grapefruits; I had been consuming them my whole life. I thought I pretty much had them figured out and that I had experienced all they had to offer. Because of the miracle berries, however, an entirely new world of sensations presented itself to me. Tastes that I did not know existed, that were not even part of my reality, were now easily reproduced. I experienced in that moment a paradigm shift.

I wondered what else lay just outside my reality.

I yawned, stretched, and sat down at my computer. As had been customary lately, I put on some music and donned my cans before diving into my morning pages.

As I mentioned before, my brain partners with entertainment media in a compelling way. The right piece can completely shift an otherwise quotidian experience for me.

I remember once just strolling through campus, listening to the Original Soundtrack to that flick, based on the Hubert Selby Jr. novel.

Everything just seemed so…significant.

When writing code, I mostly listen to podcasts. I like lectures, talks, and works of fiction that I can easily pause and whose meaning would not be entirely lost if I blacked out for a few seconds. The high literary stuff is too much for me. I tried listening to a reading of H. G. Wells’s “The Invisible Man,” once, but I quickly turned it off and put on some Trash80 instead. Wells deserves my undivided attention, and I made a note to pick some of his work up from the library instead.

When not enhancing myself, I listen mostly to a mix of chippy techno songs, rap, and some rock. I discovered entirely by accident that Kid A provides an excellent ambiance for coding, and I’m apparently not the only person who thinks this.

For writing words, though, choosing background music is a bit more difficult. The playlist has to be interesting enough to encourage the process, but unobtrusive enough to not get in the way. I have a few standby’s. Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s crossover hit is on that list. For some reason, that album, the musical equivalent of deep fried Twinkies, puts me in the right mood for creating.

One of my favorite tracks came on, putting the lyrics of “Papercut” to the beat of “Big Pimpin’”, and I banged out my pages in record time. The song appeals simultaneously to my “baller” and “angsty teen” sensibilities, clearly a searing commentary on social mores…or something.

Or maybe I just like bad music.

When I was younger, I could not enjoy horror movies or scary stories. I would sometimes lie awake for hours, my entire body taught with fear. Much like my friend Jerry, my brain partners with entertainment media in a way that seems to be stronger than most people’s do.

I cried at the end of Chrono Trigger. That music box type theme song still gets me every time.

So too would my mind merge with entries in the horror genre, imagining that every time I stepped into a elevator, it’d be my last, or that if I spent too much time looking into the mirror, supernatural acts of unspeakable evil would occur.

Sometimes it wasn’t even the patently spooky things that scared the shit out of me. At the tender and impressionable age of 10, When I first saw Cyrax perform his little web trick when passing by the machine in an arcade, my mind fixated on somehow being caught in webs. This contributed to my crippling claustrophobia and also kept me up nights.

When I was invited to a friend’s birthday party in the 8th grade, and we thought it’d be a good idea to watch that innocent movie with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr., I didn’t want to look uncool, so I watched too, not knowing that I’d be unable to scrape from my mind those haunting images of meat hooks and dead bodies crawling with crabs.

And finally, when I was at a friend’s apartment for a Halloween get together, we started watching what I assumed to be was a nice, Japanese, romantic comedy.

It wasn’t.

I never looked at needles the same way again.

Man, the way that shit just sneaks up on you… It’s like, for the first half of the movie, you’re watching a zany episode of Friends, and then, with very little foreshadowing, you’re in the middle of one of the longest and goriest torture scenes ever to grace the silver screen. For months after, my mind was plagued with doubts about people I met. Any one of them could be a closet psycho like the woman in the film!

And so, with my proven track record, it was with great hesitation that I clicked on the “download” button for Scarecrow. On the one hand, there was the very real possibility of inducing a heart attack, on the other hand, Wil Wheaton recommended it.

“Hey baby, are you hungry?” I asked.

“Yeah, I could eat a little,” she said.

My mind spun through possibilities like a Rolodex, landing on the card for ye olde standby, Talay Thai.

“How about some Thai food?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

Of course, things weren’t always so easy.

When I left San Francisco about a year and a half ago, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on how the city is laid out. Firm was my grasp on where the various neighborhoods lie in relation to one another, which bars and night clubs were the coolest (and which ones were lame), and of course, the best late night cuisine in any given area. My mental map of eateries in San Francisco included the smells and tastes as well, and in fact, whenever I smell that warm scent of tamales on the street or hear the sizzle of bacon fat and hot dogs, I often have a flashback of being back in front of Casanova.

Coming to Los Angeles, I had to start over fresh. Streets had strange names, like “Stoner” and “Sepulveda.” Nothing was rectangular like my familiar Sunset district. And of course, there were the turnabouts, the one way streets, the endlessly snaking highways…

It was a lot to take in.

Nothing was so far removed from my San Franciscan experience that I couldn’t find an analog, a way to relate to it. But even with my vast foreknowledge of city life in general, great volumes of Angelenian specific information presented themselves to me, each waving, gently, like the branchiae of the majestic feather duster worm.

Damn. That came out of nowhere.

More importantly, I didn’t have a feel for LA yet; I wasn’t sure how everything fit.

And so, I forced myself to go out. With no GPS in my car, Yelp, Google maps, and little scraps of paper served as my guides. I became intimately familiar with the 405, the 10, the 405 connector to the 10, and with each passing mile I started to perform a sort of mental cartography, cutting up the city into large sections, and connecting them together with the magical pipelines of streets and highways.

New synapses formed in my brain while others were pruned, and I grew to memorize where my favorite spots were. I absorbed their correlations to the cardinal directions, as well as their general flavors. There is still much to learn, but I have at least a basic idea of what each neighborhood is good for.

I still keep a list of late night restaurants in my glove compartment.

Hey! Hey you!

Me?

Yeah, you.

…yes?

Want to cook more tasty meals for yourself?

Yeah.

Want to save money?

Who doesn’t?!

Are you very, extremely busy?

Heck to the yes!

Well guess what? You need a slow cooker in your life! Like, you need one right this instant.

Wow! Thanks disembodied voice! *ding!*

So went the conversation I had with myself before I clicked “submit” on my new Hamilton beach four-quart slow cooker. I had been wanting one for a while, ever since I discovered the amazing crock-pot-a-day blog. When I saw an article linked from Lifehacker entitled “Simple Crock Pot Recipes Save Time and Money”, I took it as a sign from Pelor himself that I should pull the trigger. That was about a week and a half ago.

Today it showed up at my cubicle in a wastefully large box filled with non-biodegradable packing peanuts. Which was totally necessary since, you know, it’s such a sensitive instrument.

I couldn’t wait to get home and test it out.

I picked up a nice chuck roast and a couple jars of various pickled vegetables and peppers on my way home from work. Yes, I had decided to christian my new slow-cooker with a recipe I saw a while ago over at Brian’s Belly, the Giardiniera Beef. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I like to play fast and loose with ingredients and quantities when I cook, but I still read lots of recipes for inspiration. The giardiniera beef to me epitomized slow-cooking: it required minimal effort and produced something really tasty.

I salivated as I lovingly unwrapped the meat, gently placed it in my clean stoneware, and emptied an entire jar of Mezzetta’s California hot mix on top of it. I added a few more spices, some water, and turned the knob to “slow.” I could already taste the beef in my mind, but my mouth would have to wait another eight to ten hours.

The next morning, I awoke to the heady aroma of oregano, garlic, vinegar and yes, beef. I took a little taste and my mouth flooded with flavor. In fact, I had actually over seasoned it. It seems that less spice is needed for slow cooking, since the flavors come out a lot more than in fast cooking.

I noted my little miscalculation as I packed my lunch and thought of which recipes I wanted to try next.

The receptionist at my office dropped the package off at my desk.

“Here you go,” she said.

“Thank you!” I replied.

The cardboard box was emblazoned with the familiar and comforting Amazon logo, and I eagerly tore into it. Thanks to the advent of i-click buying, super saver shipping, and credit cards, Christmas comes 365 times a year for me. My coworkers can attest to the ridiculous amounts of stuff I have bought and had delivered to my office. When I was on vacation in Hawai’i, the boxes piled up in my cubicle, creating an impenetrable wall between my space and my coworkers’.

Just picture a couch cushion fort, except made of clothes, shoes, books, and electronics.

When I don’t use the 1-click, I just instinctively add stuff to my Amazon cart whenever I see something I like. When I see a grouping of items that’s around $25, I’ll order them together with the super saver shipping. Super saver shipping takes a while, and I love surprises, so I purposely keep myself in the dark about when my packages will arrive. When they do, I’m always delighted.

When today’s gift arrived, I had already completely forgotten about its possible contents. To my utmost glee, I slowly took out a pristine, plastic-lined six-pack of black socks.

Like most people, I tend to lose socks in the laundry. I have no shame in buying packs of slightly defective ones from Ross, since shit, they spend most of the time in my awesome shoes anyways, and socks for me have a pretty short lifespan.

It’s like I’m renting them, really.

But this time, after waiting a ridiculously long time to do my laundry, I knew that it was nigh time to re-up and reload. I decided to splurge and spoil myself with new, non-defective socks.

I slowly put on a fresh pair, still warm from the drier. My feet were lovingly caressed by the cotton/nylon blend and the still springy elastic, and I knew few greater pleasures.

When I first bought my desk, I was so happy.

After all, there was nothing on it.

Ever since then, it’s been a daily struggle keeping my desk, and my room as a whole, clean. A large part of the problem is just having too much stuff. I love buying little things. I’ve said it before, but if something costs between zero and ten dollars, I don’t think very hard about buying it. If something costs between ten and thirty dollars, I will think about it for a few minutes.

How do you think I ended up with over thirty t-shirts? How do you think I ended up with not one, but two “lens adapters” that didn’t fit my camera?

I love the idea of minimalism, of cutting away all unnecessary things from my life and living simply. The thing is, it’s hard being a minimalist when I also have this awesome invention known as a credit card. Oh mighty credit card, you are both a terrible and terrific enabler of my online buying addiction.

And so, every once in a while, I perform a massive purge of all my stuff, but it’s tough. I have a bunch of old hard drives, tiny compared to today’s standards, that I just can’t bring myself to dispose of. There are a bunch of computers in various states of disrepair in my house. I keep telling myself that someday I’ll fix up one of them as a MAME box, I’ll fix up another one to be a dedicated server. And yes, I’ve been saying for months now that I’d like to sell off or give away most of my t-shirts.

Over that time, instead of culling my collection, I’ve added to it substantially.

There have been few times in my life when I truly felt I was at “Inbox Zero.” It was a glorious, but fleeting, feeling. I know that I have the willpower and ability to do it again, and to stay there every day with some maintenance, but it would require another giant push of initial effort to clean out my various inboxes. I’ve resigned myself to doing small bursts of cleaning here and there to keep the piles at bay, telling myself that I’ll get back to Zero over the weekend. As I have more and more to do, the date just keeps getting pushed farther and farther back.

I was planning on doing it this weekend.

“Heat ‘em up!” I said, in my best serious Venkman impression. It was hard to keep a serious face though, as me and my friends made that characteristic sound of the proton packs charging up.

“Bwahahaha, throw it!” I said, through choked laughter, as me and my friends made even more sound effects, shooting our “proton packs” into the air at invisible spooks.

Those were the days.

Alright, alright, I’ll admit it. I wanted to be a Ghostbuster growing up. As a kid, my friends and I often put on our backpacks, took paper towel tubes, chained the tubes to the backpacks with paperclips, and made all manner of sound effects to indulge our wildest ‘bustin fantasies.

Before the advent of all this fancy shcmancy digimal entertainment, all a kid needed was a little cardboard, some office supplies, and a healthy disregard for reality, to completely transport himself to an alternate dimension: a world in which ghosts, both friendly and malevolent, were simply a fact of life, and supernatural attacks took place on a near daily basis.

(I also spent many hours envisioning what it’d be like to be a anthropomorphic nunchaku, made from two toilet paper tubes chained together with paperclips, wielding reptile, but that’s a topic for another post.)

At its core, the Ghostbusters’ story is really just one about a team of glorified, jumpsuited exterminators. There is a finite amount of seriousness you can apply to that idea before it sounds ridiculous. The cartoon managed to take this fairly silly idea and actually give it some meat. For example, I was surprised at how comfortable the four were with the idea of sacrificing themselves for the good of the world. The Ghostbusters were actually quite heroic, not to mention intelligent. With the exception of Winston, they are all doctors. Looking back, it’s obvious that each one fell into a certain archetype, but they were still all admirable characters.

The ghosts themselves were all very bright and colorful. Just look at their mascot, Mr. Stay Puft. I mean, granted, he could squash you with just one misstep of his gigantic marshmallow shoe, but still, how could you not love this guy? I know I’m not the only person in the world who wants this; I desire with every fiber of my being a big squishy doll of him. Slimer too is so adorable. I desperately want someone to make me a Slimer plush. I would put it right next to my huge Spongebob Squarepants doll, and they’d be best friends forever. To me, the scariest looking creatures on the show were the reanimated skeletons. They actually looked kind of menacing. Most of the other bad guys looked totally sweet, even when they were trying to kill the main characters.

Sure, the episodes were a bit formulaic, but they had enough variety to keep things interesting. Oftentimes, the Ghostbusters were tasked with capturing (or sometimes, helping out) supernatural entities from classic myths and legends. In almost every episode, the writers came up with some reason why the Ghostbusters couldn’t just use their proton packs and traps, or why they would be ineffective against their foe. This forced them into some pretty creative solutions, which never failed to entertain.

Aykroyd’s original movie script had a far more epic scope than did the final script for the first movie. It took the ‘busters through time and space, doing battle against huge, world-ending god-monsters. I would have loved to have seen this version borne out.

The cartoon and the movies had a very good balance of gravity and fantasy, and when it fell on the side of silliness, it did so effectively. In one episode, a power outage caused the ghost containment unit to shut down. The team had less than a minute to fix it until all Hell literally would have broken loose. So what did they come up with? They rigged a turbine to some kid’s bicycle and had Janine, their hot secretary, pedal her ass off to generate the electricity.

On the serious side, there was plenty of scientific sounding jargon thrown around. Of course, I have no idea how accurate it was, but it always sounded impressive.

To sum it up, The Real Ghostbusters kicked ass. It fleshed out the franchise, giving life to that entire world and introducing a generation of kids, like myself, to the joys of cardboard tubes.

I could go on, but shit, this is cutting in to my precious Ghostbusters-watching time.