Deranged Ramblings

I don't quite fit in socially at work. It's not that I don't like the people I work with, its just that I come from quite a different background than most of them do and consequently we don't really have much in common. Most of them, for example, do not have college degrees, enjoy country music, do not speak English (in some cases, have never heard of Marcel Proust, John Locke, Patroclus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Laurence Olivier, Thomas Pynchon, James Taylor, David Sedarris, or Spencer Green, and think I'm showing off when I use "big" words like "effeminate" and "sequential." And yet, despite all this, I'm consistently the one saying stupid things and generally giving the impression that I'm a big idiot. As witnessed by the sorry scene that happened Friday afternoon: I'm not a rude person. Its never my intension to offend, and in fact I feel I put a lot of effort into being non-confrontational, considerate, sympathetic, and app...

Ok, so I'm so completely busy with rehearsals I have no time for the blog right now. Let me announce when my plays are now, though. Macbeth Aug. 25,26,27 ; Sep. 1-3, 8-10, 15-17 House opens at 7:30, show starts at 8:00 Admission is $7.00 for students with ID card, $9.00 for everbody else The 25th of August is a preview night, and its cheaper. I think its $5.00. It's an outdoor theater with stone steps for seating so feel free to bring a blanket or a pillow to sit on. Its kind of hidden, so here's how to get there: 1300 East Center Street Provo, Utah 84606 From I-15, take exit (Center Street) east toward the mountains. Follow Center street until it passes 900 East. (As if you were going to 7 Peaks Water Park). Just past 900 East the road will bend to the left. Instead of following the bend, turn right onto the Utah State Hospital Campus (please observe posted speed limits). When you come to a round about (round planter box), turn left and follow this parking lot around to th...

I'm no longer fat. Ok, so I never was fat, really. But I was certainly heading that way. I was plagued with nightmares of myself at forty watching TV from my bed while eating a drumstick, so large I could not support my own weight, and then dying of a heart attack. Nothing I could do was stopping the inexorable process. I would stop gaining weight, then lose a pound or two, then suddenly gain a bunch more. More and more of my pants were going into the "do not fit anymore" pile. The final straw came when we saw the costume designs for the upcoming production of Macbeth that I am in. My costume requires me to wear a very tight shirt, which looks really good in the rendering, but I worried about what it might reveal. I pulled the shirt I was wearing back from behind, making it look tight in the front so that we could get a preview. "Uh-oh," said my director, the lovely and talented Barta Heiner, "looks like you got a little extra flub here," and she grabb...

Given that I am still a young and virile twenty-something, one might expect that I would have some exciting and wild plans for the coming weekend. However, those who know me well would tell one that this is rather unlikely, given my history. They would in this case be wrong, I am proud to say, and ought to be ashamed of their quick and thoughtless judgements that I am inherently boring; because this weekend I'm spending the large bulk of my time babysitting my mother's dog... er... dogsitting her dog. So you can see that I'm not going to be doing anything boring or uninteresting because, really, how much more interesting.....um... can... you...... get? This dog has been a member of our family for some years, and yet I referred to it (rightly) as my mother's dog. He was her baby from the very beginning, and they've always had a special relationship that the rest of us couldn't quite understand. But I should go back to the beginning. The story of the dog really st...

As many of you know, I’m something of an actor. Currently, I’m rehearsing for two plays at the same time, and they are both Shakespearian tragedies: Hamlet and Macbeth. On a totally unrelated note, I’ve been really depressed lately for some reason. So, anyway, I’m up to my eyeballs in Shakespeare, but then, being an English major, I’ve been deeper than that before. But, really, what is the deal with this guy Shakespeare? Why is he still so appealing to so many people after four hundred years? Is it the nifty vocabulary, the hypnotic iambic pentameter, the presentation of deeply essential human themes? Or is it the dirty jokes, the cod pieces, the silly banter? In my opinion, the secret is clearly the cod pieces, but a lot of other people think there's more to it. My English professors taught that Shakespeare was part of the “holy trinity” of the mighty English writers, along with Milton and Chaucer. But wasn’t Shakespeare just some guy trying to write plays that pleased L...

I went to my Grandparents’ house today, expecting nothing more than the weekly Sunday dinner which has become one of the few constants during my time in Utah . I certainly did not expect to relive childhood games of the variety I described in my last post. Imagine my surprise and pleasure, then, when I ended up having a three-day long sea voyage adventure in which I barely escaped with my life! It happened like this: I was lying on my aunt and uncle’s hammock, talking to my little cousin Danny (age 6) about the biggest storm he ever saw, and suddenly, I’m not sure exactly how, the hammock became a boat and little Danny turned into a brave and fearless captain. We were adrift in the gigantic waves which rocked our tiny vessel back and forth. There was much scrambling about at first. I wasn’t exactly sure what I supposed to be doing, but the captain found his place at the front of the boat and took command. “Oh no, another wave,” shouted...

Do you ever remember random events from your past with such great clarity that suddenly you are in a way reliving the experience emotionally, even though you have not thought of the event for years? Well, I do! Sometimes, of course, its a memory with especially intense emotional baggage checked and stored in overhead compartments, but often, in my experience anyway, it is something rather mundane and simple. And when this memory is from one's childhood (and, as young as I am, what other memories do I have, really?), I not only relive the experience but view it as an outside observer who can more fully understand what’s really going on in the situation than the child version of myself in the past can. You didn't realize, at the time, how annoying or rude or naive you were, but from your current vantage point it is all too painfully obvious. This leads to a strange sort of double consciousness - in your memories, you don't know something and act accordingly, but in your prese...

I think my imagination is dead, and I think I know exactly who the murderer is. You see, the “golden days” of my blog, when ideas for fun posts were coming every other minute, coincided perfectly with the period of time in which I was not in school and unemployed, and therefore in possession of no small amount of free time to just sit and brainstorm. Now, my full-time job gives me little time to think about anything but frozen TV dinners and paperwork associated therewith, and what free time I do have I want to spend on video games or TV, not on anything associated with thinking. It just proves what I’ve always believed: once you join the corporate world, the artistic side of your brain just shrivels up and dies. Yes, I have more than a little streak of bohemian in me (viva la vie boheme!) but its true that by the time I’m finished with work I barely have enough creative juice to get me through rehearsals for the two plays I’m in, so forget about a clever idea for the blog. Which ...

This is just a short update to let you all know that I am still alive. It has been a week since my last blog post – this delay is due simply to a lack of inspiration on my part about what to write. Never fear, I’m sure I shall come up with something any day now. As it is, allow me just to tell you what I’ve been up to. I read the new Harry Potter book this last weekend and enjoyed it quite a bit. A lot of people seem to be disappointed with it, or so I’ve heard, but I think that may be because the whole series has become so popular that its beginning to be easier to find things to fault than to praise. The hype surrounding the new release got so big that nothing in reality could live up to it. We expect nothing but the best from such a celebrated series, so expectations are high. So even though Mrs. Rowling delivers another solidly crafted, entertaining book, we are now harder to impress. Needless to say, I think it is a brilliant work by a brilliant author who really knows how to tell...

Speaking of Costco, I found myself there again yesterday in order to fill up my car with gas. Its pretty cheap there, and as I am now an exclusive member with access to all the rights and privileges associated therewith, I thought I might as well take advantage of it. For some reason, Costco employs a man whose sole duty is to watch people pump their gas at the station. He walks back and forth, inspecting people’s gas-pumping techniques like a military commander inspects a soldier’s barracks. As I pulled up to the station I thought to myself that having the man there was pretty silly. Filling your car with gas is a pretty simple process, especially since the pumps have those little computers that won’t let you get any gas until you pay, so I think everybody there could probably handle the job without any supervision. After all, we are Costco members, we’re smart enough to recognize the cost-efficiency of buying in bulk, so we’re more than qualified to pump some gas. I was wai...

And now for something completely different: My roommate and I went shopping at Costco yesterday, after he persuaded me that buying in bulk was the cost-effective and masculine thing to do. I didn’t have a huge grocery list or anything – I just wanted to purchase the ingredients I would need to make a favorite dish of mine. My mother and I invented it when I was quite young. She was improvising on the ingredients to use, so I helped with a few random suggestions and, if I remember correctly, was allowed to stir. My mother indulgently named the result after me, which was quite an honor because up to that point I had never had any sort of food bear my name. So I was in Costco with my roommate, buying the ingredients for Matt salad, when I began to get frustrated with the whole “buying in bulk” thing. I needed a bag of noodles, as Matt salad is a variation of the popular pasta salad, but you cannot buy a bag of noodles at Costco. You can only buy eight to ten bags. A can of olive...

I was just as shocked as anybody to find out about the explosions in London. It hit me pretty close to home, though, because I've walked those streets and ridden on the buses and the tube. London felt like a second home to me while I lived there, and its always difficult to learn something disasterous has happened at home. It reminded me in a small way of the feeling I got when, in an extremely remote area of the Philippines where I was the only American for miles, I found out about 9/11. It hurts me to see what hatred and intolerance can do. Man's capacity to destroy himself is a painful concept to see acted out at the cost of innocent lives. No doubt we will only see more violence in the years to come, for violence begets violence in a terrible cycle. I only pray the pain we feel at being attacked doesn't turn us into the very thing we are fighting. The last five years have given us new meaning to the word "tragic."

I'm fat. Ok, so I'm not really all that fat. Yet. But I'm certainly feel like I'm heading that way. As I mentioned last month, I got a gym membership and I'd like to report that I have actually been using it quite regularly. I'd also like to report that in that very same amount of time I have gained over fifteen pounds. Now that wouldn't be quite so bad except that nearly the entire bulk of the fifteen extra pounds has decided to take up residence in the inappropriately named "love handles" area, with the remainder commuting from the suburbs of my belly. The overall result is that I begin to take a shape not unlike a pear, and clothes that once fit with a nice sexy snuggness now tear at the seams. Take, for example, the shirt I am wearing in the photograph on my profile to your right. The photograph was taken over a year ago, when I was in England. I tried to put it on the other day and was only able to button it up with extreme effort and while ho...

I’ve been dealing a lot with memories of my past here on my blog within the last couple of weeks. I guess I feel like this electronic medium is my opportunity to introduce myself to the world. And I’m pleased to say that all three of you who read it have made feel as if the world is happy to know me. So to continue in the same vein, I’m going to discuss one of the many memorable aspects of my childhood. Let it be said first of all that I am, despite all appearances, quite a nerd and I love video games. Just so you know what you are dealing with. You see, this fascination with electronic entertainment began when I was quite young. I blame my father, because, to the best of my memory, the first game I ever played was a pseudo-text based, crappy ASCII-graphics DOS game called CASTLE, which my father introduced to me in the computer lab at the university he was attending. At some point we actually owned an Atari, that ancient precursor of the modern home video game console, but it v...

I'm afraid of telephones. Let me clarify: I’m not particularly afraid of the actual physical devices themselves, but of having to use them. It’s been like that as long as I can remember. I get this knot in my stomach every time a phone rings, even if its not my phone or somebody else answers it. I can't stand to pick up the phone, or have a conversation on it for longer than five minutes, and don't even ask me to call somebody I don't know or haven't called before. I can’t, I freeze up. My friends and acquaintances are confused to learn that, despite the fact that I can talk your ear off if we are having a conversation in person, I’m generally monosyllabic on the phone and have to be coaxed to talk at any length. So the phone and I have a troubled relationship, but that hasn’t stopped it from creeping up into all aspects of my life, no matter where I go. In high school there was even a phone in my bedroom, though I never used it. It was connected to the ph...

For some reason I’ve been thinking lately about something that happened to me a couple of years ago. I was right in the middle of my undergraduate education with a major in English. Now English majors are used to getting a certain kind of reaction when they tell people what their major is. I thought that once I graduated I would not have to go through the all-too-common scenario of having to justify what I had decided to major in to other people who I didn’t even know. It turns out that post-graduation the question “What is your major” transfers fluidly into “What was your major?” resulting in the exact same problem. Most English majors I know got so sick of the reactions they get when announcing their major that they began to try to avoid the subject all together. It is not uncommon to start the sentence, “I’m an English major” with a kind of reluctant sigh, an “oh-boy-here-we-go-again” sort of feeling expressed in a brief hesistation. “Oh,” the other person says, clearly ...

So I was driving home from the bookstore today after having celebrated two full weeks of employment by purchasing a book by the mysterious Thomas Pynchon. I was driving down a street in a residential area, near an elementary school in fact. Suddenly, I saw movement on the road ahead of me. A mother pheasant was attempting to cross the street with a gaggle of little pheasant babies in tow. It took several seconds to register what I was seeing, but finally I put on the brakes and brought my car to a halt quite a distance from where they were crossing. The mother had seen my approach, however, and was now frozen in fear in the middle of my lane. "Go," I said, as kindly and encouragingly as I could, as though she could hear and understand me. A car was coming up behind me, obviously upset that I was stopped in the middle of the street. "GO!" I shouted to the mother pheasant. If I lived inside a Hollywood movie, I probably would have said, "For the love of God, save...

So I'm feeling like I ought to write something on my blog, but I don't really have anything to say at the moment. I'm feeling quite political today for some reason, and so I could very well write a whole post about my feelings on the US prison at Guatanamo (summary: should they close it? Yes. Will they? Not a chance.) However, I have decided the last thing my happy little blog needs is a heated political diatrabe, so rather than invite your wrath or apathy or whatever by rambling on about those sort of things I will simply post a couple interesting quotes to make of what you will. #1- A very passionate political commentator on the News gave us this great quote. I wish I could remember his name, but he was squaring off against another pundit who was arguing that the Guantanamo prison should remain open and who gives a crap about the human rights of terrorists (which is by far the most popular position on the subject I have heard around here). The quote was, from my memory: ...

An old friend and former roommate of mine, Nick, has a passion for photography, among other things. He also has a really nice camera. He wants to get into doing potraits, so he's been asking a lot of people he knows to be subjects for a shoot. Yesterday he took me up to the canyon and took about a million pictures of me in what was to be my first ever photo shoot (first of many, mark my words!). Here I will share some of my favorites with you. In about 85% of the pictures he took, my eyes were closed. I had a knack for timing my blinks exactly with the camera shutter. But these worked out pretty well. Some of them have been touched up by Nick on the computer. Enjoy!

I love this one. I was trying to be tragic and sad in a tortured artist kind of way. Looks good in black and white.