I love this movie

"as a younger man, I was a sculptor, a painter, and a musician. There was just one problem: I wasn't very good. As a matter of fact, I was dreadful. I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent. I knew my limitations. We all have our limitations, Freddy. Fortunately, I discovered that taste and style were commodities that people desired." - Michael Caine as Lawrence Jamieson from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)

rule: recognize this.

If you thought you hated the Christmas season

Try talking to a personal assistant. Don't get me wrong. My job is awesome and my boss is fun. But if you ever happen to hire a personal assistant for yourself some day, here are some rules for the holiday season:

1.) Either you buy all your Christmas presents for people yourself and deal with the consequences. Do not buy a Christmas present, realize the shipping isn't what you thought it was going to be, then make your assistant run all over town finding a popular but specific item the day of.

2.) Please don't make your assistant go to the mall. Please.

3.) Make sure he/she knows in advance. Like advance advance. Advance does not sound like, "Oh I forgot-" or "CRAP! Can you-" or even "Hey, you know I should probably bring something tomorrow."

4.) Please let your assistant know where you are going for the holidays, when, and what level of contact you want to be with him or her.

5.) You know what's better than giving your assistant a physical present? Giving them time off.

Just a couple of short rules

Rule: Don't be a lazy person; update your blog regularly

Rule: If you feel the desire and need to buy an attractive pair of bright, kelly green pants, do so. Please be sure they fit you.

Rule: Watch Legends, starring a pants-less Tom Cruise

Rule: Do not buy a round of shots if you ran into something trying to get to the bar

Rule: If you are playing laser tag, do not run into an area, get shot in your laser, scream, then run away, leaving your back sensor exposed

Rule: Tell your loved ones how you are feeling; they do care.

I heart you, Michael Pollan.

So I'm reading Michael Pollan's second big hit, In Defense of Food. I'm going to resist my impulse to make it a rule to read this book, but it's super thought-provoking and I think well-written and researched. There is a little paranoid, but if you read it in conjunction with Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser - for a non-Pollan perspective and body of research; certainly one could also read Pollan'sOmnivore's Dilemma - then the paranoia seems a little less extreme and might seem more like hyper-(justified)vigilance.

I won't ruin it for anyone, but he quotes Wendell Berry - an accomplished writer and defender of sustainable agriculture practices - quite often, and one of the quotes near the end of the book is going to be a rule I'm going to attempt to follow:

Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

Word, Mr. Berry. Word.

and then I found five dollars or TMI

So I find that there's a widespread phrase used when someone is telling a story to another person or to a group and then suddenly the storyteller perceives that the climax of the story isn't quite as interesting or funny to the audience as he or she originally though it would be. The phrase is, of course, "...and then I found five dollars." The storyteller says this almost as an apology. The idea being that he or she recognizes that the story isn't so great and is attempting to justify its telling by altering the ending to something more "exciting."

There's also the too-much-information story, where how much is too much is determined by the audience and then expressed with the acronym TMI. Sometimes a storyteller will self-edit or throw out the caveat of TMI.

I've been thinking a lot about stories and snapshots and vignettes recently, as well as the act of storytelling and I've come to the conclusion that the "and then I found five dollars" or "TMI" self or external edit is completely bogus for me much of the time. The only exception to this rule is if you've made it clear that a certain topic or word or something offends you, scares you, or brings up hurtful feelings in some way, and the storyteller proceeds regardless.

Especially in person, the telling of stories is often the most exciting part to hear and watch. Think of puppet shows, or people telling stories to children. Better yet, think of children telling stories. They're so animated and excited. They imitate mannerisms, facial expressions, voices, and they use varied volume. This is sometimes true of adults - however, oftentimes it's muted or subdued. Even if the story is inane to me, I like to share in the excitement or wonderment that other people must've felt to think that the experience warranted storytelling. Furthermore, I often feel privileged to be allowed a peek into the emotions and experiences in other peoples' lives. Like I said, I really like snapshots and vignettes. I feel like these stories are most telling about peoples' personalities and ways of thinking, and that if there were a way to collage them, it would form a crazy, soulful, multi-faceted autobiography. A jewel. What is with autobiographies being linear and narrative anyway?

In my head, I imagine a grade school project: a paper mache orb. Peoples' lives are this balloon, and as they have experiences, these snapshots and stories are glued to this balloon and when their lives end, the balloon is gone, and what is left is a somewhat spherical - after all, whose lives are perfect and symmetrical? - delicate, airy bark or carapace. That is how autobiographies should be presented: crusty orbs, crinkly spheres, crannied globes, smooth eggshells, warped melons, feather-light balls, sonorous hollows on which we knock and hope for an answer.

Anyway. Rule: Try not to self-censor or discourage others from telling their stories.

As a show of faith, here's my tmi/found five dollars story:

When I was little and I was being potty trained, my mom used to have me sit on the toilet and sing a song, most often "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in order to get me to at least pass the time on the toilet if I wasn't passing anything else. As a result, I have a strange habit of singing while on the toilet at home, or making an effort to resist belting out 80's tunes while poopin' in public restrooms.

Cheers.

And So Can You!

So I don't know if anyone remembers, but there used to be a show on PBS called "Yan Can Cook" hosted by Martin Yan. The tagline was "Yan can cook, and so can you!" And was always shouted at the end of the show call-and-response style with the live studio audience. Of course, I was like seven years old at the time the show was at its peak, so I remember thinking his name was Yan Can Cook (not unrealistic for a Chinese name, but I think it was mostly because I was seven.). The things I remember most from the show are the religious way my mother followed it - she would often tape (I can't believe how rare VHS is nowadays) the shows, and barring that (or in augment), she would copy down the lists of ingredients that would appear on the split-screen occasionally and write down the handy recipe instructions - and Martin Yan's incredible knife skills. Often with a large meat cleaver, he would beat an always-surprising tattoo on his cutting board that would compel a little giggle to escape my mouth because it was hard to believe anyone could be that fast and precise.

I remember giant notebooks filled with her immaculate handwriting as well as pasted-in slips of recipes, causing the whole notebook to crackle and bulge and smell of paste and glue. The pasted pages were always a little wrinkled, and often you could see the pastel pea green lined paper peek through areas that weren't covered with recipes.

I recently thought of Mr. Yan and looked him up on the ever-reliable youtube and discovered that his English has gotten better, that he has a restaurant in the states with a couple locations, and just general knowledge about this man who I always associated with pbs and chopping really fast with a giant cleaver. He is witty, albeit slightly hokey at times, and I would say he has a great stage presence except for the fact that I feel like it's genuine; he's congenial and upbeat all the time. It makes me a little sad that I don't ever get to hear him speak in Chinese; I can only imagine the powerhouse this guy is when speaking in his native tongue. I can't decide if my admiration of him stems more from nostalgia of peaceful and tangible memories of my childhood with my mother or if it's because he's so dang fast with that cleaver.

Anyway, our rule for this post comes from Mr. Yan:
"Cooking is feeling, common sense, and imagination."

Fonts

Hey, if you're a person designing some sort of, like, flyer or something or if you're writing a paper or doing something that involves letters that are going to be imprinted on the retinas of people, please choose your typeface carefully. Please make it legible, and not take up a stupid amount of space. Or, OR don't choose a type that smooshes all the characters too close together, like lots of "western, cowboy" fonts do. Lastly, wingdings, webdings, otherdings are not as clever as you think they are.

NO
- Comic Sans
- Impact
- Lucida Console
- Fonts ending in ding
- Arial (it's just ugly and should only be used to legibility on the web if necessary. sorry.)
- Monotype Corsiva (who the hell came up with this font? FUGLY. [edit: found out who came up with this font. Still ugly. Esp. on the computer screen])
- Curlz MT (should only be used if you sell scarves to blue-haired piano teachers or people who wear ratty sweatshirts that have appliques of kitten vignettes)
- Kristen ITC (should only be used if you are retarded)
- Tempus Sans ITC
- Haettenschweiler

You know what? Here:


Try typing "kinetic typography" into youtube for other awesomeness. See also T-Pain's new video "Can't Believe It" for use of this and basically one of the best music videos I've seen in a long time.