Background Noise

the contender

I pulled a muscle in my neck working on my archives the other night. Eli had two episodes of The Contender on Tivo and he wanted me to watch with him. I decided I could sit on the couch and “watch” while setting up my archive. I’ve been keeping this journal for months and it has always bugged me that the archives were such a mess. But it wasn’t until recently when I had to go in looking for something and it took me longer than three minutes to find it that it occurred to me that I should fix it.

(Here is the finished product)

Anyway, I have mixed feelings about The Contender. First off, boxing is a great sport, and I like a good boxing match as much as the next girl. There’s nothing better than two ripped guys with hard bodies (and faces that look like they were chewed up by dogs and left to heal on their heads) beating the hell out of each other for sport. It’s a pretty great show and I enjoyed it last season. The thing that bugs me is that they go out of their way to show the fighter’s family (and sometimes children) cheering for them on the sidelines during the fight, encouraging them to beat the brain damage into the other guy. I like a little separation of emotion when it comes to sports where the main goal is to use your body as a weapon, delivering and accepting brutal punishment on your organs as the object of the game. I’d rather think of the guys as rock em sock em robots who aren’t real people with real lives and real ambitions and real emotions, but simply fighting machines, born into this world to take a beatdown.

I’m sure I’m thinking about it too much. When I tried to talk to Eli about it, to see if he ever gets emotional about watching two bleeding guys punching each other in a ring while the people who love them scream encouragement from the sidelines, he looked at me like I’d suffered some sort of head trauma myself. “It’s a sport, Jaeme.”

Well, yeah, I know.

This led to a discussion about how boxing is like kittens playing compared to Ultimate Fighting. In UFC fighting they mix it up with street fighting, martial arts, and basically the fighters do anything possible to try to kill their opponent. They don’t actually kill them, and there are rules like no eye-gouging, but it’s still very brutal and bloody. I can’t even watch the Strongest Man competition without feeling a cold chill run up my spine because I know what those guys are doing to their bodies. Watching some burly muscle head try to pull a fucking train with only his body and a rope, waiting for his legs to buckle and break in half or his biceps to separate from the bone…ugh, it’s not for me.

So yeah, I kind of half watched The Contender while fixing my archive, and now my neck is jacked from sitting on the couch bent over my laptop for two hours. I just feel an urgency to get things in order lately because if I start back to work soon, I will have much less time for things like playing around in my blog. I plan to continue updating because it is so easy, but that will probably be the extent of my extra-curricular internet activities.

And I’m saying if I start back to work because nothing is set in stone yet. There are still the background checks and negotiations to get through.

Oh yeah, I’ve also been updating my book log, and I know it’s one of those things most people don’t get into, but I’ve been picking out some real shit at the library so I want to remind you that I am ALWAYS open to a book suggestion. In fact, to be a good sport, I’ll start. I recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Your turn.

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where is the muppet of common sense?

Eli and I stalked the movie store for three days trying to rent The Hills Have Eyes. So when we finally got our hands on a copy this afternoon, we planned our night around watching it. Unfortunately, the movie contains something I cannot deal with since having a baby of my own and that is anything that comes between a mother and her ability to protect her child. You don’t mess with the babies, man.

There was a part, right before I turned it off, where one of the mutants holds a gun up to the baby’s face and the baby reaches out and touches the barrel like it’s a cool, shiny new toy. It reminds me so much of the baby things Joey does because he doesn’t know how the world works yet. Like today when he held the nozzle of the hose directly in front of his face and then pressed the sprayer while looking directly into it, surprising himself by shooting a blast of water straight into his eyes and up his nose.

We watched The Chronicles of Narnia last weekend and I was fully expecting to be taken to a dream world of magic, and instead was taken to a dream world of suck. Maybe it’s just me and I’ve been ruined by Lord of the Rings and now I expect every fantasy movie to be smart and for adults. Chronicles of Narnia definitely is not for adults because they barely explain the back story on anything and it’s full of that Davey and Goliath shoving lessons down your throat bullshit I was sick of by the time I was seven.

Even Sesame Street is edgier than Narnia. Though I have to admit, sometimes I get very frustrated with Sesame Street. Like the other day when Luis wanted to cook juevos rancheros for Maria and Big Bird was trying to help him out by going to the market and buying three tomatoes and one hot pepper. It turned into this huge ordeal, first because Big Bird has like no short-term memory and couldn’t remember his list of TWO ITEMS, and then when he got sidetracked by Maria after purchasing his produce and had to hide the bag under his wing while he helped her fix a toaster. And the whole time he’s fretting like an asshole about simple shit that he should totally be able to work out on his own. First off, just buy what you think Luis wants and then run back to the store if it’s wrong, and second, just because Maria asks for your help doesn’t mean you have to give it to her. Dude, make up an excuse. Tell her you have to make a phone call, take a shit, anything and get the fuck out of there. Sometimes Sesame Street is so tedious with this shit and I sit there on the couch watching it and rewriting the scripts in my head to how I think they should be. Like what was Luis thinking sending the biggest and brightest colored muppet on the entire street out to do an undercover mission? Send Grover or one of the other smaller muppets like Zowie. Or how about not using muppets as your servants at all and maybe getting off your ass and doing your shopping your own damn self. And you’ve lived on Sesame Street long enough to know that muppets are not very bright so if you want to surprise your wife with a nice dinner, you shouldn’t even involve them because chances are they will fuck it up and the surprise will be ruined. You’re  better off just distracting them with some sticks or letter shapes or a pile of shiny fucking rocks while you handle the dinner preparations yourself.

I suppose if I wrote the scripts the action on Sesame Street would be limited to like two minutes of adults doing things with common sense and there would be no muppets anywhere except maybe Oscar who would throw things every once in a while or scream obscenities from his can to keep it interesting. But then I'd have to fill the rest of the hour with dancing letters and kids would probably hate it.

I’m taking my summer TV angst out on Wes Craven, a beloved classic novel and The Children’s Television Workshop and it’s really not their fault. I just don’t have anything good to watch.