Apples & Onions, Part Two

Chicago and New York are two great restaurant towns. They cater to every ethnic niche imaginable,¹ with quality ranging from road kill to five star levels. Both cities have their specialties, of course; New York is known for its proud Italian heritage and the sheer volume of marinara that implies, while Chicago's German and Polish roots have its restaurateurs making food so big and hearty that the odds of you finishing it are astronomical, or dare I say...gastronomical?² But occasionally those culinary lineages bleed into each other, creating vastly different approaches to the same dish. In this installment of Apples & Onions, I'm tackling one of the most widely-known: the hot dog.

Most New Yorkers I've talked to describe the lowly hot dog as a "snack," and this attitude I think illustrates the difference in attitude between New Yorkers and Chicagoans. In Chicago, a food isn't worth eating unless it's a whole fucking meal by itself.³

The New York hot dog is simple. On a plain bun, you put a dog that's been bathing in warm water while it eagerly awaits the $2 bail necessary to release it into the world. Mustard and ketchup are standard. Sauerkraut and onions in some kind of wackadoo spicy sauce are less common, but not unheard of. Virtually anything else, forget it. A small thing to take up some room in your stomach, the opening act to a much more elaborate show later on.

A hot dog.

The Chicago style hot dog is a very specific kind of hot dog, for which one should accept no substitutes. You get a boiled beef dog on a poppyseed bun, for starters. You top that with mustard, raw onions, tomatoes, a pickle spear, celery salt, and relish the same shade of glowy green as that nuclear fuel rod that rides on Homer's back for half of the opening credits of The Simpsons. Under no circumstances should so much as a droplet of ketchup touch the thing.

A hot dog that has been dragged through an arboretum.

Like I said: full. Fucking. Meal.

I didn't start eating hot dogs until relatively recently. I hadn't liked them since childhood, but a combination of digestive and financial desperation meant that the three bones I was spending per day at the nearby halal cart had to be put to use elsewhere. I found that both the New York and Chicago patterns weren't really all that bad; I'd just needed time to appreciate that it was a food not as instantly enjoyable as its distaff counterpart, the burger.

I like a foodstuff with some heft. They say the stomach doesn't know it's full until ten minutes after the fact, but I know for a fact some foods out there can make your stomach start to reconsider its vacant space after bite one, and I like those foods. So in a straight contest, the Chicago dog gets my vote. But I've learned to appreciate the New York dog for what it is. It'll never be an entire meal for me, even a bunch of them.⁴ But when I've got a little time and cash, it does just fine.

Just hold the ketchup.

Next time on Apples & Onions: transit. Getting from point A to point B in a city that is very, very interested in you not getting to point B.

-PK

¹ And a few that aren't. I'd tell you about them, but I can't think of any examples.
² Just kidding, that would be gay.
³ And you will have four of them.
⁴ Unless I decide upon a lifestyle change, going from Well-Adjusted Man to Sad, Sad, Fat Fuck.

Some navel-gazing fluff about writing

In my boredom today, I watched a bunch of videos on CollegeHumor. Now, it may be just that I'm their target demographic, but I rather like the site and its vids. Sometimes they go for the easy joke, parodies that barely scratch the surface in the same manner that the "______ Movie" series does. Other times, however, they have biting commentary where it hurts to laugh both from sheer hilarity and because it's uncomfortable to acknowledge how true it is. One of the vids I watched took a swipe at one of my favorite directors, Tim Burton. It endeavored to satirize the elements that have become staid or stagnant in his work, to the point of showing up in all of his films. By this Burton fan's estimation, they were successful.

Tim Burton is a man with a very distinct voice as a storyteller. His world alternates between swathes of desaturated greys and blasts of loud primary colors, with all the gothic twistiness and disaffected loners that come with that territory.¹ I've always admired his insistence on being true to himself. He doesn't water down his vision for anyone else's sake, and I can get behind that kind of purity. But the video's satire is pretty damn accurate, and to my own dismay I felt like I could predict his latest effort, Alice in Wonderland, with utter ease specifically because his other work's given me such a clear idea of how his mind works.

Every writer wants to be distinctive in a way that makes them leap off the page. I think it's an inferiority complex about our medium--after all, we work with walls of text, not bright canvases or blocks of clay. It's not something that's easily demonstrable. If you're going to impress a girl, you're much better off playing her the song you wrote than you are dumping a stack of a hundred pages of black and white in her lap and saying, "Enjoy!"² A few writers have that ability, to utterly own a sentence from syllable one to syllable end. Stephen King does his whole stream-of-consciousness thing, Aaron Sorkin builds his stories on a foundation of rapid-fire dialogue, and Warren Ellis has perfected the art of the grotesque simile. But the rest of us work to achieve that standard, so that every sentence they write feels like it's undeniably theirs.

That balance is hard. You put more of yourself into your work, you also put more of yourself out there, and unless your true self is Guy That Everyone Likes³, the less likely it is you'll appeal to a bigger audience. Now, for some people that's fine--I personally would rather write something that a thousand people absolutely have to read than something a million people might get around to reading because they'd heard it was pretty good.

But beyond just not appealing to all the right demographics, there's the very real danger of stagnation. I want people to know what to expect from my writing in only the broadest strokes. Otherwise, I want them to stay guessing the entire time. I can think of a few writers who recycle characters, exchanges of dialogue, and even entire plots from project to project. Some don't realize they do it. Some do, and defend it with a cry of, "I'm just giving the people what they want!"

As an unpublished twentysomething trying to make myself heard in a city full of unpublished twentysomethings trying to make themselves heard, I'm not exactly a qualified expert, but I don't think the audience always knows what it wants. I think it thinks it knows, but a surprise, whether good or bad, is far more likely to trigger real thought and discussion in them than just more of the same. Of course, there are plenty of things to prove me wrong. Two and a Half Men is anything but groundbreaking, but it is also one of the most-watched shows on television. Meanwhile, innovative stuff either continually struggles for ratings like Mad Men, or dies an untimely death like Dollhouse.

I'm not exactly sure what elements make up my voice as a writer yet. I know I like wordplay, long exchanges of dialogue, female protags, Americana, and footnotes. But I also do my best to try and subvert those things if I feel I'm leaning on them too much.⁴ I'm still figuring out what does and doesn't work for me. And once I do, rest assured, o hypothetical readership, you won't be getting more and more of the same from me.

Unless, you know, that's what you want or whatever.

-PK


¹ A disproportionate number of them are also named Edward. And by "disproportionate," I mean "three."
² I did, in fact, do this once. Consensus is that I got a million points for style, and zero points for anything that actually mattered.
³ If you are, chances are I hate you. Which would mean you're not the Guy That Everyone Likes, so I don't hate you, which would make you oh my god I've gone cross-eyed
⁴ For instance, wouldn't that last sentence have been an absolutely perfect place for this footnote?

Bleearrrrgh

Hello. I'm as surprised to be here as you are to be reading this.¹ I spent the better part of yesterday wrestling with the worst hangover I've ever had, and the Saturday before it wrestling with select patches of Manhattan sidewalk and street.

I do not normally drink to excess. I enjoy alcohol and its effects, but I have a tendency to stop myself before I get too far. With beer, this is easy; my stomach doesn't have enough room for the amount of beer it would take for me to truly get bombed out of my mind. Wine and liquor are a different matter entirely, where it becomes a case of slowing myself down before I get ahead of my own built-in failsafes. Most of the time, I succeed.

Unfortunately, most does not mean always.

This past weekend, I started things off with a whole can of FourLoko, which might be the world's most vile concoction this side of purestrain santorum. Unpleasant going down and a significant blow to my sobriety, but not a punch I couldn't take. From there, a train ride and cab ride to a known open bar, the first of three planned stops that night. At said bar, I entertained myself with the nearby foosball table and the vuvuzela my friend Mike decided was an exhibit meant to be touched.² I also entertained myself with one, two, three, four, five gins & tonic downed in rapid succession. It was an open bar; better get my money's worth, right?

Excessive amounts of alcohol affect everybody differently. My friend Colin becomes an utterly belligerent son of a bitch. The aforementioned Mike likes fighting, with hilarious consequences. When I drink too much, I don't act like a problem so much as I become a problem. My ability to walk or even stand completely deserts me, and I find myself suddenly playing the title role from Weekend at Bernie's.³ If I'm safely in the confines of a dorm building, this isn't much of a problem--I get dragged down a flight of stairs, put to bed, and the rest of the night goes on without me. But other problems present themselves if I decide to go full-body flaccid in the streets of Manhattan. For instance, how will I get home? And how much help will my friends be if they're almost as hammered as me?

The answer is, "throw money at cabs until one of them drives us." Or "let a bunch of concerned gang members carry me down the block while my friend announces our presence by blowing his recently acquired and totally not stolen vuvuzela." The point is, due to my awesome friends I got home alright. And though the Sunday that followed might have been my worst one since the last time I had to go to Church, I'm mostly back to normal now.

This kind of drunkenness has happened to me two other times in my life. One was the result of seven Irish car bombs, and was uneventful. The first one, on the other hand, started with a chugged beer, then five glasses of wine. As I'd been planning to leave and rest for a while, Colin grabbed a bottle of peppermint schnapps left over from the Christmas season and handed me a shot, calling it my "leaving the room tax." And then he handed me another, and another, each time telling me I was "almost there." I devolved into a writhing mess, rolling in my bed and blathering about not knowing "what's real and what's false anymore."⁴

I won't be repeating this anytime soon. Like my writing, my binge drinking follows a loose calendar. In this case, it more resembles Christmas in that it happens once, and then there's a lot of time waiting for it to happen again. Except I don't think Christmas is anticipated with quite as much dread.

Moral of the story: FourLoko is fruit punch-flavored failure in a can.

-PK


¹ I jest, of course. I know there's no "you" on the other side of this screen.
² Pro tip: if you want to do something and someone tries to stop you, point to somewhere in the opposite direction and say "the guy" said you could do it.
³ And no amount of mambo music will make me mobile again.
⁴ My friends were decent enough to capture it on video. And show it to me. A month later. After they'd been constantly quoting it around me to my increasing confusion. As I said, I have excellent friends.

Blockage

This blog has been a fun exercise for me so far. It's cathartic, getting all these thoughts out into the ether, even if the only one privy to them is still me. There's something about seeing them here in the black and white that makes them feel more legitimate than the fleeting snatches¹ of thought that come up as I flip through the channels in my brain.² But the fact of the matter is, this blog is not just a journal. It's a symptom.

I have a rough creative calendar that's more or less held true for the past six years. From mid-September to April, I will be very productive, pumping out thousands of new words a day for one project or another. Around May, this will start to peter out. Then June 1st hits and I won't be able write, full stop. It will persist through the entire summer, no matter how many things happen to me that might be pen-worthy. Only in September will it all start to come back to me. I think my brain developed this cycle as a response to the school calendar, to save me from a seconds' boredom. Very considerate, higher mental functions, but now during the one time of the year when I'm free to write to my heart's content, the ink instead grows stagnant in my pens.³

I don't know how many of you out there consider yourselves "writers." I mean, everyone writes, but some people just have a certain feel for it. They're the sort of people who can feel whether a sentence is going to be a good one or not by word three. They'll read a particularly nice sequence of words and kick themselves for not coming up with it. You people with brains like that will know what this is like. But to those of you who've never really experienced writer's block, it's terrible and I hope you never have go to through it. I've heard writer's block be compared to not being able to get it up. I think it's worse than that. It's blue balls. It's not just not being able to perform; it's knowing that you've got it in you somewhere and when the time comes you just can't. And it hurts in a way that outside parties don't really get.

I'm primarily a fiction writer. I'm all over prose and drama. I've attempted poetry a few times, but it was the kind of awful verse that even Douglas Adams couldn't have considered on his darkest day. So while this is writing, it doesn't really count in my eyes. It's not my normal thing, just a collection of the flotsam and/or jetsam that's left in my big ol' empty head.

But Paul, didn't you write that absolutely superb and life-changing story last week?

Why yes, hypothetical reader, I did. Occasionally I'll have a moment where everything returns to normal and I can carve out a few paragraphs. It's something, but it's not quite the same, like eating Panda Express after your tongue has known the taste of real Chinese food.⁴

Everyone has their own cure for writer's block. Some force themselves to write, jamming themselves back into their creative groove. Some get drunk, have conversations with their drunk friends, write down the ideas that come out of it, then try to decipher it the next morning.⁵ Some read voraciously, the literary equivalent of striking matches frantically until one of them catches. My usual solution is to just ride it out. I'm almost positive a good deal of the blockage comes from fatigue, so why force something if I'm not up to it? Come September, I'm sure something will make it worth my wait. And until then, there'll be blogs aplenty. Lucky you.

-PK


¹ Hehehe. "Snatches."
² Food Network and Skinemax, mostly. Occasionally Nickelodeon.
³ Read that carefully, or you might make a hilarious mistake.
⁴ Ironically, authentic Chinese food uses less actual food product than Panda Express, unless cardboard counts as actual food product.
⁵ I tried this once. What I had thought was the beginnings of my next great work of sweeping importance turned out to be, disappointingly, a scrawled delivery order for empanadas.

Answer #3: Being Asian

I'll clear the air right up front. I'm not pure Asian. I'm half-Filipino, half-American. I could get into all the European ethnicities to which my dad owes a chromosome or two, but it would take entirely too long and your attention span is probably tenuous enough without me giving you actual reasons to click that neat little X in the top corner.¹

Even though I'm half-white and half-Asian, I don't look particularly like one or the other. I've had a lot of amusing guesses² as to what I was, and most of the time I'd be lucky if they were on the Asian continent altogether. My friend Conor, ever the gentle one, has said that I'm doomed to live out my life rejected by both. But the odd thing is, I'm actually not horrified by the thought.

I was raised around white kids, in white neighborhoods, one of a very small Asian contingent at a predominantly white high school. My university is a bit more ethnically diverse, but the ratio still swings heavily in favor of those who eat mayonnaise. For all intents and purposes, I'm a white kid. The only differences are that I fear not the rays of the sun, and I'm able to take ethnic umbrage when it suits me.

I've often joked at how bad I am at actually being Asian when it counts: my DanceDance Revolution skills are lacking, my ride of choice is not a Honda Civic, and my math grades would typically be more useful for spelling the word "coccyx" than "Alabama." But beyond the superficial, jokey things based in stereotype, sometimes I do feel a genuine disconnect with my Asian roots when I try to dig any deeper than the food. When I first came to college, I saw that there was an entire club for Filipino students. I got the necessary information for the first meeting, made a few jokes about chicken adobo with the people handing out flyers, and went on my way. Awesome, I thought. Time to reconnect with my roots.

When I went that night, I stayed for about two minutes. Those one hundred and twenty seconds told me everything I needed to know about them and about me. They were wonderful, inviting, and inclusive. They knew good food when they tasted it, and they were a really friendly sort. They also stood on almost zero common ground with me. They talked about Jollibee burgers, quoted comedians I'd never heard of, and used words with consonant combinations I'd thought were hitherto impossible. It was not for me.

But it's not like I'm a seamlessly integrated part of the caucasoid community, either. Before I realized what I was saying was odd, I used to let slip little neologisms unique to Filipinos (for instance, in my house, lights "open" and "close"). Also, I was able to milk the hell out of my half-ness when I was applying for colleges.³ Instant essay topic about how delightfully confused I was to have all these contradictions laid out before me, doubtlessly with some contrite, cliched title.⁴ Not my best work, but it was a college application. Nobody ever does their best work on those because they're too busy carefully wording sentences to be vague enough that a "Find and Replace" command will allow them to make it one-size-fits-all.

The truth is, I'm not delightfully confused. I'm not really confused at all. I spend less time worrying about sunburn, get to pretend I'm exotic, can realistically pass myself off as not being able to speak English when I don't want to talk to panhandlers, eat spicier food than most of my friends, and all I have to do in exchange is occasionally weather some mouthbreather's question of, "No, where are you really from?" Sounds like a fair trade⁵ to me.

What the hell is Paul doing here? Being Asian Being white, but with the added privilege of being able to tell racist jokes without people gasping.

-PK


¹ No footnote here. I just wanted to make you scroll all the way down the post...Wait, where are you going?
² Stranger: Are you Inuit?
Me: No.
Stranger:...Are you sure?
³ Amusingly, my dad had ethical problems with this, while my mom did not.
⁴ For example, "The Best of Both Worlds," or "East Meets West," or "My Genomes Are Like Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris Dueling to the Death, and Chuck Norris is Sort Of Winning."
⁵ The kind of fair trade where both sides amicably agree to a deal, not the kind of fair trade where farmers lie about how intimately children were involved in harvesting their crops so privileged white youth will drink their coffee.

Chandler's Law

"When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."
--Raymond Chandler

* * *

They were in his bedroom, swimming in rumpled green beddings, feeling the air cool down around them.

"Sing it for me again."

"I just sang it for you."

"So sing it again. Please?" Lyla peered up at Tom with deep, soulful eyes that hadn't been quite so soulful a second ago. Tom didn't know how she could turn it on and off like that, but it got him every time.

Tom rolled his eyes playfully. "Alright," he said with exaggerated resignation. "Last time." Lyla smiled, resting her head on his chest and closing her eyes. She liked the feeling of his voice rumbling in his ribs, liked the warmth that came with it. She felt the first tickling pangs as Tom hummed, finding his key. He coughed. She shuddered, giggled.

"So," Tom began. "So you think you can tell--"

The door exploded inward. Splinters sprayed everywhere and the broken lock clanged noisily to the floor. The heavy boot that had kicked the door in hit the floor with a thud as its owner stepped into the room. He was black-clad, his features sharp and severe. He leveled a gun at Tom and Lyla with a steady hand.

Lyla screamed, drawing the covers up like some kind of shield. In spite of himself, Tom's first thought was how shiny the gun looked.

"Please don't hurt us!" Lyla yelled, voice shaking and shrill. "Take what you want and go!"

"I ain't gonna take anything, lady," the gunman said gruffly, but he didn't lower his weapon.

"What do you want?" Tom asked carefully, hands coming up alongside his head. The gunman shrugged.

"I'm not sure. All I know is, your story got boring, so I was supposed to come through this door with a gun."

"Boring?" Tom echoed. He turned to Lyla. "We weren't boring, were we?"

"I didn't think so," she replied earnestly.

"Well someone did, or I'd've been sent to another room full of boring people," the gunman said, annoyed. There was an uncomfortable silence.

"So..." Tom ventured after a few moments. "What happens now? Which of us do you shoot?" Lyla turned to him, horrified. "I'm just asking!" Tom said defensively. "I'm assuming he shoots one of us, and then the other would take to the avenging part of this story."

The gunman gave this a moment of thought. "Well, which one of you is the protagonist?" he asked.

"I am," Lyla and Tom chorused. They turned to each other.

"I thought I was," Lyla said. "You didn't come into the story until that day I met you at the diner. I was around before that."

"So was I," Tom argued.

"Well, I didn't see you," Lyla said.

"Lyla, I hate to break it to you, but I'm the protag here," Tom said. "You're a really great girl. You're beautiful, and whimsical, and funny, and basically the wet dream of every lonely writer out there."

"So?"

"So, considering how I'm lonely, introverted, and emotional, doesn't that tell you something about the kind of person that's writing this story?" Lyla considered this. Horror creeped onto her face slowly before completely blossoming like a mushroom cloud of sickening realization.

"Oh my god," she breathed. She turned to the gunman again, desperation in her eyes. "You can't kill me!" she pleaded. "I could live on! I could have development! Maybe I'm the beginning of a trope that's about to be subverted!"

The gunman thought again for a moment. "What if neither of you's the protagonist?" he asked. "What if I'm supposed to kill both of you so the real hero of the story can get involved and solve your murders?"

"Would we get to come back as ghosts to help him solve the case?" Tom asked. The gunman shrugged.

"Dunno. Weirder shit's happened on my beat." There was another uncomfortable lull as the room's three occupants mulled over the confusion.

"You know," said Lyla, "we've been talking for a long time." The gunman's eyes went wide.

"Oh, no--" he began. The closet door slid open. With a yell, a dark man rolled out of the closet adroitly, coming up on one knee with a gun in each hand. He leveled a piece at the first gunman, and another at the two lovers in bed.

"This story has become seriously boring," the second gunman said in a gravelly, no-nonsense voice. "I'm here to fix that."

"I'm on it, buddy," Gunman One said. "Back the hell off." Two shook his head.

"You're part of the problem," he accused. "You're a plot point that's not going anywhere." He paused for effect. "Except Hell," he added, pulling back his gun's hammer for further emphasis.

"Wait! Stop!" Tom yelled. "This is my room! Everybody calm down!" Both gunmen shot Tom dangerous looks, but were nonetheless quiet. "So let me get this straight," Tom said, trying very hard to bring all these meta things down to a level he could understand. "If nothing else happens, more gunmen will just keep showing up in my house?"

"Until something does happen," One said. Two nodded in agreement, making sure to look as taciturn as possible while doing so. Tom thought a moment, then grabbed his glasses off his nightstand. He put them on, flipped on his lamp, and then grabbed a thick book from his bedside table. A dictionary.

"What are you doing?" Two asked, confused, as Tom opened the book.

"Have a seat," Tom said as his eyes fell upon the word "aardvark." "I want to try something."

* * *

Over the next hour, gunmen had come in through the window, up from the floorboards, and even under the bed. One of them, a sniper in the high rise across the street, had his rifle trained on the room as his voice crackled through on Tom's speakerphone. All told, fifteen gunmen and a rather ominous tiny red dot crowded Tom's already cramped bedroom, pointing weapons every which way.

"I think you can stop now," said Nine, a Chinese man brandishing an ornate sword. Tom, who was just finishing up the multiple definitions of "Aztec," trailed off in his dictionary reading.

"But I'm not sure what to do now," Tom confessed. "I didn't think this far ahead. I just figured one of you would get impatient and start shooting." Nine raised an eyebrow. "Or stabbing," Tom amended.

"Tom," Lyla whispered urgently. "If you stop, we'll die." Tom would have made a rejoinder at that point, but Tom was quite suddenly not there at all. "Tom...?" Lyla said slowly, panic pitching her voice up as she looked around frantically, seeing only gleaming gun barrels. The gunmen all exchanged knowing nods.

"Delete key," Three said.

"The powers that be decided your boyfriend was a bad idea," One said sympathetically. "But at least now you know you're the prot--" he trailed off. Lyla was gone, too. The room was now merely full of gunmen itching to kill things, and no obvious target for their ordnance.

"What now?" Eight asked irritably.

"Not sure," Two said with a shrug. "But there can't be too many more of us in the pipeline. How many more could he possibly send?"

Two was right. There would be no additional gunmen, no matter how boring the story got. But the large number of grizzly bears that had just appeared in the hall outside suggested that this had become an entirely new type of story, and one that would not be boring.

* * *

My first stab at metafiction. This is the result of a grain of an idea I've been kicking around for a while. Not substantial enough to be anything other than a very short story, but I had fun playing with it anyway. Have a good weekend.

-PK

Apples & Onions, Part One

I was born to be a city-dweller. I may never be more than three feet from a cockroach at any given time, and I may have cumulatively breathed in carbon monoxide in doses so high that one might think I put my mouth around the rim of a volcano,¹ but I'm happy in cities. I like being around people that don't have time for me. I like having everything within easy reach geographically, even if not economically. And while I don't like having to dodge clusters of poop on the sidewalk, I do like the adorable dogs that leave them.

I was born in Chicago, and even though I moved out to a nearby suburb at an early age, I've always been proud of my Chicago roots. I've been in New York for three years, and I still decline ketchup on my hot dogs, still refuse to fold my pizza, and still talk to strangers on the subway.² But I've also picked up New York habits. I walk faster now. I've perfected that intense tunnel vision gaze the savvy Manhattanite can use to shut out those people trying to sign you up for GreenPeace. I've even taken to muttering, "Fucking tourists," under my breath when a flabby, pasty out-of-towner stops directly in front of me to look up and marvel at how tall a building is, without realizing it's something so soul-wrenchingly dull as a telephone exchange office.

I've always been fascinated with the gulfs of difference between American cities and the people that live in them. We're all American, sure, but the cultural divide between two cities as close as New York and Boston is probably wider than the one America-at-large shares with Canada. I'm in a good position to examine the way things are in America's two foremost cities,³ and that's going to be a recurring thing here. I won't be doing an arbitrary "Who's better?" thing, just musings on the way things are here and there.

Something I appreciate about New Yorkers is their directness. Everyone goes out into the day with their own mental itinerary, and they leave themselves very little time to stop and smell any roses. That mindset makes New Yorkers really easy to deal with. They want it straight, don't waste their time with the frills and candy coating. But that bluntness I appreciate also means there's no time for small talk. One of the hardest things I've ever done is try to initiate a conversation with a stranger around here.

Chicagoans are not afraid to talk to strangers. They don't mind taking some time to bullshit with someone they're probably never going to see again. Yeah, they've got places to be, but sometimes a chat with a random person on the El is more entertaining the the umpteenth run through your iPod's contents.

I try to talk with people all the time, whether it's around the city, on the subway, or even on planes. My east coast friends, quite naturally, assume this is a sign of insanity on my part, and hope I might someday open my eyes to the fact that this gregariousness will inevitably end with me gut-stabbed. All due respect, guys. I haven't gotten the shiv yet, but I have gotten a few phone numbers. I think I'll keep doing what I'm doing.

Next time on Apples & Onions: Hot dogs. Is less more? The answer may surprise you.⁴

-PK


¹ A lot easier than you might think, if you're loose about what defines "volcano."
² And someday, they will talk back.
³ Eat your botox-riddled heart out, Los Angeles.
⁴ Unless you answered, "No."

Answer #2: Watching

Waiting. Commiserating.

In a previous entry, I noted that I was not much of a sports fan except on the most superficial level that there are, in my mind, good guys and bad guys, and I don't want the bad guys to win. But for every second of time I don't spend thinking about America's burgeoning sports culture, I spend a minute thinking about the entertainment industry.¹ I consider film and television to both be my wheelhouse, and anyone who's known me for more than five minutes knows that I basically rest all hopes of my future on them.

It used to be weird to describe movies as a hobby or an artistic passion that one could pursue. Books were the real currency of art and culture, the erudite would say; movies were just comfort food for the masses. But with the rise of filmmakers like Tarantino, whose educations were founded entirely in the hours they spent burning out their corneas going through the stock of the video stores they worked in, the worm turned and now film is quickly becoming less of a curiosity and more of a respected and vaunted artistic medium. In this way, it follows the path of the novel, which had to endure a similar rise to prominence the previous century.²

But just as the oppressed Italians in America quickly turned on the Irish that came after them, gleeful to no longer be on the lowest rung of the ladder,³ so have movie types turned on television. Most of the cool kids nowadays don't even own a TV; after all, it's just comfort food for the masses, they say.

Well, that's really too damn bad for them. Right now, TV is going through the same kind of creative renaissance that film went through in the 70's. Yeah, Two and a Half Men is still going, but for every piece of schlock like that you're now getting the kind of provocative, thoughtful stuff the world has been waiting decades for television to realize it could produce. So eventually when younger people than I unearth current slamdunks like Dexter and Sons of Anarchy the way people now might discover Casablanca for the first time, I'll be there yelling, "Better late than never, you little shits!"

Which brings the topic of this entry back to me. Due to self-engineered quirks in my scheduling and what is probably a horrible lack of prioritization on my part, I spend unholy amounts of time watching movies and sitting through TV series after TV series. I enjoy them like frequent meals, preferring variety but nonetheless having a rough palate that I tend to sample from. I think on them. I analyze them. I take them apart, peeling away narrative threads the way that creepy kid down the street might pull wings off a fly.⁴ I see how it all works, take the best bits, and I put it into my own writing. TV and movies are as much of teachers to me as the people that get paid to do it professionally, and sometimes their advice is better. Certainly, their homework is more interesting, but that may simply be due to a higher volume of explosions.

From time to time, I'll put up reviews of whatever I just watched on here. But this is just to introduce another thread.

What the hell is Paul doing here? Watching Grinding my eyesight to a fine powder and loving every minute of it.⁵

-PK


¹ This might be mathematically impossible. If you think it is, keep it to yourself.
² But novels are dumber, because there's no pictures.
³ Or so they think.
⁴ Hey, what are you looking at me like that for?
⁵ Except for the 125 that make up Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin.

Vuvuzelas: Not a country in South America

By my own admission, I'm not much of a sports fan. I casually follow hockey and do an excellent job of convincing others than I regularly follow hockey. When pressed on my opinions for other sports, I usually throw my lot in with whatever team my native Chicago offers up.¹ But while I'm not so avid that I have SportsPhone ahead of my parents on speed dial, I can appreciate the spectacle of sports. I can appreciate the effect it has on people, and how it brings them together. In fact, I often find the things fans do to be far more entertaining than the sports themselves.²

This brings us to the World Cup. Soccer is another sport I follow only casually, but I nonetheless enjoy watching it when it's on. Except now, I don't. Tune into a FIFA game this summer, and you're bound to hear an incessant buzzing, like a beehive at an airport.³ Tournament promoters are touting it as an integral part of the South African soccer experience, even as TV broadcasters attempt to placate advertisers and viewers who signed on for soccer, not aural torture. Introducing the vuvuzela:

The horn that has melted both my eardrums and my tolerance for others' cultures.

South African fans can't get enough of them. At the request of tournament organizers, they are not blown during official announcements or national anthems, but otherwise they drone ceaselessy until match's end, as though the stadium were a cicada-infested tree. Except cicadas aren't nearly as bad. Most reports have put the decibel output of the vuvuzela at 130 dB, which is louder than the engine of a motorcycle or a chainsaw and 10 dB above the human pain threshold.

And so the debate rages. Naysayers point out the health risks to being exposed to so much constant loud noise. They are also quick to note that their buzz makes it difficult for players on the pitch to communicate with each other, and that the horns being blown outside the stadium at night make it hard for players to get sleep in their hotel rooms. Vuvuzela boosters, on the other hand, claim that it is a local tradition; just as international fans would be expected to tolerate bawdy songs from the audience about the opposing players' illegitimate children⁴ if the Cup were held in England, we should humor the South Africans and just enjoy something that hurts both health and viewership while adding nothing to the game.

My opinion's clear on this, really. I'm all for banning them just because I'm a spiteful bastard who doesn't like how they sound, but it's nice to have health and obstruction of play arguments on my side, too. Critics of my position say a vuvuzela ban would be an attempt to "Europeanize" an African occasion. I guess I wasn't aware that things like long-term hearing damage were strictly a European concern.

As a final note apropos of nothing else, my friend Jude over at Omnomnom Books is having a contest to give away a copy of Dust, a novel about zombies having feelings or something like that. I get an extra point for mentioning it here, so go me. Try your best to win it yourself, dear reader, but expect that you'll have to pry it from my cold, undead hands.

-PK

UPDATE: It would appear my enemy has a Twitter feed. Thanks to Colin at Musings and Mayhem for alerting me.

¹ Not as much anymore. The laughter can get to be too much.
² Especially the nicknames for when fans all dress up in one color, such as the Calgary Flames' "C of Red" or the Cleveland Browns' "Giant Sloppy Bowel Movement."
³ That's on fire.
⁴ That's right, Genaro Gattuso of Italy. I'm onto you.

Answer #1: Working

A combination of my Midwestern and Asian work ethics as well as my inconvenient need to eat now and then means that I must have a job. Now, I'm not opposed to jobs--after all, they're a great way to fill the idle hours, and you occasionally meet interesting¹ people. Work is a different matter.

There's an old saying that I've seen on a million motivational posters in my years spent rising through the ranks of the public education system: "If you find a job you truly enjoy, you will never work a day in your life."² I think that holds quite true--after all, it's only work if someone's making you do it. Now, this is where the gardeners among you will cry that what they do is work, and no one makes them do it but themselves. Sorry, but it's not work. You just have a really boring hobby.

Though it elicits derision from my friends, I am proud to say I have a long history of extremely easy jobs that require little effort, mental or physical, on my part, and in exchange reward me disproportionately well with either high wages or free food (and often both). High school taught me that the key to getting through life is to do as little work as possible to get the best possible results,³ a tenet I live my whole life by now. Consider my past work experience:

Golf Caddy. Perhaps the ur-example of easy jobs, since you get to set your own schedule. This one required by far the most physical effort from me, but all that entailed was walking forward, not dropping the bag, and not getting in the golfer's way. Good food (gratis) at the halfway point, and then sweet, tax-free cash payment at the end of it. You also get to watch rich people badly misbehaving, a free entertainment without peer.

Golf Course Maintenance. This job dovetailed with the above one. I rode around in a golf cart, collecting tips for doing next to nothing and once again indulging in free country club food. This one packed in an hourly wage on top of the tips I was making every night, which would often rival what I brought home from four hours of golf. We raced golf carts freely in the later hours, unafraid of the possibility of being caught by our bosses, or perhaps a blue turtle shell.

Baseball Announcer. In summer of 2007, I was the voice of IHSA baseball...as long as it was played at the baseball diamond at my high school. I sat in a weatherproof box, played good music when our guys were batting and bad music when theirs were, and once again food was provided, compliments of the school. And I only kind of like baseball.

Security Guard. Probably my least fun one. I was up til 4 every morning, which isn't actually terrible once you get used to it. I was working at the base of my university's security department, which had a threefold advantage. One, I got to hear stories and complaints from some very interesting¹ people. Two, I got to know all the security guards, who even now simply let me into any building without question, whether I'm technically cleared for entry or not. And three, I got to play with a walkie talkie.

Library Computer Guy. My current position, taken entirely to pay my rent. I sit at a computer, as I am now, and don't field any tech questions because there's no way for people to know that I'm an employee of the library. Thanks to this job, I'm almost done with the entirety of HBO's Deadwood, and will probably be able to sink another four or five TV series entirely before the summer's out.

I have not yet found the job doing what I truly love, and so I continue to work. But by my tally, I'm still the one that's winning.

What the hell is Paul doing here? Working "Working."

-PK


¹ Note, importantly, that "interesting" and "sane" are usually mutually exclusive traits in a coworker, and plan your risks accordingly.
² There would also be a picture of a group of friends climbing a mountain together, all smiles. One would be black.
³ The high school system was horrified to discover that this was the lesson I'd distilled from their years of effort, and not, say, Avogadro's number.

You're listening to

In commercial breaks for radio and television, there's occasionally something called a station ident. Somewhere between the endless reminders to buy Frosted Flakes lest the lack of them cause your pubes to burst into flames, a friendly reminder will worm its way into your ear, declaring, "You're listening to WEEL--putting the 'roll' back in 'rock n' roll.'"¹

I like the station ident. It's simple, it's clear, and it's the one bit of a broadcast that doesn't have any agenda except being kind enough to remind you where you are after you've put your brain on screensaver. So consider this my station ident. If you continue to read this blog, you will be subjected to my opinions, my ideas, my dreams, and occasionally a recipe.² This blog will be the third globe of my brain, the one most suitable for public consumption. But this entry will be simple. It will be clear. It will be the one bit of broadcast that has no agenda except telling you that you are here.

I'm Paul. I live in Brooklyn. I write a lot. All my favorite TV shows are canceled, and there's no raw flavor in nature that trumps pineapple. I have a few bad habits, and when I indulge in all of them on weekends onion rings are the only cure. One question, no real answer: what the hell am I doing here?

-PK


¹ Actual station ident I heard once.
² Just kidding. You fuckers will never get my recipes.