September 07, 2008
Live Blogging the 2008 Video Music Awards
I'll be doing my usual thang over at Boob Tube Dude this year.
Come by and enjoy the snarkage!
Posted by Ryan McGee at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2008
We Pause Now...
In Love Story, we learned that being in love means never having to say your sorry. (Although my wife disagrees.) The modern day equivalent may be, "Having a DVR means never having to watch a commercial." This, friends, is progress. It's progress that's been in place for a while now, but you can't sing the praises of this development enough, really.
That being said, there are a few commercials that have impacted my life recently. The first saved my nephew from a serious crying fit last weekend. See, he's started Stage 1 of Crawling, which essentially means he does his best "WWI soldier scurrying in the foxhole" routine, pulling himself by his forearms and elbows towards whatever shiny thing attracts his fancy.
At one point, he mosied himself down to a mere few feet away from my mother's coffee table, a slick modern piece with metal feet. I was watching him as he played with his toys, but I could tell he wanted to proceed full steam ahead towards the coffee table. I heard cheers come from the Sox game on the TV, and in his millisecond of freedom, he lurches headlong, William Wallace-style, smashing his head into the nearest leg.
The next moments were rapid, as the wife and I swooped in, picked him up, and spontaneously started singing the chorus to this commercial to him.
By the time his parents came over, the back-and-forth of "oh no you DIDN'T" had him in complete stitches. Mad props to our friends Liz and Marc for telling us a few weeks earlier how infants take their post-injury cues from the adults around them. Had we not learned that, I'm pretty sure we would have been singing something like, "Oh hell, you DID IT!"
Next up: the greatest act of culinary chicanery since restaurants secretly replaced their normal coffee with Folgers' Crystals:
There are others in this series, with everyone losing their minds in the same unbelievable fashion upon learning they dressed up to the nines to eat pasta from tin foil lasagna pans by a C-student at the local high school. As far as they are concerned, this is the most delightful surprise since learning the cheerleader from Heroes turned legal. They should go all Chris Farley on the Pizza Hut delivery guys, but instead take them home and have their way with them sexually. (I think.)
But the upside to this? I've taken the ridonkulous optimism from this commercial and applied it to my own life. After all, Boston's an unfriendly town, with people more likely to scowl at you than smile. So, enough's enough. Every time something good happens from now on, I'm gonna shout, "Pizza Hut delivered the pasta!"
Works in many situations, really. Forget playing "Dirty Water"; the Sox should spontaneously scream "Pizza Hut delivered the Pasta!" after every win. Blind date goes well? Pizza Hut DEFINITELY delivered the pasta. You beat those racketeering charges? Pizza Hut's delivering some pasta your way, my friend.
Course, don't shout it too loud, as the Pizza Hut people already found me on Twitter for starting this meme. You might have thought you had to worry about Big Brother, but all the while, the Hut's been keeping its eyes and ears on you. So you have to ask yourself: is Pizza Hut delivering the pasta, or is the Pizza Hut pasta delivering you?
Food for thought, indeed.
Posted by Ryan McGee at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)
August 31, 2008
More Logan in Action
Posted by Ryan McGee at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)
August 30, 2008
Logan In Action
My nephew: Thor in the making.
Posted by Ryan McGee at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)
August 26, 2008
Thinking Back...
It's a weird thing, reading back on all the stuff I used to write here. Not so much for the content, although I will say that reading a lot of it feels like reading the writing of another person. But it's more about the sheer volume, which bespeak a certain lifestyle, which only calls into question just how different that lifestyle is now.
This isn't some lament about how married life has changed things so much as an observation of the current state of things. I probably write more than ever now; it's just not here. Around two years ago, I started writing about Lost on a weekly basis, and that pretty much lead to this and then this, which take up a lot of my writing time. Throw in a job that's demanding during the day, plus the glory that is my PS3, plus the silly desire to occasionally have something resembling a real life, and this, the original site, the free for all, suffers.
But I keep it around, because occasionally it's the absolute perfect place to drop certain entries. The other sites have rules, but this is blogging anarchy. And it's like an old pair of shoes, very easy to get into, even if I hardly ever find cause to wear them lately. But it took pouring over the archives to realize how much I love this place, and how I plan on having it for the long haul, in some way shape or form, as long as I possible can.
Posted by Ryan McGee at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)
August 25, 2008
A Few of Her Favorite Things
In honor of the wife's birthday today...
...her favorite LOLcat...
...and a clip from her favorite show, "Spaced"...
....Happy Birthday, baby.
Posted by Ryan McGee at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2008
Just Can't Get Enough: 8/13/08
So I'm coming up on the first anniversary of married life, which feels impossible on two fronts. It simultaneously feels like it's been six weeks and six decades since that day actually happened, which I'm sure is not a unique sensation. But I've never claimed to be unique.
Mrs. Me was in charge of 99% of the day itself. It's not because she's a control freak so much as she's got far superior taste than me in most every facet of every day life. But that 1%? Well, that was the music, a setlist that stretched from the moment the ceremony ended through the time all the guests left. That was my baby, and I spent 8 months and change getting it just right.
The day itself was a mixture of the mundane and the phenomenal, in ways I can't express and in ways I won't bore. But I do remember distinctly the moment it all felt real, in a palpable sense: when this song played during cocktail hour. That was the moment in which I truly realized it was my wedding day. I know it sounds weird or even offensive that it took a song to drive it home, but if you've ever been through it, and/or really love music the way I do, then it makes all the sense in the world.
Posted by Ryan McGee at 10:45 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2008
Lost: Season 1 Retrospective Podcast
Over at Zap2It's Guide to Lost, I've been conducted an experiment known as "We Have to Go Back," in which I've been rewatching the entire series of Lost through the prism of present knowledge.
Season 1 just wrapped up, and so the Boob Tube Babe and I did a podcast in honor of this milestone. Take a listen!
Posted by Ryan McGee at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)
August 06, 2008
Blogging Yourself to Live
So I've just finished Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live, a book that came out in 2005 that I just got around to reading. What's great about the book is the three years in between when it came out and the time I read it: those 36 or so months gave me just enough time to grow to the point where this book wouldn't completely f#ck me up for life.
But let me back up for a second, because hey, it's my blog and I'm wont to do so: 24 months after this book came out, I went and got married, which was a great and wonderful thing and I came back from our honeymoon full of stories I wanted to share, and share them here I did, and the result was the not so delicate sound of apathy washing over me from the interwebs. And truth be told that's fine, that's the right of the interwebs, and looking back, who gives a flying fig what type of coral I saw while snorkeling.
But that apathy led me to cut my multipart narrative short, which means you few, you moderately happy few that actually gave a hoot about the honeymoon were deprived of the weirdest part. On what was supposed to be the last day, we checked out of the hotel only to find a hurricane had canceled all flights out of the country that day. This meant an extra day in the hotel, so we splurged by going to the super nice place we didn't think was involved in the all-inclusive deal we'd struck with the establishment.
So around 10 am, we head down to brunch, a rather crowded affair filled with people in the same boat as ours. And in the middle of the crowded buffet line stood a man who if you saw in a crowd, or without aid of your eyewear, would look just like me. But this wasn't me: it was me in 20 or so years, were I to go surly and more than vaguely Republican. So while waiting for my wheat bread to properly toast, I kept looking at this funhouse-mirror version of myself, feeling both in my body and "Being John Malkovich"-esque at the same time.
And then the weirdest thing happened: the older, Cheney-like version of me totally swiped my newly toasted bread. Just took it like it was his.
Since I was full of annoyance anyways (although most people would feel charmed to have an extra day in paradise, I had mentally prepared to return to Boston), I verbally bitchslapped The Neocon of Ryans Future, telling him it was mine, and huffing back to my table. My new bride asked me why I was so red in the face. So I told her.
"Future Me tried to steal my toast!"
Now, I bring this all up because of the Klosterman book, since that reminded me of Past Me, because this book sounded like what I used to sound like in my head. Now, obviously I'm not the writer he is, but reading the book is like reading the best version of my worst self, that hyper-aware, pathetically morose, filters-everything-through-music-to-give-my-own-shortcomings-a-buffer-zone self that showed up somewhere in the late-90's and survived through the publishing date of this book. In fact, 2005 is when my wife and I moved in together, and had I picked this book up when it came out, I'm not sure that would have happened.
An exaggeration? Probably, but this book would have affected me in the way High Fidelity had a few years earlier. I can read that book now as a historical artifact, but at the time it read like a freakin' autobiography. It's bad enough reading Killing now, because clearly it's making me write entries in my old way, which is to say it's making me write like Klosterman. But when i read Klosterman, it sounds like he's writing like me. And the 2005 version of me would have probably balked at the prospect of moving in with my now wife, and found some way to sabotage it, which may or may not have led to a pattern than would have mimicked that of my male-pattern baldness: a sad, testosterone-laced cliche.
Clearly he isn't, but there's a reason why guys like him and Bill Simmons are so popular. It's not that they invented a certain way to think or write so much as give justification to the millions of men who did this anyway and thought they were freaks for doing so. Klosterman and Simmons speaks to those men who are stuck somewhere between Past Self and Future Self, somewhat missing the old and terrified of what's to come, all the while unsure how to deal with the now in any other terms but the commonality of music, movies, and sports.
I'm not looking at life through the sole prism of a White Stripes album anymore, and I'm not yet busy swiping the breakfast foods of some prematurely balding thirty-something. I'm not Past Me, not Future Me: I'm just a big mess of Present Me. It's a great mess, but a mess all the same. The big difference now is accepting the messiness, which is hard for someone like me, but a lot easier than it would have been in 2005. The old me couldn't have done it. The old me would have perpetually sabotaged any possibility of happiness.
And now? No sabotage. And no mix tape to provide context for the meltdown. I'm not killing myself to live. I'm learning to enjoy life. And for now, that's enough.
Posted by Ryan McGee at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)
August 05, 2008
The Monarch Rules All
This might be completely impenetrable if you've never seen The Venture Brothers, but I can't recommend the show enough. Just so freakin' different and original, and in case like this, insanely funny.
If I had to pick an all time top ten favorite characters list, The Monarch would have to be Top Five. Just have to be. What a creation.
Posted by Ryan McGee at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)
