Monday, May 12, 2008

The weeks in culture: April 21-May 11

Watched:
Baby Mama - Every modern woman thinks Tina Fey resembles them. I am no different.
Death at a Funeral - Quirky British comedy of errors
Select Sex and the City eps - Not quite the marathon Sar and I had planned, but we did watch some classic moments (Miranda proposes to Steve! awwwww)
Select Grey's Anatomy eps - Josh was gone, I was bored, I wanted to relive the glory days when Meredith and Derek got their flirt on and all was right with the world.
Iron Man - Awesome up one side and down the other. Witty, visually appealing, action-packed, with morals, flirting, a message, and a fabulous performance from Robert Downey Jr., who I've always had a crush on. This movie did nothing to diminish said crush. If anything, said crush was strengthened by shirtlessness and sardonic humor of RDJ throughout film. Note to self: see film again.

Read:
A General Theory of Love by Fari Amini and some other fools
Listen, I like non-fiction that reads like prose. This ain't it. It doesn't behoove writers to get so flowery about the inner workings of the brain that it makes it difficult for their explanations to be understood. Know your subject, know your audience, and don't diminish your message by clouding it in a lot of unnecessary adverbs.
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
Read this one for a book club with some coworkers. It has kind of an On The Road vibe to me -- and I didn't like that either. 650 pages of indulgent, meandering, competent but meaningless prose. All you self-absorbed poets, who hop from bed to bed and smoky, dimly-lit bar to bar, who think your dabbling in metaphors and hedonistic relationships is going to unravel the keys to the universe, who think you're revolutionaries who are challenging the status quo, who flatter yourselves with your knowledge of obscure literary figures? Get a job.

Highlight of the weeks:
Birthday soccer! ...Or Iron Man. Did I mention Robert Downey Jr. is smokin' hot?

Lowlight of the weeks:
Incompetent coworkers. I'm hoping one of them gets shit-canned.

Pop culture time waster of the weeks:
1980's and 1990's lyrics trivia. Nostalgic and surprisingly tough. It helps if you kind of say/sing them to yourself, but you also might feel like a super lame-ass.

The weeks in soccer:
Aside from super-fun birthday soccer, I've had an okay time. Last week I managed to pull off another curving corner kick goal - I think if I practice I might be able to improve my consistency at it, and that would be delightful indeed.

Toward the end of that same game, though, another woman fell on one of my legs and my ankle made this horrible cracking noise. I walked it off and played the rest of the game, but later it swelled up like mad and kind of didn't want to be bent at all. That sort of interfered with general movement, as you might imagine.It's fine now; I played yesterday and didn't manage to tweak it anymore, which is good. It was kind of cramping my style.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Una fiesta de futbol -- con fotos!

I've been shamefully lazy in finally getting up a post about the raucously fun time I had celebrating my birthday this year. So I'm finally just going to crank it out, and it won't be that long a post, because I'm lazy, and it won't be that great a post, because things that are fun to do aren't always as easy to describe, or take pictures of, as you can see.

So, see:



As the pictures depict, I celebrated my inexorable march towards death (26, egads!) by getting together some people for an outing to the indoor soccer field in Redwood City. Mostly it was Josh's friends and family, but I did convince Sar, Corey, and Nathan to come out and represent me. We had the field, and the whole soccer building, to ourselves for a couple hours one Saturday afternoon during which we played quite a few games (first to five points) that were punctuated by Gatorade/Coke/Bud Light and Dorito breaks. Clearly we have our health in mind.

Actually, maybe we do -- despite the competitive level of play, no one was seriously injured (does a semi-broken toe count as injured? I guess it kind of does). I was pretty seriously bruised, though, as I imagine we all were. And I kind of have a huge knot under my right knee that looks disturbingly like a second knee. But the main complaint I heard from people post-game was soreness. I consider that the soreness of having a fantastic time! Booyah! Which I know I did.

I hope everyone had a good time -- there were solid plays and good athleticism all around. Some of us went balls-out a bit more than others (I'm looking at you, Andy!), but we all took our turn in the goal (not as bad as I'd always thought) and we all went home with hundreds of tiny pieces of rubber from the somewhat-ghetto astroturf-in-decline of the field. A little something to remember the day by.

I may have celebrated my 26th like a 10th, but I did enjoy myself a hell of a lot.