Rated A for Awkward

 I find myself in a lot of stressful, awkward situations. One of the best ways for me to relax is to unwind with a movie. Movies are awesome, right? I even enjoy watching movies with other people. I grab some beer and pizza, fire up my exquisite 5.1 Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound, and sit back to enjoy a moving picture with people I like. But sometimes I make poor movie choices and other times Hollywood just conspires against me, so the entire evening ends up a smoking ruin. Below are a few quick examples of movies that you should probably put some thought into before you screen them with your Great Granmammy.

1.) Saving Private Ryan

It's awesome when you make friends with a theater's projectionist when you're in high school. That super cool "I know a guy" ability is something you want to flaunt. You especially want to show it off if you take a young lady on a date. However, there are certain things I just didn't understand about dating and I honestly still haven't learned a lot in the years since.

"Girls sound a war cry on a conch shell when they want you to kiss them, right?"

Yes, I sneaked a girl into "Saving Private Ryan." It was the only R-rated movie in theaters that wasn't horrible. I was probably over compensating by attempting to avoid a movie that had sex appeal and thereby avoid any awkwardness. I guess I couldn't think of a tactful way to lean in and say "I promise that I'm not thinking about you being naked so that things won't get uncomfortable," which would have failed on two fronts as it establishes me as a liar, since I was a high school boy, so I definitely thought about naked girls and it absolutely makes everything uncomfortable forever. All things considered, it's probably for the best that "Schindler's List" was not released during my high school years.

Great job, High School Liam!

2.) The Rescuers

Did you know that someone put boobies in this movie? Covert boobies in the background? Well, they did and my friend's family apparently has crazy awesome vision. So. I imagine that put a strange twist on Family Fun Night.

It's not like you wouldn't have sneaked some ta-ta's into Pictionary anyway.

Disney has been under fire with accusations of hidden smut for years, so much so that I now watch every film as though it were a perverse "Where's Waldo?" exercise. But this was indeed out and out pornography, and Disney has never released the perpetrator or motive. It appears in only two non-consecutive frames and at 30 fps, you'd have to have a quick eye. Which apparently many people do.

Don't lie, you know you wanted to see them.

3.)Full Metal Jacket

A friend of mine actually threw her then-boyfriend under the bus on this one. She abandoned him while watching "Full Metal Jacket," a movie entirely comprised of shooting people super hard and threats to shit down people's throats after ejaculating in their eye sockets.

 Also, Adam Baldwin just goes fucking nuts on a building with a machine gun.

That's not all that weird in and of itself. I don't know how many girls have left the room when I'm watching a movie they find scary/gory/perverted/dumb, but if I had to venture a guess I would say all girls ever. Even girls that I've never met. If I put on an unappealing movie, they sense it and exit whatever room they're in.

That's not even my place. She's taking it out on someone, who's probably just watching "Bagger Vance."

No, what makes my friend's act of treason so awesome is that they were watching "Full Metal Jacket" with her father. Her father. Again, I have no idea what possessed them to do so, but those were the circumstances. She basically just said, "I'm out" and vanished. And I think she did it just 'cause, you know? Either this was a test of character or she just pulled the ultimate "eh, fuck it." Both conclusions are equally hilarious.

Oh, also this event happened when she was in high school. I think they may still be friends, but honestly I stopped listening to her story after the hilarious part.


4.) Pulp Fiction

You can make the argument here with any Quentin Tarantino movie, but I feel like "Pulp Fiction" could be the most squirm-inducing. I'm not sure if my mother is able to perceive obscenities or not, but Tarantino fucking uses those goddamn words like a motherfucker. That's not the real issue here, though. Sex talk is never a really great occurrence around parents. It just feels wrong and dirty.

"There's no way whatever follows this image will be sexually deviant, Mom."

You know what's worse than talking about doin' it? Butt rape. It's totally absurd to be sitting in the same room as your mother, your mother who graduated from college before we landed on the moon. Like two years before we hung out at Lunar-ville. So, watching Ving Rhames gagged and screaming, being dragged into a backroom while Bruce Willis is watched by a character called "the Gimp" is a moment when you slowly turn your head toward your family and intone, "uhhh...." is like your pants falling down at graduation.


5.) Dicks, Shoes, and Penises. And Then More Shoes.

I guess my lady-paramour really has some genuine affection for her mother. I know this because she went to go see the "Sex in the City" movie (cleverly titled "Sex AND the City") with her mother. She claims this was an act of charity, as no one else would go. I'm not entirely sure I believe her, as she did willingly attend the first two Twilight movies. But only the first two, she reminds me, as though it makes it acceptable. Her rebuttal would be that I own a, uh, film called "Punk Rock Pussycat Dolls." It's a mail order, straight-to-DVD title.

It's an art film.

Anyway, in this horrific display of potential filial duty, my lady-friend finds herself in a theater full of lonely, middle aged women eagerly watching a movie that pretty much only features women talking about shoes and dicks. I am told that wing wongs make an appearance. I'm fuzzy on the details of how many or how often, but the giant room was filled with a cacophony of hoots and hollers. All the while, the girl I court is trying her damnedest to shrink into her chair. I assume she could no longer have any kind of eye contact with her mother on any level.


LP out.

It's Impossible to Kick the Weather in the Balls

Whenever I have to move apartments, a heatwave sets in and tries to kill us all. I know that my moves always take place in the summer, but I'm talking about the hottest days of the year are exactly in synch with me having to move me incredibly awesome (if inappropriate) futon bunk bed. Maybe I pissed off a gypsie or a magical hobo or an evil fairy godmother or something. Maybe I just have horrible luck, but I definitely have a curse. So, you know, sorry about that guys. If it helps, I know some Canadians that always bring cold weather when they visit. In fact, they just visited last week and brought that awesome reprieve. Although, one of them also brought that huge snowstorm we had back in the winter of 2010. I maintain that Canadians are all Ice Wizards/Witches.

This is...I think this is what Canada is like. Probably?

Anyway, last year's move had me driving all around the state, because my move was totally fucked and I wanted to die. As per the curse, it was stupid hot outside. Did you know if your car's radiator explodes and leaves on the side of the road in rural Virginia, it will ruin the rest of your day? It's true. Did you further know that if you're wearing a light colored T-shirt while waiting for help to arrive, you can look at your own perspiration spreading through the fabric as a visual timeline of how long you have left to live before you're dead from heat exhaustion? It's like looking demographic maps of a pandemic sweeping over a populace, except your sweltering chest is the diseased country and your body's tears are the wave of destruction.

But you may be asking yourself, "What can I do to stay cool after I'm rescued?" And I'm here for you with my helpful guide to see you through this insidious heat wave. I've done significant research (read "I just thought shit up and told it to you as though it were science") to bring you a few bullet points on things you can do to slap Mother Nature around and show her who wears the pants in this family. So, for instance, you can...


1.) Not Do Whatever It Was You Did As A Kid

You what's awesome? Hurling yourself down a hillside-installed Slip N' Slide, surprise water gun attacks (with the optional water balloon bombardment), gorging yourself on freezie pops, drinking 17 Slurpees until your head implodes from a massive brain freeze, hanging around in just a swimsuit, and drinking from the neighbor's hose.

Childhood!

Nobody tolerates any of that noise now. I'm not a kid anymore and I've been warned more than once by police that sneaking around people's yards with a gun, no matter what it shoots, is a good way to get outfitted with a new set of ventilation holes courtesy of bullets.

But if you're a car, they're called "speed holes"

Those behaviors just don't fly anymore. That's what I did for years to regulate my temperature in the Dog Days of summer. Apparently fun is illegal once you get a diploma. I remember exactly what the inside of a garden hose tastes like thanks to my childhood summers. These were simpler times, before the internet (i.e. we didn't have access to boobs). Though I do have to concede that height, weight, and spinal development are all key factors in the Slip N' Slide experience. Don't get me wrong, sitting on the porch with a bunch of cold beer is a lot of fun, but it isn't "hit your friend in the face with a goddamn water balloon" fun.

Pictured: so much fucking fun

2.) Go to the Movies. Maybe?

This is a method I used to get a lot of mileage out of. It might be the geeky nerd in me talking, but sitting in a dark, cold room seems like a pretty good way to escape the sweltering death choke of summer. Hollywood especially endorses visiting the cinema.

Can you still call it "cinema" if you're watching Saw?

I don't know if you guys go to a lot of movies or not, but they're pretty damn expensive these days. Of course, when I was in high school gas was only a dollar, which may skew my opinions on a lot of expenses. But there's an issue at play here that some of you may not realize.

See, everyone talks about digital rights management (DRM) on electronic media these days. You know how when you download a song from iTunes but it only lets you play it on your specific iPod or a limited number of computers? That's DRM. You can even rent movies from iTunes and cable services like On Demand, for a reasonably low price. A lot of times it's only $1.99. But, people get mad because once you start watching the movie, you have to finish in the next 24 hours or it's gone, and only sometimes are you able to change the device you watch it on. That sounds kind of like bullshit, right? Most of the time I end up renting a physical DVD/Blu-ray for one night only, but I don't like being forced to.

Because I'm a rebel!

Anyway, movie theaters do the same thing, worse even, and you don't even notice. They sell the rights to a movie for about $10 a pop and you only have viewing rights for the specific two hours when the movie is shown. And you can't pause that. There's an awesome theater near me that serves beer and wine in the lobby, but when that alcohol catches up with your bladder halfway through Lord of the Rings you just have to settle for missing part of the film.

Or settle for purchasing new pants.

3.) Die

While I've gone on record to tell winter that it can go fuck itself with an iron stick, summer can free the beast all over your face, too. There were 2,190 deaths in the U.S. between 1992 and 2001 due to excessive heat. In fact, the loss of human life in hot spells in summer exceeds that caused by all other weather events. Combined.

Occasionally heatwaves manifest in the physical form of a flame tiger

An excellent example of what makes heat waves the deadliest weather overall is the 1995 Chicago heat wave. If you're old, dying will be one of the more likely activities on this list. While it's important to remember that people die every single day and the weather may just be picking on those that were already going to die (see "harvesting effect"), extremely hot weather can cause wildfires, power outages, extra psychological stress, and can even cause physical damage like buckling highways.


4.) Honestly, I Was Trying To Come Up With Another Topic, But All I Want Is a Cold Beer

Sorry, you're on your own

I Think We Forgot How Odd the 90's Were

I recently experienced two events that drop-kicked me into a sentimental time machine. The first occurred while visiting my sister and having to explain all the old photos of me to my girlfriend. I gave up saying, "I guess you really had to be there" and then drove her all around my hometown. The second is that I watched Empire Records again. And while all of those actors are playing teenagers even though they're in their 20's, those of us who were teenagers at the time believed that's what teenagers should be like. So, you know, pretty heavy on the nostalgia there. I noticed when I was confronting this evidence that my memory was a little rose tinted.

1.) Anachronistic Jobs

This goes back to Empire Records. I can't name a single friend that still works/is trying to work in a record/movie store. That used to be THE cool job to land. And we all wanted to be friends with the people who worked there, even if you were that stuck up bitch that laughed at me in high school and only rang up my purchases condescendingly. Whatever.

I don't want to give anything away, but I was a huge nerd.

I can't even think of the last CD I purchased in a store. I think it was back in 2006. That's five years ago. Back in 1997 I couldn't go five days without setting foot in a record shop. And you'd better believe those stores were some of the first places I visited once I could drive. These temples of cool were cultural touchstones. You have plenty of movies like High Fidelity and Clerks to take as examples.

What happened? Napster changed everything, but not in the way you think. It wasn't that we could all download gigs of music for free that mattered so much as the means by which it was done. Digital distribution is hottest thing in media retailers. It's taken almost a decade for new systems to be put in place, but I'm willing to bet you spend your time downloading and streaming most of your media. The digital divide was much wider back then and internet connections were slower than a summer car trip.

Plus dial up had that awesome song when it connected.

Couple that with archaic computers with extremely limited storage (my first desktop had a just a single gigabyte of hard drive storage BEFORE Windows 95 was installed) and there just wasn't any room for growth until the industry caught up. Speaking of...


2.) What the Fuck is This "Internet" Thing?

This seems laughable today, but people had no idea what to make of the web back then. It was all over the goddamn place and I don't mean the network's physical presence. I mean that people were totally in the fucking dark when it came to implementing it. All we knew was that it involved phone lines and we got to add "cyber" to the front of every word to make them sound more awesome.

Tada! It's the Cyber E-World Web or whatever!

Up until the past few years, you could still find sites that could be viewed as text only. That isn't functionality that anyone needs anymore. Period. But it was important back then and a lot of devices required it for use. Tiger Electronics released the first hand held game console with internet connectivity, but it only displayed pages as text.

This dinosaur right here.

True, you had to connect it to a hideously large external modem and it was monochrome, but you could do it. My family even had a word processor that could do the same thing. Do you guys even remember word processors?

People even tried to inject the internet into refrigerators for fuck's sake. Although the most hilarious attempts at shoving the net into our lives were via movies. The Matrix seemed totally plausible, The Net scared the shit out of Luddites, and people believed hacking was done by kids with 'tudes, wearing roller blades and VR headsets.

Hacking, apparently.

3.) Severe and Prolonged Identity Crisis

The 1990's were extremely transitional. On top of the technological revolution, you have to remember that the Cold War had just ended and we'd lost a lot of our cultural identity along with it. And we went looking for it again like a pack rat rummaging through their closet looking for an old yearbook. For those 10 years it's like society's parents had gone out of town for the weekend and we just ran buck ass wild. Imagine the recklessness of the Twenties, but with ecstasy.

We recycled everything we could find value in, no matter how small or esoteric. The Eighties were still a little too fresh on the mind, but the Seventies had a huge comeback. And we were unapologetic about it. Lazy, even. When envisioning a new TV program, we collectively said "fuck it" and just named it "That 70's Show." We had movies like Dazed and Confused and Boogie Nights. The Sixties had their shot, too, with Boomers celebrating the anniversary of the clusterfuck mudfest that was Woodstock and the release of the Beatles Anthology albums. Tie dye shirts got pretty big. Singer songwriters got a break, too.

How else can you explain Tori Amos?

But that wasn't enough for us, fuck no. We even went and threw in some damn swing dancing in those last couple of years. That didn't even make sense. But we collectively couldn't care less. My point is, if you spent any amount of your formative years in the 1990's, you had absolutely no clue about your cultural identity. It's like if you were adopted, tracked down your birth mother, and found out she was the biggest groupie slut ever.

Take that, Liv Tyler!

4.) Cartoon Shows Went Off the Fucking Rails

I remember waking up from orthognathic surgery and being totally out of it. I guess "remember" is the wrong term, but I am theoretically knowledgeable of the event. I was in a world of hurt and pumped full of enough painkilling narcotics to make Mark Renton blush.

Sorry, you weren't eating lunch, were you?

But, I had nothing to do except layabout in my drug stupor. So, of course I tried to watch TV. I know they try to make the television controls simple by only having one button to turn the TV on, off, and change channels, but that's really confusing for a person who's so fucking high on medicine that they think all of those tubes and IV's might be transforming them into a Borg.

"Paging Dr. Third-of-Five."

So I played TV roulette and it landed on Pokemon. I was pretty sure that Japan had vomited directly into my eyes. Later, after my reconstruction was complete, I tried watching that cartoon again and it still made just about the same amount of sense. And this kind of madness was going on everywhere. What are you explanations for "Aaahh!!! Real Monsters!," "Ren and Stimpy," "Rocko's Modern Life," or "Every-Show-Ever-On-Nick?"

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" had a large part to play in this Saturday morning bedlam. After you invent reptiles trained in martial arts, all bets are off. They opened some kind of Mutant Pandora's Box and the world was forced to watch sanity and creativity take a back seat to "WTF?" Wanna make a cartoon about intergalactic leather-clad rodents? Sure, we'll call it "Biker Mice From Mars."

Don't want them to ride motorcycles? That's cool, we can go with a anthropomorphic space rabbit named "Captain Bucky O'Hare."

Fuck it, let's just mixed sharks and gangs and see what the animators can shit out.

I give you "Street Sharks."

I guess you could make a case for this insanity in other decades, but all I know is that Saturday morning cartoons completely disappeared after the turn of the century. In much the way that Batman & Robin killed the franchise until Batman Begins, the Nineties exploded cartoons.


5.) The Colors, Oh God, The Colors!

Actually, the Nineties exploded a lot of stuff. Everything had to extreme, to the max, if possible. This extended as far as the color palette of everyday life.

It was a bad time to grow up with astigmatism.

We were insatiable hedonists and we reveled in day-glo vibrancy stretched across spandex. We invented raves just to have a place to put all of the goddamn new colors we invented. Remember when I mentioned Pokemon earlier? They colorized the shit out of it so hard it gave people seizures. I'm not linking to a video of it, so it's on your hands if you go searching for the offending clip.

But we all did it and thought nothing of it. We did it to Play Doh, even.

Every kid needed to be extreme. They need to be extreme so bad, that we developed a new spelling, "X-Treme!!!" Those exclamation points aren't a personal addition by me. You just yelled a whole lot back then. Like, all the time. For no fucking reason. Those videos I linked to were for a soda. A soda that is now defunct, possibly due to it's over X-Treme!!! nature. People were just all like, "Fuck, yeah! Soda rules, motherfuckers!!!" You don't need to think about rioting when you drink a soda.

6.) I Thought I Was Kind of Cool in a Loser Kind of Way

This is the one of the best things about the argument "Pics or it didn't happen." My yearbook presence is extremely minimal and no one had digital cameras back then.

This is what we took on school field trips.

So there's about zero proof of how absurd I was back then. I am able to tell you that I wore, in public mind you, corduroy cut-offs, mismatched soccer socks, combat boots, a chain wallet, a Sailor Moon T-shirt, a flak jacket, and spiked "Atomic Turquoise" hair.

Ha ha, suckers! That shit isn't on the internet!

Look, you had to be there.

LP out.

Moving Out is Like Being Punched in the Tit

Moving is bullshit. I assume anyone reading this is an adult, so you've moved at least once. And it was total bullshit, wasn't it? Even if you were excited about living in a new place or going off to college or whatever, it's still a punishment from god to an evil world. And I'm going through it all again. Right now.


1.) You Always Own Too Much Shit

If you're reading this at home, take a look around your room/apartment/house/Hooverville shanty. You've probably got it in decent order. Nothing looks terribly out of control. I mean, you have stuff, plenty of it, but it's totally manageable. No. It's not and you're dead fucking wrong. The second you start that packing process you'll notice the true quantity. It's like at the arrival of boxes, all of your possessions start reproducing like coke-fueled rabbits.

I don't really want to sift through the results of a "cocaine + bunny" image search.

Where did you get all of this stuff? You don't remember carting it all around last time. Did you really bring back that many things from your parents' house over the holidays? Why do I even own some of this shit?

I really don't know how to defend this purchase.

Even if you thinned out your possessions before your last move, it doesn't matter. Chances are you just bought all new shit to replace whatever you ditched. Or maybe you just totally forgot about how much of a pain in the ass it was lugging your stuff around when you moved in. It doesn't matter, though, and you grimly face the fact that a sizable portion will "have to go." But you don't really do that. No, you stand around picking up all of your stuff and deciding that you really do want that hideous sweater from Great Grandaunt McDoodle or that you really will need all of those AV cables and old computer parts. And you do this for days. You totally lie to yourself until it comes down to right about the last day. That's when you have your "Oh, shit!" moment.

Then, out of nowhere, you are a changed person. Suddenly you are a heartless, nihilistic son of a bitch and nothing holds meaning for you any longer. You just start tossing everything in sight into the garbage, no matter how precious it was a few moments before. If you insist on putting a positive spin on this frenzy, please consider this a perfect opportunity to ditch any artifacts from a former relationship with a cheating gorgon that may still be lingering about your place.

She's hiding her face because if you see it, you'll turn to stone.

You're going to fill all of the available trashcans at your place. Then you're going to sneakily add garbage to your neighbors' trashcans. And finally you'll just give up and toss your garbage bags beside other people's trashcans. The worst is when your final moving day is trash day as well. It's pretty hard to keep your head down when you walk right past the garbage men start tossing all of your stuff into that hideous, foul-smelling maw they call a truck. You KNOW they're laughing at you.

And apparently they're also going to murder you.

2.) You're Forced to Confront Your Past

Before you get to that scorched earth policy and you're still "trying" to pack, you have to face another horrible truth: everything you've done since you lived there. You find all sorts of filthy secrets you'd locked away and forgotten. This may come in the form of uncovering well-intentioned projects that you just never finished. Remember that month when you were really fucking into knitting and you just couldn't stop talking about it too everyone you met? Say hello to your haphazard and pathetically half-finished scarf.

There are freezing kids in the world that could've used that. Ass.

Or what about the time when you were really going to get in shape and you were totally for reals serious about it this time seriously? Oh, my, it looks like you unearthed all of those exercise books and infomercial fitness gadgets you bought.

Yeah, this thing was clearly going to get you all kinds of ripped.

Awesome. Not only are you stressed about moving, but you've confronted irrefutable evidence that you're a failure. OK, well, maybe not. Maybe you're just a bad person instead. Every time you run across a borrowed movie, album, or book that you never returned or even watched, listened to, or read you'll feel a heavy stab of guilt. Worse yet, you're confronted with the decision of how to handle this. Do you have time to enjoy them now? Almost certainly not. Should you give them back? Eh, probably. Unless you hope that the lender also just totally forgot. But what if you return them and then you're asked how you enjoyed them? And then you're also asked why you're so goddamn late getting back to them? It's a gamble; live with the embarrassment or live with the guilt.

Like I said, you're a bad person.

The situation can be so much worse, though. Let's pretend you have friends willing to help you. They're going to see all of your shit. Every last thing that you hide away in a closet, drawer, or S&M dungeon is going to get exposed.

"Why do you own all of Season 2 of 'Sailor Moon' on VHS?"

There is another situation which is worse than that...



3.) Strangers Will be Examining You

And that situation occurs when your landlord leads total strangers on a parade through your private life. Typically, it feels pretty awkward to have voyeurs blatantly gawking at everything you own, so you try to make yourself scarce when your harpy of a landlord arranges these little viewings. This means you have to spend a lot of time not being in the place you pay to live in and wondering just who is secretly sniffing your bedsheets.

It's the only way he can feel alive anymore.

I've come home more than once to find the contents of my medicine cabinet rifled through. One time they just straight up took some of my medicine. You can hide things away as best you can, but they're there to investigate this place and they're going to be manhandling all of your personal items. Whatever they want to touch is fair game. And it's impossible to see the actual apartment through all of the things you've populated it with. They're not really looking at the rooms, they're judging you and probably thinking they have nicer things than you do.

Of course this all provided that your landlord was responsible enough to give you the proper amount of notice before barging in. My place right now just leaves a note on your door. No phone call, but only a gesture of "meh." That's kind of illegal, though. Even worse than that, I had a landlord that made me leave the apartment to show it regardless of the fact that I had just come home from the hospital for a serious injury the day before. Another time I was surprised by the same landlord when he just showed up and led people into my bedroom while I was changing. The viewer didn't even flinch. She just regarded me in a half state of dress and then walked out. Like I was an amenity.

"This stuff doesn't come with the place, lady."

4.) Trying to Get Back Your Fucking Money

Landlords and insurance agents are always more pleasant than when they might have to give you money back. It's not in their understanding. The normal routine is that you pay them, not the other way around. So your landlord starts cooking up all these reasons why they'll have to get a professional cleaning crew in. I was threatened with that because my cat had tossed some of her Fresh Step out of her box while I was at work. Not actual poop, just like a quarter cup of actual litter.

At any rate you're going to clean that place harder than you've ever cleaned it before. You mop, wash, and scrub everything until all you can taste is bleach and Pine Sol. But, no matter what, you know, you just know, that you're going to get fucked.

To be fair, you were already in a convenient position and dressed for it.

I had this process go well exactly one time. The guy cut me a check for my full $700 deposit right while we were standing in the kitchen. I immediately got the fuck out and dropped it in the bank before he could say anything else.

But on the way out the door, I had to walk right past the garbage man AND the building's maintenance manager...

Sorry, guys. Just...I'm sorry.

LP out.