Life: As Viewed Through the McDonald's Menu

Yesterday I was standing in line at McDonald's, gazing up at the masterfully crafted fabrications of hamburgers, cheeseburgers, double cheeseburgers, chicken and fish sandwiches, and golden fries. These things - for we all know those picture's aren't really of the food itself - spoke to me.
They were promises.
Shining, glimmering, juicy, each sesame seed placed with God-like attention to detail. Cheese just beginning to melt, their yellowed corners bending ever so slightly, like dairy-born geisha inviting you to begin your feast.
I ordered, and opened my box with glee, looking forward to grasping that perfectly round, symmetrical burger. And I gazed inside to find...

But I am getting ahead of myself.

What I really wanted to talk about in this post was something far different.
You see as I was standing there, hands in pockets, fedora tipped low over my brow, I noticed something peculiar about the menu's system of organization. Something that speaks deeply about the American condition.
The two primarily divisions of the menu are as follows.

Kids' Menu - Happy Meals
Adults' Menu - Extra Value Meals

Let that sink in a bit. Let it wash over you like the sudden realization that Santa isn't real. (Sorry, spoiler warning.)
When we were young we didn't need 32 oz sodas, a pound of fries and half a pound of meat. We didn't need paper bags stuffed to the gills with food.
All we needed was four chicken nuggets. A tiny little soda to wash it down with. And a small little flurry of french fries.
And the toy. Oh, the toy! I am sure that somewhere in my family home there is a massive plastic bin filled to the brim with movie and television show tie-in toys.

See, back when we were young we didn't need grand and awesome (Biblical 'awesome', not Ninja Turtles 'awesome') material possessions. We didn't need to gorge ourselves on massive feasts piled high with sides and main courses. All we needed was enough food to keep us running around our neighborhoods, and a toy interesting and personal enough to keep our imaginations alive.
I can still remember back when even a Happy Meal seemed too much for me. I could barely finish before I wanted to go play again. And the toys I had... sure, I was blessed with the good fortune to have a Sega Genesis, but in the end if I could go outside, nature was my greatest toy.
Into our teens my friends and I could still spend hours a day catching and playing with frogs and toads.

Now, though, now that we have entered the real world, happiness is no longer what we want from our meals.
The economy sucks, the job market is shrinking, and all we can think about is high MPG, low APR, and extra value.
No more toys. No more boxes with little mazes and word games on them. Just a massive bag of pornographically perfect food...

Which brings us back to what I was first talking about.

I open up the box containing my double quarter pounder with cheese, the one that I saw crafted to such artisan-like perfection posted on the menu board.
And within I found two malformed patties of beef, cheese sliding off of them, one half on top of the other, both barely on the bun. Grease stained the cardboard, saturating it, dripping off of it. I sighed, closed my eyes, and then looked back up at the pictures. The promises. The perfect, saintly, broken promises.
The funny thing is that this is the reality of the world.
Happiness is simple, easily delivered, uncomplicated. It comes in forms of meager design. A perfect sunny Saturday, a soft kiss from a loved one, a two stanza poem. It is that look you get from a grateful stranger when you let them pull in front of you while in heavy traffic.
Value is the thing you supplant happiness for in your later life. After you have been indoctrinated to believe bigger is better and cash is king. Value allows you to have your sheet cake, and keep your pockets jingling too.

But are we happy? When we wake up in our massive houses with our central air and our plasma TVs, all of which we got at "a really good discount," don't we feel the slightest pang of regret? Don't we miss those days of innocent youth when baseball was our XBox, fireflies were our television, and frogs were our video games?

Don't you miss me?

Cell Phones - Why They Suck - Pt. 1

I am old enough to remember a time before cell phones.

I recall walking outside into an idyllic spring day in order to trek from house to house in my neighborhood, searching for friends. Knocking on doors and having them answered by parents, asking politely, "Is Tony home?" and then listening to them yell for their son, who would bound down the stairs and we would chat at the door until finally he'd either come outside, I would be invited inside, or I would move on to the next house in search of something to do.
I remember my mother giving me a few coins so I could call her from a payphone if the movie got out early. I remember making plans days ahead of time and committing friends' numbers to memory. I recall listening to the radio in the car and never having to turn down my favorite song because someone was trying to make a phone call.
I remember seeing movies without the omnipresent glow of a cell phone screen or the sudden blaring of monophonic Motzart three rows up.

Yes, cell phones have made the world a worse place. When a friend and I used to hang out, I would never have to pause in the middle of a story so they could shoot a text or chat for fifteen minutes about something that people would never dream of actually committing time and effort to. ("Ohmigod, wait, what? He did what? With balsamic dressing, ohmygod, how could he order that salad with balsamic...")
I seriously believe that half the reason we've gotten so hung up on trivial things in this day and age is because of instant communication.

It used to be that you would see something stupid ("a man ordering a salad with balsamic dressing, ohmygod...") and you would think to yourself: Holy hell, I totally have to tell my friend about that later!
Then later would come and guess what, you couldn't even remember what you were going to tell them about. But that's ok, because in truth it was so stupid and trivial that God actually cried a bit to think he had some part in the creation of an entity which might find such a thing worth talking about.
Now, though, you can instantly text, call, e-mail, videotape, photograph, and otherwise document every inane triviality you encounter and spread it with an almost religious fervency right from your phone!

Now the internet is awash in ridiculously pointless pictures and videos of people and animals doing ridiculously pointless things that a lot of people will watch and quote and relate to friends who have also seen them and also think they are justtoofunnyholycrap and the whole thing will turn into a massive cultural phenomena that will be related on every closing-segment news program two days after it stopped being new, funny novel, or even tolerable and then Family Guy will do something on it and it will start all over again and seven thousand videos will show up on youtube claiming to be responses to it but are really just people singing an acoustic version or lipsynching in front of a web cam in a poorly lit room and yet people will watch them because if there is anything Americans hate more than foreign films it is anything even remotely approaching originality.

And all because some smart marketing sonovabitch looked at a cell phone and thought to himself, "Slap a camera on that thing, we'll make billions."
Every other day I hear a story about someone somewhere getting into some kind of trouble because of a cell phone. A thirteen year old charged with possession of child pornography because his girlfriend sent him a naked photo of herself. A tram car crashing because the conductor was texting. The list goes on.

And the worst part is how quickly people have begun to see cell phones not as a nifty device, but as a seriously necessary part of their life. I have watched a girl burst into tears when I turned her cell phone off and refused to give it back to her.
Get over it!
It's a phone! It's not your grandmother's goddamned dialysis machine!

I suppose the purpose of this rant is just to vent my frustration over the seeming over reliance on technology that is gripping us like one of those malevolent vines in The Ruins. Whenever I hear someone bitching about their lack of cell service or that Facebook won't load, or that the air conditioning isn't strong enough my first reaction is to punch them hard and tell them, "There, now you have something better to bitch about!"

But I don't. Because I know someone would probably end up filming it and putting it on YouTube, at which point I would become part of the problem.

***

(Now, as you can see from the title of this post, this is just Part 1. I honestly have no idea how many parts there will be in this series, or what they will focus on, but I can gurantee at least one more.)

No, I Will Not See a Terrible Movie With You

I've begun to think that maybe the primary reason I will never find happiness in a true and lasting relationship is that I cannot be bullied into seeing a terrible movie. Every time I hear that some romantic comedy opened to $24 million, I can't help but feel that $12 million of that is guys who would have much rather been somewhere else, seeing something else, possibly while drunk.
Yet these stalwart heroes sit through an hour and a half of some interchangeable blond lobbing trite dialogue at some generically handsome man so that their girlfriend will be happy and they can go home at night content in the knowledge that the "We never do anything I want to do" argument has been warded off for at least another day.

Fuck that noise.

Maybe it's because I recently started seeing someone who thought that I could only truly be considered boyfriend material if I watched 'The Notebook' with her, or because the sudden and devious release of the newest Harry Potter movie suddenly has everyone asking me if I would be down to see it, but I've been thinking a lot about this whole "seeing movies together" thing.

Allow me to attack this perception that I am duty bound to see movies I don't want to with certain people from every angle I can think of.

1. I always go see movies that you want to see.
Yea, ok, so at the outset this looks like a pretty reasonable argument to put forward. I mean, if I make you go see a movie, then technically you should be able to make me go see a movie, right?
But did you see what I very subtly did there with italics? I highlighted the operative word.
Make. Forced. Coerced you to do under duress.
However, more often then not, I don't make anyone see any movie. In fact, I can say with absolute certainty that I've never made anyone see anything. And how do I pull this trick off? How can I still see all the movies I want even if no one else will go with me?
I go alone. Obviously.
It's possible. I've done it a lot. They don't stop you and ask you where your buddy is why you aren't holding their hand when you see a movie.
Still, most of the people who want me to see a movie with them use the "I've seen movies you want to see" approach with me anyway. So what happened? If I could just go alone, why didn't I?
Because they invited themselves along and I was too nice to tell them no.
Now don't get me wrong, most times I don't mind having someone along. I like being able to talk about a movie. But don't bring up that time we went and saw Funny Games and you freaked the hell out because it was so terrifying and cruel. I was going alone. You wanted to come. I warned you.
Tit-for-tat in a relationship is wholly acceptable. Compromise is what makes a relationship run. But you forcing your company on me during an experience I tell you you won't like and then demanding that I follow you to an experience I know I won't like doesn't make any damn sense.
It's like cutting off your thumb and then demanding that I do the same because you did it first.

2. It's not that big a deal.
How dare you, you presumptuous ass.
First of all, how can you deign to designate an art form's level of importance to someone else?
Let's say that on average a movie's time requirement is about 2.5 to 3 hours. That's three hours out of a 16 hour day (assuming you're getting the required 8 hours of sleep). That's almost one-fifth of my day I am devoting to something. Something that costs on average about $10.
That, my friend, is a deal, maybe even a big one. For ten bucks I could rent two good movies at Blockbuster. For 3 hours I could watch The Godfather. I could be doing so many better things with my time than watching Bride Wars.
I view movies as art. I don't go to a museum featuring art I have no interest in. And if I did, I could look at a painting for a minute and then move on. I don't listen to country music, and even if I was forced to the average song only lasts 3 minutes.
Movies require a much greater time and money commitment and therefore become a much bigger deal than you seem to think.

3. It will make me happy.
That's not my job.
If seeing a movie in general won't make you happy, why would having me there hating every moment of it make it any better?
This basically amounts to you being that kid who tortures frogs just for the fun of it, with me as the frog.

I don't wanna watch Twilight!

In fact, more often than not, I don't invite people along to movies because it will make me less happy because I know they won't like the movie. I'll be worried that they will think the movie is terrible and won't have enjoyed themselves.
I don't like putting people in a position of unhappiness. I also don't want to have to deal with their whining.

4. Please?
You didn't say "Pretty please" so no. Sorry.

In closing, allow me to say this, for the record:

If you ask me to go see a movie with you, and I turn you down, it's nothing personal. I just think you have terrible taste in movies.

My Battle in the Name of the English Language

Before you ask - No.

No this will not be a blog post about the "mongrelization of our proud white dialect with Spanish and ebonics."

Whatever the grand fuck that means.

I have no problemo with that kinda stuff. Without shared words between languages we wouldn't have things such as deja vu, or je ne sais quoi, or... shit do any not come from the French? We need to work on that. Wait, there's a German one: schadenfreude (loving it when someone gets their shit kicked in by fate). So you can see that the English language isn't threatened by the use of foreign words or other turns of phrase (in fact, some people think we need more of them.

What is a threat, though, is this massive, frightening, almost unholy movement towards netspeak. I am sure that there is a real word for it, but I don't want to look it up. I prefer to pretend it is some terrible disease that no one took time to name because the sheer eye-hemorage-inducing terror of it all left them too dumbfounded to speak, and when it slipped away no one wanted to remember it.

You know what I am talking about... it's the kind of idiot-bred wackiness that turns "Thank you for all your help" into "kthnxbi!"

When I first became aware of this silent predator of intelligence I was but a wee lad of maybe 11 or 12. I was IMing with a friend when she said "lol."

Keep in mind that this was during simpler time when the internet was new and still cute and adorable. Before it hit slash-fic producing puberty and unleashed a whole realm of evil on the world.

When she told me it meant "laugh out loud" I could see the reasoning behind it. We were still new at this whole "Mass instant communication through text" thing. How else were we supposed to say we found a comment to be funny?

MaleScreenName1 - And then the priest said to the rabbi, I asked for a lobster!
FemaleScreenName1 - I find your comment to produce a reaction akin to amusement.

So ok, I can accept lol. Of course soon enough I was just typing "haha" because I just can't even try to be trendy, but the point still stands.

Then it started to get out of control. Rofl. Roflmao. Roflmfao. Pretty soon I began to think statements I was making were so hilarious people couldn't even be bothered to type, they simply had to mash the keyboard to let me know they hadn't had an anuerism from laughing so hard.

"brb" made sense to me too. You're talking to someone, suddenly the house catches on fire and a robot is trying to eat your dog. You're not going to take the time to type out, "Hold on a second, man, some gnarly shit's going down here." Even "Be right back" is too much. Shortening it to "brb" allows you to politely excuse yourself without pissing off your parents, girlfriend, dog-eating-robot, etc.

Now, though, something more sinister is happening. No more are breevs (internet abreviations, get it, I think I heard that somewhere) simple used for quick interjections. No... whole sentences are disappearing at a rate even more alarming than the loss of the rainforests.

I am so glad I am not a word.

For instance, say I want to write something simple, like "Oh my God, I find your comments entirely too hilarious!" (though why would anyone ever say that in real life?) I can just write "OMG, I ttly lold! Rofl!"

First of all, why do you need to tell me you're rollingonthefloorlaughing when you just told me you laughedoutloud. Secondly, is it really so hard to just type out the damn words?
Thirdly, do you have any idea how stupid you sound? And really, if it hadn't been for those Cingular commercials with that girl who talked like some people type then maybe this could have just been a silent threat. But no! Instead those commercials held up a grim mirror to the possibilities of our bleak, bleak futures.

Don't you realize? Can't you see? You are that annoying as fuck little girl! I know we all like to laugh at those commercials ("Idk, my bff Jill? haha... what a lamebat.") but if you actually text those types of things to friends, then you. Are. Her.

And really, I blame it on Twitter.

140 characters? Are you fucking kidding me?

Most times I Twitter something I have to either pray I am not having a thought so simple that my two year old nephew couldn't fail to articulate it, or I have to self edit myself so that it becomes clear to me after a minute that I shouldn't have bothered trying into the first place.

But then again, I suppose there is nothing to stop the slow, cancerous forward march of the breevs. Man got tired of pushing things, he invented the wheel. He got tired of lifting he invented pulleys. He got tired of women he invented homosexuality (bah-dum-kish). Now he gets tired of writing, and he invents breevs.

God help us all.

I'm Not Who I Was.

So here's my third post about the place I work (I'm counting the password one) and my second post that has to do with logging in to things (I'm counting the password one... again. Obviously.)

When I go to work everyday, I have to clock in, as many people with part-time jobs must. So I walk over to a little computer terminal, enter in my four digit Employee Identification Number, and then walk over to my desk to get down to work.
That's a lie. First I have to pretend I am James Bond and scan my fingerprint so that the computer will accept that I am who I am. My number isn't good enough for the computer, it needs some real hard evidence.

Now I know what some of you are thinking. "The future is here! Finally, my dreams of working in a place where I get to use television-like science can be combined with my reality of working a middle-class job where I sit at a desk all day!"
And I will admit, the idea of scanning my fingerprint every day to clock in and clock out was novel at first. It doesn't take more than a second, and really what do I care? So they have my print on file and can probably frame me for an assassination attempt, I at least get to say that I worked in a place with such high security that they needed me to scan my fingerprint to get in.

Then... then I started to look down while scanning my print.
You see there's this readout on the digital screen that happens to tell me how well my print matches the original print I gave them when I first began working here. It's like giving my fingerprint a report card based on its ability to be exactly the goddamned same.

What was unsettling, then, was my finger's seeming inability to score above a 72.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my finger is a C student at being itself. Every time I have to scan it I try something new. More pressure, less pressure, tilted to the right, the left, up, down, freshly cut with a razor blade. No matter what I do to try to help him along, my poor right index finger just can't get a B.
For a while this didn't bother me, except that for the past week or two something even more fiendishly bizarre had been happening.

My finger has actually been failing the test.

Instead of the reassuring Beep of success (or at least not sucking too badly) my fingerprint has been getting the unholy BeepBeep of failure.
It's like if Babe Ruth not only failed to hit a home run, but walked up to the plate with a loaf of French bread instead of a baseball bat.

Now this all links in with the first post I ever made, about the Existential Crisis that comes from working in a cubicle.
I've watched enough X-Files and Law and Order and Homicide to know that fingerprints are pretty much one and done. I have mine, you have yours, and you can always tell who I am by my fingerprint.
So what happens when my fingerprint ceases to be able to perform its sole task of being itself. Perhaps this little terminal with its fingerprint reader is some sort of Mexican Magical Realism device. Maybe its not reading my fingerprint, but my own self.
For instance, maybe I am really only 72% of who I was when I first got this job. Maybe my fundamental personality has shifted, and less than three thirds of my original characteristics are still in place.

This then raises an interesting question. Is it a good or a bad thing that I seem to be losing rather than gaining compatibility with my old self?
Maybe I was a terrible human being back then, and now I am slowly redeeming myself. Maybe back then I was suicidal and depressed, but now I am coming back into the light.

Maybe they just need to dust that damn thing so it will finally get a true reading and I can stop thinking about it.

Only time will tell.

Slate.com Agrees with Me

Sorta.

Here's an article from Slate that deals with the idea of identification and security. Passwords on Post-its, man.

Password Protection

Ever since the internet arose from the slimy depths of the collective human subconscious, passwords have been a necessity. And why not? Lord knows if I were a twelve year old girl I wouldn't want someone opening up my computer, checking my e-mails and seeing that I am a member of a fanfiction forum that specializes in homoerotic pornography based off of Harry Potter and that emo-vampire from Twilight.

(Contest: If someone wants to troll the internet to see if such a place actually exists, I will hyperlink to it, but as it stands I am too afraid of what I will find if I go looking for it to do it on my own.)

I remember back in the old days when a password was just that - a word that let you pass into the world of the internet (be it e-mails, chatrooms, or IM accounts). The word "slug" could be a password, and that was just fine.
But as cyberspace has morphed into a new and terrifying kind of animal, passwords have had to grow as well. And therein lies the problem.

You see, I work at a company that requires a password to get onto the computers. That same password is then applied to my company e-mail account
So far, so simple.
However, I also have to utilize a program that is specific to this company, and that requires its own password, which must be different than my computer password.
Ok...
The password for the computer and the e-mail must contain at least one number. Not so for my research program.
My university e-mail also requires that my password contain a number, but further specifies that I can't use any words from the English language... so really it isn't a password anymore. It's a Junior Jumble cypher as written by someone with a bowel-shakingly horrible case of dyslexia.
Then, when I need to check how many hours I worked last week so I can approve them so I can get paid, I have to enter still another password.

Still, if I just put my mind to it, I can remember all these passwords and never have to worry about them...

Until it is time to change them.

That's right, I can't be trusted to keep my own damn passwords a secret, so the world of technology helpfully decides when it's time to change them. The problem here is that all of these passwords are required to be changed at a differing interval of time.
So even if I were to simply make my most intricate and complicated password my universal password (which I have tried) sooner or later I will have to change one of them and the whole fucking system is thrown into utter disarray. Now I can't remember which one I had to change, and what I changed it to.
Suddenly I am typing in every password I have ever used until finally I simply mash the keyboard in frustration, only to find that the coagulative mess of characters I just created was the correct password all along. Because apparently I went through the same damn thing when I had to make the password in the first place.
Why? Because you can't reuse a password. Ever.
Now, I am no wiz when it comes to math, but I am guessing that by the end of my time on this earth, I will have created over 4,756 passwords. Most of them will be created by picking the name of a famous dead Russian (Leo Tolstoy for example) and then assigning him a random number (75).

This is why I love websites that allow me to pick a password, and judge it in real time for durability. A helpful box next to the "Enter desired password" field changes as a write.

Stop = Weak
Stopmaking = Frail
Stopmakingme = Fair
Stopmakingmewrite = Strong, but not good enough
Stopmakingmewritemore = Getting close...try again
Stopmakingmewritemorefuckingwords = Now you're just being mean, sir.

At least that incomprehensibly long string of bullshit will stick with me for the rest of my life.
Currently, my passwords are starting to feel a lot like my girlfriends. I lose one I loved and a new one comes along, and after a while I can feel a deep connection forming, until one day, seemingly without reason, they abandon me.

Someday we will figure out a way to simply feed a small sample of blood into a tube attached to our computers, using our very DNA as a password.
And the day after that we will have to expose our bodies to radiation to spark a genetic mutation, because unfortunately God didn't include enough numbers in our genetic code.