The other day, I was watching television and realized I had nothing to watch. There was nothing new on Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus, Apple Itunes (or whatever it’s called), Amazon Prime, HBO Go (or is it Now?), CBS All Access and Telemundo. Okay, I don’t even know if I have Telemundo, but I bet if I did, there would be nothing new on it.
I’ve reached that era of humanity in which I’ve watched everything I can possibly imagine, leaving me staring at my television screen with nothing to do. Yes, a real first-world problem, eh?
So, rather than try to find another source of television, I’ve decided it’s time for me to just launch my own streaming service, something that caters specifically to Duane. I know the whole world has been waiting for this, as I’ve queried my various stuffed animals, and they nodded emphatically (or they just stared back at me with blank faces, but I’m pretty sure they were enthusiastic).
So, I’ve decided that in order to launch my new service, I need to feature premiere Duane-programming, which means 24/7 Star Trek (but only the shows I haven’t seen yet, which limits it to, um, none of them cause I’ve seen them all, twice, plus that one where Kirk fights the lizard guy probably at least five times; I mean, quality is quality, right?).
But the shows are going to have to be really cool, so as I’m a huge fan of twists and mysteries, we’ll have to focus on a lot of those, except every now and then they’ll have to not have a twist or mystery (being the twist and mystery itself). There should also be absolutely no sports whatsoever, because I don’t like watching shows where people can do all sorts of athletic things I can’t do, like breathe normally, or anything more strenuous than that.
I also don’t want romances because they’re not believable. Never once in my life has a woman knocked on my door and then wanted to make mad passionate love to me. Nor go on a second date. Perhaps there’s more than just a coincidence there.
I don’t like reality programming because I refuse to believe that 37 teenagers can live in the same house without an adult and somehow still manage to end up with beer in the refrigerator. And people laugh at me for liking science fiction?
So, the kinds of shows we’ll have to have will be the very high-tech science fiction shows with laser battles and really cool cars that talk to the actors, saying really funny things that people don’t actually say in real life, because that would be too scripted. But they still have to sound all natural, like it’s the right thing to happen at the most inopportune times.
And ninjas. You kind of need ninjas in most shows. Which now that I think about it, perhaps romances would be okay, as long as it was a romance between two ninjas (who throw laser ninja stars at teenagers who live in apartments with no beer). I’m not really sure where I’m going with this one, but something tells me I’m on a roll.
Of course, there’s no way to really talk about this without mentioning price. I figure $3.00 a month is appropriate as long as the entire world seems interested in subscribing. Considering there’s about 340 million people in the US alone (on any Tuesday, although Wednesdays and Fridays our numbers dwindle horribly), that would be (gets out calculator…at least three dollars times 340 million, which my two years of second grade math instruction comes out to about at least a million dollars). So, yeah, this would be really profitable.
I was going to say that my streaming service should have hot cheerleaders and Scarlet Johanssen but that was much more relevant when I was a teenager, so let’s just say that as long as we’re meeting the ninja demographic, we’re probably okay.
I haven’t figured out exactly when I’m going to be launching this new streaming service, but it may have to wait until after I’m finished watching the latest season of The Expanse, on Amazon Prime. Or was it on Starz? One of these days I’m going to have to figure out where my stuffed animals have hidden the remote.
First off, this isn’t a post that’s designed to glorify how much I’ve read. Posts like that have a habit of being a bit condescending, boring and painful to get through. Yes, I’ve read a lot of stuff. But so have so many other people. This post really isn’t about that.
What this post is about is one of the consequences of reading a lot of stuff. As a social creature, I really love to share great literature and nonfiction with other people. The problem is: Most people don’t care.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: I love to read. When I was a kid, just learning to read, I remember having finished all of the stuff other kids were supposed to read and then asking for more. The teacher had nothing else to share in the classroom at that time, but she had been reading “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky, which was on her desk. I asked about that, and she told me it was too difficult for someone of my young age. So, the next day, I got my mom to check out the book for me from the public library. And I struggled through it, and finished it. Years later, I’ve probably read that book at least five times. I get something new from it each time I read it.
A more recent example: I just finished reading Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, a brilliant writer and thinker who also wrote A Paradise Built in Hell, which I love for its alternative approach of explaining history and the ramifications that occur during history. Both books are chalked full of history, so because I work with a couple of history people, I thought about recommending those books to them. The response I generally received was a blank stare, almost an admission of “your review to me didn’t convince me that I should waste my time reading what you were talking about.”
And that’s the problem right there. Over the years, as I’ve read more and more brilliant stuff, I’ve often recommended it to other people. What I’ve discovered is that so few people take up the gauntlet and decide to read those books. Instead, they listen to your explanation of that book and then because you’ve explained everything about it to them, they decide not to read it, possibly thinking that they’ve already absorbed the knowledge of that book by the mere moment you spent explaining it to them. And then they go on with their lives, only reading the things they find significant.
This reminded me of two things. First, Rebecca Solnit’s book Men Explain Things to Me, in which she details an encounter she had with a boorish man who found out she was a writer and had written on a particular obscure topic so spent the next hour or so telling her she had to read this book about her subject if she was ever going to understand it like he did. Turns out, she wrote that book he was talking about, and as men behave like men, he took forever to acknowledge that once finding out, and then still managed to talk down to her regardless of realizing that fact.
Second, the concept of knowledge and literature requires a modern scholar to actually read the texts himself or herself and not just the cliff notes version (and especially not just the conversation about it from someone who read it instead). Imagine discussing Plato with someone who has never read it but watched a lecture on Plato once. That works great if neither of you have read it (you can be clueless together) but when you’re the one who has read him, discussing it with someone who has no intention of reading it is a complete waste of time.
That’s how I feel when I talk about literature with people and discover that they’re not going to read it, condemning it because they didn’t read it first. I talked about Solnit with one person and actually saw his face turn negative, like he was disgusted by the fact that he’d never heard of her before, and thus, she was unimportant in his mind. That’s the kind of emotional response I receive a lot when I talk about literature that is important yet obscure.
What probably bothers me the most is that people often do not even realize that the books we read are snapshots of the best works of lives that we may never experience again. Other times, they’re snapshots of careers in progress, such as when I recall having read the early works of Ken Follett (who wrote a brilliant spy thriller in Eye of the Needle and then turned around and wrote one of the worst mysteries with ever bad writing technique available soon after that; and then he followed that up with one of the greatest historical narratives I have yet to read in my lifetime). It’s like having great conversations with people who have so much to tell us, and we’re limiting ourselves to only what’s popular, and quite often, on some television or movie screen.
It’s almost gotten to the point where I may not discuss literature with people any more. I remember bringing up Haruki Murakami to one colleague recently and received that “I haven’t read him, so obviously he’s not significant” response. Keep in mind, Murakami is probably among the most respected authors living in the world today. But because he’s not “known” to some individual, I end up having to explain his significance, which finally ends with a sense of “well, if I should find myself on a deserted island, am already bored and his book is all that’s there, I might read it.” Again, I find myself thinking, screw you and I hope you remain uneducated for life. But fortunately, I’m not that elitist. Well, not after I’ve had my first morning diet Dr Pepper.
Years back, I had been between relationships and just decided that perhaps I needed time to myself, basically dating no one. I was in the middle of undergraduate work for genetics at the time, planning to eventually move onto medical school when a long-term relationship just fell apart on me. Realizing I had a number of years of tough education ahead of me, I realized this was probably not the time to get involved in any kind of future relationship.
Life doesn’t really work that way, unfortunately.
During that summer, I took a part time temp job to just pass the time (and keep up my finances before school work made that impossible), so I got this really mundane job working for a subsidiary of Pacific Bell. They were moving one section of the business to another location, so the job consisted of a bunch of temp workers literally transferring physical files from one place to another. Very boring work.
But kind of exactly what I needed after a break-up.
There were a few dozen other workers there with me, and there were a couple of supervisors. I kept being offered one of the mid-level supervisory positions, due to education, but as I wasn’t really there for longevity or intentions of rising up, I chose to remain at the bottom and just do the grunt work. Again, it was exactly what I needed.
The job was supposed to last about three months, and about a few weeks into it, the cliques already started to form, and as you would suspect, it’s very easy to get cast into certain corners, even without doing anything to make it happen.
One of the first things I noticed was that because of the horrible management of this project, we had lots and lots of time of sitting around in conference rooms just talking. I quickly started bringing books to read to pass the time, but all around me, people did the sort of things you might expect happen when people have lots of time and nothing to do. Add in those cliques I talked about, and you might get the impression that things might turn sour really quick-like.
The place had a real feral activity to it that resonated with herd mentality. The group would often find a weaker member of the room and then pounce on him or her, pretty much turning that person’s life into a nightmare until the person finally decided to never return again. We lost a number of people that way.
In the early days of this group activity, I found myself targeted early but that ended quickly as I was also a debater (and had been doing it in college to begin with); they discovered it was no fun engaging someone who could rapidly respond to anything they wanted to bring my way. So, I was mainly left to my own devices, which, as I said, usually consisted of me and my book.
For the most part, I really didn’t pay much attention to what happened around me, until I noticed the attention turn to a young woman named Sally. Now, Sally was originally from Hong Kong, on a path towards citizenship in the US, but she spoke horrible English. This made her an easy target of a group of workers who just loved the idea that it took her time to respond to everything they said, so it was easy to twist her words around and add to her frustration. Plus, she was the kind of young woman who got really upset, really fast and when edged on by people who are just trying to cause trouble, it does not bode well.
Due to a few assignments that were doled out by coincidence, Sally and I spent a few hours alone in the room when others were doing other things, so I actually had a chance to talk to her. Unlike the rest of them, I’m a really good listener, so when she was struggling to say what she wanted to say, due to broken English, I spent more time just listening and letting her find the words that she wanted to say instead. I learned quite a bit about her and found some of her background to be quite fascinating. Example: She was very well educated; just not in English.
As you might suspect, the others treated her like she was stupid, as people tend to do when someone around them is not fluent in the mainstream language. And as they continued on their warpath each time they tried to spook her, I started interjecting in those conversations so that not only did they have to attack her, but now they had to go after me as well. And as I said before, I’m not the sort of person you want to engage in argumentation.
Quickly, she realized it was a lot safer to hang out wherever I was and was pretty much always sitting next to me. The others just quickly realized that she wasn’t worth the effort, as they weren’t getting the results they wanted, so they went after someone else and continued their usual bantering. To be honest, I don’t remember much more about them after that.
So, needless to say, it was very difficult for me to separate myself from Sally during this work assignment. At the same time, I didn’t want to lead her on or get involved with any relationships at this time, so even though she was always around me, I tried to avoid thinking much about it. However, as it was getting close for me to finish my time there (school was going to be starting back up soon), I was going to take the coward way out and just disappear once my assignment was complete.
Unfortunately, Sally was a lot smarter than I realized. The day before I was supposed to be done (I had told no one but my immediate supervisor I was leaving), she appeared where I was sorting files and held out her hand: “Phone number!” she said.
I guess I should have realized there was a problem when we first started dating because it started with me getting home that night, receiving a message on my answering machine stating when and where we were meeting for coffee at a time she designated.
So, a couple of little things that help explain her a little further: First, she was a dead ringer for the actress Michelle Yeoh, something I made the mistake of saying one early date. She got extremely angry and said “She’s ugly!” Which, of course, she she’s not.
She also hated every one of my friends. Every one. The men were all abusers. Her words. The women? I suspect a bit of jealousy, even though they were never a threat to her in any way.
On a whim, she would just get really angry over anything. When we disagreed on something, she would pinch, really hard. And she would rarely stop. I know it sounds kind of funny because pinches don’t sound really painful, but oh wow, they were. I’ve been shot before, and I’m really not sure which one I’d consider worse.
One of my favorite, yet weird, experiences involves when we went to see a movie. The usher was taking our tickets and he looked up and her and nearly dropped his jaw, stating: “Oh, my god, you look just like the woman in the James Bond film.”
He was referring to, of course, Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies. The second he said it, I saw her face turn seriously angry, and I said: “I’ll go grab us some seats.” The last look I saw on his face was what appeared to be mortal fear as Sally was closing in on her next victim. About five minutes later, she sat down next to me, and I said, “He’s still alive, right?” She just nodded and then started in on some popcorn.
I’ll be honest, but I just wasn’t really ready for a relationship at the time. I kind of fell into it, and I really wasn’t over the previous one. And she kept getting more and more angry and violent as time moved on. I brought her to a school function once as my plus one, and my thesis advisor pulled me aside before asking me if she needed to plan an intervention to get me out of this relationship.
So, at some point I realized it was probably safer to end this relationship, so I tried to sit down with her and talk about it, but every time I did, she suddenly forgot how to speak any English, said she had to leave, and then came back a few days later as if nothing had happened. This stretched on for some time.
Finally, I set up a time where we could talk, and I said, without doubt, that this is something that needs to happen. Instead of pulling the same tactic, she nodded and left.
A few days later, she wrote me an email, and started with an abusive flurry of messages about how I was the worst person who ever walked the planet. I, at first, tried to respond in as friendly a manner as possible, but then those messages kept getting worse and worse. So, I stopped responding.
And then she started sending me bills. For her time. She had literally gone through and calculated everything she might have ever spent during our six months together and wanted compensation. So, clothes she bought, transportation she had taken, air she breathed, etc., was fair game. And when I didn’t respond, those amounts kept going up, like the worst loan shark in history.
Finally, I moved away and entered grad school. I stopped hearing from her.
Years later, a friend of mine from where I had been living sent me a link to a Craigslist ad. It was a series of pictures of Sally, with three kids (too young to have any connection to me), trying to find a new boyfriend because the last guy left her with three kids.
I don’t really have much to say. Maybe it’s just better that way.
