Posts by Rob

Weird Movies

Nov03
2008 Rob Written by Rob

Much to her dismay at times, Kristi married a movie nut – made worse by his preference for flicks that are, well, just weird. I can’t help it. I love movies to begin with, an addiction that goes back to working weekends by myself in a server room with nothing much to do except wait for things to break, while watching an endless parade of movies on my portable DVD player.

The weird movies aren’t supposed to be taken literally. They hit the human condition from an oblique angle, coming up a take on human truth that would be obscured by a more conventional story. That’s what makes really good fantasy fiction – not in the furry-hobbit-ring-quest sense, but instead stories that are speculative and weird and a little like looking at the world through a funhouse mirror. You get the Alice In Wonderland effect. Everything is a bit off, a bit shifted, but the human condition is thrown into a sharper light for it.

Some of my all-time favorite weird movies:

Stranger Than Fiction. A rut-bound IRS auditor (Will Farrell, in a surprisingly serious role) starts hearing a woman’s voice (Emma Thompson) in his head, narrating his life in the third person – and before long, forecasting his imminent death. His only means of avoiding this fate is, with the help of a local lit professor (Dustin Hoffman), to unravel the dynamics of the voice’s “story”. Great movie for English lit geeks.

Brazil. What can I say, it’s a Terry Gilliam flick about a 1984-esque UK, the socially oppressive nature of bureaucracy, and the profound self-delusional power of the human spirit. And bad plastic surgery.

Pi – Faith In Chaos. Darren Aronofsky’s (Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain) debut indie film about a math genius, obsessed with finding a steady numerical pattern underlying the stock market, who gets a lot more than he bargained for when he finds it.

A Scanner Darkly. The best Philip K. Dick adaptation ever made. In a U.S. under constant, all-pervading government surveillance, an undercover narcotics cop – hopelessly addicted to a nasty new street drug called Substance D – is tasked with investigating a D addict who may be deeply connected in the drug’s distribution network. The suspect: him.

Primer. The smartest time travel film I’ve ever seen. A couple of suburban Apple-esque garage hackers accidentally invent a limited form of time travel, and use – and abuse – it the way most average modern real-life suburbanites would. Incredibly smart movie, one you’ll have to see at least twice before really appreciating what the hell is going on. Brilliant, brilliant indie flick.

I Heart Huckabees. This one’s just too bizarre for words. An extremely odd movie about corporate conventionalism, featuring “existential detectives” played by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin. Great film, just way weird.

And probably my favorite all-time weird movie..

Bubba HoTep. Okay, follow me on this one.

Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) didn’t die in 1977 – that was a damned good Elvis impersonator who swapped lives with Elvis, leaving Presley to live a happy, carefree and unentangled life as an anonymous performer again. Then the real Elvis lost the only proof that he was the real Elvis. Then he broke his hip and ended up in a nursing home in rural Texas, old and bitter and regretful and unbelieved by everyone, trapped forever in the life of an Elvis impersonator. The only one who believes his story is John F. Kennedy – an elderly black resident who insists that the government dyed him black and has part of his brain in a jar in Washington.

When a cursed Egyptian mummy invades their nursing home, only Elvis and JFK – unbelieved and generally considered highly dotty – are left in position to fight it.

Bubba HoTep is my all-time favorite weird movie, just because it’s an entirely insane story idea (based on a novella by Joe R. Lansdale) and has no business working – but it does. And well. What would otherwise be just a goofball idiotic Elvis monster romp actually becomes a highly poignant story about aging, regrets, and reflections on fame, courage and life.

You guys got any over-the-top weird movies that you love and could recommend?

Posted in Diversions, Everyday Life

Another Day In The Salt Mines (Rob Edition)

Oct31
2008 Rob Written by Rob

Yeah, I work from home. I’ve been self-employed now for almost ten years. And god, when you put it like that, a guy feels old – was 2000 really almost a decade ago? You have got to be kidding me.

So a few days back, Kristi told me about a recent conversation in her classroom. I imagine someone noticed that I was tagging along on the Berkeley trip and wondered just what in the heck Mrs. Warren’s husband did for a living, to be able to just take a day off and ride along on his wife’s field trip.

“He’s a writer,” she said. The next question is usually, “What kind of books does he write?”, as though the only successful writers in the world are book authors. Kristi preempted it: “Mr. Warren writes for businesses – brochures, websites, technical documentation, anything like that they need. Businesses go to him to write that stuff for them.”

“And so your husband just works from home? And he can just take off whenever he wants?”

“Well, not whenever he wants. Sometimes he’s on hard deadline and has to work late getting a big project done. Sometimes he just spends the morning drinking coffee and playing Burnout Paradise or whatever the hell he does when I’m not at home.”

“And he doesn’t have a boss?”

“He works for his clients. But no, he works for himself.”

“How’d he hook up THAT sweet gig??”



Long story, man. Long story.

But then again, once you get to a certain age, isn’t everything a long story?

Truth was, I woke up one day many years ago and looked at my life and said to myself, I’ve had enough of this crap. Think Peter from Office Space. And unpleasant things happened: a friend died of cancer, another old friendship painfully crumbled, and of course, some planes were flown into some buildings and knocked a whole lot of people (including me) out of the complacency of the 1990s. I didn’t really “hook up” anything, much less a sweet gig – I just changed my life one day. Everything else after that was hard work, sacrifice, determination, a few smart decisions and a fair amount of luck.

I just decided to not give up, and that decision hasn’t killed me yet. Everything else was a sidebar.

The writing business – our business, now – has had a down year from 2007 (thanks to practically taking the summer off for the wedding), but we’ve had a great October. That makes the third month straight of record numbers. We just the other day signed on a new client in supply chain logistics; they sell GPS tracking solutions to trucking fleets. I’m really excited about this one – their business just cuts across so many verticals, making them an ideal portfolio job. Every client like them usually leads to a dozen more high quality clients, right behind them. We now have a full docket of high quality clients, boding really well for 2009.

So anyway, today, Halloween, I’m in a lull. Half a dozen clients with open projects, but most of them are on their thumbs for one reason or another; two new clients won’t officially launch until next week. So today I’m mainly sitting here in the home office, rewriting the code on the business website and our back office organizational software, tightening up the organization. I’ve got a movie (Bubba HoTep) playing in one corner of one of my big widescreen computer monitors; I’m keeping an eye on email and generally just drinking coffee and waking up. I might crack open Burnout later if I need a video game break.

Okay. So maybe it is a sweet gig. Most days, at least.

Bad day at the beach is still better than a good day at the office – know what I mean?

Posted in Work

Berkeley

Oct24
2008 Rob Written by Rob

I think I’ve mentioned before that things tend to break for the business at around the fifteenth of the month. It’s the weirdest thing: first two weeks, dead. Then we hit the fifteenth and the phone won’t stop ringing, leading into two weeks of crazy-crazy-crazy before dying off again.

Every month, right around the 10th, Kristi has to talk me off the ledge. There’s nothing quite like knowing that the month is almost halfway over, and then looking up at the status board and you’ve got two freakin’ billable hours logged so far for the month. Is that going to be it? Oh crap.

And then the fifteenth rolls around and BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM it’s all incoming mortars. Within about a week, we had big new projects from my industrial joint client, a New York marketing firm, an orthopaedics practice and my A/V lift designer client, and had a very hot, very solid lead on a client that does GPS tracking systems for trucking fleets. We’re going to end up rounding out the best October the business has seen in – well, looking back now, probably ever. The flipside is that now I’ve got a desk full of work that needs to be done soon if I want to bill it on October billing. So it’s off to the races.

Perfect time to take a day off for a field trip to Berkeley.

It’d been scheduled for over a month, this field trip with Kristi (and fellow EU teachers Brad and Anthony) and about forty gifted students from East Union. And it was fun: we piled up in a charter bus, watched movies there and back, and went out to UC Berkeley for the full campus tour. The kids were great. We adults raided the gift shop for a Berkeley coffee mug, wandered aimlessly up and down Telegraph trying to find someplace to eat that was open before 1pm, and generally soaked in the college experience. By the time we returned, Kristi and I were just exhausted, feet hurting and both of us ready to crash. Luckily we had dinner planned at her parents’ that night, or else God only knows what we would’ve ended up eating. Granola bars, maybe.

Berkeley was fun. I got my mug. The kids got their big-city-college experience. Kristi got photos. And now we both have a LONG day ahead of us. I have three client calls and two big deliveries to get out the door. She has football duty tonight, and so she might not get home until almost 9pm.

Just one of those Fridays where you’re living for Saturday, know what I mean?

PS – Good news. Kristi’s parents have agreed to take care of Samson while we’re in Florida on the weekend of 11/8. That’s a load off: he’s expensive to board and doesn’t take to it very well. It’s one thing for a 10lb cat to dislike boarding, it’s quite another altogether for an energetic 120lb lab. He’s going to be a lot happier that weekend staying at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. Thanks Don and Kathy!

Posted in Travel, Work

The China Cabinet

Oct19
2008 Rob Written by Rob

They say that in every successful marriage, one person is the spender and the other is the saver. It’s not that I’m cheap per se – or at least, I don’t think I am – it’s just that of the two of us, I’m the one more likely to flinch at a price tag. Part of it comes from upbringing. A lot of it comes from working as a freelance writer for almost ten years, never knowing exactly what my income will look like from one month to the next. My natural instinct is to squirrel away nuts for the winter.

The flip side to that equation is that Kristi likes nice things and is a lot more willing to test the financial waters in the name of something nice and old that she found at the local antique shop.

When we first began sorting our wedding registry – even before I moved to California – one of the very first selections we settled on was the china. True to nature, my wife to be informed me that we were registering for nice china, whether or not anyone actually bought us the stuff. It wasn’t a hard fight for her to win; we both felt that once we’d passed the thirty mark, our days of fine Target kitchenware had been numbered anyway. So we registered for Wedgwood china, which runs retail for about $225 a setting, but can be obtained for about half that when it goes on sale.

We were pleasantly surprised to have actually received several settings for our wedding in July, as well as for holiday and birthday gifts. Between those, gift cards and some last minute MAJOR scores on end-of-summer sales, we’ve recently rounded out a full ten place settings.

(And I’m telling you, we seriously scored: three settings at $100/each at Macy’s. If we buy or receive two more through Macy’s now, they give us about $150 of free and very nice stuff. Ah, the holidays..)

So these ten boxes of china have gradually accumulated in the kitchen cabinets because we had nowhere else to put them. And since about March, Kristi’s been jonsing to buy a china cabinet for the dining room. Every so often she’d find one she liked at the local antique shop, would come home and broach the subject of plunking down X dollars and I’d balk. Can’t do it, babe. We’re slammed on wedding bills, and besides, the world’s probably coming to an end next week and so let’s settle for something flat pack from Target. And then she’d fix me with that cold stare of death that she slings out whenever the subject of flat pack furniture ever seriously enters a house conversation.

The business had a good week this week. Ended Friday with a newly signed contract, a deposit check on its way, two other solid prospects in negotiation and several clients scheduling out billable hours for October. We were both tired after a long week but upbeat and generally in a good mood. So we decided to get out of the house on Saturday and drive up into the mountains, up around the small Calaveras mining towns like Angel’s Camp and Murphys. It’s nice and relaxing to just spend an afternoon up in the Sierras, browsing the little local shops and playing tourists and enjoying a winding mountain drive among the big redwoods. We ended up at a little shop in Arnold full of odds and ends and bits and pieces, some inexpensive, some not.

And there we finally found a china cabinet that we both liked. It was the right design, size and feel for our dining room. It cost slightly more than the antique shop one we disagreed on back in April. And it took several moments for Kristi to pick her jaw up off the floor when she pointed at it, said “I’d like that” in her I-know-I’m-not-gonna-get-it way, and I simply said okay, I’ll go pay for it – let’s figure out how to get it in the truck. I think she still doesn’t believe it.

Our new china cabinet, in its new home and full of Wedgwood china:

china_cabinet_20081019.jpg

I like surprising my wife sometimes. It’s fun.

Posted in Everyday Life, Family and Friends, Gift Ideas
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