The Open Matt Project

Happy Thanksgiving!

After last nights wine binge, I failed to wake up until 2PM this afternoon. Not good. That meant that I wasn't going to get the fat ass turkey into the stove for at least 2 hours... or 4PM. So chowtime was looking like 8-9PM.

No problem. Travis stopped by at about 4ish, just about when I was busy preparing the stuffing. Chopped celery, mushrooms, and onions sauteed in my garlic / olive oil foam and butter - with salt, pepper, sage, and a touch of cayenne pepper as flavoring. I hadn't cut the baguettes last night, so even though I left them in the stove (which has a pilot light that keeps it mildly warm), only the outsides were dried out so I had to break 'em and bake 'em.
The mix, once completed, smelled awesome. It tasted awesome.

Much, much better than Stove Top.

Thank god Travis was here, since I don't think I could have stomached the turkey preparations without him. He pulled the guts out, washed it, and made it do a little dance. He carved the excess fat off the thick cut hickory smoked bacon and we stuffed probably 2 pounds of it under the skin of the turkey. It looked unbelievably disgusting. I jammed the stuffing in the bird and Travis couldn't stop laughing at me the whole time. After brushing the whole damn thing down with the garlic foam, we tossed the rest of the makings (onion, mushrooms, celery, potato quarters, and a few strips of bacon) around the fat bastard and tossed it in the oven.

Where it rests now.

I took a picture of the apple pie we made yesterday, and whenever they're done I'll be taking pictures of the finished turkey, the mashed potatoes, and the chocolate-berry crepes I'll be making for dessert. My mouth will not stop watering.

Thanks

I want your help but I can't take your help but I need it and I don't know how to make it help but it comes anyway and I thank you for it but it doesn't have anyplace to call home in me even though I have to take it and I call it as I see it inside me loving me from you and loving you through me back again for as long as it might take to tap tap on my shell and crack through my useless hell into the bound body I call myself binding myself for your own good so I'm left hoping you'll pass on to someplace more receptive with even my silent shriek there only to push you not to draw you in further more pain is not what I want despite that is all that is left.

Please Sir, May I Have Some More?

I've been so envious of the extension links on Winds of Change that I snuck in and stole the code for it. I am a code ninja!

No, actually I wrote the site manager and politely asked if he could help this poor cripple with some code lovin'. He was very helpful (thanks Joe!) and now I've got it up and running.

Angel I

"Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be, Connor. It's harsh, and cruel. But that's why there's us. Champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world was what it should be, to show it what it can be."
- Angel

Masochist. Fool. Romantic. Sucker. I've been called a lot of things, and for a long time I've felt they were pretty accurate. I do choose to do things that I know will hurt me. I do trust people who can easily betray me. I hold on to love and believe that it is forever. I know the risks, and I take the chances, and I pay the prices.

It's my money that I worked for that I loan or give away. If that is percieved as my not valuing money, and fosters an environment where people feel they can simply take it from me, that is not my failing.

It's my emotional investment. I choose to care about others. I want to feel their sadness and their joy. I enjoy sympathy. If that type of connection is not returned, or worse, used against me, that is not my failing.

It's my belief system that I'm not just displaying, but opening up to the public for modification. I read periodicals that I don't agree with. I listen to people who don't agree with me. I not only want that conflict - I require it. I can't fully support a system that I haven't already argued against to the best of my ability. If that is seen as a weakness, an opportunity to exploit a seemingly undefended perspective, that is not my failing.

I am not unaware of the risks. Quite the contrary, I am acutely focused on them. I simply refuse to let them stop me. Were I to stop, what would be left? No trust. No compassion. No openness. No love? No thanks.

In the movie The Mission one of the characters is faced with a decision that will result in tremendous suffering and death regardless of which way he decides. His aide asks, "what will you do?" and he replies, "as my conscience dictates... what else?"

Exactly.

Warm Up

Since we're going through some record-breaking cold weather, here're some hot chicks to help keep you warm. You can thank me later.

Rene Russo is hot. I saw her once in my favorite, now gone, cafe in NYC. She's even hotter in real life.





Neve Campbell is hot. She reminds me of Denali when she's sad, Rose when she's angry, and a weird combo when neutral. At any rate, caliente.





Fairuza Balk is hot. She has been on my top 3 "if I could do anyone it would be ..." list since I saw The Craft. Caveat: "do" means flirt with.





Liv Tyler is hot. I can't watch movies with her in it because she's the spitting image of Denali. Naturally, that means she has to be cast in the Lord of the Rings, a movie I've wanted to see since childhood. So it goes. Denali the elf. Great.





Anna Paquin is hot. I'm not sure when I decided this. Rose thinks she's asshole-ugly, but there's no accounting for taste.





Michelle Rodriguez is hot. I didn't want to see Girlfight at all in any way, but with HBO sometimes you don't get a choice so I saw it. She knocked me out.





Claire Danes is hot. My so called life, indeed. Too bad I was the nerdy kid and not Jared Leto.





Natasha Henstridge is hot. She knocked Bridgette Nielson out of the top-blonde slot. She's on a horrible show called She Spies, on after Saturday Night Live, that I watch anyway just for her. It hurts me to see her wasted on that tripe.





Milla. Married to Luc Besson. Another reason to hate the French.

* thanks to UGO Actress Archives for the tiny images.

Free Riding Sharks

I am frequently approached with various political perspectives, ranging from the blind, raving right-wing to the blind, raving left-wing, and almost always I find myself pulling out the same leveling tool so that I can more clearly respond to them.

The tool is the notion of two bodies of people who as far as I can tell have been around, well, as far as I can tell. One body I call "free-riders," and the other is called "sharks." The free-riders are people who take advantage of systems to ensure minimal effort and maximal return. The sharks are people who care only about one thing - maximizing their power over the world.

Abort, Retry, Trust

Trust has become the number one top-o-the-charts topic with a bang for me. In the past few months I've seen trust fostered, questioned, inversed, broken, and reborn. There is an inevitable degradation that occurs which taints everything that came before and everything that follows when something as pure as trust is sullied by scrutiny. I remember my father hearing Ronald Reagan say, "trust - but verify," and arguing with him about the value of that statement.

For him, it was a part of building trust to check and make sure. For those of us who remember the game of the same name, this would be akin to not fall back into your partners arms, but rather lean back. For me, trust intrinsically involves a degree of faith. You can check if you like, but if a failure occurs it is not going to occur because you failed to check.

Perhaps there is a connection between his 1950's sense of diminished certainty, fostered by severe political scandal (Nixon and JFK), the death of his wife and raising kids alone, and my more current non-existant certainty. For someone like me, who has been raised under the spectre of potential total annihilation since birth and whose schooling focused its attention on relativity (culminating in part with the ironic Uncertainty Principle) the allure of faith is almost irresistable. Faith requires no proof, and to some extent demands it.

Trust -
From Old Norse traust “confidence” and treysta “to trust.” Ultimately from an Indo-European base meaning “to be solid,” which is also the ancestor of English true, tryst, and tree.

Faith -
13th century. Via Old French feid from Latin fides “trust, belief” (source of English confide and fealty). Ultimately from an Indo-European word that is also the ancestor of English federal.

(Etymology is a tricky business, so I won't go into the great many thoughts that occurred while researching trust and faith. However - the mind reels.)

Trust is always grown over time. Typically, it is given in insignificant amounts to begin with, where a failure will cause little or no damage. It is then granted in larger amounts with each subsequent success. Again, verification only serves to let you know when a failure has occurred - it does not safeguard you from the failure. Each moment of trust stands on a iced lake of faith and this is what makes its successes so invigorating and its failures so catastrophic. The building of trust is a synergistic activity for the participants, rewarding partners with more than their investment. The breaking of trust is a recursive destruction that steals from each partner not just more than they invested but also from each following investment.

It is the foundation of faith under trust that cannot bear the weight of scrutiny and with only a moderate investigation it becomes the more mundane 'understanding' - and understanding changes with the winds. This is precisely why, after my experiences recently, I have come to understand trust so well and as a bitter consequence have so little of it.

Don't Ask!

Every time someone asks me "how are you doing?" and doesn't mean it in a casual way, y'know like passing someone in the hall, I usually answer. Really answer. I'm not talking about lying-on-couch therapy type answer, I just mean I tell them how I feel.

When I get a "oh," or a "right," or worse a "yeah, well I'm off to the store," I just want to reach out and touch them - on the nose, with my fist.

Don't fucking ask me how I'm doing if you don't care. Ask me about the weather! Ask me about what I'm up to! There are lots of questions that won't require any serious thought to respond to. There is just nothing more frustrating than telling someone how I'm trying to work out a problem, or get over a mood, or figure out something that's very important - and get a "oh, well anyway..." in response.

A Case of the Mundaes

After a very long phone conversation with Denali (yes, that Denali) last night, and an unrelated but even longer session with Anarchy Online I managed to cheat the first rays of the sun and get to bed. Consequently, I woke up at noon today in a state of mind that I would like to call 'groggy.' Sadly, I can't. The fact is that I was completely brain dead.

Let me illustrate.

I tried to browse my daily spread of websites. Reading? Don't make me laugh.
I tried to clean my kitchen, but when I threw out a handful of cutlery and put the styrofoam container from last nights sushi into the sink... Nix on cleaning.
I tried smoking and drinking coffee. Coffee! That wakes you up right? Right?

Wrong.

If you had any respect for me before - now is the time to stop reading. I warn you, it only gets worse from here. When faced with uncertainty and difficult choices, I have found the following piece of advice to be most useful: consult with trusted advisors

So it was a no brainer to flip the TV on and listen to the good advice of Brisco and Logan (detectives on Law & Order) telling me to sit down and let them take over. Except it didn't work. I couldn't understand what they were saying or why they were after the guy they were after. I got lost. Lost

Lost by TV. A new low. Perhaps I should take on the challenge of colored blocks, or maybe finger-painting. Sad, really sad...

Must be Monday.

Sundae is the Lords Day

Another quiet Sunday. I've been saying for years now that I dont drink, or smoke, or whatever it is that's being offered, on Sundays. It's the lord's day, I explain.

I've confused a lot of people with that, since I've been one of the least religious people most of my friends and acquaintences know. At least as far as they know that's the case. I like to play coy with my affiliations, particularly when the almighty is involved.

What is not so mysterious is how much I love Sundays. They really are my I-don't-have-to-run days. I don't understand why, but no matter how bad things are or how frustrated or angry I might be, it is soothed and washed away over the course of the day. By the evening, I'm almost always feeling relaxed and more settled.

This morning I awoke from one of those tear-jerking sad dreams that I have on occasion. I knew that I'd have to go downstairs and redistribute the garbage from the two large bags I had left to three small bags. The garbagemen refused to take the large ones last week, so there was no way around this one. The end result was digging through rotting food, bathroom scraps (tampons, toilet paper, etc.), and broken glass. Anyone who knows me knows that being elbow-deep in filth is going to poke my clean hands OCD, so let's just say this was somewhat olympic for me. It wasn't fun but I got it done.

Then I talked with Jim and found myself going over the recent frustrations with my social scene. Skipping the meat of the plot (lies, betrayal, anger, redemption, etc. etc.), I'll just say it didn't make my mood better. I tried to settle into some games or TV. No dice. I just felt, somewhat correctly, that my life was empty and aimless. I surrendered the day to the gathering clouds.

A sinkload of washed dishes, a phone order of my favorite sushi, and a new episode of Law and Order later - I feel much better. Much. It's quiet now, both outside and in. Maybe the lord has something to do with it, maybe not, but I can't help but think to myself - wouldn't it be cool if he did?

Matrix Repetitions

Spoiler Warning!!! Although there are no details, I do talk about the themes.

Here's my brief take on the Matrix trilogy. I think all of the problems that people have with the series can be directly linked to the diminishing respect the creators had for the audience as each movie came.

In the first movie, they explain only just enough to give your imagination a real workout.

In the second, there is far more exposition - much of it unneccessary. We understand the stakes. We understand that for every rule we're told about, there will be an exception, and we can't wait to see it. We so so got that Neo loves Trinity. We got that the machines are bad. We mostly got that choices and free will are the main theme. We really got 90% of that in the first movie, but ok, we can sit and wait through some repetition to bring the slow kids up to date.

In the third... Well, I'm baffled. What happened? They explain again and again that the machines are bad, that Neo loves Trinity, that nobody knows anything!, and so on. The characters ask "why?" about 20 times each, and after the first 30 minutes of the movie, I was saying out loud, "so we can talk even MORE" as a response - and the audience laughed each time!

And what was the payoff? After listening to the frenchman, and Smith, and the Oracle, and The Architect, and Morpheus? We got D.E.M.

Deus Ex Machina: In ancient Greek and Roman drama, a god introduced by means of a crane to unravel and resolve the plot.

Read: Neo.

What a miserable shame. What happened to the fascinating and mysterious Merovignan (or however you spell his name)? What about Persephone's kiss? What happened with the TrainMan? Where did the Twins go? Why was Zion's defense so poorly planned?

Almost everything that made The Matrix such a good movie is inexplicably absent by the time we get to the third movie. I just don't get it.

Sour Boots

Well I guess now I know how much people care about pix.

Birthday Pictures

If any smart monkey wants to tell me how to get these images to go side-by-side, I'd consider that a late birthday gift. I have too much creening to do in my house today to look it up. Happy Birthday to meee!

Ow Ow Ow

Ok, I officially hate whoever it was who stole my bottle of Advil. I have my suspicions. It is genuine evil to steal medicine. evil I say!

Happy Birthday to Me

There is just something wrong with folks commenting on the Halloween post (Halloween was so so so lame this year) about my Birthday, so here is the official "Matt turned 31" post.

Thanks to everyone who showed up, despite my protests, yesterday to bring me cupcakes and beer and make me laugh and allow me to play videos nobody wants to see! I love you all so fj4

ugh had to go vomit. I am old, and hung over bigtime. Ugh.

Anyway, Happy Birthday to meee!