Super?

Superbad with Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. I'm not sure what to say about this one. I liked The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up a lot but this movie didn't quite do it for me. The first third of it was awesome and I liked the last part of it too but for some reason the big middle section sort of fell flat. I could tell it was trying to be funny but it came across as the kind of funny reserved exclusively for telling not-funny-at-the-time situations. Which is exactly the kind of situation they were in, but again, as you're watching it it's not funny at the time. Nearly everyone else I spoke to liked it a lot, so maybe it was just lost on me. Since I was never one to go out and party in high school all of the "oh, man that is so true!" moments were lost on me.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The previous two movies made by the same guys were funny and definitely had a moral to the story. This had a message (the crazy high school life really isn't/wasn't what it was cracked up to be) but it seemed to emphasize that at the expense of the comedy that the film is billed as.
One thing I must laud the producers on is their focus on reversed roles in their movies. In the 40 Year Old Virgin it's the man that is sweet and innocent and the women who are making purely sexual advances on him. In Knocked Up it's emphasized that the female role is partially responsible for her accidental pregnancy as opposed to it being exclusively the dumb, horny man's fault. In Superbad, the sweet girl the main character has a crush on turns out to be the aggressive one; the hot, popular girl hosting the party turns out to not drink and isn't interested in popular, hot jocks. Even among the male characters the traditional roles are discarded. The fat kid isn't the meek sidekick but the confident and vulgar leader of the group and the nerdy kid is actually the most resourceful and street smart among them.

Ants

I've always had a love/hate relationship with ants. For a time in elementary school we conducted campaigns against colonies, drawing them out and smashing them daily until there were hardly any workers left. But you could never get rid of them entirely. We knew there was a queen that we couldn't reach, but we thought we might be able to seal their colony shut with glue and rocks. But obviously that doesn't work. No matter what we did, they'd always come back. Once I realized that, I developed a respect for them and would study them as empirically as an eight-year-old on lunch break could. One such very scientific study involved comparisons between the red ants and the black ants, whose only visible difference seemed to be their color. Same size, same build, but common lore had it the red ants were more ferocious and and a more painful bite. The experiment consisted of collecting equal numbers of red ants and black ants, shaking the container and pouring them in the same enclosed space together. As I recall the red ants won, though it wasn't a fair match; the red ants ganged up on individual black ants.
I have a feeling that if my everyday experiences with ants were with South American or African ants, I would have just hated them outright. There's something about a river of ants that eats anything in its path that doesn't inspire the same kind of grudging admiration. The ants at Collier Elementary couldn't be kept down, they persevered, they were the underdogs. Those ants are just bullies. And then there are these ants. Nothing about this ant sounds good, it's apparently used in an initiation ritual into manhood. Like the guy said, "Why is it that things that make you a man tend to be such dumb things to do?" I'd prefer a slightly more practical test of manhood, something more Spartan.

Beyond Bread

Saturday was my last day at Beyond Bread. Unlike Sunflower Market I really did enjoy working there, despite the inevitable stupidity of people. I don't want to work in a restaurant again for precisely that reason. Thankfully the idiocy was limited primarily to customers and the occasional coworker and not the managers, which again, is more than I could say about Sunflower. I didn't learn as much about humanity as I did with my first job, but important lessons can still be drawn from the experience. Some of these might not be lessons so much as rants, but oh well:
-Passing the anti-smoking law in Arizona really helped get rid of the most unpleasant coworkers. Within a week of that passing the mean, dessicated, beady eyed spinster, the creepy, fish-faced,-alleged pedophile and the irritatingly flamboyantly gay drug addict all quit or were fired. Funny how my upbringing indirectly taught me that smokers were bad people and I fought against that generalization for years, yet the worst people at work all just happened to be smokers. I felt vindicated, but I'm still trying to fight that prejudice.
-Beyond Bread seems to hire two main types of people: beautiful young girls and creepy and/or lecherous men. There's more variety than that but the trend is readily visible and puzzling. On top of that there's a division between the Front of House and the Sandwich Line. The FoH people tend to be the attractive, charismatic and polite type while the Sandwich Line tend to be the foul mouthed, rude and surly type. There are exceptions to every rule, of course.
-Every semester I try to give sorority girls the benefit of the doubt; maybe they're not as dumb as we all think, maybe it's all an act. And every semester I'm angry at myself for questioning my own senses. I'm sorry, they really are dumb and as polite as they pretend to be with their smiles and upward inflections? they are rather inconsiderate. I have a long list of stories I could tell, but I'll just give you this one: after an agonizingly long and confused and needlessly complicated order they declare how they must be the worst customers in the world (they're not, sadly) and that I should get a tip for putting up with them. They proceed to pay and walk off with a "'annnkyou!" and leave no tip. I don't mind not getting a tip, really I don't, but if you basically tell someone you'll give them a tip because you know you've been difficult and you don't tip them at all, you're a total bitch.
-Some things to remember are: Beyond Bread does not have pastrami. Nor does it have potato salad. Nor does it have a soup/salad/sandwich combo. They have menus by the front of the entrance, please take two seconds to locate them. The sides are (please remember this): chips (they are called Beyond Bread Crisps on the menu. This is admittedly confusing as they are not chips of bread but simply house brand potato chips) baked Lays, baby carrots (they are raw, why would you have cooked carrots as a side?) or for an extra fifty cents pasta salad (totally worth it) or vinegar slaw (wouldn't be worth it if it were free). If you're going to order half a sandwich, let the cashier know that part first, not last.
-Getting free pastries night after night on the closing shift sounds great at first, but the novelty wears off soon. Or at least it should.
-Do not complain about how fat you are while you take home multiple pastries a night each night for a month.
-The highly volatile and eccentric people they hire at Beyond Bread are, as the managers pointed out, the good ones. "You should see the ones we turn away!" Now there's an unsettling thought. And on a related note, don't ask for a job application reeking of alcohol. Also, don't answer "Why do you want to work here?" with "I'm really desperate for work! Please! I'll work anywhere!"
-If I find the people who seem to enjoy deliberately defiling public restrooms, I will stab them in the eye (I strongly encourage you to do the same). Seriously now, what reason is there to pee on the floor, crap on the side of the toilet or wipe your snot on the walls? Assholes.
-Ending on a high note, customer stupidity or mere oddness is the greatest source of entertainment there is at work. From people ordering Montezuma's Revenge and Gordy's Godzilla to a bowl of Gestapo and the Eat Me Out salad. The last funny story I heard was regarding a certain young, blonde, beautiful and shapely customer. Usually she only comes in with a very rich older man and of course he pays for their meal. But the other day she came in by herself and when she paid with her credit card the cashier noticed her name: Tyndall Tsunami. The first thought that went through her head (bless her sweet little heart) was that she must have married him because of his last name. She seemed very unaware of how much that sounded like a porn star name. I Googled it (how could I not?) but found nothing. I'm also left wondering why you would have your stage name on your credit card.

Shoulda Coulda Woulda

I have been puzzled by several people's notions of regret and reconciliation with the past. Though nothing has recently incited this posting, I feel I've digested the matter sufficiently to venture an opinion. There are those that say they do not regret any of the things they have done in the past because there's no point in dwelling on the past, or that if it wasn't supposed to happen it wouldn't have, or frequently that they do not regret because the experiences made them who they are today. While these are all well and good means of coping with one's ignoble past deeds (and I believe any rationalization that works is better than sullenly obsessing over one's mistakes) I wonder if people apply that type of reasoning beforehand. Something along the lines of foolishness begets wisdom, which I can hardly disagree with since I know several people with colorful pasts with a wisdom beyond the ken of my own stuffy self. That said, such wisdom does come at a cost of happiness and if the idea of regret even enters one's head it was probably not something altogether pleasant.
But just because someone went through such an experience does not necessarily make them wiser. There are some who do knowingly things against their better judgment and later claim the ordeal was worth it because now they know why it was a bad idea. This logic baffles me; it's as though they decided to hit themselves in the face with a hammer knowing full well that common knowledge says that's a painful experience, then after hitting themselves in the face with a hammer declare that the experience was worthwhile because now they know exactly why people always say, "Don't hit yourself in the face with a hammer."
There's also the issue of what everyone else will think about them. Now common belief holds that we shouldn't care what everyone else will think about our actions. In the literal sense this is true; we shouldn't worry what everyone will think, but I have yet to meet a single person who does not alter their behavior based on what some will think. At any rate, whether or not you decide to feel (or at least tell people that you feel) regret is contingent on how you think people around you will react. In the realm of, say, sexual experiences, if you knowingly enter the situation and can reasonably expect the experience to ultimately be negative or humiliating you have two options. You can either regret doing something against your better judgment and have people think you're a fool for doing it in the first place (as I admittedly just did in the previous paragraph) or you can adopt the "No regrets!" attitude and have people think you're either a slut or a womanizing pig. So the choice ends up being, do you want to be thought of (by yourself as well as others) as stupid or rakish?
Moving away from specifically sexual regret, people still have different concepts of regret, or at least different from how I would qualify or define it. I think people who claim they have no regrets think that it means constant sullen brooding over some past action they wish they could have done differently. I would qualify regret at its most basic as when you wish you could have made a different decision given the information you had at the time (hindsight is always 20/20, after all). For example, I sometimes wish I had made more of an effort to have a more socially eventful freshman year of college. But had I had a really great time that first year, I would have likely felt I had too much to lose by leaving the country for a year. So in that instance, I do regret not doing something even though that nonaction ultimately resulted in the amazing experience of studying abroad. On the other hand, though, doing something like being needlessly mean to someone at some point ultimately made me the person I am today. But if I hadn't done that would it really have made such a profound difference in who I am? And if it did, who can say whether it would have been an improvement or not?

Rotten Grapevine

One thing I have come to learn is that second hand accounts of people are inherently unreliable. This may seem like a pretty obvious statement but there's more to it than you'd think. Typically the person being talked about (person B) is a friend or loved one of a friend or loved one (person A). We have never met person B, or possibly only met briefly, as a result the only impressions we get of this person are from other people's (person A's) accounts of them. So if our friend is upset at this absent person, that's going to color our perceptions about them. Rarely does one just bring up person B and go on about their virtues, it tends to be that person B has angered or upset person A and A is now venting. If this happens enough, all we know about person B is that they seem to be a total jerk and have no redeeming features. Then when we voice this opinion to person A they instantly defend person B claiming we've got them all wrong and they're really a good person. We will tend to be skeptical of this since we've never heard anything resembling that sentiment before. We lack the ability to forgive person B's flaws since we have no counterbalance to all this negative info. This both blinds us and gives us clarity on the true nature of person B; we have obviously never met them and have no way to judge their character as a whole. We might, in fact, like them just as much as person A does if only given the opportunity. On the other hand, since we are not friends with them we are immune to their charms and may see inexcusable behavior for what it is and not be duped into ignoring it.
Will knowing any of this prevent you from making judgments about people you have only heard about? No, of course not. The ultimate outcome of that is when, through differing accounts, I thought that Frank's friend Connie was literally three different people. With that in mind, remember until you actually meet them, you only know half the story.
Except for person C, they clearly suck.