by Matt Mayer

Thursday, October 02, 2008

I Liked Speed Racer ... A Lot

I feel like nobody gave the movie Speed Racer a chance. Nobody said word one about it. Nobody saw it.

I saw it. Rented it on Blu-Ray. It was awesome. The visuals were innovative. The plot was strong. The movie was fun.

My one complaint was Speed's younger brother. I cannot tell you how annoyed I was by that kid. I want to say he kinda had to be in the movie, but I can't. I can't prove it. I never watched the TV show, so I don't know if the little bro was important or used the same way. He was a pudgy little loud-mouthed brat. He was essentially me when I was his age. I'm not saying I hate my younger, previous self. I'm saying there's only allowed to be one of me! I shall find him and kill him, and I shall get off because he is me, and I'm still alive. You see? The plan is bulletproof!

BULLETPROOF!!!!!

Bulletproof is another movie I thought was pretty good when I saw it even though people didn't really care about it. What can I say? I loved Adam Sandler. Somehow I doubt this, but hopefully I will have a similar post to this one about Don's Mess With The Zohan.

Monday, September 08, 2008

My gf's reaction blog!

Ummm...so, my girlfriend thinks it is lame that I blog about my boring life. So, she has started a blog that makes fun of my blog posts.

She has also decided to start all the way at the beginning of my posts and catch up to me. Who knows when that will be? But, she's going for it.

I don't know how to feel about it really. I guess I could let it upset me, but I feel like she's just busting my balls, so no big deal, right?

Let me know if I should like stand up to her or something. They're a little mean so far, but also it's nice that she cares. I feel like she's sort of always looking out for me somehow. It's in my links to the right and this blog's title links to it, so help me have feelings towards this. Is it nice with a coating of mean? Or is it just mean?

Friday, September 05, 2008

Note to self

Bodily functions are more important than checking email.

I wake up from a serious need to pee, and I walk straight to my computer and hit the space bar so it wakes up and I stand there waiting for it to do so. What is wrong with me that I don't just go to the bathroom first? What is this obsession with checking the email?

I also check it often right after sex. "Oh, baby, that was the best sex we've had in a while ... any facebook notifications!?"

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Inspiration comes when you most expect it

Went to see 2Square today. Lutz. Grosz. Genius.

I went in expecting a lot. I had been meaning to see 4Square, then 3Square, then finally 2Square for almost a year now. 4Square inspired my favorite '06 DC Comedy Festival show, Chuckle Sandwich. Chuckle Sandwich inspired one of my original favorite groups, Dr Fantastic. So I felt I had to see and would likely love the group that brought on so many other favorites for me.

It is a rare occasion when anything at all meets expectations after it has been hyped up: a Five Guys burger; Ender's Game; The Dark Knight. It is even rarer when that hype has been built up by you yourself.

2Square met, shook hands with, and had meaningful intercourse with my expectations. Afterwards, my expectations took 2Square home to meet the parents and siblings (of which there are many ... Mr and Mrs Expectations get frisky, often), and 2Square had meaningful intercourse with every last one of them. Even Elvin Expectations, the bucktoothed, acne-riddled virgin (no longer) of the Expectations clan. My goodness, I've never seen so much meaningful intercourse, metaphorical or otherwise, in all my life. It was like watching every wedding night in America happening simultaneously in one house.

To say the least, I am inspired. And I expected to be, as sad as that sounds. People were right. I was right. They are amazing.

Go see 'em.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

need to kill an hour?

Go to youtube, and look up the video "MJ - Smooth Criminal (Complete)" posted by josedek. Play this on silent as you play ANY OTHER MUSIC while watching the video.

Start both at random, or from any place within them, and be amazed as the video for Smooth Criminal has so much movement in it that it can sync up with any other music.

Successes have included:
Torn - Natalie Imbruglia
Spanish Flea - Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
The following theme songs - Perfect Strangers, Airwolf, Chip 'N' Dale's Rescue Rangers, Saved By the Bell
The Banana Boat Song - Harry Belafonte
...the list goes on

Thursday, August 21, 2008

The Most Charitable of Beggars

A woman walked onto a crowded subway car. Wasting no time, she was already speaking highly of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost as she cleared the closing doors, blessing the entire car. She placed her laundry bag on a clear section of bench; one can only assume the clothes in the bag were as ratty and torn as the shirt on her back.

Boisterous and lightly coated with a veneer of joy, she offered up a unique rendition of This Little Light of Mine peppered with interjections of "Holy Ghost!" and "Church!" The woman made sure to sing loud and proud towards both the north and south ends of the 4 train.

Predictably, at the end of the song, she reached into her own back pocket and pulled out some change. With the mineral-colored pieces of metal in her hand, she walked swiftly from one end of the car to the other, requesting more pieces of metal. She rattled off generic labels like an auctioneer to get the attention of innocent bystanders: "Young man, young lady, thank you young man, young lady, young lady, mister, thank you ma'am, young lady, miss, young man, mister..."

As she completed her collection of payment for services rendered, she picked up her laundry bag and paused to make one more charitable contribution. She made sure to lose her temper at a man near the door who had ignored her entire show, like so many others had. He now knows how hard it is to do what she does, how long she was in the military, and what kind of a person he really is. She's got a little light, and she let it shine all over the unsuspecting man.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Coming 360

Sometime in 1995 or '96, I made the conscious decision to become my own polar opposite. Uncomfortable with my body, my friends, and (most significantly) my social status, I wanted to be a different person. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin and find somebody else's to live within.

This is the thing that has affected my life most, both then and now: my self-loathing in middle school; my love for who I am now, peppered with an understanding that I could love myself more if I were more like the me I used to despise. Essentially, I was two completely different people for the first and second dozen years of my life, and now I am moving back towards center.

A chubby, intelligent and diligent child, I played videogames, read comic books, and did my homework. Sports were a weak spot for me. I always wanted to be better at them than I was. Food was a weakness. My room a safe haven. Sweatpants were my only clothing bottoms. I ate my boogers.

Plenty of fodder for the average, or even below-average bully. I had them all trying out their best stuff on me. All I wanted was for people to like me. That made it worse. I would go home crying every day. I would constantly be putting myself into situations where I would be harassed or attacked. I became indignant. This couldn't be my place in life.

So, I changed. I changed everything. I stopped reading comic books (and regular books too). I stopped doing my homework. I started playing more sports. I cut my hair. I wore jeans. This didn't matter. My place in the Mahwah school system was forever etched. I had been too resistant to accepting my fate and had thus sealed it in the school scriptures. This change did not matter to the outside world until I entered ninth grade and left everything I knew by going to a different school system.

(On a side note: I am very glad that my change did not grant me entrance at The Cool Kids' Table, because it was not my place. I didn't know at the time, but it was the wrong thing for me to try to do. I'm glad my experiment failed. Because of its failure, I ended up where I did for high school. And for that I will be forever grateful, for reasons that will not be explored in this blog.)

Nobody at Bergen Academies knew the former me, except my current roommate and best friend, Mark, and a small handful of others. So, I was able to trick myself into believing that the new me was the real me. My shallow choices called for a mutiny and left the actual real me on a desert island with a pistol and a single bullet. The first mate became the captain, and the ship took a whole new direction.

I went from the top of my class (or near it), to the bottom of my new class. I cared about clothes and lacrosse and having crushes on girls (but never doing anything about that because deep inside I was still shy Matt). I feigned confidence and acted popular. I was a social climber. I was the opposite of who I had been 3 years before. The 180 was complete.

I lived my life in that way to some extent for the next 8 or 9 years. I was an attention whore; I wanted to be friends with the popular people; I spent more time getting ready to go out at night than I actually spent out. There were parts of me that resisted. Parts that were still me, the real me. I did community service; I didn't drink until I turned 21; I definitely still played videogames; I was really shy around girls, even ones who liked me; I was picky about my real friends, the ones who I let really close. But mostly, it mattered more to me that I got an A in Cool than an A in English 101. I got a C- in that, by the way. Somewhere inside, I knew all along that I was doing the wrong thing, and the parts of me that were deep down underneath this new outer coat were trying to escape to the surface. I started out one way, made a U-turn and have been slowly turning the car around ever since.

The real movements back towards the original me started happening around the time of two major events. I started dating my current girlfriend, Sarah, and I started doing long-form improv.

Sarah is a grounded, intelligent, beautiful girl. She represents both sides of the spectrum well. In many ways, though not in all ways, she is where I want to be. I know that more and more everyday.

Improv comedy, more specifically long-form, and even more specifically the UCB community drew me in. I was and continue to be compelled by the art. I believe that that is significant to this story: the beauty of loving the people you're working with for everything they do, not just the stuff that immediately SEEMS brilliant on the surface. The more easily recognizable thing to me in terms of how it plays into my current pitch towards the past, is that that person I used to be would be 100% accepted by this community. If I had not changed one bit from before I got indignant and had found long-form some time along the way, I would still be as accepted in this community as I am now (if not moreso ... but that's a blog for another time). The most important part to recognize in all of that is that this is the community I most want to be in, period. I spent so much effort trying to be somebody I am not only to end up in the same place I would have wanted to anyway.

I am not going to give up everything that I have become since that fateful 3-year transition, as there are positives I have found, but I am happy to find a place where I feel comfortable picking up things I used to love. I dropped those things for the wrong reasons, and now thanks to this community and how accepting it is and how it's made up of people who I believe I really relate to deeply, I don't have to be afraid. Afraid to read comics, or obsess over a videogame, or geek out about books for a while. I'm doing all of those things right now, for the first time in a decade.

Thanks. Seriously. Thanks.