Putting my SONiC 102.9 Glee Club Points to use towards a double pass, I attended a screening of Drive. One would think that a movie with this title would feature epic car chases and fiery explosions, but the director wasn’t Michael Bay. Whoever, Nicolas Winding Refn is, my husband thought that he did a horrible job. Sorry, dude.

The movie opens with the main character, played by Ryan Gosling (who looks uncannily like my coworker, but that’s irrelevant now), setting up a wheelman job. He later arrives at the job and shows off his driving skills while evading police, and he does this without casualties and without saying a word. In fact, he’s so silent that I’d forgotten about the initial phone call and thought he was mute. (Hey, he’s acting more and more like my coworker each minute.)

He barely says more than two words at a time for most of the movie, and his actions don’t speak louder until the second half of it. His (lack of) interaction with the main female character was almost painful: the audience was staring at them staring at each other or the wall or random objects and scenery. My Chris’s silent “COME ON!” gestures in the theatre were hysterical. He summarized the movie best with his frustration-filled tweet: “Long pause followed by long fricken pause”.

I actually liked that Drive is not the conventional action movie with cars, but I’m not sure what I just watched. It isn’t The Transporter or The Fast and the Furious. It does get surprisingly violent and gory at times, but those times are few and far between; I would normally be thankful for this yet these are the only times that something appears to be happening.

I’m not sure what to make of the driver protagonist (who doesn’t have a name). Why does he make me think of Steve McQueen with autism?

Still, I can’t say that I hated the movie, and I’ll explain why below. Now we come to the actual reason why I wrote this post, because despite its atypicalness and critical acclaim, Drive isn’t very remarkable to me. But at least I can get a message from it:

Relationships get you into trouble.

Blame my high school English essay training for me making that bizarre statement. Despite what James Sallis intended for his novel, I can’t help what I take from the movie.

[Spoilers ahead.]

The Driver appears to be a silent loner. He has one friend, his boss/agent/father-figure Shannon, who he doesn’t interact with outside his various driver roles. One day he lets a married woman Irene and her son Benicio into his personal life and develops feelings for the two. Her ex-convict husband Standard returns, which causes some tension among the three adults, but Standard (refreshingly) doesn’t confront the Driver about anything, and they all become awkward friends.

Standard finds himself in trouble when his prison dues follow him home, and the Driver agrees to help him to protect Irene and Benicio. Well, events didn’t go as expected, and Standard dies in a botched heist. Driver escapes after a few attempts on his life, and he tells Shannon, who asks the wrong person for help and endangered everyone’s lives further. Shannon gets killed. Driver gets stabbed in an attempt to spare Irene and Benicio from further threats.

Due to everyone’s criminal connections, one could argue that trouble and violent ends would befall most of these individuals eventually, but I claim that Driver’s involvement in their lives and their involvements in his hastened their tragic fates. He didn’t have enemies until he made friends with people who did, and he apparently wasn’t the type to walk away from those who start something with him.

My loosely interpreted broken Aesop was the spark that I got from this otherwise snoozefest of a film. This made Drive miles above Limitless for me. I absolutely hated that other movie despite it being entertaining, because I thought the protagonist or I should’ve learned something; we didn’t. Movies shouldn’t have to teach anything, but I felt cheated at the end.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Drive is probably one of those films that one has to watch repeatedly to appreciate (or get why the critics love it so much). Rent it so you’ll have an option to deal with the long pauses. It does have its moments.

Wait—I published no new posts here for over 14 months, and all I can write is a combination of four letters that appears and reappears a thousand times over in Facebook and Twitter statuses every seven days?

Well…yes.

Okay, no, I can assemble a slightly more entertaining post until I have lots more energy to keep up writing. Lack of energy was part of the reason for my current hiatus, you see, but I’ll explain more about that next time. This week has been a bad one for me, yet there were a few good moments.

I would like to highlight the things that made me smile this week:

• Chris attempted to play Peek-a-boo with my newly acquired PeekaBoo shirt, draped over the back of our armchair. After multiple rounds of him covering and uncovering his eyes with his hands while looking at the image of a shy Boo hiding behind its own “hands”, Chris said, “It’s not playing ball.” Aww, he wanted Boo to come out of its shell! He’s so cute!

• I won a gift card. It’s a useful gift card, for items at an electronics store I frequent. An actual human being called to notify me of my prize, how I came to win it, and that it would come to me in the mail. All I had to do was confirm my address, which the person already had on file and read aloud to me first. Completing surveys printed at the bottom of store receipts finally paid off. I am so lucky!

• I got an earworm. This normally wouldn’t be a good thing, but it’s the chirpiest, catchiest six words and three chords ever. Its video below enhances the whimsy. As a bonus, the dude reminds me of a friend. This song is so fun!

  Click here to view the embedded video.

What made you happy this week? Whenever you’re feeling low, think of things that bring you smiles (even slightly creepy ones). Enjoy your weekend.

SMILES!

Not only will the time of the meal be different, the restaurant will be different, too. The thoughtful organizer has provided us with a copy of its latest menu, so we’ll know what we can expect there. The menu has just one problem, however.

Click to see the PDF attachment of Beijing Beijing’s menu that I got in my email.

Yeah…I can’t read that. I barely eat the food. I barely speak the language. I fail at being Asian.

So, do I request a translation summary? Or do I just go to the restaurant with an open mind and an empty stomach? It’s not like I had any idea what I was going to eat at the previous dim sum lunches.

Chris doesn’t seem to get my excitement. He types in a instant messenger window to me:

you want a game that examines bowser's colon?

which end will you come out of?

Hmm…hopefully, the end that doesn’t involve a toilet sequence. Ew. Please let there not be a toilet sequence!

Nevertheless, yes, I totally want to explore the bowels of Bowser, the cavities of King Koopa. Wouldn’t you?

Ladies, how do you keep your skirt bottoms from spinning around on you?

Wii Sports Resort

The sequel to the game that comes bundled with the Wii console, Wii Sports, comes with yet another expansion device for the controller. The Wii MotionPlus extends the length of the controller and enables more precise motion capture during gameplay. This makes bowling and golf more challenging—and more aggravating!

Still, the sports activities are fun and diverse overall. Bowling and golf are the only carry-overs from the prequel, but there is also 100-pin bowling and Frisbee golf (or “Folf”, as Chris calls it). Instead of tennis, there is table tennis. Archery and wakeboarding make excellent uses of the MotionPlus. Swordplay is an entertaining, albeit very quick, game to challenge one’s friends. The best activities, however, for competitive or cooperative gameplay are canoeing and cycling. Those two activities also make for great upper body workouts.

There is no training or test mode like there was in the prequel game, yet the sequel tries to engage and encourage a player with badges. If you’ve managed to accomplish a specific feat for a particular sport, you get a badge, just as if you were a boy scout or a girl scout. Chris is well on his way to collecting all of them, despite not yet learning what all the badges are. (Update: Oops, they’re called stamps, not badges.)

If you like sports games as a means for socializing, want a chance to excel at activities that you were horrible at in real life—grr, archery—, or just want another way to work up a sweat while sitting on the couch, Wii Sports Resort will make a fine addition to your video game arsenal.

Super Mario Galaxy

Arguably the best platform game for the Wii, this game has Nintendo’s pleasantly plump plumber exploring dozens of different galaxies in his search for Princess Peach and a mystery woman’s Power Stars. Mario travels to just about every theme of world: gardens, beaches, fire, ice, toys, desserts, and more. I love the creative level designs.

Even Mario’s powers are cool. He may become a buzzing bee, a floating ghost, a silver skater, or a coiled spring, just to name a few.

Although it is cute and charming overall, the game may not be for kiddies, surprisingly. The gameplay can be agonizingly difficult. Chris and I must have spent the whole of summer 2008 going through the game’s storyline. Some of the challenges were fun, while others were just brutal. If you despise timed challenges as I do, you’re going to suffer through a lot of frustrating levels. It’s a good thing that the game developers made it nearly impossible to run out of lives. Unfortunately, that was not all that they made nearly impossible.

How does rolling on a ball in a pinball-like environment sound to you? Neato? NO! Imagine crossing a tightrope with a unicycle while birds are flying at your head. That scenario is similar to Mario’s situation, except he has a whole whackload more obstacles. You bet that we went through a whole whackload of 1-Ups.

We eventually did conquer that level as well as many others to complete the main game. I have to admit that we did feel mighty proud of ourselves after completing each laborious challenge. We nearly went insane and exchanged harsh words to each other while doing so, but we did it. And we did it together.

Even though this is mostly a single player game, it supports cooperative play, and I highly recommend getting a teammate to help you collect Star Bits and aid you in levels. Plus, you can take turns spiralling into madness. CP was great at the timed challenges and the rolling ball. I rocked the boss battles.

Be warned: you must have a strong relationship with your teammate. Otherwise, you may never speak to that person again after playing through certain levels. After the weekend, Chris and I have less than 10 Power Stars left to obtain for 100% completion; however, the hardest levels are left, and the game has zapped us of our patience for it and for each other. Tempers flared. But we always managed to make up with each other shortly. We realized that it’s the stress of the game that causes us to snarl at each other and nothing deeper.

Super Mario Galaxy may look magical and offer excitement, but it is a hard game. The sequel, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is coming out next year. Chris says that it’ll be the cause of our divorce.

I’m still getting it.

Yes, the apostrophe is a valid character for a name. Yes, the application probably should’ve taken that character into consideration. Unfortunately, an external developer is responsible for the code, and it just so happens to not be entirely compatible with the naming conventions of our internal user IDs. It happens. The apostrophe problem came up before for other applications, and either the code was adjusted or the users adapted.

This time, the user seemed much attached to this little punctuation mark. She remarked that it was culturally significant to her, that other cultural groups are certainly accommodated. She insisted that the thing to change is the code, not her ID.

Right, I agree with the resolution but not with the reasoning. Surely, neither the application nor its developers are persecuting her?

The “cultural” argument aside, I am incredulous that a user would feel so passionately about a string of characters. For some applications, users had to truncate their long IDs because older Microsoft systems limited account names to 20 characters. Do I ever hear these users lamenting about the loss of their letters, the shortening of their surnames? (Not once!)

Some people have diacritics (accent marks and the like) in their names, such as the umlaut. My first and last name, for example, both have a diacritic when spelled in Vietnamese. Does not typing a special glyph when logging into my workstation dilute my heritage?

I understand that, in this age of the Internet where anyone may establish a web presence, one’s computer aliases and IDs could be considered part of his or her sense of self. After all, how else would an application program recognize you? How else would you distinguish yourself from others in your online community?

Regardless, changing a computer ID shouldn’t change who you are as a person. You exist before the username. You should persist independently of it. Machines may be everywhere nowadays, but they don’t define all parts of your identity.

Then again, I am one who is very attached to her name. I felt miffed when people mix up the vowels in my first name. Occasionally, somebody adds an extra letter to it. They sometimes do that to my short, phonetic, and should-be-super-easy-to-spell last name, too. Although amusing, those cases were also somewhat annoying.

So is a missing apostrophe like a misspelling? Is it that bothersome to look at a malformed name? To use it?

How important do you think the characters that form your name are to your culture, to your identity? Would you insist that all of it, or certain parts of it, be maintained everywhere?

Well, it turns out that I’ve only ever been to the Edmonton Corn Maze. I went there with Chris last year to go through the Edmonton Indy design. This year, we returned to get lost within curler Kevin Martin’s guts.

An aerial shot of this year’s design, courtesy of the official website

This time, we didn’t use the maze’s “passport” sheets to help us navigate our way. Chris and I alternated leading the other through the maze after each checkpoint. He chose his turns randomly, while I stubbornly adhered to the left-hand or right-hand rule. He’s the one with the photographic memory, so he could throw caution to the wind and still be able to backtrack if necessary. I, on the other hand, get lost anywhere where my surroundings are taller than I am. I think that we spent a lot of time traversing the maze’s “curling stone” during my first turn.

Over or under, the cornstalks were really tall.

Our goal was to complete the maze within an hour. After ten checkpoints, we made it to the exit with five minutes to spare.

Next year, Chris and I will race each other through the maze. He even suggested that we bring the dogs, Angel and Yuki, with us as well. He said that he wasn’t joking, but I suspect that he was anyway. Nevertheless, the dogs will love it there. Plus, Angel can help slow down Chris for me while he tries to sniff and mark as many cornstalks as he can.

The maze done, we headed over to my desired attraction: the petting zoo. I wanted to go to the Edmonton Corn Maze mainly because they have a donkey there. Who doesn’t want to see a live Eeyore?

Besides a donkey, there were goats, (baa baa) black sheep, a calf, and pigs. The pigs perturbed Chris, as they had straight, non-curly tails. (Therefore, they weren’t real pigs. ) For good pictures of these animals, check out the Edmonton Corn Maze’s Flickr photostream. For okay pictures of me feeding them, see below:

Who’s hungry? Who wants to exchange germs?

Have you experienced the fun of getting lost or getting licked on yet? The Edmonton Corn Maze is open for the season until October 17^th.

Tim, my cubicle neighbour, revealed to me that he egosurfed. He was perturbed by the amount of personal information revealed online. He was curious about whether he could find other people’s info as easily as he found his own. While perusing results for my name, he came across an old art piece of mine.

What is THAT doing on the World Wide Web?! Furthermore, what was my adolescent mind thinking back then?

Tim found my Human Rights poster in an online newsletter of the Alberta Teacher’s Association. Even in the Information Age, I didn’t expect to see it on my browser nearly 10 years later.

I created the piece in Grade 8, while I was a student at T.D. Baker. My Social Studies class was to create a poster or an essay for the International Human Rights Conference held in Edmonton at the time. With construction paper, markers, and glue, I made a collage of items that represent things that all human beings are entitled to have: food, education, and equality before the law, for examples. Encompassing these items is a representation of a human being of various skin colours (in whatever plausible marker colours). A no-longer-sensical phrase completes the poster.

I earned “Honourable Mention”. Back then, I thought that I could have done better if I had used liquid glue instead of glue stick, which did a poor job at keeping the collage items in place. Now, I realized that I was fortunate to have been mentioned at all. (Really, what does that phrase mean?)

I had a lot more patience when I was younger. I could spend hours drawing for a class assignment. I loved working with small, cut-out paper shapes. I wasn’t the best artist in any of my classes by far, but I could identify myself as “creative” without hesitation. (What happened?)

Although I don’t know exactly what went on in my head a decade ago, I knew that I was proud of that poster. It was nice to see it again—embarrassing yet nice.

Thanks, Tim!

(And thanks, Mr. McFadyen, for submitting the poster on my behalf and for possibly bringing it to the attention of the judging panel. Ah, school used to be such fun before the late-night “homework” brought on the headaches and tears.)

Have you stumbled across something from your past online?

Long ago, when Don asked an employee how it tasted, the guy replied, “Awful but good for you.” That response piqued our curiosity. However, Chris and I haven’t committed to trying the plant until recently.

We went to two different Booster Juice locations last month and remembered the wheatgrass. Both times, it wasn’t available. I was beginning to think that it was being phased out. But, lo and behold, today we spotted some bright green sod by the manual juicer.

Chris and I made our smoothie selections and ordered a single shot of wheatgrass. The shot comes with a separate shot of fruit juice; we chose orange. After the smoothies were blended and the wheatgrass juiced, we had four drinks in hand.

Chris was the first to drink some of the dark green liquid, immediately followed by some OJ. The reaction on his face was difficult to read. I asked him how it was.

“Tastes like grass.”

It wasn’t a satisfactory answer, but I had to try the juice myself anyway. Initially, it tasted like nothing; then, there was a distinctive “grass-like” aftertaste. Yup, he was right. If grass had a taste, that was how I’d have imagined it would taste.

Now we know. We can report to Don our findings.

Between the two of us, we had 2.5 servings of vegetables with that wheatgrass shot. I’d rather chew the actual vegetables.

Brussels sprouts must be less bland than grass. I feel sorry for cows.

What do you think of wheatgrass or liquified veggies?