The Company Men

First, don't confuse this movie with the similarly-titled, In the Company of Men. Two different movies.

Second, this movie is a farce.

I enjoyed it well enough and will likely watch it again but it has some issues that reminded me of Wallstreet 2.

The main character loses his cushy corporate job and finds himself in the wonky world of the Blue-Collar man.

I think we are supposed to feel like he learns something important about how lucky he is to be living the corporate lifestyle and that the Blue-Collars are important too. But that message is lost somewhere. Maybe I'm wrong and only suspected that to be the plot since most of the White-Collar-man-turns-Blue-Collar stories go that route.

But not this one.

We find out he's been working with his company for about twelve years. He is currently making 120k per year. After a few weeks of being unemployed he has to sell the house and move in with his wife's parents. Sell the Porsche. Get a job with his brother-in-law the carpenter...oh and spend some quality time with his son...I guess.

The problem here is that there is only one major splurge...a golf club membership.

At 120k a year, with only one child, why is he still making payments on the car? Maybe the house was a little big for a three-person family, but it's in the middle of an average middle-class neighborhood...or maybe slightly higher than middle class. It couldn't have cost more than 500k. I'm actually thinking is was more like 200-300k.

So, he's got the house, the car, and a club membership. There is no boat in the driveway or mention of one elsewhere. No additional properties. No evidence of lavish expenditures (we see one corporate wife has just purchased a table that costs a few thousand dollars). He seems to be an average man with average luxuries. Yet with his high income, he is actually ushered into the poor house after only a couple of months. I think we missed something here.

Anyway, he throws a hissy fit an out-state job offer, gets angry over the competition he faces, snubs his nose at his secretary when she asks about her own job security, reluctantly accepts the carpentry job with his brother-in-law...but thankfully gets back into the corporate setting after losing everything.

So, what was the point of this movie?

Was it just to show that corporate executives are people too?

Because with winning quotes like, "I don't want to be just another asshole with a resume!", I think something was lost in translation. Yet, it sums up exactly what the movie is about.

The Numbness

When you are standing on your feet for a twelve-hour shift, it does something to your body. It's a strange soreness. Not like muscle aches or strained joints. It's kind of like the pads of your feet go to sleep and spend all of a day off trying to wake up. Lot's of tingling ensues but if you actually rub or scratch the heel you are not sure there is any feeling.

The sensation goes away. By the time you clock in for the next day of work you're feeling "peppy" and bouncing on those feet like everything is good. And it is, until somewhere around that ten-hour mark and you still have two more hours to go.

Also, it doesn't matter how many hours you work. Be it four hours or fourteen, the last hour will always be the longest part of the day.

Been Awhile

It's been a long time since I posted here. But, honestly that seems to be the suitable intro to most of the posts on this blog.

I've got some personal adventures to share. Lot's of changes (positive ones!) in my life over the past year.

Sleep Apnea
A new house (our first!)
A new baby (or two, depends on how much of myself I've already shared here)
A new job
Writing projects

So much new stuff I haven't shared!

Thanks to Jessica, formerly of the World of Warcraft blog, The Pink Pigtail Inn, for inadvertently inspiring me to dust off this old house!

Wallstreet 2

I think Oliver Stone was a little off his game with this one. He didn't seem to have much of a point. This would have been a good time to show how technology has largely taken the middle man out of the picture and left the most of the action to near-light-speed information transfer systems. The industry calls them black boxes, I guess. Anyway, Wallstreet is a shell of what it once was, almost all the of businesses that once thrived there are gone now. And the floor isn't as full as it used to be.

So then, what was this movie about?

It jumped around a lot. We got a glimpse of banks collapsing, getting handouts, and investors shutting out green technologies to keep the oil profitable.

The lead character was just as fractured as the story. His mother shows up in the middle of the movie but we don't really know why. Then she shows up later asking for money and we learn that her son (our lead character) is having financial problems and can't help her. We missed something here. We know he got fired, but when did he become broke?

His girlfriend breaks up with him because he is a liar and a manipulator, but everything turns out ok because her daddy has a change of heart? How does this change her relationship with our lead character?

So, yeah, this movie lacking in the story department. View at your own risk.

Wealth Beyond Reason

Recently Afghanistan was found to be loaded with copper, iron, and lithium deposits worth over a trillion dollars.

The "officials" who commented on the finds said that all the people of the war-torn nation need do is lay down their arms and set up an industrial infrastructure and all will be fine and dandy.

But, if it is that easy, then why has the African nations and their people not seen similar results with all of their diamond mines? They too are in need of an infrastructure and then things will get rolling for them as well.

The sad truth is that these natural resource markets are quickly sucked up by large corporations and then the product is severely controlled. No system will ever be put in place for local people to learn what they need to know to create their own infrastructure. The third world governments enjoy their personal relationships with foreign banks too much to care about their own people.

It would be great if I could be proven wrong, but I doubt it will happen.

Accentuate Writer's Challenge: Why I Write.

I'm late to the party, but I'll do this anyway. The challenge is simple, write about the first time you felt like you were a writer.

I don't remember what grade it was, but one of my junior high school English teachers somehow inspired me to go home and write a short story. It was probably one of our assignments, but it was just too long ago now to remember. I also do not remember asking her to read the work or even if I actually handed it in for credit. What I do remember is her coming to my desk with my story and telling me how good it was.

Apparently that is all it took for me.

Somewhere I still have my first three short stories packed away somewhere with other odds and ends from my past, but it's been so long since I even accidentally ran across them it is quite possible that they've been tossed.

One was a sci-fi story about an attempt at establishing a colony on an alien world and the doom that engulfed it.

Another was more sci-fi but tinged with horror about a young man walking alone one evening and encountering a stranger who professes to be an alien and also the young man's father...this one was very moody, lots of shivers in the dark and the scuttling of leaves...I like it. I remember reading it over on several occasions and transporting myself to that lonely, cold and dark place in the woods.

The third was ultra violent. It also had a sci-fi twist. The violence was inspired by a novel I read called The Blood of the Children by Alan Rodgers. I don't remember much about my story except that it was about an older sister who violently loathed her younger sister. The younger sister was largely hated by their mother also. So, there was this huge dramatic darkness within the younger sister and she was getting ready to do some very bad things. This was the longest of the three stories (about three times as long as the others) but I never finished it, didn't hardly start it really, but I was certainly proud of the endeavor.

Throughout the rest of Junior High and High School, when I wasn't starting stories that would never be finished, I was writing a lot of dark poetry. I was heavily inspired by heavy metal and the occult. My 10th grade English teacher in High School was impressed with one of my writing assignments and introduced me to the head of the High School English department who would go on to be my 11th and 12th grade English teacher, my Creative Writing and Modern Mythology teacher, and also my instructor for three years in the High School magazine course. It was through him that I would find my greatest motivation and also my greatest failure. He taught me to write about things that I know and observe rather than veiled copies of what I had read in the latest horror publications. Once I was elected to represent my High School for the literary arts in an annual regional competition, I forced my writing for the first time. I wanted to impress absolutely everyone that I could imagine. I did not write my entry for myself. I don't know if I would have won anything at that competition if I had done things differently, but I know now that I never gave myself the chance.

I'm 34 now and still have problems writing for myself. My blogs are my most current attempt to do just that though. I dabbled in freelancing to a couple of online article sites, but I just wasn't enjoying it. I gave NANOWRIMO a shot in 2008 and wrote two short stories for entry in the Accentuate Writer's Forum contests.

I am happy for my blogs though I am still unfulfilled. But at least I can say that I am still writing after all these years. It wasn't until I submitted my work to the Accentuate Writers Forum that I learned how bad my grammar is. Since then I've started college and am taking English refresher classes as part of my course study (electronics). Who knows, maybe I'll get something written (and finished) that I am happy with and is also well-written within the next year or two.
The sky's the limit!

How many children is too many?

I did a Google search for this question recently and was stunned by the overwhelming popular answer: two is too many. Or maybe three. Certainly more than that is too many.

Points made in some comments I read:

People with a lot of kids are selfish and irresponsible.

The world is already over populated and people should aim for 0% population growth.

Please, give me a break!

I'll tell you what selfish is. Selfish is blowing your 50k-100k salary on frivolous material possessions. Selfish is having a full freezer and refrigerator while watching starving third-world children on the news.

And how about those starving children? Why are they starving? Because there are too many of them? Or because the the governments of their nations strive to keep the populations uneducated? Maybe because even when first world nations do give charitable donations, those government officials keep most (or all) of the gifts for themselves?

What about the agricultural industry that has managed to place patents on enhanced seed and grain while pushing the original, natural seed and grain almost into extinction? So that if a third world nation wanted or could grow its own grain, they have to purchase the seed from the patent holder? In North America, private farmers are sued all the time when some stray, patented seed migrates to their fields.

Fresh water requires an infrastructure to clean waste and direct the water where it is needed. But it doesn't matter if your nation has one billion people or twenty billion people, if the government does not want to spend money on that system, or they are so corrupt that no private industry can afford to stake a claim, than any number of people becomes too many.

No, parents of large families are not guilty of selfishness (ok, I'm sure some are) but rather they are guilty of living a fantasy where people are free to live how they want to live.

Land of the free? More like, land of the gotta-have-it-alls and want-mores.

What these population control freaks often neglect to share in their published comments or articles is the number of parents who look back and wish they had dared to produce more children.

Even church is not a safe harbor for Christian families who would like to have more children. But the number of Christians who wish they could have more is steadily growing.

The truth is, having a large family is time-consuming. Do you have hobbies and self interests? A pile of kids is going to change that. You can still have hobbies, you can even get away once in a while for some quiet time. The problem is that many parents just can't fathom sacrificing for a family and when they see another set of parents who appear to be successfully raising lots of kids, jealousy abounds.

It's funny how all these educated people say we need to control the population and reduce growth. Vasectomies should be handed out to everyone. What a bunch of slackers. Here's some science for you, straight out of the Theory of Evolution, if you don't use it, you lose it.