What are you doing? Rescue the president!

I recently saw Olympus Has Fallen. I wish I hadn't. It's not just a bad movie, it's promoting ideas that I consider to be harmful.

One of these ideas is that the president's life is worth more than the life of any other citizen. At first, this may seem true or even obvious on some level. You may think, "He's the most powerful man in the world because he's in charge of the most powerful country in the world. Surely this makes his life more important somehow." But for one thing, the president's power has been greatly exaggerated over the years. He's not really our leader so much as the head of one third of the federal government, but I'm sure you all know all about that. Perhaps we're meant to think of him as in control of everything to draw attention away from the people who are really in charge. Or maybe the idea of a strong leader who's in control of everything is an image we're supposed to have. But for another thing, if someone assassinates the president then we just get a new president. It doesn't cripple the country in any way and it's crazy for our enemies to think that and it's crazy for us to go to any greater lengths bargaining for his life than we would for anyone else. He's just a representative of the people and there are plenty of people to take his place. Elevating him to the status of a king or holy man causes harm by discouraging criticism and questioning.

Another idea I consider harmful is the idea that our nuclear weapons keep us safe. This ties into the idea that we all need guns to keep us safe even though guns are weapons and are thus designed specifically for offense rather than defense. Nuclear weapons are made to kill as many people as possible, not to save anyone. And yet in this movie everyone's terrified of the idea that our enemies will gain the ability to disable our nukes because it will leave us vulnerable. It seems to me that an enemy crazy enough to sacrifice the number of innocent lives that would be lost in a nuclear assault is likely to be crazy enough to disregard the risk of us firing nukes back at them. So far there's only been one country that has ever done that. If I showed you a graph of how many nukes each country has used against other countries and then compared the data, you'd be dividing by zero to calculate the United States as being infinitely more dangerous than anyone else. Since we have proven we cannot be trusted with nukes, if an enemy gains the ability to render our nukes unavailable I'd call that a good thing. To be fair, the movie later shows that our nukes may well pose an enormous danger to ourselves, but it doesn't quite connect the dots to say that maybe we should think about getting rid of them. Mutually assured destruction really is as crazy as it sounds, and I would've thought enough people have watched Dr. Strangelove to know that.

The movie is a bit like Air Force One but instead of terrorists taking the president hostage in a plane they take him hostage in the White House. But in Air Force One they give you a reason to care about the president by showing him to be a genuine, honest man. In Olympus Has Fallen the president is accused of being corrupt and the movie makes no attempt to counter that accusation. But of course we're supposed to believe that the president is a good guy because it's the bad guys who are saying he's not. We're just supposed to hate the Asians. The turncoat who's working with the Asian terrorists is critical of the president because of the Wall Street bailouts among other things, so there's some indication that Wall Street protesters are villains here. The movie also demonizes the entire middle east by having the news say crowds were celebrating in middle eastern countries after hearing the news that the White House had been attacked.

Apparently the Asian terrorists who have taken over the White House want to get these super secret "Cerberus" codes from the president and two high ranking officials, all of whom are hostages. So naturally when they start threatening to kill one of the guys who has a code (smart), the president orders him to give up the code because he doesn't wanna see the guy get killed. Then the terrorists start beating up the female secretary of state who has a code, and she seems to be holding her ground pretty well. The president then orders her to give up her code, arrogantly saying, "They'll never get mine." What, so as the president you're allowed to proudly defy these terrorists by never revealing information under torture, but you assume that none of the people working under you are strong enough to do so? Anyway, apparently the terrorists didn't even need the president's code because with only one code remaining they were just able to "crack" it. You're telling me a code this important doesn't lock you out of the system with the first hint of an incorrect code entry? When the news of the third code being entered reached the pentagon or wherever it was the remaining government officials were meeting, they said "but the Cerberus code should take days for them to crack." Excuse me? According to password security testing software on the Internet, my email password would take CENTURIES to crack, and it's not exceptional in any way. But apparently the super secret codes to our massive array of nukes can be cracked in a few days. Great. Anyway, it turns out the reason the terrorists wanted the codes wasn't to deactivate the nukes, but to detonate them in the silos. Every nuke across the entire country, killing us all. Even though it's all fiction, I should say the movie presents the interesting possibility that our nukes may be used against us since no security system is perfect, so that's another reason why having all these nukes doesn't make me feel very safe. But anyway, when the codes are activated it starts a five minute countdown before they take effect, giving the hero time to get in there and shut it off. Apparently he needed another deactivation code to deactivate the deactivation codes. It seems to me like the five minute countdown wouldn't make sense considering that the whole point of the Cerberus codes is to stop a nuclear missile after it's been fired. Imagine getting to the bunker where the codes are meant to be entered just moments before the nuke reaches its target so you can enter the codes just in time, only to find that you have to wait five minutes after that for the nuke to be deactivated. That would be a fun countdown to just sit there watching helplessly.

If you're not convinced the movie is jingo by the end of it, they pretty much spell it out for you by having the end credits start up over a closeup of an American flag blowing in the wind. Hooray for us. We need more movies celebrating the glory of peace and fewer movies trying to make us afraid of everything and everyone. In case it's not clear, I recommend against seeing this movie.

(The title of this post refers to an inside joke used to make fun of the dialogue in the game Ghost Squad.)

Join the army or not

I wanted to be a soldier in Afghanistan for many reasons. People seemed to have difficulty grasping the many reasons part. They'd offer alternatives like being a journalist in Afghanistan, even though I'm no good at that and wouldn't get the training and benefits and prestige. For every reason I'd give, they'd offer an alternative that addresses just that one reason and leaves out everything else.

Previously I decided not to join the army and then changed my mind again and decided to join after all. Since making that decision, it seems the army has been trying to stop me for some reason.

I knew there would be a waiting period before I could get shipped to basic training, which is usually about 4 to 5 months these days, and it would take 28 weeks to finish my training, which would include both basic and health specialist training. I was told by a few sources that I might be able to influence the people in charge of human resources to make sure I get shipped to Afghanistan as soon as I was done with training. So from the time I sign up to the time I leave for Afghanistan would likely be about a year. Many sources say that the war in Afghanistan will be over by the end of 2014. The plan is to start reducing the number of troops there at the start of 2014 and have them all gone by the end.  And since I may not get to go there right after I finish training, the sooner I start training the better my chances of getting to go are. So naturally I wanted to get started as soon as possible.

MEPS is where you take the ASVAB test which determines what jobs you're qualified for and where they do physical examinations and where you sign up and get your ship date. One of the recruiters I had spoken to back in December had me under the impression that I would get to go to MEPS as soon as I wanted. When I finally decided that I wanted to go and talked to a recruiter again back in January, they explained that this wasn't the case. They would need to "project" me to go to MEPS, which means they sign me up to go over there a minimum of 72 hours ahead of time. But before they could project me, I would need all my papers in order and need to meet certain conditions. First, they would have to do a background check using my fingerprints, which again takes three business days for them to complete. So that makes it about a week minimum between the time I say I wanna go to MEPS and the time I actually get to go to MEPS. I figured a week wasn't so bad even though the clock was ticking, so I went through with it.

The papers I needed were: my birth certificate, my social security card, my high school  diploma, my college degree (which is optional of course), a signed letter from the doctor who had performed surgery on me recently, signed letters from every chiropractor I had ever seen, and a packet they gave me to fill out. Boy do I wish someone would have told me I'd need these things ahead of time. I could have gotten them together during all that time I spent not sure if I wanted to join or not. I asked the recruiter if there was any way to expedite the process, if I could just go to MEPS and get the stuff in later while I was waiting to ship out. The answer was a definite no. Not only could I not go to MEPS before everything was taken care of, I could not even get projected to go to MEPS until everything was taken care of.

My mother was out of town on a business trip so I had to call her and bother her about where to find my birth certificate and social security card. She asked me to wait until she got home, but I was in a hurry so I looked for them on my own. I found my birth certificate but the card was missing. It was strange that I needed the card because pretty much every place ever just needs the number. But still I managed to get a temporary replacement from the social security office which would apparently work for the army. My diploma and my degree could also have substitutes. I was able to use official transcripts instead. The college transcript was tough to get because I had a $10 parking ticket from years back. The security office was willing to wave the fee because it was from so long ago, but in order to do that I would have had to come back the next day since the cashier closes at four. I didn't want to go all the way to Bremerton again so I just put the money in the drop box with the lady from the transcript desk witnessing.

The packet required all kinds of invasive information that no one is comfortable giving out. It required personal information from every member of my immediate family. I gave them my half-sister's address in Germany. And it's always very difficult giving my employment history because I don't even remember most of my managers' last names. Luckily I was able to get by just putting down what I knew. I didn't wanna leave employment slots blank because it might look like I was lying.

But the first thing I did was call the hospital in Seattle where I got my surgery. This was on a Monday, and I called back every day after that to see if they had faxed the letter I asked for because I was in a hurry. On Tuesday they said they'd get it right to me. On Wednesday they apologized and said they'd definitely get it to me that day. Finally it came in on Thursday morning. The results from my fingerprints had already been completed at that point. All three chiropractors and everyone else I needed things from had gotten them to me speedily, so I ended up just waiting on the hospital which I contacted first.

I called the recruiters' office on Thursday morning thinking I was finally good to go. The recruiter once again explained to me that this was not the case. Before I could be projected, they had to send the letter from the hospital to MEPS so that MEPS could confirm that I was okay. This would take anywhere from three days to two weeks. So that letter, the one thing I ended up waiting on after everything else was done, ended up being the one thing that I would have benefited greatly from getting sooner. All the quick responses from all the other offices I contacted were for nothing. The recruiter sounded impatient with me, insisting that he had explained all this to me already. But he hadn't.

I hated that the army casts so much suspicion on people simply because they've had medical work done. Surgery fixes people. If I hadn't gotten the surgery then I'd presumably be in worse shape but the army would've let me right in with far less trouble. But since I've had surgery and since I've seen chiropractors to help me be in better condition, that's an issue that's potentially disqualifying. I understand why it's a red flag. Obviously they don't want people with bad backs. The thing is that they should just disqualify people based on their problems, not based on their solutions.

And it's amazing to me how such little things on their incredibly long checklist of problems can disqualify someone, even if they astoundingly answer no to every other question. When I wrote that I have herpes, they called me into a private room to confirm that it was just cold sores like most people have. How bizarre. Why would genital herpes disqualify someone from the army? People with genital herpes go through life perfectly fine with only their intimate partners even knowing about it.

Another thing that surprised me is that the recruiters encouraged me to lie about the little things. They told me they had done it themselves, and if they had been truthful then they probably never would've gotten where they are now. Somehow this didn't strike me as very military. What the recruiters said is that it was their job to get me into the army while it was MEPS's job to keep me out.

And keep me out they will. I was of course hoping that it would only take them three days to read my medical documents since everyone else was able to create the documents and send them so quickly. I became very worried and frustrated when it took longer. I was helpless. They were under no obligation to read it at all. They could just throw my stuff in the trash or lose it in some cabinet and no one would be the wiser. There was nothing I could do to make things go faster.

Finally I got a call after two weeks. I thought that I was ready to go at last. But it was not to be. A different recruiter from the friendly one I had been talking to explained to me that MEPS need additional documents. I was instructed to return to the hospital after April 9th, 3 months after my surgery and nearly two months after that phone call, to get another followup appointment and another signed letter assuring the army that I was really really okay this time. I explained that I had already gotten a signed letter promising that I was okay and that they had already read it. I asked if there was anything I could do to help things go faster. I again asked if this could be done after I go to MEPS. I asked to talk to the recruiter who had been helping me before. I pleaded. But it was no good.

The period of time that I can schedule followup appointments with my doctor that are included in the cost of the surgery is 10 weeks, so if I go do this new appointment I may have to pay extra. And the army may invent more excuses. Who knows? Maybe they have some motive to keep me out that has nothing to do with my tonsillectomy. Maybe they're testing me to see how much crap I can take. Maybe they've read my Facebook and don't like my attitude. In any case, it certainly seems like they have no intention of letting me into the army ever. But if it is just the tonsillectomy, I wish someone had told me that getting surgery might prevent you from joining the army. The recruiters could have told me. The army websites I've read could have said something. This information should be out there.

Everyone knows the old picture of Uncle Sam saying he wants you to join the army. I really thought the army would be a job where I was wanted. I'm so sick of the rat race of everyone competing with each other for employment and having employers reject them on a whim for arbitrary reasons. For all it's faults, I thought the military was a decent alternative to this. I thought Uncle Sam really wanted me. But right now, I don't feel wanted at all.

Everybody do the Django

Never got around to saying what I thought of Django Unchained. Prolly my favorite Tarantino film next to Kill Bill. So many spectacular scenes. The doctor diffusing potentially lethal situations using his foreigner's understanding of English. Him explaining to Django the myth of Brunhilde. Django going after his first targets in his extravagant valet costume. Him bursting down a door with only the words "d'Artagnan motherfuckers" before shooting. It's all very enjoyable to watch.

Samuel L. Jackson gave his best performance ever, in my opinion. His character was so nuanced, so believable, so real. And he was so bad. An article critical of the movie suggested that it was wrong to think of Steven as a villain because the real villains were the slave owners, not that old uncle tom. But I feel like that assessment misses so much of the juicy details. Steven loved to harass and subjugate black folk at least as much as any white man did. He loved to feel so high above the other black people, which is why he was so astonished when Django showed up as a free man. Steven was an ally and an enabler to the white slave owners, and so especially from Django's perspective this made him among the worst of villains. Steven loved Calvin because Calvin gave him this lofty position of power over the other black people whom he then got to oppress. Steven believed wholeheartedly that it was a black man's place to serve white men. I guess it's hard to explain, but his villainy was quite clear to me. The acting was so good because he communicated so much without having to say anything.

I suppose I was expecting a much more disturbing movie, mostly because of Tarantino's reputation for violence. But over the years I've found that the reputation may not be warranted. Other directors put much worse things in their movies than Tarantino does. Tarantino is all about blood splatters and nervous tension. He never goes with all out torture porn, and the most graphic and brutal scenes of gore are conspicuously not shown on screen. Part of it is out of respect for the sensibilities of his audience, and part of it is that he's skilled enough as a director to know when it's a more powerful choice to leave things to the imagination. Sometimes the anticipation of pain is all it takes to deliver the message.

I'd like to address the accusations of racism. Firstly, anyone who thinks this movie is racist should see it before casting judgment. It might do you well to observe how a lynch mob is portrayed. I'll give you a hint: not intelligently. I don't see why a racist filmmaker would try to make racists look bad in his film. Secondly, Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson are two of the highest paid black actors in Hollywood. They can afford to be very picky about the movies they choose to be in. If you really think Django Unchained is racist in any way, then good, because that means it will get more publicity.

The part of me I will never get to see

On Wednesday January 9th 2013 I had my tonsils and adenoids removed and my deviated septum fixed. That's a bilateral tonsillectomy, a bilateral adenoidectomy, a bilateral septioplasty, and some other surgery that I can't recall. They decided to have me stay the night at the hospital so I just got home today. When they woke me up after the procedure and told me I should spend the night I asked them if I'd be monitored while I slept. The surgeon said yes I would. This was a good thing because it was an opportunity to see if I had sleep apnea and stuff.

Sometime after midnight I started wondering about how they were monitoring me. I asked the nurse if that black circle on the ceiling was a camera. She said it was a light and that there were no cameras in the room. I asked how I was being monitored and she seemed very confused. I had to explain that I was told I was going to be monitored and that it was important for me to be monitored so they could see if I had sleep apnea and stuff. She said I was doing fine and I had to explain that she was only checking on me while I was awake. This hospital stay was a rare opportunity for me to be monitored while I slept and I wanted to take advantage of that. After some arguing the nurse finally agreed to have someone hook me up to a machine.

I was in a great deal of pain and I still am. It's not too bad in terms of constant pain but it hurts a great deal more when I swallow, which I'm apparently supposed to do a lot. I was repeatedly asked where the pain was and of course I always answered that it was in my throat where, you guessed it, my tonsils had been removed. I was given a variety of narcotic pain medications and none of them were able to get me to a point where I could swallow comfortably save one: fentanyl. Naturally I assumed this meant that I'd be getting more of it since it was the only one that I responded well too. I mean otherwise, why would they keep asking how I felt and if the meds were working? Unfortunately the nurse was argumentative about this request as well. The list of tricks she cycled through went something like this:

1. "You don't get any more fentanyl tonight."
To this I would reply that I would like to have some in the morning then. She repeated herself: no more fentanyl tonight. She seemed to have trouble distinguishing "tonight" from "tomorrow morning."

2. "You're already taking three narcotics."
And I only need one: fentanyl. Please give me that instead.

3. "Fentanyl only lasts an hour."
I would much rather have a stronger drug that lasts a little bit than a weaker drug that lasts the whole time between doses. An hour is more than enough time to eat a meal. When I'm not swallowing, I don't need to medicate the pain.

4. "Just stop eating to give your throat a rest."
This defeats the purpose. I want my throat to feel better so that I can eat. If I'm not eating then I don't need my throat to feel better.

5. "You can't take fentanyl at home since it's an IV med and we need to find a medication that works for you to take home."
We've already tried everything and we've already found the one that works and since I can't take it at home you're refusing to give it to me the one time I can take it.

6. "I'm not the doctor so I don't decide what drugs to give you."
Yet you've already demonstrated that you can make suggestions about what drugs I get to take since I asked for a non-prescription throat spray and it was brought to me.

Eventually this culminated in a nurse rant (which is like a normal rant but slow and gentle) where she repeated herself over and over again in broken English (almost none of the nurses seemed to speak it as their first language) until I finally gave up.

I certainly don't think the consent form I signed had anything about giving them the right to withhold my tonsils from me. I asked to see my tonsils many times during my stay, to which nurses always replied that they'd see about it. The first time was right after I awoke from the anesthesia, and I was told my tonsils had been taken to the lab. By the time I was leaving the hospital and I asked to see my tonsils one last time I was told they had already been sliced into little pieces. I asked to see them anyway.

I finally got to the lab and saw my tonsils in little baggies. They looked much smaller than I expected, and apparently my adenoids were in there too but could not be identified to me for some reason. I commented that they looked like crab meat, and one of the women working there started laughing. Either she is greatly deprived of humor in her daily life or she found me attractive, but Occam's Razor would have me rule out the latter for being too unlikely.

Right now I'm having difficulty breathing because tampon-like splints have been sewn into my nostrils. This is supposedly to allow my nose to heal properly, but I certainly wish they could have been tube-shaped or something so that air would have a sure way through. When I woke from the surgery I was not told the splints had been put it and I certainly wasn't told what to do about them. As I was clearing out some blood clots from my nose with my finger (which I wasn't supposed to do and hadn't been told not to do) I found the splints and at first thought they were just more blood clots so I tried to get them out until I realized what they were. So I became worried that I might have shifted them out of place so that they were blocking more air now than they should be. During the night I called for a nurse and a male nurse from Kenya showed up and I asked him to examine my splints and he said they looked fine. But today when I was leaving I asked my regular nurse to have a look at the splints and she wouldn't do it. She said she wasn't a doctor and wasn't the one who put them in and no matter how I explained that another nurse already performed such a check she insisted against it.

When I got home I got to use a squirting device to "irrigate" my nostrils. Reading the instructions for how to do it, I learned that I was supposed to start doing it right after my surgery. None of the nurses told me about this or gave me the tools to do it. I'm supposed to keep irrigating my nostrils to keep the blood from clotting, but I'm afraid a lot of blood has already clotted because I didn't start soon enough and it's too crusty to be affected by the nasal spray alone. But the nurses all told me I wasn't supposed to put any solid objects in my nose, so I'm kind of at a loss here until the medical team responds to my emails. I just hope I don't suffocate in my sleep before then.

I'm glad I got the surgery but I'm not happy at all with how it went.

2012's best picture from 2013?

I saw Zero Dark Thirty yesterday. I thought it was pretty stupid. There is a lot of excitement packed into the last 20 minutes or so of the movie that gives the audience a good final impression of it so that's why I think this movie has a 93% on rotten tomatoes, the highest score of all the newly opened and top box office movies. But on the whole the movie is incredibly boring. I agree with the few negative reviews on the site:

"Bigelow has hamstrung herself by not committing to a viewpoint. This is a by the numbers, cold, emotionally inert, just the "facts" procedural drama that is just barely a step above an episode of Law & Order."

"I was pretty upset that Bigelow got snubbed by the Academy.... until I actually SAW the film. It felt like a really good TV movie, but Jessica Chastain's phony and forced performance drags it down."

And I strongly disagree with the many positive reviews:

"Chastain makes Maya as vivid as a bloodshot eye. Her porcelain skin, delicate features and feminine attire belie the steel within."

"From the very first scenes of Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow demonstrates why she is such a formidable filmmaker, as adept with human emotion as with visceral, pulse-quickening action."

The characters all seemed shallow and the directing felt empty and basic. I had recently seen Jessica Chastain in The Debt and this was exactly the same role. A young woman government agent trying to compete in a man's world, hunting down a notorious war criminal who has eluded everyone else for years. Sometimes I could almost forget which movie I was watching. None of the characters were explored in any depth and none of them were particularly likable. I know this makes me a bad person since the movie is based on true events but one of the characters was so obnoxious to me that I felt relieved when she died (even though it was more than a little predictable). There was seldom any background music, so most of the movie was just bland shots of people doing stuff that is unclear why you should care about it. Inane conversations, office jobs, and paperwork.

I felt like I was watching some kind of acting exercise. Like some acting students were given some scenes and asked to practice what they'd been learning in class. Raise the stakes (which means raise your voice at the right time I guess), pace the scene well (which means put in plenty of pauses), and don't forget to react to your scene partner! I guess what I'm trying to say is that it didn't feel real at all. It doesn't feel like any great amount of effort was put into making this a good movie. It feels like making it was a chore. It's just Oscar bait. "Okay, we're supposed to make a movie now about capturing Bin Laden and stuff. Might as well get to it. I heard we'll win an Oscar for it." You've got all those weird detached speeches that you hear in the trailers. Like "I'm bad news. I'm not your friend..." and "...there's just us. And we are failing." They sound so weird when they're actually in the movie because people don't actually talk like that. They only make sense in the context of the trailer when played over that Clint Mansell / Kevin MacLeod sounding music. And what's up with the scene where Joel Edgerton is asked what convinced him and he gestures toward Maya and says "her confidence"? Is there a joke there? Is she supposed to look not confident? I can't really tell, but I think the audience is supposed to assume that.

So anyway, yeah. What a pretentious load of bull.