Blurring the line between squalor and wealth

I’m not one of those people who gauges when to clean their room by a steadily worsening odor coming from some mysterious corner. I’m not that disgusting. But there are signs that I’ve discovered that serve as great alerts for when it’s time to quit slacking and get to cleaning. One of the most obvious is the amount of scattered money and coins lying on my desk. Every time I put on a new pair of pants, I make sure to empty the pockets from the last pair so nothing is lost and later found in the laundry. This inevitably leads to a desk covered in receipts and currency, but it’s certainly better than fishing coins out of the washing machine. (I suppose a piggy bank would solve all of this, but I feel like 25 years old is an odd age to buy one’s first piggy bank.)

The coins on my desk had been telling me over these past few weeks that my room was steadily approaching unrivaled levels of squalor. But until I bit the bullet and cleaned up this morning, I hadn’t quite realized just how long it had been since I’d last spruced up. The embarrassing evidence was in the coinage. Up top you’ll see a photo of four particularly interesting coins I found earlier today. There’s a 50 cent piece left over from a trip to Las Vegas last weekend (or more specifically, their fine blackjack tables that refuse to use either quarters or chips for half-dollar intervals), 10 British pence from a trip to England back in March, a Canadian penny that’s somehow made it into American circulation, and OH GOD WHAT IS THAT.

Yes, apparently that is a copper dime–the product of some sort of manufacturing error. Some casual Internet sleuthing has led me to discover this one is worth $10. More than excitement over this neat little find, this news led me to immediately think:

1. So that’s how long it’s been since I cleaned my room…
2. …long enough to collect multiple types of foreign currency–one from a country I haven’t visited in years…
3. …a coin I didn’t even realize they still made…
4. …and an abomination of nature so rare that it’s worth 10 times the face value.
5. I really should clean my room more often.

Yes, I like to think in ordered lists.

Guildford, England

I’ve been to England three times now. The first trip was visiting London in the summer of 2006 on the first leg of a two-month long tour of Europe. It was a journey of awkward discovery–not so much in the pubescent sense, but more in the “What in the holy hell is the difference between mashed and garden peas!” kind of way. Then, last year, I visited for a week, staying comfortably on a friend’s couch in East London and branching out with a couple day trips to Cambridge and Windsor. Now I’m here for a third visit. But this time around I won’t get a single whiff of London. I’m here for Guildford and Guildford only.

The reason can be explained away in two simple words–work trip–but I have to admit, this sleepy little college town has sort of grown on me. The city doesn’t have any real claim to fame, so long as you don’t have a striking fascination with the giant silver elk-moose-beast that guards the Eastern entrance to the University of Surrey. It’s got a college, a train station, an endless cavalcade of academic research parks, and a red brick town center whose old-world charm is almost entirely lost to the T.G.I. Fridays and Burger Kings that dot the landscape.

But when you develop a familiarity with cities like this–those forgotten dots on a map–you begin to feel less like a world traveler and more like a world inhabitant. It takes a special kind of American to grab a taxi at the airport and say, “No sir, no London for me today. Take me to Guildford.” The taxi driver then trusts you. The taxi driver then tells you about the best place to find a roller coaster in Southern England. Or at least… he did for me.

This morning, I was able to walk from my hotel to the development studio I was visiting in about 10 minutes. It was an occasionally harrowing 10 minutes, with traffic roundabouts seemingly designed to kill pedestrians and a moment when I nearly knocked on the door of a bio-mechanical research company before glancing across a pristine pond and spotting the studio I meant to find. But that weird little walk was a potential story, and more than souvenirs and pictures, I love traveling because of the stories.

I’m not saying you should run off to Guildford any time soon. Unless you’ve got the sort of job that will occasionally send you off on two-day trips to the other side of the world to visit a tiny college town, there’s really no reason to go. But if you’re the type of person whose love of travel includes seeing the overlooked and the everyday corners of a foreign country, you could certainly do a lot worse.

A New Kind of Spring Training

For someone who reads as much as I do, it’s a little strange that I don’t have a definitive favorite author. Sure, the name on my bookshelf who occupies the most space is Japanese magical-realist Haruki Murakami. And gun to my head, I probably would pick Murakami as my favorite author–but in normal situations, it’s a tougher decision.

But that’s not the case when it comes to sports writers. Easily the best writer in the business is Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski. I don’t read the magazine, but I do read his blog, and it’s a consistent source of absurdly lengthy and absurdly fantastic posts on baseball, sports in general, and other random musings that a compulsive writer can’t not put into words.

One of his latest pieces is on the optimism of Spring Training, how the hopes of preseason baseball and unrealistic stories are so deeply intertwined–and how wonderful it is that none of us care how hopeless those tales really are:

My favorite spring training story so far comes from Surprise, Ariz. — the best name ever for a spring training home — where according to my good friend Bob Dutton the Kansas City Royals look serious about trying to make Kyle Farnsworth a starter.

I like this story so much because it has a little bit of everything a spring training story needs. Unrealistic hope. Aging veteran. A pitcher with a new pitch. I like this story so much because it’s – thisclose – to desperation. But in February, desperation can feel a lot like promise. In February, the unreal can feel real. In February, you are still in the middle of the dream … and you don’t know that you’re dreaming.

Like clockwork, I find myself falling in lockstep with Posnanki’s expertly described opinions. Spring Training is a time for getting your hopes up. And it doesn’t matter how unlikely those hopes are–winter’s over, and we deserve to let our collective minds run rampant with unfulfilled hopes and desires. It’s what thaws the last bits of ice that Mother Nature left lying around.

This year, though, is a little different for me. For the first time in a half-decade, the Mariners are expected to be a contender. They traded B-level prospects for one of the best pitchers in baseball (Cliff Lee), following that up by trading 1/3 of the team’s catering budget (Carlos Silva) for the troubled but undeniably talented Milton Bradley. Various and sundry quality acquisitions have strengthened these deals, building up our new front office as one of the best in baseball.

And when a team is expected to be good–maybe great–those stories fall by the wayside. The veteran pitcher who stumbled onto a sinker over the offseason, the ancient second baseman who’s recent lasik eye surgery should really help him capture that former glory… hell, even the new coach who largely rode one terrific skill to the hall of fame who’s been brought on to sprinkle magical fairy pixie dust on young players. Those are the kinds of pie-in-the-sky stories that tend fade away when your team doesn’t need unrealistic hope.

So, of course, this spring training is a little less interesting for me. I have to wait until the season gets started to really start getting into the swing of things. But, ultimately, that’s a pretty good tradeoff. Winter will wind down whether or not we use ridiculous stories and anecdotes to speed up the process. And come April, I’d much rather be rooting for a winning team than realize that magical sinker wasn’t so magic after all.

Shutter Island

Shutter Island is a movie that makes its intentions clear very early on. The film begins with a pair of federal marshals (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) sent to investigate a disappearance at an insane asylum just off the  foggy coast of Massachusetts. But it’s a premise delivered with a wink and a nudge, because Shutter Island wastes remarkably little time before it starts revealing its characters and story to be source of great doubt.

I’ll admit straight away that I’m generally not a big fan of movies with unreliable narrators and the twist endings that inevitably follow. If given a choice, I’d rather get lost in a great story and believable character development than focus all my attention on what isn’t being told.

Of course, that sort of movie can definitely work (see: The Sixth Sense and, if you’ve got the stomach, Oldboy) but it places an inordinate amount of pressure on the twist. Shutter Island–for all its great cinematography, disturbing tension, and expert acting–just doesn’t deliver on that promise.

DiCaprio’s main quest is to figure out just what’s going on while battling his own descent into insanity. Why do the seemingly stoic guards clutch their rifles with a death grip? Why is the asylum director, played by a deft and convincing Ben Kingsley, so willing to withhold critical information and suddenly remember things when DiCaprio confronts him with the latest clue? Why do we have less and less faith in the flashbacks that punctuate the investigation?

Those questions aren’t ever really answered until the end, but the problem is that Shutter Island’s conclusion is both disproportionate and underwhelming. It withholds too much despite the audience virtually clamoring to know more, only to deliver an ending that doesn’t feel worth the ride. That “A-ha!” moment just isn’t there, and when a movie establishes so early on that you’re about to be taken for a ride, you really expect the conclusion to deliver something special. In a glowing review, Roger Ebert effectively shrugs his shoulders at the ending, suggesting that the ancillary parts of the film are so well done (a sentiment I share) that the ending doesn’t hurt things:

You may read reviews of “Shutter Island” complaining that the ending blindsides you. The uncertainty it causes prevents the film from feeling perfect on first viewing. I have a feeling it might improve on second. Some may believe it doesn’t make sense. Or that, if it does, then the movie leading up to it doesn’t. I asked myself: OK, then, how should it end?

All respect to Mr. Ebert, I just can’t share this ambivalence toward the final act. While much of the movie is quite impressive–the setting and its thick layer of dread, the actors and their quality portrayals–the plot is like a cackling villain the whole way through, gesturing at a massive black curtain concealing the truth. Only in this movie, that curtain could have very easily been a hand towel.

Yet More Baseball

As you might have gathered from yesterday’s entry, I’m pretty excited about the start of this year’s baseball season. That excitement took hold of me yesterday when I dropped $109 on a full year of MLB.tv Premium, a video streaming service that lets you watch every game of the year outside your market–both live and archived. I’ve been using it the past few years, and aside from a few technical snags here and there, the service has been a remarkably good value. For someone who lives two states away from his home team, it’s a nifty resource.

This year, the big new feature has been the introduction of HD video streams, branded as NextDef vido. Granted, that’s a pretty awful name for anything–even a comic book villain. But the prospect of streaming HD quality video had me quite excited nonetheless, and I was eager to see how it worked.

Turns out, it didn’t. I tried watching a bit at work yesterday–slow work day, I swear–but could only manage to get the standard picture working. I bounced from Chrome to IE to Firefox, checking, unchecking, and re-checking every network setting I could find, but no luck. I tried it at home, and aside from a stuttering feed on my DSL connection, the HD picture managed to work. So I was convinced it was a lost case at work–some type of company-wide firewall that my feable mind would never have been able to overcome. 

But nope. After more desperate troubleshooting, I figured out the problem. And boy is it embarassing. My version of Windows Media Player… was two versions out of date. Not one! Two! Holy God, how does that happen? I know my work computer is getting a little long in the tooth, but I didn’t realize it was that old. Ahh well. It’s working fine now. God bless technology. 

***

I managed to see the final two-thirds of the Mariners-Twins game. It was a lot of fun watching Felix mow down an admittedly weak Twins lineup, but more fun was watching our new mascot Ken Griffey Jr. launch a solo home run into the right field bleachers. For a moment, I’d forgotten what an abysmal fielder he is now, how he whined his way out of Seattle all those years ago, and that he really should never face a lefthanded pitcher–I forgot all of that. Instead, I was transported back to my childhood. A childhood filled with memories of giant Nike billboards in downtown Seattle sporting his image, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball on Super Nintendo, and that incredible single-game playoff against the Angels in 1995. It was a thrilling moment. I don’t know if I’ll feel experience too many of those this year considering how much he’s got left in the tank, but the one time was pretty amazing.