I have used this space to complain about poor customer service more than once, so it would behoove me (behoof me? is that the singular?) to do the same, or rather the opposite, and give credit when a business does something I like.
Last night was pizza night at the Wimmer house, which is about as exciting as it gets around here these days. (Which is still pretty exciting—will pizza ever lose its delicious charm? I think not.) I ran over to Papa John’s to pick up a large pie for carryout, and when I got there they told me it would be a few minutes longer because they’d had to remake it.
Well, that was too bad, because it meant I would probably miss the beginning of 30 Rock. But they got it done as quickly as they could, and then the manager asked if I wanted the pizza they’d screwed up, too. And though my high cholesterol level said no, absolutely not, the rest of me was totally like YES, YES, YES, and since my body is a democracy and not a COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP, off I went with two pizzas for the price of one.
And the mess-up was just that they’d forgotten to put pepperoni on, which is not a real big mess-up on a pizza with all the works, and which my cholesterol level totally appreciated.
So thank you, Papa John’s Store #1388, and manager (I’m pretty sure you are the manager, or a manager) whose name I unfortunately cannot remember. That was very cool—much cooler than eating the pizza yourself or, God forbid, throwing it away—and I will see you again on a Thursday soon.
Diane Patterson has a pretty great post up about discovering that movie-trailer music is actually its own genre and you can buy it and it’s great to write to. She also mentions that she writes to movie and video game scores, which is something I might try, because it sounds like something I would enjoy:
I discovered a while ago I need music when I write. Not just any music, but orchestral music. There must be no singing (or the words must be unintelligible), which makes the background music in most cafes deeply annoying. I started with New agey electronica like Enigma or Andreas Vollenweider, and then moved on to movie scores, which tend to be driving, rhythmic, and stirring. I have written tens of thousands of words to Pirates of the Caribbean. The Killing Fields makes me tear up every time. Mishima. The Mission.Steamboy. And oh my God, Last of the Mohicans — every time I’m listening to Last of the Mohicans and I feel myself getting incredibly emotional and stirred-up by the music, it’s “Massacre/Canoes.” Every. Time.
Then I discovered video game scores. I had no idea that modern video games had such good music: Assassin’s Creed (any of them),Uncharted (any of them), Infamous. Video game scores have a tricky mission in life: they have to be good music that you might hear over and over and over again while you try to solve a certain puzzle, so that you feel energized but won’t want to stab someone the thirty-second time you’ve heard the same clip.
I used to listen to Enigma and Andreas Vollenweider a lot.
I assume the answer is yes, unless you’re struggling with a drinking problem. Or a beet problem.
So herewith: My Isthmus cover story about extreme beer is online! (As the name suggests, it’s mostly about beer/Mountain Dew hybrid beverages best consumed while hang gliding onto a wakeboard, bro.)
Pretty much all I wanted when I was in junior high was to have a newspaper column. I started reading Ann Landers at age eleven, and I devoured my mom’s Erma Bombeck books (it was a long time before I understood why this was a hilarious title), and eventually I moved on to Mike Royko. Probably I was the only eighth grader in Fargo, North Dakota, who knew who Slats Grobnik was.
Then I got to high school and took Journalism 1 my sophomore year, which meant I could start working on the school paper my junior year. And when I did, lo and behold—they gave me my own column. I called it “Running Wild,” because I was on the cross-country and track teams and because I spent way too much time listening to the new Soup Dragons album that year.
Being a newspaper columnist was everything I’d dreamed it would be. Whenever the paper came out, people complimented me on my “article.” (I eventually devoted a couple paragraphs to explaining the difference between a column and an article; it seemed really important at the time, because I was sixteen.) Women veritably threw themselves at me; my high school crush even invited me over to her house. (Nothing came of any of this, because I somehow had less game then as a healthy teenager who lifted weights every day than I do now as a middle-aged pudgy dad who is presently still wearing pajama pants.) The powers that be took notice of me, inasmuch as I once wrote a critical thing about the student council and the adviser (my Spanish teacher) said her feelings were kind of hurt.*
And then there were the awards.
I had been convinced of my own brilliance for a long time (ever since I penned a disco tune called “All’s Well That Ends Well” when I was about four). But then our journalism adviser, R.D., included some of my columns in his annual packet of submissions to whatever organization it was or is that judges the quality of high school journalists in North Dakota. I’m pretty sure I missed the actual trip up to Grand Forks where they handed out plaques—I must have had a track meet or something, where I promise you I did not win any awards—but when our delegation returned to Fargo, they bore with them some sort of marker indicating that I WAS THE BEST HIGH SCHOOL OPINION COLUMNIST IN THE ENTIRE GODDAMN STATE.
At long last, validation.
Well, the next year I got to write my column again. (This time I named it after a Jesus and Mary Chain song. As names of newspaper columns go, it was probably a downgrade, though I like how “Fargo” is right there in the first five letters. Musically, however, a definite improvement.)
And again there were fame and recognition, and ladies I was too scared to try to put my hands or mouth on. In a moment of hubris, I used the column to try to persuade everyone to elect me Sadie Hawkins King, and that totally bombed. I mean, I don’t know how close the vote was (I vaguely remember someone telling me: “Not close”), but what really sunk the whole experience was how, right before they announced the winner—on a microphone—in the gym—at a pep rally in front of the entire school—I stepped forward to accept the honors and then they called somebody else’s name. (You deserved it, Ryan. I shouldn’t have tried to exert my tremendous influence as a member of the Fourth Estate to sway the voters. Plus, you were quite a bit cooler than I was.)
Anyway, that was the most embarrassing experience of my life (finally eclipsing the “mooned the principal” thing from first grade), so you’d think I would have learned something from it. But.
When they gave out the journalism awards that second year, once again my column had been submitted, and since it was still, in my eyes, objectively the best opinion column to appear in a Class A or any high school newspaper in the entire state, I figured I was a shoo-in. Also, I did get to go to Grand Forks for the awards that year, which also featured on-the-spot writing contests, and I think right before they did the ceremony I found out I’d won Best Editorial (different from an opinion column, because, you know, unsigned, and totally different from an “article”) for my take on the big caning in Singapore. Oh—and, I swear to God, I heard some kid from another school actually point me out as I walked by and say something like, “Wimmer’s gonna win it again” to his friend. So I was rather amped up. Perhaps even more impressed with myself than usual.
I was pretty much on the edge of my chair waiting for them to get to the award for Best Opinion Column. I mean, I was literally trembling as my moment drew near. I must have had a speech planned, because I always had a speech planned.
Needless to say, I shot up out of my seat and started for the podium just as they announced the winner—who was a guy named Jay Enyart from Bismarck. He wrote a column called “My Little Corner” for his paper, and every single installment ended with something like “…I’ll see you in my little corner.” It was so unbearably twee. Also, our adviser was sure their adviser laid out their whole paper for them.
So I still think I should have won. Not only was I robbed, but I totally made an ass of myself, too. If I see you, Enyart, you better watch the hell out. YOU WATCH THE HELL OUT.
*Also, I once wrote something mildly anti-Semitic, and I am really, really sorry about that, Mr. Bernath. That was a totally nice letter you wrote me explaining why it wasn’t funny, and in response I just made another stupid joke in the next column, and I’m pretty sure I called you Mrs. Bernath. (That was because I didn’t look closely enough at your cursive until later.)
I won’t deny it: This is not a very good blog. It veers wildly from overly, obsequiously professional (and, I think, boring) to randomly goofy (but probably not in an entertaining enough way to justify any clients it might cost me).
Well, I’m working on it.
Here’s something I think is true about the blog medium: It’s as much about practice as it is about professionalism. This is simply inherent to blogging—the cost of entry is so low, the compensation so minimal, and the window of time you can expect your audience to spend on your blog so short, that it just doesn’t make sense to polish and edit and revise blog posts. At least not the same way you’d polish and edit and revise a newspaper or magazine article.
And while that doesn’t mean you should just put out crap, it does mean that the only way to improve is by doing it, by blogging often and in public, so you can figure out what works.
It can be hard, because, yeah, it’s embarrassing when you’ve blogged something you wish were better-written, or when someone calls you out for not knowing something. It dismays me to think of all the stuff I’ve posted online that makes me sound like a total (as opposed to a partial) fool. I kind of wish I could wipe it all out and start fresh and sound like a genius from square one.
But there is also comfort in knowing that all the foolish stuff is out there and that, you know, by putting it out there and leaving it there, I’m owning it. Yup, sometimes I am dumb, or boring, or lame. But that’s because I’m a person. And maybe the best thing blogs and the rest of the internet will do for us will be to make it undeniably obvious how integral dumbness, boringness, and lameness are to the human condition, so that we can get comfortable with them. That would be good for everybody, right?
It has been interesting and heartening over the last decade or so to see fantasy and science fiction clamber up out of the ghetto they were banished to back when I was a kid. Harry Potter helped, and so did video games and “respectable” comic books like Sandman and Watchmen—and all those toy franchises from the ’80s like Transformers and Thundercats, and the attendant, unshakable nostalgia that fans clung to twenty-odd years later. Ursula Le Guin, who should know, tackles why this stuff matters to grown-ups too:
To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary. Many of its great texts are poetry, and its prose often approaches poetry in density of implication and imagery.
I just reread the first two books of her Earthsea series and keep meaning to start the third. I think I keep putting it off because I remember from more than twenty years ago how hard it hit me to come to the end of Ged’s adventures, even if I have no recollection of how they actually ended. (I know there were more books afterward, but at the time there were not.) The “shift and deepening of meaning” she mentions were there, for sure—it’s very cool to realize A Wizard of Earthsea was subtly and subversively injecting just enough Taoism into my eighth-grade brain to ably temper the C.S. Lewis. I’m sure I owe her a greater debt than I’ll ever fully appreciate, and the books really deserve more thought and time than I can spare this morning.
