The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

Set in the '50s, 'The Prize Winner of Defiance' is the true story of one woman's effort to keep her family of 10 afloat under difficult circumstances with winnings from jingle contests. Applying her remarkable resourcefulness and an uncommon wit, she finds her own way in the profitable jingle contests popular in the 1950s and '60s. The result is a bittersweet comedy-drama.

One of the perks that comes with working at the SF Film festival is a free membership of the SF Film Society. This enabled me to see a prescreening of the movie in San Francisco. Following the 'contest' theme of the movie, there was a free raffle before the screening.

I couldn't believe my luck. Not because I won anything in the raffle because I didn’t. I felt lucky because my date for the movie is turning out to be a winner in every way imaginable.

Update: my beautiful date read my palm this weekend and concluded that we would have 6 kids. Guess I should get into the contest business as well.

Lost in Translation - II

Sunday morning I picked up a free magazine called ‘Possibilities’. It contained a section called 'Translating Girl Speak':

You’re sweet = You’re boring
Sweet is a bland term about as exciting as a plain white T-shirt. It’s a filler adjective, like nice. It’s a pleasant word to use when she’s trying to spare your ego a little pain and can’t think of something better to say. She enjoys you as a friend, but there’s no special magic there to propel you to boy-friend material.

What are you thinking right now? = I’m interested in you, and I hope you’re thinking about me
This is the classic. Where you’re thinking of something mundane or work-related, while she’s looking at you and thinking of you in a special way. Now you have three seconds to come up with something profound. As a standby try “I was just thinking of how pretty your hair looks when we’re outside in the sun”.

I had a really time with you = Please ask me out again
Commonly women don’t pursue; they drop hints, and the rest is up to you. Women give signals of encouragement: laughing at your lame jokes, twisting hair around their fingers, or dangling a shoe off the end of their feet. So go ahead, and make the next move.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I had a date Saturday night. And I like her. At the wine bar, she asked me a couple of times what I was thinking. When we left the bar, she almost lost her shoe while standing up. And she called me while I was still on my way home to tell me that she really had a great time. At last, I’m not clueless anymore.

About Schmidt

About Schmidt is a funny and dark comedy in which Warren Schmidt retires from his 20+ year career at an insurance company. This event is causing him to reflect on his life and along the road of self-discovery, he finds something new and meaningful in his thoroughly unimpressive life: preventing his daughter from getting married to a underachieving waterbed salesman.

The days before the wedding, Warren is staying with the free-spirited family of his soon-to-be in-laws. While he is sitting in the Jacuzzi by himself, his son-in-Law’s mother comes out of the house naked and joins him in the tub, making Warren feel very uncomfortable.

This scene in the movie reminded me of a third date I had late last year. After getting back from dinner, me and my date were sitting on the couch and sipping some wine. All of a sudden my date got up and said ‘Hey, let’s get in the hot tub!’ As it was supposed to be a dinner date, a bathing suit was not on my list of 'items to bring' for this particular date but soon it became clear that wearing bathing suits was not required.

Needless to say that on that night I got to know my date much better than I could have hoped for.. :)

Vertigo

me: 6th row from the back (or is it top?)

Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" starts with a scene where Scottie, a detective, slips down a steep roof and ends up dangling from a flimsy rain gutter.

While I was dangling upside down in the "Vertigo" rollercoaster at Six-Flags Marine World during our team offsite, it felt like I would have been better off hanging on to a rain gutter and that I'd taken a wrong turn in life. The fries in my stomach made it clear that they only wanted to go in one direction: up.

Before riding Vertigo, I made sure that I didn’t have any loose items in my pockets. When I was about to remove my Google badge, one of my peers told me not remove it. “If you want to pick-up women, wear your badge. It’s a statement that you have a job and they love that!”

The subtleties of dating are all in the details: rings, badges…

Sideways

With my dating life fading, letting go leaves me with a problem: how am I going to maintain this page and create new content that still relates to the title of this blog?

Introducing: Nick and the Celine. They flew in from Las Vegas for a long weekend in Napa. Both divorced, their kids with their exes and judging by the way how they looked at one another, it was clear that wine was not the main objective for their trip. Their brand new Mustang convertible stopped next to my Miata on the empty parking lot just when my friend and I were about to leave my car to check if the tasting room was still open. And as the winery wasn’t closed just yet, my friend went back outside to let Nick and his lovely companion know that they should come in as well. While they entered the tasting room, my friend jokingly told the woman behind the counter that the guy who came in just after us would pay for our tasting.

Nick didn’t blink an eye, pulled a stack of twenty dollar bills out of his pocket and put two of them down on the counter to pay for our tasting. Despite our objections, he insisted on paying and with the conversation flowing as easily as the wine, we convinced our new found friends to join us for one final stop at Vander Heyden. Different tasting room, familiar scenario. Before we were able to close the door behind us, Nick put his twenty dollar bills on the counter and minutes later we were sipping a late harvest cabernet...

Three weeks have passed since then and it appears that Celine travelled back to France. It's unclear if this is a permanent move. But if a sequel for Sideways hasn't been planned for yet, I think I can provide some plot ideas... :)

Fight Club

First rule of Fight Club: do not talk about Fight Club

I would argue that the movie Fight Club is avante garde sublime art. The film seduces and indoctrinates, urging the viewer to confront his or her own emotion. Despite the destruction in the movie, the visual image is beautiful.

Edward Norton plays Jack, the main character in the movie. In today’s western culture that's been robbed of its masculine principle, Jack finds himself only accepting his masculinity through tears and the estrogen-enriched breasts of another man. Jack represents today’s males - they're lovely, valuable people, not interested in harming the earth, or starting wars. But there's not much energy in them. They are life-preserving and not exactly life-giving.

And then, something happened to Jack. He let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. He found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.

Lately I'm starting to think that I should let go as well with regards to my dating efforts. Freedom.

Kinsey

Science versus Emotion

One of the best films of 2004, Kinsey pays tribute to the man who revolutionized our understanding of human sexuality. Indiana University researcher Alfred Kinsey was so consumed by statistical measurements of human sexual activity that he almost completely overlooked the substantial role of emotions and their effect on human behavior.

The film has some funny moments; when conducting sex interviews to make a census of American sexual behavior, an immigrant in broken english reveals he had, "sex with horse", to which the interviewer tries to retain composure and interrogate him further, and the immigrant replies, "No, I had sex with Horace. Horace!"

Last week I ran into my ex girl-friend. The one with the pearl necklace. Amazingly, the scientific side of my brain was telling me 'What did you ever see in her anyway' but at the same time my emotion was going the complete opposite way...

Big Fish

Daffodils in Big Fish..

Tim Burton's "Big Fish" and the book "Life of Pi" are very similar in that they both are a manifestation of people telling their life stories, leaving it up to their audience to determine whether those stories are based on true facts, just imagination, or both.

Telling stories is a big part of dating as well. It's the initial process of getting to know somebody as it provides information on who we are and the choices we make in life. And as it's only natural that when you like somebody, you want to make a good first impression, there's the potential that the real story gets a little decoration to make it look better. That's not necessarily a bad thing; don’t we all want to be entertained? I therefore think that the final question in "Life of Pi" with regards to which version of the story is the better one is a rhetorical question.

My stories from last week include meetings with women I don't get, I can't get or I couldn't retain. Even decoration wouldn't make any of those stories entertaining.

For the record, I just want to state that all the entries in this blog are based on real stories... :)

Seinfeld

Jerry and co

How do you determine if somebody you're dating isn't a date anymore but has become a girl-friend... Are these the correct criteria to check for:

• How long have you been seeing her?
• Phone call frequency - are you on a daily?
• Do you have to ask her out on Saturday night or is a date implied?
• Does she have anything in your medicine cabinet?
• All of the above?

So if somebody you're seeing wants to spend her birthday with you, does this supersede any of the criteria as mentioned above?

I-Robot

I-Robot

Jeffrey Rayport, a Harvard professor, visited Google this week to talk about his book "Best Face Forward”. Jeffrey argued that new technology is changing the way how businesses are building relationships with consumers and gave examples of how people are currently interfacing with technology and robotic devices.

Apparently, users of the iPod in the Mid-West have come to believe that their iPod knows what is going on in their life and selects appropriate music for the moment. At the end of a 10k run they get exhausted and all of a sudden iPod switches to the theme of "Rocky" and they see Stallone working out in a gym, making them realize that they can make it to the finish as well. The iPod as an intelligent device that is interactive, wearable and knows who you are.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a device with extra sensory perception that could be used for dating? The iDate would be able to take the guessing part out of the process. No more 2nd or 3rd dates that won't be going anywhere; no more wasted time or emotional energy because of a misinterpretation of the word 'maybe'.. I see a big market potential!