How We Heal

For Gini’s birthday, we went out to one of the nicest restaurants in town – Pier W, an elegant restaurant that juts out over the lake.  It was raining, but that gave us a beautiful view of Cleveland’s choppy waters, looking big as an ocean, admiring the slate-gray sky and the way water fell into water.
I could tell we were getting better because we began to tell stories.
The thing few people tell you is that after the heart attack, there’s trauma to be unknotted. I almost died; Gini waited for me to die.  The weeks afterwards had a weird, plastic feel, as though I was living in a bubble.  The pain went away, but this strange uncertainty didn’t waver, this sense that something had changed and we could not quite name it.  We were afraid to trust the future.
And horrific fights resulted, because when you’ve had a heart attack, you must have lifestyle changes, and every bite becomes a matter of literal life and death.  Gini and I had the most vicious battle we’ve had in almost seven years over, of all things, seven bites of a chocolate ganache.  But she’s traumatized and terrified, and I’m frustrated and furious at this narrower, healthier world, and so the adjustments were inevitable.
And after we found what seemed like a new fit, we retreated. We’ve been cuddling a lot, going on dates just by ourselves, not feeling like socializing. Gini’s 55th birthday should have been cause for a raucous party, but all we wanted to do was spend time with each other – not even with our daughter Erin, just relishing this slow time in each other’s arms.
Over heart-healthy tuna and scallops, we began to tell stories of the surgery, smiling.
She told me the absurdity of waiting around for me to heal, of rushing home to try to be with me in time for the catheter, what the mood was when I was out of the operating room and everyone went out for Mexican.  I told her how strange it was, waiting in the ER, feeling perfectly fine and yet being told I could pop off at any moment.
Slowly, lovingly, we began to probe those experiences for the silliest and scariest bits, transforming raw terror into anecdote.
It’s how we heal, here at La Casa McJuddMetz; we take our lowest moments and refuse to let them define us.  Instead, we haul the boogeyman out from under the bed and dress him in jester’s clothing, turning this too-human fear into a way of entertaining people at parties.  And why not?  Our fears are, in many ways, what defines as humans, these terribly silly moments where we were mortified but might have been amusing with time or another angle.  Comedy is pain, pain is comedy, spinning one effortlessly into the other.
Over wine by a very beautiful landscape, we began to laugh. To place the events that unmanned us into as something firmly in the past, an experience that was once now but is currently over, a thing that so affrighted us back then but is not all that relevant to today.  To give these moments their respect, but not to allow them to drive us any more.
We drank wine, and felt the normality seeping back in, and watched the sea.

An Unfortunate Correction To Yesterday's Birthday Wishes

In wishing my wife a happy birthday yesterday, I said this:
“If you think I’m wise, witty, or at all interesting, she’s probably about 50% of that.”
Now, what I meant to say was, “If you think I’m wise, witty, or at all interesting, she’s probably responsible for about 50% of that.”  Instead of complimenting her, I made it sound like I thought my wife was half as interesting as I was.
However, I did prove my point.  Gini did not approve that birthday wish at all before it went live.  If she had, she would have said, “Uh… is that what you meant to say?” and I would have corrected it.
This is the function Gini serves in my life: stopping me from rampant stupidity.  Give her a hand, folks.  She’ll be here all week.

Business Models That Fail

My account is about to expire on FetLife, the Facebook for Kinksters, and I wanted to renew it – after all, like LiveJournal, even though I have issues with the site, I’d like it to continue being alive.  I’m a webmaster, and I have sympathies for anyone trying to make a living off of a site.
But when I went to renew, I discovered they had no online option.  Nor did they have anywhere to mail a check to in America.  Instead, to renew, I had to:
1)  Get an International Money Order in the amount I needed to renew my account, in Canadian dollars.
2)  Mail it to Canada.
Now, this isn’t entirely Fet’s fault; they used to have credit card processors, but being a site that discusses all kinds of sex, they’ve been dropped.  Nor will PayPal process their payments.  So I dig it’s a tough row to hoe.  But I posted an entry saying that while I liked Fet, I am at heart both lazy and forgetful, and this sort of inconvenience to renewal will ensure it’s forever on my “to do ” list without ever getting done.  So I encouraged them, difficult as it may be, to find a way to reconnect with the credit card processors.
At which point I was berated by folks who said, “Well, twenty minutes out of your life isn’t an inconvenience!  You should do it out of duty!  Here’s tears for your white people’s problems!”
These are stupid people.
See, when you’re running a business, your whole goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to give you their money.  You’d be surprised by what factors will cause people to walk away, on the Internet; if a page takes more than seven seconds to load, a double-digit percentage of people won’t stick around.  Amazon fought with its developers to create”one-click checkout,” because reducing the number of steps in your checkout process from five to three can double your sales.
It seems insane – but particularly online, people get bored and walk away.  Give people a chance to say, “Do I really need to buy this thing?” and often, they will.  Or they’ll get distracted by something else.  (This also applies at retail, where a long line at the checkout register or being unable to find the thing you wanted in a few minutes will cause folks to wander off.)
So if you can lose 50% of sales from a slightly-lengthened checkout process, what percentage of sales will you lose when you have to go outside for a money order?
I can always tell when a business is about to fail, because the main thrust of their advertising shifts from “Here’s what we can do for you!” to “Support local businesses!”  And yes.  We should support local businesses.  I do whenever I can.  But when your main argument shifts to a desperate attempt to guilt me into purchasing because you know you’re not as good but you want customers to subsidize you for not being a chain, well…
…even if I buy, enough people are gonna walk that you can’t subsist.  I’ve tried.  You can’t be substandard – maybe you shift to carry different merchandise, maybe you focus on customer happiness, maybe you do outreach programs.  But “Buy Local!” can’t be your hotpatch to try to prop up a failing business model.  You have to be genuinely good in some way, because this isn’t a civic duty I’m carrying out by purchasing from you; it’s my optional money that I’m giving for services rendered.
Sure, maybe I should inconvenience myself out of obligation.  That’s not the question: the question is, “Even if I do, how many people will do it?  Will it be enough to sustain the many servers and infrastructure needed for a site?”  And somehow, I doubt it.  And you can berate people all you like, but when resubscribing for an optional service involves remembering to go outside and run an unfamiliar errand, well, that’s a craptastic process.  It’s perfectly rational to worry for the future of FetLife when they’re relying on that.
Like it or not, one of the rules of the universe is that if you want people’s optional money, you make it easy for people to give you that optional money.  Claiming that getting a money order isn’t really an inconvenience is fooling yourself.  And maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t – but Lordy, if someone sympathetic to them has been meaning to get around to it for a month and keeps forgetting to hit the bank, then FetLife’s gotta be suffering.

It Is The Birthday Of My Wife!

It is my delightful wife Gini’s birthday today.  If you think I’m wise, witty, or at all interesting, she’s probably about 50% of that.  So go wish her a happy birthday!

Room 237: The Review

I was terribly excited when my friend George told me about Room 237, because George had turned me into a The Shining addict.
See, The Shining was a source of deep disappointment to me for years – it’s one of my favorite Stephen King books, but the movie version was cold, antiseptic, and not at all surprising.  The whole point of the book was that you sympathized with Jack Torrance at first, and then he became a monster – with Jack Nicholson playing him, he was a lunatic from that first slimy, leery-eyed smile.  All of the family love that I adored about the Shining, where dysfunctional people who really cared about each other were teased into murder by the machinations of the hotel, had completely disappeared.
And then George started sending me videos.
The video that first got me was this analysis of the Shining’s literally impossible architecture, where there’s an office with an outside window where there logically could be none – and watch how carefully Kubrick has the camera follow Jack into that office, as if he wanted to show you just how crazy this all was.  There’s enough of those impossibilities that it becomes far more than your standard set-building shortcuts, and more like a subliminal effect Kubrick purposely built in:

And the more you know about Kubrick, the more you suspect he did it on purpose.  The man was a genius with a 200 IQ, an obsessive Freudian, prone to thinking in abstract terms.  He was meticulous about his sets, spending literally millions on 2001: A Space Odyssey to make sure that everything in the movie was space-ready and compliant with what NASA knew about space, even though no one else would care.  He placed cans on sets by himself, arranging them for his own purposes.  He gave Shelly Duvall a nervous breakdown during the filming of the Shining, forcing her to do a scene 200+ times until he was satisfied for reasons that nobody else on the set understood, setting a Guinness World Record for the number of takes.  (He might have broken that record with Scatman Crothers, were it not for people yelling at him with concerns that the elderly Scatman couldn’t take it any more.)
So if there’s one filmmaker ever who would have scattered his film with obscure references to tell an alternate story, it is Kubrick – revered, popular, given big-budget movies and no Hollywood control.
And if you look closely at the Shining, there are some very weird things happening that don’t make sense.  The architecture shifting is one thing; there’s clearly a body coming out of the elevator of blood in another.  There’s something going on beneath the surface, and given that Kubrick liked his films to be rewatched, some of those details are meant to be seen.
But then you have the guy who claims that the movie is actually about the genocide of the Indians, based purely on the fact that in two scenes, there are Calumet cans of baking soda, and they’re turned different ways.
What I wanted from Room 237, which documents these various Shining conspiracy theories, was to take us on the emotional journey – set it up that reclusive, cryptic Kubrick was the kind of guy who did crazy shit like this.  Show us the most obvious bits of mindfuckery so we’d go, “Oh, man, look!  He really fucked us on that one, I never noticed – what else is there?”  Then, bit by bit, show us increasingly dubious or arguable tricks of The Shining, stepping us further into conspiracy nutjob things, so by the time we get to the theory that The Shining is Kubrick’s encoded apology for faking the moon landing footage, we’re sitting there questioning everything we know.  Was any of this planned?  Was all of it?  Where do you draw the line on Kubrick’s intention?
But no.  The film is incompetent – just six faceless nutjobs rambling on their various theories.  The film starts with the Calumet can theory, one of the most ludicrous, shooting its wad in one go.  It barely touches on the legitimate reasons people think there might be a hidden message in the movie, ignores Kubrick mostly, giving no history, throwing out various weird bits of the Shining as if they’re all equal.
Now, some of my friends have liked Room 237 because it’s a look at conspiracy thinking, which I can see – the way these people obsess over crazy details, spending more time on an extra with no lines than all of Scatman Crothers’ scenes.  But the movie starts by trashing the very idea that there might be any legitimacy in these theories to begin with, then letting these guys drone on for ninety minutes with no unifying theme.  And they’re boring.  I maintain you could have made a way more interesting film out of this even if you just wanted to use The Shining as a meditation on how crazy conspiracy theorists get.
The film’s so incompetent that at one point, a crying child interrupts one of the narrators.  Do we cut this out of the film?  No.  We wait for fifteen seconds in silence, the film paused, while he tends to his kid.  It’s like they weren’t even trying, man.