A Little blue

M

ost of us, I think, have a variety of expectations for the different things in our life. We expect a date to go well, or a meal to taste good. Chnces are, expectations are high or there are no expectations at all. But occasionally, low expectations can be a good thing. Especially with movies.

This weekend, I saw Zoolander. I should say I had no expectations, but I'd be lying. I had low expectations. I expected it to be bad. Zoolander was on a cable network, TNT, I think, and so as I was working out with my weights in the basement, I decided to leave it on since it probably would not effect my concentration. But as I cought glimpses of it, I started cracking up. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson usually rub me the wrong way, but the roles they played were perfect: good-looking and stupid male models. I mean they made male models look really stupid, but the laughter started when I noticed that Stiller's father Jerry had a major role. Even his mother was in an early scene as a crazy tree hugger type trying to get at Mugatu (Will Farrell), the guy that Derek Zoolander and Hansel McDonald foil and save the Malaysian Prime Minister from getting assassinated. Yeah, like right... Hahahahah. Anyway, it was totally mindless, but some of the scenes caught me off guard and I found myself actually enjoying it. I mean, the secret voice that exposes the secret of the conspiracy is none other than the X-File's David Duchovny. Anyway, low expectations allowed me to enjoy the movie. You're on the air...

Link_Strife: Let's see, I might have a question as well.... Okay, so how do you manage to always sound so cheerful on Xanga? Well, okay, not cheerful, but at least you never sound angry. Except for that one time, but you didn't use swearwords, like I am often tempted to do. Life is trying, I use Xanga to let out steam.

O-man: Well, Link, I guess being cheerful is one of the things I do best. But that doesn't mean I'm always cheerful. There are a number of things that anger me, and anger can be presented in a number of ways. For example, I get upset at certain issues related to race and discrimination, and I will present my views, but in as civilized manner as I can. Why? Because these issues will never be resolved in a shouting match. I prefer to confront issues as calmly as possible here. But that doesn't mean I am a calm person. In person, I can get visibly upset and digusted with many things. The beauty of Xana is that I can edit and re-edit what I write before I make it public. Sometimes, if the topic seems inflamatory, I will leave it for a few hours are even a day or two, and then re-read it later to see if there is any excessive hostility. This, of course, is not the case with comments on other Xangan sites, and I have unfortunately left some comments that I wish I could take back. But such is life.

There are also times when I feel kinda down, as well... Like today.

Yesterday was Father's Day, and I was hoping I'd hear from my daughter. As I mentioned in previous post, I get the impression that my daughter feels I have abandoned her, and that I feel her drifting away, week to week, month to month, year to year. Well, I opened my e-mail account hoping to find a message. There was one in which the sender name and subject was unintelligible. In Japanese, it is known as mojibake, or "character transmogrification", and looks something like ・＆,！,A, ‘,％,＾,＊,＠,｜, This happens when Japanese characters appear on a page expecting characters encoded in English. I was a bit excited thinking it might be K, but when I changed the encoding it was just spam from Japan. I checked my e-mail several times throughout the day, but today I am resigned to the fact that I will not receive a message from her.

I suppose I should have applied my approach of low expectations to my daughter as well. It would have saved me from being disappointed. But, then I would hate myself for having low expectations of her. She is no "Zoolander". Better to be disappointed than to have lost hope.