Mornings on the T

I don't mind taking the subway to work at all. The probability that something extraordinary will happen is around 50%. This is to say that, after a while, things that you might consider ridiculous become everyday occurrences, like a homeless man blowing his nose into a clear plastic poncho in a car packed with people. When the pair of Brazilian teenagers across from you begin whispering sweet nothings to each other in Portuguese and picking at each other's facial acne, you sit there and smile to yourself instead of screaming "LOOK AT YOURSELVES!" at them.

If riding the subway tells you anything, it's that nothing is funnier than real life. The T is a never-ending source of small comedies and dramas that play out over the course of three or four stops. I love being a spectator to most of them. We live in an increasingly lonely society, one that often leaves us in silent observation of what goes on around us. Most of this is dependent on people’s strange willingness to be candid in the presence of strangers who will exit their lives forever in ten minutes.

One of my dad’s maxims as a baseball coach was “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.” You can always learn more by listening than you can by talking. At the same time, though, you may find out things you never wanted to know. I don’t listen to my IPod on the train anymore because I like to pay attention to the people around me. My favorite repeated occurrence is when someone is on the phone and has absolutely no qualms about talking as if nobody else is around them. I’ve heard enough half-conversations about failing relationships and doctor’s appointments to last a lifetime.

Nothing will make your day like the watching a fat businessman land-surf down the staircase and flail across the platform, arriving just as the train’s doors close. The look in his eyes is priceless – it’s like he goes through the stages of grief all in the course of two seconds. First there’s the blind hope that the conductor will see him coming and hold the train. Then there’s the rage at the conductor for closing the doors when he probably saw him coming, generally punctuated by a halfhearted bang on the door, followed by the acceptance of the fact that ten minutes of his life are going to be spent waiting for the next train.

Then you accelerate out of the station and never see him again. Which is probably good, because there’s a good chance he wouldn’t appreciate the sight of you laughing at him from inside the car.

The Benefits of Exercise

I just had a woman come by to take a look at an apartment that happens to be in the same building my office is in. I'm using "woman" in the loosest sense of the word, since a more appropriate term would be "giant Weeble."

To recap: the woman shows up right on time and literally has to turn sideways to get through the door to our office. She is about 5'1 and pushing 350 pounds. Whatever; I'll show her the place. We go into the lobby and a sign on the elevator informs us that it is out of order. "No problem," I say, "we can take the stairs."

Her response? "No, I don't think I can see it today."

"It's on the second floor, it's right up the stairs."

"I would REALLY prefer to take the elevator. I don't do stairs." At this point she handed me her card, told me to call her when the elevator was working, and left.

This woman was unwilling to walk up one flight of stairs to see an apartment where she might be living for the next year. And you wonder why I hate fat people.

I Am an Old, Old Man

I used to think that I was still young. At first glance it seems ridiculous to even consider the possibility that I might be getting old, since I’m 22, I graduated from college in June, and less than thirteen months ago I couldn’t legally drink.

That was before this month, which I spent watching Ben Roethlisberger and Reggie Bush play football. Roethlisberger is 23 years old and Bush is 20, which means that if you asked him what his favorite Super Nintendo game was he would probably look at you like you asked him to go out to the barn and help you churn some butter. That is disturbing. Like Reggie, Carmelo Anthony and Andrew Bogut are both younger than I am. I have more than a year on LeBron James. At this point, the average NBA player is about my age, and I would practically be an elder statesman on the Clippers. Part of me feels guilty for caring about the performance of men who aren’t allowed in bars. The other part of me is terrified that I’m destined to become That Creepy Old Guy, in the vein of that creepy old guy who tells everyone at the bar what a great quarterback he was in high school.

So it’s entirely possible that watching sports has skewed my ability to accurately evaluate my age. I’m still younger than 70% of the population, but about half the people I watch on TV are younger than I am, mostly because they’re athletes. That’s a depressing step. When the people who you find entertaining are younger than you almost by necessity, you’ve really crossed the Rubicon into adulthood. In another year I’ll probably have a colostomy bag.

The primary reason for this is because, like most guys, I never really abandoned the idea that in some universe I would become a professional athlete. When I was growing up I never understood people who looked at pro athletes with a weird combination of admiration and jealousy. Why would you be jealous of them? After all, couldn’t that be you in five or ten years? Barry Bonds didn’t represent greed – he represented possibility. For those of us who were even marginally better than average athletes, becoming the next Jim Edmonds was a realistic career choice.

Of course, we all have to grow up sometime. Even then, the phrase “grow up” confuses me, because it seems like something I was already supposed to do. I don’t feel unprepared per se; I just have a vague sense of having missed out on something important. It’s like I showed up to high school one Monday and everyone else was talking about developing investment capital and the housing market. Meanwhile, I’m still more concerned with organizing a rec-league softball team, and I sincerely doubt that I will ever appreciate fine wine. On some level, this is sad. It appears that my only options are either to stop clinging to my youth, or to become an overgrown man-boy who will one day fight with his children over video game controllers. Only time will tell.

When I was in seventh grade, I was given what turned out to be an incredibly depressing homework assignment: write an essay on where I thought my life would be in fifteen years. (Maybe my English teacher was just running out of ideas.) Of course, like everyone else, I crafted a lifestyle that would make a Saudi prince seem like the poster boy for fiscal responsibility – all Maseratis and vacation homes in Belize and trophy girlfriends. As for where I’d be getting that money, I figured by 25 I would already be a professional baseball player, or, at worst, in the upper ranks of some farm system (they don’t like to rush the stud prospects).

But now, like everyone else, I have a real job. The star small forwards and cornerbacks of ten years ago are riding the subway to work with me, listlessly watching a homeless man blow his nose into his raincoat in the middle of a crowded car. 90% of my interaction with sports takes place on a TV screen or monitor. Not that there’s anything wrong with this. I still love watching football, and will continue to do so until the day I die (likely at age 32 in an unfortunate motorized-wheelchair accident). However, I just spent three hours of my Sunday watching a guy (Roethlisberger) who could easily have been in my graduating class in college lead his team to the Super Bowl. I’m not sure what this means, other than that I need to stop comparing my own career path to professional athletes’. It shouldn’t bother me that Reggie Bush will make more with one signature than I probably will in a few years. I should congratulate Lebron James on achieving my dream of appearing four times in the same Nike commercial before his 21st birthday. I may not be able to throw for 268 yards against the one of the best defenses in the AFC, but I am a beautiful and unique snowflake.

And I'm still doing better than Marcus Vick.

Save Arrested Development

SAVE ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

Please, do this for me even if you don't like the show. Then put a plastic bag over your head and inhale deeply, because I honestly hope you die a premature and painful death.

Below is the text of the letter I sent to Fox last week; I'm lazy and am just now getting around to posting it here.

Dear Fox:

I guess for a while I could deal with your mangled abortion of "Family Guy" and your inexplicable refusal to get rid of Tim McCarver during the baseball playoffs, but giving up on "Arrested Development" was the last straw.

Part of me is depressed because I know your network is purely a market-driven enterprise that does nothing but respond to what it thinks consumers want. Therefore, I should put the blame for AD's failure on my fellow man. I guess AD was just too smart and funny to survive on network television. I mean, they didn't even have a laugh track - how are you supposed to know what's funny without the TV prompting you to laugh?

But a bigger part of me is angry. The part of me that knows how stupid it is to use something as imprecise and outdated as Nielsen ratings to determine a show's appeal. The part that realizes that the people who fill out Nielsen forms are the same people who hold up the line at 7-11 because they can't add change. The part that knows TV networks could put together much better programming with even a modicum of effort. The part that seethes at the fact that you can continue to promote a show that survives based entirely on Pam Anderson's boobs.

People don't watch something purely because they like it - they watch it because it's the best thing available in that particular time slot. If you give people a sampling of quality television to choose from, they'll choose something good. I guess I can't blame you, though, because at this point you've put together such a DiMaggio-like streak of dull, derivative sitcoms that you'll never need to have an original thought again and people will still watch whatever you regurgitate because your competitors suck so heroically. TV is becoming more and more like the telecommunications industry - if even ONE provider/network could do things right consistently, they would make money hand over fucking fist, but apparently that's too much to ask.

People failed to watch Arrested Development not because it was a crappy show, but because you marketed it so poorly, as David Cross pointed out in the Season 2 DVD. I understand that it's difficult to rope someone into watching a half-hour TV show with a thirty-second spot. Still, for future reference, when you're pitching an intelligent show for once, you might want to avoid any of the approaches you used to promote it:
1) Trying to guilt people into watching it by citing its awards, as if Joe Television is going to hear "X number of Emmys" and suddenly tune in.
2) Showing 10-second clips of something like Gob dancing like an idiot, which is hilarious in the context of the show but when shown by itself makes "Arrested Development" look like another "Stacked." There are literally hundreds of smart, funny moments per episode, any one of which you could have used in AD's commercials, but you consistently chose them poorly.
3) Moving the show from Sunday to Monday without telling anyone, all while using all your ad time to suck "Prison Break"'s dick like it held the cure for cancer. Also, smart move filling the gap left by AD with reruns of "Prison Break." Nothing helps a fledgling show take hold like driving it into the ground.

I guess the only conclusion I can draw from this chain of events is that people – both viewers and television executives – are idiots, and that they need either a laugh track or an overly simplistic graph to tell them what's good and what's not. However, it does give me some solace to know that when the content delivery revolution finally rolls around, the free market will take over, shows that are actually funny will take hold, and with any luck the people who canceled Arrested Development will be homeless in a Santa Monica gutter. One other bright side is the fact that Fox is now down to two watchable shows per week. As soon as you lose the rights to the baseball playoffs, I'll never have to watch Fox again.

And as for the rest of your programming, good luck. I can think of five people off the top of my head, myself included, who could write better material than "The War at Home." Well, maybe "The War at Home" is a bad example, since I'd rather take a dump on a plate and then watch it spin around in the microwave than watch half an hour of that. You’d better hope Kiefer Sutherland never decides to restart his movie career.

I know my opinion is worthless, since you make just as much money when an ad flicks before my eyes as when the same ad appears to someone who thinks "Stacked" is funny. I do want my voice to be heard though, because I know a lot of other intelligent people who love "Arrested Development" as much as I do. I just hope you notice that my response to AD's cancellation was at least kind of well-written and hopefully reflects my ability to dictate trends as a consumer, whereas I imagine when "Stacked" inevitably gets canceled, the people who will be upset will either have their e-mail screened out by the warden or will be too busy masturbating to care.

Sorry to take up so much of your time. I know you're busy addressing America's burning need for another dopey husband/hot wife/quirky family show.

Love,

Dan McCarthy