Flaws in My Favorite Movies and Why I Defend Them

Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? This conversation came up recently when we were watching Mad Max Fury Road. It doesn't strike a chord with me as much as the six movies in this list, but I'd say it's pretty near perfect.

So are any of my favorite movies perfect? I can't say they are, but here are the things I'll admit are flaws, and why I'll still defend these movies to the death.

6. The Force Awakens - the ending is rushed

Guess what? R2D2 randomly woke up and now we know where Luke is? For such a long movie, they sure did rush the finding-Luke plotline.

Why I defend: When they actually do find Luke, it's such a beautiful moment it makes me cry every time. And this is a fantastic movie, my favorite in the franchise. I love the return of the original cast. I love that we have a strong heroine who is never sexualized; we don't think of her as "the girl," we think of her as the hero. (They didn't QUITE stick with that in the sequels, but that's not The Force Awakens' fault.)

5. West Side Story - Tony is an idiot

The remake of West Side Story gave Tony more of a back story, including that he'd actually been involved in some criminal activity, rather than him being the seeming innocent that he was in the original who just happened to be best friends with a gang leader. But they also kind of make him a moron. 

In the original, the song "Cool" is sung by the Jets, trying to calm down after their leader, Riff, is killed. In the remake, Tony sings the song BEFORE the rumble, while taunting Riff with a gun that he then lets Riff take anyway. Tony is basically the worst rumble-stopper ever. Why did they do that? Did that actor just want another song?

Why I defend: This is just such a good remake, bringing my favorite movie from childhood into the modern age. Yes, Tony is basically the cause of everything bad that happens, but let's focus on the female characters. Rachel Zegler, Ariana Debose, Rita Moreno, all of them will make you feel feelings again. I was crying so hard walking out of the theater that I ran into two people.

4. Black Swan - so many unanswered questions

I can see how people would be put off by a movie where you never find out exactly how much was actually a figment of the main character's imagination. Black Swan sure does that to you. Nina is losing her mind throughout the movie, and she's also seeing herself everywhere. You'll see that Lily's face, Beth's face, and even a random unnamed character's face change into Natalie Portman's at pivotal parts of the movie. My biggest unanswered question is probably whether Nina stabbed Beth. When Nina visits Beth in the hospital, Beth stabs herself in the face with a nail file, her face turning into Natalie Portman's as she does so. But when Nina runs away, we see her drop a bloody nail file. Unless this scene was entirely imagined, SOMEONE got stabbed, but who did it? She's already hallucinating at this point, so did she even go see Beth or ...

Why I defend: This movie is a masterpiece. When it came out, my friend and I agreed that the last 20 minutes of this movie alone were better than any of the best picture nominees. Pretty much all of this director's movies have beautifully tragic endings, and this is the most beautifully tragic.

3. IT - damn it, I can't find a flaw with this one

I guess the only, the ONLY thing would be it's odd between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 they abandoned Ben being the resident historian who knew all about Derry and now it's Mike, but that MAKES SENSE,  Mike is the one who STAYED in Derry and I'm kind of glad they did that because Mike didn't get a lot to do in Chapter 1, don't say anything bad about this movie, it is the closest on my list to a perfect movie.

2. Cloud Atlas - the beginning is confusing

If you've never seen Cloud Atlas or read the book, this movie covers 6 separate storylines, all linked together, spanning from the 1800s to the far future. And I kind of love that ****. In the book, though, they present the storylines in order, starting by going forward and then going back to the earliest storyline, so Adam Ewing (played by Jim Sturgess in the movie) is our bookend character. In the movie, they give you everything everywhere all at once (that sounds like something that could win an Oscar). I could see people completely checking out after the opening scene where all 6 protagonists are shoved in your face, talking about things you would have no idea what they are if you haven't read the book and haven't seen the movie before. Who is Old Georgie? Who are all these people? Where am I?

Why I defend: If you make it past the opening scene and just tell yourself it will make sense later, this is the best English-language movie I've ever seen, and I love that they constructed it the way they did. Showing parallel scenes in all the different timelines is done masterfully, and I'm so glad they cast the same actors in each timeline. And, much like Black Swan, the soundtrack definitely adds a lot. This movie will make you feel like you've lived multiple lives.

1. Uzumaki - Kirie is not as strong a character as she was in the manga

This is my favorite movie. I can't even tell you why, just ... watch it. It's a brilliant fever dream based on my favorite manga, well, at least roughly half of my favorite manga. Junji Ito's manga brings you into a world where people throw ducks at balloons and nothing is the way it seems. No one throws ducks at balloons. That was a Simpsons quote. But, yeah. This movie is hard to describe, and the only flaw is that Kirie, the main character, is not the strong protagonist she was in the manga. She's more of a victim.

Why I defend: By making Kirie baffled and powerless instead of proactive like she is in the manga, she's actually more relatable. I mean, what would you do if your town were turning into a giant spiral? Maybe you'd try to take control of the situation, but I think I'd be just as baffled and powerless as Kirie is in the movie. I mean, I have to move somewhere like 4 miles away and I feel baffled and powerless, so maybe movie-version Kirie is a heroine for Mandies.

Ten Comedy Characters Who Fell From Grace

 Sometimes, even those who have it all can throw it away. In this blog, I'm going to be counting down the top ten comedy characters I could think of that started out upstanding and either went back on their own values, made some very bad choices, or just went bat**** insane. 

Some disclaimers:

-Walter White isn't going to be on this list. Breaking Bad is not a comedy. I mean, we get some larfs, mostly at the expense of Marie, but it's not.

-We won't include any characters who were just terrible to begin with. We're looking for contrast. So, Gil from The Simpsons won't be on the list.

-We won't include any characters that ultimately had some kind of redemption, so no Jerry Smith, Kirk VanHouten, or BoJack Horseman.

Without further ado, here's my top 10 list! Please let me know what you think in the comments, and like and subscribe. I keep forgetting I'm not YouTube.

10. Michael Bluth - Arrested Development

How he started: As the intro narration states, "Now, the story of a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together."

As the show begins, Michael and his son, George Michael, are going back to live with his family and try to help them recover from some financial difficulties. In the first scene, he tells his son that family is the most important thing.

How he wound up: He completely abandons his family at the end of season 3, after which the show was canceled. When there was a revival for seasons 4 and 5, season 5 ends with him, again, abandoning his family, just when they were all agreeing they were lost without him.

Don't get me wrong, Michael does a lot of *****y stuff between the two abandonments. As the show progresses, he becomes more and more selfish and detached from his family. He barely listens to his son, and treats his son's first serious girlfriend terribly. He has a physical altercation with his brother because they both want to date the same girl. He has a physical altercation with his son because they both wanted to date the same girl. (Calm down, that was in season 4 when George Michael is older, everything's legal). It becomes pretty hard to root for the character who was supposed to be our hero when we see how susceptible he is to selling out. But, that's part of the comedy.

9. Hayley Smith - American Dad

How she started: Hayley was the oppressed voice of reason in the family. Obviously the smartest and most compassionate Smith, she was interested in starting a charity and frustrated with her father's political views being so different from her own. 

How she is now: Hayley has gradually spiraled over the seasons, and it's ultimately revealed that she's more dependent on her family and her lovable yet moronic husband Jeff than anyone is on her. She is shown to have deep insecurities and be incapable of growing up. She purposely tries her hardest to fail community college, and let's face it, she's never going to move out of her childhood bedroom. In an episode where Jeff becomes intelligent due to a surgical procedure, she can't handle it, because she needs him to be dependent on her. She needs a purpose and never finds one, and that's what makes her the most interesting character on American Dad. At one point, she decides her purpose is to have a baby, at another, she decides she's going to raise chickens, nothing ever works out for her. She even gives up on her previously strict vegetarianism when she decides her life's purpose is her job at SubHub. Hayley is, truly the definition of, arrested development.

8. Joe Swanson - Family Guy

How he started: Joe was the life of the party. No one seemed to even notice he was in a wheelchair. His wife worshiped him, he was the life of every party, his son respected him, his confidence had no bounds, and he was described as being attractive (and, by his wife Bonnie in early seasons, some kind of sex god).

How he is now: Joe is a complete joke.

I'm not sure exactly when this happened; I think it was more of a gradual shift, like Hayley's. But Joe's main character trait now is that no one can stand being alone with him. His wife completely hates him, and it's implied that they never have sex, and when they do, it requires some very expensive equipment that insurance will only pay for once a year. He's completely checked out on his son and daughter, and he is completely incapable of making conversation.

"Joe, you should look into taking a class on making small talk."

"You know, I actually am.

-Cutaway to Joe in class-

"It sure is cloudy today."

"Joe, if you'd been paying attention, you would have been more sympathetic when your classmate told you that her son died."

"I'm sorry. It's a shame your son had to die on such a cloudy day."

7. Kitty Kenarban - Malcolm in the Middle

How she started: Kitty is the mother of Stevie, Malcolm's best friend. She is extremely strict, treating Stevie like he is made out of glass. She's also extremely reserved and uptight in her interactions with other people, in other words, the opposite of Malcolm's mom, Lois. When the two families go out to dinner (because Kitty wanted to vet Malcolm's parents and see if it was ok for Stevie to hang out with him), Lois realized Kitty is incapable of displaying any emotion other than concern and fake smiles.

How she ended up: This is more sudden than any of the prior downfalls. Kitty leaves the family, leaving her husband to take care of her handicapped son, and causing Stevie to have a complete breakdown. She comes back at some point, and we find out she had been living a life of pornography and petty crime. She never apologizes, though. It seems she had a lot repressed, but ... what happened? Did the actress who played her have other commitments? Ultimately, she's just written off the show.

6. Dee Reynolds - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

How she started: "Sweet Dee" was the voice of reason in the gang. She cared about everyone. She has lines like, "Guys, we all love Charlie very much, we need to be there for him," "Charlie, it's the waitress from the coffee shop that you like, let's go talk to her!" and "You guys really are not hiring my friend Artemis because she does not meet your physical standards?"

How she is now: Dee is a monster.

Part of this was due to a casting change. It's Always Sunny was started as a low-budget passion project by Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenny, and Charlie Day. They needed a token girl, so they created the character of Dee and cast McElhenny's girlfriend. She didn't screen test well, so they recast Dee as Kaitlin Olson. Kaitlin didn't like being the "straight person" and wanted to be as funny as the guys, so she helped reinvent the character into a female Dennis, just as depraved and even sometimes predatory as he is. And it's comedy gold. Seinfeld (more about them later) opened the door for a show about terrible people, and Always Sunny charged right through it.

The episode "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink" is a really, really terrible flashback episode where we see that when the gang were around 18 - 20 years old, they worked at a roller rink and Dee was actually sweet and everyone loved her. She has a head injury while roller skating and immediately is shoving people and yelling out her standard "sonsof******s" accusations. Fans, including me, were really not happy about that episode, but maybe it was Always Sunny's way of going back to try to explain the extreme character change between season 1 and season 2.

5. Meg Griffin - Family Guy

How she started: She's a sweet 15-year-old girl. She wants plastic surgery because gosh, her lips are too thin! How is she supposed to get the attention of the cute boy named Kevin who just moved in next door (more about him later)?

How she is now: Meg is a monster and also depicted as grotesque, even though the character design hasn't changed. She's frequently mistaken for a man, a sack of potatoes, or a barrel that happened to have a hat that looked like hers on top of it.

It's a good thing they aged Meg up from 15 to 18 over the course of the show, because multiple times she's been depicted as a sexual predator who will sleep with absolutely anyone. Her family's treatment of her is terrible, but her behavior is also terrible. She can't get a date to save her life, but she's trying to get all the older man *** in town. She's also been married or at least gotten up to the altar three times, including once to a gay man in his 50's. This girl is messed up. But, like Dee Reynolds, she is the result of a staff of male writers who felt like they needed a female character but didn't know how to write for one. And like Dee Reynolds, she started out kind of stiff and stereotypical before going straight off the deep end.

4. Eleanor Abernathy (commonly known as "Crazy Cat Lady") - The Simpsons

How she started: Is this a cheat? The first time we see her, she's already become the crazy cat lady, who can't speak intelligibly and throws cats at people. But in a flashback episode, we see that she used to be a promising young lawyer. This proves to be canon, as in the La La Land parody episode, she sings that "I have a law degree, but now I smell like cat pee" and one of the cats then sings along to affirm that her brain is gone.

Where she is now: Well, she can't speak intelligibly and she throws cats at people. What was meant to be a one-time joke, I assume, became a regular character. In the season 34 finale, Homer becomes so enraged that he can't speak intelligibly either, and they have a conversation. Maybe she's just dealing with a whole lot of rage.

3. Kevin Swanson - Family Guy

How he started: He was the bland, described-as-attractive son of Peter's new neighbor Joe. Meg was mad crushing on him. He walked her home from school once and they held hands. He invited her to his New Year's Eve party, which did not happen due to Y2K.

How he is now: Everyone is advised to not talk to or acknowledge Kevin. Again, I have no idea what happened with this character. Did they decide not to pursue the love-interest-for-Meg storyline? Did the actor leave the show? At any rate, at one point we randomly find out that Kevin died in Iraq. He returns at one point, admitting that he faked his own death, and from then on it's just increasingly downhill. We see that Kevin is no longer the upstanding young man he used to be, he has PTSD, and his parents have checked out on him. In one episode, Stewie and Brian are trying to find someone desperate enough to date Meg, and they land on Kevin since he was in the middle of the street trying to set himself on fire. But even Meg turns him down at this point.

Is this an insensitive portrayal of veterans? Yeah. Am I glad they got rid of Kevin for a while and didn't move forward with the whole Meg-likes-Kevin subplot they had in the first two seasons? Also yeah. That would have been insufferable. I hope this guy gets back on his feet at some point.

2. Russell Dalrymple - Seinfeld

How he started: He was the president of NBC, divorced, very protective of his daughter.

How he ended up: This might be the darkest downfall of any of these characters, and the fact that a laugh track was playing through the whole thing is unnerving, but it's a product of the times.

Russell had it all, until he went on one date with Elaine. Elaine wasn't into him and had gone out on the date just to prove a point, and tried to let him down easy by giving an excuse. "I don't really like television. I mean, maybe if you were in Greenpeace or something."

After this, Russell, now completely obsessed with Elaine, checks out at work, starts firing people at random, actually does join Greenpeace, and dies.

I re watched that episode of Seinfeld because I don't return to that one too often, even though I loved the show when I was young. The laugh track can sometimes be jarring because we're not really used to laugh tracks anymore. I'm strangely fascinated by the logistics behind when they play the laugh tracks, but that could be a whole separate post. The main storyline of "The Pilot" is funny, but the B-plots of Russell spinning out and George thinking he might have cancer are absolutely anything but funny, and the laugh track plays any time there's a pause. I mean, he was obviously mentally ill, and stalking Elaine. And his sacrifice pretty much puts his death and the failure of Jerry and George's pilot squarely on Elaine, but I don't think she cares enough to notice. Elaine, after all, is the character that opened the door for Dee Reynolds to charge through.

1. Matthew Mara (now known as "Cricket") - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

How he started: He was a priest who was dedicated to the Lord but still harbored some feelings for his high school crush, Dee Reynolds.

How he ended up: God, you knew this would be my #1 as soon as you saw the title, right? There's no one else it could be.

Dee, mainly because she is a horrible person and wanted attention (this is why she's also on this list), told Cricket that she loved him so he would leave the priesthood to be with her. Immediately after he did so, she told him she was kind of just kidding about that.

When Cricket manages to clean up a little bit, the gang ruins that by getting him addicted to cocaine. He ends up homeless, a lifelong drug addict, and trying to write a rock opera. Over the course of the show he is hunted for sport, set on fire, and eventually becomes a prostitute.

Cricket goes from being a priest to being, essentially, sub-human. Currently, he runs with a pack of stray dogs and he's not even the alpha, but the gang still lets him come into the bar to wash himself off and smoke PCP in their bathroom. So, hey. He's still got friends. 

The Good, the Dad, and the Ugly

 TV dads. From the Brady Bunch guy to Bill Cosby to Bob Saget to Al Bundy, we can all agree that most of them suck. And that I don't remember the character and/or actor names. But, some TV dads etch themselves in our memories by being good enough dads to really EARN that annual tie gift, or being bad enough that they need to go to extensive Dad Camp and be forced to wear sweaters and make lame jokes until they are deemed competent enough to get their children back. Today we're counting down the best and the worst of the TV dads.

A few disclaimers before we begin:

-This isn't a comprehensive list. I don't watch everything in the world, ok, so this is only shows I have watched extensively. I would never presume to talk about things I don't actually know about, like the internet trolls who like to complain about the declining quality of a show they haven't actually watched in 20 years. 

- This is only going to encompass comedies, horror-comedies, and dramedies, not dramas. I mean, how much fun would it be to write about a dad who has a slew of daughter-wives, a dad who forces his children into unwanted marriages, sentences his son to death, and then sleeps with his son's lover, or a dad who burns his 11-year-old daughter at the stake because a hot redhead told him to? We're sticking on the non-murdery side of things today. (And if you're upset about Game of Thrones spoilers, you're really late to the party.)

- These are not lists of my favorite and least favorite dad characters; I am judging them by how good or bad they are at being dads. So don't bother to ask, "Where are some of your all-time favorite characters, like Homer, or Hal from Malcolm in the Middle?" Well, they just didn't hit my good dad or my bad dad radar. Homer pretty much parents when Marge nudges him to, and Hal pretty much parents when Lois allows him to. You ask, "But Mandie, surely Peter Griffin will make the bad dad list for his treatment of Meg." To which I reply, come on, it's Meg.

Also I probably forgot a lot of dads because I wrote this list at 2 a.m. Anyway, without further ado, let us play good dad bad dad.

Bad Dad #5: Joseph Sugarman (BoJack Horseman)

Joseph Sugarman was the father of Beatrice, BoJack's mother. I don't believe BoJack ever met him, but we see him in Beatrice's flashbacks.

"Well, he's just a product of his time," you might try to excuse him. "There were lots of wealthy, standoffish, misogynist dads in the 1940's." Sure, maybe he couldn't entirely help being the way he was, but he did ruin the life of a daughter who could have been better.

After Beatrice's brother is killed in World War Two, her mother has a meltdown, and Joseph has her lobotomized so that he doesn't have to deal with women's hysteria. This leaves him to raise Beatrice alone, which consists of loveless grooming so that she can marry a wealthy suitor. From restricting what she eats (when pushing her to marry Corbin Creamerman of ice cream wealth, he suggests she could have all the ice cream she wants to ... serve to the men) to forbidding her from reading or independent thought (reading takes up space in women's brains that is better spent on hips and breasts), he makes Beatrice the miserable cynic that she is. It is because of Joseph that Beatrice feels the need to rebel, so she sneaks out of her own debutante party to sleep with a local nogoodnik and gets pregnant with BoJack.

This leads to an even more miserable life for Beatrice. Ironically, from the brief glimpses we get of Corbin, he actually was a good guy who would have treated her well. BoJack's father is nothing of the sort, and their resentment-filled marriage produces the hopelessly messed up character of BoJack. So, I guess, say what you will about Joseph; if it weren't for him, we wouldn't have a show.

Good Dad #5: Kyle Carson (BoJack Horseman)

Two BoJack Horseman characters in the same list? What is this, a crossover - oh, wait, that reference doesn't really work here.

Who wouldn't want a dad like Kyle? He appears in only 3 episodes, but he gets his own theme song. "It's, Kyle and the ki - ids, Kyle is the dad, and Charlotte's married to him" When BoJack decides to go find his long-lost crush Charlotte, he is dismayed when Charlotte tells him she can't wait to introduce him to Kyle and the kids. ("Please, tell me that's the name of a band you're in.")

Kyle is the ultimate stereotypical lovable dad. This is a family that eats dinner together every night, and Kyle believes it's not dinner until he gets there with his repertoire of dad jokes. He considers himself the comedian of the family. He's always happy and enthusiastic about things like phone surveys on cable service (he's been rehearsing a set for this one) and the implausible, greeting-card-inspired TV show "Birthday Dad" ("No, Birthday Dad! Don't cross the international date line! It won't be your birthday anymore!") And he's determined to be a goofy, lovable part of his kids' lives. When his daughter Penny is upset because she doesn't have a date for the prom, Charlotte and BoJack try to comfort her while Kyle immediately dons a tuxedo and a bouquet. However, BoJack has already agreed to take Penny to the prom. And, so, like the prior entry in this list, Kyle is a very minor character who plays a very major role in the show, sort of. If he'd gotten that tux on a little faster and he'd taken Penny rather than BoJack, then BoJack's life wouldn't have been ruined by the series of events that precipitated from ... you know what, I'm not going to spoil this show for you. It's worth watching and watching to the end, not like Game of Thrones where only one of those things is true.

Bad Dad #4: Rick Sanchez (Rick and Morty)

It was tough to put Rick on this list because he's a great character and he really does love his daughter Beth, but that doesn't make him a great father. 

Beth's mother dies when Beth is very young, due to a freak Rickcident, so Rick is left to raise Beth alone. Except, he doesn't, really. It seems he pretty much neglected his brilliant young daughter to go off and do space stuff, even though it's obvious she wanted to grow up to be just like him. He even created a rainbow-colored pseudo-reality called "Froopyland" he could shove her in to get her out of the way and distract her from her own mad scientist ambitions. It's evident that by the time Beth got pregnant at 17, Rick was pretty much totally absent.

Then, 17 years later, Rick is back and wants to be a part of their lives, which means that he is going to eat their food, constantly insult Beth's husband and children, and use Beth's son Morty as a sidekick on all his space adventures, which he continues to leave Beth out of because she's a boring mom now. Yet Beth continues to worship her father and is grateful for any attention he gives her.

A great example of this is the famous episode "Pickle Rick." Beth is trying to take the family to therapy, and Rick gets out of it by turning himself into a pickle. His plan backfires, leading to a series of bizarre misadventures that somehow drops him, in pickle form, right into the therapy office. Summer and Morty immediately realize that Rick turned himself into a pickle just to avoid therapy, but Beth refuses to believe that of her dad. When the truth is finally revealed and Rick is injected with anti-pickle serum to return to his human form, all is immediately forgiven when Rick asks Beth if she wants to go out for a drink. Beth is thrilled and forgets all about her attempt to get family therapy.

Is Rick a terrible father? No (we'll get to some of those later), but his crash-landing back into his adoring daughter's life after 17 years of absence and taking over what was probably previously a very boring, normal little family is not a dad-of-the-year move. But, without it, we wouldn't have a show.

Good Dad #4: Clancy Wiggum (The Simpsons)

Springfield's worst cop is also one of Springfield's best dads. He's kind of alone among adult animation dads in that fatherhood never seems like a chore to him. He's proud of his little Ralphie, encouraging all of his interests, even his imaginary friend, Wiggle Puppy. Sure, threatening to put a boot on Ms. Hoover's car if Ralphie didn't get cast in the school play was not a great move, but we know Clancy would have been there for Ralph whether or not he got cast, or whether or not he'd have to issue a gentle "Get off the stage, Ralphie" from the audience. Clancy's aim is always to keep his boy safe and happy. Just take a look at his voicemail message.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w63fEaWtM0Y

Another thing setting Clancy apart is that he's always shown as the parent taking care of and advocating for Ralph. We rarely see Sarah Wiggum (though we did finally get a Sarah-based episode in the last couple years, and might see more now that she's voiced by Megan Mullaly). The Wiggum boys are pretty much a perfect duo. They even walk alike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhu0agKDQYE

Bad Dad #3: Bill Ponderosa (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia)

Who doesn't love the Ponderosas?

Siblings Dennis and Dee Reynolds decide they're going to try to make things work with their respective high school crushes, Maureen and Bill Ponderosa (also siblings). Things look like they won't work out when they meet up and realize Maureen is a cat-obsessed, unemployed buzzkill and Bill is married with two kids. Don't worry, though, that doesn't stop the two couples from hooking up. And, it turns out Bill isn't too concerned about the fact that he has kids. When they invite him to a "squashing our beefs" dinner under the pretense that his kids will be here, the conversation goes kind of like this:

Bill: ... My kids aren't really here, are they?

Mac and Dennis: ... no ...

Bill: Thank god, lets get wrecked

The best example of what kind of a dad Bill is is probably this clip from when Bill is attempting to drink himself to death at the bar and the gang seeks out his family to try to have an intervention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxxM3zrJ_gY

In a later episode, we find out that Bill's son is his drug dealer.

So, Bill should not be a father, but, as he admits in the episode where they try to figure out who is the father of Dee's baby, he is a sex addict that doesn't like condoms and may or may not be lying about having had a vasectomy. So there may be any number of little Pondys out there. Oh well. Possibly he's trying to build up a good dealer base.

Good Dad #3: Cleveland Brown (Family Guy, The Cleveland Show)

I'm a big fan of all three of the major MacFarlane animated comedies, and each has its own appeal. Family Guy is great if you want to watch a dark-humor sendup of the classic family sitcom, American Dad is great if you want to go on a madcap adventure, and The Cleveland Show is possibly the best equivalent to a "comfort food" show because it's about a family that actually loves each other.

Unlike his drinking buddies Peter and Joe, Cleveland is actually invested in his role as a father. He'll skip hanging out with the guys for obligations like their weekly family day or their inexplicable Christmas routine, spending the entire day listening to "A Very Slow Christmas" with Peabo Bryson. Like so many a Wiggum before him, he's dedicated to supporting and advocating for his socially awkward son. He also jumps right in to help father his new stepchildren, Roberta and Rallo, and even offers to take in the Griffin children when Peter is deemed an unfit parent after almost killing Lois with a deep fryer. 

So, yeah, he's a MacFarlane dad, so he's going to do stupid things, but, as he sings in his now-canceled theme song, "Through good times and bad times, it's true love we share."

Bad Dad #2: Luther McDonald (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia)

We are now getting into the territory of dads that never cared even a little about their offspring. Mac idolizes his perpetually incarcerated father, though none of the other characters understand why, as evidenced in the below clip:

Early in the series, after trying to coerce Mac and Charlie into some ... drug smuggling activities, Luther scares them so badly that they attempt to fake their own death. Yet Mac continues to long for his dad's love and approval. But this is a dad who gave his son the name "Ronald McDonald" just because he thought it was funny and still does, a dad who stands up and walks out of the room when his son tries to come out to him, a dad who multiple times has made his son fear for his own life. But, I don't know, maybe he's redeemable. Maybe they'll have that catch one day.

Good Dad #2: Joel Hammond (Santa Clarita Diet)

What do you when your realty business is struggling, your wife has turned into a semi-dead creature that craves human flesh, and your teenage daughter is playing hooky from school?

If you're Joel, you tackle every problem with equal dedication, no matter how nervous it makes you, no matter how much you can't stand the sight of blood. Whether you're sneaking into a morgue, taking care of the still-alive disembodied head in the basement, or going on a potentially lethal mission to share a strudel with a potentially undead man, you'll reluctantly throw yourself into the mission. And, the whole time, be concerned about your family's everyday lives. Is Sheila finding fulfillment at work? Is it possible Abby doesn't really want to go to college? Does she like the boy next door?

Joel manages the near-impossible task of being a loving husband and father while keeping the zombie apocalypse stemming from bad clams at bay. He ultimately joins the Knights of Serbia, an order devoted to ridding the world of the undead, specifically so he can keep his wife safe. It's almost a no-go when he finds out his daughter would be his heir upon his death and takes up his mantle. But, as the good dad he is, he realizes he can only protect so much before he listens to what Abby actually wants to do, and allows her to be his heir. The Hammond family is such a great unit. Shame they only got three seasons.

Bad Dad #1: Cal Jacobs (Euphoria)

While it's not typically my thing, I did get drawn into two raunchy high school soap opera type shows that aired over the past couple years: Sex Education and Euphoria. I think I watched Sex Education first, and Euphoria is Sex Education's less British, more controversial (there is sex but there is also drugz, which Sex Education lacks), vastly more popular cousin. Both shows feature a minor antagonist who is a dad that pushes his son so hard that the son is constantly unhappy and bullies others. But Euphoria's Cal Jacobs makes Sex Education's Mr. Groff look like a complete saint.

Hurt people hurt people. Nate Jacobs' one redeeming trait is that he might only be a monster because of his father, Cal. And when we finally get Cal's back story in season 2, we find out that the cycle of demanding, abusive fathers goes back at least one more generation. In the flashback, we see that teenage Cal was, like his son, a popular athlete under a lot of pressure, mostly from his father. Cal dated a popular girl just to keep up appearances, but his true feelings were for his best friend Derek. Cal and Derek did share one magical night together, only to wake up the next morning to a call from his girlfriend saying she was pregnant. Hence Nate.

Cal and Nate's relationship is one of the most effed-up father-son relationships I've ever seen. They clearly hate each other, but also are incredibly defensive of each other, possibly out of a need to protect the Jacobs name. The whole family must know Cal is having rendezvous in hotel rooms and sometimes taping them without the other person's consent, and Nate choked and traumatized his girlfriend, but still there is the need to keep up appearances.

The mutual protection ends the night Cal goes back to the bar where he and Derek first kissed, is kicked out of the bar, and then comes home and proceeds to pee all over the front hallway while laughing maniacally. Here we get one of the show's darkly funny moments; as Cal starts to unleash a lifetime's worth of pent-up words at his family, his wife and sons are fixated on asking him to put his **** away. Once he puts his **** away, things don't get much better. He tells Nate that he is the worst thing that he's ever done.

Is it ok that Cal did this because he had a shitty dad? No. Is it ok that Nate does the things he does because he has a shitty dad? Also no. One of the things I like about this show is that it gives characters backgrounds and motivations without necessarily redeeming them.

I guess the moral of this story is, don't be a shitty dad. Don't pay it Cal, pay it forward.

Good Dad #1: Bob Belcher (Bob's Burgers)

And we arrive at the winner of the dad award. Bob is a good dad almost to a fault. His passions on the surface are cooking and keeping the family restaurant in business, but deep down he's a family man more than anyone else on this list. I've blogged before about how I don't see how this restaurant could possibly stay open, and Bob is the only person in the family who seems to share my concern, but he will still always cave and close the restaurant to go on whatever zany adventure his family wants.

I get a lot of crap for this, but Linda's not a great mother. She's not going to make my bottom five moms if I ever write that blog I know you're all clamoring for, but I feel like she encourages her kids' weirdness and coddles them to a point that it is actually stunting them. Bob is the sane parent, but no less caring than Linda is. He listens to his children and tries to help them find practical solutions to their problems, unlike his wife, who seems to think the best solution for any problem is to let your freak flag fly and maybe even perform an impromptu song about it. I have no doubt that if it weren't for Bob, the restaurant would not exist and Linda and fam would be institutionalized.

Even though Bob is sometimes quietly frustrated with his children's ineptitude, he is still willing to do whatever he can to make them happy. He takes a second job and even shaves off his mustache so Tina can have the perfect birthday party, he pretends to be a My Little Pony superfan, infiltrates a convention, and even gets a partial tattoo so that Tina can get her favorite toy back, he gets his legs waxed so Tina won't be afraid to ... hmm, a lot of these are things he does for Tina. Is Tina grateful? Not really, she never really thanks him for the party, says she doesn't really like that horse toy anyway, and decides she actually likes having leg hair. But, Bob at least kind of enjoys the waxed feel. See, this is a guy who can find the positive in everything.

So, in conclusion, while this show would rank medium on the scale of animated comedies I've enjoyed, Bob is a freaking saint. And also kind of got me into veggie burgers. Hmm. I sure could go for a Father Knows Cress or a Make Shroom for Daddy right now.

What I Learned from Various Celebrity Autobiographies

When I read nonfiction, I tend to delve into stories about people going through extreme ordeals (Into Thin Air, Unbroken, a couple books about the Donner Party, etc.), OR autobiographies of current-day celebrities who are people I think I might like. Below are my reactions to 8, I mean, 7 1/4, celebrity autobiographies I've read. 

I was thinking of ranking these, but they're just too completely different to rank, SO, get ready for my insane rambling about the time I spent with people I will never actually meet. 

Ellen DeGeneres: Please Take Away Her Computer

I think the book I checked out from the library was actually Ellen's third memoir. Maybe she'd gotten all the good material ... I mean ... all the material ... out by then, and this was what was left. 

Disclaimer: this was back when Ellen was the person who made my grandmother happy with the dance she did on her show, not the Ellen following the revelation she didn't treat her employees very well.

This is the only book on the list I could not finish. I stopped 2 or 3 chapters in and returned it to the library. To give you an idea of what Ellen's book was like, please watch the following Bob's Burgers clip.

Actual Footage of Ellen

I wish I were kidding, but I'm not that far off. If someone with ADD were put in a recording booth, given some shrooms, and told they needed to talk a certain number of words every minute or their head would explode, that would be what Ellen's audiobook sounded like.

"The other day, I saw a bird. Heh, bird. That's a funny word. Word and bird rhyme. Here are some other words I think are funny. Herd. Like, is it I'm listening to something, or is it sheep? Are sheep really good at listening to things? Maybe someone herd that about sheep and that's where sheep herds come from. Sheep herds. Shepherds. Hmm. What was I talking about? Portia and I had some good wine last night. I saw a bird when I was buying it."

That was my dramatic re-enactment of my memories of Ellen's book, but I don't think it's too far off.

Portia de Rossi: Still a Mystery

When I checked out Ellen's book on the Libby app, Portia de Rossi's was recommended.

I'd always been kind of curious about this woman. She has a made up name (I believe her given first and middle name were the same as mine are) (don't ever call me that), and everything I've seen her in (Arrested Development, Better Off Ted, Santa Clarita Diet), she's been emotionless, deadpan, coming off pretty cold. She was a mystery. It's an argument I've had with male friends (most of my friends are male I guess): Can Portia de Rossi act? Can she be funny? Or is it just the characters she's been handed; is this what she's going for? My friends were like, "What are you talking about, she's funny."

I would argue Lyndsey Bluth is the least funny character on Arrested Development, one of the funniest shows formerly on television. It's possible that they just needed a female so they could have the insanely quirky son-in-law portrayed by David Cross on the show, and didn't really know how to write for women. Lyndsey is stupid, but not in an over-the-top ditzy way, but just in a passive, goes-through-the-paces-her-family-dictates way. Her mother fat shames her and tells her to stay out of the way, her daughter literally pimps her out, she just goes along with whatever.

I kind of wanted to hear Portia talk. I didn't, really, because I checked this out as an eBook rather than an audiobook. But she was pretty guarded in her autobiography. Most of what she described was during her Ally McBeal years, and I've never seen that show. And the main impressions I got were that celebrity life isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that Portia wasn't really happy.

While on Ally McBeal, she was constantly compared to her thinner costars Calista Flockhart and Lucy Liu to the point that she developed an eating disorder. She describes this time in kind of a detached tone, and what struck me is that she seemed to be going through all of this on her own. I'd think she'd have an assistant to talk to, a personal trainer, someone to help her be OK while going through this.

Arrested Development went on a long hiatus, and when it returned for season 4, Portia was back but she had changed, looks-wise, more than anyone in the cast. She had a different face. Not just any face. She looked a lot like Calista Flockhart.

I actually googled this to make sure I wasn't crazy. A lot of people had been thrown by how different she looked, and had taken to the internet to see if this was still Portia de Rossi.

She's still kind of a mystery to me, and kind of a sad one, as her memoir made it sound like fame was more of a chore than a joy. It did end on a somewhat hopeful note, and not surprisingly, she retired from acting not too long after, leading to some stilted "Well, we don't know where Lyndsey is" writing in Arrested Development season 5.

Amy Schumer: Standup Act + Autobiography = Entertaining but Somewhat Self-Congratulatory Bookbaby

I like Amy Schumer's standup, and I did really enjoy her variety show "Inside Amy Schumer." 

Her autobiography contains multiple stories that were told in her standup specials, as well as some new, more serious and more personal stuff. Is it really an autobiography? Not entirely, but neither were the last two I've covered. It jumps all over the place. Anecdotes from her childhood are mixed all up in there with stories about her trying to make it on "Last Comic Standing" and her gun control campaign after there was a shooting during a screening of one of her movies.

It was an interesting read, for sure. I feel like there's a lot she didn't cover, and I also feel like some of what she did include was with the agenda "I need to get MY side of the story out." My only real complaint with Amy Schumer is that she never really takes responsibility for stuff.

Someone: Does Amy Schumer write all her own jokes?

Amy: Of course I do.

Someone else: That skit on "Inside Amy Schumer" where the shopper is trying to not be racist when describing who helped them today is exactly like one from MadTV years ago.

Amy: I had no idea that prior skit existed. I have never seen MadTV. I didn't even write that. My staff wrote that. I don't always have time to greenlight everything.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book, and I still enjoy Amy Schumer, even though my best friend has informed me I'm alone in that camp. I'll keep watching her stuff. I don't care whether she wrote it.

Andrew Rannells: It's OK to Be Happy

The Andrew Rannells autobiography was a breath of fresh air. I listened to the audiobook version that he narrated, and the whole thing was just as friendly, funny, sometimes self-deprecating as he comes across in interviews. My favorite thing about this book is that he wasn't afraid to say he was actually happy doing what he was doing. Before he got his Broadway break in Hairspray, he was in an off-off-off Broadway musical based on The Karate Kid called "It's Karate, Kid!" He admitted it was not the greatest play in the world but he had so much fun doing it.

Rannells wrote his autobiography kind of young, just shy of 40, and didn't go on to describe his Broadway and TV stardom, but he felt like his origin story was important to tell. While overall lighthearted, the book deals with some tough stuff. You would have to live under a rock not to know he is gay, but I hadn't known previously that he grew up in a Catholic home in the Midwest. The most serious chapter of the book describes his first relationship with an older man who manipulated him and turned in to a stalker. He was still a teenager at the time, and felt like he couldn't ask his parents for help, because that would mean coming out to them. He stresses that he would hate to think anyone else is in a similar situation and feeling they have nowhere to turn.

Anyway, I might be biased toward this one because I fell asleep listening to it and I half lived Andrew Rannells' life. I was dreaming that I was in all these musicals, what's up with that, but it was an enjoyable read. If I ever meet this guy I'll give him a hug.

Jessica Simpson: Probably Better Off than Britney

Why did I read Jessica Simpson's autobiography, you may or may not ask.

I found out she had an autobiography from an episode of the podcast "Imagined Life" (which was a great podcast and I miss it). I thought this would have some hot goss on late 90's pop stars and ALSO have some insight into what it's like to be on a reality show, as she was on the then-revolutionary "Newlyweds."

This might be something weird about me, but I have always been really curious about how much of reality shows is scripted and how much is real. How deprived are the people on Survivor really. How much of Catfish is staged. Is any of Kardashians unscripted? Etc. Etc.

I hate to admit it, but this book fits the description of an autobiography better than ANY of the others on this list, and even inspired me it might be fun to write my own, even if just for myself. Mostly, but not completely, linear, it tells her story from her first memories until the births of her children.

(Side note: Jessica, like Andrew, wrote her autobiography just shy of age 40, and I was shocked to find out that when she gave birth to her third child at age 38, they called it a "geriatric pregnancy." Yikes!)

Jessica, like Amy, does seem to include a good deal of content for the purpose of telling HER side of the story. While neither she nor Amy have stooped to the level that Jessica's younger sister Ashlee did after the lip-syncing on SNL fiasco by first blaming it on her band, then on acid reflux, then on a one-day-only vocal node injury that did not impact her speaking voice for some reason (seriously, watch the video of Ashlee on SNL, it's a trainwreck), she does seem to have a lot of things she feels like she needs to stand up for herself about. I guess you can kind of understand that, given that during her run on "Newlyweds" she was being marketed as the dumbest person on earth.

For example, Jessica apologizes for and explains away some of the dumb things she said, claiming they were honest and not her playing a role. She really did think buffalo wings were made out of buffalo, and here's why. She claims she nailed the singing audition for Mickey Mouse Club as a child but did a misstep in the dance part or something and that's why Britney and Christina got in and she did not, though if they could cast one more person it would have been her, and that Britney and Christina continued to sign on with record labels just before she would have been able to. But, that may have been the case, and she doesn't really throw any shade at them; she saves that for her exes Nick Lachey and John Mayer.

Regarding the reality show stuff. she doesn't go into explicit detail, but it's somewhat as I expected. It wasn't completely scripted, but they'd come up beforehand with what the premise of this show and the conflict, if any, would be. I still really want to know more about how reality TV works. Anyone out there been on reality TV? Can we talk?

Overall, I enjoyed her autobiography. It came off as honest and was never boring. I also found out a lot about her I didn't know. Her "savin' it" claim was not a publicity stunt; she was raised religious and religion is still important to her. She talks candidly about some childhood trauma she endured, the ups and downs of her relationships, and always having to feel like a poor man's Britney. I would read Britney's autobiography, but given the last thing I've seen that Britney wrote was an Instagram post that was something like, "GUYS SHOULD I BUY A HORSE????? LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I'm not sure how good that would be.

Elliot Page: All the Trigger Warnings, This Book Should Have Been Called Trigger Warning

This was the most harrowing of the autobiographies I read, so I won't say too much about it.

If Portia described her rise to fame as somewhat joyless, Elliot's was even more so. I did learn some interesting things about other celebrities and about the industry from reading this book, but I forget all of it because it was overshadowed by how bad I felt for Elliot.

He does not talk too much about the filming process for most of his movies; the one he lingers on longest is "An American Crime," which I had never heard of (neither the movie, nor the true story it was based on). Already battling anorexia and self-harm, he threw himself into the role of a teenage girl who was beaten and starved to death to the point where it was detrimental to his health. His life was possibly saved by the fact he fell in love with the title role in "Juno" and was told he would need to gain weight and take better care of himself in order to land the part.

My partner had heard of the true story behind "An American Crime" and we watched the movie while I was reading Elliot's autobiography, then watched "Juno" right after to feel better. 

Unlike Portia's autobiography, Elliot's doesn't really end on a positive note, but more of an ambiguous one. Although, he wrote this autobiography pretty young, so I guess the whole "halfway there" vibe makes sense.

Jerry Seinfeld: Standup Act + Autobiography = Entertaining but Somewhat Misogynist Bookbaby

What is there to say about Seinfeld. I'd argue it was the most iconic sitcom of the 90's. Some might argue "Friends," but I think way more people will get "yada yada yada" or "no soup for you" or "master of your domain" than whatever Friends had, "we were on a break" or "Joey doesn't share food" or whatever. This book is what was described as the memoir of the man behind the show, but it's made up mostly of his 2-minute standup bits that were in the intro to old Seinfeld episodes and also in the bathroom book (what do you actually call a book you keep in the bathroom? Crapper Gazette? idk) that my parents had when I was little.

When I started reading (well, listening to), this book, it was like being wrapped in a loving, distracting blanket. I won't go into details, but I was going through a very hard time, and anything I looked at was triggering panic and self-hatred. This book required no attention span, as each portion was just a couple minutes long, and a lot of it was the standup that I remembered watching at my parents' dinner table and/or reading on my parents' crapper. It was just what I needed.

Granted, some of it doesn't age too well. Like, the one where he says he hates the people who travel around the airport in motorized carts and says that if they're so fat or lazy or disabled that they need motorized carts, maybe air travel is not for them. Or, there are the countless bits about how women are different from men, and all women are like this, trust him, he'd know. Like, you ever notice how women are obsessed with Q-tips? He goes on about this for a while. I am not obsessed with Q-tips and have never met any woman who is. Was he blanking out on his next set while he was at a Walgreens and just picked something random on the shelf or

When I was in high school, a socially awkward schoolmate once tried to use one of Jerry's bits and pass it off as his own. I think it was prompted by someone mentioning that girls pluck their eyebrows. "Man, women don't make any sense. Like, they'll pour hot wax on themselves, rip off all the hair on their legs, but then they'll be terrified of a spider."

Someone called him out on the bizarre thing he'd just said. "Dude, that was incredibly sexist."

I recognized he'd gotten this from Seinfeld, since my parents had the book by the crapper. But I kept quiet about that, and he basically pulled his head back into his shirt like a turtle and didn't say anything else.

As Jerry's memoir goes on, we transition from 30-something Jerry to 60-something Jerry. At this point, it loses the sense of nostalgia from the Seinfeld bits we remember and, while still sometimes funny, it comes across way more "OK Boomer" and way more misogynist than the older stuff does. 

PARAPHRASED EXAMPLES OF NEWER SEINFELD HUMOR

"The thing with setting up your friends is, you just have to know how to describe them to the other gender. Because no men can think about anything except sex and no women can think about anything except money. So you just describe them using the same words except insert 'boobs' to the guy and 'bank accounts' to the girl."

"The thing with women is, they expect you to remember every single word that they say. But it's alright. You don't actually have to memorize the names of all of their cousins. You can just sit there and nod and think about cartoons while they talk. This will trigger something in women that is called 'anger,' but it will pass. You can usually distract them by showing them something pink."

"Sometimes, you'll get cornered into getting married and you can't get out of it. Don't worry. It's all going to be the woman's show. She will turn into a monster and the bridesmaids will be her minions and they'll figure it all out; you just have to show up."

"What's the deal with cell phones? Like, you don't have room in your house for a cord? You really need people calling you all the time? These damn weiner kids need to save up some money to buy a cord."

Jenny Lawson: Also Still a Mystery

My first introduction to Jenny Lawson was about a decade ago when I was sent a link to her story about how her husband Victor had forbidden her to spend any more money on frivolous things and in response she bought a five-foot-tall metal chicken and called it his "anniversary present."

Jenny is a writer, blogger, and motivational speaker, and a lot of her earlier shtick was based on her doing things exactly like that and Victor being the eternal straight man. I could summarize their relationship with this clip of Family Guy making fun of Dharma and Greg (a show I have never seen).

What a Free Spirit

I read one of Jenny's books, "Furiously Happy," as part of a book club years ago. It was a pretty poignant book, dealing with the need to find happiness and how hard it can be to do so. I can relate. One constant was that when she had a depressive episode that rendered her nonfunctional for a while, or when she decided to do something like have a "dead raccoon rodeo" by putting a taxidermied raccoon on top of the cat and seeing how long it could stay on there, her husband was always there for her. He'd be ready to deal with whatever she was going to throw at him, and while she was doing all kinds of crazy stuff like Dharma getting up on that table or whatever, he would shake his head but he wasn't going anywhere.

When I read "Furiously Happy," I was dealing with intermittent depression, but I was with someone who had no patience for it. 

When I met with my book club on this book, the only thing I think I said was, "Her husband is a saint."

But I wondered if I could possibly broach a subject like this with my partner. I tentatively told him, at some point, "I wish I could feel like it's okay to break down when I need to."

I went years without returning to Jenny Lawson, but I recently read her autobiography "Let's Pretend This Never Happened." All her books are somewhat autobiographical, but this one told the story of her childhood, meeting and marrying her husband, the challenges of young marriage, and some medical issues she faced, including multiple miscarriages. 

I still don't know what to make of Jenny. When she first met her husband, he was from a richer family and she didn't feel like she was good enough, so I wonder if some of her bizarre behavior is a way of putting up walls to pre-emptively push him away. While I liked this book and was sad to finish it, like my funny friend was going away, it did start to seem like "Dharma get off the table" over and over again; much like my fascination with how much of reality shows is real, I didn't know how much of this was an act. The thing is, she has photographic proof of a lot of this stuff.

PARAPHRASED EXAMPLES OF STUFF VICTOR SAID

"What? I can't believe you're making me drive out in the rain to pick up a taxidermied mouse dressed as Hamlet that you bought at 3 a.m."

"What? I can't believe you called the police because you were stuck in the bathroom and thought the cat shoving things under the door was a rapist"

"What? I can't believe you found out right after I left for my work trip that you think there's a chupacabra in our yard and also you're afraid the dog buried in our yard will come back from the dead"

"What? You cannot buy a plane ticket for your taxidermied alligator with a pirate outfit on it, even if you made up a persona for it, I'm spending my miles on this"

I would love to sit down with Jenny and have some real talk someday, because she seems simultaneously like she would be my best friend and like she would be looking into my eyes, seeing all and knowing all, and planning how she would harvest my soul. That actually sounds like something she would say.

Her book did end on a somewhat serious note, describing how she was grateful for the experience she had where she threw herself in front of an attacking dog to save her young daughter. When she told her sister, "I got attacked by a dog," her sister didn't believe her, because she was prone to exaggeration. But then she showed pictures from her hospital stay. She said that she was glad to know she would sacrifice herself for someone she loved, and that when all's said and done, she's grateful for her life experiences because they've brought her here.

It was a great ending. Then there was an epilogue. Where she went on a rant of Ellen DeGeneres esque proportions. Someone should have taken her computer away before she did that.

2 Minus 3 Equals Negative Fun

 I'm reading an autobiography right now. It'll be featured in future blog post "Celebrity Autobiographies I've Read, Ranked" or possibly a cleverer title than that or possibly I'll never write it. Anyway, I'm only halfway through it now, but the author had some school anecdotes that reminded me of my own occasionally crappy experiences from kindergarten through undergrad. I really have no complaints about grad school, it was pretty great, one of my profs was kind of pompous but he was a good teacher, and I had another prof who was hot and also a good teacher so he canceled out the pompous one. But, I hit plenty of road bumps along the way to enrolling in Professor Hot's class and getting my M.A. I would never use, and here they are.

First Grade: A Hankerin' for Some Spankerin'

I didn't really go to kindergarten. My family lived, at the time, in a town with a reportedly bad school system, so I went to a 3-hour-a-day daycare that was called kindergarten but it was kid zoo.

When we moved out to a small rural town when I was six, I was enrolled in the local public school. I consider this my first actual school experience, as that kindergarten did not count. 

I had never had to sit at a desk before. I was the only kid in class who already knew how to read, and I was bored out of my mind. I couldn't sit still, I drew pictures all over my desk, I wrote in all of my books, I was sent to the principal's office I think my second day. I never disrupted anyone else, I just did my own thing because I was bored out of my mind.

In a later generation, I might have been diagnosed with ADD, which I don't think I actually had; I was just bored as ****, but my practically decaying first grade teacher had a different solution: spankings. I think this woman had had one foot in retirement for at least a couple decades. Even though our parents had to sign something when we started school there saying whether or not the teachers had permission to use corporal punishment, and mine said no, that teacher spanked me all the time. And I cried every time.

She also failed me in every single subject. I would later learn, it was impossible to fail anything at this school, but despite doing all my assignments correctly I got a "minus" in everything along with some notes I couldn't sit still and I drew all over my desk. At one point, I glued my handwriting textbook to my desk; I was kind of proud of that.

At some point during first grade year, though, we took IQ tests, and it turned out I was a genius.* Which leads me to

Second through Sixth Grade: Quest

As a result of the IQ test, I was put in something called "Quest."

Before you start thinking this is something like being sent to the Krelboyne class in Malcolm in the Middle, because I'm sure so far my story was sounding a lot like the Malcolm pilot, Quest was 1 hour a day of sending the "gifted and talented" students to one of the pods, and then sending them directly back to class.

We did some cool stuff in Quest. Like, we actually got to read instead of having stuff read to us. We ventured into chapter books, learned how to type, and were given some creative writing assignments, but this was just setting us up to be even more bored when released back into the general population in sixth grade. The most baffling thing, though, is that there wasn't a general population. It seemed really arbitrary who was in Quest and who wasn't. Some kids were in it one year and not the next, and we'd only taken that IQ test once. It seemed like they had a rule of two kids from each class being in Quest. So, basically it was "These two kids are better than you, so they get to leave for an hour. But, to make it up to you, we'll do something like play heads up seven up or practice for the school play while they're gone." (I couldn't be in my fourth grade play because I was in Quest. I was pissed.) "Oh, Randy, I'm sorry. You were in Quest LAST year, but this year we decided you're not gifted and talented. Sit back down."

Third through Sixth Grade: Worship Me, for I Am Thy God

In the latter part of my elementary school years, I learned that teachers in a small town school, most of whom never had any ambition other than to be a teacher and have been at this for years, are extremely set in their ways, can never be wrong, and will hold petty grudges if ever corrected by a student.

My third-grade teacher couldn't spell, occasionally taught us incorrect things about grammar, and would get upset when third-grade Mandie couldn't hold back from correcting what she'd written on the board. If they didn't want me being all uppity, maybe shouldn't have put me in Quest.

My life's goal at this point was to be a vet, and I proudly talked about that a lot. One day, my teacher brought her son's pet snake into the classroom, and while some of the boys were clamoring to hold it, she said, "Mandie is the one who wants to be a vet. SHE should hold the snake."

I was afraid to hold the snake. She informed me, "Well, you are never going to be a vet."

Later in the year, she told the entire class NOT to vote for me for the "citizenship award" when someone suggested I would be a good candidate. This was a glorified popularity contest that still got published in the town newspaper because there was nothing going on in our town.

My fifth grade teacher was even worse in that regard. I don't think she knew that "you're" is a word. When I pointed out something she did that was wrong, she'd tell me it was "inappropriate" to correct the teacher and find some loophole to assign me detention, like forgetting to put my student number on my paper. I gave up on trying to ever talk to the teacher again after I pointed out she was pronouncing and defining several of the vocabulary words of the week wrong. One that comes to mind was "raucous." Despite having the word defined in our textbooks, she believed this was wrong, and confused it with the word "ruckus." She gave us sentences to use it in like, "The children made a 'raucous' when they found the Easter eggs." I'd tried to show her why this was incorrect and what her confusion was, but this was not ok. I gave up and decided I was going to fly under the radar from here on out.

I tended to run into teachers with moral high horses that did not seem justified. They were generally opposed to "the idiot box" (TV) with the primary offender being "The Simpsons" (a.k.a. my favorite show and chosen family). Mentioning The Simpsons was grounds for punishment. Some of the boys in my class found ways to sneakily say "d'oh" in conversation in front of the teacher and that brought me joy.

Seventh through Eighth Grade: Worship Me, for I Am Not Only Thy God, but Thy Savior, Also Watch This TV Show I Like

In seventh and eighth grade, we went to the junior high esque format of going from one class to another rather than the same teacher all day. Other than the core subjects, many of these classes lasted only six weeks, and there were some wild ones. 

Like, for one, there was a class called "Life Education." Before you start to wonder what that class might be about, like, career skills or managing a budget or sex ed (we'll get to that later), you're wrong, we just had to watch Degrassi Jr. High. The final was filling in the blanks to the lyrics of the theme song from Degrassi Jr. High.

The teacher who taught this class, I shall call him "Mr. Degrassi," was also the eighth grade English teacher. He believed himself to be the second coming of Jesus but with better grammar.

He was full of emotional stories about how he had saved children's lives in the past. What kept these stories from having any credibility was the fact that one of the first stories he told us was incredibly stupid.

"Once, a girl came up to me and asked what I thought was a very personal question. She said, 'Can I go to the bathroom?' I didn't know why she was asking this medical thing. I kept just saying, 'I'm so sorry, I can't answer that question.' If she had only said 'may' instead of 'can,' I would have been able to understand her and she wouldn't have went to the bathroom on herself."

This is the man who was teaching us Life Education. He claimed to not understand the sentence "Can I go to the bathroom." Also, he felt like he was tapping into the teen experience and teaching us everything we needed to know by showing us a Canadian sitcom that had aired around the time we were born.

Mr. Degrassi fully came into his element one day, holding up a piece of paper. "I'm holding here the most important piece of paper a teacher can ever receive."

"A paycheck?" one student quipped.

"No! If I were here for the money, I wouldn't be here. This is a letter I received from a former student ..."

He went on to describe how we were about to write autobiographies. He'd had a student who sent him a letter saying that he was about to take his own life, but just as he was stepping out on to the ledge he remembered a teacher named Mr. Degrassi who had cared about him enough to think he should write a story about his own life.

Of course, the autobiographies would not be free-form but rather would be predetermined chapter titles with specific questions to answer in a five-paragraph format. I skipped the chapters "My Friends" and "My First Crush" because I did not have any friends and was being bullied way too much to think about crushes. I turned in a single page for each chapter saying they did not apply to me.

This is when Mr. Degrassi should have swooped in and saved my life, right? I was the kid who hid during lunch hour, was afraid to make eye contact with anyone, and who he probably should have suspected had an eating disorder.

Nah, I got a C on my autobiography for not writing all the chapters. It's fine. It was impossible to fail out of this school (more on that later).

Eighth Grade: You Really, Really Can't Fail at this School Even if You Try and I Tried

I tried to fail eighth grade.

Maybe part of it was a cry for help. But mostly I was hoping that I would have to repeat eighth grade and not be in the same class as my bullies anymore. The seventh graders seemed nicer, and they didn't know me, so there's that. Or maybe my parents would pull me out of the school system and send me somewhere else. I'd been campaigning for that for a while.

I had been a straight A student, so you'd think someone might notice or care when I started actively trying to fail. Not really, though.

I didn't read any of our assignments. I dropped to a C in history, and in literature. (I actually was interested in the books we were reading in literature, so I'd read them, just, later. After the test.)

I was trying my darndest to fail and I only got down to a C. But, I guess that makes sense, because there were three kids in my class who spoke no English and were passed through every year, despite apparently not speaking a word of English and never completing an assignment. Were they my age? I don't know. They mainly just spoke to each other, and in Spanish.

Wishing to be invisible, I never said anything, even when what was happening around me was completely ridiculous.

For example: We had a class called "Council Fires" that was supposed to be about character building but it was just putting us in the gym and having us play kickball.

We had courses in gym on juggling and roller skating. I could not juggle or roller skate, and no one attempted to teach me, so I spent every 45-minute gym period pretending to throw balls and then chasing down the bleachers after them if I dropped one, or holding on to the wall for 45 minutes straight, respectively. No one commented on this.

We had a huge event also covered in our local paper where each of the core classes taught about a single subject for two weeks. Seventh grade, it was ancient Greece (we all tried feta cheese for the first time), and eighth grade, it was World War II.

We had a teacher who was old enough that she'd been alive during World War II. Granted, she'd been 6 years old. She taught the class on D-Day.

"I still remember it. I was 6 years old, and I was sitting in the hammock, and all of a sudden people were yelling, 'It's D-Day! It's D-Day!' And I jumped out of the hammock, and ran into the house, and my parents were saying, 'It's D-Day!'"

"What's D-Day?" one of my classmates asked. 

She looked flustered for a moment. "Well, it's the day the war ended. You knew that."

I knew this was wrong, despite trying to fail history, but, again, given up at this point.

On the final day, we had a few other very old people who lived in our town come in for World War II Q & A. Most of them said they didn't really remember the war, but had relatives in it, and they were proud they'd lived in this town their whole lives and Main Street used to be a lot different and things used to cost less.

Only one student had a question for our expert panel. She asked, "Were any of you in the Holocaust???"

I mean, if you just did an intensive World War II unit and one of your students didn't even realize the Holocaust happened in Europe, then maybe ... never mind. 

When graduation was nearing, we got our proposed schedules for freshman year at the local public high school. Which I wasn't going to go to. Something had finally tipped my parents to the point they would send me to a private Catholic school in the next town. As we were looking over the schedules, one of my classmates asked, "Speech? What's that? Learning to talk Mexican?"

... Never mind.

High School: I Have Sex with You

I honestly do not see how I could have graduated if I'd continued in the public school system. But, then again, given my prior section, I don't see how I could have failed. I have no idea what would have happened, but I didn't have to worry about that. I was going to private high school.

For the most part, I got a pretty solid education there. A couple classes were tough enough I struggled with them even when trying, a new experience for me. But there were a few exceptions, like the fact we learned "World History" through movies (I'm glad I got to catch All Quiet on the Western Front and Good Morning Vietnam, but I doubt the accuracy of Jurassic Park) and the final exam was to do anything related to history. I put together a 3D puzzle of a castle. I'm really not good at puzzles, so I feel I more than earned that A.

But the class I'm going to call out here was a requirement for all freshmen: Christian Sexuality (shortened to "Christian Sex" on your schedules).

This was an abstinence-only sex ed course. Not that the mechanics of sex were ever actually discussed; other than "Don't Do It" lectures, we watched videos about the trials of abortion and teen pregnancy. And a lot of stuff that was just general morality, like not drinking and driving, and listening to your parents. It was kind of D.A.R.E. part 2, and I remember our textbooks presenting cartoony moral dilemmas in exactly the same format as the D.A.R.E. manuals I'd gone through in sixth grade.

The thing is, no 14-year-old in that G-rated class took it seriously, at all. It was a joke that horny 14-year-olds used when saying who they were in class with. "Oh, I have sex with _____." "Remember when I had sex right next to _____ last period?"

One day, we were learning about why masturbation is wrong. I respect your religious opinions if you believe masturbation is wrong, but this specific D.A.R.E. esque worksheet was showing that young men shouldn't masturbate because they're often thinking about topics like goats or their own grandmothers.

After I had sex (giggity) first thing in the morning, period 2 was French. We started every French class with a prayer, and the teacher asked for prayer requests. One of the boys I'd had sex with (giggity) in the last period said, "I would like to pray for goats. And old ladies." 

The final for that class was to sign a document saying we would not have sex before marriage. I do not have said document. It was taken from me and put up on the band room wall as part of a freshman hazing thing.

College: I Missed a Final and Got an A

I admit I did not go to the best college in the world. Much like my high school, it was a mixed bag where there was excellence combined with the occasional Jurassic Park-watching or non-masturbating freeforall.

One of these was French I. Everyone had to take Spanish or French as a gen ed requirement.

Let's face it, most people who are taking Spanish or French (or German or Latin, in bigger schools) just because they have to, do not care about learning the language. I might have kind of wanted to learn French, but it wasn't a priority. I'd taken it in high school, so I had a leg up, right?

(I think in high school, a lot of kids pick the language they take based on what country they want to go to for the famous no-drinking-age-in-Europe class trip. I dated someone who took German because he'd rather get beer drunk than wine drunk.)

I had more than a leg up. I had both legs, both arms, and my entire torso. This might be the easiest class I've ever taken. Even easier than the Degrassi one, because if I hadn't filled in the blanks on that Degrassi theme song test, I might not have gotten an A.

I missed the final for my French class.

This is not like me. It especially is not like college-era neurotic people-pleaser Mandie. I still don't know how it happened. I realized the next day, while preparing for one of my other finals, that the French one had happened and I hadn't shown up for it. Granted, the class consisted mostly of watching videos and playing with magnets, so I didn't have any prep for the final exam.

I got a 0 on the final, which was 10% of your grade. However, I'd had slightly above a 100% in the class due to an extra credit thing I did at some point. So. I got an A in French.

I had to go to France for work years later. 

I don't speak French.

At all.

College: Blue Man Teletubbies, How to Make Popcorn, and My Fake Major

I had a vision when I went to college. I was going to double in music and English, and live my dream life of teaching music while writing and/or editing, with my supportive, sensitive husband at my side.

I didn't feel like it was a huge dream, but oh man, it was. Heck, lately I feel like even renting an apartment is something you have to sell your soul for.

I took music and English classes throughout my first two years. At the end of sophomore year, all music majors/minors had to take a competency exam in piano and voice. I failed it.

I don't know why I failed the piano portion. I had been playing piano for years, but I was nervous and I choked. The voice portion, I just guess I didn't sing right. I'd been told most of my life I was a good singer, but I was told after two years of paying the school for music tuition that my technique was wrong.

I'd been getting straight A's in my music classes up to this point.

I was not permitted to take any more music classes based on failing the competence exam. I often wish someone had told me sooner to stop trying if they sensed I did not have the talent. I was pretty well taken care of financially because I had a good scholarship to this school, but what if I hadn't? I'd be in an incredible amount of debt in addition to the lost time.

I focused on my English major and a theater minor that I picked up. And I took some really great classes, that helped me reimagine my future, that changed my critical thinking process. But there were also some ... not so great classes.

1) Business and Technical Writing
My main complaint with this course is that we had to do an internship and we had to find it ourselves. We had to rack up 30 hours of business/technical writing experience and we had no guidance at all.
I tried so damn hard. I at last found a job editing an article for the local history museum for a local newspaper. (WHY did I not think of the newspaper from my hometown? PTSD probably, but I'm sure they needed people. CURRENT MANDIE SMACKING PAST MANDIE IN THE FACE.) The local history museum is one room guarded by an antisocial guy who didn't want to talk to me. I milked everything I could out of this but could only stretch it to five hours. What do I do. What do I do.
Luckily, my best friend and I worked at a movie theater. (I never thought I'd say that sentence.) I asked my apathetic boss, "Can I write a training manual for working at the movie theater?"
"Sure."
And so, I spent 25 hours doing the same job I normally do except also writing about it. I chalked up hours to my internship that might be spent cleaning popcorn, counting boxes of sour wormz, or chatting with my friend while we waited for the last showing to start. I did write a very detailed manual. My boss put it in a file cabinet somewhere.

2) Visual Literacy
This was a requirement for English majors and theater minors, and I was both. Essentially, we were supposed to write analyses of visual media.
That's it.
There was a textbook, and some kind of structure, but my three major papers were visually analyzing a website, a TV show, and a movie.
I wrote about catsinsinks.com and Teletubbies for the first two, and the third I decided to throw them (them = the TAs) for a loop and write about Citizen Kane. 
We also went to see Blue Man Group so we could visually analyze it. I didn't want to be in the splash zone but I was. I got banana mush on me.
The final project was to do anything visual. 
Two of my castmates from The Crucible were in the class, and they just re-enacted a scene from The Crucible.
I put a small amount of effort into it and found a website that let you play a virtual keyboard using color coding. I did a fake presentation showing one of my classmates how to play a song using just the colors.
His presentation was cooking something. I forget what. I wanna say cookies.

3) My major wasn't real.
In the final class, Senior Seminar, we were informed that my college was eliminating English as a major moving forward. To major in English, you'd have to double major. English Education was the most likely choice, but it was too late for any of us, as far as that went.

So, in short, academia was a wild ride for me. I started out failing, then I got into the largely meaningless "Quest," then tried to fail on purpose, but failed at failing, then tried to succeed, then got straight A's in a major I was not able to complete and a major I was told after the fact was being discontinued.

But, working in a junior high cafeteria sucked, so I threw myself back into it to go to grad school.

*I'm not a genius. I think knowing how to read gave me a major advantage in that first-grade IQ test that came out to a 163. Don't worry. I took another IQ test when I was in junior high and I was 130 something, and if it's continued to decline since then, well, it's no wonder I don't even know where my keys are. Where are my keys???

Chicago: A Mostly Love Story

Hello friends. Long time no blog, but as I am most likely moving out of Chicago next month, I thought I'd blog a tribute/recap about the last several years. 

My Chicago Neighborhood History

1. Lincoln Park (take 1) - the cherry popper
When I first moved to the city, I rented a room for two months from someone who was renting a "two-bedroom" "apartment" in Lincoln Park. The ways of the city were new to me. I'd gone to grad school in Lincoln Park, so I thought I'd be fine, but to be fair, I'd never left campus.
O Lincoln Park, how you initiated me to the ways of the city. You are where a terrified Mandie learned how to get a Ventra card and use public transit on the reg, where she took a bus for the very first time, where she learned you have to pull that cord thingy if you actually want to get off the bus, and that Chicago has a multitude of neighborhoods. When attempting to find a new place, I remember just searching "Chicago" and the realtor getting back to me, "It looks like you've selected apartments in Rogers Park, Logan Square, and Bridgeport. Where are you looking to live?" To which I responded, "I don't know, is there any difference?"

2. Wicker Park - the fun experimental one
Imagine a street lined with bars and quirky little shops. Imagine a neighborhood catered to a certain kind of hipster in their late 20's to early 40's who is not that wealthy but not that poor. Imagine a place where you can always get inventive small plates, vintage clothes, rare used books, and Old Style. That is Wicker Park. I was with you less than a year, Wicker Park, so you kind of seem like a fever dream. I think I've outgrown you, but we had fun.

3. River North - the sugar daddy
So, you had to break up with Wicker Park when your apartment flooded. That's ok. You're ready for a more grown-up neighborhood. How about renting a room in a condo in a neighborhood where everything around you is ... a gallery or a studio or a gallery or a studio or ... yeah that's pretty much it. 
O River North, I was out of my depth. I had not the age, nor the experience, nor the money to sustain this for very long, but you gave me a taste of what I guess I'd call the good life. Remember the time the condo association had a party and I tried to mingle with people who were all about 10 years older than me, married, and owned their condos? At one point, they were talking about their kids and one woman, trying to include me, asked me with a plastic smile, "So, do you have any ... nieces or nephews?"

4. Humboldt Park - the comfy guy you chillax with
Can you afford to live completely solo in the city? Yes, if you get a studio apartment that's a 20 minute walk away from the nearest public transit. But it's close to the gigantic Humboldt Park, the 606 trail that crosses the entire west side, and a diverse community of people that seem to give very few ****s. Your grocery store is the Puerto-Rican owned place that has produce you've never heard of. Your only local restaurant is a sandwich shop/liquor store where things can get weird but everyone there is used to weird. No frills, but it's a place where you can be you. You never feel like you have to dress up.

5. Lincoln Park (take 2) - the former friend who's just too good for you now
Maybe you want to be closer to work, and live in something bigger than a studio. What? There's a 700 sq ft apartment in your price range in good ol' Lincoln Park?
It turns out, not everything that says it is an apartment, actually is. And it turns out, you do not by any conceivable stretch fit in in Lincoln Park.
Everyone in Lincoln Park is a) a DePaul student, or b) a wealthy young family that looks like they were created in The Sims: Pleasantville edition. You do kind of derive pleasure from your nighttime walks around the neighborhood, lusting after the lovely gardens, the extravagant Halloween and Christmas decorations, it warms your heart. But your isolation sinks in after so many days of dodging spandex-clad, perfectly made up moms power walking with their likely designer strollers, having damn weiner kids pounding on the windows of your basement apartment to mess with your cats, and every weekend in the summer being a rager til 3 a.m. until the college kids stumble home, dropping many a White Claw clan down the steps leading to your door. GET OFF MY LAWN. Seriously. I live in the basement. You're partying right outside my window, and I am old.

6. Edgewater - the rebel that never really let you in
I decided, toward the end of my time in Lincoln Park, that I wanted to get as far out as I could get and still be in Chicago. So ...
I knew Edgewater only from running through it. It seemed like a cool place, and it was, but I could never make it feel like home. It's a diverse melting pot for sure; what do you expect when you live right between a college and a series of nursing homes? There are a whole lot of different folks here, but don't expect to get to know any of them too well. Overall, I got the feeling this is a neighborhood whose residents are pretty much just looking out for themselves. The beaches are nice, but other than that, a bunch of high rises and nowhere that seems particularly friendly to hang out.

Things to Do in Chicago

1. Watch the sun rise over Lake Michigan
Head out to the Lakefront Trail or one of the many beaches. It's a really incredible sight. Belmont Harbor is one of the most peaceful places I've found, but it's all good. If you're a swimmer, maybe go for a morning swim.

2. Go to a street fest
There is a fun party for just about everyone in Chicago. Regrettably, I don't think the Lagunitas Beer Circus or the Goose Island Battle of the Breweries tournament exist anymore, but I went to each of those once and they were legendary. I've been to the Wicker Park Fest three times, and it is always wild. In addition to the live music and the various food/merch stands and beer tents, all the stores and restaurants along Milwaukee are still open, including that one karaoke bar, and oh man I got the worst whiplash from headbanging there after overdoing it at Wicker Park Fest.

3. Run to Evanston
If you're a distance runner, like I used to be, run north on the Lakefront Trail as far as you can, and then keep running. When the trail ends, you get spit out onto Sheridan for a while, and then all of a sudden you're right back out by the lake, and there's a sign telling you you're in a new city! The exhilaration of having run that far is great in itself, but the beach on the Chicago/Evanston border is breathtaking, with rocky shores and typically calm waters that just merge seamlessly into the sky.

4. Have a drink at Signature Lounge
On the 96th floor of the Hancock building (97th? I don't remember) there's a bar you would want to go to after dark. There might be a little bit of a line to get in, especially if you go on the weekend, and your drink will be pricy, but it's worth it. Even when you're as jaded as I am, you can love the city lights, and the view here is amazing.

5. Go to the Field Museum
It's the best museum, ok? Alright, I might be biased because it's always been my favorite. Don't miss the exhibit that walks you through the entire history of earth. It is my happy place. Plus, you get to see some dinosawrs.

6. See local standup or improv
Yes, there are incredibly expensive theaters in the Loop you can go to where you can see the latest show to leave Broadway, but, there are a lot of hidden gems throughout the city where you can see amateur actors on their way to the top. One that I used to love was The Den in Wicker Park. In between shows, there was a lounge where you could play board games, read books about the history of Hollywood, and drink some interesting custom cocktails.

Things You Can Skip in Chicago

1. The Loop 
No one lives in the Loop. No one is in the Loop that does not have to be. Every business closes shortly after work hours during the week, and god help you if you're there on a Sunday and need someplace where you can be indoors. Or if you miss the last train of the night out to the suburbs and you have to go to the bathroom. And don't even get me started on the "upper" and "lower" streets and how bad your GPS will crap out. 

2. Deep dish pizza
Real Chicagoans don't eat deep dish. Any place you go for deep dish in the city is going to be a chain that is just as easy to find, and probably more popular, in the suburbs.

3. The Bean
... I mean, it's shiny?

4. Shedd Aquarium
It's a good aquarium. But, it's expensive AF. If you're going to have a Chicago museum day, maybe go somewhere that has something other than fish. Or, if you wanna see animals, go to the (to my knowledge still) free Lincoln Park Zoo, or visit one of Chicago's cat cafes!

5. The "Rock n Roll" McDonald's
It's not a special McDonald's. There's like some signs on the wall. The menu is the same. They do not sing to you or anything. I don't get why people from the suburbs thought this place was a big deal.

6. Wrigleyville when there is a Cubs game going on
Unless you wish to become one with the madness, and that madness is made of loud, and that loud is dressed in blue.

Five Video Games That Can Make You Lose Your Soul

 Three disclaimers before I begin:

1. I am not a gamer. I can barely say I've dipped my toe into the ocean of gaming, it would be more like a part of a toenail, like if I had a hangnail or something. That is the level of my exposure.

2. I am NOT saying that playing these games WILL make you a bad person, or that people who play them ARE, but these are some games I've had experience with that make it kind of tempting to lose your soul.

3. No, Grand Theft Auto is not going to be on this list. I've never played it, but had a boyfriend who was adamant that it is not what the general populace has branded it, "that game where you run over hookers," but either way, I can't even drive in real life, I can't even drive a Go-Kart without running into the wall and a park employee having to rescue me (true story), so I shall abstain.

And now, let's delve into the world of video games that let you be a total jerk without even realizing how far you've fallen down that slope, shall we?

#5: MORTAL KOMBAT

My introduction to Mortal Kombat was an eye-opening one. 

I had never heard of Mortal Kombat - the game, the movies, anything. I'd never played arcade games growing up. I did not realize competitive video gaming was a thing.

But I was hanging out with one of my coworkers, and he mentioned he was going to be playing in a Mortal Kombat tournament the following weekend. I said, "Oh, I'll come see you! What's Mortal Kombat?" He said, "Ok ... are you sure?"

I told my friend Mike that I was going to a Mortal Kombat tournament and didn't know what to expect. He said, "Oh, expect you'll be the only girl there. You are going to be hit on SO MUCH."

Mike was wrong. Oh, how Mike was wrong. Well, he was right that I was the only girl there, but I did not get hit on, unless you count the multiple people who SHOVED ME OUT OF THE WAY if I was blocking their view of the currently active game in any way.

This was my introduction to fighting games, and I caught on quickly that you are fighting another character to the death (hence the name of the game), but that's not how you lose your soul. There's an optional thing you can do called a "babality." In addition to killing your opponent like in a normal fatality, you reduce them to a baby version of their character and humiliate them. Most of the people there are very attached to their characters. It's not like, "Hey, I'll be this character, they look fun," it's like, they ARE that character. My coworker had never played as anyone other than Johnny Cage and never would.

But anyway, babalities are apparently a huge **** move. Here's a video compilation of them; you do not have to watch the whole thing to get the gist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaLflkIApJU

Someone pulled a babality at that tournament, and his opponent threw down his controllers and STORMED out of the room. I asked my coworker afterwards, "What happened?" He responded, "The guy did a babality. That's kind of a **** move, you're embarrassing your opponent as you beat them."

So, you can be a jerk in Mortal Kombat, but even aside from that, this game has a fandom that scared me sometimes.

So, the day after the tournament, my coworker asked me out. I wanted to be a part offff his worrrrld so when he went to a practice tournament at the arcade that sponsored him one night, I asked him if I could tag along. He'd taught me the very basics of the game and I'd picked a character, Baraka, cuz he had kewl teeth. So my boyfriend taught me some Baraka moves and said, hey, you might get through one round, maybe. And I joined the tournament.

Here is where the guys there who were kind of his friends/teammates are happy that he brought his girlfriend and that she's taking an interest in something they like and maybe they even want to help teach her so she can play too!

No.

Here is where everyone is extremely annoyed that this girl who doesn't know what she's doing entered their practice tournament because that could have been an actual game, obliterate her immediately, and rearrange the bracket so she's not in it. I'm not a competitive person AT ALL; I don't like strategy games, I only like games that are, like, fun. I realized that night that these guys are not playing for fun.

I get it, I guess. You're really into this game. You don't want someone weighing you down and getting in the way of a game you'd actually really cared about, perhaps even impeding it, because they are trying to be a sweet girlfriend and spend more time with their boo. But, I learned my lesson. Mortal Kombat is not a game for me; probably no game that competitive is. But as someone who's been in the "No Mandies" version of the "No Homers Club" in so many capacities throughout my life, I hate the idea of a fandom that excludes you from the very beginning if you don't know exactly what you're doing or talking about. Fandom does not offer entry level positions. This is part of why I'm incredibly wary of anything with an aggressive fandom. Like, I like Star Wars, but do I know stuff about it? No. So I don't say anything around Star Wars fans, especially because if I say the movie I enjoy most is "The Force Awakens" I will be told I'm an idiot and should be canceled from earth. Even the thing I'm the biggest fan of, The Simpsons (I am bilingual; I speak English and Simpsons quotes), I can't talk about because people who label themselves classic Simpsons fans will tell me, upon learning I still enjoy the new episodes, that I am stupid and wrong and should be canceled from earth.

So, to summarize:

-Building "babalities" into a game so you can further humiliate the person you're already defeating seems mean, especially for a game targeted to adolescent boys

-I probably should not have tried to join that tournament, but, I kind of still stand by my opinion that games should be fun. Maybe this is more of a sport than a game. Maybe I'll see my old boyfriend represent the US in Mortal Kombat in the Olympics someday.

#4: THE WALKING DEAD

The guy I dated after dating Johnny Cage was very into video games. My heart sank a little when I realized the extent of his enthusiasm, because I had learned that I am bad at video games, as my prior lament illustrates, and felt ostracized from that community. To quote something I've heard before somewhere, "A bird and a fish may fall in love, but where would they live?"

But something intrigued me about the type of games my new boyfriend played. He was into indie games, and also story-based games. Possibly ... video games could have a place for Mandie.

I told my boyfriend I would like to learn the ways of the video game. He wisely started me out on Gone Home. It's completely story based and does not require any quick thinking, dexterity, hand-eye coordination, or mad fightin skills. However, I needed help from him even on this one, because I also have no spatial reasoning and no sense of navigation and kept getting lost in the house, and also I wasn't used to using keyboard navigation. I mean, until I made my brief and tragic debut in Mortal Kombat in my twenties, I had never played any computer game or video game that required any kind of gaming skill, unless you count trying to shoot buffalos in my #2, which I was also bad at. I might game more if I were just ... better at it. I've been frustrated so many times to buy a game and then get held up because even though I was invested in it, it was just too damn hard and I didn't have the skilz to get very far in it. Example: Limbo. I could never get past the very first scene in that one, and I was disappointed, I mean, man, I paid for this, but I'm video game disabled. I mean, I even had to have my friend Naomi help me with the arrow shooting challenge when I played that Trogdor game on Homestar Runner in high school.

I guess I get it, if all these games were Mandie-level easy, who would want to play them?

But, I digress. Anyway, unlike me, my boyfriend had never watched The Walking Dead or read the graphic novels. And, unlike him, I had never played the Walking Dead Telltale game. If you don't know what Telltale games are like, I shall let Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers educate you.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EWUY-MJt9A

This is a pretty brilliant parody. In the Walking Dead game, you have a single POV character, but you'll occasionally get little hints, like in that video, stating, "X is growing suspicious" or "X will always remember this." Throughout the game, you are given a number of choices, much like our favorite principal was, and a limited amount of time to make a choice, so you have to think fast when deciding what you're going to do or say, and that alters the course of the rest of the game. Like my #3, this game probably has a plethora of possible outcomes.

The thing with the Walking Dead game is, even just in season 1, which is as far as I got, there are multiple "you can save only one" situations where you're actively killing whichever character you don't choose. This game does not follow the same plot or include the same characters as the Walking Dead books or show, so you don't know what's going to happen. I ... don't remember there ever being a "you can save only one" scenario in The Walking Dead, but there probably was, it's been a long time. This is more like Sophie's Choice: A Fun Zombie Game. (oo I'm going to write that down and TM that)

So yeah, you kind of have to be an ***hole in this game, because you're choosing to kill someone in your lil survivors clan in order to save the other. I played this game while my boyfriend was sitting next to me but I was calling all my own shots. He'd disapproved of my choices overall, but it was when I chose to save Shawn instead of Duck that he told me in frustration that I do not have a soul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9VsUGGESo

So you're in a zombie apocalypse situation, and you have the choice of saving the skilled, able-bodied, helpful young man or the idiot child who got himself into this situation and is more of a liability than anything, sitting there being all annoying and ****. To be clear, IRL, I would save the child, because he is a child, but this is a game, Shawn is more likely to help me win the game, and that animated child was annoying me from the first time he showed up and I wished to have him removed from my gameplay.

My boyfriend told me I didn't have a soul, but what he knew and I didn't know (but YOU know if you watched that video) is that whatever choice you make, Shawn still dies and Duck still lives. And whatever choice you make, the group is still going to blame you for Shawn's death.

But come on. Shawn is pinned under a tractor. Duck could very easily run away from the zombies if he weren't just sitting there looking like an 8-year-old with the brain of a 1-year-old who just came out of a 1000-year coma. (Children are generally liabilities in the Walking Dead universe. I mean, Carol just starts taking 'em out in the show. Telling them monsters will eat them, telling them to look at the flowers, giving them cookies, etc etc) (I think I like the clingy, horny Carol from the books more than whatever she is in the show) (Have you seen the episode where they think Carol died or left the group, but then she comes back? Wait that's all of them) (I digress)

I could have known what the outcome would be, if I'd just looked up a playthrough guide of this game. Shortly after the Duck/Shawn dilemma, there's a Doug/Carley dilemma, and you can look up what the outcome would be based on which of them you tried to save. 

Pretty much every game I've ever played has a playthrough guide. I know I relied on them heavily for Night In the Woods and that one zombie comedy game, I think it might have been Australian, if you know what I'm talking about tell me, otherwise someday I might be able to get back into my Steam account.

Anyway. Walking Dead, the video game. Kinda interesting. Makes you be Sophie.

#3: UNDERTALE

Where to begin about Undertale. I have more history with my #2 and #1, but this is objectively the best game I, in my limited experience, have ever played. But it still allows you to, perhaps even unknowingly, be a ****.

When this game came out, it became my boyfriend's w3rld. His computer background was Annoying Dog. Even though Annoying Dog plays a very small part in Undertale, if any, I guess it was his favorite. I didn't know anything about this game, so when I asked him what he was doing tonight and he said "I'm gonna play more Undertale," I had seen the doglike background and I assumed this was a video game about dogs and actually thought, for a couple months, that he was saying "Under Tail." I really thought that was the game's name.

Anyway, he continued his love for this game, and was so eager to share it with others that he would get on group calls when any of his friends were starting the game, and would give them tips and do all the voices. 

I felt left out.

I asked him at one point if we could play the game together. He said, "I can't restart Undertale on my Steam account." I asked him why. He said, "I just can't." I would understand this later.

When I was cat-sitting and needed to occupy myself one weekend, I watched some Honest Video Game Trailers, and saw the one for Undertale. Wait - this is not a video game about undercover dogs solving mysteries? 

I was intrigued, and I bought Undertale and started playing it.

The concept of this game is that you're playing as a genderless human child that has fallen through a barrier between the world of humans and the world of monsters. You journey through six different realms, encountering various monsters along the way. Some are friendly, some pop up and try to attack you with no real bearing on the plot (EXCEPT ... well, we'll get there), and some, depending on how you play the game, could end you, become your friend, or change the way the story unfolds entirely.

The boss fights in Undertale are Toriel (the kind goat-woman who tries to keep you from going any further for your own good), Papyrus (an aggressively stupid skeleton you can defeat if you can make him think you want to go on a date with him), Undyne (militant girlboss), Mettaton (inadvertently created homicidal robot who can morph into an emo-sexy game show host - I swear I'm not making this up), and Asgore (the sympathetic, grieving king who reluctantly accepts that you will need to fight to the death).

So how can playing Undertale make you a ****? We're getting to that.

In order to get through Undertale, you have to be good at video games. In addition to the boss fights previously mentioned, there are a lot of minor monster characters that show up out of nowhere (e.g., Annoying Dog) and want a lil fight. When fighting, you have to be able to dodge their attacks, which takes mad skilz and increasingly madder skilz as the game progresses, and then you can attack them or you can spare them and keep taking damage. There's a trick to beating each of them - sparing them enough times, or there's a sequence of actions you can take on each of them (for example, you can pet Annoying Dog, but that is basically forfeiting your turn and you still have to keep dodging his attacks until you've petted him enough). 

So you have the "choice" of killing each monster you encounter or letting them live, and that's kind of the crux of the game. Only, it's not a choice if you're not good enough at video games to dodge the attacks, and you have no option but to try to kill the monsters. And also if you thought that the point here was to kill to win, like so many a Mortal Kombat, you'd have no way of knowing that this was the point of Undertale.

You don't win if you kill the monsters. There are a multitude of possible endings based on what monsters you do or do not kill, but they fall in three main tracks: the pacifist run (you don't kill any monsters), the neutral run (you kill some, but not all, of the monsters), or the genocide run (you kill everything).

If you do a pacifist run, which I have nowhere near the skilz to complete, you get a happy ending. If you do the neutral run, you get an ambiguous ending and have the chance to start again. If you do the genocide run, the characters cease to be funny, they basically call you a horrible person full of blood lust (one of the characters who would be lovable if you were not on a genocide run tells you to burn in hell), and you don't have the option to go back and get the happy ending.

But how could anyone know that starting this game? I wonder how many people have accidentally completed a genocide run, thinking they were doing what they were supposed to.

I got stuck on this game when I got to the boss fight with Undyne. I was stuck until my boyfriend was able to help me. I'd already killed some of the minor monsters along the way, and he informed me that I wasn't going to get the good ending, but he'd help me get through the rest of the game. When I got to the neutral ending, we restarted my game and he helped me do a pacifist run, by which I mean I just watched him do it, but I was still engaged enough in the story that I cried toward the end. That's how good this game is.

I also need to shout out the soundtrack. I used to have it downloaded on my phone. All the fight songs are so playful and energizing. 

The music during the Papyrus boss fight is infectious and also gives you a taste of the humor in this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU9Nv5aM5aY

Anyway, Undertale. Fun, amusing game that might cause you to inadvertently become Hitler. Is not about dogs.

#2: THE OREGON TRAIL (we're getting to the ones I actually still feel bad about now)

Oh, what a game. It teaches you about history, about American geography, about what plants you can and can't eat, it - who am I kidding. If you were a little kid who played this, you don't remember ANY of that stuff. You only remember possibly the word "dysentery," and also that this game may or may not have enabled you to be a huge ****.

When I was in elementary school, computer time was a common reward, and one of the most popular games was Oregon Trail. All the kids used the same computer (I'm old, and also I went to a crappy small-town public school). So, you can name your wagon team after your classmates, and if your team dies, you can write an insulting epitaph. And everyone in the class will eventually see that epitaph, because I'm sure you remember that while traversing the trail, you get notified when you pass a grave and have the option to read it. So there were plenty of epitaphs along the lines of "Chad lo-oves April!" or "Kimmy died of stupid." I think I contributed to the mean once, by leaving the epitaph "Daya has a boyfriend" because, at least for my generation, 3rd and 4th grade were when the worst insult was that you did like like someone, and 5th grade and onward the worst insult was that you'd never had a boyfriend/girlfriend. It was quite abrupt.

When my family got the Oregon Trail game a few years later, there had been some updates. For one, you could now save a copy of a "trail log" that I thought was really fun. It automatically logged events like "you lost 25 pounds of food due to spoilage," but, you could also write in it yourself. So, you could cast some characters (people you knew, fictional characters, celebrities, whatever), and log their reactions to what was going on, and then save the log. My sister and I, and even my dad, had an absolute blast.

I wish I still had access to any of these logs, but I don't. We mashed up fictional characters we'd created, kids at school, George W. Bush, the Backstreet boys, I forget who else. You were even able to go in and edit things that were auto-logged to the trail log. For example, you could edit "No grass for the oxen" to "No grass for the AJ (we have him on a very specific diet)." 

Things took a darker turn when we picked up a different version of Oregon Trail - 4th edition - from a bargain bin at some point. 

So, I think it was leaning more into the educational game thing rather than the kill your friends thing, and rather than being able to name your wagon party, you choose two people from ... I wanna say four ... characters played by I sure hope amateur actors who are as hammy as anyone in a small town murder mystery dinner theater times ten (speaking as someone who's been in one). So those two people are your crew, and they communicate through live-action video clips based on what's going on in the game. There's no longer a log option. No more writing epic stories about George W. Bush succumbing to a piece of cheese he kept on the wagon so long that the mold became sentient. 

So, out of the four characters, the one that was the most baffling/annoying was Alliteration T. Meriweather. I was hoping I could find a clip of just him, but I couldn't. There's this clip of an entire playthrough of the game where he's one of the chosen partners, but I do not care enough to watch 90 minutes of someone playing Oregon Trail; I'm including this simply so you do not think he is a fever dream I had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjtra9rT2OU

Alliteration had virtually no skills, survival or social wise, I think he was there for comic relief, and he spoke entirely in alliteration. For example, when you run into another wagon train and choose to get advice from your partner, he says, "We shouldn't be shilly shallying with strangers! Shun them, I say!" (Yeah, even his alliteration was lazy.)

Anyway, Mollie and I wondered how fun and chipper and alliterative our pal Al would be if things got bad. So we purposely played a game where we left way too early, or way too late, I forget, brought virtually nothing with us, except for useless items like a grandfather clock, and never went hunting.

Anyway. When things were looking dire, we saw a whole new Al. This is when we saw the struggling actor who could have been a star if his college production of Hamlet had a role for him, facing the abyss and trembling. The alliteration was gone. We saw an Al begging us for his life, bewildered by what we had wrought. "Partner, are we going to die out here? I don't want to die. Not here. Not now. Partner, please, what's going to happen to us?"

Mollie and I were both SHOOK and immediately started trying to salvage the game. We stopped to rest and trade some stuff, but Al ultimately took off in the night with the grandfather clock and we never saw him again, and I don't think we played that game again.

--- OREGON TRAIL TAKEAWAYS ---

1) I don't know if this game is available anywhere, but if it is, I would love to play it. The original version. I can't look Al in the face again.

2) There is a game called "Organ Trail" that is a whole lotta fun and I would try again to get through if I still had access to my Steam account. Oregon Trail but zombies. Check it out!

3) Let me recommend to you the book "The Indifferent Stars Above." It's one of the best literary nonfiction works I've ever read (I place it above In Cold Blood and Devil in the White City), and it's about logistics of the Oregon/California journey in general but specifically the Donner Party. And, no, the Donner Party were not all a bunch of cannibals. The few who partook ate only of those who had already frozen to death after succumbing to one of the worst winters in recorded history. But, reading that book makes you realize how ... real the Oregon Trail game you blithely played as a child really was. The Donner Party made all the wrong choices. They started their journey too late. They trusted the wrong people. They made the wrong turns. They did not ration properly. And, as a result, about half of them died, much like the likely result of playing the children's computer game over a century later.

So, this game, started as an educational game, kind of became a running cultural joke. I got very excited when I saw an Oregon Trail card game a few Christmases ago, with the tagline "You Will Die of Dysentery." I bought it for my sister and her boyfriend and we played it together. I died of dysentery on my first turn.

#1: THE SIMS

How, in this post Black Mirror society, can I address the atrocities I committed in The Sims? I shall try.

The Sims, like Oregon Trail, is a game I really miss playing. I might be able to play it again if I can get back into Steam. My sister and I played this game obsessively throughout high school. Like, I remember a bleary-eyed 8-hour Sims session one summer night, after which I stumbled over to the couch and turned on the TV to see the 12:30 a.m. rerun of 3rd Rock from the Sun, and literally thinking, "How could Dick talk to Sally if he didn't click on her to interact with her? Why isn't her face in the corner of the screen?"

But when I played The Sims, I was a ****, In many ways. Let me count the ways.

1. MANDIE USED THE EASY BUTTON

In addition to making my sister Mollie do the house-building for me, I constantly used the cheat code to give my Sims money.

Were I to play this game nowadays, I would actually try to achieve their daily goals, get them those promotions, you know, try to play it like a game that has some kind of strategy, not one where you're creating fake people and then seeing how weird you can make things. But as a high schooler who has not been in the real world yet, gimme dem cheat codes and let's buy them a home recording studio and a Diet Mt. Dew machine, who needs werk.

2. MANDIE AND MOLLIE MADE FUN OF THEIR FAMILY

You might think by this I mean we made a Sim version of our family, which we did (their last name was "Kittywiggles"), but we went much further than that.

The Sims allows you to create wallpapers and even paintings from images you have saved on your computer. So, when decorating the house that always Mollie built, the walls could be papered with a picture of that time your dad fell asleep on the couch and you put a plush Pillsbury Doughboy under his arm, the floor could be the picture of that time you and your sister were miming what cable TV violence is like on the way home from the airport (we were jet lagged), the outside walls could be that picture of Mom that Mollie did in Microsoft Paint trying to capture her facial expression when she does not approve of something, the ceiling could be the Balrog from Lord of the Rings, and you could hang up a painting that is the Microsoft Paint rendition Mollie did of our corgi, Max, vomiting a rainbow after eating Mollie's colored pencils.

My god, the monstrous houses we created. Also, when you enter something into the Sims marketplace, you can give it a description that you'll see when shopping for your wallpaper or whatever. Most of our descriptions were Linkin Park lyrics, I think.

3. MANDIE BECAME AN INDIFFERENT AND SOMETIMES VENGEFUL GOD

So. Sometimes I did actually try to play the game and do the stuff I was supposed to do. Sometimes.

Other times, I purposely put my fake people in situations where they would fail, cheat on each other, and/or fight. Like, if there's an uptight Sim and a Sim that likes to tickle, that ****ing uptight Sim is going to get tickled like ****. 

I'm kind of reminded of this Malcolm in the Middle clip, except, I wasn't smiting my Sims, I was just making their lives reality show bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_p6WI4V8N8

Sims could take actions that were outside of your control. You'd see their queued actions in the corner of the screen, and there was one time two of my Sims left the world. Like, the queued action that I did not initiate and could not control said "Leave World." And those two simulated characters were gone. They made the right choice.

The Sims let you create a virtual Real Housewives of Whatever. I remember the review I posted for the book "Black Chalk": "You create six soulless people and put them all in the same room until they start screwing and murdering each other, it's like Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' had a baby with The Sims."

4. MANDIE AND MOLLIE COMMITTED MASS MURDER

For some background. I wanted to be a cartoonist throughout pretty much my entire childhood. That didn't pan out for me, but Mollie does still write comics (https://www.thrivingmurtle.com). 

We had a comic strip we co-wrote from when I was 9 years old all the way through my high school graduation. Our fictional town had a cast of characters that rivaled that of The Simpsons (and, we borrowed a lot from The Simpsons, tbh). In addition to the comics that we wrote and showed to pretty much just each other, there were a few board games and some spin-off works, including an apocalyptic trilogy where the third entry is over 100,000 words.

Twice (only twice, because this game takes several days to play), we did Survivor with these characters.

How did it work? Mollie and I divided 10 characters randomly into two tribes. Then, we'd start playing board games against each other whenever we were both free, each playing for one tribe. The tribe that won had immunity, and we'd write "tribal councils" detailing how the other characters voted.

When we got down to 5 and merged tribes like Survivor does, the first challenge was always the Sim challenge. 

There are ways you can kill Sims, which seems sketch for a game marketed to children, but you can put them in a swimming pool and then delete the ladder, or you can start a fire. The two easiest ways to start a fire are to set off a rocket inside (inevitably starts a fire) or to have a Sim with minimal cooking skills try to use the toaster oven.

So we'd create 5 Sims, and then we'd set a fire. The Sims will not try to put the fire out unless you click the fire and tell them to put it out. So, the Sim that survived the longest had immunity.

We turned these Sims adventures into canon in our apocalypse trilogy. See the following excerpt from book 3:

---

“Yes, it is that, and yet it is so much more. There are rough times ahead. Now give me your palm, Amber, child of the wind.”

“That would be Karen, actually.”

“Oh, yes. Well, let me read for both of you.” 

It turned out Amber would move in with her friends and Karen’s cousin Sandra, become a talk show host, fall in love with all of her new roommates except David, and buy a vibrating bed. Rob had to go into another room for several minutes before he came back with Karen’s fortune, not even bothering to look at her hand. She, sadly, would die in a toaster oven fire along with four of her military-school-bound love children. 

---

Anyways. Those are my video game sins, confessed and purged. Also confessed those of yours that I know about, Mol. You're welcome.