Will Hartzell-Baird's Blog, page 3

Merry Grinchmas

Siiiick

The Lumberjack and the Suit

I've previously discussed my wife's love of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies. Incidentally, to those who have read this blog and relied on it for investigative research purposes, I'd like to apologize and issue a minor correction. In my previous post, I called the protagonist Blondie because I'd felt that a disproportionate number of the main characters were blonde; after watching more of the Christmas movies, however, I've found that most of the main characters are, in fact, Alicia Witt.

I bring this up because this year, my wife discovered that the Hallmark channel also runs movies in celebration of fall. They don't go quite as far as they do for Christmas--that is, they don't run a 24/7 movie marathon for more than a month--but they nevertheless pump out a series of indistinguishable rom-coms against a seasonal backdrop. (As if to emphasize this point, they actually switched from the fall movies to the Christmas movies while I was in the process of writing this blog. It's October. They ended fall before Halloween.)

We've taken to calling it "Fallmark," because my wife likes awful puns. I promise none of the jokes in my books are that bad. This is just our name for it, mind you; Hallmark calls it "Fall Harvest," I'm guessing because Hallmark decided to award a free Hawaiian vacation to the first marketing executive who came up with a worse name than "Fallmark."

The fall movies tend to follow a broad formula where some city slicker takes a temporary trip to a small town for some reason (often, but by no means always, an ill-fated wedding), and then falls in love and decides to stay in town indefinitely. Frequently, this also involves leaving behind some sort of lucrative career and handsome, successful fiance (the theme here apparently being that you should follow your heart, pragmatic concerns be damned).

This is actually pretty much the same as one of the more common plots from their Christmas movies, except that the small town's economy revolves around the fall harvest rather than Christmas-related tourism. Another minor difference would be that the part of Alicia Witt is played by Lacey Chabert. To be clear, it's only a subset of the Christmas movies that follow this same formula; while the Christmas heroine might move into a small town to live with her new Christmas-tree-farming boyfriend, she might also wind up moving into a palace with the prince of Hallmarkovia. But it's only the former plot that seems to pop up in the fall movies.

Because we've been watching these mediocre movies again, my attention has once more returned to the theme of the Lumberjack and the Suit. As I mentioned earlier, many of these movies feature a love triangle, wherein our heroine has a fiance back home (the Suit) who is successful at his lucrative career back home, but doesn't understand her. Then, when she travels to Harvest Town without her fiance -- which is particularly odd in the movies where she's traveling to Harvest Town for her wedding to the Suit -- she meets the Lumberjack. The Lumberjack, as you've probably guessed, is not like the suit. He's a small town guy. He understands the heroine. He's good with his hands. And he wears a lot of flannel. It's a lumberjack thing, I guess.

You can probably fill in the rest of the movie yourself. The Lumberjack and the Heroine are stuck interacting with each other for some reason, they'll probably get into a fight, then they'll fall and love and the Heroine will realize that the Suit is an enormous asshole.

Obviously, the Lumberjack isn't an actual lumberjack (except when he is). He could have any of a variety of professions: a farmer, a cowboy, some sort of...orphan...caring...person...from that one movie with the parade floats that are important for some reason. Oh, or a doctor. He can be a doctors sometimes, too.

The Suit, in contrast--wait, no, the Lumberjack can be a woodworker, too. It might just be a hobby, but that's still something they can be sometimes. I should also add that while the Lumberjack is much less career-focused than the Suit, he's never exactly unsuccessful. He just values other things more. Like...orphans. Or small town living. Well, I guess technically orphans are still his career if he's a professional orphan-caring person, but if the Suit were in that same position, he'd just be in it to climb the corporate orphan-caring ladder.

Anyway, back to the Suit. The Suit, in contrast, is the career-driven one. He's probably an agent, or a marketing executive, or a doctor or something. Okay, I know that last one was a Lumberjack career, too, but it actually works for both - but only if the Heroine herself is also a doctor, and is leaving her big city job at a prestigious but hectic hospital to go become a small-town doctor out in the sticks.

Aside from his career, the Suit might be cheating on the Heroine; if not, he's just too self-involved to notice that she's deathly allergic to nuts, and so it would generally be considered rude to offer her a bag of peanuts. He's also likely to be guilty of the grave sin of wanting the Heroine to come to some boring work party with him and pretend not to hate his insufferable boss. And he probably thinks that her dream of opening up her own Christmas-themed cupcake store for dogs is stupid. The specifics aren't necessarily important, as long as he doesn't probably appreciate/support the Heroine the way that some guy she just met while travelling does.

Oh, she should call her store "Pupcakes." And she could, like, top them with little frosted cats in Santa costumes so that the dogs would look like they're eating cats, and they could have flavors like "snickerpoodle" or "chocolate chip cookie doberman." No, really, I promise my books aren't this bad. Seriously--hey, wait, where are you going? Come back! I've got Pupcakes!

Don't leave me here with these stupid movies!

The Lumberjack and the Suit

Coming Home

Recently, our apartment complex was acquired by another company, and in celebration, they decided to renovate everything. Oddly, this even included apartments that were still occupied, as opposed to the usual strategy of landlords everywhere, which is to wait until you move out, and then make the apartment a nicer place to live.

In any event, the powers that be decided to make this process as pain(less/full) as possible by performing the entire renovation over the course of a workday. This was nice, since it meant the inconvenience was over quickly, but it was also unfortunate, since it meant that the inconvenience was both massive and unavoidable.

Along with replacing several of our appliances and all our cabinets and counters, they tore out half our carpet and replaced it with laminate. I tell you this not because I think you’ve been affected by whatever mind-altering chemical HGTV puts in the water to trick their victims into giving a shit about other people’s renovation projects, but rather because I want to provide you with a sense of perspective.

You see, when you live in a two bedroom apartment and you’re told that you need to clear out all of your storage space but can’t put the junk stored therein anywhere on your carpet, you have a bit of a predicament on your hands. That is, the sort of predicament where you pile all your worldly possessions into one corner of your living room and look for someplace to spend a couple nights while your home is in shambles.

Incidentally, would you like a frustrating experience? Pile all of your furniture into your living room and set everything else on top of it, and then turn your head slightly to the left to look at your completely empty dining room, where you’re not allowed to put anything.

It took us most of the week to turn everything we own into a game of Jenga, with the whole experience feeling midway between moving out (and leaving all your crap behind) and going on vacation (to your mother’s house).

In the final hours of packing up to stay a few nights at my mother’s house, the place felt somehow wrong. Like the thing that made it home just wasn’t there anymore. Our apartment, but not home. Both barren and full of junk. It was like walking around inside of a Zen koan.

When we’d finally finished, the moving out feeling returned. I wanted to wistfully look around the apartment one last time, but all I could really do was wistfully look around the ratty old carpet one last time. Goodbye, barf stain from the cat. Goodbye, dishwasher with the weird smell.

And then hello to my childhood bedroom. Well, not so much childhood as a few years from high school to college, but still–I was back home again.

Sort of. The room was the same in the sense that it occupied the same physical space, but shortly after my departure my mother turned it into an office. And then, a few years after that, she realized that when you have four grandchildren and you do all your work on a laptop anyway, a home office is less practical than an extra bedroom, and she converted the office into a Nightmare Emporium.

A Nightmare Emporium, by the way, is a giant bed surrounded by a sea of out-of-season decorations that can only be described as a cross between the Nightmare before Christmas and that actual nightmare about Christmas you had as a child, where Santa Claus broke into your house in the night and murdered your pets.

I’d show you the half of the room dedicated to Christmas, but this is a family-friendly blog.

Anyway, after a couple nights in the Nightmare Suite (during which I’m pretty sure a haunted Santa managed to perform a Child’s Play-style incantation on my wife in the night), we went back home to see our brand new, same old apartment.

But still not home. Not yet, anyway. It wasn’t because everything had changed; it was the way everything was packed away. The place that should be a refuge from the world–where you could relax on the couch or start a new project or just walk around with no pants on–had become a place of constant annoyance, where dust covered every surface, where stacks of things waiting to get put away taunted you at every turn, and where everything you needed was forever lost somewhere in a load-bearing box that somehow held up the couch.

Cleaning up proved tricky, since, through some quirk in the space-time continuum, our apartment seemed to have gotten smaller since we’d taken everything off the shelves, leaving us with several storage dilemmas. Nevertheless, even though it took some time, we eventually managed to restore order, and the unfamiliar place where we kept all of our stuff turned into home again.

And, at the end of it all, I had to agree with the demon that now inhabits my wife’s body: it was good to be home.

Coming Home

The Supermarket of the Damned

For those who don’t live in the Indiana area, up until recently there was a chain of grocery stores called Marsh. I say recently because as of this month, Marsh is now a chain of empty buildings. This is either a surprising new business strategy, or the result of their descent into bankruptcy; either way, they’ve sold everything they had, right down to their fixtures, and closed their doors.

Before the sad, lifeless husk that had once been our grocery store closed for good, my wife and I decided take a last look around. Their wares had been thoroughly picked over at this point. By then, their merchandise mainly consisted of bagged ice and countless packages of Peeps Oreos.

Shockingly, their math skills didn’t save them.

There’s something odd about wandering the aisles of a grocery store to find empty shelves as far as the eye can see, barren walls where brightly colored, patronizing advertisements should jockey for your attention, and the eerie silence of a PA system failing to play pop music or blare incomprehensible announcements in a shrill, distorted voice.

It was for this reason that we decided to take one last trip to our local Marsh. Simply put, visiting a store that has no interest in ever getting money from you again is like watching a star die. There’s something beautiful and tragic about it. Also, you can get deeply discounted junk food. Of course, if they turn out to be moldy or poisonous, there’s no one left to hold accountable in court, but I suppose that’s life.

And besides, who can say no to cheap Peeps Oreos? I mean, other than people who have eaten them.

The Supermarket of the Damned

The Peeps Show

I recently came to the disturbing conclusion that there is -- for a limited time -- such a thing as "Peeps Oreos." Oreos, you may recall, are those cookies with a mediocre cream filling sandwiched between two godawful chocolate cookies, and Peeps are those flavorless marshmallow chicks you get around Easter as a gift from people who have heard of candy before, but have never actually tried it and aren't sure what it's for. Strictly speaking, there are also bunny-shaped Peeps, but calling those things "Peeps" is sort of like calling a taco with bread instead of a tortilla a "taco" -- yes, there is a certain superficial resemablance, but you're missing something fundamental to the nature of the thing. If they're not shaped like baby chicks, you might as well just eat a discolored, stale marshmallow that's sat on the street for a few weeks, because the flavor will be the same, and it's quite a bit cheaper. Although perhaps advice like this is why my personal finance blog never really took off.

At any rate, as soon as I learned of the existence of these universally reviled, sugar-laden monstrosities, I knew that eventually I would wind up eating one, and so I might as well get it over with as soon as possible. It was the same feeling I had when I first saw the trailer for Sharknado.

Since my local grocery store had mysteriously opted not to stock this horrible, horrible snack food, I had to order it from Amazon, which proved to be a rather expensive decision. I've not generally found Amazon to be overpriced in the past, but since I am a deeply negligent person, it wasn't until I received the package that I realized that I had paid $10 for what was clearly the smallest full-sized pack of Oreos I had ever seen in my life.

Upon opening the package, I realized three things:

The "Oreos" were of the vanilla cookie variety, which, while clearly superior to the chocolate cookies, barely count as Oreos.
The cookies weren't even vaguely Peeps-shaped, meaning that this was wholly a cheap marketing gimmick, bearing even less resemblance to Peeps than those vile pretender-bunnies.
Now that I had paid $10 for an entire package of terrible cookies, I would be morally obligated to eat more than one of them.

The latter conclusion was reached with a sinking feeling of dread.

However, something odd happened as I bit into my first shitty cookie: it wasn't that bad. Which is not to say that it was good. It was, in fact, wholly unremarkable in every respect.

My wife, of course, being almost as stupid as myself, took me at my word and tried a cookie. This was initially fine, but shortly thereafter, she recoiled in disgust and declared that the aftertaste was dreadfully bitter. Unconvinced yet fascinated, I then finished off an entire row of these cookies trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about. I never detected a hint of bitterness, but I did determine that I'm the type of person who is willing to eat an entire row of mediocre cookies in the hopes that something awful will happen to him. Which is, I suppose, a sort of awful thing in and of itself.

As this journey reaches its conclusion, I like to think that I've taken something away from it all...maybe a lesson about marketing, or human nature, or maybe even something about myself...but I think mainly what I've gained from this is a half-eaten pack of Oreos that will sit untouched for the next year and a half.

So...does anyone want some free cookies?

The Peeps Show