Excuse Me?

It's not intentional, but this year is shaping up to be the year Braddy works hardest on self improvement.


That's the spittle of discipline.

Anyway, you remember when I read Leadership and Self-Deception a couple of months ago? Actually, this might be the book that set the whole tone of the year for me. There's one little bit from the book that I've been thinking about a lot. I can't quote it exactly, so I'll have to paraphrase:

People often get so hung up in their own concerns that they don't recognize that other people have needs. The "self-deception" in the title of the book refers to our ability to objectify others in a professional environment, so that people become either tools for us to use to our benefit or obstacles standing in the way of us achieving our goals. What this means, practically, is that most people aren't really concerned with what our excuses are for failure in the workplace (or in life, for that matter). They only care that we're inconveniencing them.

This understanding that people are usually so focused on their own concerns that they don't have time for my rationalizations has led to two changes in my behavior. The first one is, I'd say, almost unequivocally a good one: I've stopped making excuses. Since nobody cares what they are, if I screw up, I've consciously tried to apologize without justifying my actions and promise to do better next time - which, really, is about all anyone can do.

UNFORTUNATELY, I've also come to expect this behavior from everyone else, which means that I have NO patience AT ALL for other peoples' excuses.

Now, like most self-deluded people, I think I'm right in not accepting excuses. I know a woman who always shifts the blame for her failures. Every time something goes wrong - and I mean every time - she either spends the next half-hour either looking for evidence to exhonerate or just straight up blames someone else for the failure. I kinda lost all patience with her when she forgot to complete a project and then turned to me and said, "Why didn't you remind me?"

If you ask me, that's unacceptable behavior. I refuse to be held accountable for anyone else completing their given responsibilities unless I'm their supervisor in some capacity (which, in this case, I'm not). HOWEVER, I recognize that the way to change this behavior in others is not necessarily through verbal chastisement, and it CERTAINLY isn't through grudge-holding.

Which, I guess, is the ultimate problem - if I get fed up with other people's excuses, it hurts no one but myself.

Catching Up with the Classics: Rear Window

Ever have an uneventful Saturday night, where you hit the streets with money in your pocket that you just have to spend? That's the situation I found myself in this past weekend, and I walked away with a pretty impressive collection of Alfred Hitchcock movies.

Should make meeting my goal a little easier.

Rear Window is the first movie in my remedial Hitchcock education. I'm quickly getting to the point where I can call myself a Hitchcock "fan." The unusual cinematography created a unique movie-watching experience - nearly everything is shot from within a single room, which cultivates a claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere. And speaking of paranoia, Jimmy Stewart does paranoia very well in a role QUITE different from the one I'm used to seeing him in.

Hitchcock is a master of suspense, and the suspense is strong in Rear Window, especially near the conclusion. Unfortunately, that suspense may be the film's biggest weakness (possibly a weakness in ALL Hitchcock films - I'll have to let you know later). Suspense compels the viewer to fear for the life/well-being/sanity of the protagonist; however, when we already know how things will end, suspense loses it's power over us. I worry that the several long, drawn-out scenes will bore me on a second viewing.

However, we're talking about the FIRST viewing today, and that was a good one. In my mind, Rear Window is an obvious classic, and well worth a look if you haven't seen it.

Beauty in the Details - Three Winks Studio

Once upon a time, I took a stroll through the open house at Poor Yorick Studios in Salt Lake City. While there, I purchased a print from my friend Stacy Young, a fantastic photographer and head of Three Winks Studio. Stacy's a brilliant photographer, who has taken a lot of absolutely beautiful pictures. I've seen a lot of her work over the last couple of years and consider myself to be a pretty big fan, which is kind of a weird thing to say about a person I used to see every Sunday at church.

Here's the picture, for those who are curious:


I LOVE this close-up on the blueberries but my reasoning here's a little strange. Bear with me.

The crowns on these berries are spiked and aggravated, almost as if the berries were violently torn open. Also, the skin on the berry is dusty and a bit discolored. In short, these are NOT an advertiser's blueberries. However, I find I love looking at these berries, which I have a tough time describing as anything other than "honest."

I purchased this photograph in part because it reminded me of a photograph I once saw on Stacy's blog - a portrait of a woman*. Stacy used a lens which captured a lot of the fine details of the woman's face - crow's feet on the woman's eyes and the slight hairs growing out of her cheeks. The woman looked straight at the camera. with a slight smile on her face, and, frankly, she looked stunning.

When I hear phrases like "spikey berries" and "hairy-faced women," I'm not immediately drawn to exclaim, "What a beautiful world we live in!" Yet that's exactly how I feel when I look at the sublime details Stacy captures in her pictures - despite perceived "imperfections," everything is full of inherent beauty that we can see if we only learn to look at things a little differently.

I'm grateful for fantastic photographers who see the world as beautiful and are able to capture that beauty with their art. I keep the picture of the blueberries in my apartment as a reminder that, sometimes, it's our flaws that make us beautiful - a lesson a lot of us would do well to remember (myself included). If you find you need that kind of reminder yourself, I recommend checking out Stacy's blog.

* and it's not like I could really justify purchasing someone ELSE'S portrait - that'd be a bit creepsville.

A Question of Timing

So I had a talk with a friend of mine recently who's in a bit of a troubled relationship. My friend thinks they may be at the point in the relationship where they need to... umm... re-evaluate their relationship. However, as much as my friend needs this closure, they aren't sure if their partner is ready to have "the talk."

Back when I was in college, I dated a girl for a couple of months. Things went well for a while, but I eventually got the feeling that I needed to end things. Sadly, around that same time, my girlfriend's nephew died. I felt like it would be a bad time to end the relationship, so, not wanting to add more emotional strain to her life, I opted to keep the relationship going. When I saw her again, she told me she thought it was time to end the relationship, and we broke up. Not even two days had passed since her nephew died, yet she knew that the breakup was the best thing for us.

From this experience (and this is what I told my friend), I learned that the right thing to do is the right thing to do, regardless of timing. Even though I thought I shouldn't break up with my college sweetheart, it turns out that it WAS time for both of us to move on, and we both knew it. My friend, on the other hand, says that they would prefer to wait until the right time, as doing the right thing at the wrong time can have a negative impact.

So I guess I don't have an answer to the issue - as this is probably another one of those "case by case basis" things. What do y'all think here?

Imaginary Numbers

I'm not the math guy. I USED to be the math guy, but now I'm not. I'm the word guy.

Could I be the math guy again? Possibly. I mean, I still have a pretty good grasp on mathematical terms, like imaginary numbers.










Can you name them all?

Goody Goody... Goulash?

Recently I’ve devoted a lot of energy to trying new things – mainly new movies and books, that sort of thing – but I’ve also wanted to try to branch out and develop some new skills. Cooking’s not exactly something I’ve expressed a lot of interest in, but I decided to give it a go over President’s Day weekend. See, several years ago, while serving a mission for my church in the Czech Republic, I acquired this book:

I don’t THINK the turducken was originally Czech…

I LOVE Czech food – all those fattening sauces and dishes dripping with sauerkraut. It’s all delicious. I picked out a recipe from the cookbook – kotlíkový guláš, a simple beef stew – and gave it a go.

I ran into some problems translating the recipe. There were a couple of words that I couldn’t find in any of my dictionaries, offline or on. Words weren’t the only things tough to translate, either. In my experience, Europeans measure most of their cooking ingredients by weight, whereas Americans usually measure volume. Conversions were a bit tricky, but (with a little help from my math-major roommate) I was able to get all the ingredients together.

Not pictured: The frozen pizza I held in reserve, just in case.

I’ve always viewed cooking as a chore. After all, it’s a lot more work to make a stew from scratch than to heat up a can of Campbell’s Chunky, especially when cooking just for myself. Still, I’ve always been able to follow a recipe pretty well – I haven’t ignored EVERYTHING my mother taught me.

Step One: Melt lard in a big pot with bacon. I’m pretty sure I heard Jenny Craig crying somewhere.

The nice thing about stew, it seems, is that once it gets going you don’t really have to pay much attention to it. After sautéing the onions, carving up the potatoes, and browning the meat, I put the whole thing in a pot with some water and let it cook for about two hours – long enough to watch the entirety of Kenneth Branaugh’s Much Ado about Nothing.

Uncovering the stew only to pose for an action shot.

We ate well last night, my roommate and I. The goulash sat in my stomach like a rock for the rest of the evening (I blame the lard and bacon fat). Sadly, I think the dish lacked something. Potatoes, for one thing – the recipe only called for about one potato to go with about a whole pound of beef, which is just silly. I’ll be trying the recipe again, adding a few more spices and definitely upping the veggie count.

But now you have photographic evidence – Braddy CAN cook.

It tasted a lot better than it looks here. Trust me.

The Following is an Actual Exchange I Shared With One of the Doctors I Work For

Dr. Moench takes a seat in the waiting room.

BRADDY: Are you here to check in for an appointment?

DR. MOENCH: Can Dr. Moench see me now?

BRADDY: One moment, please. Braddy wheels his chair away from the desk and then back again. Dr. Moench, there's a patient out here to see you. He's being pretty pushy.

DR. MOENCH: Who is that? I don't know who that is.

BRADDY: I think he's a friend of yours.

DR. MOENCH: Sounds like he's a little testy. I can't see him today.

BRADDY: I'll tell him. Wheels his chair away from the desk and back again. I'm sorry, but Dr. Moench can't see you today. Would you like the number to our intake office.

DR. MOENCH: That's unnacceptable. I want to speak to the president of your company right now.

BRADDY: (facetiously) Sure. Let me take a number and I'll get back to you.

BLOGGER'S NOTE: Kind of a boring week. I'll have more stuff to post next week, I'm sure.

Why I'm Still Single 42

In the last week, my blog has gotten 167 hits from people searching for the term, "why i'm single."

It's also gotten 59 hits for "why im single," 21 hits for "why i am single," 20 hits each for "why i m single" and "why i'm still single," and 11 hits for "pocahontas."

I guess people feel lonelier around this time of year. I wonder why...

The World Inside

I sat down to do a drawing one day and couldn't decide on a single thing to draw... so I decided to draw EVERY single thing.

I see this picture as a HUGE experiment - I tried several different techniques here for the first time. I think my proudest techniques are the intricate cross-hatching I lifted from observing some of Stan Sakai's great work on Usagi Yojimbo and the shadow in the haze just below that. I've always thought smoke was difficult to draw, but this worked out okay.

I tried to fit in a wide variety of fantasy-style stories - and I even managed to squeeze in an old friend.

Braddy and Bacon (Not What You Think)

Apparently, I’m getting a bit baby-hungry, which is weird and kinda gross.

Babies aren’t exactly the scary foreign entities they used to be once upon a time. I’ve had quite a bit of time to acclimate myself to them and their fluids – after all, I’m a thrice-times nuncle now, so I’ve had quite a bit of experience with the little ones. I draw the line at diapers, but I’m finally not afraid to hold a baby.

And that’s where things start to change. My little brother, who looks almost exactly like me despite being two years younger, brought his little bouncing goblin up for Christmastime. The baby (who I like to call Bacon) fussed quite a bit – as babies do. Bacon got passed around from relative to relative, but none of them could get him to stop crying. Surprisingly, he seemed to calm down when I held him, and I even got him to smile that toothless baby smile.

We think it’s a simple case of mistaken identity – my brother studies math at BYU, so he generally has to keep his face clean-shaven. Over the summer break, just after Bacon was born, he stayed home and played daddy while his wife went to work, and he let his beard grow out. I, who have never had to kowtow to ridiculous anti-shaving prejudice, was fully bearded during the Yuletide season, so something about my voluptuously virile visage soothed the savage sniffler.

Still, the kid freakin’ loves me, and that is awesome.

Catching Up with the Classics: The Maltese Falcon

Thanks go out to my friend Larissa who provided me with the opportunity to watch The Maltese Falcon – a movie I’ve known only by reputation and not by… anything else you could know a movie by. I only had a basic understanding of what the movie was about, and after watching it, I know just as much now as I did before.

The Maltese Falcon is incredibly dialog heavy. I’m guessing that, due to more stringent content restrictions at the time (or perhaps technical limitations), they couldn’t actually SHOW much of the gritty content that would have made this plot of intrigue, betrayal, and greed more coherent. As it was, they had to rely on a lot of dialog that both Larissa and I found difficult to follow.

I’m sure that difficult was due ENTIRELY to the complexity of the plot and had nothing at ALL to do with the fact that we were both sugar-crashing after eating a huge ice cream sundae.

Objects in camera are tastier than they appear.

I saw Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and actually kinda hated him there – he’s too wooden to be a convincing romantic lead. However, as unethical detective Sam Spade, Bogart shows that he has a lot more range as an actor that I gave him credit for. He KILLS the part.

(Just for fun, if you want to play The Maltese Falcon drinking game, simply down a shot every time Sam Spade makes a phone call. You’ll be smashed before intermission.)

Also, Peter Lorre is in the film, and Peter Lorre makes EVERYTHING better. He’s so good at these sniveling, conniving characters that you just love to hate him… or hate to love him. Either way, you feel dirty and never want to be clean again.

I feel about The Maltese Falcon the same way I felt after watching Ghajini – I don’t quite know what I saw, and I’m not even sure I liked it, but I’m pretty sure I want more of it. I’m drawn to the old-school, hard-boiled detective model, and I saw a lot in The Maltese Falcon to like. Character motivations are complex, and, sometimes, I kinda dig a story where NO ONE is likeable, which is certainly the case here. Moral ambiguity in fiction is like cheesecake – delicious, sinfully rich and probably really bad for you.

Truly Truly Truly Outrageous

Who doesn’t love a lazy Sunday? A whole afternoon to spend reading a good book, hang out with friends, visit family, watch hours of Jem and The Holograms…

Wait, what was that last one again?


I don’t know if I was too young or what, but I never really watched He-Man, Transformers, or GI Joe when I was a kid. I missed out on most of the “cartoon designed specifically to sell toys” genre (although I did get a healthy dose of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). I picked up Jem at the library as… I dunno, something of an experiment. I can’t explain why I’ve been so interested in traditionally girly entertainment recently, but here we are.

Okay, so Jem and The Holograms is, surprisingly, pretty bad. Still, holy crap, I actually kinda loved it. I mean, between the sappy dialog, flashy animation, and out-RAG-eous characters, there’s a lot of cheese to fall in love with.

The plot of the show makes NO SENSE at all. Jerrica leads a double-life as stage performer Jem thanks to a sophisticated holographic system her father invented and called Synergy. Why exactly Jerrica has to pull the Hannah Montana routine I was never clear on. For that matter, I never understood why Hannah Montana had to pull the Hannah Montana routine, but whatever.

The Holograms spend their time making 80s-tastic music videos when their not… um… running a foster care center? Meanwhile, their musical enterprises are often sabotaged by The Misfits, a band with no artistic objectives other than to be as horrible as possible. I guess we now know where Kanye West drew his inspiration from.

Thank you, I’ll be here all week.

I think the highlight episode for me was “Danse Time,” in which The Holograms’ lead dancer, named (I &^%$ you not) Danse, sprains her ankle and has to go through months and months of physical therapy before she can walk again. Meanwhile, local billionaire Xanthos (who is NOT, despite the name, a super villain) sponsors a video contest which will award $250,000 to the music act who puts together the best video espousing the virtues of friendship and goodwill. Jem and her band have a great song, but to win the contest they will need Danse’s help. Will their friend be able to dance in time for The Holograms to enter the contest?

Spoiler alert: OF COURSE SHE WILL!

I loved just about everything in this episode. I mean, first of all, there’s Xanthos, who’s got to be the worst philanthropist ever – he decides that the best way to spend his $250,000 to promote world peace is to give that money away to a group that composes a third-rate “We Are the World” knockoff rather than, I don't know, funding a literacy program or something.

Then you’ve got The Misfits, who enter the contest purely for the profit. They decide that the best way to promote peace and friendship is to dress up as candy and perform their song standing inside a giant gumball dispenser. Seriously – this is a thing that happens.

The best part, of course, has to be the drama surrounding Danse’s rehab. The doctor tells her that she may not ever be able to dance again (which would be really unfortunate – she’d have to change her name to Limp). She eventually meets a young man named Sisko, who is blind. They, of course, fall in love, and then they share this bit of dialog.

SISKO – I heard that you’re a good dancer.

DANSE – How did you know?

ME – BRILLIANT!

All joking aside, I was pretty impressed with Jem and The Holograms – not for what it was, but for what it had the potential to be. Since there have been so many updates of “classic” franchises recently, I seriously think it may be time for someone to take a look at Jem and The Holograms. Get some decent musical talent behind it (and hire a decent writer to come up with some convincing motivation for these characters) and there’s a chance that this show could be REALLY good.

I’m not actually volunteering for the writing job, by the way. But if I WERE to write Jem and The Holograms 2012, you’d better believe The Misfits would interrupt an award ceremony to point out Beyonce just wrote the best song ever. Also, I’d probably have to write a guest spot for Andre 3000, just to be groovy.

The Long and Winding Road to Braddy's Blog

Here we go again - I've been getting some... STRANGE hits on my blog. Thankfully, I can access a list of the search terms people have been using to get to some of my posts. Have a look (and a giggle).

• mt receding hairline - That's in the Appalachians, I think


• clean living, chum batman - Which leads you to one of the best comic panels ever


• best sexist pictures - Speaking of sexism...


• mother gothel curvy - ...what? Are Rapunzel's mother's assets really the most important aspect of her character?


• me:why am i still single? - If you have to ask Google why you're still single, I think we might already have the answer.


• tatiyana@nirvam.it] - She's such a nice girl...


• fergie in my hump - Um... ew.
• city place imaging aurora, "braddy" - I don't even know what they were TRYING to look for.


• rick astley awkward - You take that back! Rick Astley's the best!


• "seven deadly sins" + "wrath" + "abstract painting" - I'm pretty sure this isn't what they were looking for.

In other news, I've started attending a book club as of last night, very kindly organized by my friend heidikins. So now I've got a bit more direction in finding new material to read, which is awesome. Our first book is... My Name is Asher Lev.

Oh well. The next book will be a new one.

Wish I Said It First #17

#17

"I don’t think G rated is a bad thing. Maybe what it’s become has been a pandering toy commercial. I think that any old black and white movie you find could be considered G rated, but they can make you cry, and people can die. There can be suspense and horror, and all kinds of stuff. It just isn’t done in a gratuitous and pornographic way. I think that’s perfectly fine."

-Jill Thompson, author of Scary Godmother, via an interview with NYC Graphic (the whole article's pretty cool, by the way)

Resolution Check - One Month Later

In an effort to create some semblance of accountability, I'm doing a quick check-up on the goals I posted here at the beginning of the year. Here's how I'm doing so far:

• 30 Minutes of Writing Per Day - So far, so good.


• One Quick Sketch Per Weekday - I've phoned it in a couple of days, but I've been doing pretty well here.


• One Drawn "Scene" Per Week - I, um, actually forgot about this goal. I've got, like, one and a half "scenes." But I've been doing some pretty good sketches, so I'll call it good.


• 6 Books Read By Year's End From This List - One down, five to go.


• 12 Books Read Total - I'm joining a book club, so I'll be able to hit the twelve-book mark pretty easily.


• Watch 6 Movies From This List - Nothing yet, but this averages out to one movie every other month. I'm not worried yet.


• Eliminate the Word "Um" from My Spoken Vocabulary - Okay... this one has been really HARD. Need to do better.

So I've got some work to do, obviously, but the month of January was really promising. Here's hoping the rest of 2012 goes as well!