Slice of American Pie

Two days ago was the fourth of july, Independence Day, and, for the first time in my life, I spent this national holiday completely alone. Last year, I spent my fourth in a small town in south-central Utah, this year, I pounded the pavement in Philadelphia. Yet, despite the vast difference in location and magnitude, the celebrations I saw were nearly the same. People crowded around for free food or drink, clapped at the entertainment and proudly sported their red, white and blue. So here are some photos from my last two Fourths, hope you enjoy this slice of Americana. 

Men In Love

There seems to be a new trend in Hollywood, men who carry a torch for their leading ladies. After a long period of women being the unrequited love torch-bearers, it seems the tide has turned. Gone are the long drawn out loves of the 90s, women pining for years over their men; all the while the man his sweet time to figure out whats up. Such films at Titanic, Jerry Maguire and Ever After have been replaced by movies like  The Notebook and Pride and Prejudice, both featuring male characters who are proud to say, "I am in love."


I first began to notice this trend on the 100th episode of Bones, where David Boreanz's Special Agent Seely Booth confesses to the Bones lady herself, Emily Deschanel's Dr. Temperance Brennan, "Its always the guy who knows... I'm that guy." Bones shoots him down on account of her troubled past, but Booth doesn't seems to mind. He's in love; he knows it, she knows it, but she's just not ready.

Following along the same line, on Gossip Girl the tables in the Chuck-Blair relationship have been reversed, Ed Westwick's Chuck Bass is now bent on regaining Leighton Meester's Blair, because, well, he loves her, and he's Chuck Bass.

Finally, in this week's Castle Nathan Fillion's Richard Castle is finally starting to show some love for Stana Katic's Detective Beckett, even though he has yet to confess it. Seems like its the men who are doing all of the falling onscreen right now, and its about time.

To be a (M)Athlete

I have never been an athlete. Sure, I played sports as a kid, running track, playing soccer, basketball, among other things. Other than a brief stint as a rower freshman year of college, I never really spent that much time in the pursuit of physical prowess. I was generally encouraged to pursue excellence in the classroom over excellence on the field, and I was happy with that. To be honest, I am lucky. I'm naturally pretty thin, and I build muscle relatively easily, so my appearance was always more athletic than the reality. I prided myself in being more fit than most of the American population, and that was always enough for me.

Now, however, as I consider my future, and the jobs I want to do, I am forced to consider the possibility that I might have to become, gulp, and athletic individual. Not just some person who walks a lot, or can run a mile, or can carry her groceries 10 blocks home, but an athlete.

In the past few months I have been slowly adjusting myself to this realization. It is no longer enough to be good, I've got to be one of the best. I've got to join that group of people who you see each morning sweating in out on the track, trail, or in the gym. The people who can say that running, biking, swimming, lifting, spinning or whatever they do, is not just a hobby, but a part of their life. I never understood what that meant, but now, I think I'm beginning to slowly see. Being in shape is one thing, but being in good shape, marathon, triathalon, athlete shape, thats a whole new ball game.

I'm not sure I'm ready, nor do I fully understand where the mystical line is. When, exactly, do I go from mathlete to athlete? I guess, like many things, its a process. And one day, I just might wake up and say, "today is the day." But until then, I'd best go to bed, 'cause I've got to run in the morning.

50 Best

In light of the recent release of the "World's 50 Best Restaurants" list by S. Pellegrino, I am prepared to make a list of my best restaurants and why. (Don't worry, there aren't actually 50)

1. La Baguette, West Colorado Location (Colorado Springs, CO) The reason this tops the list is simple, I've never had anything but amazing cuisine francaise here. The cheese fondue is creamy, rich and decadent, the onion soup is succulent and flavorful, and the tuna salad croissant sandwich is buttery and fresh. The bread is crackly and crusty, and the lemon tart is just the right combination of sweet and puckering sour.

2. Ai (Colorado Springs, CO) The best japanese food I've ever had always comes from here. The miso soup is perfection and the tempura is light, crispy and barely greasy. The genmai-cha is served searing hot and brewed just right. To top it off, the sushi is supposedly wonderful. (I've never had any)

3. Amanda's Fonda (Colorado Springs, CO) For real southwestern style mexican, this is the best place on earth. Salsas are spicy, everything else is gooey, runny and flavorful. The chips are crisp and salty and the flan is a light, fluffy cloud of caramel that melts in your mouth.

4. Alma de Cuba (Philadelphia, PA) Each time I eat at Alma de Cuba, I marvel at the small rolls and dipping sauce they give as a starter. I could eat just those as my meal and be entirely satisfied. Their black bean soup is tick, rich and wonderful as well.

5. Bubble House (Philadelphia, PA) The Bubble House has some of the most ingenious food I've ever ingested. Their sweet potato fries are famous and their wasabi mashed potatoes spicy and the perfect pairing for their ginger-hoisen glazed salmon. The red thai curry bowl is also wonderful, creamy and spicy at the same time. To finish, their Vietnamese coffee is sweet and strong.

6. Cafe Rose (Lyon, France) Cafe Rose has the best tomato-mozarella sandwich I have ever tasted. I have tasted many.  Le Mozza, as its called, is served on the best bread in France, chewy, crusty and coated in poppy seeds.

7. Sitar India (Philadelphia, PA) The food at Sitar is served buffet style, and its easy to over do it. Like all the best Indian cuisine, its spicy and flavorful, but, here, its impossible to go wrong. The samosas are amazing and the badam kheer is the perfect sweet finish to the meal.

8. Le Fournil (Seattle, WA) The tuna sandwich at Le Fournil is perfection, once again served on wonderful bread, its peppery and light. The tarts an cakes aren't bad either.

9. Boriello Bros. Pizza (Colorado Springs, CO) If you favor New York style pizza, I challenge you to find better pizza than at Boriello Bros. The slices are huge, thin and infinitely cheesy.

10. Pagliacis Pizza (Seattle, WA) For slightly thicker pizza with creative toppings, Pagliacis pizza is unbeatable. The side salad is also wonderful.

11. Swiss Chalet (Breckenridge, CO) The fondue at the Swiss Chalet is stringy, rich an traditional. The raclette is always the finest.

12. The White Dog Cafe (Philadelphia, PA) The nachos at White Dog are renowned, and their innovative menu will please any discerning palate.

13. Max Brenner (Philadelphia, PA) I have only eaten at this chocolate haven once, so I can't put it too high on the list, however, the sheer decadence of the menu will stun any chocolate lover.

14. New Deck Tavern (Philadelphia, PA) New Deck has the perfect fries, served in a pub style atmosphere that makes indulgence easy.

15. Di Bruno Bros. (Philadelphia, PA) While not technically a restaurant, their baratta cheese and bread make a wonderful snack while hitting the shops at Rittenhouse square.

16. King Chef (Colorado Springs, CO) The best diner food around. Served, as always, with endless cups of coffee.

18. La Creperie (Pike Place Market, Seattle, WA) For the most authentic French crepes I've ever had stateside, la creperie is impossible to beat.

Battle Royale

As I have been on a bit of a Japanese culture binge of late, on my last trip to the bookstore I picked up a copy of Battle Royale by Koushun Takami translated by Yuji Oniki. The novel is about a group of Japanese junior high students (age 15 or so) who are placed on an island together by their totalitarian government and told they must kill each other until a single survivor emerges. Armed with weapons ranging from Uzis, to hand grenades, to a fork or hunting knife, the students face the last hours of their lives locked in bloody combat. (and, yes, it is truly extremely bloody)

While violence and death dominate the book, with fourty-plus people dying in its 576 pages, there are also some interesting themes, some great character development, a few good laughs, and a resonating poignancy that makes sleeping afterwards a little difficult. The novel, released about ten years ago in its native Japan, was promptly made into a film, never released into American theatres. Given the times, with Columbine and similar incidents on the American psyche, its easy to see why the film would not have found much of an audience.  Yet, these connotations aside, it seems to me that this story is one that today would find a broad base of appeal.

Given the recent american taste for horror and slasher flicks, an adaptation of Battle Royale could probably do quite well. In fact, I would be more concerned that the plot, the characters, would actually get in the way for the modern american audience. Because the truth is, in Battle Royale the young students really start to come alive. (hehe) Even though you know from the very beginning that they are destined to die, you can't help but picking students to root for, and you can't help but thinking about what it would be like to die so young. The mastery behind the novel is this, Takami refrains from making his characters undersized adults, he keeps them firmly planted in the land of youth. Teenage crushes abound in the novel; boys and girls barely old enough to love searching each other out and dying for each other. Their innocence and naiveté  makes the violence around them all the more heart-wrenching. One of the main characters, Shuya Nanahara (Male Student No. 15) spends much of the novel protecting his dead best friend's crush, despite the fact that she must die, simply because this is all he can offer as tribute to their friendship.

Image from the 2000 film Batoru Rawaiaru (Battle Royale) directed by Kinji Fukasaku.

The other masterful aspect to the novel, in my opinion, is the pacing. The novel is never boring. Perhaps because so many characters die there is never a lack of action, however, as many B-list horror films can attest, even death can be boring when there exists too much of it. The reason the pace works so well, I think, is that Takami weaves the action so fluidly in with the storyline, with character arcs overlapping skillfully so that even as one character dies, another is fighting to live. Rather than being a story told from a single point of view, nearly every character serves to function as the focal point of a narration, often (spoiler alert) just before their death. Yet, somehow, all of these viewpoints don't seem too rushed or too jumpy, but rather, certain characters pop up to narrate often enough to blend all of the story together.

At the end of the 550 and change pages, the novel comes to a rousing and satisfying conclusion, with a few twists and turns you just might see coming. (even though you won't quite get right how they play out, guaranteed) Battle Royale is a very worthy read, particularly if you're looking for a well-written, bloody, poignant and enjoyable story.

P.S. Quentin Tarantino, if you ever read this, I think I have found your next screenplay.

Flying SOLO

This past weekend was a very important one at my most prestigious university, at least, for the students. I'm not going to name any names, but here, the big drinking, dancing, partying weekend goes by the name of Spring Fling and always includes lots of the things that make my school "the party ivy." (figured it out yet?)

What I like best about Fling is not all of the things I have already mentioned, though I hold dancing very near and dear to my heart, but rather the most amazing mess that the most brilliant can make. Here, from the moment we walk onto the cobblestones of America's Oldest University, we are told that we are the best and brightest (at least until next year's class arrives) and that there are high expectations of us. Little do we know, but from that moment on, we enter into a tacit contract with this University. We pretend to be everything they say we are, and they pretend that we never slip up.

This contract is never more evident than during Fling. Fling is the time when most all of us students mess up, public drunkenness, missed classes, noise violations and dark sunglasses each morning. And the University turns a blind eye. Fraternities advertise parties on sheet hung out frat house windows, all bearing the words, "18 to enter, 21 to drink." Yet, I've never been asked my age at a fraternity door. Long lines form outside these houses each night of fling, clusters of students, some barely able to stand, waiting to be let in to a building fairly shaking from the bass of the house/techno music being pumped inside. Yet, no one stops them, no one warns them, no cops arrive and students who end up in the ER barely get slaps on the wrist. Now, I'm not saying that this University is always like this, that each weekend the sheer number of red Solo cups left in the streets totals in the thousands, but this weekend they do. And everybody pretends to be blind and deaf to it all.

In the bright light of Monday morning, all the students return to our perfect delusion. Tall cups of coffee in hand, we thousands of former solo-cupers of Fling walk to class, hair in place, smiles on faces, all pretending we got more than 10 total hours of sleep over the weekend. We return to our shining perfection. This is our end of the bargain, no matter how much we misbehave, if no one punishes us, we'll continue smiling, applying, and trying and as always, making you look good.

Of A Meaningful Life: A Wager

Photo by Eileen Harper, 2009
" All of us waves are going to be nothing... No, you don't understand. You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean."— Morrie Schwartz


I have been taking an Existentialism class this semester, and for the first time in my philosophical life, I have come face to face with the fact that all these vague arguments I make about the world on a daily basis have changed me. My views on the nature of time, of the relativity of morality, on the reality of experience have all effected the way I choose to view the world. And as a philosophy major, and someone who spends a good deal of time thinking about such topics, I can finally say that I understand, at least to some extent, why I believe and think the way I do about the world.

I have long been an Atheist, this is nothing new, but in exploring existentialism I came to realize why, truly, it is that I am atheist. It is more than just a distaste for modern religions (not that they are all bad) and it is more than just an inability to believe. It is a choice I make, every moment of every day. According to Blaise Pascal, a well known existentialist philosopher, we should all choose to be religious believers, people with faith in the infinite existence beyond our finite life. His idea is that life is a wager, we have a finite life, bounded on one end by birth, the other by death, and what we do in this life either allows us an infinite existence in some sort of heaven, or it does not. Thus, he argues, we should devote our lives to faith, for a finite life seems little to bet against an eternity in heaven.

I must agree, Pascal's logic is sound, betting a small finite existence for an eternal one makes sense. Yet, something in me rebels against this notion. What if this finite existence is all I've got? What if, even with faith, I have no chance of an eternal life? Then, it seems I must live. Are you willing to bet your assured life, however long it may be, against a chance? I am not. I would much rather spend my life affirming for each moment, that I am alive, that my existence is mine to choose, rather than betting on maybe getting some future reward.

If there is no eternal life after this one, it will be as if I had never existed. In two-hundred, three-hundred years, who will remember me? No one. My body will be long gone, my spirit, (if indeed I have one) my mind will all be gone, as if I had never been. But, for this brief lifetime I have, I will have affirmed, against the silence of the universe, that I have lived. And that is what matters to me. I live for me, because I, against all scientific odds, have gotten the chance to live... so I must use my right to it.