Tag: Time

Off to the races!

I’m going to try keeping this brief because I have a new game to return to.

Today was racetrack day in Florida.

The idea that we would be watching horse races was interesting for me to prepare for. It’s been a long time since I’ve personally gone to any kind of races, and in the time since there have been controversies at the track I’m most familiar with in Del Mar due to a series of horse deaths.

Obviously Florida is a whole world away, but I was curious to see whether any hint of animal rights backlash would reach across the country.

I didn’t see anything of the like.

What I did see is one of the coolest god damn landmarks ever built:

pegasus_credit_shutterstock — Shutterstock photo from *The Miami New Times*

Look at this. A Pegasus stomping on a dragon? How could you not be excited to go to Gulfstream Park?

I wanted to get a photo of the statue myself… But naturally heavy weather picked up the moment I separated from my grandparents to get a nice angle on foot.

Here’s the best I got:

That said, I did get some nice photos of the area in-and-around the track. The whole place is like a Las Vegas gambler’s dream.

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So how about the races themselves?

I had a good time looking through the schedule when we first arrived. There were an obscene amount of horses named after Marvel Comics characters (though no Thanos), and one named after that spelling mistake the President made some years back.

The people who name racehorses are a different breed pic.twitter.com/Xq9fcvPs08

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) August 3, 2019

I had to bet on Cofveve for the memes. Especially with my Dad’s justification that “losers are winners in this country.”

But in the end, memes and a slight sunburn were the best I got.

Cofveve disappointed by being in the very back for the entire race.

Yet… The story doesn’t end there.

While I was wasting my money, Grandpa put a bet on a box of three horses and Grandma copied his bet.

They managed to win ~$1,300.

The nuttiest thing is that it was apparently a complete accident? Grandpa intended to bet on one horse but wrote the wrong number down.

And then crazily enough, two races later they managed to win another $75 or so!

Lesson learned: Always copy off of Grandpa’s notes.

Because I bet on three races and managed to walk out with nothing but a hot dog…

And this neat horse-racing gif.

Then, you know, I got soaking wet trying to take a picture of that statue.

In the end, it was all worthwhile. We had a great time, my grandparents won a lot of money…

And they bought me Fire Emblem: Three Houses with some of that money.

I’ll admit, I may have been dropping hints throughout this vacation about wanting the new Fire Emblem game. Usually I never know what gift to request when they ask, so it was a rare opportunity.

But I didn’t expect to actually get anything until Grandpa was in a celebratory mood.

Now I no longer have to avoid spoilers at all costs, and so far I’ve adored the little bit of time I’ve been able to sink into Three Houses.

In fact, I’ll likely be posting some takes like this about the game on Twitter:

So I’ve been playing Three Houses for two-and-a-half hours, and the only battle I’ve done is the prologue fight.

The amount of freedom this game immediately gives you to explore its (still restricted) open world, interact with characters and read optional lore is astounding.

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) August 3, 2019

So follow me if you’re into that sort of thing.

More Fire Emblem takes will have to wait, however. Because we went out to dinner at one of the grandparents’ favorite Chinese restaurants:

Let me tell you. They had some stellar short ribs.

I’m still licking sauce off my fingers as I write this.

Unfortunately, this is the penultimate Florida vacation blog post. As of tomorrow night I’ll be back on a plane to LAX, landing at 12:30 a.m.

It’s a shame because I’ve genuinely been having a great time. But all good things must come to an end.

So come on by tomorrow to see whatever we wind up doing as a big send-off!

Captain Marvel is an excellent, if flawed, lynchpin for the MCU

So, guess who just saw Captain Marvel? The movie which Meninism Magazine voted worst blight on masculinity since Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters.

I kid. Any relation to real-life absurdist magazines or misogynistic straw polls is purely coincidental.

It’s just hilarious to me how reactionary the hate for this movie has been leading up to its release.

But that’s neither here nor there. I’m not here to make political statements.

I’m here to review a Marvel movie.

As a general disclaimer, I wasn’t excited for Captain Marvel like I was for Infinity War.

Not because of the aforementioned testosterone backlash — though I’ll admit some of the film’s advertising seemed a little too determined to prod that tiger.

I just happen to know next to nothing about Carol Danvers, so it was going to take a lot to convince me she is the Avenger’s one true hope.

Luckily, the experience was more fun than I expected and proved the heroine’s place in this narrative.

Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson as “Vers,” an amnesiac member of the Kree Empire’s armada of intergalactic warrior-heroes locked in conflict with a shapeshifting race of alien terrorists called the Skrull.

Vers has visions of a human life as Air Force pilot Carol Danvers, and winds up on Earth before her untrustworthy narrative is resolved.

There she must sort out her fractured past, flush out the invading alien threat and have buddy cop adventures with Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury — over ten years before he starts the Avenger’s Initiative in 2008’s Iron Man.

The movie starts strong by putting the clichéd complexities of an “amnesiac protagonist” on the back burner for an in media res emphasis of the living world in Marvel’s deep space, similar to Guardians of the Galaxy.

But when things got to Earth, I became concerned.

The burst of mid-90s nostalgia pandering — complete with a Blockbuster video and Stan Lee cameo rehearsing for his appearance in 1995’s Mallrats — is fun and gives Larson a quirky “fish out of water” bit reminiscent of Wonder Woman.

I imagine it’s not uncommon to levy comparisons to DC’s female-led superhero film, but I think the better comparison is with Solo: A Star Wars Story.

My least favorite part of that origin story was the way it condensed every bit of information you know about the character’s past into the span of a week. It was blatantly referential rather than clever and story-driven, weakening Han Solo as a character.

When Captain Marvel introduces Nick Fury, dropping bits and pieces of recognizable information for MCU veterans to say,

I was afraid the film would fall into the same trappings of timeline condensation.

However, it handles itself far more tactfully, and instead ties huge loose ends of a decade-long story into succinct bows. It’s, dare I say, a marvel how well Captain Marvel stands as the “inciting incident” for the rest of the MCU.

The final product is not my favorite Marvel film as an overall experience. But the wonderful cast helps solidify the movie’s place.

Jackson is a stellar second lead. His interactions with Larson, Carol’s best friend Maria (played by Lashana Lynch in a performance that stood out despite a late entrance) and the kitty Goose were solid cinematic glue.

I have to give extra props to the effects department for selling a de-aged Jackson so well over almost two hours.

The alien races’ full-makeup and costumes also worked, with Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) and Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) each nailing their roles as Kree and Skrull commanders respectively.

Thanks to them, the “alien war” serving as Captain Marvel‘s crux was far more interesting than I expected based on YouTube think pieces setting up certain Avengers as confederates due to the Skrull’s infamy in comics.

The movie also benefitted from being smaller in scale than I expected.

Everything was very interpersonal, only briefly referencing “world threatening” stakes that most superhero movies rely on. As an added bonus, this made the effects more contained, befitting plot and action where needed.

But of course, there’s the lead. Brie Larson is charming and wonderful as the kick-ass, witty, and snarky hero who growls at aliens and doesn’t need to prove herself to anyone.

I had a few smaller gripes with her character, such as the only injury she ever suffered being a bloody nose (mostly to contribute to her mysterious past) and the forced reliance on amnesia tropes as a whole.

Though that’s more on the screenplay than her performance.

It’s also worth mentioning one of my Dad’s complaints with the film: She very quickly accepts a sudden shift in perspective on [Spoilers]. That, in turn, feeds my own issue that after the character development, her powers seemed incredibly vast considering their somewhat modest origins.

That said, an action set piece at the end of the movie makes great use of visuals to show her strength and definitely sold Captain Marvel as a powerful ally in the upcoming second fight against Thanos.

The film’s score also offered some distinct positives. It relied more heavily on variations of the main theme than a glut of pop songs (like Guardians), and there was a stand out moment where Western vibes took over the melody during a one-on-one confrontation in the desert.

So that, in a nutshell, is Captain Marvel.

A solid enough Marvel flick that perhaps falters most in its primary storyline’s reliance on amnesiac origin story clichés, but makes up for it with beyond excellent world building, special effects befitting a more personal adventure (that really only got wonky once or twice) and a top-notch cast.

All playing second fiddle to the cutest cat ever committed to film.

After Captain Marvel, I’m very ready for Endgame to hurry up and hit theaters, because if the mid-credit stinger was any indication, it should be a wild ride.

Featured Image courtesy of IMDb

The Umbrella Academy precipitates to the top

I don’t talk about seasons of television very often when reviewing things. More self-contained projects like movies tend to be easier to watch and digest, in my experience.

But it has been a while since I’ve seen a binge-watchable show that hit me quite as hard as The Umbrella Academy.

So much so that I forewent writing anything last night to finishing the series. Then felt enough of a high that I went out of my way to Tweet Netflix directly after midnight:

Alright @netflix, we all know you have time traveling briefcases now, you can quit fooling around and drop #UmbrellaAcademy season 2 already. Alright?

Alright.

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) February 23, 2019

Still haven’t gotten a reply, but hopeful nonetheless.

I can’t promise this will be an entirely spoiler-free review. I won’t give away grandiose plot details, but character arcs or smaller cliffhangers from individual episodes might slip through. I don’t have a lot of experience writing about binge-worthy television yet, so not sure if that’s standard procedure.

If you just want the brief review I gave to my old advisor Mitch Ziegler today after judging a write-off competition: Go watch the show.

It’s a quirky, interesting take on the superhero genre from Dark Horse Comics, which has a style more reminiscent of The Addams Family than Iron Man.

I was clambering for more as soon as it ended, which is about as big a compliment to the ten-episode Netflix original I can offer.

More spoiler-y, deeper thoughts ahead.

When you succeed in making Ellen Page the relatively “normal” girl in your ensemble, you know you’ve succeeded in creating a fascinatingly strange world.

The show (and comic, though there are some plot differences) creates a world where 43 children were miraculously conceived and birthed one day in 1989. Seven of whom were adopted by a man who combines superhero family patriarch of Professor Xavier from the X-Men and strange eccentricities of Count Olaf from the A Series of Unfortunate Events books.

It’s never really elaborated on whether the other 36 children have superpowers, but they really don’t matter.

The Umbrella Academy quickly veers away from the cliché serialized superhero gathering the premise almost preassumes to focus on those seven children once they’ve grown up. All in some way broken by their odd abilities and idiosyncrasies wrought by a calloused, distant father.

Every character becomes a great case study on their own, while also bouncing off one another well.

Except perhaps for Ben (Justin Min), who died prior to the series and comes into play as a foil for Klaus (Robert Sheehan), whose powers allow him to see and speak to the dead.

Klaus’ character is actually a fantastic generalization for the series.

During the first episode, I found him repugnant. To stave off the screams of the dead he’s haunted by, Klaus has become a near-useless junkie. Most of that episode features him bumming around the Academy half-naked, stealing their now-deceased father’s antiques to sell for drugs.

It’s an archetype which is played up to the point of nausea. A lot of the first episode is somewhat nauseating, with seven stereotypically quirky characters (the shamed Hollywood actress, the stoic leader, the hardened Nightwing-esque vigilante, etc.) being introduced alongside a whole host of plot points.

But as the show gets past that first bout of exposition, all the characters warm up.

Klaus, for instance, has a phenomenal scene with his brother Five (just “Number Five.” I promise it isn’t that weird) trying to get information out of a prosthetics lab. It plays the extreme bluntness of someone numb to the world in a very funny way.

Then Klaus goes through a harrowing experience which leads to him sobering up, and in the process he became my favorite character.

Or he would have, if Aidan Gallagher didn’t absolutely blow everyone else out of the water as Number Five.

Five can teleport to different points in space, and eventually learns how to teleport through time as well. In the process, he gets himself stuck in a desolate future.

When he returns to the past, the time travel reverts him back into a 13-year-old boy, just with all the experiences of a near 60-year-old man.

Gallagher brings a fantastic dry wit to the character, and his 50+ years of combat experience combined with teleportation makes every action scene with Five a visual marvel.

For someone who has only had roles on Nickelodeon sitcoms before, I was shocked by how hard he hit the ground running. Even while talking to a mannequin.

All of that said and I still haven’t touched on four of the siblings — one of which is portrayed by Ellen Page, who deservedly gets the lead credit as a straight man character who glues her wacky family together and has one of the better overall arcs.

Then there are the villains, Hazel and Cha-Cha (Cameron Britton and Mary Blige), who are at once intimidating antagonists and compelling, sympathetic characters.

While I adored The Umbrella Academy‘s characters, the show had a lot more to offer.

It’s an incredibly dark, surreal take on a superhero story. Think of the semi-dysfunctional but ultimately loving family dynamic of The Incredibles set in a My Chemical Romance music video — a sensible comparison.

The killer soundtrack is well-utilized, with songs ranging from Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” to They Might Be Giants’ “Istanbul,” alongside The Sex Pistols, Radiohead and more. Plus some solid standalone tracks.

A lot of the visual effects also stand up quite well in a world glut with high-budget superhero stories. Most everything in the set design feels practical, and the display of powers — teleportation, conjuring ghosts, etc. — occurs infrequently enough to feel rich and well-produced.

Only in the last episode is there a traditionally high-octane effects show that is over-the-top, but fittingly so with how much it was built up.

Honestly, I’m not sure what else I could say about this show without my little review devolving into relentless gushing. If I had one substantial complaint, I would have liked to see more of the children flashback scenes. The older character studies are great, but a series featuring the cocky kids stopping crimes would be really fun.

Despite that, The Umbrella Academy is a very solidly acted, well-produced series with enough of a dark, cynical sensability to keep even the most exhausted of superhero media fans engaged.

I’ll just be here waiting for season 2 to come out. If you’ve heeded my advice, hopefully you’ll be right there too.

Featured Image courtesy of IMDb.

Reading on Writing Tools

It’s funny. After spending three-or-four hours locked away writing this ten-page paper for my Mass Media Ethics class, I looked outside and thought it was so late that I missed my window to write something substantial on my blog.

But then I realized it’s only 7:00 p.m. (as of the point where I started writing anyway) despite looking like 11:00 p.m.

Welcome back Winter. How’s it going? Persephone doing alright down with Hades right now?

That’s good, that’s good.

All joking aside, I am actually pretty tired of writing after banging out an extensive essay on ethical philosophies when publishing graphic images in newspapers.

Plus I’m having a pretty fun time watching my dad get real annoyed at the T.V. while the Dodgers seem to be choking out during seventh inning of game five in the World Series.

So I won’t write too much here today. I’ll save some energy for another small Evolution and Creation paper I have to do next probably.

Certainly I won’t bore you all with the particulars of applying concepts like Utilitarianism and Communitarianism to national news publications — go ahead and watch NBC’s “The Good Place” if you want any of that. The show does it in a far more entertaining way than I could.

Instead I think I’ll briefly talk about my next “for fun” reading project. If you want to consider supplemental materials to help with my novel a “fun” book.

Professor Rizzo suggested I take a look at Roy Peter Clark’s book here as a way to pick up on some extra skills for more literary writing.

So far this kind of thing has been one of the early benefits of having a mentor for my Honors Project. Not only do I have an instructor to grade me in classes over the next year, someone who’s willing to read whatever I write and give me advice, but I have someone in my corner with a wealth of experience to be able to recommend books and connections that may help my writing in the long run.

It’s super cool, and I eagerly ran off to Amazon to pick this sucker up after she mentioned it last Tuesday.

Now that is has finally arrived, I’m excited to crack it open and see what I can learn. Thought that was worth sharing with the world, at the very least on the off-chance that you too are looking for some supplemental materials to help with whatever you might be writing.

However I’ll have to personally broach the subject another day, because for now I’m off to homework land once again.

Wish me luck.

The Concept of Cash

Has anyone ever stopped to think about how strange the idea behind money is?

Probably a silly rhetorical question, as commerce is something that many people have thought long and hard about over the course of human history. But I don’t exactly mean the concept of different monetary systems or the merits of different economic theories like capitalism vs. communism.

I’m certainly nowhere near enough of an expert in any sort of financial realm to be able to begin to tackle those big ideas.

However, recently I’ve been contemplating a different bizarre aspect of money that relates more to a psychological sphere of thought. Namely the idea of ownership when it comes to money, particularly in the much more nebulous 21st century where the lines between the physical and the digital are blurred more and more.

I could point to a number of places as the genesis of my thinking on this subject, though two primarily come to mind off-hand.

First is my sister, who loves to tell the story of an old man who approached her as she worked the concession booth at a Redondo Union band event. Apparently his idea of small talk was telling a couple 16 year olds that they should be careful with the money they were handling because all U.S. bank notes supposedly have some trace of cocaine on them.

He’s not even wrong if this 2009 article from CNN or this 2018 Snopes piece are to be believed, but still. Weird thing to just casually talk about.

The second place is my mall adventure with Juan the other day, where one of our stops post-mall loitering was the bank so he could deposit some money.

I probably have another post incoming sometime soon regarding stuff from this trip that’ll make it relevant again, but for now just know we went to the bank after all was said and done.

Both of these small, seemingly disconnected events kind of evoke the same cliché: You never know where your money has been. An unarguable idea, especially looking back at the lede to that CNN article I linked where the author talks about how frequently money is passed from person-to-person through anything from paying for goods at a store to dropping $5 on the ground by accident.

But I’m not here to examine the idea of your money having been touched by anyone and everyone at some point in the past, per say. Rather, I’m more interested in the much smaller idea of casually calling it ‘your money.’

At its core, money is the symbolic representation of a totally imaginary concept called worth.

That is, symbolic unless you go into the minutia of things like the cost of materials needed to print a penny versus how much a penny is symbolically worth… But that’s going pretty far into the weeds.

What I’m looking at is the idea that we, as a species, have collectively decided that slips of paper have been assigned a value that essentially boils down to a more simplified form of bargaining. Instead of trading a sack of flour for two chickens, we’ve come up with a representation of how many paper slips each sack of flour or each chicken is worth, that way there’s a universally tradable object allowing someone to buy anything they want rather than being restricted to getting chickens.

Naturally there’s an infinite number of complications to that idea when it comes to things like the universality of currency if we all have different currencies worth different values. But like I said, I’m not an economist or a financial guru, so let’s just go with a more simplified world view here.

The creation of a universal representation of wealth has also crystalized an idea of what it is to be a wealthy individual. Sure back in the day you were the king if you had X number of chickens or acres of land, but there were people who could argue they didn’t need chickens or land if they had different goods.

In today’s society, money is literally the deciding factor because money can be used for almost anything.

That’s why people will go around talking about their net worth, how something like their stock options give them a billion dollar value. Because that symbolic value is worth something in that it’s usable for almost any kind of bartering one can imagine.

But in 2018, that’s where things get complicated and interesting to me. You can say you have $100 available right now, but do you really have the physical Benjamin in your pocket? Or do you have $100 in this nebulous digital concept called a bank account?

Now I know bank accounts aren’t technically completely nebulous, since there are physical places where one can deposit and take out physical bills. But here’s the thing: Even those physical bills aren’t technically completely your property, despite the fact that your inherent worth says you have that much available.

When you deposit a dollar in the bank, there’s no guarantee that when you take it back out you’ll be receiving the exact same dollar. It’s more likely that the bank just has a pile of dollars hidden away somewhere that they peel bills off of for anybody that needs it at a given time.

Also yes that probably isn’t how a physical bank works, but again. Not a banker. So any real life bankers out there please don’t get mad reading my description.

Just go with it for the sake of this hypothetical.

The idea extends beyond banks as well. Like I mentioned before, purchasing items creates an interesting dynamic. That dollar “you own,” once handed over to the cashier in exchange for whatever it may be, goes into a cash register. But if you go back to that store one day and get cash back for having too big a bill, you aren’t guaranteed to get the exact same dollar you handed over long ago.

That dollar probably disappeared as soon as the person behind you in line that day used a bill that was too big and got cash back. Now it’s suddenly a representation of that person’s wealth rather than your own.

As usual I don’t necessarily have a larger point to this discussion beyond it being an interesting train of thought into something most of us more than likely take for granted in this fly-by-night world we live in.

But next time you go to buy that new video game or receive a paycheck and toss those singles around like you’re the king of the world in a strip joint, maybe you’ll think about this post and give your psychological perceptions of money a reexamination.

Those bills you’re tossing around? They aren’t yours, as you might think. No matter how hard you worked to earn them in the first place.

They’re just a symbolic representation of the work you put in given a physical form that allows you to barter without trading away any actual goods. No matter how many times you kiss that wad of cash, happy to be worth something, just remember that the second you put it down it’ll be the property of whoever picks it up next.

But also maybe think about the fact that you’re likely kissing money that has cocaine on it. Because let’s not forget, that money could literally have been held by anybody before it was held by you.

The Aftermath of Creation

Having just wrapped up the second season finale of Westworld, HBO’s killer hit about robots populating a Wild West theme park that slowly come to some semblance of consciousness, I can’t help but sit here and just…

Stare blankly at the wall. Because holy shit.

I’ll be honest. After the absolutely wonderful first season and everything the show did to subvert any and all ideas about what was happening through unreliable narrators and timeline fuckery, I figured the second season would be way more straight-forward and focused on the repercussions of the first.

Also on samurai. Because all of the promotional material leading into the second season featured glimpses of Shogun World, a feudal Japanese-themed park adjacent to West World.

Those portions of the season set in Shogun World were just as amazing as advertised, by the way.

But that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at is the fact that the second season of the show wound up once again subverting my expectations by creating an absolutely beautiful loop of events through multiple timelines and a twisted web of character actions and motivations.

The writing in the show is absolutely beautifully well-done and leaves no thread unresolved. Except for those that are clearly setting up events for season three, but that’s a more spoiler-ridden discussion that I’m not planning on going into since we’re so fresh off the episode’s release.

If you are interested in marinating in the world of spoilers and mind-blowing writing loops, I do have some solace for you. That’s a world that is adjacent to what I’m looking to chat about today.

See right after the Marvel-esque post-credit scene, my dad decided to try to look up some answers as to what the hell just happened. He came across this very timely article by The Wrap where some questions were answered in strikingly specific detail by one of the show’s co-creators.

I would imagine they might want the crazy speculation trade to run rampant for a few days to drudge up more interest, but I can’t argue about having tangible answers.

Reading through the small interview got me thinking about the fascinating dynamic that’s created between an artist or creator of any kind and those who take in the created work.

After essentially melting into a pile of my own brain goo after watching the constantly evolving and ramping finale to the show, it was almost jarring to watch one of the co-creators treat the exact same content with such a casual, omnipotent attitude.

But then it occurred to me. Of COURSE she’d be almost unreasonably casual about it. She’s known what was going to happen since before the physical show itself had a single frame recorded. All creators know what their works look like well before it’s observed by the public at large.

As someone who creates stories himself, both non-fiction stories and fictional ones (in my head at the very least), I suppose I’ve experienced the exact same thing. Seeing people come to see an article I’ve written is something that has made me feel really proud, even excited.

Despite the fact that it’s at a much smaller scale than a HBO hit series.

That scale is hard to imagine, but must be incredibly satisfying to experience. Thousands of people, hundreds of thousands even, all in the same place I currently am as a fan, all flooding the internet with messages of bewilderment and craving the opportunity to learn as much as possible about the content we just absorbed.

It must be insanely gratifying to not only watch those people come in, but to be able to provide them answers that have been in-the-works for not just all the weeks leading up to the show’s finale, but the months of production before that.

For a show like Westworld, that level of gratification is certainly warranted. I wish nothing but the best upon those who brought such a beautiful creation into the world for everyone to experience.

Especially one based on a cheese-y 70’s flick. Because the way that original idea became this new phenomenon is an incredible transformation in its own right.

The whole idea of bringing something into the world for others to experience that’s full of hopefully surprising developments has gotten me thinking more about my own personal works as well. Over the next few weeks I’m likely going to be working more on the proposal for the novel I’m going to write as my senior honors project, and I might just be posting things around here about that to gauge interest, acquire feedback or simply store my ideas for the future.

So stay tuned for that, if you’re interested in seeing what I’ll be cooking up!

Watchless Woes

For about a month now, my right wrist has been emptier than I can remember it having been for years.

As you can see in the image up above, half of my watch strap came off one day when I was attempting to put it on, and the pin that keeps that strip of leather in its holster went flying off somewhere in my room. Never to be seen again, presumably.

I’ve been a little downtrodden about the whole thing for a while. On the one hand, I quite enjoy wearing a watch. Sure, a watch may seem like a superfluous anachronism in the age of iPhones and other smart devices that can tell you satellite-accurate time stamps at the whim of anyone who wants to pull the device out of their pocket.

But I like having the analog device on me, something I can just slide up my sleeve to peek at at a moment’s notice. Not only does it fill an otherwise empty space on my arm (which has a rather intense watch tan now as a result of my wearing it so much), the extra time-telling accessory has also come in handy at places like school where I can more aptly tell time by leaving it on my desk during an exam.

I’m rather attached to the watch because of that, but it also means a lot because it was a gift from my dad when I graduated high school and needed a fancier watch to match my suit.

The observant viewers in the audience might notice that this particular timepiece has a left-handed stem, as in it’s meant for left-handed individuals:

I myself am not a left-handed individual. In fact, my sister is essentially the only leftie in my entire family if you don’t count things like great, great relatives and such.

That often confuses a lot of people, because typically right-handed individuals wear watches on their left arms and vice versa to ensure they can get at the adjustment mechanisms with their dominant hands. But I’ve gotten used to the opposite, wearing the watch on my dominant hand, because the stem is on the wrong side.

It was something I didn’t even realize was due to underlying watch mechanics more than just personal preference back when I went to Hollywood Babble-On with dad and he realized I was wearing it on the wrong, but technically right side.

Rambling aside, you can probably imagine why I have an attachment to the watch at this point.

The watch band has been degrading away for some time, so I’ve meant to get it fixed for a while. The total break wound up being the last straw, if nothing else.

Today’s adventure took my family over to Manhattan Village specifically to address the issue of my busted up watch. There’s a kiosk there manned by someone who my parents have been going to for years to get their watches and such repaired, so now it was my turn.

Naturally after weeks of putting it off, the adjustment took 15 minutes and only cost about $20.

Figures I imagined it would be much more of a challenge than it actually was.

But hey that misconception is in the past. After all, the watch is now fixed up with a fancy new band!

We kept the old one too, because why not?

It actually looks good as new now, as cliché as that sentiment may be. That is, of course, a positive considering it gives this sentimental object a longer lifespan. However, it will take some time to get used to how stiff the new leather is.

That was probably the one positive of the grody old band, it was flexible in all the right places because I wore it the same way every time.

Though to take that in a more positive direction, there’s only one way to make this new band feel natural again: