Sometimes things you enjoy can get ruined by the mere fact that someone points out the obvious to you, well-enough is not left alone, or something becomes cliché about it.  Examples:

• One episode of South Park lampooned Family Guy and pointed out the show makes pointless jokes that have no basis or bearing on the plot.  It sounds highbrow, but it ruined Family Guy for me.
• Matrix 2 and 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3, and Star Wars Episodes 1-3 all turned the awesome originals into tripe.  What wonders the first works brought us were repeated and retreaded until the wonder was no more.  The signs of forward thinking creativity became watered down to levels of… luck.
• Don’t get me started on using famous songs in commercials.  Too late.  I’d give anything in the world to NOT think of KFC when I hear Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”… but alas, that’s not to be.  The classic Southern rock anthem is now an unfortunate cliché.

The reason I bring this all up is fuck American Beauty.  Especially this scene:

Why do I have such disdain for this sequence?  It’s not that I hate it… at all.  It’s that I quite actually agree with it wholeheartedly.  I’m the type of person that likes to look up at the clouds every now and again and feel small.  I enjoy remembering my minuscule place in the universe that I share with the floating grocery store bags and the tumbling cardboard containers blowing in the wind.  What makes me mad is that I liked paying attention to the things too many people ignore before the movie came out (ten whole years ago), and when I do so now, I feel like a cliché because I’m reminded of that movie.

I thought of that on the way to the bar before soccer last night, and I needed to get that off my chest.  On to the Drunken Recollection!

SIDENOTE: Does it bring anyone else extreme amounts of joy to see toilets being discarded on the curbside?  Oh, the stories they could tell.  And it looks so juxtaposed with its surroundings.  Can you imagine being the garbage man that has to hoist the porcelain throne into his compactor?   I tried to Google Image Search “toilets being thrown out” for additional laughs, but all that showed up were pictures of Lily Allen. Weird.

Once at the bar, time constrained nicely between basketball and soccer, I had to save yet another restroom from flooding.  What’s up with people not being able to turn off faucets!?!  Have we gone numb?

Anyway, a few topics of interest came up that I thought I’d share:

• My (possibly brilliant, or perhaps stranger than I) cousin Steve brought up the suggestion that adults should start referring to their age in months as opposed to years.  It’s more specific, it sounds impressive the older you get, and it gives clues to your birthday… that is if you’re good at math and know your times table.  Just remember, you have to be older than 252 months to drink and older than 216 months to vote, see Rated R movies, and be considered “legal.”
• I was reminded of an old daydream I used to have where people kept growing the older they got, so you’d have to have bigger homes and bigger cars and bigger clothes and bigger factories to make all those big things.  Nobody could lie about their age or get Botox or plastic surgery to stay small.  And even if you were fifty, your seventy year old parents could still pick you up if they needed to, or you had a bad day and wanted to be nuzzled.  (I’m probably stranger than Steve, hands down.)
• Do celebrities have insurance?  Do movie stars walk around with Blue Cross cards or Medicaid, or do they simply pay cash?  Maybe they get comped like with stores and restaurants.  “Hey, guess where Angelina and Brad went when they got the flu?  Kaiser Permanente.”  “Man, I wanna go there, too!”  I could research this further, but I only really cared about it last night.