SINUS INFECTION

Definitely won’t be going back anytime soon! I could not smell a thing for five weeks, my face hurt and my temples were so swollen that my wife started to call me Frankenstein. The green discharge from my nose was oddly fascinating, and the occasional day off work was nice, but it’s still not enough to earn a recommendation. In the end, my experience with a sinus infection was very disappointing. (Also, duration of visit WAY too long!!!)

OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER

**********The condition makes me feel VERY, VERY, VERY safe and VERY, VERY, VERY focused. I think I do some of my VERY, VERY, VERY best work in this state. The condition makes me feel VERY, VERY, VERY safe and VERY, VERY, VERY focused.**********

 Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended.

INGUINAL HERNIA

It wasn’t the most painful experience of my life, but the weird, little bulge in my groin was a freak-out, and quite frankly I didn’t like thinking about the mechanics of it at all. I mean, my intestines were poking through my abdominal wall? That’s just gross, and it really doesn’t sound right. However, when I was having surgery done a nurse was required to shave my pubic area and she had to pick up and move my penis in order to do this. I’m not a freak or anything, but it was a real porn scenario and I have to admit to kind of hoping something was going to happen, so that was kind of thrilling.

Another up side of the hernia is that I was able to get out of doing TONS of stuff. As far as illnesses go, this one comes quite highly recommended, and depending on the doctor, you can get some excellent pain medications.

ANTHRAX

No walk in the park. STAY AWAY!!!

BURSITIS

Like the hernia, this is an excellent excuse condition. Although it sounds like it should really only effect old people, it’s something that athletes deal with the most, so it’s actually kind of cool—a “healthy sickness,” if you know what I mean. It can hurt like a bugger, but it usually doesn’t and the treatment is typically just rest, so if you want to get out of something (like walking around Ikea all Sunday) all you have to do is say that your chronic bursitis and your knee is just killing you. It’s kind of like having a handicap pass for your car.

TOURETTE’S SYNDROME

Not nearly as much fun as you might think—get something else.

We sat in the third row of this IMAX 3D spectacle, and I have to say it was the most concussive, punishing movie experience I have ever had.  We were so close to the screen that we couldn’t actually see the screen, and appreciating the movie was more of a physical challenge than an aesthetic one. Strictly confined within the conventions of the genre, Pacific Rim was a living, evolving piece of abstract expressionism that came screaming out at us like some terrible flying monkey.  We could only see gestures within the film– sound, colour and velocity—all swirling and spitting before us, but never did we have a clear, overview of things as they unfolded.

Of course, this didn’t really matter, because we knew exactly what was taking place. Pacific Rim is an action flick, a B movie writ monstrously large, and it followed the formula these movies always follow. This genre is now so much a part of me that I feel like it’s coded into my DNA, my understanding instinctive and unmediated rather than the product of conscious, cognitive functions, if that makes any sense.

Nonetheless, it was still a very disorienting experience ( I wanted nothing more than to inhabit a Brian Eno composition while there), and not simply because of the shock and awe campaign detonating around  us. Pacific Rim (note the name) was a movie designed for a global audience rather than a North American one. The film was so flat and one-dimensional that it was little more than a series of symbols and cues. There was no nuance or complexity, and this was intentional, because it’s built to travel, to be easily transferrable to other languages and cultures. The primary human characters in it are a diverse array of ethnicities, and the world represented a global, cultural mash-up. You simply don’t have to speak the language in which the movie is made to understand exactly what’s going on, in fact, you might even be better served if you didn’t.

For a movie that was all about fighting, there was no real violence in it, and it was more like a gigantic puppet show than a graphic representation of what a robot three times the size of a skyscraper fighting a massive alien might be like. It was a kid’s movie, meant to move merchandize and launch a franchise that will have global appeal. Last year, I think the top 10 top grossing films in North America were all sequels or prequels. Losing market share to piracy and revitalized cable television, original one-off movies that aspire to art are not where the bottom line lives, and the Hollywood arrow no longer flies no toward the heart of North America, but is now launched like a volley out toward the rest of the world, where all the money and people actually live.

Table Tennis reminds me of a Wes Anderson film and I like to watch it wearing shorts and drinking coke. It makes me feel like a boy, a boy with an unlimited future where anything is possible including an Olympic gold medal in a child’s sport, instead of the middle-aged man who keeps getting ads for Gout medication popping up in his Facebook feed.

Sailing is a sport I like to watch while drinking gin and tonics. I usually dress for this event, in the sort of outfit that would get you beat-up on buses or in certain towns. Actually, I should tell the truth here, I don’t really watch sailing, but fall into a kind of glamour stupor with sailing as the backdrop. I dream, and yes, these dreams include supermodels in bikinis and helicopter pads and then supermodels not in bikinis. Long live the one percent!

Perhaps my favourite part of the Triathlon is the name. It sounds like a Japanese monster that took on Godzilla. Beyond that though, I find myself drawn to the hopeless masochism of it and the strange psychology that propels people through it. “No, I do not want to do one thing well, I want to dedicate myself only partially to three different things!” I can relate to that. It’s an event for the ADD age, celebrating the doomed scattering of ambition rather than the focused of achievement of excellence in one field. It’s what people who don’t expect to win a marathon, bike race or swim meet do, it’s a hedge. I drink chocolate milk when I watch, as well as play video games, surf the net for good Groupon deals and unload the dishwasher.

Beach Volleyball has finally been saved. I couldn’t watch it before as I found it demeaning to women. I mean, why did they have to wear bikinis? And why weren’t their bodies more like, you know, women’s bodies? They all looked like a tall, thin and often leathery species from outer space. Nobody needs that kind of objectification. Now, in sensitivity to nations where the female body is rightly feared, especially if it’s revealed to look like it came from outer space, participants will be allowed to wear more traditional Burqas or clogs or whatever flies in your country, religion, etcetera. This year Beach Volleyball will be a learning experience, and I will treat it with the solemnity it deserves, watching it while sipping tea in my library.

* PS: This was recently published in and written for Ottawa Magazine.