joe randel's art dump

Do you own a suit?  A nice well-tailored suit that makes you look like a million bucks?  They say every girl’s crazy bout a well dressed man.  Well, I just had to go and buy one.  I’m in a wedding this month and the suits that I’ve received from Uncles over the years just wouldn’t cut it.  So it was decided that I should buy a new one that fit me properly.  Now, I don’t wear suits all the time.  In fact, I would say that I wear a suit about once a year… maybe.  But when I got in to a properly fitted suit, it felt pretty damn good.  I looked pretty damn good to, if I must say.

Even though I don’t wear suits, I’m glad I bought one.  Now I don’t have to worry about renting one in the future.  I just have to make sure I don’t gain any weight so it’ll fit me forever, because I sure as heck don’t want to shell out for another one.

Do you believe in destiny or are you in control of your own future?  I’m not religious (well, I do lean towards Buddhist teachings)  so I don’t see a divine being pulling my strings, but I do think that the universe (for lack of better term) puts choices in front of you and it’s up to you to decide which path you go down.  I do believe that there are places we ought to be in life and people we should meet, but it’s through our choices whether we get there or not.  I also don’t think there is such thing as a wrong choice.  Through our mistakes or poorer choices, we can see how we got to this point in our lives and maybe how to get back to where we should be.

So I guess I see it sort of half and half.  My life may not be written in an all-knowing book with me unable to deviate from the story.  Maybe it’s more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.  Where there is a one path that’s the best one for me, but I can make my decisions, and mistakes, to reach one of any number of endings.  Including the best one in my own roundabout way.

Are you in control of your destiny or is yours already written out?

Today where I live they had an “open doors” even across the city where there where free tours and such at a lot of the museums and arts & cultural centers.  It’s a great way to get out and see what your city has to offer for free and might entice you to become more involved or sign up for a program or two.  With so much to see and do, it can be hard to pick, but I knew what my choice was… The Model Train exhibit!

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We recently had to get a new home phone.  The last one’s battery died and it’s about the same price to get a new phone as it is to get a new battery.  Ugh…  Anyway… New phone.  It stuck me how much I’ve become dependent on my phone remembering phone numbers for me.  I have a hard time remembering my number let alone the numbers of others.  I could at one time remember a handful of numbers.  Wife was better and could remember just about everyone’s number.  If there was an emergency and I had to recall by memory someones phone contact… I’d be screwed.  I’m sure most of us would be too.  In this day and age, technology is there to make our lives more convenient, like who needs to know how to spell anything now that we have spell check.  But I think in the process it’s making us stupider too.

Can you remember any phone numbers or do you let your phone do all the remembering?  Also, I remember a time when I didn’t have to dial an area code for local numbers.

I’m an old man.

What’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen?  It can be bad for any number of reasons.  Bad acting, bad story, bad camera work you name it.  But the general feeling is that the movie is just painful to watch.  Where you able to make it through the whole thing?

The two movies that come to my mind are About Schmidt and Billy Madison.  My wife rented a bunch of movies one night and About Schmidt was in the stack.  We remembered seeing commercials for it a long time ago and thought that it looked pretty good.  We where wrong.  The movie was so painful we couldn’t wait for it to end.  We kept waiting for things happen… but it just got worse.  But we weren’t going to abandon it, we believe on seeing movies through to the end no matter how bad.  Or maybe we just haven’t seen one that bad yet.

Billy Madison was so bad that it holds a special place in our relationship.  It was the first movie we saw together and we saw it with another couple.  The other couple thought it was great.  We did not.  The two of us agreed that it was possibly the stupidest movie we had ever seen.  It’s not that I don’t like Adam Sandler.  I’ve enjoyed other movies he’s done over the years.  But I just couldn’t get behind this.  Ugh… so stupid.  I don’t even remember much about it at this point.  I just know we both walked out of the theater, glad that it was over.

How about you?  What’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen?  Or are  you one of those people who watch bad movies on purpose?

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Oh, and Batman Forever was crap, Star Wars Ep I is still really hard to watch and from what I gathered, Master of Disguise is eye gougingly horrible.  It was playing when I used to be a theater projectionist.

This past weekend I kept up with my cultural roots (being 1/2 Mohawk) and attended the local Pow Wow.  If you don’t know what a Pow Wow is, it’s a celebratory gathering of all Native Peoples in the area.  There is native singing and dancing, plus food stuffs to eat and Native arts to buy.  It’s lots of fun and a great way for us to remember our the culture and ancestors.  Follow the link and I’ll show you some of the pictures I took and explain about things along the way.

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