Love Yourself.

I read a lot of Thought Catalog. For those of you that don't, you should and for those of you that do, I'm sure you've figured that out about me by now. It's pretty easy to spot my attempt to emulate the same 20-something humor of that blog. Lately my favorite Thought Catalogs are typically titled "A (number) of _______ 20-somethings should know", in which ideas or advise are presented for us, young adults, to consider. Articles like "5 Mistakes Every 20-Something Should Make", "7 Musts For Any Self-Respecting 20-Something Man", or "5 Things You Need To Do In Order Survive Your 20s". When I read most of the advise, I'm either laughing my ass off or thankful to hear someone express the same feelings I share. 

The major theme I've noticed recently in these articles revolve around learning to love yourself. It's something you hear over and over again. It gets washed out in movies and the idea becomes distracted during one's everyday life. Like most things, you don't quite know what it really means to love yourself until you have honestly accomplished it. And like most Thought Catalog article's I'm just a 20-something trying to make sense of my knowledge on this topic and pass it on to others. 

I never really understood what loving yourself meant maybe until my senior year of college. It took a long time. In middle school I was awkward. Everyone was. I couldn't quite figure myself out, but either could anyone else. High school was maybe the first time I really became self-aware. One day I literally realized how huge my thighs were. I had trunks for legs, or at least it seemed. I became so self-conscious about every little thing. The 10 blackheads on my face were a total embarrassment. Giving a stupid answer to a "popular" person made me want to shrivel and die. I would eat very little, thinking I was fat. I couldn't even begin to understand who I was, let alone love myself. 

Going off to college wasn't too difficult. I was in a relationship that started in high school, which made the transition much easier. However, I found myself feeling very alone after we broke up at the end of my first year. At that point, you could say I hated myself. I wanted to make sure other people felt the same way. Long story short, I found myself scheming ways to ruin other people because I was bored with my own drama. 

I realized, among other things, this was an unhealthy way to live and it produced equally unhealthy friends. I needed to discover confidents and to figure out how to first like myself. The plan was pretty simple. I found it by focusing on my work and less on other people. I just dove in to long hours of homework and design. Honestly it was super awesome. I was really passionate about what I was involved in and I didn't have to worry about any drama. I noticed I wasn't stressed and I even began to grow fingernails. Before I would incisively bite them off with worry. When I didn't have to rub knots out of my back everyday or care to gossip about so-and-so I knew I succeeded. I really liked my life and soon loved myself.

It hasn't all been perfect. I'm still unreasonable at times and I still freak out, but I run from drama as much as I can. I avoid enemies because I've got a lot of other great things to worry about instead. So my advice as a 20-something to other 20-somethings, figure out how to love yourself. If you find yourself causing problems for other people because you are bored, get a hobby. Seriously, find something productive to do that you can feel good about. If you crave attention so much you'd settle for destruction, join a contact sport and work it out there. If you find you are attracted to any of theses types of people, you aren't much better off. Surround yourself with people that are building you up. There are plenty of world problems that can be solved and beauty to uncover. Make the planet happy to have you. In turn, you will then figure out how to love yourself. Truly. 

Fight : A Movie

As the release of The Expendables 2 nears, I was reminded of a movie plot I thought of while watching the trailer for another action movie, The Last Airbender. First, lets start with action movies in general. Most movies of this genre are thin on plot, weighing heavily on explosions and attractive men and women driving fast cars. Some rogue cop tries to foil the plans of some scum ready to blow up the city of New York. There is always a girl that distracts the cop, he drives a mustang, bang, bang, bang, plot twist! The good guys win! Pretty standard stuff. 

Lately, movies like the Batman series, Inception, and Transformers have made incredible efforts to push action movies to another level. But, I wondered, why anyone hadn't made a movie that has done the exact opposite? Here, in lies, the trailer for The Last Airbender. A child waits in a Chinese like temple while thousands of enemies ascending upon him. I thought, wow! This sounds like a two hour movie of just fighting, which would be AMAZING. No playing around with any crappy plot, just karate chop after karate chop. Although, when I actually saw the movie, there was way more plot then I even cared to dream about. Also, terrible acting, so terrible. That must be what happens when M. Night Shyamalan and Nickelodeon decide to make a movie baby. Then I saw the The Expendables movie. It was as close to a plotless movie I had ever seen, with fricking awesome heroes like Stallone, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Couture, Austin, Crews, Rourke, and Willis. Still though, a little bit too much set up. The story goes like, something, something, and then they have to take out some military leader and a villain CIA guy in Latin America. I'm crossing my fingers director Simon West read my mind for The Expendable 2 coming out in August. In the meantime I thought I'd explain my perfect action movie. 

I would call it Fight : A Movie.

Time: Present

Location: Remote jungle in South America, maybe a desert, and sometimes an abandon steel factory. 

Who: Good guys vs. bad guys.

What:  The good guys fight the bad guy.

Why: Who the eff cares. I wanna see something blow up. 

It's a fairly simple concept. My movie would be about the good guys, we will call GG, fighting the bad guys, which we will call BG. They GG and BG would both be dressed in black, BG would be denoted by a swastika or any other evil symbol. I'd let the BG actors choose when they got to the set. 

The movie would open up in a jungle with the BG patrolling a series of crates, obviously filled with more weapons that they will use later on. Then, cut to the beach. The GG have been sneaking up on the BG by scubaing to the shore. They slip out of their scuba gear and take their place along the cliffs and move in. Once they are spotted the fighting begins. 

Standard gun fighting, ducks, dives and more shooting. GG moving in closer, and hand to hand combat starts. All the injured are yelling like Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

One hour later the GGs are getting their butt kicked and they fall back to recoup. 

The BG are now on a large barge in the middle of the ocean. A telescope view of the ship and text describing their location appears at the bottom left hand corner 

Bad Guys,

Ocean: 50 miles off shore.

The GG still sneak up on them again by scubaing to the boat. The BG never learn. The GG jump aboard and this time with explosives. They blow some things up. More yelling and hand to hand. Then there are shots of some government looking generals in a secret dark room with glowing red lights barking orders. Even bigger explosions. 3 hours later they are still fighting and the movie ends. There'd be too much plot if anything was really resolved. 

I'm thinking it's a summer blockbuster. 

Go, go Power Rangers

Thanks to Netflix I recently watched the very first Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episode that aired in 1993. Back then you either loved MMPR or you made fun of those people, while you secretly loved it in the dark. Everyone knew their power ranger color and fought kids off with their morphing dinosaur power on the playground. I always thought of myself as the yellow ranger because girls only had two choices and Kimberly, the pink power ranger sucked.

Even now, watching the show makes me a little embarrassed. The good thing is it was not as bad as I remembered, but I did have some serious issues with the plot and acting direction.

#1
The kids hung out at one of the coolest teen hang outs ever. There were coordinated classes of karate and gymnastics, and a juice bar with apparently no adult supervision. That would never happen in the real world. I can only think of a handful of things a bunch of hormonal teens would do while left unattended.

#2
For some reason these five teens are selected by a giant head and robot to fight off intergalactic terrorists. My reasoning is their wardrobes already color coordinate with their ranger color. Once selected, they blast into a blur to their new headquarters, given their ranger belts, and explained their powers and duties in a brief paragraph. With little comment they figure it's "too weird" and decide to leave. Uh, yea guys, it is weird. So why don't you ask any questions?! Like, where the crap are we? Who are you? Why do we morph into dinosaurs? How in the world is it possible to even morph? Why can't I be a different color? Nope. Nothing. They don't ask for any explanation. They just peace out.

#3
Rita Repulsa's voice (the evil chick) doesn't match with the movement of her mouth. It's bad enough that the other bad guys and power rangers can't move their mouths when talking and need to use extremely aggressive hand motions to express their unexpressive face. When Rita speaks, it is like watching a dubbed over Chinese movie. The actress just kinda holds her mouth open while she should be saying a line and it's still open, long after. I'm also pretty sure when her back is turned but you can still hear her voice, the actress is just standing there, not even pretending to mouth anything.

#4
I just love to hate the fight scenes. Anytime any of the rangers fight, they play the same metal clanging noise for every hit. It doesn't matter if it is skin to skin, rock to face, foot to sword. All metal. And again, back to the fact that these kids were just chosen and given morphing powers, they magically know how to fight dramatically better. They just hop in their giant dinosaur machine and can control it with a joy stick. And please, like five people could sit together in a even more giant morphing machine and agree on what to do first.

#5
Last but not least, no one ever dies! A couple punches are thrown and then the bad guys just disappear. I feel that the show really missed an opportunity to teach kids about loss and to kill off Kimberly. God, she was so annoying!

Thankfully the show had one kick ass theme song to redeem its other poor choices. I'm not sure how many more episodes I can manage to watch but MMPR did shamefully to steal another 20 minutes of my life and another 30 minutes while writing this post. Go, go Power Rangers.