I’m going to dig into spoilers, because my only real problems with the movie (and they’re pretty big problems) have to do with specific plot points and how they play out. The acting, the dialogue, the action sequences, are all top notch. It’s fun, it’s exciting, there’s intelligent themes that are thoughtfully explored… there’s a lot of stuff to like. It’s abundantly clear that everyone involved with this movie was both intent and capable of making a truly great popcorn movie, one that we’d put on the same footing as The Dark Knight, Skyfall, etc.

Which begs the question of why they made some colossally stupid decisions around particular elements of the story. Spoilers abound from here on out.

I actually don’t think it was a terrible idea to have Khan in there, but the writers never decide if they want to innovate like they’ve done with a number of other elements in the reboot or just use the character as an excuse to make a ton of callbacks to Wrath of Khan. I get why you’d want to do that – Wrath of Khan is the best storyline in all of Star Trek, but Kirk hasn’t betrayed Khan yet in this timeline, so the motivation for Khan to want to destroy the Enterprise seems a bit flimsy even if it leads to a fantastic action sequence. When Khan announces his true identity he practically hisses it into the camera as if it has some special significance… but it doesn’t yet, and there was derisive chortling in the theatre both times I saw it. I watched it again today to see if I had missed anything, and rewatched Wrath of Khan, and the whole sacrifice thing is just horribly played fan service. We know Kirk’s not going to die so there’s absolutely no tension.

The most frustrating part in all this is that Abrams can wring the emotion out of the big sacrifice scenes like nobody’s business. The first 10 minutes of Star Trek do it perfectly. I cried in the theater, and it’s because the stakes are life and death and while the viewer doesn’t really have an attachment to any of the characters, it becomes immediately clear that they have very very strong attachments to each other that triggers that empathy response. We know George Kirk can die and that if he does, he’s not coming back thanks to magic blood. His death has implications. When Kirk “dies” in Into Darkness, the only thing it triggers is another unearned callback to Wrath of Khan.

It’s not unusual for summer movies to be this stupid, but it is unusual for a movie with so many other things going for it to have lapses this massive in storytelling logic and the management of audience expectations. Including Khan was fine, and changing the relationship between him and Kirk made sense within the story… it’s only when they tried to shoe-horn elements from the previous movies in without the proper context that it falls apart.

And magic blood that can cure anything is just lazy screenwriting. They could have raised the stakes without making them mortal for characters we know can’t die.

That title makes things sound bleaker than they are. All things considered, I have a lot to be happy about in my life. Professionally, I’m doing great things with an eye to the future and I’m pretty confident that’s all going to play out well. I’m incredibly lucky to have found a company where my efforts are recognized and rewarded. I intend to keep that going.

And yet, the situation mentioned in the video, of not having an emergency contact… I’ve been there.

I’m not on speaking terms with my parents. I take ownership of that, but every millenial that blames the boomers for the state of the world and hasn’t called their mother a selfish cunt to her face… I’m inclined to call a hypocrite or a coward. Anonymous criticisms, which we’re all happy to dish out ad nauseum, are water off the back of anyone who can look to their kids and say “well, they love (read: are dependant on) me so I must be doing something right.”

I do get along great with my sisters. They’re my emergency contacts. And we’re there for each other, but that’s the not perfect picture people look for when they’re seeking any possible excuse to not connect with someone. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but god damn it if I don’t want to find someone to whom I can be amazing. I’ve felt it before and been rejected for not being worth enough. I’ve felt it before and been rejected because the person on the other end wasn’t ready. I don’t know how much money I need to make or how much weight I need to lose but if someone can demonstrate to me that they can be that amazing to me given x conditions, I would starve myself to death just to be in their presence.

That’s mostly metaphorical. It still isn’t healthy. And yet, I’d do it. That’s my malfunction, and to the extent I’m aware of it I try to avoid it when I can but god damn if it isn’t seductive to just throw it all away to say that I had something.

I’m being over dramatic. Online dating is a crapshoot and yet it’s still so many miles better than the bar scene I use as entertainment. I’m on the leading edge of the millenials and I’m kinda banking on a collective freakout once we start hitting 30 (after all, many of us think it’s the new 20). I’m open to something amazing sooner, but I’m not holding my breath. All I can do is suppress my desires and hopes to keep from getting grumpy at their going unsatisfied, and keep on hustling to make myself a more worthy person.

I’m sorry for not being as positive as usual.

Read the book and saw the movie this weekend – I had started the book about a month ago and got maybe a third of the way in, but last night I finished it in one sitting. It’s not long, but it’s pretty dense in terms of symbolism and themes and I took advantage of SparkNotes to get a better grasp of everything.

The movie’s good, if incredibly heavy-handed, which is both a blessing and a curse, often in the same scene. While reading the book, I never quite grasped the connection between Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss and its meaning – that for all intents and purposes, Gatsby was casting God out from his life and replacing Him with Her, and doing so knowingly. The film does this scene with Fitzgerald’s words as subtitles and Tobey Maguire’s superimposed face narrating the damn thing. I facepalmed at the unsubtlety, but then I got the point, and thought it pretty brilliant and insightful into Gatsby’s character… so I can kinda forgive it.

Structurally, the film feels a lot like Moulin Rouge. There’s a bit with Leonardo DiCaprio in an officer’s uniform looking up at his love that brought to mind the armour he wore in Romeo & Juliet. The soundtrack’s a mixed bag, but the stuff that’s good is really good. And yet there’s something that just feels off about the whole thing. I may need to see it again to fully digest the thing.

Jay-Z has a song on the soundtrack where he raps about what he’s aspiring to in the context of the past – being a 21st Century Kennedy. Cool. $100 Bill is a great track. But it’s on the soundtrack for a movie in which the main character is consumed by chasing his past, and it’s that chase that ultimately brings about his downfall. Is he doing it sincerely, in which case he’s kinda missing the point? Is he doing it to emulate Gatsby? We can argue that Kennedy’s a better role model for rappers to aspire to than, say, Tony Montana, but it feels like the same mistake. If it’s a mistake. Which I’m not sure it is, because I’m still not sure how I feel about Gatsby as a character. There’s a lot of misplaced hope, and tragic loss, and bad things done for the most sincere of purposes.

And in the end, the whole thing’s just going to be used by people as an excuse to spend tons of cash at Tiffany’s and Brooks Brothers because they’re aspiring to partake in something so beautiful and so sad that it makes me wish I knew German because they’ve got to have a word for this sort of thing.

It’s really easy to respond to a story like this with a knee-jerk “SUPPORT THE TROOPS!” but it strikes me as completely insane that we’re giving soldiers danger pay in the first place. The job description is to shoot and be shot at. Do firefighters get bonuses if there’s an unusually high number of fires? Ruling out overtime, just if they work a 40 hour week, and in the average week spend 20 hours fighting fires and 20 hours on call… if that ratio changes to 30/10, do they get paid more? Would that provide an incentive to take one’s time putting out a fire?

I’m grateful to anyone who’s putting their lives on the line so that I can tell dick jokes on the internet. I have no problem with my tax dollars going towards them being generously compensated while doing there work, and cared for when they return home. If they were accidentally paid more than they were promised, it’s reasonable to expect repayment of the difference, but the only reason this happened was a pay cut that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Of course, this is what happens when you cut taxes but want to maintain balanced budgets… you need to reduce costs somewhere. Boosting the military has long been the wheelhouse of the right, and I’m not above admitting I get a little schadenfreude at the situation.

If the cost of getting Keystone XL approved is the implementation of a carbon tax, I suspect I’ll get a little more.

“It’s not the status cards, it’s the fact that we have been paying out of the nose for generations for something that isn’t our doing. If their ancestors sold out too cheap it’s not my fault and I shouldn’t have to be paying for any mistake or whatever you want to call it from MY hard earned money.”

I don’t have too much to say on the topic of Ms. Van Ryswyk beyond this: how the hell does someone with opinions like that win a nomination for the NDP? Why would they even run for the NDP if they’re clearly not on that side of the spectrum?

I’ve thought about running for public office. Maybe an MP, maybe a city councillor. Never all that seriously, but even so: I think I’d be pretty damn good at it. I sincerely enjoy helping people. I enjoy crafting and delivering rhetoric. And I want to make a positive impact on the world around me.

I also have a Twitter account on which I sometimes say things that are pretty vulgar, as a hobby I do standup comedy that I’ve posted online, and I have a blog that catalogs my thoughts and growth as a person going back 10 years. Someone who wanted to assassinate my character would have everything they need to do so. I like to think I’m as mature and compassionate a person now as I’ve ever been, but I absolutely have said immature things in the past. I cursed so much… and with so little elegance. A properly dropped “fuck” can be a thing of beauty, but I just threw them around everywhere back in the day.

The weirdest part is, a couple years back I deliberately purged my blog of the stuff I thought was bad. Looking back today I’m shocked at some of the stuff I let stay. I’ll probably go back for another purge soon.

My point is that I’m pretty young to be getting into politics as a candidate, and I’ve more or less been on the vanguard of new social technologies for the better part of my adolescence and adulthood. There aren’t many people older than me who blogged during high school because I was one of the first people who had the opportunity to blog during high school. In time, the kind of online history I have will become more and more common, and I suspect we’ll get to a point where everyone’s going to have this dirt in their past, and while there won’t be a formal statute of limitations on this stuff, it just won’t matter.

On that day, I might consider doing more than just donating to political causes.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Boston over the years. Most of my family lives there, and pretty much every summer we’d get in the car and drive down. My first major league baseball game was with my Uncle Bruce at Fenway. Red Sox vs. Orioles. We didn’t have cable at home, but my aunt had all the channels and high speed internet and there was a public pool nearby where we could go swimming every day. I kinda vaguely remember the Big Dig. I vividly remember the aquarium, the science museum, the childrens’ museum, tall ships in ’92, getting bit in the face by a German Shepherd and getting stitches. This big arcade out in Framingham where we’d go every year.

At one point during the Spring Break years I lived in the area for a couple months, commuting from Waltham to Peabody every day on two commuter trains and a 40 minute bus ride… something I’m still not entirely sure how I accomplished. That may be why I didn’t see much of the city in those months, but even then, I have good memories of my time there. It was there that I saw DJ AM and had one of the more emotional nights of my life. Since then I’ve visited a few times, performed at the Beantown Comedy Vault a couple times, and last month went to PAX East… which was actually the first time I was ever staying in Downtown Boston for any extended period of time. I got to know the city a lot better. It’s a great city, which makes today’s news all that much worse. When you can mentally sketch out the geography of where these things happened because you were staying a few blocks away just a couple weeks ago… it’s jarring.

A lot of people have said far more meaningful things than I’m capable of regarding today’s events, but I bring up my own memories of the city because I hope that when the authorities find whoever’s responsible for this, we don’t let them be a part of our memories of today. We can’t give them the satisfaction of getting in our heads, of being named, analyzed, discussed. I’m not sure what could drive a person to do this, but if they wanted to see their name in lights, I want that dream to be dashed thoroughly. Just refer to them as That Fucking Asshole (or TFA for short) and be done with it. No photos, no public dissection of what media they consumed, just throw them down the memory hole and be done with it.

Justin Bieber hopes that Anne Frank would’ve been a Belieber. This has upset a lot of people, but I really can’t count myself among them. I feel like it should, but it doesn’t seem like a huge transgression worthy of outrage. If he was making asian poses in front of Auschwitz (which I saw when I was there, and god damn if it didn’t take every ounce of my strength not to smack the tourists doing it), that’s a totally different story, but all he did was expressed his respect for her in the context of his life’s work. Self-absorbed? Sure, but not worthy of an outpouring of scorn.

And why wouldn’t Anne Frank be a Belieber? I think his fashion sense is atrocious since he’s become famous and he has a history of saying dumb things, but the world isn’t a worse place for his music. He makes saccharine inoffensive pop songs for teenage girls. His lyrics aren’t misogynistic, they’re not overly materialistic. It seems to me that there’s far more worthy targets of rage in pop music today. Chris Brown leaps to mind.

What I think this episode illuminates is a handy test for whether a piece of pop culture is good, bad, or just kinda inert for our society… I’m going to call it the Frank-Bieber test (ladies first, naturally). The level of revulsion I would feel at learning that the creator of a work hopes Anne Frank would love it is how good or bad for us that thing is. If Michael Bay said he thought a lot about making a movie Anne Frank would love when he worked on Transformers 2… Yeah, that feeling tells me everything I need to know about that movie.

Stephanie Meyer. Kanye West. Steven Spielberg.

I don’t care for Justin Bieber or his music, but the vitriol being thrown his way over this just feels like hate for hate’s sake… a subject which Anne Frank probably had an opinion or two on.

I usually don’t talk about my love life – larger thoughts on how I connect and relate to the opposite sex, sure, but never specific occasions/dates. I’m making an exception to that rule here. The date I went on this weekend led to more thought and introspection than usual, and while I don’t get too specific (nor would I want to), I do want to share my thoughts in the aftermath, which wouldn’t make as much sense without some backstory.

When I knew I was going to be in Toronto for a few days, I changed the city on my online dating profiles. I often wonder if they’re getting stale and that once a person sees you a few times they just ignore you by default, regardless of anything that might change about you or your profile. I assume that’s the case, it’s how I approach things. Anyway, I didn’t go to Toronto to spend my time on OkCupid, but I made the change, added a note that I didn’t live in Toronto but was in town for the week and hoping to make the move this summer (which I’m not entirely expecting, but if the opportunity came up…) and waited to see if anyone reached out. A few people did, and one woman in particular was cute and flirty. What the hell, I said to myself. What’s the most awesome and pleasantly surprising thing I can do here?

“Do you want to get super dressed up and go out for fancy cocktails tonight?”

This is something I’ve never asked of a woman in Ottawa. Mostly because I’m a little nervous that it’d establish a pattern I couldn’t afford, and partly because there’s nowhere in Ottawa that specializes in great cocktails. A decent Old Fashioned can be had at Zoe’s or Social, but nothing amazing. Nothing that makes you okay with paying $15 for a drink. Barchef has crazy expensive drinks, but they’re so interesting, unique, and delicious that they’re worth spending good money for.

Even the $45 Smoked Manhattan. Having done one, I can safely say I’d rather have one of those than a bunch of drinks at any other bar. It was amazing and indulgent and if you have the opportunity I highly recommend it. It seems weird to think about saving up for a single drink, but if you do you won’t regret the choice.

So I’m looking super fancy, she’s looking super fancy, we’re having fancy drinks and I just kinda told the part of my head that worries about money to shut the hell up. Which leads to installing Hotel Tonight on my smartphone when she says she has a roommate. Which leads to booking a room at a hotel with a rooftop bar. Which leads to drinks at said rooftop bar, and room service, and eventually waking up next to a beautiful woman with a huge smile on her face.

In that moment, I felt really, really, good about myself. That I could do this. That I could treat someone to a really awesome night on the town. To just sweep her off her feet by going above and beyond her expectations.

Looking at my bank account later that morning after we parted ways… that felt less good. Not dire by any stretch, but I’ll be having dinners in more than usual for the next little while. I’m okay with that. It was a wonderful night, but it’s not sustainable. I can wrap my head around both those facts.

Here’s another: I usually don’t have an amazing, or even a worthwhile time, most evenings that I go out drinking. There have been some truly iconic and epic karaoke nights, but most of them are a congealed blur of the same 15-20 songs. Yes, any particular night has the potential to be a great night, but there’s factors that go into creating the great ones that you can see coming. It’s often a longshot that any given night will be great. It takes patience to wait for optimal conditions. To save up by refraining from the $5 tallboys so that when there’s an opportunity to grab that $45 Manhattan, I can do so without flinching.

There’s another way, of course – to find the opportunities to feel like I’m amazing and powerful and king of the world that don’t involve dropping a lot of cash. It’s here that I think I can make the most progress. Something that I remember from my trip to Europe last summer was this one bar that had bottle service available – bottles of champagne were something like 25 Euro, and someone in the group at my hostel was celebrating a birthday, so I bought a bottle. They were grateful, I felt great for doing it. Because hostels typically don’t draw the same crowd as nice hotels, the cost barrier to do something awesome was way lower.

So, if we were to hash out my feelings in the wake of this trip to Toronto, I’d say the following: Balling out, as they say, is a hell of a lot more fun than simply spending more than usual, because the difference between a 4-star and a 5-star experience is miles wider than that between 3-star and 4-star. It makes sense to focus on quality over quantity, to maximize the 5-star things I can afford. Different people have different expectations, and I can leverage that to ensure that I’m doing as much as possible to improve the time people around me are having.

We’ll see how it works.

It’s been a great few months, health wise.

After the revelation that no one but myself was going to hold me to account for me sticking (or not sticking) to a diet… I became dedicated. And while single weight measurements can be spotty and it’s better to take an average of multiple weighings… I’ve gone from being in consistently in the low 190s to consistently being in the low 170s. And I’ve done that while developing at least some muscle mass, so I’ve probably lost even more weight than that.

And yet… it’s still hard. Socially. Ordering a glass of Red, or a vodka soda, or declining to take part in a pitcher at the bar… it feels weird and I’m not sure if it’ll ever not feel weird.

I’ve kind of fallen off the wagon over the past couple weeks between being in Boston and Toronto, both health-wise and blogging-wise. As expected… no one called me out on it, which just means that I’ve gotta get myself back on track. The good thing about this is that I can take a step back and evaluate what is and isn’t working.

The slow-carb diet is working. It takes a little more prep/thought around meals, but not much. The actual food I’m eating is healthier than what I used to eat and I’m dropping pounds. Cheat days are less fun than I expected, though. Going all out with the deliberate goal of consuming as much beer and starch and sugar as possible… all well and good in the moment, but I’d feel sick and puke in the middle of the night.

So, here’s the new approach. Maintain strict slow-carb during the week – no starches, no sugars, no grains. ECA stack and a protein shake every morning. If I drink, stick to sprits with zero-calorie mix and a bit of wine. Beer is fine Friday-Sunday, but no deliberate cheating otherwise. If I know I’m going to be somewhere with limited options that are compatible with my diet (say Scotiabank Place or the movies) then plan ahead, eat before leaving, and don’t use it as a fallback.

Two months from now I head back to Croatia for another trip. I’d like to be in great shape when I go. I think I can pull it off.

When I started at Shopify, I was specifically told that the job I was being hired for was something I was expected to stick with for a year and a half or more. There was some concern that I was going to want a promotion very quickly and if one didn’t come, that I’d leave the company, costing them the sunk costs of hiring, training, and onboarding me. A fair concern.

When people ask me for advice on getting hired at Shopify, one of the things I always stress is that candidates need to make the case for them being a great fit not just for Shopify, but for the specific role they’re interviewing for. That’s because we don’t want someone with the attitude of “doing their time” who’s then going to ask for something bigger. The Guru position is rewarding in its own right, and within the team, people don’t so much get promoted as they evolve into different specialized roles, which naturally happens thanks to all our own unique quirks.

Mine were travelling as much as possible and dealing with the biggest clients possible. First I was given Angry Birds, then I asked for Penny Arcade, and it just kind of took on its own life from there. If there was a big client who needed some TLC, I was the guy.

So it’s not entirely surprising that today was my last day as a Shopify Guru, and that Monday will be my first day as a Shopify Enterprise Solutions Specialist. As we’ve grown to the point that this specialization made sense, I’m now at the point that I can make the acquisition and care of Shopify’s biggest customers my full-time vocation. I’m really excited about the move, and already I’m talking to some really cool clients that are potentially interested in working with us.

So: here’s to an another awesome two years and change.