Intro
My buddy Colin and I saw The Adjustment Bureau tonight. Colin remains an upper-middle manager in a shrinking local Theater chain. Wednesday/Thursday are usually dead-nights at all theaters everywhere in the USA. This is the ideal time for staff members to see movies and bring friends and family in to see movies. So it was this evening.
What did I think of the movie? I loved it. It’s a fantastic movie. The amazing thing is that I had no idea that this is yet another adaptation from a Philip K. Dick movie. Was not Philip K. Dick the greatest writer of the past 200 years? It seems like 9/10th of the great movies I’ve loved in my life were adapted from Philip K. Dick books.
I will write a full-scale review of the movie later. Suffice it to say was a tad more gentile and chick-flicky than I had supposed, but it didn’t spare the metaphysical horses when the time came for key exposition. This is my favorite movie of the year so far, and I doubt it will be surpassed.
Better still, I ate movie theater popcorn for the first time since Gastric Bypass. It went down easy. It did not come back up. I was surprised. My new digestive tract seems to love anything with corn: Polenta, corn bread, corn chips, popcorn. So far everything with corn has worked. Of course, I haven’t tried bourbon…
Not so with meat. Nothing with meat has stayed down, including my Chili con Carne.
Onward to the key point
One of the key elements of this movie are the dimensional doorways that allow Adjustment officers to move rapidly from place to place in the world. Naturally Colin had to show me the secrete doorways and passages in his theater which lead to service elevators that lead down to the street level. I thought this was a fairly hilarious way to reach my parked car.
“You just had to show me the secrete passages down to the street level, didn’t you”, I asked.
“Yeah sure! Why not!” Colin said.
I am not sure how the conversation twisted around but we got onto the subject of on-rushing romance life. It must have run this route because this movie was so blood damned romantic. Incidentally, I have lost nearly 42 pounds lately, and I am over 42% of the way to the final goal. There is quite a dramatic difference. I am fully mobile again. I don’t limp or walk slowly anymore. I look different as well.
Colin felt he needed to point out things that David Harris (Matt Damon) did especially well. This was for my edification. Bear in mind this is a 37 year old married guy giving tips to a 44 year old single guy. Hilarious! Married life usually robs a man of his dancing steps. Naturally, I thought this was a bit condescending, so I formulated a quick retort:
“We’ll see how all of these techniques work on your Sister in Law (hereafter SIL) in a week or two.” For those who don’t remember, Colin has a 12/27/1980 Capricorn SIL, and I score over 200 points versus her in several synastry categories… according to the computer.
Colin looked like he had seen a ghost. “I don’t know about that…”
I replied, “Sure! Why not! If you are confident of these methods, they should work fine on your sister in law. Obviously, they worked on your wife, and they share the same gene pool.”
You know, my logic is utterly brutal some times. Don’t fuck with me, logic-wise.
Colin explained that he was worried about arranging an introduction. He felt it could be costly… politically speaking. He had difficulty explaining why. Water people are like that. They run on intuition, not logic and mathematics. He took at least three rough stabs at answering why he might think this was risky proposition:
- I am 12 years older than the oldest boyfriend said SIL has ever had.
- Though I have never once met his in-laws, they have a hear-say impression of me, which is purportedly good. It is hard to understand why a hear-say impression (which is good) would be a reason not to arrange an introduction. Perhaps the hear-say impression is bad?
- Colin said “In some two months time, you will look very much like the boyfriend of 8 years she just broke up with.” He did not go on to elaborate. He seemed to think this would lose me points, rather than gain me points.
Naturally, this whole conversation began as a retort to condescension, so I had no real goal or intension of arranging anything this evening. However, I put a final point on it by saying the following:
“Your thinking three moves ahead, Colin. The objective is not to get to home plate with your SIL, rather it is to test the computer and see if it is a liar. If there is no chemistry between us, the computer is a liar, and I am happy to know this fact. No harm. If there is a 200+ chemical reaction between us, your SIL will be very excited. No harm there either.”
Was this a true statement of motive on my part? Absolutely. Readers of this blog should know well that I am a little obsessed with meeting girls born on 3/12/1986, as this is the theoretically perfect date. Last time I checked 12/27/1980 is not equal to 3/12/1986.
I am a little frustrated that I have not been able to arrange a predictive test of this Synastry software yet. I can look at past relationships I have had, and see that the Synastry software makes very interesting and true declarations about them. So far, I have not been able to arrange a predictive test, where I match two candidates afresh based on what the computer predicts. Colin’s SIL would be a nearly perfect predictive test.
What if it’s all true? What if Colin’s SIL and you hit it off at a 200+ chemical reaction? Hey! Wonderful! I wouldn’t complain about that. Would you follow through? Sure, why not. However, my life and future happiness do not depend on this outcome. I still have 3/12/1986, and 1/31/1980, and 4/13/1979, and a plethora of others to look at.
A feather in the cap?
Still there is one thing Colin said during that conversation that has stuck with me hard: “In two months’ time, you will look very much like the boyfriend of 8 years she just broke up with.”
If you are a logical man, this has to raise your antenna. You know and I know that every last one of us has a phenotype we prefer. There is a look and size and schematic to woman that you prefer as a man. The same is true for women. There is a guy type that each and every woman prefers most. This may be different for every woman, but rest assured, she has a type. Yes, you can be occasionally pleasantly surprised by how attracted you may be to someone outside that preferred phenotype. Nevertheless, there is a phenotype you prefer, and you know it.
Supposedly, in two months’ time I will look very much like the boyfriend of 8 years she just broke up with. I would suspect that such a long-term dude would be a representative of her preferred phenotype. ‘Tis a pitty if he is not. If I do look like him, I would say this constitutes prima facie evidence that the synastry software is on track.
