Coffee & TV: automatic drip and The Departed

I don't 'do' New Year's resolutions but I did spend the first three or four days of the new year sick, and it gave me a lot of time to think about how much I hate(d) my life. I hated my job, hated that I was always late to it, hated applying to new jobs, hated being depressed, hated taking medication for being depressed, hated being single, hated trying to date, hated therapy, hated spending so much money on therapy. Hated Twitter, Instagram, most (but not all) books. Hated writing and hated not-writing.

It's overwhelming to have your life defined by hate. Like, how do the neo Nazis do it?

I read a thread on why people are late and how to address it, because, if I'm honest, it's not just work - I'm late for everything. Not a sociopathic 30+ minutes no-call-no-text late to everything kind of late, but a good 10-20 minutes to every single thing, including hard start events like flights and trains and shows and interviews and doctor's appointments. Of course the flights and shows are terrifying -- never go to a play with me, seriously, we'll either be running there or you'll be paging me from your seat -- but given the state of public transit in New York and people's general forgiveness surrounding same I've kind of been able to slip under the radar on the rest. You probably don't even think of me as a late person. It doesn't align with the aura of competence I've cultivated in my 'real' life, emotional messiness outstanding. But my manager sure does! For this reason it seemed like being late to work was a good goal to tackle in the ongoing adventure of FEELING BETTER YOU DUMBASS.

The thread was super helpful. I learned about about the 'planning fallacy' and the 5-minute rule and billing your time. From a linked article, I learned about CLIP-ers (and that, by clicking on the link while I was meant to be getting ready for work, in thinking that reading another article would take "just a second," definitely made me a CLIP: Chronically Late Insane Person: "a reliable way to identify a Group 2 CLIP is a bizarre compulsion to defeat themselves—some deep inner drive to inexplicably miss the beginning of movies, endure psychotic stress running to catch the train, crush their own reputation at work, etc. etc. As much as they may hurt others, they usually hurt themselves even more.").

Once I got to Grand Central more than 5 minutes before my train was due to leave (once!!) and I spent that 5 minutes...buying bagels for my destination, so I still ended up running through the terminal trailing bags and beverages and shoes like a clown car and sliding under the conductor's arm onto the carriage.

I also learned from the thread I have already created so many systems to minimize/prevent the damage of my inevitable lateness: capsule wardrobe. multiple alarms. pop up reminders for morning meetings. making breakfasts and lunches the night before. same place, always, for my keys and wallet (but not! my phone). It was sort of heartbreaking. As was the number of people like me, who just can't stand to get up in the morning. Like, wake up feeling dead-can't face the excruciating day-"not a morning person" people. This seems like more than some Garfield "mondays amirite" kind of shit.

So I decided to try a few more things. I timed my morning routine, so I could see how long it 'actually' takes to do the things I swore took an hour. And I set another two alarms, for 8:45 and 8:50, for "you absolutely must" and "No I am NOT KIDDING" leaving the house.

This helped. I discovered that I was spending closer to 30 minutes in the shower, instead of the 10 I thought. Just, you know, standing there. So I moved a radio into the bathroom and started listening to it when I was in the shower. And I learned that my morning coffee routine, which I believed took 5-10 minutes, was more like 15-20, start to finish, including unrelated but connected side tasks like emptying/filling the dishwasher, cleaning up the sink area, throwing out expired refrigerator contents.... (learning # 3: I think everything takes 10 minutes. This is funny sort of because my dad thinks everything takes 45 minutes, including tasks like "bulldoze driveway" and "break down old dock").

I also learned I really really needed an extra incentive to get out of bed, because the longer I stay in bed the more terrible I feel, and the more terrible I feel the longer I want to stay in bed. Once I get out of bed the countdown timer to feeling human (2 hours) starts ticking. So I need that timer to start ASAP.

In the absence of my own KJ Kindler daily pep talk I decided to buy an automatic drip coffee maker and an electric timer and program them to turn on at 6:20 every morning. I thought having coffee ready and waiting would make it easier to get out of bed, and plus there was the actual 20 minutes I would be saving. This was sort of true. If I stumbled into the kitchen at 6:25, the coffee was not bad, and certainly better than nothing. Better than it would have been if I hadn't spent the time and money buying a good fresh roast and grinding it by hand the night before. If I stumbled into the kitchen at 7:20 and reheated it in the microwave, it was burnt and lukecold, but still better than nothing. Probably? It was hard to draw the line between 'better than nothing' and 'actually quite bad.' Especially if your default view is that you deserve nothing.

During the period effective mid-January to early-February I didn't watch any new television. I wanted to protect my fledgling habit and was concerned my progress would be lost if I got really involved in a new show and started binging episodes until one or two in the morning. At the same time, Netflix started serving me The Departed in its "you-might-also-like" suggestions; I'm not really sure why -- awards season tie-in? a "remember when our business model was good movies on demand" nostalgia trigger? my non-public indifference to Martin Scorsese films? Anyway, that is the story of how I ended up watching The Departed three or four times in as many weeks, while maintaining a 95% on-time arrival rate to my job.

I am pretty sure I saw The Departed (in theaters?) back in 2006, and I've also seen Infernal Affairs, which is the HK film Scorsese remade. But I have a terrible memory for what happens in movies and a zen-like acceptance of all plot devices (your plot holes will not be found by me, guaranteed!), so I rewatched the unfolding of the events of The Departed with interest and appreciation. 151 minutes gone surprisingly fast is no small thing when you're looking to kill time. In today's current entertainment landscape the movie would make an excellent five-part mini series, although the end of ep 3/beginning of episode 4 would be a little bogged down with the Relationship Storyline. I'm sure a light re-cut could fix this, no problem. As I've said repeatedly now, hire me, HBO.

I also really enjoyed the early 2019 discourse around The Departed which, if you missed it, centered around a Kickstarter campaign to digitally erase the rat that appears in the final scene of the film. Adam Sacks, in his ask letter, says the rat is a a “painfully on the nose metaphor” that destroys the ending of an "otherwise perfect" film (that last quote from memory, as the campaign has since been deleted due to a DMCA takedown notice, god bless/curse this wonderful/terrible nation).

Peace be to you, Adam Sacks. May the subtle, nuanced performance of Jack Nicholson guide your journey towards the removal any over-the-top or 'on the nose' elements from the oeuvre of noted minimalist Martin Scorsese, who has never to my knowledge made a movie under 2 1/2 hours, or missed an opportunity to score a scene of Criminals Doing Crimes to "Gimme Shelter." Nicholson/Frank Costello says in the opening scene of The Departed, "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me," in a totally naturalistic depiction of how real people talk about illegal activity.

I am not enough of a film scholar to say whether or not The Departed is a "perfect film" but I do think the first episode of our imagined miniseries is balls-out great. In it we learn that in post-Civil Rights era Boston, the Irish Mob is alive and well, running protection rackets and planting moles in the PD (including choirboy and Costello sponsee Colin Sullivan/Matt Damon). That when a 9-mm hollow point hits the skull, "it mushrooms, and when it mushrooms, it peels back, so you may have six, eight, 10 little particles of the bullet that are like razor blades, tearing their internal organs, liver, their lungs, their heart, tissue, bone, blood brain matter. That's called a blowback."
(This will be important later!)
We learn that Billy Costigan/Leonardo DiCaprio has two accents, and that "families are always risin' and fallin' in America," which is why Costigan wants to be a cop instead of follow in the organized crime footsteps of his father's family.

President Bartlett: "Who said that?"
Costigan: "Hawthorne."
Marky Mark: "Pffft. What's the matter, you don't know any Shakespeare?"

Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sgt. Dignam (Mark Walhberg) don't believe Costigan has really cut ties with his past, so they coerce him into going undercover and infiltrating Costello's organization, with the objective of disrupting an operation involving microprocessors, because 2006.

MICROPROCESSORS

cool story bro

Thankfully the mechanics of the plot aren't really that important; it's not a movie about microprocessor theft. It's about deception, and self-deception, and where the line lies; about who you are and if you can change and what you think you deserve.

I know DiCaprio finally won an Oscar in 2016 for The Revenant but it's my opinion it was a 10 year anniversary award for his performance in The Departed. I learned everything I needed about fear and anxiety from the way he turned his ball cap around when he and his shithead cousin pass the cops in the middle of a drug run, and about anger and resourcefulness from the way he opened a door with his foot (his foot!) after breaking his hand beating the crap out of some out-of-town thugs in order to get Frank's attention.

The terror and pressure he feels after making it into Costello's inner circle are incredible, of course. (My habitual lateness would NOT be tolerated here!!) Costigan ends up needing his "court mandated" counseling more than he anticipated:

"I puked in a trash barrel on the way over here. I haven't slept in fucking weeks."

here's a good scene, click on it if you feel like watching one

me @ my psychiatrist

Yeah, it's super dark. Costigan says "I'm not a cop!!" over and over until you can tell he believes it -- all while DiCaprio's micro-expressions during really violent scenes show he's actually never going to get used to being the bad guy. The line between what's tolerable and what's better than (nothing/death/fill-in-the blank) keeps moving. Spoilers for a 15 year old movie, but everyone dies at the end, and not in a drawn-out, "here's why I did it" kind of way -- headshot, done, no drama. The ballistics lesson comes back:

Costigan: "What would happen is this bullet would go right through your fucking head!!"

Right? And that's it - no more, no less.

Until next time,

Ruth

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