In the winter of 2004, a lot of people started calling me Cheddar Ted on account of my exceptional rapping abilities. It's a nom de guerre I didn't initially take to, but I'm really warming up to it now. This is the Blog of Theodore "Cheddar Ted" Bressman. You think you know, and you probably do.
I was definitely feeling pretty weird when I went to see DEFINITELY, MAYBE by myself last night. As I cozied up to a diet coke and Red Vines, I thought to myself, "Cheddar, make sure you're not still doing this for a laugh when you're much older or else you will have succeeded in living the depressing life you're always flirting with in your humor." But last night I didn't care. I was sitting with horrible posture and taking violent bites out of mad fresh sticks of Red Vines.Not to digress too much, but while still on the subject of Red Vines, there’s a few points I’d like to make before diving Greg Louganis style into this self-indulgent, mildly funny pool of loneliness:First, I'm a big fan of the Samberg/Parnell Chronic-les of Narnia Video, but I always found it unrealistic that they would be eating Red Vines in a New York movie theater. Anyone from New York who spent their summers at a Jewish Camp in Ojai, California knows that Red Vines, like dudes who don’t feel self-conscious wearing sunglasses and sorority girls from USC who magically become professional in a work setting, are a West Coast thing.The truth is, one of the best parts about living in LA is you can buy Red Vines in movie theaters and almost anywhere else really. So in the cinema and other places, you can actually drink soda through a licorice that has a big enough tubular radius to make the process simple and, in my mind, pretty fun. But there is one catch: If you like huge sodas like me, you have to bring a real straw along, because the cup is so deep you’d have to drink about a third of it from the side, which is uncomfortable. Plus, given my penchant for being extremely clumsy, I’d absolutely have spilled my diet coke all over the handsome cable-knit I took from my father’s closet over Thanksgiving break, and I didn’t feel like taking any more chances. I mean, I was already running some sort of mad scientist titration with my own emotions and from a social standpoint I felt I was running a pretty sizeable risk of running into someone and having to articulate my motivations for this little field trip in a way that could be taken as socially acceptable.Because when the film started and I saw that cute little girl from LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (who’s lost some weight by the way...must have been listening to Greg Kinnear!) I knew that like most of my schemes, this was going to be a lot better “a priori” then in reality. Sure enough, there I was, two hours later, in a theater full of couples and groups of Asian teenagers, tearing up and feeling about as awkward as people who abbreviate the word like "awk." Obviously this flick is real sappy at times, but the truth is, it's funny as hell and as an added bonus, it gives a pretty spot-on history of the development of cell phones in our consumer culture. I also found it to be very honest in its depiction of Will (Ryan Reynolds); he gets to some pretty dark places. As I’m continuing to find out into the quasi-adulthood I’ve recently settled into, plans don’t seem to turn out as you intend, and the idealism that comes with a commencement speech and a summer of trying to find interesting jobs can quickly become a jaded pattern of settling that is termed “being realistic.” But the point of DEFINITELY, MAYBE is that you can still realize the idealistic conception you have for your life within the framework of deep disappointment, something that’s no stranger to Cheddar.Now the cynics will certainly say it’s contrived -- in the parking lot I actually heard one dude complain to his disappointed valentine about how the whole thing just seemed forced -- but what can you to say to those people except, “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I wish I were a bit more cynical, but then I wouldn’t really be myself, and that seems to be something people are always trying to avoid. As my semi-troubled cousin Irene always says, “it’s better to be hated for something you are then loved for something you’re not.”
All I'm saying is it wasn't the best Valentine's Day, but it wasn't the worst one either.
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