101. Ming

So I'm hanging out at Ryan's talking with my friend, Ming. We get to talking about this art project thing that I'm working on with a friend and Ming is just picking at every little nit he can find and it starts driving me nuts because he just doesn't let up. And so finally I can't take it anymore and I say, "geeze Ming, what the fuck?" which is quite an accomplishment on his part because it's not easy to get me that worked up.

He seemed to dial it back a bit after that. But I know why he did what he did, and it was all good in the end. I was talking ivory tower, high concept ideas and he was bringing up practical, real world concerns and that's good because the rubber has to meet the road somewhere and you'd better make sure you have enough gas to get where you want to go.

But I think of the movie, Apollo 13.

There's a scene where the crew of the damaged spacecraft get into an argument when Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) brings up a point about their re-entry angle being too shallow which would cause them to bounce off the atmosphere, back out into space with no way to turn around. Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks...always Tom Hanks to the rescue) defuses the situation by saying, "Now listen, there's a thousand things that have to happen in order to get us back home. We're on number eight. You're talking about number six hundred and ninety-two."

And that's how I felt about all the things Ming was bringing up. Yeah, there are problems galore, but let's take it bit by bit. Now to be fair, in this analogy Swigert was bringing up a problem that could have potentially made steps 8 - 691 irrelevant, but they made it back to earth so I win.

Geeze Ming, I think you're going to make one kick ass lawyer. The way you were grilling me there, if I were a defendant and you were a prosecutor, I bet you could have gotten me to confess to dressing up a as a woman and committing lewd, unnatural acts with poodles. (objection, badgering the witness)