Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • The Last Laptop I’ll Ever Buy (Until Next Year)

    The Last Laptop I’ll Ever Buy (Until Next Year)

    For nearly seven years, my Acer Predator Triton 500 has been the iron lung of my digital life—an aging warhorse with an RTX 2080 GPU that’s seen me through countless essays, projects, and caffeinated obsessions. It’s been docked to an Asus 27-inch monitor and paired with an Asus mechanical keyboard fitted with “snow linear” keys that clack like polite thunder. Compact Edifier speakers provide the soundtrack, and with minor upgrades here and there, this has been my workstation since early 2019.

    But lately, the setup feels a little haunted. My Acer sits on a riser, its keyboard unused, like a retired prizefighter still showing up to the gym out of habit. I justify its existence by using its display as a secondary reading screen—my Kindle or some grim online essay glowing faintly while I type notes on the big monitor. Still, I feel like I’m keeping a loyal but obsolete machine on life support.

    So, I’ve been hunting for a replacement—something new, powerful, and, most importantly, emotionally satisfying. My first thought was to go full desktop. But each option carries its own curse:

    Apple Mac Studio: A minimalist marvel with angelic cooling and infernal control. For $2,500 I could get the specs I want, but I’d be exiled back into Apple’s walled garden—a sleek gulag where the motto is “Our way or the highway.” I haven’t touched macOS in seven years and don’t miss it. Besides, reconfiguring my mechanical keyboard to play nice with Cupertino’s control freaks feels like negotiating peace in the Middle East. I’m too old for that kind of diplomacy.

    Windows mini PCs: They’re cute, powerful, and cheap. Unfortunately, I can’t shake the suspicion that they run hotter than a Vegas blackjack dealer. Every buyer review reads like a cautionary tale about throttling and regret.

    Tower PCs: Cooling problem solved, aesthetics annihilated. They look like 1990s fossils—hulking boxes humming with regret, some lit up like a Dave & Buster’s rave. I want my office to feel serene, not like I’m rebooting Tron.

    Small Form Factor PCs: The corporate cousins of mini-PCs—clean, respectable, and utterly soulless. A Lenovo ThinkCentre or HP Elite Mini would be safe, but seven years of loyalty deserves a little passion. Safe feels like tofu: virtuous, flavorless, and instantly forgettable.

    Laptops (Again): I swore I wouldn’t go this route, but comfort is seductive. I know the terrain. I nearly bought a Lenovo Pro 7i—until I saw the price tag. Three grand for specs I’ll never fully use? I want power, not penance.

    This indecision loop has become my mental treadmill, the same cycle I went through choosing between a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry—until I realized I’d pick the Accord, someday, probably, maybe. The problem isn’t the purchase—it’s the unresolved narrative. My brain demands closure before it can move on.

    Then, last night, salvation—or something close. The 2025 Asus TUF A18: RTX 5070, Ryzen 7, QHD screen, and the sweet, stabilizing heft of an 18-inch chassis. The specs scream overkill—64GB RAM, 2TB SSD—but the price, at $2,300, hums just right. It’s powerful, cool, substantial, and mercifully within budget. It feels like destiny—or at least the closest thing a middle-aged man can get to it while comparison-shopping on Newegg at midnight.

    If you asked me right now what I’d buy, I wouldn’t hesitate. The TUF A18 isn’t perfect—but it’s enough. It’s rational, emotional, and, most of all, final. The debate ends here.

    Or does it? Perhaps tomorrow I’ll wake up and prostrate myself to the Mac Studio with the words, “I’ll obediently reconfigure my mechanical keyboard to your System Settings, Master.”

  • The Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed

    The Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed

    In the summer of 2025, the English Chair—Steve, a mild-mannered, hyper-competent saint of a man—sent me an email that sounded innocuous enough. Would I, he asked, teach a freshman writing course for student-athletes? It would meet two mornings a week, two hours a session. The rest of my load would stay online. I should have known from the soft tone of his message that this was no ordinary assignment. This was a CoLab, an experimental hybrid of academic optimism and administrative wishcasting.

    The idea was elegant on paper: gather athletes into one class, surround them with counselors and coaches, raise retention rates, and call it innovation. Morale would soar. Grades would climb. The athletes would have a “safe space,” a phrase that always sounds like a promise from someone who’s never had reality punch their teeth in. Through the magic of cross-departmental communication, we’d form a “deep network of student support.” It all sounded like a TED Talk waiting to happen.

    Morning classes weren’t my preference. I usually reserved that time for my kettlebell ritual—my secular liturgy of iron and sweat—but I said yes without hesitation. Steve had earned my respect long ago. A decade earlier, we’d bonded over Dale Allison’s Night Comes, marveling at its lucidity on the afterlife. You don’t forget someone who reads eschatology with humility and enthusiasm. So when Steve asked, it felt less like a request than a summons.

    And yes, I’ll admit it: the offer flattered me. Steve knew my past as an Olympic weightlifter, the remnant coach swagger in my stride was visible even at sixty-three. I imagined myself the perfect fit—a grizzled academic with gym cred, able to command respect from linemen and linebackers. I said yes with gusto, convinced I was not just teaching a class but leading a mission.

    Soon enough, the flattery metastasized into full-blown delusion. I stalked the campus like a self-appointed messiah of pedagogy, convinced destiny had personally cc’d me on its latest memo. To anyone within earshot, I announced my divine assignment: to pilot a revolutionary experiment that would fuse intellect and biceps into one enlightened organism. I fancied myself the missing link between Socrates and Schwarzenegger—a professor forged in iron, sent to rescue education from the sterile clutches of the AI Age. My “muscular, roll-up-your-sleeves” teaching style, I told myself, would be a sweaty rebuke to all that was algorithmic, bloodless, and bland.

    The problem with self-congratulation is that it only boosts performance in the imagination. It blunts the discipline of preparation and tricks you into confusing adrenaline for authority. I wasn’t an educational pioneer—I was a man on a dopamine binge, inhaling the exhaust of my own hype. Beneath the swagger, there was no scholarship, no rigor, no plan—just the hollow hum of self-belief. I hadn’t earned a thing. Until I actually taught the class and produced results, my so-called innovation was vaporware. I was a loudmouth in faculty khakis, mistaking vanity for vocation. Until I delivered the goods, I wasn’t a trailblazer—I was the Flim-flam Man of Higher Ed, peddling inspiration on credit.

    Forgive me for being so hard on myself, but after thirty-eight years of full-time college teaching, I’ve earned the right to doubt my own effectiveness. I’ve sat in the back of other instructors’ classrooms during evaluations, watching them conduct symphonies of group discussions and peer-review sessions with the grace of social alchemists. Their students collaborate, laugh, and somehow stay on task. Mine? The moment I try anything resembling a workshop, it devolves into chatter about weekend plans, fantasy football, or the ethics of tipping baristas. A few students slink out early as if the assignment violated parole. I sit there afterward, deflated, convinced I’m the pedagogical equivalent of a restaurant that can’t get anyone to stay for dessert.

    I’ve been to professional development seminars. I’ve heard the gospel of “increasing engagement” and “active learning.” I even take notes—real ones, not the doodles of a man pretending to care. Yet I never manage to replicate their magic. Perhaps it’s because I’ve leaned too heavily on my teaching persona, the wisecracking moralist who turns outrage into a stand-up routine. My students laugh; I bask in the glow of my own wit. Then I drive home replaying the greatest hits—those sarcastic riffs that landed just right—while avoiding the inconvenient truth: humor is a sugar high. It keeps the crowd awake, but it doesn’t build muscle. Even if I’m half as funny as I think I am, comedy can easily become a sedative—a way to distract myself from the harder work of improvement.

    Measuring effectiveness in teaching is its own farce. If I sold cars, I’d know by the end of the quarter whether I was good at it. If I ran a business, profit margins would tell the story. But academia? It’s all smoke and mirrors. We talk about “retention” and “Student Learning Outcomes,” but everyone knows the game is rigged. The easiest graders pull the highest retention numbers. And when “learning outcomes” are massaged to ensure success, the data becomes a self-congratulatory illusion—a bureaucratic circle jerk masquerading as accountability.

    The current fetish is “engagement,” a buzzword that’s supposed to fix everything. We’re told to gamify, scaffold, diversify, digitize—anything to keep students from drifting into their screens. But engagement itself has become impossible to measure; it’s a ghost we chase through PowerPoint slides. My colleagues, battle-scarred veterans of equal or greater tenure, tell me engagement has fallen off a cliff. Screens have rewired attention spans, and a culture that prizes self-esteem over rigor has made deep learning feel oppressive. Asking students to revise an essay is now a microaggression.

    So yes, I question my value as an instructor. I prepare obsessively, dive deep into my essay topics, and let my passion show—because I know that if I don’t care, the students won’t either. But too often, my enthusiasm earns me smirks. To many of my students, I’m just an eccentric goofy man who takes this writing thing way too seriously. Their goal is simple: pass the class with minimal friction. The more I push them to care, the more resistance I meet, until the whole enterprise starts to feel like an arm-wrestling match.

    Until I find a cure for this malaise—a magic wand, a new pedagogy, or divine intervention—I remain skeptical of my own worth in the classroom. I do my best, but some days that feels like shouting into a void lined with smartphones. So yes, I’ll say it again for the record: I am the Flim-Flam Man of Higher Ed, hawking sincerity in an age that rewards performance.

  • The Fig Jam of Eden and the Gospel According to Dr. Phil

    The Fig Jam of Eden and the Gospel According to Dr. Phil

    Last night I dreamed my in-laws owned a house in Southern California—a suburban Eden fenced off from the infernal sprawl. The garden was lush to the point of parody: fig trees drooping with purple abundance, vines heavy with mysterious nectar fruits that looked genetically engineered for temptation. But paradise had its fine print. Poison ivy twined through the arbor like a legal clause in a lease with the devil. My in-laws, wounded by this horticultural betrayal, decided to sell the house and flee to the coast where they had found an obscure yet appealing city. As they packed, they shared a final sacrament: crackers smeared with their last batch of fig jam. It was obscenely delicious, the kind of sweetness that feels like divine mockery—Eden’s exit tax.

    My story in the dream wasn’t so upbeat. While they escaped to ocean breezes, I was sentenced to return to the California desert, a spiritual exile with a vague rap sheet. My sin was unnamed but apparently grave enough to require rehabilitation by Dr. Phil.

    At the studio, Dr. Phil strutted out like a Texan oracle with a talk-show budget. Each of us received a set of mystical props: a rock, a book, a flute, and a seashell. We were told to sniff them and describe their scent. The trick, he said, was that every smell meant something different to everyone. At the end of the show, he’d reveal the “real” smell and, somehow, this revelation would transform our lives.

    When my turn came, I inhaled the objects furiously—nothing. No salt, no cedar, no note of redemption. Just the hollow scent of my own frustration. Instead of passing them on, I hoarded them. Soon they piled around me like the debris of a failed experiment: rocks, shells, books, flutes—my life rendered as an archaeological dig of bad habits.

    Dr. Phil raised an eyebrow, that signature look of televised concern. “I hear you’re a professor—a smart man,” he said. “But you’re disorganized. You need to get your act together.”

    I looked at the clutter choking the floor and saw the metaphor laid bare. My possessions were my sins: chaos, indecision, intellectual hoarding, spiritual mildew. I woke knowing the dream’s diagnosis—my life had become a dumpster fire disguised as scholarship. It was time to clean house, inner and outer.

  • The Gospel of the Honey Bear: Worshipping at the Altar of Limited Edition

    The Gospel of the Honey Bear: Worshipping at the Altar of Limited Edition

    My wife has always been immune to fads—the sort of person who can scroll past influencer hysteria without so much as a pulse flutter. So when she announced yesterday that she had to have a Starbucks Honey Bear Straw Cup, I thought she was joking. “A cup?” I asked, as though she’d confessed a crush on a cartoon mascot. She showed me the photo. There it was: a cherubic bear with a straw sticking out of its head, beaming with the smug innocence of a cult leader. My daughters chimed in, voices rising in unison. Clearly, I was outnumbered.

    So at six in the morning, I trudged to our local Starbucks, noble fool that I am, hoping to secure the sacred totem. The barista, barely conscious, looked up with eyes that had seen too much. “Sold out at three a.m.,” he murmured, his voice the verbal equivalent of burnt espresso. “Ten minutes. Line out the door.” He added that a new shipment would arrive Monday—but those too would vanish at three a.m., devoured by the same nocturnal zealots. When I asked if people were scalping them on eBay, he sighed. “That’s part of it. Also… limited edition.”

    This wasn’t my first brush with late-capitalist hysteria. Just two weeks earlier, I’d witnessed a pre-dawn mob outside Trader Joe’s clawing for Halloween Mini Canvas Tote Bags as if they contained the blood of youth. They sold out in an hour. Civilization, I concluded, now runs on collectible anxiety.

    Perhaps our daily routines have become so numbing that people need the ritual thrill of scarcity to feel alive. A talisman, a honey bear, a tote bag—anything to simulate transcendence for ten blessed minutes. It’s the new spiritual economy: redemption through limited edition.

    Empty-handed, I returned home from Starbuck’s this morning, brewed my own dark roast, and read Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure—his autopsy of ambition and futility—while reflecting on my own lifelong hunt for literary honey bears: the bright, unattainable chimeras that promise meaning but mostly sell out before dawn.

  • The No Consequences Era of Education

    The No Consequences Era of Education

    It’s been a bruising semester. I’m teaching a class full of student-athletes—big personalities, bigger social circles. I like them; I even feel protective of them. But they’re driving me halfway to madness. They sit in tight cliques, chattering through lectures like it’s a locker room between drills. Every class, I play the same game of whack-a-murmur: redirect, refocus, remind them that the material matters for their essays. I promise them mercy—“just give me 30 minutes of focus before we watch the documentary or workshop your drafts”—but my voice competes with the hum of conversation and the holy glow of smartphones.

    The phones are the true sirens of the classroom—scrolling, snapping, texting, attention atomized into pixels. Maybe it’s my fault for not collecting them in a basket like contraband. I thought I was teaching adults. I thought athletes, of all people, would bring discipline and drive. Instead, I’ve got a team that treats class like study hall with Wi-Fi. My essay topics that have created engagement in past semesters—like Jordan Peele’s Sunken Place—barely register. The irony: I’m showing them the metaphor for psychological paralysis, and half the room is literally sinking into their screens.

    After thirty years of teaching, this is the hardest semester I’ve had. I kept telling myself, Five more weeks and the storm will pass. Next semester, you’ll have your groove back. Today I spoke with a colleague who teaches the same class to the general population—same disengagement, same cell phones, same glazed eyes. He added one more grim diagnosis: the rise of fragility. When he points out errors, missing citations, too much AI-speak, or low effort, students protest that his feedback “hurts their feelings.” They’re not defiant—they’re delicate. Consequences have become cruelty.

    That word—consequences—haunted me as I walked to class. I thought about my own twin daughters at their highly rated high school, where late work flows freely, “self-esteem” trumps rigor, and parental complaints terrify administrators more than failing grades. It hit me: this isn’t an athlete problem—it’s a generational shift. The No Consequences Era has arrived. Students no longer fear failure; they resent it. And the tragedy isn’t that they can’t handle criticism—it’s that they’ve never been forced to build the muscle for it.

  • How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation didn’t teach me anything comforting. It confirmed what I already suspected: addiction isn’t a habit; it’s a ravenous creature with a bottomless stomach. The more you feed it, the louder it howls. It storm-raids your mental vaults, looting the energy you need for your work, your relationships, and your sense of self. And your family feels the theft—spiritually, emotionally, domestically. Addiction doesn’t just eat you; it nibbles at everyone near you.

    Even with self-awareness, even with a clear understanding of triggers and a sincere desire for freedom, you don’t get a clean fight. The casino is rigged. Modern dopamine doesn’t drip from a bottle or a needle—it streams through fiber-optic cable. Our phones and laptops, the same devices we use to create, to earn, and to connect, also serve as the slot machines we keep in our pockets. The house never closes, and the drinks are free.

    Lembke tells us to avoid triggers, but what do you do when your trigger is baked into your professional life, disguised as “productivity” and “connection”? Avoidance becomes theater. You can only tiptoe around the swamp for so long before some lonely hour arrives, and curiosity knocks like an old vice with freshly polished shoes. A hit of self-pity, a twitch of boredom, a flicker of FOMO—and suddenly you’re back in the feed trough, gulping pixels like syrup. The crash comes fast: shame, exhaustion, vows of purity. Then the next impulse, the next relapse, the same ancient ritual. Lot’s wife didn’t want to look back; she simply couldn’t resist. Neither can we, sometimes. Salt is surprisingly modern.

    So the task becomes stark: learn to live in this world without turning yourself into a monument of regret. Train your gaze forward. Build the strength to resist that backward glance. The modern life mission isn’t to slay the demon—he regenerates too easily. It’s to starve him, inch by inch, while protecting the scarce, bright energy that makes you human.

    Becoming a human being is a high-stakes game. Learning to live a life in which you don’t become a pillar of salt is one of life’s chief endeavors.

  • I Will Not Let the Foot-Shamers Win

    I Will Not Let the Foot-Shamers Win

    Last night over salmon bowls, my teenage twins informed me that today’s high-school generation considers bare feet a social felony. To expose toes in public, they say, is to reveal yourself as a swamp creature—an outlaw of etiquette, a barbarian with no awareness of modern civilization. The vocabulary to describe bare feet is vicious: “grippers,” “trotters,” “dogs,” “plates of meat.” Because I live in Southern California and wear flip-flops year-round like a semi-retired island hermit, I am now a walking scandal. One of my daughter’s friends reportedly whispered, “I saw your dad’s dogs. Gross.” And just like that, I became the suburban boogeyman haunting teenage group chats—Toejack the Footed Menace.

    My generation also hates bare feet, but we limit our disgust for airplanes, where shoeless passengers press their fungal feet against the communal air vents. Writer Tom Nichols posts photos like he’s covering war crimes, and comedian Sebastian Maniscalco calls overgrown toenails “machetes” with the intensity of a man who has suffered. So yes, the barefoot debate spans generations—but where Boomers see in-flight terrorism, Gen Z sees any exposed foot as a moral collapse, a failure of hygiene and personal branding.

    Personally, I think the hysteria is absurd. My deepest fantasy involves moving to a tropical beach, walking the shore barefoot at sunrise, and not being cyber-executed by teenagers over my phalanges. Yet here I am, contemplating pedicures. I want buffed nails like polished shells and heels so moisturized they could star in a coconut-oil commercial. If I must defend the barefoot lifestyle, I will do it in gleaming style. I will not let the foot-shamers win. I will make going barefoot beautiful again—one jojoba-glazed toe at a time.

  • When Mortality Breaks the Watch Hobby Spell

    When Mortality Breaks the Watch Hobby Spell

    I’ve forged more friendships online over watches than I ever expected — grown adults bonded by steel bracelets, dial colors, and the feverish belief that the “perfect collection” is one watch away. It’s a strange brotherhood: half enthusiasm, half rehab circle. We compare scars from impulse buys and premature flips; we laugh at the madness and whisper, half-serious, that maybe this time we’re cured.

    My own watch delirium began in 2005, when I was 43 and convinced mechanical timekeepers were little machines that could somehow fix the machinery inside me. Twenty years vanished in a blur of rotating bezels and just-in-case divers. Then, at 63, mortality tapped my shoulder. Suddenly the hobby’s siren call softened. The obsession didn’t die — it continued to burn brightly. But after 20 years, desire finally dimmed, replaced by a quiet awareness that timepieces were no match for time itself.

    The feeling reminds me of a scene from Battlestar Galactica: a traitor is sealed behind glass, pleading as the airlock hisses and the crew looks on, solemn and unmovable. A ritual exile. That’s what aging feels like — not tragic, not pitiful, just inevitable. There comes a point when people still inside the warm illusion of endless tomorrows unconsciously edge away from those who’ve glimpsed life’s shrinking horizon.

    A pane descends — not hostile, just real. You tap the glass and wave, wanting back into the cockpit of youth’s delusions, but the craft has sealed. No reentry. Only the quiet work of dignity: embracing your season, building meaning instead of collections, and being useful to the younger travelers who can’t yet see the void but will one day meet it too.

  • My White Stallion from Hell

    My White Stallion from Hell

    Last night I dreamed someone repossessed my sensible car and swapped it for a giant white truck — part Tonka toy, part overcaffeinated stallion. This thing didn’t drive so much as impose its will, snorting diesel and self-actualization. It anticipated my needs, turned on by itself, and barreled toward destinations like it had read my calendar and resented my free will. Worst of all, it absorbed my own impulses, amplifying my compulsive streak like a steroidal spirit animal with road rage.

    It respected nothing. Barriers, fences, construction zones — all mere suggestions. The truck treated civic infrastructure like bubble wrap: there to be popped for pleasure.

    Then the fever dream deepened. The truck stretched, swelled, and reinvented itself as a boat, because why limit your delusions? It ferried my wife and me to Newport Beach and slid us over a canal toward some sleek restaurant where every entrée probably came with a life coach. The sunset was cinematic; my subconscious apparently has a generous production budget.

    After dinner, my wife asked for a beach walk. Romance, surf, a soft breeze — what could go wrong? I swapped my dress boots for sneakers. That’s when the truck, apparently offended I could ambulate without it, snatched me like a jealous cyborg Labrador and plopped me behind the wheel. Off we launched, fishtailing across the coast like a toddler steering a cruise ship. I mashed the brake pedal; the truck laughed and kept accelerating — a mechanical id with horsepower and zero boundaries.

    We plowed through so many barricades I’m amazed dream-me didn’t receive a lifetime ban from California. When I finally woke up, grinding beans and stirring steel-cut oats felt like absolution. Nothing like coffee and civilized porridge to remind you you’re still in charge — at least until your subconscious reschedules its next rebellion.

  • The Day the German Chocolate Cake Lost Its Throne

    The Day the German Chocolate Cake Lost Its Throne


    The plan for my birthday was simple: a German Chocolate Cake from Torrance Bakery—rich, decadent, predictable, the sugary punctuation mark to another year survived. My wife, Carrie, placed the order, and I considered the matter settled. But on Sunday, three days before the big event, she blindsided me with an unsolicited miracle: a homemade hummingbird cake. It’s carrot cake’s tropical cousin—bananas and pineapple mingling like exiled fruits at a Southern potluck.

    She confessed she wanted to get me a “real” present, not something outsourced, so she compensated with butter, flour, and a whole lot of love. I ate three thick slices that Sunday afternoon, each forkful blurring the line between nourishment and seduction. “This is so wholesome,” I told her, “it doesn’t even count as cheating on my diet. It’s morally superior to carrot cake—and so dangerously good it might ruin Tuesday’s German Chocolate encore.”

    Carrie laughed, apologized for my impending existential crisis, and on Tuesday returned with the official cake: the grand Torrance Bakery specimen. We performed the ritual—candles, singing, obligatory family cheer—and I consumed an 800-calorie slice with the reverence of a man honoring tradition.

    It was moist. It was glossy. It was… fine. The caramel layer, usually the German Chocolate’s battleground of decadence, seemed to have surrendered before the fight began. I chewed, waiting for transcendence that never came. It struck me then: German Chocolate Cake is unreliable—half the time glorious, half the time cafeteria bland.

    The verdict arrived between bites. My lifelong allegiance had shifted. My mother’s German Chocolate Cake once ruled the birthday throne, but the crown has passed. The hummingbird cake reigns supreme—a moist, fragrant coup d’état led by pineapple and banana insurgents. The old guard has fallen. Long live the new confectionary monarch.