Category: Personal

Last night I caught myself calling a cartoon character a douchebag, and it suddenly occurred to me I could be over-using the word. I’ve been using it an awful lot lately, and I don’t remember even hearing it before a few years ago. It got me a little worried I was slipping into another Internet meme: I might as well be one of those faux hipsters shouting “the cake is a lie” and “I like me some…”

But then I realized, “Oh hell to the no, this is just how I roll.” Douchebag is just a great word. It perfectly describes a certain type of person, and none of the other options quite come close:

Asshole is just too broad, and it doesn’t have the same sense of permanence. The guy who’s been making racist comments non-stop for the past ten years is an asshole, but so’s the guy who just cut me off in traffic.

Prick is too soft; a prick is just a minor irritant, not the prolongued obnoxiousness of a bonafide douche.

Asswipe and its variant, Shitstain, convey the same sense of uselessness as douchebag, but without the same sense of oblivious arrogance.

Dipshit and its TV-friendly Dukes of Hazzard-era version dipstick only cover the stupidity, but again, not the arrogance.

Assclown is pretty great, but it’s from Office Space. It’s always going to be from Office Space.

Asshat captures the incompetence, but none of the smarminess of a genuine douchebag.

Jack-off and the pathetically underpowered jag-off are just kind of vulgar and stupid. And even if they weren’t, they kind of capture the self-absorption of the true douchebag, but none of his unctiousness.

Twat is awfully close, but it’s a lot more vulgar, right on the edge of what’s too vulgar for me to be using in casual conversation. I don’t like typing it, much less making it bold and italic.

And all the fuck- variations — -wit, -wad, -head, -brain, -ing jackass — might as well just be less PG-13-friendly versions of asshole.

Clearly, douchebag is an immensely powerful and unique word. How else to describe Jeremy Piven and that guy from The Mentalist? It’s a word whose time has come.

Which got me wondering: what prompted the douchebag explosion? I don’t remember using it at all before 2006, and since I’m usually late to catch on, that means it must’ve entered wide usage around 2000. Office Space came out in 1999, with Gary Cole’s pivotal role of Nordberg providing the personification of the modern douchebag. (I don’t mean to diminish young Robert Downey Jr.’s pioneering work in douchebaggery in the 80s, or the great work that Dennis Miller has done in the field consistently over the past 25 years, but it hadn’t yet become a phenomenon).

But surely douchebags existed before then. OR DID THEY?!

There are various studies done by actual, professional linguists on various isolated communities that suggest a correlation between a society’s understanding of certain concepts and whether that society has a word for that concept. This goes way deeper than that “1000 words for snow” business: this is freaky reality-bending stuff.

For instance: one society didn’t use specific numbers for counting, but more general terms like “none,” “a few,” “more than a few,” or “a lot.” When shown two different amounts of something — both within the “a few” cut-off — they simply didn’t recognize a distinction between the two amounts.

Another study took people who didn’t have separate words for different shades of a color — not just guys, who either can’t or refuse to acknowledge the distinction between “salmon” and “pink,” but more like societies who didn’t have a word for “purple.” As I understand it, even in tests where language was removed, the people couldn’t distinguish colors they didn’t have a word for.

So there’s the question: has there always been a constant supply of douchebags, and we’ve just gotten better at identifying and describing them? Or are we actually creating douchebags, summoning them from the ether like Bloody Mary or Beetlejuice? Maybe some kind of combination, where we’ve so effectively described the douchebag that the guys (not being sexist, just accurate: they’re always guys) who were formerly just vaguely described as “pretentious twits” or “smarmy pricks” or “Christian Bale” now had something concrete to aspire to.

So I guess what I’m saying is: words have power. And I like making fun of people who never really did me any harm.

I want to wish a happy birthday to my best friend Rain, who is neither a weather phenomenon nor a Korean pop sensation (although really, she could be if she’d just put a little more effort into it).

I’ve been friends with Rain for almost fourteen years now*, and she can still surprise me by doing something unexpectedly and inexplicably awesome. Like, for instance, not just buying me a cake for my birthday, but sitting outside in the cold with me and eating it so I didn’t have to finish it by myself. I — like many humans, I’d guess — would never even think to do something like that, but then I’m neither as tenacious with my friendships nor as thoughtful.

Rain is one of the first friends I made outside of work after I moved to San Francisco, and that kind of ruined things. See, I’d never been out here for any length of time, so I just assumed that things on the west coast worked differently. I thought I’d been somehow moved up to some higher circle, where everyone was inordinately hip and smart and effortlessly funny, and people were true to their word, and everyone would be unjustifiably kind to you without expecting anything in return. Of course, I eventually learned that there was nothing inherently special about San Francisco; I’d just moved out here and almost immediately met someone exceptional. I can say without exaggeration that Rain’s friendship is about 95% of what makes the bay area not just “the place I live,” but “home.” (The other 5% is just because the katsu curry rice around here is really good).

So happy birthday!

* She was, of course, 16.

I hope everybody’s having a Merry Christmas, even if you’re not the type who usually celebrates it. As for me: I didn’t get knocked over by any crazy Italian women, I’m about 90% over my seasonal debilitating cold, I’ve only read 1 work-related e-mail in the past 7 days, I’m full of dressing and my mother’s squash casserole, I’m loaded up on presents, and I’ve got a TiVo full of Samantha Brown Christmas specials (Disney and otherwise). I can’t think of how Christmas could get any better.

Let me tell you what I got: an alarm clock radio that hooks up to an iPhone, so I can actually hear it and never be late for anything ever again; a huge hard drive for my home theater PC; the latest MST3K DVD set including Tom Servo; a copy of Up that I won’t be watching any time soon, lest I break down into heaving sobs; and a copy of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which means I might actually finish reading a book this year.

Plus, we got my mother an iMac — the best kind of gift, since it means I get to buy something else from Apple. It’s been so long since I became a Mac zealot user, I forgot just how much is involved in making the switch. The gang at Cupertino are sitting all smug on their $200 share price, I’m sure, but I don’t think anybody at Apple appreciates how much trauma they’re causing new switchers by not including versions of Free Cell and Klondike with OS X. I’ve been unable to find a decent one online, so I had to promise my mom I would write one for her before I go back home. Here’s hoping I’m not all talk.

So Season’s Greetings from Georgia, and I hope everybody has a Happy Week-Leading-Up-To-New-Year.

The LA Times review of 500 Days of Summer starts by calling it “an original romantic comedy.” This is not true. For one thing, it’s a “romantic comedy” only if you can call Annie Hall a “romantic comedy”: it’s not as much about celebrating a relationship as it is about what we can learn from a failed relationship. And secondly, it’s tough to point out “originality” as its strongest suit when you can’t talk about the movie without mentioning Annie Hall.

But that’s not a bad thing. After all, Annie Hall is such a great movie that even lesser imitations can be great, even if only for their time. 500 Days of Summer doesn’t hide any of its influences — it references The Graduate multiple times, even including the closing scene — and manages to feel like a celebration of those influences, instead of being purely derivative. It’s as personal and confessional as a Woody Allen movie, without feeling as narcissistic. It’s as ambiguous as a Mike Nichols movie, without feeling as bleak, or as if you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you by the ending.

It’s also got every romantic comedy cliche you can think of, except for a scene with people jumping on beds singing into hairbrushes (and I think there might’ve been one of those that I missed). But here, they’re played well enough that they actually work: the comic relief pals are used sparingly and feel natural, the chance-encounter-at-a-wedding is underplayed enough to feel realistic, and the scenes showing the highs and lows of the relationship are cleverly mashed up and shown out of sequence. The result is that you’re not thinking “I’ve seen this before” (unless you’re extremely cynical), you’re putting together familiar pieces to tell a larger story.

And it’s not a “chick flick,” since it’s very much told from the guy’s perspective. Granted, it’s a particularly sensitive, self-absorbed, and hopelessly-romantic guy, so make of that whatever you want. I’m a huge fan of “How I Met Your Mother,” which makes me think I’m squarely in the target demographic for this movie. Here it’s the guy whose heart is broken by an emotionally distant (and seemingly manipulative) woman: again not a completely original concept, but still nice to see movies acknowledging that relationships have two people involved; it’s not just a hero and a target. One of the best lines is when Summer compares the relationship to Sid & Nancy and has to point out that she’s Sid, a joke they reinforced with a promotional video.

As it’s told from the guy’s perspective, Zooey Deschanel is perfectly cast, to the point that you have to wonder if the entire movie were built around her. She has a power over men that can’t adequately be explained; the movie even has an entire sequence about it. (And yes, includes a scene of her singing, which frankly just seems like overkill, since we’re already enamored). So it’s perfectly understandable that a guy would fall for her and fall hard; we accept it without a second thought. But unlike, for example, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, she’s not relegated to the thankless role of “the manipulative bitch.” You can see how she made her intentions clear, as best as she understood them herself, and it was just a case of a guy projecting his image of a fantasy girl on someone instead of paying attention to the reality.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is well-cast, too: good-looking enough that he doesn’t come across as too annoying or pathetic (and when he does, his little sister calls him a “pussy”); but not so much that the average-looking people in the audience can no longer relate. My favorite part of the entire movie is when he launches into a genuinely gleeful musical number (set to “You Make My Dreams Come True” by Hall & Oates) and he checks himself out in a car window reflection. I won’t spoil it, but if you’re a guy who hasn’t seen himself like that in a moment of feeling-good-about-yourself, you’re either lying or you’re much younger than I am.

And speaking of being much younger than I am: there is a faint sense of artificiality about the whole movie, not enough to ruin it, but just enough to keep it from being transcendent. Part of it is that it keeps threatening to cross the line into indie-movie preciousness, never going quite over but driving the whole way with its blinkers on. (But I was watching it in a Sundance theater, which might’ve had something to do with that). The other part is that it felt like people in their 20s delivering lines written by people in their 30s. It’s entirely possible I’m just out of touch, and people in their 20s in Los Angeles really are into The Graduate and Annie Hall and sing Pixies songs at karaoke. But even if the details aren’t genuine, the overall message of the movie is.

From way over on the other side of the country, my family sent me a cake! It came in a big box packed with styrofoam and dry ice, like a transplant organ. I don’t want to think about what that must’ve cost. And I don’t want to make up a story about how I couldn’t possibly eat the whole thing myself, because we all know that would be a lie.

Plus I got the Criterion versions of my three favorite Akira Kurosawa movies, and a book of imaginary creatures, and one of those creepy e-cards with a talking cat. And, since I’m in the habit of treating every day like it’s my birthday, I got myself the new Ghostbusters game last week. (I’ve only played a little bit; so far my favorite thing is the character design).

And it’s not even over yet! Tonight I get to go to a semi-fancy restaurant in SF that I’ve heard about but have never actually gone to. And then a bar on the bay with a creepy wax Arabian. So far, this is already up there with they year we got a Matterhorn at Farrell’s on Memorial Drive, and the year I got to take a bunch of friends to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Apparently, the trick is to let other people plan it for me.

And I’m either getting more mature, less vain, or more lazy, but the march of years isn’t taking the same psychological toll on me as it has in the past. Sure, I finally have to come to terms with the fact that my beard isn’t “graying,” it’s almost completely white, but on the bright side: I’m in a position where nobody really minds if I look like a derelict. So if I haven’t beaten the aging process, at least it’s a draw.

Since I’ve moved out here, I’ve met four other people with the same birthday (one on the same year in the same state, which makes me wonder what was going on in Georgia in October 1970 (apart from the obvious)), so wish all them a happy one as well.

Man, I’m glad this is the last I have to write about my trip to Italy. It was hard enough being there, and then I didn’t have to put captions on pictures or come up with puns for post titles. And what do you do with Florence? “Uffizi Does It?” “Medici Balls?” “Major Duomo?” All terrible.

So the city may have a dull name (apparently “Florence” is closer to the original Latin than “Firenze” is, so the English name is more accurate, at least according to the tour guide) but it makes up for it on charm and looks. They know they’ve got the best Cathedral, and they’re kind of smug about it: instead of putting it away from all the cool stuff and building a wall around it, they’ve got it sprawled out all over the square, visible from everywhere in town, rubbing it in everybody’s face.

It’s halfway between Rome and Venice by train and in spirit: it’s more manageable and navigable than Rome, and a good bit less touristy than Venice. And like Siena, it’s got a theme going on: everything’s either David- or Medici-related. I can comprehend this place, you think. You can really understand how kids on their “life experience” European junket after college would feel like staying.

Coolest thing about the city: the Piazza della Signoria. It’s not all that pretty, to be honest, but the place is just lousy with statues. Instead of roping everything off in a crowded museum, you can get up and walk around the pieces and see them from every angle. Even climb up and break off an arm, or chop off a toe if you feel like it.

It’s a great city, just about everybody’s been there at least once, and those who haven’t been yet should make plans to go. Here’s my helpful travel tips:

• Spend three days. I spent two in Florence and two in Siena, and wish I’d spent an extra in Florence just to wander around.
• Take a tour. I took the ArtViva “Florence in One Day” tour (spread out over two days) and would recommend it very highly. The tour groups are very small, mine were friendly, and it was nice having people to chat with a few hours. (And since they’re just day tours, if you don’t like your group, you only have to put up with them for an hour or two). The guides are native English speakers and were all entertaining and knew their stuff.
• The tour guides also gave great restaurant recommendations. Both places I tried were the best restaurants I went to on the whole vacation. (Good food, but great, friendly service).
• Even if you don’t take a tour, do what the ArtViva guides do: keep it simple. Instead of trying to hit every major site in the city or every work of art in the galleries, they picked a few of their favorites and gave detail on those, describing the connections between them. I’d been trying to make sure I saw everything I could in Rome and Siena, and being exhaustive was exhausting.
• Make sure you go downstairs in the Uffizi gallery, to see Caravaggio’s Medusa. It’s rad. Also, much harder to miss is Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, also rad: I’d seen plenty of pictures, but it’s much more impressive in person.
• Be aware that prosciutto isn’t necessarily the same thing as prosciutto di Parma. I had to put up with several unremarkable ham sandwiches until I managed to find any of the good stuff.
• There’s obviously a ton of hype around Michelangelo’s David; it’s a symbol of the city, and it’s the one thing that many tourists are there to see. What’s unique about the statue is that it actually lives up to the hype: your first sight of it at the end of the hall is pretty amazing.
• The best views of the city are from Piazzale Michelangelo, across the river at the top of about a thousand steps. I took about a billion pictures, as is every tourist’s responsibility.

The last of my pictures are up on flickr, including miscellaneous shots from around the city, shots of the Cathedral interior and exterior, and views of the city from Piazzale Michelangelo.

I’m pretty sure the reason I didn’t like Venice is the same reason I wasn’t that impressed with Paris a few years ago: I’m not the target audience. There are cities that I’ve gone to by myself, as a single guy, and had a great time. Dublin, for instance. Tokyo or Manhattan, if “talking to other people” isn’t your goal. Orlando, if you dig roller coasters. But Venice is for couples and super-spies.

I got the worst possible first impression of the city. The biggest rainstorm I encountered the entire two weeks of my vacation started right as my train was pulling into Venice, so I got to stand in line for vaporetto tickets for about 45 minutes getting soaked. The delay put me into some kind of rush hour, and I was taking one of the non-tourist-dedicated lines, so I got to pile into the bottom of the boat with my luggage while the locals sat and glared at me, visibly inconvenienced by my existence. I had to keep asking someone to wipe the fog off the windows so I could see what stop we were approaching, and the reaction was as if I’d asked a stranger for a kidney.

After the rain stopped, though… the city was still kind of a drag. You’re constantly reminded of the area’s rich and storied history going back centuries, but it’s completely incongruous with everything you see. It simply comes across as a theme park, and a dirty, unfriendly, and inconvenient one at that. I didn’t get any particularly great views, because everything in the city was covered in scaffolding or advertising (presumably to pay for future scaffolding). The food was overpriced — the rule seemed to be “take the already expensive prices in Rome and then add 4 euros across the board” — and everything I had was the worst I’d had in Italy. And on account of my bad timing, many of the museums were closed.

Your transportation options are limited to “waterbus” and “walking,” and the city seems laid out specifically to discourage walking. Apparently it’s widely known that the city is hard to navigate — one of the most commonly-sold tourist shirts has signs pointing to St. Mark’s Square in opposite directions, much like the shirts with a picture of a giant cockroach or mosquito reading “actual size” that you find in Texas & Florida — but they underestimate just how much of a pain it is to get around. There were places in Rome and Florence that were within easy walking distance where the maps and tour guides advised me to take a bus; routes in Venice that were described in the books as “a pleasant and easy stroll” ended up being short-form Trails of Tears.

Still, I wanted to make a go of it, and just wander around, treat it as a historical place, and get as many good photos as I could. And that’s where the other problem started: I kept getting accosted, literally once an hour unless I was indoors, by dudes trying to sell me flowers. The first time it happened, another tourist couple spotted the incident and started laughing, and I laughed along and did my “get a load of that guy!” look and went on thinking it was a charming little anecdote. But it just wouldn’t stop, even though I was clearly there by myself and by the looks of me, was more than likely single back home as well. (I’d been out of the country for almost 2 weeks by that point, walking non-stop and still believing I had to eat 2 courses at every meal, so I was sweaty, fat, and beardy. I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to date me).

Finally, I decided I’d had enough. An older guy came up to me while I was listening to the bands at St. Mark’s Square and offered to sell me a rose. Instead of just saying the usual “No, grazie,” I did the universal gesture for “Seriously?” with an added, exaggerated look around me to show that I wasn’t there with anyone. Then:

Me: NO, GRAZIE. SOLO MIO.
Him: You don’t have wife?
Me: Nope. By myself.
Him: Girlfriend?
Me: Uh-uh.
Him: Nephew?
Me: [thinking] What?!? [out loud] Uh… no.
Him: Still… is nice rose? [gesturing around the square] It’s beautiful place, you enjoy it. Everybody like rose.
Me: Marry me!

I didn’t say the last part out loud, but the guy had definitely charmed his way through my defenses. But by the time I’d pulled out my wallet, he was already offering a rose to a nearby couple, and I ran back to the hotel room and cried myself to sleep.

I also got stopped by a woman with dark circles under her eyes carrying a clipboard asking, “Ontidrug? Ontidrug?” After a couple of repetition I realized she was saying “Anti-drug” and asking me to sign a petition to support a halfway house. She instantly identified me as American and asked where in the US I was from. I said “San Francisco,” she said, “Oh, games.” I was surprised that it had become common knowledge in Europe that so much of the American videogame industry was centered in the Bay Area, and I was about to offer that much of it had moved to Southern California and Seattle and Austin, but she said, “No, no. I think of Las Vegas.”

While I was filling out the petition and getting out my ten euro obligatory donation, she explained how she was a former heroin addict who’d been helped by the hopefully legitimate organization I was ostensibly supporting. She then asked who I was with, and I’d been so used to the question by that point, I just said “Just me. Solo mio.” She replied, “Oh, you came to Venezia alone.” There was a brief pause, and then she said with visible and audible disbelief and pity: “Why?”

I’ve been asking myself the same question the last two days, I thought, and said, “I just wanted to see it.” I’m glad I saw it, and I’m glad I never have to go back.

My pictures from Venice are up on flickr. And technically, it was the last place I visited on my vacation, but I’m saving Florence for last because I didn’t want to end on such a whiny, negative note.

[And just so’s I’m not spreading misinformation over the internet: Be aware that “solo mio” isn’t correct Italian for “I’m alone.” It means “only mine,” if even that. My point was that most Italians’ English is better than my Italian.]

When I was planning to go to Italy (I did mention that I went to Italy, right?) I got about a dozen recommendations that I visit Siena, a city in Tuscany southeastsouthwest of Florence. I’m grateful for the recommendations, because it was my favorite part of the entire trip.

I’d had an unrealistically idyllic preconception about the city before I left; I’d pictured some tiny village in the countryside surrounding a small fort-like town square. It’s not like that, although I’m sure there’s plenty of that atmosphere just a short distance away. Instead, it’s a fairly big city with some amazing architecture and a bustling tourist economy. It feels like a perfectly preserved medieval city: walking through the narrow, hilly streets surrounded by tall buildings, it’s easy to imagine yourself living in Italy in the late 13th century.

I realize I got a skewed perception of everywhere I went, since I kept myself to tourist-centric areas, but Siena seemed to be driven by day-trippers. I woke up one morning — it was unavoidable, since you’re assaulted by various bell towers going off at 7:30 AM — and walked through the city and around the city walls. You could see people just starting to get the business of their daily lives squared away before the tour buses started arriving around 10. From that time to dusk, there are waves of people crowding the shops around the Duomo (Cathedral) and Piazza del Campo (town square), shopping, wandering around, making noise and eating ice cream. Around dusk, everything starts to shut down except for the town square, and the city goes back to normal until the next day’s rush of tourism.

The Duomo is amazing — not nearly as large or ostentatious as Florence’s, but covered with astounding detail on every inch of its surface. The same symbols are repeated everywhere — the colors black and white, the coat of arms for the city and its districts, and two babies suckling on a she-wolf — all tying into the city’s history and mythology and making it feel like a place with a very strong identity. I’ve forgotten the details on why black and white are the city’s colors, and I can’t find them online: it has something to do with smoke.

The statues of the she-wolf are from Siena’s origin story. I was wondering why the city would be full of images of Rome’s founding, but apparently this is a spin-off involving Remus’s sons after he was driven north out of Rome and somehow had to be raised by a different wolf. For whatever reason, the Sienese version took hold a lot more strongly than the Roman version.

The horse race around the town square, the Palio, is in August, but there was still plenty of Palio-related material to see. The local channels were running a documentary series interviewing locals with their own stories about the race. And posters, banners, and symbols from the different districts were everywhere. Although the Piazza del Campo is a large (and beautiful) area, I can’t imagine a horse race taking place there; it must be an amazing but manic experience.

Another unexpected highlight of Siena: it was the best gelato I had the whole time. I normally think that coffee-flavored ice cream is one of the most blatant creations of Satan put forth to humans, but I had a serving of Tiramisu-flavored gelato that was like getting an open-mouth kiss from God.

If anyone’s considering a trip (and it comes highly recommended), I’d have two pieces of advice:

1. Don’t make it a day trip, but stay the night. The city at dusk is beautiful, and wandering around early in the morning gives a much better impression than seeing it in the midst of crowds. I stayed two nights, which was in retrospect overdoing it. One’s enough.
2. Avoid the restaurants around the Piazza del Campo. They were extremely overpriced and the service was just short of being openly hostile.

So It didn’t turn out to be the peaceful getaway to the Tuscan countryside that I’d expected — the city’s much too interesting for that — but it was still relaxing and a great contrast to Rome and Florence. I’m told there’s any number of bed & breakfasts and small hotels around the area if you want the typical experience of Tuscany, but staying inside the city walls turned out to be perfect for me.

My pictures from the city, mostly the cathedral and town square, are up on Flickr.

I’ve got to admit I just don’t “get” Catholicism. I was raised going to southern Pentacostal churches — where “Halloween” had to be renamed the “Harvest Festival” and grown men and women would suddenly stand up in the middle of services and begin speaking in tongues — and I still think that all the Signs of the Cross and rosaries and Latin and standing up and sitting down and those swingy smoky ball things are a little weird.

But as I understand it: the Pope is supposed to be something of a manifestation of the Holy Spirit here on Earth, and the Vatican is a visible representation of the power of the Catholic Church (and by extension, Christianity). I’m sure that’s an insulting or possibly sacrilegious over-simplification. But now that I’ve been there, and the Holy See is now the Holy Seen, all I know is that Vatican City is a physical manifestation of the Law of Diminishing Returns.

I avoided going anywhere on the Vatican side of the river on Easter Sunday, to avoid what I was sure was going to be an obscenely enormous mass of humanity. (A couple at the hotel assured me afterwards that it was every bit as crowded as I’d expected. They’d been to New Year’s Eve in Times Square and still hadn’t seen as many people gathered in one place). Still, even on an “off” day, the place had more humans than it could support. I quickly gave up on the idea of getting inside St. Peter’s Basilica, since the lines circled over halfway around the entire plaza. The Pieta will only exist in pictures for me.

Besides, I was really there to see the Vatican Museums. Even with two separate tour books in hand, I still had to ask someone for directions. As it turns out, you have to leave St. Peter’s plaza and walk around the outside of the walls to find the entrance to the building that used to be just a few hundred feet away. It felt like miles, but Google Maps tells me it was just about a kilometer and I should stop whining already. I kept thinking back to what the narration on the tour bus had said — that Vatican Hill was the site where hundreds of Christians were burned to light a Roman banquet — and I felt undeservedly martyred and somehow vindicated. Two thousand years later, and Rome is still torturing Christians: first by burning them, and now by making the chubby and sedentary ones walk marginally inconvenient distances.

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The museum itself seems like a structure designed not so much to display works of art as to drive people from the street into the Sistine Chapel. You’re given one choice at the beginning, letting you take a brief diversion to see some medieval-era religious art, but once you get back on the “main” route, you’re in a line behind tour groups fifty-or-sixty strong all plodding towards The Only Ceiling They’ve Made Movies About.

My first impression was that it was a disappointingly low-rent display, with a hallway of statuary open to the air, each one of them presumably a priceless work of antiquity, but jumbled together as if they simply didn’t have room to keep it all. As it turned out, this was just the warm-up. You soon end up in increasingly ornate and overpowering halls, with each alcove containing something priceless. I’m told that the palaces, chapels, museums and churches of Europe were built on the assumption that displays of wealth == displays of power, and the hallways of the Vatican Museums all seemed to designed to deliver the message Don’t Mess With the Roman Catholic Church.

After a stretch of this, you’re given the option to stray from the path and check out the ancient Egyptian and Etruscan museums. I skipped the Egyptian section — impressive, no doubt, but I had a Greek and Roman theme going, and I didn’t want to have to adjust to something else that I didn’t have enough historical context to appreciate. I got back on the route to the Sistine Chapel, and it’s around there that the whole thing reaches a tipping point. What had been an overwhelming but majestic display crossed the line and became frankly ridiculous.

It becomes a stretch of one impossibly large hallway after the other, the entire space crammed with details fighting for attention. It’s not just the case that there’s no time to stop and think; it’s actually dangerous to. You can look at the ceiling and realize that any one of these paintings was probably a person’s master-work, the thing that his entire life was building up to. And that there are hundreds of these in this hall alone, and no indication of how many hallways are left to go.

And at the end of each hall, a sign drawing you forward towards the Sistine Chapel. There’s no real pretense that you’re here to see anything else; from the moment you walk through the ticket area, there are arrows pointing you towards the Main Attraction. At first, I’d been disappointed, because I naively believed that the “Sistine Chapel ahead” sign meant that it was just in the next room — but that was before an hour and a half of Halls of Maps and Halls of Tapestries and Halls of Mentholyptus (probably not real; I quickly lost track). It didn’t take long for me to hit the point of saying “okay I get it just get me to the Cappella Sistina already,” but there was still a long way to go.

And the museums don’t seem to get the idea of a “climax,” either, since they keep throwing more ornately-decorated rooms of impossibly priceless art at you after you’ve seen the Sistine Chapel. I’ve no doubt I walked briskly through masterworks of incalculable value, ignoring everything except for the one sign that said “uscita.”

One of the only sections of the museum that had been pointed out to me before-hand was the “Raphael Rooms”. In any other environment, they’d probably be a highlight, but here they just seem like a last obstacle towards the final destination. At least when I was there, they were kept dark and cave-like, and there wasn’t enough space for all the tourists to get through comfortably. So we just plodded on, following the arrow.

And just when you think you’re close, the Vatican Museums throw one last curve-ball at you: a long series of stark white rooms off the main path, each a gallery for 20th century religious art. These got the biggest disservice of all, ripped of any context they might’ve had and positioned as one last hurdle before the finish line. Especially after seeing hundreds if not thousands of master-works of representational and realistic art, attempts to present the Crucifixion or the Resurrection or the Assumption of the Virgin in a modern style just come across as sketchy, amateurish, or downright ugly.

Then finally, the Main Event. There are countless signs and notes and pictures and other reminders that photography isn’t allowed in the Sistine Chapel. I haven’t seen a rule so blatantly and casually ignored since “SPEED LIMIT 6 IN GARAGE.” Walking into the chapel is like walking through a mass of paparazzi where someone forgot to lay down a red carpet. Blinding flashes going off all around you, hands holding digital cameras and video cameras and phone cameras all stretched towards the ceiling. You’re also reminded to keep the noise down, but there was a roar of voices louder than at Grand Central Station. Every language known to humanity was being spoken; I’d swear I overheard people talking in Klingon and FORTRAN. I didn’t talk or take pictures; even if they were going to ignore the rules, I was going to stick to them if only on principle.

There was plenty of security making its way through the crowd, doing nothing to enforce the “no pictures” or “keep it quiet” rules. It’s not that they were bored, since their eyes were darting everywhere. I’m guessing that, like me, they were just simply overwhelmed. I’d seen such an excess of art by that point that you couldn’t get my attention with anything less than an entire ceiling painted by Michaelangelo. Even then, I didn’t really care, because I was too exhausted to do much more than say “I was here” and then head back to where I could get an internet connection and really see the painting. I think that the guards had stopped looking for the small-time offenders and were just concentrating on finding people with cans of spray paint or bombs. There’s not much more that they could’ve done, since there were simply too many people.

And to that I say: Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you guys made birth control a sin.