Are You Not Entertained?

Occasionally, life presents me with an honest-to-goodness cultural stereotype. While working my un-fulfilling retail job yesterday, I passed by a middle-aged Asian woman, who suddenly, apropos of nothing, told me, "You look like that actor...he was in Proof?"

To which I responded, "Uh, I never saw that, who do you mean?"

"Proof, with, uh...Meg Ryan? No, not Proof...Proof of Life, yeah, that's it. Russell Crowe!"

Color me flabbergasted. I've been told that I look like two people in my life, and neither of them were Ridley Scott's favorite slice of Australian beefcake. A girl once told me that I looked like actor-director Kenneth Branagh, which is not a terrible resemblance, and a kid in a Taco Bell actually mistook me for the lead singer of The Spin Doctors, which is a similarity I categorically reject (even if I did have longish hair at the time and probably looked like an unwashed hippie).

For the record, here's Russell Crowe in the rarely-seen or remembered Proof of Life:

Here's the most recently available photo of myself (I'm the one on the right, smartasses):

For full effect, picture my face painted camouflage as I rescue David Morse while boning his wife on the side.

Interesting side note: here's David Morse in the same movie, who looks almost exactly like my dad:

So, to sum up, we have a lady saying that I look like an actor who I don't look like from a movie that nobody saw that actually features another actor who is a much better candidate for my doppelganger, all of which leads me back to the cultural stereotype I mentioned earlier:

Asians really can't tell us apart.

Writing for Other People Is Weird

So, I've taken on a little no-money writing gig for a start-up blog out of New Zealand called Men's Domain. The site owner found me through Twitter and asked me if I would like to write a movie column of some sort, so I proposed "The DVD Cave," which would be a spotlight on movies that "real men" should have in their collection. So far I've featured The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Hard Boiled. It's a neat little thing, and even though I make no money at it, it makes me feel like professional writer to publish things on somebody else's website.

Here's the thing, though: it's really hard. Here on my own blog, I can vomit up words by the page and the only standards I have to meet are my own. But when I write for somebody else, I get all self-conscious, and my language gets weirdly formal, and the worlds wind up petering out way too soon. For instance, I should be able to write a few thousand words about The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly in my sleep; after all, it's one of my favorite movies. But for this other blog, I barely managed a page.

I keep telling myself that I'll eventually learn to relax and write as comfortably for other people as I do here in my own comfy corner of the blogosphere, but every time it's time to write a new DVD column, I procrastinate until the last moment, then quickly type up an awkwardly-written series of words that doesn't even communicate one tenth of the opinions I hold about the chosen film. Or, at least, it feels that way. I don't know how it reads.