Bert Vandecasteele

Category: Blog

  • Cruel Angel’s Thesis – a rabbit hole

    Cruel Angel’s Thesis – a rabbit hole

    So yesterday while browsing youtube randomly, I fell into a Neon Genesis Evangelion rabbit hole. For those wondering: 1995 Japanese anime starring teenagers forced to fight religiously tinted aliens called angels – and their own angst. I wrote something about it way back when because it’s one of the best anime out there and definitely formative to me as a writer.

    It also has a kick-ass 90s J-Pop intro.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fShlVhCfHig

    I think Evangelion has the perfect intro. It’s snappy, kind of happy, but also has this weird feeling of impatient desperation in its rhythm. But that’s besides the point. The point is that, while clicking the related videos, I suddenly landed on this:

    Okay, the video doesn’t load, but watch it on Youtube. It’s motherfucking Kanye featuring motherfucking Evangelion. And I can’t stop listening to it.

    But the rabbit hole doesn’t end there. There’s the obvious alternative Evangelion Intro versions, like 8-bit and 4kids:

    These are hilarious in their own right. But EVANGELION FEATURING BARBIE GIRL IS A MASTERPIECE:

  • Dütti

    Liebe Layla,

    wie geht es dir? Wir haben uns lange nicht mehr gesehen, und ich war zufällig spazieren im Duttmannkiez und dann bin ich zufällig an deine Wohnung vorbei und habe zufällig auf dem Klingelschild gesehen, dass du da immer noch wohnst. 

    Wie lange ist es her, dass wir uns gesehen haben? Zehn Jahre? Neun? Wie geht es dir? Machst du immer noch diese verdammt leckere Weinblätterdinge, deren Namen mir partout nicht mehr einfällt? Bist du immer noch getrennt von deinem Ehemann, oder bist du zu ihm zurück? Sitzt du immer noch weinend auf der Couch und schaust dir WhatsAppvideos aus der Heimat an, in der Mitglieder deiner Familie in Syrien vom Islamischen Staat geköpft wird?

    Und wie geht es ihm? Er ist inzwischen erwachsen, oder?

    Hat er die Kurve gekriegt? Oder hat die Pandemie sein ohnehin zerbrechliches Schulleben den Todesstoß gegeben? 

    Wurdet ihr auch vergessen?

    Klar wurdet ihr das. Ihr werdet immer vergessen. Wieso soll’s jetzt anders sein?

    Es tut mir leid, Layla, ich wollte ihm helfen, damals, als er noch in der 2. Klasse war und einfach nicht lesen konnte. Weil ich ihn mochte. Weil er lustig war und spontan und zwar nicht intelligent, aber dafür klug. Deshalb kam ich jahrelang zweimal die Woche, deshalb haben ich mit ihm zusammen – zwei vergessene quasi-Deutsche Außenseiter in Berlin – Ottfried Preußler entdeckt. Aber letztendlich hat es keinen Unterschied gemacht. Weder Preußler, noch ich.

    Oder?

    Ich will es wissen, Layla. Ich will bei dir klingeln. Auf einen Tee vorbeikommen. Mit diesen Weinblätterdingen, deren Name mir partout nicht einfällt. Wie damals, als wir zweimal die Woche diese schräge Pseudofamilie waren, die ich inzwischen mit einer echten Familie ersetzt habe. 

    Ich klingele nicht. Vielleicht bin ich irgendwann nochmal in der Gegend. 

    Zufällig. 

  • The end of an era

    The end of an era

    Right. After eight years, this marks the end of my time at “In aller Freundschaft – die jungen Ärzte”, a weekly medical for German public tv, Thursdays 18:50. It was a wild ride. In eight years, we founded an in-house writers room, survived a pandemic, about four hundred episodes passed through my hands and I’ve grown from junior floor writer to deputy headwriter. I’ve come to feel at home here, and I can’t yet imagine a life without this show as its spine.

    It’s strange that a series about growth has been so pivotal for my own. When I started in 2016, I was fresh off my first job as a soap author, where I was thrown out for being terrible. I was still completely unsure that this career would ever work out. But it did, and I’m looking forward to the next adventure. It’s hard to leave my professional family – but after eight years, I need a bit of a creative break, away from the Johannes Thal Clinic in Erfurt.

    I’m looking forward to what happens next.

  • A letter to my ent doctor

    A letter to my ent doctor

    Dear ent doctor,

    Wednesday the 14th of December, 2016, I found myself in a radiologist’s practice for a scheduled MRI. I personally had no idea why other than the fact that I had been suffering from significant hearing los on my left side. I had spent the entire year struggling as a floor writer for a TV medical, finally had had my first professional victory in doing a rewrite that was not shitty and this appointment was, honestly, an afterthought. On WhatsApp, I kept cracking jokes to my colleagues about it being a great chance to research one of the many medical devices we didn’t have at our studio because it was too expensive, proofread some scenes that were due tomorrow and then I was called in. The nurse gave me headphones, shoved me into that tunnel and for 20 minutes, I ignored the metallic banging by listening to Mariah Carrey’s “All I want for Christmas”. Afterwards, I wished the nurse a merry Christmas and figured I was going to meet some colleagues in town to celebrate a birthday party. But as I was putting on my coat, the radiologist came to me in the dressing room. The words that came out of his mouth were so stupid and absurd I will take them to my grave:

    “Well, the good news is it’s not cancer, but you might wanna visit a neurosurgeon sooner rather than later.”

    I asked him what it was I had. He said he was not at liberty to say, but he would inform my doctor and they would give me call with further info. “Before Christmas?” I asked, he didn’t answer, gave me the pictures on a CD and left. I went home and started researching. The ent doctor’s (yours, dear doctor!) referral had said “suspected diagnosis ANVS”, so I googled that, and it spat out acoustic neuroma / vestibular schwannoma. My heart sank as I read Wikipedia:

    “A vestibular schwannoma (VS), also called acoustic neuroma, is a benign tumor that develops on the vestibulocochlear nerve that passes from the inner ear to the brain. “

    I cracked open the first of many beers and thought – “Fuck me, I have a brain tumor”. Six weeks of night terrors later, on the 1st of February, 2017, I would sit in front of a renowned neurosurgeon, my quite pregnant wife sitting next to me, discussing the planned operation and he would correct me: “Technically it’s not a brain tumor, but a nerve tumor. It’s brain-adjacent.” I swore internally – of all the diagnoses in the world, brain tumor was definitely the cooler sounding one. And if you’ve been to high school, you know one thing: You can’t be cool-adjacent. You either are or you’re not.

    So the tumor was benign, but it had to be operated. The operation would probably damage the hearing, facial and balance nerve in my inner ear. I looked at my wife’s pregnant belly. Four weeks later, on Monday the 27th of February, the neurosurgeon opened op the side of my skull and over the course of three hours in which he probably bored his assistants with stories about his weekend skiing in Switzerland, removed a 1.2 by 6mm mass on the left side of my hearing canal. I woke up with a thousand cables stuck to my arms, one going up my urethra, and three IV accesses: one of my left hand, one on my right, and a particularly annoying one between the toes of my right foot that everyone in the hospital would forget about for my two-week hospital stay.

    I woke up from the operation at around seven, head partially shaved, bandaged at a twelve centimeter long scar behind my ear, and found my wife sitting next to me. I remember being ecstatic: sure, up was down and down was up, balance-wise, but as long as I closed my eyes it was okay. There was still some hearing left in my left ear. And lastly and back then most importantly, my face seemed completely normal. Of all the possible side effects of the operation, Bell’s Pallsy had been on the top of the list. My wife spoon-fed me a yogurt and took a picture of me as she wished me goodnight. It was the last picture of me with a symmetrical face and to this day, I can’t look at it.

    The night was grueling. By midnight, I had used up my IV medicine so I could only take sips of whatever that clear foul-tasting flued the nurses gave me was, probably vodka. I tried to get some sleep, but every 30 or so minutes I would wake up in pain. Every time I came to my senses, I could feel the left side of my face slowly sliding further down. By morning, it was gone. My lip hung down, drool dropped from the left side of my mouth. My left eye wouldn’t even close anymore.

    I’ll stop writing here, but I could go on. About suddenly having to live with being hard of hearing. About fighting with you to get a logopedist to work on my face. About trying to ride a bike again. About fighting to go back to work. About my wife being scared for the birth of our first child, not for herself, but for the stress it would cause me. And about, five years post-operation, being in a completely unrelated therapy session and coming to terms with the fact that what happened was a trauma I had completely blocked from my thoughts. So, dear ent doctor, I hope you understand what it means when I come to you to get my doctor’s referral for my next MRI appointment, and I tell you I’m scared. I hope next time you take a minute to talk empathetically to me, instead of getting angry, berating and belittling me to the point of making me cry.

    I wasn’t like this when I came to you in October 2016 and you saved my life by suspecting I had this one-in-a-million brain-adjacent speck in my head. But I am now, and I’m trying the best I can. So please, for the love of God, I wish you’d try to stop being a dick.

    Looking forward to your call with what I hope are positive MRI results,
    Bert

  • When the 80/20 Rule Fails: The Downside of Being Effective

    When the 80/20 Rule Fails: The Downside of Being Effective

    Audrey Hepburn was an icon.

    Rising to fame in the 1950s, she was one of the greatest actresses of her era. In 1953, Hepburn became the first actress to win an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a BAFTA Award for a single performance: her leading role in the romantic comedy Roman Holiday.

    Even today, over half a century later, she remains one of just 15 people to earn an “EGOT” by winning all four major entertainment awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. By the 1960s, she was averaging more than one new film per year and, by everyone’s estimation, she was on a trajectory to be a movie star for decades to come.

    But then something funny happened: she stopped acting.

    Despite being in her 30s and at the height of her popularity, Hepburn basically stopped appearing in films after 1967. She would perform in television shows or movies just five times during the rest of her life.

    Instead, she switched careers. She spent the next 25 years working tirelessly for UNICEF, the arm of the United Nations that provides food and healthcare to children in war-torn countries. She performed volunteer work throughout Africa, South America, and Asia.

    Hepburn’s first act was on stage. Her next act was one of service. In December 1992, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her efforts, which is the highest civilian award of the United States.

    We will return to her story in a moment.

    Efficient vs. Effective

    You get one, precious life. How do you decide the best way to spend your time? Productivity gurus will often suggest that you focus on being effective rather than being efficient.

    Efficiency is about getting more things done. Effectiveness is about getting the right things done. Peter Drucker, the well-known management consultant, once encapsulated the idea by writing, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

    In other words, making progress is not just about being productive. It’s about being productive on the right things.

    But how do you decide what the “right things” are? One of the most trusted approaches is to use the Pareto Principle, which is more commonly known as the 80/20 Rule.

    The 80/20 Rule states that, in any particular domain, a small number of things account for the majority of the results. For example, 80 percent of the land in Italy is owned by 20 percent of the people. Or, 75 percent of NBA championships are won by 20 percent of the teams. The numbers don’t have to add up to 100. The point is that the majority of the results are driven by a minority of causes.

    The Upside of the 80/20 Rule

    When applied to your life and work, the 80/20 Rule can help you separate “the vital few from the trivial many.”

    For example, business owners may discover the majority of revenue comes from a handful of important clients. The 80/20 Rule would recommend that the most effective course of action would be to focus exclusively on serving these clients (and on finding others like them) and either stop serving others or let the majority of customers gradually fade away because they account for a small portion of the bottom line.

    This same strategy can be useful if you practice inversion and look at the sources of your problems. You may find that the majority of your complaints come from a handful of problem clients. The 80/20 Rule would suggest that you can clear out your backlog of customer service requests by firing these clients.

    The 80/20 Rule is like a form of judo for life and work. By finding precisely the right area to apply pressure, you can get more results with less effort. It’s a great strategy, and I have used it many times.

    But there is a downside to this approach, as well, and it is often overlooked. To understand this pitfall, we return to Audrey Hepburn.

  • elhana

    Hey guys!

    One of my texts got featured on the elhana project website.

    For those not in the know: elhana is a big brother project in the Berlin area, where you help out a kid with problems at school. I sat with Yussuf (not his real name) twice a week, from 2010 to the end of 2015, helped him with math and german and just the general facts of a elementary school kid’s life (Beyblades, Ninjago and divorce, mainly). And, because I’m me, I wrote a text about this experience.

    You can read the text on their site or on mine, whatever floats your boat.

    Working with Yussuf was a delight and an enrichment of my life. Ober the course of five years, I taught him how to play chess, and now I can’t even come close to beating him. I can wholeheartedly recommend this project. If you’re in the Berlin area and interested in doing something good on a small scale, give elhana a shout, tell them Bert sent you.

  • Opposites Attract, pt. 6

    Opposites Attract, pt. 6

    (The story so far: Alice and her caravan (Jack, Arbuck and Marie) were stranded on a floating rock with a dishonest guy named Brock. After Brock secretly stole their food, Marie turned into a gargantuan monster and Alice saved the day by crashing the rock down. But how did she do that?)

    Rocks don’t float

    Alice slowly opened her eyes.

    Jack towered above her.

    “Hey”, Alice said.

    “You missed the best part.”

    He held out his hand. She snatched it and got up. The rock was lying on top of the unmoving lizard. It had hit it squarely in the stomach. The force of impact had made its guts splatter violently onto the pristine sands, and its ladder tongue lay limply in front of its mouth. It had died the way it had come: Maw open wide.

    Arbuck was sitting in the sand. Marie was lying in his lap. She had turned back to normal and was knocked out cold. As Alice climbed down the rock, she opened her eyes.

    “Welcome back to the land of the livin’”, Arbuck told her.

    “You stink”, Marie said, but didn’t move away from his lap. “What happened? Last thing I remember is being up to my ankles in food.”

    The three of them looked at each other and grinned.

    “We’re down. That’s what matters”, Jack said. He looked over to Alice. “How did you know it was going to fall?”

    Alice dropped down into the sands next to Arbuck and Marie. She dug a piece of debris out of the sand and threw it up in the air. The rock immediately arched towards the rock and clung firmly to it. “It’s magnetized.”

    Jack looked at the rock in amazement.

    Alice continued. “When Brock made the lizard tear the rock in half, it swallowed half of it and sent the other side into the sky. And because one of the rocks was flipped onto its back, it got repelled by the piece in the monster’s stomach and stayed up there.”

    Jack frowned. “So the lizard followed us?”

    “It followed its gut.”

    “Weird.” Jack reached down and pulled the Parcheesi board out of the sand. “I like it.”

    “I told you.” Alice said. “Rocks don’t float.”

    He dug through the sand and managed to find some of the pawns. Enough to play with, at least. “They could, though. Here.”

    “In your magical desert.”

    Jack dug deeper. “Well. How else would you explain a magnetic rock?”

    Alice wanted to mutter that rocks could very well be magnetic, but somehow, the argument didn’t convince her. So she shut up and let Jack dig for senseless playthings in the sand.

    Marie got to her feet, walked over to the beat and checked it out. “Right. Who’s up for some broiled Ladder Lizard?” She walked up to the creature and started inspecting it. Suddenly, she let out a yell. “You!”

    Everyone looked up. Alice could see Brock halfway hidden inside the creature’s mouth. He had just been about to make a break for it, but seeing Marie, his body went limp. He fell down into the sand.

    “Don’t eat me!”

    Marie frowned. “Why would I eat you?”

    Jack spoke. “You’re not going anywhere.”

    Brock looked at Jack, a mixture of fear and self-loathing on his face. “I want to live! Please let me go! Don’t kill me!”

    Marie cracked her knuckles. Arbuck cocked his gun. And even Alice pulled her eyes to slits. But it was Jack, their captain, who acted.

    “Kill you?” Jack pulled his eyes to slits. “I’m going to destroy you.” Then, he grinned and held out his hand. In it lay a sandy dice. “At Parcheesi.”

    And so they had broiled Ladder Lizard, played Parcheesi, and Jack destroyed them.

    Good times.

  • Opposites Attract, pt. 5

    Opposites Attract, pt. 5

    (The story so far: Alice and her caravan (Jack, Arbuck and Marie) are stranded on a floating rock. A giant lizard lies in wait in the sand below, ready to eat them. When they find out Brock, the man stranded on the rock, has stolen their food, all hell breaks loose…)

    What goes up…

    Brock looked at them in disgust. “Hey! That’s unfair!” He wanted to rush over to her, but Alice grabbed him and held him back.

    “I wouldn’t”, said Alice.

    Brock pulled himself loose. “Why does she get all the food and we don’t?” He took a few steps towards Marie, snatched an apple from the floor and hurled it at her. The piece of fruit bounced off her tiny frame.

    Marie stopped.

    Jack, Arbuck and Alice looked at each other. They spoke; it was the same word at the exact same time. “Duck.”

    They jumped behind the treasure chest. Right on time to watch Marie’s body burst out of its seams. In mere seconds, her shoulders grew three times in size. Her arms and legs exploded with muscles. She turned around. As she stood up straight, she was twice the size of Brock and towered over him. Her eyes were shining brightly, and her lips were pulled to slits. Her cheekbones looked like they could cut a man in half.

    With a swift swoop, she lunged for Brock. The balding fat man screamed and scurried backwards as Marie crashed down onto the ground. The rock trembled; Alice, Jack and Arbuck grabbed onto each other.

    Marie rushed towards Brock again. Brock tried to dodge her once more, but he was too late. Her large hand wrapped itself around his waist. Brock wriggled as Marie pulled him up from the ground like an annoying hamster. Which, judging from his desperation to hoard as much food as possible, he kind of was.

    “What is this?!”, he yelled at Jack.

    “We warned you about Marie”, Jack explained.

    “Marie, honey”, Brock pleaded. “It’s me. Your biggest admirer.”

    Marie said nothing. She sniffed at Brock. He trembled.

    “Don’t eat me! Whatever you do, just don’t eat me!”

    “Don’t worry”, Arbuck said matter-of-factly, “she’s full.”

    Brock looked back at Marie. He tried on his best, non-scared-seeming smile. “Put me down.”

    Marie grunted.

    “Please?”

    Marie snorted.

    “Down.”

    Marie groaned.

    Panic took hold of Brock. He slammed her hand and cried: “Put me down!”

    Marie looked him dead in the eye, grunted once more, took a few steps forwards and jumped down from the rock.

    Alice sprang to her feet and hurried to the ledge. She was just in time to watch Marie land right squarely onto the Ladder Lizard’s eye. The beast yelled out, thrashing its massive tail. Marie responded by growling right back at it. The lizard opened its mouth and snapped at Marie. Marie snapped back. The beast opened up wide again and roared. Marie shut it up by throwing Brock into its throat. The lizard coughed, swallowed, caught its breath and then lunged for Marie, who fought the beast with all of her uncontrollable force. And there was a lot of uncontrollable force.

    “We have to get down”, Alice said, and once again stopped Jack from jumping at the last possible moment.

    “I think she’s got this”, said Arbuck.

    Alice focused. How could they get down? Marie survived the jump – maybe they could too? But then what? They wouldn’t as much as scratch the lizard and its impervious skin.

    A sudden shockwave went through the rock, forcing Alice and Jack to their knees – and Arbuck to the ground entirely. Alice looked at her surroundings. There was no doubt about it. Jack tried to get back to his feet, but another rumble went through the ground and forced him back down.

    “We’re shaking!”, said Arbuck.

    “Rocking!”, corrected Jack.

    The rock violently shook left and right. Jack, Alice and Arbuck were flailing around and held on for dear life. Brock’s words echoed inside Alice’s head: What goes up, must come down. Then, the force of the crumbling rock swung her towards the edge and over it. She could barely hold on as Jack and Arbuck rushed in. They grabbed her hands and tried to pull her back up, but the shaking was too violent and they couldn’t.

    “It’s no use, guys!”, Alice yelled. “It’s going down!”

    “No, it’s not!”, Jack cried out. “It’s a floating rock!”

    “Rocks don’t float!”

    Alice looked down. Twenty meters lower, Marie and the lizard were still wrestling. Soon, she would be joining them, crash down into the sand, and if the fall didn’t kill her, then the lizard would. Or Marie, for that matter. She could see the cook grab the lizard into a chokehold and yank it to the right. The rock shook violently. Alice frowned. Her hands slipped further and further down. Marie now dragged the beast towards the left and slammed it into the sand. The floating rock swerved in the same direction.

    Alice assembled the puzzle inside her head with lightning speed. The swerving of the rock. The constant presence of the lizard, even three days later. And the strange way Arbuck’s gun had swerved back towards the ledge. It hadn’t been a miracle. It had been…

    “Let me go!” Alice cried out.

    “You can’t die!”, Jack yelled. “Who will do all the thinking?”

    “I am doing the thinking, Jack! Right now!”

    “What are you thinkin’, chief?” asked Arbuck.

    “Run towards the other edge and jump up and down. Both of you. At the same time.”

    “Why?”

    “Because you’re going to flip the rock!”

    Alice could see Jack and Arbuck exchange glances. Then came nods. They let go of Alice and disappeared. Alice braced herself. She heard Jack count down from three. Thud. The rock leaned forward, allowing Alice to fasten her grip; then it came back to level again. Down below, the lizard had Marie pinned down. If this didn’t work, they were all dead. Alice could hear Jack count down again. The second thud was bigger. The rock rose until it was almost vertical, then slowly leveled itself once more. Then, Jack counted down a third time –

    And the third time was a charm.

    Alice yelled from the top of her voice: “Hold on! We’re going down!”

    A large rumble went through the rock. It flipped all the way sideways, hung suspended vertically for a second; then, like a clockwork gear, something clicked into place. The rock forcefully flung itself on its back; the trio scrambled on top of it and held on for their lives as the rock started its breakneck descent towards the ground. The wind ruffled through Alice’s hair. She pressed her eyes shut. Braced herself.

    The force of impact rumbled through her like lightning.

  • Opposites Attract, pt. 4

    Opposites Attract, pt. 4

    (The story so far: On a trip through the desert, Alice and her caravan (Jack, Marie and Arbuck) come across a flying rock and a ladder. On the rock, they meet a stranded traveler named Brock, and find out the ladder was actually a giant lizard’s tongue in disguise. Now they are stranded on a rock with no way down. And the worst part: Their food fell down…)

    Nothing but Parcheesi…

    And Alice did think about it, but even as night was beginning to fall, no solution had come. First, she had considered constructing a ladder out of their clothes, but Marie was wearing too little of them for it to work. Then, she had figured they could use Brock to lure the Ladder Lizard, but Jack would probably not go for it. When her thoughts had ended up circling around building a human ladder to get them down, she finally gave up. They were stuck on a floating rock, six hundred feet up in the air, with the only way down the tongue of a creature that had no intent of waking up.

    In the end, she gave up and joined the group. They were sitting in a circle on the ground around the Parcheesi board. Brock had given Marie his sweater and his pants and was sitting in his underwear, teeth clattering loudly. Arbuck was swaying left and right, already halfway drunk. Jack was, through some form of random luck that seemed to cling to him like a fly to honey, winning.

    Alice sat down between Arbuck and Jack. She looked at Brock. “How did you get up here?”

    Brock cocked his head towards the treasure chest. “Oh, you know. Walking through the desert, when all of a sudden I see that baby on a rock in front of me.”

    Alice frowned. “This rock? In the sand?”

    “No, another rock I just randomly mentioned. Is she always like this?”

    Everyone nodded.

    Brock shrugged. “Of course it’s this rock. How else would I get up here? Besides. I wouldn’t be able to see the treasure from below. It’d just be a regular floating rock. Why would I get up that?”

    Alice eyed Jack, who moved one of his pawns and sent one of Arbuck’s back to the stable. Why would you, right?

    “So anyway. I walk towards the treasure chest. Only that’s when old Lizzy down there wakes up. Pokes her head out of the sand, opens wide towards me. I can see three rows of pointy teeth and my life flash in front of me. But then I think: No, Lizzy. Not today. I came here for treasure. Not to get eaten. So I jump aside, she slams her teeth down into the rock, swallows half of it in one swoop and sends the other half flying. So I hold on for my life and I brace myself for the fall.”

    Brock grabbed the dice and played. Alice looked at him, waiting for the rest of the story, but it didn’t come. “So what happened next?”

    He looked over to her. “I’m here aren’t I?”

    “That’s impossible”, said Alice.

    “Well”, Brock shrugged, “What goes up must come down, right?”

    “And the treasure?”, asked Jack.

    “You’re playing it”, said Brock, watching Jack boot one of his pawns from the game. “And winning.”

    Suddenly, Arbuck jumped up. He drunkenly swerved backwards, almost went over the edge, then stumbled forward again. He looked around, eyes confused and panicking.

    “Arbuck? Everything okay?”, Alice asked.

    “What’s the matter boy?”, Marie grinned as she flipped one of Arbuck’s pawns, “Sore loser?”

    Arbuck looked behind the treasure chest. “It’s gone.”

    “What’s gone?,” asked Jack.

    “The backpack!”

    Jack shrugged. “Oh, that. Monster ate it.”

    Arbuck looked at the group, slouched his shoulders and leaned down on the treasure chest defeatedly.

    Brock got up from his spot and walked over to Arbuck. He wrapped his arm around him. “Come on. Let’s just play.”

    Arbuck shook his head. “I’m hungry. And alcohol gives me the munchies”, explained Arbuck. Then, he pulled out his harmonica, turned his back towards the group and started playing the blues completely off-key. Everyone cowered like someone had just dragged a fork down a blackboard. Then, it got even worse: Arbuck started singing. “The man took my yums.” A few equally terrible tones from the harmonica. “No food in my tums.”

    “Arbuck!”, Marie yelled, “It’s not going to get better by singing about it!”

    “And you’re not my mum”, Arbuck sang.

    Marie got to her feet, stepped over to Arbuck and snatched the harmonica. “No more singing.”

    Alice sighed. “Guys!”

    They didn’t listen and kept fighting over the harmonica. Alice looked over to Jack. “Do something about it, will you?”

    But Jack just leaned back, grinned and watched the spectacle unfold.

    Arbuck tugged at the harmonica. Marie slapped his hand. There was some back and forth, and while Arbuck, who was a man, was generally stronger than Marie, he was also pretty drunk. He grabbed Marie by the arm. Marie yanked him towards the group. Still sitting on the chest, Arbuck lost his balance. He toppled backwards, let got of Marie, tried to grab the chest at the last possible moment, but he was too heavy, and the chest just flipped together with him. Brock cried out. Jack and Alice jumped to the side (Jack laughing uncontrollably) as Arbuck crashed loudly onto the Parcheesi board. The chest fell to the side, flipped open the lid and smashed hard onto the rock. A stream of food rolled out of it and slid over the ground.

    All eyes were fixed on Brock. Angry eyes, too.

    “About that…”, he started. Then, he broke down completely. “Okay, okay! While you were busy looking at the Lizard, I switched out your food for rubble and put your backpack on the edge so it would fall down! Then, I figured I’d bore you guys to sleep with a dumb game and eat everything I wanted.”

    “Hey!”, Jack said decidedly, “Parcheesi is not a dumb game.”

    “We could’ve shared”, Alice said.

    “And last for what, two days? Alone, I could last for weeks. All the way up to the next town!”

    “I say we throw him down”, said Jack.

    “Agreed”, Arbuck confirmed.

    “Guys, we’re not throwing anyone down”, Alice said.

    Arbuck rolled his eyes. “What do you say, Marie?

    They all looked over to Marie. She was on the floor, squatted, in the middle of the food, her back to the group, and was eating. Correction: She wasn’t as much eating as she was shoving entire chickens down her throat without chewing.

    Jack, Arbuck and Alice froze in their tracks, looks of horror on their face.

  • Who’s the worst? – You’re the worst

    Who’s the worst? – You’re the worst

    Before you start thinking this is the blog post in which I finally snap, pull out my mile-long shit list and start insulting everyone who’s ever wronged my poor snowflake writer’s soul, let me put your mind at ease: You’re the worst is a delightful romantic comedy series with a twist:

    The couple (pictured above) in question are absolutely horrible.
    Which is saying a lot because they live in LA.

    Jimmy’s a failed British writer who’s written more about death than Goethe, Gretchen’s a ruthless PR agent who can spin words around faster than the hadron collider (Actually- Does the hadron collider spin? Or do I need to go for a more collidey comparison?). They meet crashing a wedding, have an insane one night stand and then… start seeing each other. What follows are the ups and downs and the what-and-how of two assholes who fall in love and absolutely hate.

    I know what you’re thinking – it’s not exactly an attractive pitch. And to be honest: I postponed watching the first season for ages because it felt like a cynical comedy that I just couldn’t like.

    But the thing is: I’ve actually grown to like these assholes. The scripts don’t pawn the protagonists off as unlikely – rather, they find hilarious ways to explore what makes a person the way they are, and what happens when people who are out of touch with their emotions are steamrolled by love. Moreover, this approach is wonderfully supported by Chris Geere and Aya Cash, who manage to play their characters tough-as-nails and totally vulnerable at the same time.

    You’re the Worst boils down to one of the most realistic and honest portrayals of love. It showcases the give-and-take of a fresh relationship using two characters who don’t know how to do either.

    Oh and I almost forgot to mention through all the sappiness: It’s hilarious!

    Check it out. You might just like it.