Crispin Glover

 Over the weekend I engaged in a few activities that reminded me of why it's important to start at the bottom of the ladder in worse conditions, before getting to the good stuff (why I eat the veggies and other lower-quality food items in a dish before I get to the main course, or the juicy stuff). Otherwise known as, "don't spoil your kids." 

When I was a kid, I grew up on Chicago Bulls basketball: it seemed to be the only thing anyone talked about in my neighborhood growing up: Michael Jordan, (maybe) Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and his weird haircuts, Space Jam, the 72-win season in 1996, and of course, winning the NBA Championship year after year after year after year. I just took it for granted that the Bulls would make it to the championship every season in a path of least resistance, basically spoiling me for any future fandom of any team. So when the Baltimore Ravens lost to Travis Kelce, Patrick Mahomes, and the Taylor Swift-supported Chiefs this Sunday, I realized that a lot of fanbases have it really hard: basically every team except one experiences losing at some point during a season, and for even successful franchises like the Ravens who were at various points the best team in the NFL, it still feels like a loss for fans, another lost year in a string of lost years, failure after failure after failure, the one bad loss at the end of the season overshadowing every other good thing that happened this season. Also, I feel for those young sports fans in Kansas City now rooting for the Chiefs; they've known nothing but success, and at some point they'll realize like me how rare and fleeting sports hegemony can be. Enjoy it while it lasts. 

I did NOT get spoiled, however, about food. My parents are really good at cooking Chinese food, but definitely not expansive about their ethnicity of food (it was a lot of eggs with tomatoes, black bean noodles, Dan-dan noodles, Mapo Tofu with rice, eggplant with sauce, etc., etc., so many sauces), and nothing to take pictures about (MJ loves taking pictures of her food, and her new obsession with cooking and making it LOOK good likely triumphs over the necessity to make it TASTE good). And especially breakfast and lunch, a lifetime of school cafeteria selections (hot dog day! Pizza day! Subway day!) made eating kind of a chore, a routine to get over with at most meals, even into adulthood, with Five-Dollar Footlongs (the Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann said he lived in New York City eating only $5 footlong Subway sandwiches for years, yea OK) so I never really branched out, experienced good food, etc. So eating at a Michelin restaurant really opens my world to actually ENJOYING a meal and paying for the experience of it, the pristinely made food that forces me to reconsider the philosophy of just getting full to "maybe I should cherish the times when I'm hungry because that's when I get to eat good food." It's like being mired in a few decades of .500 mediocre seasons (below-.500 would be like not having choices in food, which I've had, I just haven't taken advantage of them) but then becoming a championship team for just a meal or two. For as much as I complain about some highly-rated (Michelin star) restaurants being overrated and having their own foibles of haughtiness and not even providing enough to make me food, there are certain restaurants that really make me want to go back (back-to-back championships). When a mushroom steak is better than any steak I've ever had, that restaurant is doing something good. 

Finally, Crispin Glover, who played Marty McFly's dad on one of the "perfect" films of the 1980s by Robert Zemeckis (but produced by Steven Spielberg), Back to the Future. First of all, not seeing the movie in my childhood in its entirety as a kid was a missed opportunity (although it does have some adult themes and language in it), but seeing it as an adult made me appreciate the intricacies of what makes it considered to be a "perfect movie." That is, except for Crispin Glover, who refused to be in the 2nd movie because of philosophical differences in opinion with the director, saying the McFlys should not have changed their fate at the end from a messy unsuccessful family to one that drove sportscars and employed Biff. I personally think plenty of movies have gotten away with flawed messages and morality, but maybe Crispin Glover has a point: the McFlys should not have ended up enriched by their gratuitous fortune of having Marty work for Doc Brown who used a flux capacitor to turn a DeLorean into a time machine. They suddenly were enriched in the second version of their lives without having understood what it was like to be at the bottom and work their way up to the top. They definitely did feel like a spoiled family at the end, and would not have been a relatable family to root for had they been like that at the end. Don't spoil your kids!