—three sticks of doom

In Super Size Me, Maverick filmmaker Morgan Spurlock embarked on what he described as "every 8-year-old's dream": to eat McDonald's food every day for a month. Morning, noon, and night, the only stuff he ate was food that had been lovingly fried and processed beneath the golden arches. The rules were these:

1. He had to have every item on the menu.
2. He had to super-size every time he was asked.
3. He could only walk as much as the average person with an office job and a sedentary lifestyle (5,000 steps a day).

His girlfriend, who is a vegan chef, was appropriately horrified. Spurlock enlisted the help of three physicians, and checked in periodically to see how much damage had been done. By the end of week one, he had put on 8 pounds. Keep in mind that's more than a pound a day. But that's nothing, because by the end of the month—prepare yourself, please—he had put on a total of 25 pounds. He had also gotten to the point where his family physician became livid and told him "Stop the experiment. Stop it or your liver's going to shut down."

I was looking around my office today, and I happened to meditate on the overwhelming abundance of plants. We actually have people on staff whose only job is to keep our captive flora hydrated. Plants are virtually everywhere in this building—on the file cabinets, forming little oases between cubie clusters, and in the hallway by the elevator. You see them just inside the glass entrance doors on the bottom floor, and in the room where job hunters fill out their copious applications. Most of these plants will never see genuine sunlight, and that makes me sad. Day after day these poor plants subsist beneath the cruel glare of fluorescent lights, never getting the opportunity to engage in authentic photosynthesis. They enrich our lives with their beauty, produce oxygen for us to breathe, and remove noxious gases from the air. What do we give them in return? A stick of stale plant food and a pat on the leaves.

It's shameful.

And I want to set them free.

Whether lazing about beside a glistening lagoon full of mermaids, or just working the burger joint as always, you'll need reading materials to keep the summer ennui from lulling you into a coma. Fight back with these picks from the bottom of my heart and the middle portion of my backpack. (A caveat to those who read while tanning: The suggested readings are so engrossing, you may lose all sense of time. Just remember that when you hear your internal organs begin to sizzle, you should probably turn over.)

Well, here I am, and I've finally seen the new Harry Potter movie. My ticket stub says "Harry—Prison," which is funny right off the bat. But let's get some embarrassing business out of the way first. As you may have noticed, I've begun cranking my way through the HP books. I admit, I was an extremely reluctant reader. I distrust anything that the whole world is raving about, and I resisted for a long time. In the end I succumbed because I love literature of all sorts, and I can't resist the promise of a great read. It was also so I wouldn't feel so freakin' left out in family conversations. Just imagine if, for some unimaginable reason, you hadn't seen Star Wars, and everyone around you was chattering about it endlessly, day in and day out, from July 4th to Turkey Day. "Oh, I keep forgetting you haven't seen it," they'd say, looking as if they felt quite sorry for you. "But like I was saying, Han Solo is really the embodiment of the mythic trickster figure in ancient cultures"—and so on.

Alfonse Cuaron directed, and I was a little curious how that would turn out. The last film of his, Y Tu Mama Tambien, was thematically fun but WAY racier than anything J.K. Rowling has written (at least in Books 1 through 3—I can't speak for 4 and 5). What Cuaron did, though, was bring the vitality and energy of his other movies to an enterprise in dire need of a makeover. If he hadn't stepped in, the HP movies may have gotten stranded Friday the 13th-style (remember: there were supposed to be 13 of those puppies) and just petered out after the fourth movie. But thanks to Cuaron's infusion of life, HP is no longer slogging along in quiet desperation, sagging under the weight of its own glossy charms. No longer is the audience lying still and thinking of England. Prisoner of Azkaban has such an exuberance to it that viewers should be more than happy to forgive its minor flaws and missteps. And if the viewers are not so inclined, then they're a bunch of ungrateful gits.

I recently discovered that the gym equipment I exhaust myself on daily is much older than I could have imagined. In 1815, a group called the Prison Discipline Society began to meet in England. Their mission was to develop the sort of devices and punishments that would inspire dread in the populace at-large, and thus deter potential criminals from committing dastardly deeds.

There once was a derelict bus;
The ghosts drove it each night at dusk.
It roared and it reeled,
Then came back to the field,
As if it had always been thus.

Act III.

MAL, ADJUS, and TED are still sitting in the yard, but MAL and ADJUS are sitting back to back. TED has not moved from his original spot. The sun is going down, it's fairly dark, and the mood is tense.

MAL: I mean, what if he was wrong? I saw Father Miller at the store the other day and he was counting out his change, and he had to do it three or four times to get it right, and I thought to myself, "this guy doesn't seem to be very good at math. . ."

TED: How dare you!

MAL: No, no, all I'm saying is that this is a pretty tricky proposition here. If he claims to have calculated the precise day of the Second Coming, how do we know he didn't switch the numbers around? How do we know it wasn't the year 3481? That would make us about fifteen hundred years early.

Act II.

MAL, ADJUS, and TED have not moved from their respective spots in the yard. It should be clear from the light that it is no longer morning, but mid-day. A faint rumbling sound can be heard in the distance.

ADJUS: (perking up) Is that the distant thunder? The golden chariots swooping down to earth to whisk us away? A storm cloud lowering from the sky, about to engulf us in the fog of heavenly bliss?

MAL: It's the man with the ice cart.

On June 7, 1843, thousands of disciples of the New York Second Advent Association, led by William Miller, donned white muslin "ascension" robes and prepared to be transported to heaven. "Father" Miller claimed to have calculated the precise date of the second coming, and followers all over the country believed him.

MAL: Man in his 40s. Full, graying beard and a stern expression. Skeptical.
ADJUS: 16-year-old boy. Overzealous.
TED: 20ish, with preternaturally white teeth and superior eyes. Sanctimonious.

Act I

MAL, ADJUS, and TED, clad in white robes, are sitting in a small yard. Behind them is a row of tightly packed, two-story houses. The occasional bird can be heard chirping in the distance.

ADJUS: When's it going to happen? Father Miller told us it was today. What if it's not today?

TED: It's today.

ADJUS: But how can you be sure?

TED: Because Father Miller is a prophet, and the Lord gave him the power to calculate the precise time of his coming.

MAL: It's special math, Adjus. Special math from heaven.

Here is a brief guide for those who wish to become hip in a hurry. Follow these guidelines, and you will attain a degree of hipness you never thought possible. Your friends will beg you to reveal your secrets, but keep in mind that a truly hip person never acknowledges having put forth any effort toward anything.

Rule # 1. Drop the names of philosophers into your daily conversations to show how smart you are. Nietzsche should be pronounced "Nitch" whenever possible. Avoid mentioning philosophers with more difficult names like Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, who never said anything worthwhile anyway. The premise of existentialism is that there is no such thing as human nature or essence, so make sure to turn this into a fervent argument for moral relativism. You will garner the respect of everyone who hears you, even in passing.

—Four sticks of doom

"Youth is wasted on the young" is one of those tedious bromides with which we're all familiar. But in Andrew Sean Greer's brilliant book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, the truth of this phrase is put on trial. A self-described monster, Max is a creature born into the world wrong. At his birth, he is as shriveled and wrinkled as an old man, and as his mind grows older, his body inexplicably grows younger. At 35, his looks and his mind finally converge, and Max gets to stop pretending to be something other than what he is. But then his body keeps going, and he can't stop its progress any more than the rest of us can halt the onset of wrinkles and sags. He dies his hair gray and walks with a cane, hoping his wife will not notice his body growing younger and firmer, knowing that when she does, the dream that is his happiness will dissolve into whispers. Time is an enemy to Max, too.

I think I've mentioned that I'd love to move to New York. Manhattan's a little more expensive than I expected, but I think I've worked out a feasible plan for survival. Here's the breakdown of expenditures (assuming a salary of $2000 a month) for a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village:

My favorite show finally gets its props!