Birthday and Butt-Chuckles

I have had a series of very bittersweet experiences with director Mike Judge over the years. While his MTV Liquid Television short-turned-serial "Beavis and Butthead" amused me with its inane banter and subversive cultural commentary, it unfortunately had me snickering like an idiot for three years of my life. That laughter was infectious! To this day, a good friend of mine still butt-chuckles as if it were a nervous tic or speech impediment caused by terrets. Yet Beavis and Butthead was the least of Mike Judge's crimes against my temperment.
More gloriously destructive was his short SNL skit "Milton", which was made into a feature length movie called Office Space. This was a seemingly harmless and hilarious movie full of wonderful quotes, most of which were just "mmmm-yeaaah" and variations thereof. But its message was alarmingly potent: work sucks and office jobs suck your soul out. I found that after viewing it just once, I was ditching classes at school for three weeks. It is for this reason that it has been over four and a half years since I have seen Office Space in its entirety. Why quit cold turkey you ask? Because I had since scored myself a cubicle at the world's third largest fleet leasing company ARI. For the past four grueling years, I have been working in the same workplace as Milton, Dilbert, and even Drew Carrey (shudder). If I were to watch even ten minutes of that damned movie, I would be absent for a month and subsequently fired. I couldn't even allow myself to watch either incarnation of "The Office" for fear of severe depression and/or untimely spiritual enlightenment.

I would like to take this moment (my birthday) to rejoice in my freedom to once again watch Office Space. As of March 23rd, I have no longer been working at ARI. And though it may seem anti-climactic, I have not yet watched my celebratory film. I did see Idiocracy, but that has almost no bearing on anything in my life as you can see from the following excerpt:



The tale of my new job will have to wait as I am still far too excited to take an objective stance as a blogger. However, for my birthday, I'd like to ask all of you readers to take the time in the next week to watch Office Space. Watch the whole thing and imagine how good it must feel to leave that job. That's only half of how good I feel right now.

THANKS!


Despite having an entire blog devoted to video entertainment, I'd like to end it with stating that I've recently become very concious of what a destructive force television is. This next film captures that sentiment. And in the words of Sideshow Bob:
"I'm aware of the irony of appearing on TV in order to decry it. So don't bother pointing that out."