Amy is San Diego hanging out with her college gal pals this weekend. If you don’t already know this, Amy had a 10 bedroom apartment her senior year, and most of them get together once a year to celebrate the fact that they still talk to each other. That meant I was fully responsible for Malcolm for the extended weekend, and since he had no school this week, I punted. I decided to bring him to Bakersfield to visit my parents. They have wanted to show Malcolm around to their friends, and I decided that I would be the bad son no more and offered to bring the child to their doorstep.
We had to get there though. Malcolm is in the annoying phase of childhood where he is either asking, “why?” or is asking when we are going to get there. I could not handle this for the 4+ hour trip down there, so I did some strategizing. I decided to use the airplane trick and brought his portable DVD player. Having him watch a movie would not only give him something to do besides get on my nerves, it would also allow me to listen to a book on tape. So, just prior to hitting the road, we headed over to the library to pick him out a movie, and grab a book on tape for me. He immediately chose “Castle in the Sky” which was done by Hayao Miyazaki, the man behind Ponyo and the Curious George movie. I felt a little strange showing him a movie that I had never seen before, but I figure there was no way in hell the guy who made Ponyo would make a slasher movie with lots of naked chicks in it. For me, I got a John Grisham novel, which is a little on the fluffy side, but not too bad considering my only other option was from a russian novelist who had more syllables in his name than the book had words.
I loaded up the movie, put in the CD, and we hit the road. Everything was going swimmingly until I started to notice that something wasn’t quite right. Malcolm kept saying, “This isn’t my movie!” I thought the comment strange, but he kept watching it, so I figured it was no big deal. We stopped for lunch and he seemed to be enjoying the movie. By the way, if you are ever on I-5 and need to stop for a meal, never, ever eat a place called the Apricot Tree. The food there sucked, more reminiscent of “weird things you find on the side of the road” than “restaurant food.”
When we got back into the car, I put Malcolm’s movie back on, and noticed that I couldn’t really understand what the characters were talking about. 
Upon closer examination I realized that it was because the movie was in Japanese. Although the movie did have english subtitles, apparently Malcolm couldn’t read them and he did not understand a single word that had been said in the 1.5 hours that he had watched it. I suddenly realized why he said that it wasn’t “his” movie. I changed the options and when the characters started speaking in English, Malcolm excitedly asked to watch the whole thing again. I had recently done the same thing for Amy for a few episodes of “The Wire” so I let him begin anew.
We finished the trip with him happily watching the Japanese subtitles which, for some reason, began to appear on the screen. I happily learned about the intrigue of a billionaire screwing his entire family out of their inheritance and giving his whole estate to a unknown missionary in the rain forest. Things got a little dicey when I started to get a little tired and began chewing sunflower seeds to stay awake. I didn’t have anything to spit them in, so I took off my hat and began spitting the seeds straight into it. Every now and again, Malcolm would ask if we were there yet, but he didn’t listen to my answer and his heart really wasn’t into it. We arrived in Bakersfield in pretty good shape, and since we were both involved in story telling of some sort, the trip went pretty quickly. In case you were wondering, I was even able to remember to dump out my hat before putting back on my head!
Tags: Movies, paul does silly things
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