The Landlord's Assistant, Part 6: Blu-ray & blue hair
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Sandra Tsing Loh versus Blu-ray.
So, let’s recap my progress in trying to propel my 89-year-old Chinese father forward, in his bunion-impaired life. I have attempted to rent out his rooms on Craigslist – tough to do after my dad’s PHONE line suddenly went dead – causing me to spend hours and hours negotiating with both Charter and its competitor Verizon, both of whom only wanted to talk to me about giving my dad larger and larger cable bundles, with two months of free HBO, ESPN, HDTV and Blu-ray.
And speaking of Blu-ray? I find as I drift across my late forties and towards my very first AARP card? In my first step towards senior citizen codgerhood? I am reaching my limit of new technology I plan to learn about, and the first victim to fall is Blu-ray.
To this point, I have successfully fended off any real information or any real understanding of Blu-ray. To me, Blu-ray is an X-gamer plummeting backwards off a cliff, against an extremely vast and extremely blue sky. Under a giant price tag that claims that something that was $4,000 has been – just in time for Christmas! Marked down to $2,000.
I just came into Blockbuster to rent Benji 2 for my children. And yes, we can use VHS! But no, turn the corner towards comedy and suddenly before you are three monitors showing stuntmen plummeting thousands of feet to their certain death. And then some sort of sleek, black, vaguely Nautilus-like Batmobilecycle exploding into particularly bright orange, yellow and green flames? That, to me, is Blu-ray.
Blu-ray is this thing where stuntmen are continually meeting terrible fates. There is no knitting associated with Blu-ray, no cooking shows – no one merely gets into their car, turns the key, and then the car simply starts. No – here is a world of slow-motion disaster, in extraordinarily clear colors. It is a thing called Blu-ray. It costs $2,000. I don’t want it.
The point being that my dad and I have now actually given up on the land line project, this being an exotic old world technology neither Charter nor Verizon was able to pull off, probably because, against an extremely blue sky, their telephone installers would dramatically plummet backwards, in super slowmo, from their poles. And then burst into extremely high-def flames.
Instead, my dad now wants me to join him in another dangerous, high-risk project. Driving him, every week, to his singing class? I would call 911 but... no phone! No phone!
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