New Age...

Yesterday, the wife brought me to a get-together at her boss's apartment out in Philly. I was expecting a little weirdness, since her boss is a middle-aged Jewish woman with some odd tendencies, but I was not prepared for ANYTHING!

When we got there, we immediately got into a fight about parking, since we were unable to find a lot near her apartment. After driving around for a few minutes, we secured a most choice parking spot, right outside of her apartment. Score one for me!

We hit the buzzer for her apartment, and were let in. Unfortunately, we didn't realize that if we didn't get on the elevator ASAP, the elevator would lock, and we'd be unable to get to the proper floor. This was all because the apartments in that building occupy the entire floor, and if you were buzzed into the building, you could then have access to the entire building. So, after some confusion, and a call to the emergency monitoring company by my wife, someone came in who was going to the same party we were, and activated the elevator. Yay.

So we get up to the apartment. It's very nice. I'm sure the cost of the apartment (not sure whether she rents or owns) is ridiculous, and the furnishings were very nice. They weren't my cup of tea, decor-wise, but it was a nice apartment nonetheless. Food was interesting. She served a light dinner before we started watching this movie, apparently the center of this whole shindig. We were served a sesame noodle type dish, which, although it was cold, was amazing! I had to stop myself from going back for seconds, thirds, etc. There was a kind of minestrone soup which just had too many weird squashes and other things of that sort to be tasty. Skip. The salad was one of the weird mesculine mixes with odd dressings and nuts and such. Skip. The wife loved it, though.

So anyway, odd food aside, there were many bottles of red wine opened, and I had a giant glass of a nice Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon. Everyone was drinking and having a good time (and trying to figure out what the final score of the Bears/Seahawks game was) and then she threw on this video, called The Secret.

The whole premise behind this film is that there is a secret force in the universe, called the Law of Attraction. Essentially, it boils down to this notion that if you think about good things happening to you; if you concentrate on that new car you want, it'll happen, one way or another. Additionally, it is presented as a conspiracy, in that people have known about it for thousands of years, but kept it a secret from the masses for fear that they would lose their power. That's right, they tried to make a case that the secret was responsible for the top 1% of the nation making a disproportionate amount of money as compared to the rest of the nation.

Anyway, they make these ridiculous claims that you can better yourself, just by thinking about it. That when you constantly worry about debt or money troubles, all you get are more debt and money trouble, but if you constantly envision yourself with a Ferrari and a palatial mansion, you'll somehow get these things, just by thinking about them. One guy went as far as to say that the only reason he had a $4.5M mansion in California was because he envisioned himself with that. I say its more likely that he sold a ton of books, a la, L. Ron Hubbard, and made a shitload of money, fleecing people out of it in the guise that they can help themselves.

I digress.

There was another guy on there, Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith D.D. While most of the quacks on the program had titles such as "Quantum Physicist," "Metaphysicist," or "Author," this guy was a Visionary. That's right. A Visionary. How does one become a Visionary? How can I get me that job? Can I just start walking around to the cubicles, selling snake oil, and call myself a Visionary? Would people buy something from me? I think I'm going to quit my job and become a Visionary.

We had to cut out early, because we were "supposed" to be "meeting" my "parents" for "dinner," so I didn't need to watch the entire 90 minutes of the flick, but before we left, I actually heard someone on the movie say that man does not understand what electricity is made of. Really. I guess that the electrical engineers of the past were wrong when they figured out that electricity was made up of positively and negatively charged particles called "protons" and "electrons." Maybe their editors should take a look at this Wikipedia entry on electricity before they allow crap like that make it to celluloid.

Oh, and if you're interested in researching this film, check out the IMDB entry here.