For six days in late April, S and I were in Costa Rica. It was a thrilling, exhausting, memorable trip full of surreal moments, and I'm going to try to capture the mood in a series of posts.

THURSDAY, APRIL 24

We flew out of Dulles at 7 a.m., connecting in Charlotte for a late-morning flight. The Charlotte airport has what appears to be a relatively new beer bar, the Carolina Brewing Co., but after two hours of walking around looking for the perfect breakfast and lounging in the airport's signature rocking chairs, I decided to pass on a quick brew. A friendly IT contractor on the flight sternly warned us to avoid any cabs in Costa Rica without a yellow triangle, since unlicensed cabs might kidnap and rob us. I was surprised by how everyone kept referring to Costa Rica as a "third world country" - it's the most whitebread country in Central America, perfect for easily-startled Americans, right?

A Three-Hour Tour

We got a cab (no yellow triangle!) to our makeshift shuttle-van pickup spot, which turned out to be a souvenir shop. A young woman at the store danced in the aisles to the classic soul and funk on the local radio as we waited and browsed. I bought a chorreader (cloth bag for making coffee, set in a wooden stand) and some cigars, which Dancing Queen assured me were no different than Cubans, just made in Costa Rica. It was one of the few purchases we ended up making by card - a lot of places only take US dollars or colones - and it backfired for S, whose bank statement revealed she was charged $145 for a $14 small painting of a local violin guy. (She's working it out now.)

We had a three-hour trip on what is considered Costa Rica's best road, to Manuel Antonio, a Pacific beach area. By "best road" I mean "entirely paved." It was as steep and winding as any road I've ever been on, wrapping around the mountains as we passed through tiny towns with no distinction between residential and commercial zoning. We also learned that hired drivers like to run personal errands en route - ours stopped at two roadside stands for produce, including an entire flat of mangoes (he promised the owner to bring back the flat). This drive was also our first experience of single-lane-only bridges that looked like they'd fall apart any minute and featured long backups. A British couple in the van told us they didn't realize San Jose was so boring, so they jumped in the shuttle and got dropped off with no place to stay shortly before our final stop.

Hostel Takeover

Traveling with no reservations is pretty common in Costa Rica, we learned from the drifters at our first hostel, on top of a big hill with a gorgeous ocean view in Manuel Antonio. We'd been traveling for 14 hours and weren't in much mood to chat with the young hippies, although S patronized a dark-skinned, shirtless Brit-accented guy who turned out to be Norweigan. I plopped in a porch hammock and tried to ignore everyone bantering but eventually chatted with a tall Canadian chick about how weird this hammock was.

Monika, one of the hostel managers and San Francisco native, recommended dinner at D'Angel, a small open-air restaurant (also typical) with spaghetti as well as comida tipica (traditional food - meat, rice/beans, stewed vegetables, cole slaw and fried plantains). We saw our first tiny lizard hanging under the roof, and encountered Costa Rica's de facto national beer, Imperial. Big heart-of-palm salad, two fresh juice drinks and big comida tipica beef and chicken dishes: $15. Pretty decent. The local supermarket also had good foreign beer - I picked up a bottle of Belgium's Leffe and an Imperial. And learned that it's hard to drink bottled beer in humid weather - it gets really frothy and nearly chokes you.

Next post: My Lover Tour Guide, Or, Creepin' Lizards

20

It's pretty pathetic when your first instinct when writing a blog post is to say "Yes, I'm still here." Then again, that's probably the content of 9 in 10 blogs, so here's to the lowest common denominator.

Life has been a weird mix of busy and repetitive. Work feels like "Groundhog Day" most days - I'll let you figure out what I mean. Consecutive days each week are taken up with small groups from different churches, and it's a little much at times, though I like them and don't plan to leave. The big problem is that I miss both nights of Pizzeria Paradiso's half-priced drafts, but it's not easy to tell your friends "I'm choosing hard-to-find microbrews and Neapolitan pizza over you," and sounds a little desperate to my own ears. One of my groups made it over to Pizzeria this week, late after a campus lecture by a "hot" New York pastor at Georgetown - half of them had never been, and though nothing was on special, we enjoyed the Oskar Blues Old Chubb, Rogue Anniversary Charlie and others. And argued theology, or something, though as usual I was mostly distracted by my draft and share of the pie.

In a last gasp of beer-centricity before a sort-of break coinciding with Lent, I hosted a Sweet Sixteen-style beer-tasting and pizza-making tournament with S and T (yes folks, this is a new name-abbreviation) over the weekend, and it was hugely successful - roughly 50 people came, half RSVPed the first day - and only slightly messy. Ommegang Abbey Ale beat the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA in the final round, out of 18 entries, if you were wondering. We learned that it takes a lot of stamina to keep drinking, even when it's only a jigger for each matchup.

Not much else to report that I feel like making public just yet. S and I are going to Costa Rica in April - she did a family-paid cruise over Christmas but I haven't been anywhere but Canada since I was 18, when I went to Chile on a feel-good mission (let's be honest). I'm not hoping for anything particularly "authentic," though it could be nice to practice my Spanish a little again (5 on the Spanish Language AP test, yeah!). Mostly I just want to lay on the beach, buy some knickknacks for family and friends, and take home a monkey butler. Two roommates are leaving soon, one for marriage and the other for a solitary and more mature existence than a house with a basement lounge called the Super Cool Bonus Room. I need to get a new bike tire so I can give back T his bike, which I've been using for a year without shame. With all the cold and little interest in recreational exercise (though today I did two hours of trail-walking), I've gained a few pounds, and my emo-boy t-shirts are fitting a bit snugly.

Also, one of these days Jeremiah and I will launch our much-discussed, little-populated all-things-culture site, for which we constantly text and e-mail each other with suggestions that eventually we'll search for in our inboxes and phones so we can put it all together. Oh, and S and I have thrown together a Christian dating site, Ecclesiator (trademark pending), that we're hoping people will use to set up their friends from different churches, because if there's one thing conducive to long-lasting relationships, it's putting your friends in the role of your obnoxious aunt. We haven't promoted it much yet because, like most things I do, it's nowhere near complete. I would love to say that it's even in alpha, much less beta - it's more like the formless earth before creation.

So that's it to some extent.

It's been a while since I've given a plug for the fake blog by my alma mater's president, but it's still really funny, and has some new posts, so I'd recommend adding it to your blog feeds. To understand why this blogger (a friend from college) created this childlike braggart character, read this old magazine article about the man out to "engage the culture." I find it utterly hilarious that the first two search results for his name pull up satire about him. You've gotta give the man credit for not wanting to make himself an even bigger target by demanding takedowns of these pages.

Is anyone reading this blog anymore without my prompting?

I was treated to one of the most bizarre spectacles in music history tonight: What turned out to be a two-year-old Coldplay performance on Austin City Limits.

The band did their normal numbers, a Johnny Cash-inspired song and then a "Ring of Fire" cover. Michael Stipe from REM showed up too, looking as gaunt and stylish as ever, as if Kate Moss went through chemo and rubbed sandpaper on her face. What stood out and repulsed me repeatedly was Chris Martin's dancing.

It's easy to forget that Coldplay's frontman got famous by walking on a beach in the rain, swaddled in a windbreaker, in the video for "Yellow." He donned a nearly-shaved head and perma-stubble (a regular feature of my face) for the band's followup, and it stayed for a long time. Now I'm not the most savvy observer of pop culture, listening to little else than public, jazz and indie rock radio, but Chris Martin's hair had never been so shaggy that I remembered - Kenny Loggins and early-80s Bono came to mind. My guess is he was going for the latter.

Bad hair I can forgive - mocking epileptics I cannot. Chris Martin had no shame on that stage, contorting his figure in ways devised by Lucifer in the aftermath of his fall from heaven and loosed on the earth in December 2005. At one point he started making what appeared to be sign language for retarded people, without a hint of self-consciousness. He hopped around stage on one foot, doing something akin to jazz hands. He dry-humped the piano during "Clocks," rocking the bench so hard you hoped he'd fall on his ass and paralyze his spine. Michael Stipe has rhythm, as displayed in the video for "Losing My Religion." Chris Martin has random bursts of endorphins. Thankfully I can't remember several other jaw-droppingly embarrassing moves he foisted upon the record-breaking audience that night (see link at the top). And yet no one seemed to care.

Well, I did. I've long enjoyed Coldplay in a sort of they're-pretty-good-for-pop way, a band that I would more strongly consider buying than nearly any other, except that everyone else was buying it, so that wouldn't make me different. Chris Martin's YouTube-worthy bad dancing has ensured I'll never give them a second thought.

When did it become kosher on cable TV to say "asshole" without getting edited out? And "goddammit"? And as if this is Amsterdam, even "Jesus Christ"? I've heard them with increasing frequency in the holiest week of the year, and in places (and times) that aren't especially raunchy or gritty.

It's easy to blame "South Park" for taking the 10 p.m. plunge and risking the FCC's wrath - the agency's professed indifference to decency standards on pay TV is eroding - but I blame network legal departments for deciding that every show should lower its standards just because everyone's watching for nipples and awards outbursts on the dial. The cursing cabal seems to be focused on Comedy Central, FX and TBS, all owned by the biggest of Big Media.

Now "damn" is a pretty good swear word for broadcast and cable TV. It's what your Grandma says about the local Mexicans, what you say about that single-malt scotch, and doesn't invoke our Lord. We brought our standards down a little for "bitch," replacing the cartoonish "witch" and "fat cow," but we paired it with "bastard" to get over the sexism charge. As the first person at my evangelical school to use both in the campus paper, in the same sentence no less, I understand the impulse to be edgy. But as "South Park" taught us in the surprisingly moral episode with 200 utterances of "shit," cursing ceases to be meaningful (and it can be!) when it's used carelessly.

Thanks to midlife-crisis-era Jon Stewart, "douche" is now standard fare on just about any channel outside Hallmark and TBN. The middle finger is less often blurred. And God bless ABC Family for giving us "Cruel Intentions" during prime time, showing us how true love (barely) overcomes in-law sodomy. I can hear "dick" or its feminine counterpart in half a dozen places after 10 p.m. The F-word hasn't made it on the small screen before 1 a.m. (thanks for breaking that barrier too, CC!), but its half-edited, missing-chromosome cousin "F-in" is nearly as annoying. The other night, "Ocean's Eleven" on TBS replaced it with "hell" in the vault explosion scene, which counts as progress. Makes more sense than "heck," and feels better, like getting frenched by your girlfriend instead of bumping or pecking.

Of course I'm part of the problem by patronizing these shows that forsake creativity for ever-more-tedious "shocks." They're worth watching anyway. "Your illiteracy has screwed us again," from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," is one of my favorite TV lines of the year. And the "13 Days of Christmas" promos on Comedy Central, using a black midget and white girls on a Christmas-themed '70s porn set, are my favorite parody since Bud Light's "Real American Heroes" and "Real Men of Genius" commercials. (Search for "13" in Comedy Central's video section.)

Hell, I'm watching "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" as I fulminate about Hollywood's moral sewer, and wishing they didn't cut the hot-chick farting contest scene. At least they left in Neil Patrick Harris (or "NPH" as Racist Cop calls him). For some reason, weed-based movies like this one and "Dude, Where's My Car?" just have masterful plots. There's even an awesome homage to the latter in the final minutes of H&K.

"OK, so you think this is just about the burgers, huh?" Well spoken, Kumar.

This has definitely been the oddest Christmas Eve and Day in recent memory for me. With S out of town until Saturday and everyone else gone, I went to the beach for Eve, a completely new one to me, and then Christmas itself with another family.

Ocean City, Maryland is intended for vacationing families, and people who are offended by people who want to ruin Christmas for us all. Just about every hotel sign in town said "Keep Christ in Christmas." Perhaps because there were no people staying in those hotels and thus no need to advertise how awesome each hotel is. The family friendly environment is buttressed by candy and T-shirt shops (one explicitly Christian) every 50 feet on the boardwalk, and belied by the official Playboy and Hustler merchandise shop on the north end of the boardwalk. Not that anything was open - shuttered garage door fronts for about 2 miles. The "OC," as every sign with limited space called it, was a ghost town.

Not that anyone cared, since no one was there. I came across probably 50 people in 3 hours on the beach, including about 20 soccer playing kids and 3 surfers. But it was a gorgeous sunny day and about 50 degrees. One lone pizza joint was open and had a respectable crowd, and I dropped in an off-boardwalk cafe run by Rue McLanahan. Much of her menu was in-season only, she said, but her hot chocolate was bitchin'. So much so that I found a hard lump of dry cocoa mix in the bottom that still hadn't absorbed. Seriously, it was tasty, especially with the vanilla and chocolate whipped cream on top, which cover a multitude of beverage sins. But you can't visit the Eastern Shore without a trip to the original Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth, 30 minutes north in Delaware, so I dropped in for an Indian Brown Ale and crab and corn chowder, which definitely makes me happy.

Because of scheduling conflicts with the sort-of-in-town Jeremiah, I didn't have anywhere to go for Christmas. My small group leader stepped in with an offer to host anyone in our group who wanted to hang with her folks, who live in DC. So me, her, college brother and parents. They were most gracious hosts and very inquisitive about me, S, work, and things you can ferment. Her folks make their own root beer every year and bottle it, which apparently requires yeast just like beer. They opened a bottle and it was very good - a bit of a medicine-y smell but a stronger flavor in general. Less carbonation than in commercial root beer. They sent me home with a bottle. And they were polite in having sips of the Bell's Sparkling Ale that I brought. We talked about lots of stuff, like how there's nothing good to watch on Netflix's streaming site. And Jimmy Carter's embarrassing brother. It was one of those days.

Post-dinner we headed to the Kennedy Center for a free jazz concert. The Center has a free performance on the Millennium Stage every day, and their Christmas show for the past 10 years apparently has been led by Chuck Redd, a well-known vibraphone player in DC that I saw before in a supporting role with funnyman pianist John Eaton. We thought we'd be able to get seats if we were there 15 minutes early, but it wasn't to be - all seats and the first standing area were already full.

We stepped out for a walk around the balcony, and came back in to be yelled at by a short-tempered guard who said we were cutting in line by coming in that side door. I briefly yelled back at him but decided, remembering a friend's story of her day in DC jail, that I didn't want to get arrested for talking sass to a dwarf in a red jacket. So we stood in the second standing area, about 150 feet from the stage. Oh well. It was a predictably "safe" show but Chuck still has some nice chops. A guy we referred to as "The Cougher" kept coughing heavily and getting closer to the crowd the more he coughed. He looked like a diminutive Vladimir Putin so I assumed heavy coughing among the masses was his form of dictating. My hosts left early to catch a movie and I headed home.

So not the most exciting Christmas season, but memorable enough to blog. Let's hope more of my exciting adventures make it into pixels next year.

NOTE: I wrote this entry about seven weeks ago but didn't finish it - this was supposed to be a three-parter, also recounting my church retreat and wacky golf adventure in West Virginia. But given my stunning attentiveness to blogging these days, that's not going to happen. So here's to dropping your pencil and hoping for the best. -- GP

HALLOWEEN

It was hard to top last year's Halloween party, our first in the house, but I think we managed this year. A dedicated guy mixing drinks at the downstairs minibar, s'mores on the grill, and a constant live DJ. The outfits couldn't be matched: Tall Roommate was Brigham Young (at my suggestion), Fast Roommate was Stereotypical TV Reporter (eerily close to his real job), Hairy Roommate was Fat Monk (an encore), S was Go-Go Girl, and I was Pieman - Homer Simpson's alter ego and "pastry vigilante." And I took my costume very seriously, with multiple shopping trips: Target (blue top, cape - a red placemat), Ross (blue tights), Party City (face crayons and glitter to make the logo), and Safeway (a key lime pie, and a butchered pie plate for a mask that I gave up on wearing out of fear for my face). And I recycled my Eurotrash leather boots from 2005's Eurotrash party. The thing de resistance, as Homer would say, was the briefs outside my pants. Several gasps and mutterings starting with "what the..." followed my non-fluttering cape.

I couldn't believe how many times I had to explain who Pieman was. People thought I had just invented a superhero that fought injustice with a pie in the face. Does no one appreciate classic television like me? But they did appreciate the free pie (not floor pie, as you might have thought). Once someone dipped a finger in the cream (tagline: "Don't do the crime if you can't do the key lime"), several other fingers followed. And once someone creamed my nose (no jokes now), I had to cream several other noses, depending on how well I knew them. A few strangers took it well. Two girls from my main church small group (most attendees were from my old church) remained nose-creamed for the duration of the party, in solidarity with the First Creamed. And to my surprise, nobody seemed to be drinking much. Perhaps our costumes were so amusing that alcohol seemed superfluous. Two people without knowledge of each other came as Static Cling. How embarrassing.

See pictures here.

VAN HALEN CONCERT

As networking would have it, I got two free tickets to Van Halen's show in downtown Washington, and took a guy from my side small group (ex-church). We were directly to the left and a little in front of the stage in box seats. My main interest in the show was seeing David Lee Roth (aka Diamond Dave) one last time up close before he lost all his hair. Eddie turned out to be nearly as entertaining - it's insane what he's still doing on the guitar as an old man.

Ever since I saw his solo video for "California Girls," I've wanted to be Diamond Dave (at various, noncontiguous times). The 53-year-old is still the Goofy Showman, I suppose the Caddyshack of Hard Rock, or the entertainment precursor to Zack Morris and Van Wilder, my other two fake heros. He still has pretty much the same attitude now, but his reflexes have slowed a bit. The leg kicks are the most obvious casualty of age - he reserves them mostly for the beginning of songs and the end of more flourishy numbers. The leather pants probably limit his flexibility too, but his half-roundhouses are just about hip-level now - no chance of kicking his own head. DLR also appears to have quite a few hair plugs now. That's my guess, considering the last time I saw him - on stage with his original bandmates a decade ago at the MTV Video Music Awards - his scalp had little follicle company. I realized halfway through the show that DLR has the same haircut as Mary Lou Retton. They did hit their peak as celebrities at the same time, you know.

Missing a bass player, the band decided to bring Eddie's kid on tour to fill in, and it was an odd juxtaposition: Lean, shirtless EVH in camo pants, and his late-teen kid, chubby in a hoodie, playing competently but with no trace of his dad's acumen. Alex Van Halen showed off mostly his stamina in playing the same pattern of percussion during an extended solo where everybody else walked off. Eddie had his own solo stage performance for a good 20 minutes of weird, ear-piercing guitar, dragging his guitar as far as the cord would go (son Wolfgang was wireless).

If anyone worries about DLR's showmanship, rest assured, it's still there. My favorite moment, which sadly wasn't captured on my camera, featured DLR asking a woman in the front row for her cameraphone, then stuffing it down his pants and rubbing it around, between the legs and back out of his pants. I'm sure it was on eBay that night. He told a story, holding an acoustic guitar more than playing it while the band rested, about emptying out his friend's ice cream truck to store beer as a teen and passing the joint around. Those were the days. By night's end, he'd gone through three matching suits in different gaudy colors, and sported a top hat occasionally.

When the "Jump" finale finally came, DLR waved a giant red flag on the second level of the stage as the synth line began (backing track - no EVH tickling the fake ivories, to my consternation). Members of the band took turns jumping, not really "off" of anything but just in the air. In perhaps the best non-groin-related stunt of the night, DLR walked out on the front crescent of the stage, where the lucky attendees had a 360 degree view, and pulled a giant blow-up microphone - at least 20 feet long and five feet high - around the wowed fans, before riding the Giant Phallic Mic back to the main stage. Glitter dropped from the ceiling, DLR did one more hip-level half-roundhouse kick, and the exhilarating, deafening show was over.

I'll get pics and video up eventually but YouTube takes a helluva long time to upload.

Three-year-old-movie-whose-ending-is-predictable spoiler alert

I watched "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" last night - a compromise with a female friend who wasn't interested in the raw performances in "Black Snake Moan" - and was really convinced that Kate Bosworth should have ended up with Mark Josh Duhamel, the hunky actor, not Topher Grace, her bitter coworker. The writing was so perfect that I ended up sympathizing much more with a man I'm nothing like, rather than the guy who is basically a West Virginia version of me. This movie is an accidental metaphor for our misplaced dreams of discovering love where we've always had it. Let me explain.

1. Tad Hamilton (Duhamel) starts as a hard-drinking womanizer who can't even keep his housekeepers straight, but he shows gentleness, introspection and humility out of character with his bad-boy image at his "charity date" with Rosalee (Bosworth). It's not just him acting to clean up his image and get the hot new movie role, I'm convinced. He is a perfect gentleman the entire evening, aside from smoking in the limo, and appears genuinely convicted that he live up to Rosalee's confidence that he has his priorities straight.

2. Pete (Grace) is a sulking, resentful little man who lords his position over Rosalee and her friend, who blithely ignore his tinpot despotism, at the Piggly Wiggly. He claims to have Rosalee's best interests at heart, warning her as Tad's charity project becomes active romantic pursuit that Tad is just an actor who wants her "carnal treasure." But as Rosalee tells him upon his much-delayed declaration of love, "you waited 22 years to tell me this?" Pete does little but insult Rosalee's intelligence, try to stop her outings with Tad (by telling her to pick up a late shift in one scene), and is otherwise evasive and impotent when it comes to his real motivation for intervening in her budding Hollywood love story.

3. Interactions between Tad and Pete show who the better man is, by far. After Tad buys a farm, a signal both to Rosalee of his long-term interest and to his manager of his changed priorities, Pete tries to humiliate him by setting him up to flub farm chores. Pete, however, ends up looking like the idiot as Tad excels in milking and splitting wood and Pete himself flubs the manly duties. Tad is always gracious in these slights from the head-case power broker. He reminds me of a charismatic friend in Seattle who put up well with my competitive slights in trivial subjects, though he's far smarter and more determined than me on the whole.

4. The final straw comes when Pete confronts Tad, on the toilet in a bar restroom, and warns him not to break Rosalee's heart, or else he'll tear Tad apart "with my bare hands, or vicious rhetoric" (indeed a good line, and one I'd use). Uncomfortable-looking Tad nonetheless treats the episode with grace and calls Pete a good man for caring so much about Rosalee. What a punk.

5. The only goof shown by Tad is his attempt to get Rosalee to come back to LA when he gets the big new movie role. Rosalee is worried that Tad doesn't really love her as he states, because he doesn't know any details about her. (It's been a week - cut him some slack?) Tad repurposes Pete's toilet-recited list of Rosalee's six smiles, admittedly a conniving way to overcome her objection, and wins her over. On the plane, Tad misdiagnoses a Rosalee smile on command, and comes clean that Pete was the source of the six-smile analysis. He doesn't put up a fight when Rosalee demands to turn the plane around, and admits without resentment that indeed, his heart was broken of his own action.

6. Pete's behavior isn't exactly impressive relative to Tad. He nearly departs Rosalee's house without an objection when she says she's leaving for LA, and then makes his feelings known through a rather intrusive mouth-kiss before saying a word. He runs away from Frasier's Bottom (yes, that's the town name) apparently right after Rosalee leaves for LA, asking his longtime crush at the local bar to pack up his apartment as he leaves for what is apparently an open invitation to join Corporate in Richmond. Is this really a sympathetic character? He avoids his problems, uses passive aggression when he's upset, and runs away when he doesn't get his way, leaving his obligations to someone else.

The bottom line is, local and homespun doesn't always equal better. Frasier's Bottom is full of wonderful people without resentment, including Rosalee's starstruck but level-headed dad (the inimitable Gary Cole), but Pete is an exception. He takes out his own frustration with himself on the target of his affection and her suitor, and does nothing to earn Rosalee's sympathy, other than act as the know-it-all, self-righteous ass he's always been. Tad, by contrast, shows real growth, if full of the Hollywood naivete that suddenly discovers small-town charm and goes overboard in his pursuit of simplicity and authenticity.

Of course there's no way that Tad can know as much about Rosalee as Pete. It's unreasonable for her to expect Tad to have picked up a lifetime of her quirks and body language after such a short period. Perhaps it was unreasonable for Tad to ask her to come to LA after such a short romance - indeed, they never even "did the deed" (kudos to the writer for that!) before he left for LA. But Tad made clear to her that he didn't care about the role that he had previously wanted so badly that he did the win-a-date promotion. If she didn't come with him, there was no point. He valued her more than the role.

But Rosalee demanded perfection from a very imperfect Tad, who was trying hard to become a better person, and wouldn't let him abandon his Hollywood ambitions. She set up Tad to connive her into coming to LA with his fake insight into her facial expressions. Perhaps this is an indication that Rosalee - who later tells Pete in a climactic highway confrontation about his own signature smiles - has secretly wanted Pete for a long time but was just as nervous as Pete about coming clean. Tad had enormous potential to become a wonderful man, and perhaps he did later as a result of his heartbreak. Rosalee put him in the unenviable position of acting to show his love, instead of accepting his budding affection as genuine and his offer to settle down.

Like "American Beauty" and "Secretary" before it, "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" built up a solid plotline about the consequences of our actions before junking the logical end and throwing up its hands, to satisfy our delusions of perfect endings without responsibility. Kevin Spacey's pedophiliac dad doesn't regret his destructive bent after his murder. James Spader verbally abuses and physically exploits Maggie Gyllenhaal into a humiliating but successful sit-in for his love. And Kate Bosworth honors pangs of desire from a holier-than-thou superior who did nothing to earn her love but observe her face for 22 years without a peep as to his feelings, while scorning a reformed actor who shows her more tenderness and self-denial than she's ever experienced.

The lesson: Be a jerk, permanently, and you'll get the girl. Risk your comfortable life for a girl, and she'll fault you for having the balls. Perhaps this movie just reflects our conventional wisdom about what women really want.