Spring Comes Early: New Directions and Netflix Man Candy

Written by Life

A few months after the divorce was final, in the early days of January, I spent a couple nights watching back-to-back auto industry unveilings on Youtube. Maserati’s Alfieri at the 2015 Geneva Auto Show. The Lexus RC F in Detroit. Not because I know anything about cars. Rather, the existence of life on alien worlds trivializes our ant colony intrigues here on earth.

Somewhere in Tokyo the Director of Global Marketing at Aston Martin is pacing around his hotel room practicing a speech about performance engineering, and on the showroom floor, the design team at Chrysler is consumed with their own machinations and triumphs. Maybe they’re all just taking a quick break from stomping each other’s fingers off the corporate ladder. Maybe they’re a well-oiled band of long-time comrades, known throughout the industry as the SEAL Team 6 of family sedan craftsmanship. I’ll never know. And they’ll never know that in a bright little apartment in Beijing, one girl closed the lid on the last decade of her life, set that shoebox on the highest shelf, and went off to make banana bread.

In other, more exciting news, Season 2 of Daredevil is out on iQiyi, and if you don’t think a Matt Murdock vs. Frank Castle faceoff is the television event of the decade, then I’m afraid there is no place for you at this table, my friend. I haven’t gotten fight-scene chills like that since Christian Bale and wassisname went all close-range gun kata in Equilibrium (shut up).

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Daredevil is Grade-A man candy, and finally, finally, there is a superhero the ladies can sigh over. Look, I’m into comic book movies, but there just aren’t a lot of spank-bank worthy super-dudes. Don’t say “Thor”, ok? Thor is a hot beefcake, yes, but how much caped Ren Faire “forsooth”ing can you really stand before you just want to date a guy that’s seen a ballpoint pen before?

Peter Parker is a wide-eyed innocent, Bruce Banner has anger management issues, Aquaman is married, Wolverine is mentally unstable, Tony Stark can’t keep it in his pants, Captain America is a Boy Scout, The Flash doesn’t know when to shut up, Superman is completely unrelatable, and let’s be honest, Bruce Wayne is kind of a psychopath. That leaves what, Green Arrow and Black Panther? But Ollie can get pretty sanctimonious, and I want no part of whatever is going on between T’Challa and Storm.

Daredevil, though? All of the taste and none of the calories.

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Though I’d love to binge-watch these as they were meant to be binge-watched, between clients and classes and book writing and a bit of casual boxing, the days are flourishing and full. I haven’t been out of the country in what feels like forever (but what is, in reality, about nine months), and I thought I ought to spend the summer climbing volcanos, or go all Kalheesi in Mongolia, or hiking the Tokaido Road, and I Googled and AirBnB’d and finally realized that all my soul really wants is a little avocado where no avocado should be. I’ll see you this summer, San Francisco.