People complain way too much. Take the weather, for example. Now, I am always astounded by how much people have to say about the weather, but I digress (or do I?) Anyway, in Seattle, I have a heard a lot of people say that it rains all the time. I have also heard myself explain to a lot of people that this thing that people say about the weather is either blatantly untrue or completely true and wonder­fully so. That’s just me adding a little variety to boring conversations.

Today, I will firmly stick to the latter stance, that a little rain never hurt anybody. After all, rain is nothing but water falling from the sky. Look at the bright side — in a few years’ time, it will be falling space-junk (like forgotten satel­lites) that you need to worry about. If you’re lucky, it will take a good snap of you from up above, that your friends will tag you with on Facebook once it irrev­o­cably damages your face. And yes, I will let this sentence be, leaving it on an ambiguous note.

Do you realize that water falling from the sky is no big deal? If you are reading this and are not named Garfield, you are almost certainly not a cat. That probably means you take a shower everyday (with water), wash your clothes (with water) et cetera. So what’s there to complain about? Live with it. Get wet. Enjoy it!

In fact, maybe — just maybe — you could even use the weather to your advan­tage. The next time you need a shower, just wait till it starts pouring and take a walk out in the open instead!

Now this rain phenom­enon starts looking interesting…let’s see if we can take its useful­ness a step further. Why wash your clothes at all? When you walk out in the rain, just make sure you’re wearing your dirty laundry. Another problem solved.

What, did I hear someone say “deter­gent”? Stop whining — there’s enough chlorine in the atmos­phere to poke holes in the ozone layer over the Arctic — that’s certainly enough to bleach your fabric. That’s close enough, you know.

And hey, now you have a good reason to argue for climate-change as well. This just keeps getting better and better. I’m sick and tired of watching doomsday movies about the Earth’s climate going berserk, where some divorced scien­tist dude figures things out but gets laughed at in the begin­ning only to be redeemed later, and everyone turns to him to fix the world, which can only be done by building a series of ladders from the Earth to the Moon through an asteroid belt, and a banal happy conclu­sion is thrust upon us whereby some unimpor­tant sidekick character dies, the scien­tist dude gets reunited with his ex-wife, and the kids continue to exist and do and say annoying things ever after — but hey, you can’t have completely happy endings, you know?

This brings us to movies — another thing everyone seems to like to complain about. “That movie really sucked!!” Boo hoo. I for one, have found a great use for Hollywood’s bad movies, much like one can use dung as manure and stop complaining about it.

The general idea is this: you find a mediocre movie to watch online — you will find several of these for free — and then you watch some of it based on a formula: ten minutes from the begin­ning, and then two minute clips, skipping ahead fifteen minutes at a time until you reach the end. The ending is not impor­tant. All in all, you would have watched about twenty-minutes of this movie, and gotten an idea of the names of the charac­ters, the plot (which is gener­ally as obvious within the first ten minutes as a billboard studded with neon lights on 8^th Avenue) and how the movie is likely to end. That brings us to the main event: reading the popular user-reviews on IMDb, which will now make sense since you know the plot and can identify the characters.

Now, it is impor­tant to choose the movie carefully. For instance, avoid the kind of movies where every­thing takes place in the dark; that’s just plain boring. Also, don’t select movies that have little dialog; those are bound to be based on some Pulitzer-prize-winning novel or the other, and you will always find people who rave about what is unarguably a perfectly bad movie. In fact, the best movie candi­dates are the ones which have both male and female charac­ters in it (distinctly so), not one of them mumbles too much and looks ugly at the same time, and the movie has an IMDb rating between 5.0 and 6.0.

So there you have it — a perfectly wonderful forty-five minutes extracted out of a mediocre movie on some rainy day. Ah…I love this weather.