Breaking my promise almost at once

Okay, I know I swore, no more Buffy the Vampire Slayer posts, but this is too funny and I have to. But no more after this, I swear. For real this time.

So I have this aunt who is totally fantastic in every way. She is brilliant and strong-minded and articulate and generous and just a totally good person whom I want to be just like when I grow up. (I know, I'm grown up, but it sort of doesn't count until I'm as awesome as my aunt.) And even though I admire her just absolutely vastly, I do acknowledge that our taste in film is a little different.

Actually, I can't figure out her taste in film apart from it is definitely different to mine. She baffles me. But as a trend it seems like she prefers cheerful films that don't have a ton of violence, or else moving and redemptive films that don't have a ton of violence. That said, she one time became so hooked on Firefly, which she was watching with my sister Anna, that she watched "War Stories" without Anna to tell her when to close her eyes. And for those of you not in the know, that's the episode where Mal gets brutally tortured with the electrocution and the ear being cut off and the yucky thing that went CLAMP and did all little squirmy things underneath his skin – ew, it was gross.

Well, yesterday my sisters and I had our Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon as scheduled, and it was great fun, and we had it at my aunt's house. And all day long I felt guilty and chagrined because my aunt and uncle sat in the room and watched it with us, and I was like, God, I'm totally ruining their day, making them think they have to sit in here and watch this show they probably don't even like just because we're over at their place.

Around 5:30, in the middle of an episode, my sisters and I had to head home for dinner. And I figured we'd just take the DVD and finish watching it at our house, because it wasn't a good episode for Aunt Becky, being the one where (HA HA HA) Jenny Carpenter gets brutally murdered. (Lame loser totally deserving everything she gets because she is lame and does not do justice to the very cool name of Jenny.) But Aunt Becky was all, We can't finish? Can you come back after and we'll finish it? which, sure, we were up for.

Well, after dinner we came back, we finished the episode, and I was pretty much thinking that the episode in its great unpleasantness would have put Aunt Becky off Buffy the Vampire Slayer permanently, but you know what she said, do you know? She said, "Do y'all have time for one more? Do you have to get back?"

Not really.

And then at the end of that episode, she looked guiltily at us and said, "Do y'all have to get home right now?" and when we all looked at her in surprise, she said, "Well! It's not often I get to spend a whole day with y'all!"

Sure, uh-huh. That's what the allure was. She wanted to hang out with us. Yeah, sure. We buy it, totally, we're completely taken in by that excuse, yup, it's all about the aunt-niece bonding experience. SURE IT IS.

And at the end of that episode (a semi-depressing one because they were playing like Angel was nice again), it was 10:00 at night and we'd been at her house since 11:00 that morning, with the break for dinner, and she looked at me sideways and held up one finger and mouthed "One more?"

Moral: It's not just me. That shit is addictive.

And you know what, you know what? Before Angel got evil, I was thinking that he wasn't going to be a very good villain and I was really not looking forward to him being a villain because I was all, Ugh, I can't maintain a crush on someone who's a lame villain, cause you know, if they're going to be bad they shouldn't do a half-assed job. But in fact the wicked Angel is so creepy. He sends little creeping creepy things creeping up my spine. I can't maintain a crush on him while he's evil because he's just SO DAMN CREEPY. Which isn't to say I didn't want him to kill Jenny Carpenter, because I really did (ugh, she sucks so bad), but still I get all tense and antsy every time he's on the screen and I totally don't like it when he's around or like thinking of being around, or when he's just hanging out with Spike and Drusilla (Spike! Aaaaaaaaand Druuuuusilla! I love Spike and Drusilla!) and the possibility of him being around other people is hanging in the air. It's very uncool. I wish he'd get good again. Spike is a more relaxing villain. In fact the centipede guy was a more relaxing villain.

And I miss Oz, whom we haven't seen in a while.

And you know what else, since I can't ever make another of these posts without being a promise-breaker twice, I have to say this. A while back there was an xkcd cartoon (PS, today's one is the best ever even though like tim I don't believe it's true and actually he MADE ME LOSE) that mentioned choreographing elaborate fight scenes in his head. Which, though it made me laugh, was not one of those things that I myself do, and I remember thinking when I read it, Huh, what a weirdo. But ever since I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I have totally started doing that. When I come into a room I start looking around gauging what things could be used as weapons and whether there's anything around that could be used as a stake, and how I would play it if each person in the room suddenly turned out to be a vampire/demon. My brain's all, Okay, well, I could take these pens and hold them in a cross position, and then if Sarah could grab that pencil and stab it from behind really hard – but would the graphite in the middle disqualify it for use as a stake? And frankly, we can't be completely positive that Sarah wasn't herself turned into a vampire just now while she was supposedly fetching more paper clips. So okay, then the other option is the blinds, I could open the blinds. Hold the pens like a cross while I go over and open the blinds and then POOF FIRE no problems there. But if the sun isn't streaming directly in, or if it's behind a cloud, I can't totally count on that working, so let's see, there's several trash cans, but only one of them is metal instead of plastic – not very useful; it's like they want us to be weaponless in here – whereas that bobble-head Yoda is actually quite heavy so I could throw that, and although I'd hate to waste the expensive technology there's always the possibility of smashing the demon's head into the computer screen in order to disorient it, but I have to be careful not to let it get its hands on that piece of wood that used to be a shelf because if it hit me on the head with that it would hurt pretty much a lot and huh, I should really bring a lighter in here because if I tossed it into the recycled paper box and then smashed the vampire sideways with that picture frame into the burning box then it would ignite very handily.

Which I'd feel dumber about if not for this: My ex told me once about this video game he used to play where you got points for chasing ambulances, and he said that when he had played it for a while and then he went out in his real car, whenever he would hear sirens he'd be like SWEET! AN AMBULANCE! and have the instinct to go haring off after it. And this is similar. And as we have seen the XKCD guy does the same thing. Ah, validation.