Sunday, June 21, 2009

Watching Moulin Rouge with my little sister

Ewan McGregor in shattered tones: The woman I love...
Robyn: IS HAVING AN AWESOME TIME IN PARIS.
Ewan McGregor: ...is...
Jenny: THE BEST WIFE IN THE WHOLE WORLD AND ENJOYING LIVING HAPPILY EVER AFTER.
Ewan McGregor: ...dead.
Robyn and Jenny: HAPPY AND ALIVE.

We forgot how adorable Ewan McGregor was in this film. Hot damn. Oh, and also how sexymazing Nicole Kidman was when she had red hair and curves.

Ewan McGregor: How could I know, in those final days--
Jenny: That poor Satine had a terrible illness that could only be cured by something awesome happening!
Robyn: Only be cured by a shock of joy!
Ewan McGregor: --stronger than love--
Robyn: But not stronger than a shock of joy!

Jenny: Hahaha, I like the part where Ewan McGregor tells her that he wasn't trying to trick her or anything...
Robyn (giving this due reflection): I like the part where they live happily ever after.
Jenny: Me too. That's the best part in the whole film. It's really good when the curtain falls and then the movie ends because there's no point it carrying on when they're living happily ever after.
Robyn: Yep, that's the best part.
Jenny: Yep, of the whole film.

But seriously, though, Moulin Rouge is fantastic. It has been way too long since I watched this film. I love rewatching films I haven't seen in ages - I forgot how hilarious Moulin Rouge is, and just think how easily it could have been total crap.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Turtles and cars

So y’all already know about me and my animal-saving ways. I always want to save poor little animals from squashy deaths on public thoroughfares. I saved a raccoon recently, and on my 21st birthday I tried really hard to save a toad though I don’t know what happened to it, and one time I saved a little cute dog, which is the shining star, really, on my saving things record, as the dog was eventually reunited with his owner in a joyful rollicking Wivenhoe park reunion.

I only mention this because I am doing this new thing where I go for walks, even though it’s as hot as the hinges of hell and I hate the heat with a hot hate, and yesterday I didn’t want to even more than I have not wanted to on the previous two days that I have done this. Because yesterday I was going to hang out with my lovely friend later on that evening, and that meant I had to go walking early, which meant it was much sunnier and therefore much hotter. And yesterday it would have been so easy just to not go. I could have just washed my hair straight away when I got home, and read my book about psychiatry, and worked on this big project I’m doing, or covered my books in contact paper and watched interviews with Stephen Fry on YouTube.

But I went walking, and it is a good thing (mercy, I am using a lot of italics today; I blame this on my recent rereading of Emily Climbs), because as I was on my way back to my apartment, I was rounding a slightly busy curve, and as a car came round the curve in one lane, I spotted in the other lane a great big turtle plodding across the road. It had a nice little face, and more cars were coming in the first lane, towards which the turtle was headed with plodding certainty. Fortunately I was there to save him. I flung myself out in front of the moving cars to stop them from continuing on their path of destruction, and gently scooped up the turtle and brought him to safety by a nearby creek.

(My mother is reading this and having a heart attack. I’m just kidding, Mother. I did not fling myself into oncoming traffic in order to save the turtle. That wouldn’t have helped, they would have just swerved to avoid me and hit the turtle anyway. Merely corroborative detail to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.)

Of course, afterwards I realized that I had taken the poor turtle back to the exact place that he was crossing the street to get away from. It reminded me of this story I once wrote with Nezabeth when we were much smaller, all about a little turtle called Fortinbras who lived in a lake that was called Deep Clear Lake but it should have been called Shallow Dirty Lake because that is what the lake was, and Fortinbras yearned for something more. This turtle probably poked its head back out of its shell after I put it down and was like, FUCK. I just LEFT HERE.

Oh well. At least it isn’t dead. I saved it!

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Life is weird

I eat bananas every day and am posting a fun fact about bananas. Past Jenny could not have predicted that this was going to happen.

Still, in spite of how much this post would make Past Jenny gag and vomit, I feel like you should know this fun fact. It makes bananas more fun. If you break off a small piece of a banana, and press into the middle of it with your finger, it will split nicely into three nice pieces. If you do not feel like getting banana on your fingers, you can accomplish the same effect with your tongue when the banana is in your mouth. IT IS AWESOME.

P.S. This behavior on the part of bananas has to do with Science. I have not just made it up.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Speed shopping

I just have to boast about this because I HATE SHOPPING. Or rather, I hate shopping that I have to do. I do not mind shopping as long as I am not shopping for a particular thing that I need to buy right now. This is because I am a Meyers-Briggs J and I like to have my decisions made quickly. If I don’t need to make a decision straight away, then the pressure is off and I can shop in a relaxed fashion and not worry about whether I buy something or don’t buy something. (Except that if I don’t buy something I will be cranky because it will have been a wasted shopping trip.)

Anyway, yesterday my sister and I were at the mall shopping for perfumes, because we were both tired of our old perfume and we wanted something new. I got one that smells like jasmine and violets, and Robyn got a nice citrusy cedary one, and anyway since we were at the mall anyway we wanted to try on prom dresses. We really love trying on prom dresses. I like to try on dresses that are poofy like a Disney princess or a cupcake, and Robyn likes to try on dresses that are so slinky you can’t even tell they are a dress when they’re on the hanger. We love trying on dresses. (The Say Yes to the Dress people would hate us.)

As we were heading in the direction of one of the department stores to look for cupcakey and slinky dresses, I said, “Unnnnnnnngh, I have to buy some new work shirts. Gross,” and Robyn said, “Yuck, that won’t be any fun” – because of the previously mentioned dislike of shopping for things that I need to get right now – and I espied Express having a sale on tops, and I said, “Can I just go in really fast and try some stuff on, really fast, and then we can go try prom dresses?” And because Robyn is a nice person she said yes.

IT WAS THE BEST SHOPPING TRIP EVER. Seriously, we went in there and grabbed like twelve shirts, and I tried them on. Robyn kindly folded them up and shook them out for me, and kept track of which ones we liked and which ones we wanted in another color or another size, and then we went back and got the other colors and other sizes, and lickety-split I tried those ones on again and we made a decision and we checked out. We were in that shop fifteen minutes. Tops. (See what I did there?) I got some sexy-ass shirts, and I got new perfume.

(Fortunately! If our pride in our shopping expedition had depended on trying on pretty prom dresses, we would have been woefully disappointed! The department stores didn’t have any prom dresses! What are people supposed to do who have formal parties to go to? Are they all supposed to wear sundresses? Is that what’s supposed to happen?)

(We did see the masturbating bear overlooking the children’s play area, though. It is very disturbing. I need them to take it away. I simply cannot believe that none of the mall employees have noticed what that bear is up to.)

(Oh, and they had a big bouncy sproingy thing set up, which we enjoyed watching. BOING. BOING. BOING. It was very cool. If we had not just spent loads of money on expensive perfumes, we might have gone on the big sproingy fun thing.)

Friday, June 12, 2009

Organization

When the new Wal-Mart opened up in town, the great big enormous one that I avoid like the plague because I hate it, my little sister’s friend Erin Molly was in love with it. She could not get over how beautifully it was organized. And I laughed at her, because yes, it was organized, but it was still – you know – EVIL. I felt like organization was all very well, but there were certain trade-ins you just don’t want to make in your life. For instance, the old Wal-Mart was very close to my house and very convenient to get to, and the new Wal-Mart was way less convenient and located on a crowded busy road. And to me, swapping convenient for organized is not a good trade.

I bring this up as an example of my hypocrisy because I just clicked like nine folders to get to the file I wanted. I am compulsive about organizing my computer files. Computer files can be like such a nice beautiful filing system, with subfiles, which is hard to do in a physical filing system. You can put things in a folder, and then in a more specific folder inside the first folder, and then inside a more specific folder again, and then inside that folder, inside a folder that is STILL MORE SPECIFIC EVEN THAN THAT. As far as I am concerned, the more folders I have to open up to get to the file I want, the more virtuously organized I am.

When I was still in school, I had a folder that said "Class Stuff", which insouciant title might suggest to the casual observer a general laissez-faire philosophy when it came to organizing my school files. NOT SO MY FRIEND.

Inside "Class Stuff", I had it organized by semester ("Fall 2006", "Spring 2007" and so forth), and inside each semester I had it organized by class. Then inside each class folder, I had a folder for class information, like the syllabus, project descriptions, and that stuff. I had a folder labeled Assignments, and then subfolders for each major project in the class; I used to make these on the very first day of class, and it made me feel pleasantly well-prepared for what was going to come. For each paper I was going to write, I made a folder where I put my notes, and a folder where I put the PDF files of articles I was going to reference, and then a folder for drafts of the paper. That meant that if I wanted to get to the current draft of my paper, I had to open up six folders. Six, and I will count them for you - "Class Stuff", "Fall 2006", "Milton", "Assignments", "Term Paper", "Drafts".

Yeah. Efficiency is my middle name.

In which I make it clear that I don't understand finance

Now, I hesitate to announce this to the internet. I’m sure that no sooner will I write these words down, than I will have an enormous crash into misery again. But for the past week I have been weirdly happy. I am just full of this sense of well-being and satisfaction, which it has been a long time since I have felt this way for nearly a week. I have all this equanimity and calmness. It’s very odd, following as it does upon several months of depression, and I have been trying to account for it.

And this is what I have come up with. My serotonin levels are up because of bananas. Yes, bananas. Previously in my life I have been known to say that I cannot eat bananas, because as soon as I eat two bites of a banana, it feels like my entire digestive system is full of banana, backed up all the way up my esophagus, so if I eat another bite of banana, there won’t be anywhere to go because my esophagus is already full, and it will just sit in my mouth until it rots and fruit flies start gathering around it.

(Ew, that was really gross.)

But then I started eating bananas, because I don’t eat enough fruit, and bananas travel relatively well and keep for a relatively long time in comparison with other fruits, and they’re cheap. Nowadays, I eat a banana every day at lunch, and I have been doing this for a while, and what has happened, my friends, is that this investment in bananas, is now paying off in SERIOUS MAJOR HOPEFULLY LONG-TERM TRYPTOPHAN DIVIDENDS.

(I am not entirely sure what dividends are. They’re what investments pay off in, right? Isn’t that what dividends means, when they aren’t the top halves of fractions?)

Because when a mommy tryptophan and something complicated with chemistry, there becomes serotonin! Get your tryptophan from carbohydrates rather than poultry, and it will give you happiness. I read an article.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Holy crap, peaches

How did I forget about peaches? It is suddenly peach season! Like magic! I went to the grocery shop, and I was looking around for pecans in order to make a salad (yeah, ya heard - I'm making a salad, and it is going to be AWESOME), and instead of pecans! I found! Peaches!

And they looked sort of small and sad, so instead of buying A THOUSAND OF THEM, I only bought one, one little peach that felt exactly squishy enough, and on the way home, I was trying to convince myself not to get too excited about it, because peaches are great but they're hard to get right. Oftentimes peaches are not that delicious.

I got home and I sliced off a piece and oh, my God, it was perfect. Perfect I say. There has never been such a delicious peach in the entire history of peaches. I mean maybe there has, but I have no way of knowing about it, because I have been living in a state of peach withdrawal. I didn't realize what a wretched state it was until I had this peach, the most delicious peach ever.

Peaches are my favorite food. Don't think I'm just saying this because I'm basking in the afterglow of a peachgasm. Peaches really are my favorite food. I have often said that if I had to live on only one food for the rest of my life, it would be peaches. Yes, I would be as sick as a dog, but really, living on only one food, that's inevitable, and at least my mouth would be happy.

GET A PEACH MY FRIENDS.