Here is a simplified map of the interstate system.
When I look at this map, my heart leaps, because it appears to be the solution to all of my interstate traveling problems (except the one where I don’t like to merge or switch lanes; that is still an issue). Regular maps bewilder me. There are so many different roads, and everything turns into something else and I can’t tell where one highway goes in a straight line because the map markings, they just don’t make any sense. Whereas this one makes everything so simple. How do I get to New York City? I go straight down I-10 and take a left on I-95, and BAM I am there!
Only at first I couldn’t believe it was that easy. I’ve seen atlases! I know what the road system looks like! And it isn’t this nice grid either! It’s all confusing and weird!
And then I realized that this interstate map is exactly like the Tube map of London: it doesn’t necessarily bear a huge resemblance to the street maps, but it is incredibly useful because you just follow the signs and you will pop up in the exact place where you want to be (or close enough to walk there). Which is why I love the Tube. If I get lost in London, I can just wander around until there appears a Tube station, and as soon as I walk down the stairs into the station, I’m no longer lost! I can get to anywhere then! Now America is like that for me too. All I need to do is find a major city, and I’m good to go.
I’m totally printing a copy of this map and going on a big cross-country road trip when I get home. Anyone want to come? I know where everything is now! We can just go wherever! THE WORLD IS SO SIMPLE NOW!
Monday, February 12, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
The worst of both worlds
So I’m missing Mardi Gras, which obviously means I’m missing all the delicious strawberry cream cheese king cake, and I’m certainly missing any parades that might be happening (which wouldn’t be such a tragedy if I weren’t also missing the St. Patrick’s Day parade).
But you know what else I’m missing? FREE PANCAKES DAY.
Let me give you that again.
FREE PANCAKES DAY. The day where I could get THREE FREE PANCAKES. FOR FREE.
Because Mardi Gras, it’s also Pancake Day. But it’s Pancake Day in the UK! So why are the International Houses of Pancakes in the US providing free pancakes? I’m missing free pancakes because there is no IHOP near here! At the IHOP on Mardi Gras, they’re giving away three free pancakes. WITH SYRUP.
They ask you sweetly for a donation and whatnot, and that’s all to a very good cause, and then they’re giving away FREE PANCAKES FOR FREE! Look at that picture of pancakes. I made a yearning noise when I espied it. Delicious lovely pancakes.
And I’m mi-hi-hi-hissing it! (That was me whining.) No pancakes and no king cake.
Anyway, you people please go ahead and hit that up for me. Eat your pancakes with joyous joy. Or, if you want really tasty pancakes, go to my house and plead with my sister or my father to make you some pancakes.
(I found out about this on Fark.com. It also had a headline that said, “IAEA cuts half of the technical assistance it was providing to Iran’s nuclear program. In other news, the IAEA is providing technical assistance to Iran’s nuclear program.” Seriously. Scary.)
But you know what else I’m missing? FREE PANCAKES DAY.
Let me give you that again.
FREE PANCAKES DAY. The day where I could get THREE FREE PANCAKES. FOR FREE.
Because Mardi Gras, it’s also Pancake Day. But it’s Pancake Day in the UK! So why are the International Houses of Pancakes in the US providing free pancakes? I’m missing free pancakes because there is no IHOP near here! At the IHOP on Mardi Gras, they’re giving away three free pancakes. WITH SYRUP.
They ask you sweetly for a donation and whatnot, and that’s all to a very good cause, and then they’re giving away FREE PANCAKES FOR FREE! Look at that picture of pancakes. I made a yearning noise when I espied it. Delicious lovely pancakes.
And I’m mi-hi-hi-hissing it! (That was me whining.) No pancakes and no king cake.
Anyway, you people please go ahead and hit that up for me. Eat your pancakes with joyous joy. Or, if you want really tasty pancakes, go to my house and plead with my sister or my father to make you some pancakes.
(I found out about this on Fark.com. It also had a headline that said, “IAEA cuts half of the technical assistance it was providing to Iran’s nuclear program. In other news, the IAEA is providing technical assistance to Iran’s nuclear program.” Seriously. Scary.)
Thursday, February 8, 2007
This is just too sad
I am so incapable of dealing with suspense. It’s tragic. Remember that thing I said about The Prestige, that at one point it was so suspenseful that I had to be physically restrained from looking up what happened on the internet? That may have sounded like it was an unusual circumstance, and it was, in that usually I don’t allowed myself to be restrained but just continue with the looking up of the ending. I do it in books too. I read enough of the beginning to have a sense of who the characters are, and then I skip to the end to see what’s going to happen to them. I hate it when the end contains characters I’ve never heard of before; it puts me out of temper with the latecomer characters and I never give them a chance to be loved.
When I watched The Sixth Sense for the first time, I rang up my sister to demand that she tell me what the twist was, because I couldn’t stand not knowing. When I watched Superman Returns — and we know he has to be okay at the end because he’s Superman! — I was chewing on my nails for the last thirty minutes of the flim, and Steve kept taking my hands away from me so that I couldn’t do it anymore. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve paused a TV show or a movie to beat a fellow viewer with pillows until they tell me what’s going to happen, I’d have LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of nickels. The first time I watched Moulin Rouge, even though I knew that Ewan McGregor HAD to survive because he is the one narrating the story and typing it on his typewriter, I was still squealing with anxiety because I feared that he would be shot by the bald gun guy.
So yeah. I like knowing the ends. With some books I try to hold out — very rarely, for instance, do I read the ends of mystery novels or the Harry Potter books, although I sometimes glance at the very last page to see who’s still alive. In the case of the sixth Harry Potter book, I wanted to see whether Ginny made it out okay, and I happened to glance down at a sentence that let me know who wasn’t okay; and that was an accident but it was really better in the end because I didn’t worry about anything for the whole rest of the book.
Well, I was prompted to mention this publicly because just now I was watching an episode of Sex and the City, and I went online to find out — this is true, I swear to God — whether the sex was ever going to get better with Carrie and Ron Livingstone. I used Wikipedia to aid me in my search to discover information about the sex lives of two totally fictional characters. That is too, too tragic.
(In my defense, however, they get along famously! and the only problem is they don’t have good sex! so it’d be a shame if that problem persisted when everything else is in their favor! and I can’t watch every episode in series 6 tonight, so I might as well find out now as not know for several more days!)
And yes, the sex was going to get better. It did at the end of the very episode I paused during to find this out. So I guess I could have saved the time. However, since I looked on Wikipedia I also discovered that Ron Livingstone is going to break up with her via Post-It note, so now I know not to get invested in their relationship. See? See how good it is to know the endings of things? All right.
When I watched The Sixth Sense for the first time, I rang up my sister to demand that she tell me what the twist was, because I couldn’t stand not knowing. When I watched Superman Returns — and we know he has to be okay at the end because he’s Superman! — I was chewing on my nails for the last thirty minutes of the flim, and Steve kept taking my hands away from me so that I couldn’t do it anymore. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve paused a TV show or a movie to beat a fellow viewer with pillows until they tell me what’s going to happen, I’d have LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of nickels. The first time I watched Moulin Rouge, even though I knew that Ewan McGregor HAD to survive because he is the one narrating the story and typing it on his typewriter, I was still squealing with anxiety because I feared that he would be shot by the bald gun guy.
So yeah. I like knowing the ends. With some books I try to hold out — very rarely, for instance, do I read the ends of mystery novels or the Harry Potter books, although I sometimes glance at the very last page to see who’s still alive. In the case of the sixth Harry Potter book, I wanted to see whether Ginny made it out okay, and I happened to glance down at a sentence that let me know who wasn’t okay; and that was an accident but it was really better in the end because I didn’t worry about anything for the whole rest of the book.
Well, I was prompted to mention this publicly because just now I was watching an episode of Sex and the City, and I went online to find out — this is true, I swear to God — whether the sex was ever going to get better with Carrie and Ron Livingstone. I used Wikipedia to aid me in my search to discover information about the sex lives of two totally fictional characters. That is too, too tragic.
(In my defense, however, they get along famously! and the only problem is they don’t have good sex! so it’d be a shame if that problem persisted when everything else is in their favor! and I can’t watch every episode in series 6 tonight, so I might as well find out now as not know for several more days!)
And yes, the sex was going to get better. It did at the end of the very episode I paused during to find this out. So I guess I could have saved the time. However, since I looked on Wikipedia I also discovered that Ron Livingstone is going to break up with her via Post-It note, so now I know not to get invested in their relationship. See? See how good it is to know the endings of things? All right.
Bah.
Did you know that Robinson Crusoe has two halves? One, two? And that only one of them is the half where he lives on the desert island for a really long time?
Okay, officially in my brain I knew that there was more to Robinson Crusoe than the desert island bit, but you see I didn’t apply it to my LIFE because I believed that I would never need to. When my brain thought about that book it was more just one of those thoughts that slides painlessly into your brain and then painlessly out of it and never receives much notice. Occasionally I would focus on it enough to have fond memories of Swiss Family Robinson, but basically I never pondered it extensively and I never thought about having to read it.
And now I am reading it. For several hours today I have been reading it, taking breaks to watch episodes of Sex and the City in order to take the edge off. It is so amazingly boring that I can’t believe my eyes haven’t fallen out of my head. I read and I read and I read, and then suddenly the book came to an abrupt stop and then there was a blank page and then there was PART TWO. A whole other part that I now have to read!
I don’t know why this causes such deep despair in my soul. I knew that I was only halfway through the book because I could see the remainder of the pages stretching endlessly out before me; but there is something about it being Part Two, like the author is officially telling me I have only worked my miserable wretched way through half of this endless novel, that makes the idea of continuing this book completely unbearable.
But there was snow today! Real right proper snow that made the ground all white (I’ll post a picture later of the view from my window) and fell all down from the sky in flurries for a little while and packed together in lovely snowballs. I woke up this morning around nine-thirty and was mystified by the lack of snow; so I pulled the curtain expecting to see another dreary dreary rainy day — and instead there was snow everywhere! My brain ASPLODED with joy.
Unfortunately I had no one to play with. My flatmates are all very underwhelmed with the idea of snow because they have seen it many times before, and Steve had to work, so I had to play in the snow all by my wee forlorn self. I built a lil snowman and then decapitated him by throwing volleys of snowballs at him until his head just fell off. That was fun. I wanted to throw a snowball at a goose, but there were no gooses around and eventually I decided that wouldn’t be very nice anyway.
(The one time it snowed in Baton Rouge — it might even have been on Christmas Day because I remember my family all coming outside to go somewhere all together in the car — I threw a snowball at this nasty horrible cat that I hated. It was a totally vile cat and it used to come over to my house from its home across the street and beat up on my cat and eat up all of her food, and it was really not expecting to be hit with a snowball. It jumped and then fled in horror and there were still bits of snow on its fur, and I really enjoyed the whole thing.)
Okay, officially in my brain I knew that there was more to Robinson Crusoe than the desert island bit, but you see I didn’t apply it to my LIFE because I believed that I would never need to. When my brain thought about that book it was more just one of those thoughts that slides painlessly into your brain and then painlessly out of it and never receives much notice. Occasionally I would focus on it enough to have fond memories of Swiss Family Robinson, but basically I never pondered it extensively and I never thought about having to read it.
And now I am reading it. For several hours today I have been reading it, taking breaks to watch episodes of Sex and the City in order to take the edge off. It is so amazingly boring that I can’t believe my eyes haven’t fallen out of my head. I read and I read and I read, and then suddenly the book came to an abrupt stop and then there was a blank page and then there was PART TWO. A whole other part that I now have to read!
I don’t know why this causes such deep despair in my soul. I knew that I was only halfway through the book because I could see the remainder of the pages stretching endlessly out before me; but there is something about it being Part Two, like the author is officially telling me I have only worked my miserable wretched way through half of this endless novel, that makes the idea of continuing this book completely unbearable.
But there was snow today! Real right proper snow that made the ground all white (I’ll post a picture later of the view from my window) and fell all down from the sky in flurries for a little while and packed together in lovely snowballs. I woke up this morning around nine-thirty and was mystified by the lack of snow; so I pulled the curtain expecting to see another dreary dreary rainy day — and instead there was snow everywhere! My brain ASPLODED with joy.
Unfortunately I had no one to play with. My flatmates are all very underwhelmed with the idea of snow because they have seen it many times before, and Steve had to work, so I had to play in the snow all by my wee forlorn self. I built a lil snowman and then decapitated him by throwing volleys of snowballs at him until his head just fell off. That was fun. I wanted to throw a snowball at a goose, but there were no gooses around and eventually I decided that wouldn’t be very nice anyway.
(The one time it snowed in Baton Rouge — it might even have been on Christmas Day because I remember my family all coming outside to go somewhere all together in the car — I threw a snowball at this nasty horrible cat that I hated. It was a totally vile cat and it used to come over to my house from its home across the street and beat up on my cat and eat up all of her food, and it was really not expecting to be hit with a snowball. It jumped and then fled in horror and there were still bits of snow on its fur, and I really enjoyed the whole thing.)
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
NYAHA!
For those of you who thought it was funny to PERSECUTE me by telling me persistently that Lupin had to die because Wormtail had a silver hand and silver kills werewolfs, YOU ARE WRONG. Lupin is not going to be killed by Wormtail with his silver hand, and I have this straight from the horse’s mouth. Ms. Joanne Rowling has taken the time to personally refute this OBVIOUS MYTH on her website. She says, “Nice idea, clearly predicated on the legend that only a silver bullet can kill a werewolf — but incorrect.” HA. HA. HA.
You know what that means? It means that there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that Lupin is going to die. He’s doing his werewolf thing (poor darling; I want to give him a big hug and take him out for hot chocolate. Tonks too, because even though I’m wildly jealous of her I think it’s totally totally suitable and I’m very happy for them both, bless their fictional hearts), and he’s going to be just fine. There is now no more reason to suppose that Lupin is going to die than to suppose anyone else is going to die; indeed rather less because I am still convinced that JK Rowling has a heart and is going to leave Lupin alive to be a support figure for Harry after all this is over. He is going to be fine, and so is Tonks. I have decided. I will not have Lupin upset any further.
However, I’m sure that Wormtail’s silver hand thing is going to be relevant, and I think it’s going to be relevant in the same way that his Debt to Harry is going to be relevant. (Come dawn of 22 July, I’m going to edit this post and you’ll never be able to prove that I said this, if I turn out to be wrong.) But it will not take down Lupin, and the tenor of her response suggests that it will not take down Wretched Fenrir Greyback either. Oh well.
So yeah. YAY!
(I’m in love with Lupin. So very in love.)
SPOILERS ADDED LATER
BIG SPOILERS
WELL, BIGGISH
Added almost a year later: Oh my God, I killed Lupin. It was me. I posted this in February, which was before JK Rowling finished the book, and she probably decided to kill Lupin and Tonks at the very moment that I wrote this. I murdered them both. I am complete rubbish and also a murderess.
You know what that means? It means that there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that Lupin is going to die. He’s doing his werewolf thing (poor darling; I want to give him a big hug and take him out for hot chocolate. Tonks too, because even though I’m wildly jealous of her I think it’s totally totally suitable and I’m very happy for them both, bless their fictional hearts), and he’s going to be just fine. There is now no more reason to suppose that Lupin is going to die than to suppose anyone else is going to die; indeed rather less because I am still convinced that JK Rowling has a heart and is going to leave Lupin alive to be a support figure for Harry after all this is over. He is going to be fine, and so is Tonks. I have decided. I will not have Lupin upset any further.
However, I’m sure that Wormtail’s silver hand thing is going to be relevant, and I think it’s going to be relevant in the same way that his Debt to Harry is going to be relevant. (Come dawn of 22 July, I’m going to edit this post and you’ll never be able to prove that I said this, if I turn out to be wrong.) But it will not take down Lupin, and the tenor of her response suggests that it will not take down Wretched Fenrir Greyback either. Oh well.
So yeah. YAY!
(I’m in love with Lupin. So very in love.)
SPOILERS ADDED LATER
BIG SPOILERS
WELL, BIGGISH
Added almost a year later: Oh my God, I killed Lupin. It was me. I posted this in February, which was before JK Rowling finished the book, and she probably decided to kill Lupin and Tonks at the very moment that I wrote this. I murdered them both. I am complete rubbish and also a murderess.
Monday, February 5, 2007
The Prestige
The Prestige is this film about rival magicians, right, and they have this big rivalry because Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) totally ruined Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman)’s whole life back in the day when they’re colleagues working together on the same show and then Angier shot off Borden’s fingers during an act because apparently they are wholly (and repeatedly) incapable of recognizing each other when one of them is wearing false facial hair. There’s a lot of mysteriousness and people being injured in various ways and disloyalty and eventually everything gets explained and somebody gets the girl. (That was ambiguous, see, because the movie is ambiguous. I’m employing parallelism in this review. Awright.)
We’ll start with the good things about this movie so that I can have all the more fun being snotty about the bad things. Okay, let’s see. Well, the costumes are very nice, and everybody’s a good actor (especially lovely Michael Caine) even though they never alarm the viewer with an excessive amount of character development, and the sets are lovely and it’s fun to see magic done. And, um, Hugh Jackman does a good American accent. And Scarlet Johanssen is shexy.
Now, I had very high hopes for this film. I read that director Christopher Nolan (who directed the fabulous Memento as well as Batman Begins which I never saw because I hate Christian Bale) had asked reviewers not to give anything away because the film was going to be all like a magic trick, and I was like, Woohoo, this movie’s going to be awesome! There’s the awesome cast, and it’s just going to be so very awesome with the complex and fascinating awesomeness hoorayyyyyy! I saw The Illusionist and I was like, Well, that was good and all, but The Prestige is going to be SO MUCH BETTER. And although Hugh Jackman does a better American accent than Edward Norton does a whatever the hell he was doing accent, The Prestige was way not better.
Maybe I’m being unfair. But the thing is, there’s a huge set-up with all these mysteries and David Bowie, and you’re waiting for everything to be cleverly explained in a fabulous way, and the ending, when all is finally revealed, really feels like a cheat. The reason for this is, I think, that the film is set up as a magnificent and exciting trick, and it really isn’t. The ending’s just kind of blah. It’s not understated enough to be cool, and it’s not spelled out enough to be clear, so it ends up just feeling half-assed.
That said, I’ll go back to the positive things and admit that most of this movie is really very good indeed. I was thoroughly enjoying it until the last, I don’t know, ten minutes or so, and at one point I was so wracked with anxiety from all the suspense that I had to be physically restrained from looking up what was going to happen. So let me give credit where credit is due. I know it’s difficult to have as many balls in the air as this movie has and still catch every single one; but if it wasn’t going to do it properly it shouldn’t have done it at all. I was watching for all the little peculiar and unresolved details, and I knew they were all relevant and it was going to be so cool when they explained everything, and then THUD, they had an implausible (and thus much less chilling than one might like) science machine – I’m not giving anything away here, I swear – and a stupid cheating unsatisfactory explanation for Christian Bale’s much-vaunted trick. And no one lived happily ever after. The end.
(See how the first sentence of that paragraph is misleading because it pretends like I’m going to be nice in the rest of the paragraph? I hope Christopher Nolan reads that so he’ll know how I feel now! *stomps off in a huff*)
We’ll start with the good things about this movie so that I can have all the more fun being snotty about the bad things. Okay, let’s see. Well, the costumes are very nice, and everybody’s a good actor (especially lovely Michael Caine) even though they never alarm the viewer with an excessive amount of character development, and the sets are lovely and it’s fun to see magic done. And, um, Hugh Jackman does a good American accent. And Scarlet Johanssen is shexy.
Now, I had very high hopes for this film. I read that director Christopher Nolan (who directed the fabulous Memento as well as Batman Begins which I never saw because I hate Christian Bale) had asked reviewers not to give anything away because the film was going to be all like a magic trick, and I was like, Woohoo, this movie’s going to be awesome! There’s the awesome cast, and it’s just going to be so very awesome with the complex and fascinating awesomeness hoorayyyyyy! I saw The Illusionist and I was like, Well, that was good and all, but The Prestige is going to be SO MUCH BETTER. And although Hugh Jackman does a better American accent than Edward Norton does a whatever the hell he was doing accent, The Prestige was way not better.
Maybe I’m being unfair. But the thing is, there’s a huge set-up with all these mysteries and David Bowie, and you’re waiting for everything to be cleverly explained in a fabulous way, and the ending, when all is finally revealed, really feels like a cheat. The reason for this is, I think, that the film is set up as a magnificent and exciting trick, and it really isn’t. The ending’s just kind of blah. It’s not understated enough to be cool, and it’s not spelled out enough to be clear, so it ends up just feeling half-assed.
That said, I’ll go back to the positive things and admit that most of this movie is really very good indeed. I was thoroughly enjoying it until the last, I don’t know, ten minutes or so, and at one point I was so wracked with anxiety from all the suspense that I had to be physically restrained from looking up what was going to happen. So let me give credit where credit is due. I know it’s difficult to have as many balls in the air as this movie has and still catch every single one; but if it wasn’t going to do it properly it shouldn’t have done it at all. I was watching for all the little peculiar and unresolved details, and I knew they were all relevant and it was going to be so cool when they explained everything, and then THUD, they had an implausible (and thus much less chilling than one might like) science machine – I’m not giving anything away here, I swear – and a stupid cheating unsatisfactory explanation for Christian Bale’s much-vaunted trick. And no one lived happily ever after. The end.
(See how the first sentence of that paragraph is misleading because it pretends like I’m going to be nice in the rest of the paragraph? I hope Christopher Nolan reads that so he’ll know how I feel now! *stomps off in a huff*)
How to be a happier person
There’s this excellent bit of the otherwise TOTALLY MISERABLE AND WRETCHED Neil Gaiman short “24 Hours” (it’s the one I told Robyn and Anna not to read because everybody in the diner gets brutally slaughtered and it’s not that necessary to the story arc and you might as well just give it a miss and take my word for it that the whole amulet thing works out and Dream is fine and can carry on having bread thrown at his head (in case you were wondering, I do own that single issue. The bread-throwing one. The really really good one. I have that. It’s mine and I have it. My lovely sister Anna gave it to me.)) where the waitress’s stories “all have happy endings. That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the problem with stories — if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”
Basically that is my approach to flims and books. My sister Robyn and I have decided there is no point in watching the miserable ends of flims when we can stop them sooner and enjoy them so much more. The classic example is Moulin Rouge, which appears to be designed for people like us. Robyn and I like to watch it right up to when the curtain falls, and then we turn it off. It’s so simple!
Okay, think about it. The real ending is that adorable Ewan McGregor sobs helplessly over beautiful and charming Nicole Kidman’s tuberculosis-ridden corpse and then is probably wretched for the rest of his life. But if we turn it off right when the curtain falls, that doesn’t have to happen! See? It could just be that the doctor was just wrong, and Satine isn’t dying at all! or that she was CURED by the INCREDIBLE JOY she felt at being with Ewan McGregor forever! (That’d cure me of tuberculosis.) And that whole thing at the beginning with Ewan McGregor being all the woman I love is dead, that was just to fool us! Teehee, good one, Baz Luhrman, you totally had us going for a while there! Yep. It’s better that way.
Similarly I don’t necessarily need to watch all of Felicity. If I just watch it up to the end of the second season, imagine how happy I would be! Whereas if I watch the third and fourth seasons, there’s all that stuff with Felicity cheating on Ben and Ben cheating on Felicity and having a KID (don’t they know about condoms? the big stupidheads!), and why would I want that to happen? (I wouldn’t.)
See, there’s an episode of Friends where it turns out that Phoebe’s mother turned off all the sad movies before the sad endings happened, and Phoebe grew up thinking that Old Yeller was a happy movie, and it was like a joke! Why is it a joke? That’s a very sensible idea! That’s what I do! Who needs the stupid dog to die? I stopped reading the end of Where the Red Fern Grows when I was quite young. Why not stop reading Romeo and Juliet right when they come up with The Plan, and assume that it worked?
And some things you really shouldn’t read/watch at all because there is no point at which you can stop and have it be okay. Stop reading Lord of the Flies before you begin. Return City of God to the flim shop/rental place. (Seriously — I saw three minutes of it and in that time two people got shot dead and a girl got raped while her boyfriend was forced to watch. Just skip it.)
Obey me and your life will be better. And don’t get attached to anyone in the Harry Potter books. After July of this year I will let you know whom it’s okay to love. It’s okay to love Lupin. It is okay to love Lupin. HE IS IN LOVE WITH TONKS AND HE IS NOT GOING TO DIE. (she said hysterically)
(Incidentally, I think that Moulin Rouge would have been better if they had made Satine’s death more understated. Have the curtain fall and then have her do the cough thing and Ewan McGregor would turn to look at her anxiously, and then cut back to his older self with the typewriter - they could do second-long shots and done a contrast with the insane joyous clapping of the audience, and then bits of the typewriter Christian bits - that would have been a better way to do it. I think. I mean, I’d still stop the movie with the curtain-fall, but at least it wouldn’t be quite so melodramatic.)
Basically that is my approach to flims and books. My sister Robyn and I have decided there is no point in watching the miserable ends of flims when we can stop them sooner and enjoy them so much more. The classic example is Moulin Rouge, which appears to be designed for people like us. Robyn and I like to watch it right up to when the curtain falls, and then we turn it off. It’s so simple!
Okay, think about it. The real ending is that adorable Ewan McGregor sobs helplessly over beautiful and charming Nicole Kidman’s tuberculosis-ridden corpse and then is probably wretched for the rest of his life. But if we turn it off right when the curtain falls, that doesn’t have to happen! See? It could just be that the doctor was just wrong, and Satine isn’t dying at all! or that she was CURED by the INCREDIBLE JOY she felt at being with Ewan McGregor forever! (That’d cure me of tuberculosis.) And that whole thing at the beginning with Ewan McGregor being all the woman I love is dead, that was just to fool us! Teehee, good one, Baz Luhrman, you totally had us going for a while there! Yep. It’s better that way.
Similarly I don’t necessarily need to watch all of Felicity. If I just watch it up to the end of the second season, imagine how happy I would be! Whereas if I watch the third and fourth seasons, there’s all that stuff with Felicity cheating on Ben and Ben cheating on Felicity and having a KID (don’t they know about condoms? the big stupidheads!), and why would I want that to happen? (I wouldn’t.)
See, there’s an episode of Friends where it turns out that Phoebe’s mother turned off all the sad movies before the sad endings happened, and Phoebe grew up thinking that Old Yeller was a happy movie, and it was like a joke! Why is it a joke? That’s a very sensible idea! That’s what I do! Who needs the stupid dog to die? I stopped reading the end of Where the Red Fern Grows when I was quite young. Why not stop reading Romeo and Juliet right when they come up with The Plan, and assume that it worked?
And some things you really shouldn’t read/watch at all because there is no point at which you can stop and have it be okay. Stop reading Lord of the Flies before you begin. Return City of God to the flim shop/rental place. (Seriously — I saw three minutes of it and in that time two people got shot dead and a girl got raped while her boyfriend was forced to watch. Just skip it.)
Obey me and your life will be better. And don’t get attached to anyone in the Harry Potter books. After July of this year I will let you know whom it’s okay to love. It’s okay to love Lupin. It is okay to love Lupin. HE IS IN LOVE WITH TONKS AND HE IS NOT GOING TO DIE. (she said hysterically)
(Incidentally, I think that Moulin Rouge would have been better if they had made Satine’s death more understated. Have the curtain fall and then have her do the cough thing and Ewan McGregor would turn to look at her anxiously, and then cut back to his older self with the typewriter - they could do second-long shots and done a contrast with the insane joyous clapping of the audience, and then bits of the typewriter Christian bits - that would have been a better way to do it. I think. I mean, I’d still stop the movie with the curtain-fall, but at least it wouldn’t be quite so melodramatic.)
The System
Here is my new system. Every day of the week will be assigned to a particular task. On that day of the week I will do no other task, so that when I finish the assigned task I will be done for the day and I can read cheerful books and watch cheerful flims and TV shows without feeling any guilt whatsoever. If I do not do the assigned task on the day allotted to it, the task will not get done at all and I will have to pay the miserable consequences.
Sunday will be my American Literature reading day. I will read my American literature book or poems and prepare a presentation if one has been assigned to me for that week. (This is going to be a miserable day because from here on out there are no good authors for us to read, except Sylvia Plath. And she is only one author, and it is only one week, and the other weeks have things like Beloved and Native Son and Light in August, God help me.)
Monday will be my day for working on papers. Today, for instance, I have begun doing research for my Early Modern Culture paper. You can see already that the system is foolproof and absolutely prevents procrastination. While I type this, a PDF file is downloading that will be extremely useful for this paper. (Okay, the PDF file finished while I was typing the title of the post. But if it were much slower it would still be downloading.)
Tuesday will be my day for working on my dissertation proposal. This means reading lots of books about sodomy and the Victorians. Tuesday will be a lovely day, except for the American literature class that takes place on that day, since as I have noted nothing good will come of American Lit class from now until ever again.
Wednesday will be devoted to Early Modern Culture and Symbolic Imagination. As neither of these tasks can be expected to take a full day or even a half day (I can knock them out in a few hours), I will also permit myself to work on papers or my dissertation proposal on this day. Additionally, if I have an extremely long book to read for my sociology and literature and history class, I may begin to read it on Wednesday. (See below.)
Thursday will be the day to read my book for my sociology and literature and history class. This week I am being tortured with Robinson Crusoe. The only copy the library possesses is 383 pages long, which leads the reader to imagine that it will not be that bad, 383 pages, it’s longish but not unbearable and everything is going to be fine. But see, that’s just a trick to lure you into a false sense of security, and then you open the book and BAM they hit you with the smallest and most depressing typeface ever. A very regular-width pen covers three lines when you lay it down on the book. Three lines! Apart from how long this makes the book that I have to read for Friday, this also means that I will probably be blind by Friday.
Friday, as anyone who has spoken to me on a Friday this term knows, is the day on which I have SIX HOURS of classes. One, two, three, four, five, SIX. That is most of my courseload right there. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were six different classes, or even four different classes; but it is three classes, which means that each class is two hours long. Two hours is much too long for a born and bred Catholic girl to spend in any one place at a time. I can just about manage an hour and a half, but when the classes start to be two whole hours long, my brain goes AWOL. Sometimes (as this past Friday) it invents exciting and useful Systems for Life, but sometimes it just totally craps out and starts making my hands write “my eyes are falling shut” and transliterate poems in the Arabic alphabet in the middle of note-taking sentences. One of the pages from last term has three hymns so transliterated rather than useful notes about Coleridge. Anyway, since I have six miserable hours of wretched classes on Friday (from 10 to 12 and then from 2 to 6), I’ve given myself Friday off. Friday is the day on which I will read books that I feel like reading. I just read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, and although the ending was a bit of a let-down, I enjoyed it very much.
Saturday is the day to do my Top Secret Research. If I told you more about this, I’d have to kill you, so we’ll just leave it at that.
(I’m not crazy, I’m methodical.)
Now, back to the Witch of Edmonton, which mainly inoffensive play I will grow to loathe and despise in the weeks to come. Let me say while I am still sane on the subject that I never liked it that much to start with.
THIS IS A GENIUS SYSTEM. You may admire my brilliance at your leisure.
Sunday will be my American Literature reading day. I will read my American literature book or poems and prepare a presentation if one has been assigned to me for that week. (This is going to be a miserable day because from here on out there are no good authors for us to read, except Sylvia Plath. And she is only one author, and it is only one week, and the other weeks have things like Beloved and Native Son and Light in August, God help me.)
Monday will be my day for working on papers. Today, for instance, I have begun doing research for my Early Modern Culture paper. You can see already that the system is foolproof and absolutely prevents procrastination. While I type this, a PDF file is downloading that will be extremely useful for this paper. (Okay, the PDF file finished while I was typing the title of the post. But if it were much slower it would still be downloading.)
Tuesday will be my day for working on my dissertation proposal. This means reading lots of books about sodomy and the Victorians. Tuesday will be a lovely day, except for the American literature class that takes place on that day, since as I have noted nothing good will come of American Lit class from now until ever again.
Wednesday will be devoted to Early Modern Culture and Symbolic Imagination. As neither of these tasks can be expected to take a full day or even a half day (I can knock them out in a few hours), I will also permit myself to work on papers or my dissertation proposal on this day. Additionally, if I have an extremely long book to read for my sociology and literature and history class, I may begin to read it on Wednesday. (See below.)
Thursday will be the day to read my book for my sociology and literature and history class. This week I am being tortured with Robinson Crusoe. The only copy the library possesses is 383 pages long, which leads the reader to imagine that it will not be that bad, 383 pages, it’s longish but not unbearable and everything is going to be fine. But see, that’s just a trick to lure you into a false sense of security, and then you open the book and BAM they hit you with the smallest and most depressing typeface ever. A very regular-width pen covers three lines when you lay it down on the book. Three lines! Apart from how long this makes the book that I have to read for Friday, this also means that I will probably be blind by Friday.
Friday, as anyone who has spoken to me on a Friday this term knows, is the day on which I have SIX HOURS of classes. One, two, three, four, five, SIX. That is most of my courseload right there. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were six different classes, or even four different classes; but it is three classes, which means that each class is two hours long. Two hours is much too long for a born and bred Catholic girl to spend in any one place at a time. I can just about manage an hour and a half, but when the classes start to be two whole hours long, my brain goes AWOL. Sometimes (as this past Friday) it invents exciting and useful Systems for Life, but sometimes it just totally craps out and starts making my hands write “my eyes are falling shut” and transliterate poems in the Arabic alphabet in the middle of note-taking sentences. One of the pages from last term has three hymns so transliterated rather than useful notes about Coleridge. Anyway, since I have six miserable hours of wretched classes on Friday (from 10 to 12 and then from 2 to 6), I’ve given myself Friday off. Friday is the day on which I will read books that I feel like reading. I just read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, and although the ending was a bit of a let-down, I enjoyed it very much.
Saturday is the day to do my Top Secret Research. If I told you more about this, I’d have to kill you, so we’ll just leave it at that.
(I’m not crazy, I’m methodical.)
Now, back to the Witch of Edmonton, which mainly inoffensive play I will grow to loathe and despise in the weeks to come. Let me say while I am still sane on the subject that I never liked it that much to start with.
THIS IS A GENIUS SYSTEM. You may admire my brilliance at your leisure.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
My new and possibly only temporary blog name
I have decided to rename my blog, and this is what I have decided upon, at least for the time being. If anyone can think of anything better, do let me know and I will take it under advisement. But I like this one a lot.
Lately I’ve been really cross with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst for being the same person. Why are they so much the same person? I was trying to write a review of Stranger than Fiction, and I couldn’t get anywhere because I kept being distracted by the fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal is exactly like Kirsten Dunst. They both have that whole free-spirited-grl character thing, and they are both little skinny girls with faces shaped the same, and their voices are different but the intonations aren’t, and they have the same way of moving, and, and, and everything. (By that I mean their boobs. Same boobs too. Seriously, it’s uncanny. Bras, girls.).
I’m really irritated by this. They have no right to be the same person. They’re so much the same person that Kirsten Dunst went out with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s brother for a while, probably so that she could be closer to Maggie all the time so that they could study each other and become closer and closer to being the exact same person. Who is imitating whom, that’s what I want to know, or are they both collaborators in this bizarre attempt to eliminate all differences between them?
IT’S JUST WEIRD.
And now, here are cats. Look at these pictures and tell me which of these makes you laugh the most. Because one of those pictures made me laugh so hard my whole torso was aching, and I still couldn’t stop laughing, and every time I thought about it, I laughed harder and harder. I suspect it wasn’t as funny as it seemed, so tell me what you think.
Lately I’ve been really cross with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst for being the same person. Why are they so much the same person? I was trying to write a review of Stranger than Fiction, and I couldn’t get anywhere because I kept being distracted by the fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal is exactly like Kirsten Dunst. They both have that whole free-spirited-grl character thing, and they are both little skinny girls with faces shaped the same, and their voices are different but the intonations aren’t, and they have the same way of moving, and, and, and everything. (By that I mean their boobs. Same boobs too. Seriously, it’s uncanny. Bras, girls.).
I’m really irritated by this. They have no right to be the same person. They’re so much the same person that Kirsten Dunst went out with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s brother for a while, probably so that she could be closer to Maggie all the time so that they could study each other and become closer and closer to being the exact same person. Who is imitating whom, that’s what I want to know, or are they both collaborators in this bizarre attempt to eliminate all differences between them?
IT’S JUST WEIRD.
And now, here are cats. Look at these pictures and tell me which of these makes you laugh the most. Because one of those pictures made me laugh so hard my whole torso was aching, and I still couldn’t stop laughing, and every time I thought about it, I laughed harder and harder. I suspect it wasn’t as funny as it seemed, so tell me what you think.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Running the gamut of emotions
So I was just checking out what was going on in the world of letters, and the first thing I espied was that the seventh Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, please don’t kill Lupin, Ms. Rowling) has been given an official release date of 21 July 2007. Which means I’ll be home to get it! It was way less cool getting the sixth book in England, although that may have been because I was in Croyden at the time, and Croyden is rubbish, than it was getting the fifth one in America. I am totally going to hit up one of those all-night bookstore Harry Potter extravaganzas. God wants me to.
(When the fifth book came out, I kept running into people I knew at Bongs & Noodles, and they were all trying to play it off like they didn’t care about the Harry Potter book and were just killing time until their movie started playing at the cinema next door. Whatever. Embrace it, guys.)
Well, so I got super excited and made a joyous squeak of elation and bounced up and down in my chair for a while, and I was all set for today to be an Official Good Day, and then there was this other thing in the news, which is that Molly Ivins, brilliant liberal Texan columnist, died yesterday.
Molly Ivins was my most favorite columnist ever, and I was sort of hoping she’d live forever (or at least long enough to see a damn Democrat elected back to the Presidency). She was 62, which was way too young. Cancer sucks. I’m even in a Facebook group that says so; and my mother has a pin that says so. Our rubbish newspaper at home is just going to be that much less good now, having been deprived of both Ms. Ivins’s column and the stroppy letters to the editor from angry conservatives. She was a very cool lady.
(When the fifth book came out, I kept running into people I knew at Bongs & Noodles, and they were all trying to play it off like they didn’t care about the Harry Potter book and were just killing time until their movie started playing at the cinema next door. Whatever. Embrace it, guys.)
Well, so I got super excited and made a joyous squeak of elation and bounced up and down in my chair for a while, and I was all set for today to be an Official Good Day, and then there was this other thing in the news, which is that Molly Ivins, brilliant liberal Texan columnist, died yesterday.
Molly Ivins was my most favorite columnist ever, and I was sort of hoping she’d live forever (or at least long enough to see a damn Democrat elected back to the Presidency). She was 62, which was way too young. Cancer sucks. I’m even in a Facebook group that says so; and my mother has a pin that says so. Our rubbish newspaper at home is just going to be that much less good now, having been deprived of both Ms. Ivins’s column and the stroppy letters to the editor from angry conservatives. She was a very cool lady.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)