Jenny P's Triumphs and Tribulations

A good weekend!

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:39:37 GMT

I am going to do this entry a la brenden because I don't want to think of a common theme or anything

FRIDAY: Drove down to Chicago at about 12:30 after calling in sick to work. Did not want to deal with that shit, and I'm glad I didn't, because we fucking BONKED. That's not really a word I just needed to put something there. Anyway, got to Chicago around 2:30, parked, walked to the Panera and read my book for like 2 hours. Then I came back and we immediately go to some bar. I'm very confused. It's a straight bar. There is a buffet table with those big silver serving trays with the fire under them, and a lot of badly dressed straight guys. Why are we here, I wonder, when so many feathered boas are going to go un-crotch rubbed tonight?

$10 for free drinks from 6-9, that's why.

I got WASTED. There was a point I was just saying shit and didn't even realize what I had said until about 45 seconds after. I think I told them I got my first orgasm when I was four years old, I don't even...but it was fantastic and I really had forgotten how nice it is to get drunk with other people who aren't your family.

After that, shit, what did we do...OH WE WENT TO THIS *URBAN* comedy club, and I kept yelling shit out at the stage and the comedians made a bunch of unfunny jokes about me, which honestly I was more upset about that. I mean, comedy clubs, drunk people must be yelling at them all the time and the funniest thing they can think to say is "Bitch this isn't rehab"? Please. No wonder you're telling jokes in a refurbished church.

SATURDAY: We were all pretty tired lol. But I got drunk again very early and discovered that being perpetually drunk = being perpetually exhausted. We seriously all just laid on the couch and watched Netflix Instant View movies all day, until like 6:00. Then we went to David's friend's son's birthday. I think that's the same degrees of removal I have from Owen Wilson. No, actually, I'm closer to him than that. I did not know anyone. And it was a *LATINO* party so it was very loud and everyone was drunk, even the children. I keed, I keed. But, as usual, I didn't come out of my shell until after a few hours and after a few beers, but then apparently I charmed the pants off everybody with all of my pet rat stories. They really liked the one I told about Katie painting Snickers after he'd died because that was the first time he'd stayed still long enough for her to do so. Whatever. We stayed there until 3:30, came home, and THEN watched Evil Dead. I don't think I fell asleep for real until 6:30.

SUNDAY: We had planned on Sunday to go to the movie theater and theater hop all day, and that we did. The first two movies were Precious and New Moon, which had already been a double feature for me, so I was kind of "ugh..." But then David showed up and we saw 2012 which was just irritating. Like, Independence Day worked because it was on an epic scale. Epic, but manageable. There were lots of characters, but no one felt superfluous or ignored. It's like Roland Emmerich just took that formula and turned it to 11. Too many characters, way too many disaster movie cliches (they went from dying in a desert to drowning in a sinking ship to getting eaten by earthquakes to forest fires with little to no pausing in between), too many endings...It was like Lord of the Rings without any of the bucolic charm. Ugh it just irritated me.

After that, we went to Margie's which is like our favorite secret Chicago ice cream place. And I was just really happy for the first time in a long time. I'm beginning to realize it doesn't necessarily have to be LA, I just need to get out of the house I grew up in, the safe place. I need to move far enough away that I'm not *home* anymore. So if I go to LA and fail spectacularly, maybe I can crawl back to Chicago instead of to my Dad.

And that was a very pleasant thought to end the weekend on. As was getting home from the Northwest side of Chicago in an hour and fifteen minutes.

FINALLY

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:48:57 GMT

Ladies and gentlemen,

No more poaching on the family computer and leaving my mess! No more idly hoping that maybe my laptop will decide to humor me today and run both Microsoft Word and iTunes without being all glitchy and annoying! FINALLY I HAVE A RELIABLE MACHINE!

Except for one thing.

Well, let me tell you about the hassle just buying the damn thing was. I'd had this particular computer picked out for a while. I'm...okay with HP as a company, and Sam's Club does sell the cheapest shit in the history of ever, including what I consider "big ticket items" like computers. This baby was only $600. 500 gigabyte hard drive, 4 gigs of memory, and a 2.20 ghz processor. I will admit that I don't know *exactly* what all of this stuff means. I just want to be able to watch videos without the audio rambling 5 minutes past the lagging video. Apparently that requires a big processor. 2.2 is not as big as they get, but it's almost assuredly better than that POS laptop I was using.

So I'm okay with this.

I didn't go on black Friday, which may have been a mistake, but I couldn't anyway because I had to work. So I went on...Sunday? to my local Sam's Club, only to discover they were totally out. Which sucked. This hispanic grandmother and her grandson were interested in the same machine I was, but they only wanted to know the price, so I was waiting there trying not to engage with them on a social level, but that didn't work, but it was nice since I just had to stand there while the grandson went out to find a *team member* or whatever they call them at Sam's Club.

like HALF AN HOUR LATER, some kid finally comes by with a couple of copies of the price tag. For mine, he had been nice enough to write the address of the West Allis Sam's Club, which I realized after my anger had ebbed was a really unnecessarily good thing to do. In the olden days, I might have given up right then, but Sir I of Phone came to the rescue again and charted a very simple course from my current location to the unknown depths of hell otherwise known as West Allis.

They actually had a better Sam's Club than ours, go figure.

SO IF ALL OF THAT DRAMA WASN'T ENOUGH, the bitch in front of me in line was the slowest unloader I've ever seen, couldn't find her Sam's card, and then wrote her whole check after the total had been tallied. Just overall "UGH" customer. But then I check out, bring my new lady home, plug her in, and...

can't get on the internet.

Like, at all.

I have this misconception about wireless cards. Judging from the reckless abandon that Nintendo and Apple seems to have with them, I thought wireless cards were the fuzzy dice of technology. Sure, add it in, can't hurt. I mean, I thought we were like five years from wireless cards being included in Happy Meal toys.

I never even fathomed that a desktop computer would force you to use an ethernet cable.

So at this point I'm tired, angry, and super super pissed. James the know-it-all computer nerd is still home for Thanksgiving and finds me something to buy on Tigerdirect. I don't want to wait that long, so I force him to take me to Best Buy only to discover that I could get the same thing at like, a 300% markup. Great.

All good things to those who wait etc. etc.

My wireless card comes today. I'd opted to get an internally-mounting one because I didn't want to sacrifice a USB port.

Doesn't fucking fit inside the "tiny-ass cabinet," I think was the phrase my dad used.

So I had to RETURN that shit through the post office which was just a barrel of laughs and rainbows, and I had to buy a new USB wireless adapter that may or may not work today.

So I'm a little frustrated.

But I'm looking up! I clicked on Microsoft Word and it took like, 4 seconds to open up. I can play DVDs again without all of that David Lynch-ian lag and slow motion shit. Windows 7 is very aesthetically pleasing.

But I can make no judgment about this machine until I'm simultaneously downloading *whatever*, playing two youtube videos, reading 18 tvtropes tabs, running iTunes, Word, and, I don't know, Roller Coaster Tycoon. I need internet just to know how far I can push this machine.

But it will happen eventually, even if I've got to drag a cable up from the basement. It's going to happen. Mark my words, internet. You will be mine.

I am disappoint with I.

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:51:58 GMT

So I saw Precious and New Moon yesterday.

Honestly, Precious wasn't traumatic, which was a relief. It was actually kind of funny in parts, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. It's just so, so sad that it goes around and becomes funny again, you know? And there was actually a character that expressed this. She started laughing when Precious brought her baby into class because she'd been LITERALLY KICKED OUT OF HER HOUSE so it's clearly not just me.

Anyway, New Moon. Yikes. I know people think the first one is stupid, but what came with the stupid was charm. I would have watched a movie with the human kids. They weren't relegated to cardboard backdrop pieces like they were in the books, which I really liked. Yeah, the fight scene was hokey, and the whole "spider monkey" thing was laughable, but you know what? It was an enjoyable movie, even if unintentionally so.

This one was just...boring. I'd forgotten how the only conflict before Jasper almost eats her is "I'm shallow and I don't want to eternally be one whole year older than you." Like I stopped listening to the dialog about 1/3 of the way through, mostly because it was clunky/redundant exposition, but also because everyone was muttering in this movie. I don't know who their dialog dubbing looping guy was, but yikes. I had no desire to listen to the dialog and the movie didn't provide much of an incentive to do so.

And yes, young men were randomly pulling their shirts off almost every seven minutes, busting out of their clothes when they morphed with no mention of how their clothes magically rematerialize. It was sort of nice to see a movie with restricted male objectification. Bella wasn't running around in a swimsuit or anything. This was a movie made FOR women. Which was kind of uncomfortable, since most of the audience around me was mothers with their little boys in tow...I felt very bad for those kids. Though they did seem to perk up a little with the wolf fights.

Anyway, for the most part, mission accomplished. It was a bad movie. It made me laugh. I got to feel superior to the Twimom sitting next to me who was crying at the end.

But there was one glaring part of this movie that was actually really, really good.

Full Moon - Alexandre Desplat

I kind of hate myself for really liking the score to this movie.

Nothing good is supposed to come out of Twilight. It's supposed to be a sinkhole of creative and artistic energy, a dark funnel that sucks all light and goodness out of everything. A horseman of the apocalypse, a sign of endtimes.

But this score is really, really good. It's romantic. It's moving. It's catchy. I heard it once and I was hooked. I've never heard Alexandre Desplat before, so this has nothing to do with me just liking the composer. This is a really good standalone score.

I thought about it a little bit. Kind of realized that the quality of movie scores has no correlation with the quality of the movie AT ALL. Conan the Barbarian had one of the most highly-regarded scores in film history. One of my favorite scores from the last decade is the one from The Time Machine, and who remembers THAT movie? And my current favorite of all time is still the Transformer's score, and we all know how controversial that movie is, as far as quality is concerned.

So why should I care that this score is really good? If anything, it accounts for any emotive quality this film had at all, because lord knows neither the characters nor plot could themselves elicit that kind of reaction. No, I'm being too mean now. People love those books. And now I love something associated with Twilight.

Shit, you know?

LADY BUSINESS

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:36:34 GMT

LADY BUSINESS THAT IS VERY IMPORTANT!!

look at this e-mail I got from my old boss at Planned Parenthood:

Why The Stupak Amendment Is A Monumental Setback For Abortion Access

By Jessica Arons, Director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

If you thought that just because abortion is a constitutional right and part of basic reproductive health care it would be available in the reformed health insurance market known as the Exchange, think again. The Stupak Amendment, passed Saturday night by the House of Representatives after a compromise deal fell apart, potentially goes farther than any other federal law to restrict women’s access to abortion.

The claim that it only bars federal funding for abortions is simply false. Here’s what the Stupak Amendment does:

1. It effectively bans coverage for most abortions from all public and private health plans in the Exchange: In addition to prohibiting direct government funding for abortion, it also prohibits public money from being spent on any plan that covers abortion even if paid for entirely with private premiums. Therefore, no plan that covers abortion services can operate in the Exchange unless its subscribers can afford to pay 100% of their premiums with no assistance from government “affordability credits.” As the vast majority of Americans in the Exchange will need to use some of these credits, it is highly unlikely any plan will want to offer abortion coverage (unless they decide to use it as a convenient proxy to discriminate against low- and moderate-income Americans who tend to have more health care needs and incur higher costs).

2. It includes only extremely narrow exceptions: Plans in the Exchange can only cover abortions in the case of rape or incest or “where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death.” Given insurance companies’ dexterity in denying claims, we can predict what they’ll do with that language. Cases that are excluded: where the health but not the life of the woman is threatened by the pregnancy, severe fetal abnormalities, mental illness or anguish that will lead to suicide or self-harm, and the numerous other reasons women need to have an abortion.

3. It allows for a useless abortion “rider”: Stupak and his allies claim his Amendment doesn’t ban abortion from the Exchange because it allows plans to offer and women to purchase extra, stand-alone insurance known as a rider to cover abortion services. Hopefully the irony of this is immediately apparent: Stupak wants women to plan for a completely unexpected event.

4. It allows for discrimination against abortion providers: Previously, the health care bill included an evenhanded provision that prohibited discrimination against any health care provider or facility “because of its willingness or unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.” Now, it only protects those who are unwilling to provide such services.

One in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Eighty-seven percent of employer plans offer abortion coverage. None of that will matter if the Senate takes its cues from the House. In every other way, this bill will expand access to health care. But for millions of women, they are about to lose coverage they currently have and often need.

Now, you guys know I'm pretty feminist. Kind of insecure about being a feminist, too, for some strange reason. Kind of uncomfortable about abortion. Not totally sure that unequal pay is truly caused by patriarchy, etc. etc.

I don't know what you'd call me. A radical skeptic? idk.

But this really, really pisses me off.

It's weird, too. I got that e-mail like, I don't know, four or five days ago and basically had my internal "wow that sucks" reaction but didn't really think to do anything about it. I'm all about standing up to patriarchy and I basically accepted the bill's implications about women's rights for what it was.

I TOTALLY SUBMITTED.

Then I read this: Mad Men, 'Maddening Times'

Now I admit that it makes me uncomfortable that someone's got to compare real life to TV for me to finally wake up, but really.

This is bullshit.

Everyone is a little antsy around abortion. No one likes the thought of undoing a pregnancy. Not even the whole "murder(?)" thing, not even just the whole patriarchy thing, not even, I don't know, the thought of scraping the inside of your uterus with a sharp metal instrument. It's just icky. And for a long time, I kind of put myself in the position, "Well, I believe in abortion, but it's not something I'd ever need for myself." I always kind of removed myself from the whole issue for some reason, convincing myself that if I ever was confronted with an unwanted pregnancy, I'd do the *noble* thing and have the kid.

I don't know why, but the Stupak Amendment kind of put things back into perspective for me.

My position is not a good one. I don't think it's good to support something and remove yourself from it at the same time. That article said something very insightful and very true: An abortion is not a planned event. You don't save up your money in a piggy bank in the hopes of someday getting an abortion. You don't sit at the computer for months beforehand reading up on all of the physical and psychological side effects, making detailed pro/con lists, sleep on it, etc. There is a lot of that, to a degree, but the thing about abortions is that they have shelf lives. It's not like buying a new car, where you need it really bad but you can put it off indefinitely as long as you're willing to make concessions. Like it or not, in nine months there's going to be a baby, in five at the most people know there is going to be one, and really, in less than two from the time you find out you can still legally make it be a nonthing.

No one plans to get an abortion.

It is a traumatic, horrible, soul-shattering decision. And one that, thankfully, I have never had to make. Yet. But who the fuck knows? I'm capable of a lot of dumb ass shit, a lot of which is evident in my last year's worth of entries. If I'm capable of hitting a car with my bike and doing over $1000 worth of damage, I am more than capable of doing something stupid with birth control, or even doing something smart with it and having it fail on me.

At first, I didn't know that I believed that 1/3 statistic, but why the hell not? We're organisms, we want to reproduce, every physical particle in our bodies is screaming to survive long enough to procreate. Immovable object, irresistible force kind of thing. One of them is going to buckle, and do you think it's going to be some 5 billion years of evolution, or the 10,000 or so of human ingenuity?

idk. I was just struck with the possibility today that this is not just a women's issue, this is my issue. And that amendment is bullshit. It's making something illegal by default, instead of by law. Like making pot legal but the only place that's allowed to sell it is on top of an unclimbable mountain. Financial restraints are realities. Insurance is a reality. I'm insured, and I haven't gone to the doctor in like two years just because I'm scared how much the bloodwork is going to cost. Same with the dentist. Yeah, the cleaning is covered, but what about fillings? Crowns? Root canals? All that stuff delves into the deductibles and percentages that I still feel too young to have to deal with.

So imagine this shit not being covered at all.

Insurance should equally cover people who want to have children and people who don't. It should also equally cover men who want to have sex and women who want to have sex. It currently does neither of these things. And if Uncle Sam is going to shove his nose into it, he better do it with a hell of a lot less discrimination. We're all American citizens, and last I checked I don't get a fucking tax credit for being a lady. So the government should not restrict what I'm allowed to do just because of my vagina.

Fuck the 60s. We've been keeping time for over 2000 years. It's time we start treating our citizens with the same level of regularity.

lol

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:37:59 GMT

I have no self-discipline anymore.

That was like the most valuable thing I learned in college and now it's gone.

I don't even reply to comments anymore right away. I don't even keep up with the fun stuff, the stuff that's supposed to help me relax. I read them, go "I can't I'm too tired" and I let them sit in my inbox.

I'm only working like 20 hours a week because honestly, I don't care. I hate captioning, it's not fucking worth the headache/eye twitch, and there's just not that much tutoring stuff to be had. And the weird thing is, it's not a big deal. I'm still making more money than I'm spending. I'm not in debt, besides all the school shit which I'm keeping up with. What's the point?

I had this really dark epiphany the other day, like I have dreams, I have ambitions. Everyone does. Right now my dreams, I think, are lofty but realizable. I'd like to write and get paid to do so in some capacity. Despite the things I read about it, I don't find this an impossible goal. I know it's going to take a lot of rejection and some crippling blows to my self-esteem, but I know if I stick with it, something will eventually happen. Maybe not exactly what I want or planned for, but something.

But what happens then? What if I get a coloring book or a joke how-to website published? Will I be happy?

Probably not.

Ambition is endless. I'm thinking about people with crazy amounts of ambition, like the people who want to be president. Let's say, that by some combination of talent, ambition, pure dumb luck, and a receptive society, they achieve that ambition.

Are they done? No! Now, they have to BE president. And they could do it badly. They could be a lame duck. They could be mediocre, like Taft or Harrison. They'll be forever written in the annals of history, but will that be enough?

We always want more.

So why even focus on ambition as a life goal then? If it will never be achieved, why not cut out of the pointless rat race now?

And do what?

That's the hard part.

I don't know. I'm keeping up with my work even though I am doing drastically less of it. I'm still on track to be out of here by January 1st, which honestly I do believe will reverse many of these feelings of pointlessness, helplessness, hopelessness, and WHINYNESS. I had trouble doing my last screenplay coverage, even though, seriously, reading screenplays is like watching movies except all of the actors are really bad in my head.

Maybe this has to do with my dad retiring. He is so much happier now that he's out of work. But if he'd been out of work all this time, we'd have no house and I'd probably be in a foster home. Well, not now, but you know what I mean.

idk. Maybe I'll be like those hippies in Into the Wild and drive around in a VW Bus without showering for the rest of my life.

hi

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:32:12 GMT

I'm posting

I have nothing to say

okay bye :)

lol RETIREMENT PARTY

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:38:05 GMT

So my dad's retirement party was tonight.

It was really weird, because I don't know him in that context. I mean, I think I went to "Take Your Daughter to Work"^TM day once, but even then they just had a bunch of boring projects and shit to keep us occupied while our dads worked. He comes home and bitches about his bosses, like everyone does, but I tend to forget that he does actual work there.

And apparently, he does a very good job.

There were a lot more people there than I expected. It kind of reminded me how *solipsistic* I am, like I focus my entire judgment of him on how he acts at home, but that's just one part of who he is, and probably not even the one that gets the most energy. He made a lot of friends. They really spared no expense for him. I mean I showed up an hour late, because I had to work, to a large space that was standing room only. It was kind of a shock.

That's not all, though:

They made him a banner. And when I saw it I couldn't help but remember that schtick Conan did with the banners, and how two of them ended up costing like five grand or something.

The machinists on the line MADE HIM THIS LAMP. Now, let me see if I can describe what it is my dad actually does...or did. In a brewery, brewing the beer is only one step. You've got the hopps, and the water quality, and the yeast, and blah blah blah, which wasn't really what my dad worked on. He worked with the fillers, which do exactly what it sounds like they do: They fill up the cans and bottles with beer for your enjoyment. This, apparently, is trickier than it sounds. First of all, some beers get pasteurized, like milk--that is, all the nasty bacteria and stuff that could kill people and cause lawsuits get boiled away. Some, however, do not, and they are "cold filtered," like Miller Genuine Draft. Apparently they taste different. I'm not a connoisseur. Also, as we all know, beer has a tendency to foam when you pour it, etc. Not only that, but my dad was forever bitching about different marketing ploys, like aluminum bottles and bottles that have a twist on the neck for *aesthetics* because that really screws up how the fillers work.

Anyway, long story short, the switch of that lamp is one of the malfunctioning fillers that he worked on. And imho, that's not even the coolest part:

Someone actually hand-painted that on the base of it. The boat says "Miller Time."

So, I mean, at this point, I'm sold. These people really care about the work my dad did for them, and they have shown it over and over. But this can only be called the grand finale:

Yes, that is a Miller Lite bottle with a label that some people made, with my dad's picture on it from like 1980, djhp.

I thought this was pretty much the most amazing thing ever, and so did he, apparently, because he came over and said "you know the last person they did this for was a PLANT MANAGER"

I don't really know what I'm trying to say. I mean, I guess that you always hear about and read about people who kind of have *revelations* about people they know, their parents and kids or whatever. It's so easy to focus on one side of any person. You focus on the positives when you're in love, and yeah, I might be harder on my dad at times than he deserves. Or maybe not. Why is it so hard to have a balanced picture of someone in your mind? Why can't I acknowledge how good he is at other things when he forgets my birthday or balks at paying for a fourth year of school, since I already had the credits to be done? And why can't I remember that he totally blew up at the cat for no good reason not three days ago when I'm at this party? Why can't people just be simple and definable, why do they have to be all complex and surprising.

Ugh. I don't know. Couple more things I realized--the fact that I did not expect this is not my fault. My dad has one of those...not quite humble, I wouldn't call it humble...more like pathologically self-deprecating personalities. The way he describes his job, his boss, his coworker's impression of him, I kind of thought of him like this mediocre worker. Like he went to work, did his work, came home, and stayed pretty stagnant for most of his career. But this isn't stagnancy. This is true respect and appreciation. I don't think anyone thought poorly of him. I think he maybe only thought poorly of himself, which his bosses were undoubtedly happy about, since I'm sure they avoided many ultimatums about raises and promotions, but...idk. I feel that in me. Sometimes I don't think I give myself enough credit.

But usually I think I give myself too much.

Anyway, other thing--his *girlfriend* calls the house today at like, I don't know, 1:00. I listen to half her message, which is something along the lines of "I bought your dad a gift and would like to give it to him with you and your sister." Now of course, family politics, this is kind of a slap in the face, like "I did what I'm sure YOU didn't think to do and I'm ALLOWING you to latch on to mine," but I mean I've had enough of that bullshit, so idk, I kind of felt sorry for her. It did come off like that a little bit, but a part of me believes she really was just trying to do something nice. That was it for Katie, she's like "OK I hate her," and idk I just hated the idea of her, so there's where I stand. Whatever, fuck you Charles the day I call you dad is the day I die.

lol I know I said I'd stop angsting soon, but it's just getting worse, isn't it? Because now for whatever reason I'm not keeping it abstract and YOU ALL ARE GETTING TO KNOW ME *SHOCK AND DISMAY.* Oh well. Change is coming soon. I know I keep saying that, but it is. And I don't know. Today was educational. I learned some things.

I keep listening to the LOTR music. I think I'm due for another marathon.

And there is your abruprt, trite ending for the day.

idk

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 05:51:05 GMT

I was closer to nervous breakdown two days ago than I've ever been before.

And what was the reason?

My cat was sick.

I made a very deliberate decision when we got her, that all of my angst, all of my unbottled emotions that were overwhelming me at the time, all of my sadness and heartache and whatever, were going to be channeled into her. I don't know exactly why this made sense to me. But it totally worked. I loved her and squeezed her and smothered her with affection and it just made everything else not so bad. It was nice having someone who was happy to see me when I got home from school. Nice to have someone to sit and listen objectively as I unloaded the events of my day. I mean, Christ, objectively, it's a fucking cat.

I knew, even when I did this, that it was not entirely healthy. Not only to forge a relationship of that depth and intimacy with a creature that licks its own asshole, but to invest in that relationship so much.

I was putting all of my eggs in one basket, as it were.

Pets die. I know this. I am very familiar with pets dying, since before the cat we were into rats and rats just don't have the longevity to justify a really deep relationship. But man, our first rat was the first brush with death I ever faced...and omg I disintegrated. I just remember crying like "why why why" as we buried him in our backyard.

I think I was four.

Anyway, animals die, it happens, they get sick and they don't really have access to the health care that we do. Well, *insured Americans* do, but you know what I mean.

My cat's less than six years old, so I've thought about this, but I didn't really think I had to worry about it yet.

She's sick now.

I took her to the vet, and they decided to hold her over night.

I was a total fucking wreck. Like I'm *catastrophizing*, like I tend to do on auto-pilot when not fully engaged in a task, so I'm thinking "I bet she gave herself a heart attack, freaking out. I bet she threw up her duodenum and they're just too chicken to call me. I bet some dog ate her when they weren't watching."

I bet, I bet, I bet.

I had to work at 6:30 Friday morning, hence the reason she had to stay overnight, and my shift was awful, I just felt like bursting into tears the whole time. Then I decide that *the minute* I get home I'm going to call the vet and see what the fuck is wrong with her. And it's been raining all night, so the fucking highway is underwater, and I have to take this ridiculous backroads route home and there's traffic and my eye is twitching and I barely got any sleep because I was so worried and

I totally fucking break down.

I never cry. I mean, I really don't consider myself that emotional a person. All of the emotions usually build up over the course of the month and are purged through slightly-more-than-passive-aggression during shark week. And that's usually all I need. But I am just sitting in my car driving through the rain, pitying myself for having no friends, for having no one that cares about me, for having no one to care about except for a stupid fucking cat that's probably dead.

It was totally pathetic and I'm kind of ashamed.

All the same, it was very eye-opening. None of the stuff I whined to myself about was necessarily untrue. Dad's got a new girlfriend he wants me to meet, which I just think is kind of selfish and cruel, Katie and her gay friend who is like the most catty, unfun gay I have ever met have pretty much annexed the only good TV left in the house, James stubs his toe and manages to complain about it for months, and that's only when his charming self is home and not failing out of school...I mean, shit, the only one who really IS ever happy to see me IS the cat.

It's a bad situation that cannot be improved. I've spent years wracking my brain trying to figure out how to improve it. Some vital, bonding quality just died when my mom did, and that's kind of that. Our family hasn't felt like a family in years, besides all the yelling and money problems.

Yep. Things are either really good, or really bad.

Moving away feels like running, but is running any worse than sinking in a quagmire that you can't improve?

The cat is not even that sick. The vet I had WAS NOT THE GOOD VET and like most things in my life, it's either really good or really bad, there is no mediocre vet to be found, and this guy was just crazy and worrisome and sort of like that doctor in Arrested Development "We've lost him" "WHAT" "yeah, we can't find him, have you seen him anywhere?" UGHHHH he was just kind of a dick. But my cat has like a headcold or something or like a sore throat, so she's not eating and she's being really lazy and tired, but she also has this like hyperthyroidism which explains all of the puking and minor weight loss, but to fix that it's $20/month for pills for the rest of her life or a one-time treatment that should cure it forever for like $800-$1000.

And this money...I can't help but think of this like as "move away right now and leave your cat to die, or fix the cat and then stay stuck in the quagmire for another four to six months."

idk why I wrote this. I never get this personal in my livejournal. I meant to post a review about Paranormal Activity. Or cover another script. And instead I'm just here whining...like always...

lol whatever. I think I can do it. I think I can cut most ties and maybe just consign myself to a weekly catch-up call with the family. I did it in Chicago. I loved being on my own. And really, with planes and shit, is Chicago really that much farther away than the west coast?

I'm scared. But I'm also suffocating. There's just a checklist I need to start that I'm too fucking chicken to start.

Okay enough I'm going to do this script coverage now.

PART THREE OF THREE...ik I'm an asshole sorry guys

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:37:33 GMT

All right, so I know I said I'd post tomorrow like...four days ago, but it was shark week and this was a particularly violent and thrashing...wide-toothed...you get the idea. My uterus was at 100% capacity which meant the rest of me was on strike. But now, before it decides to rear up again in some desperate late third act ploy, let me get all of this down!

All right, so like I said, before I got to LA I really had no idea what this trip was supposed to be. In all honesty, since I'd been working like 50 hours a week the two weeks before I left, I was kind of in "work mode" and sort of wanted to get a job out there. So I shelled over like $10 to this employment website, entertainmentcareers.com, in order to get access to all of the *hot listings* or whatever and maybe earn my meal ticket out of my dad's house.

That website is years in the making. I mean, here's how it started: I read about John August's blog like three years ago in Entertainment Weekly. I checked it out. I hated it. Seriously, that is where the pretentious and unsuccessful (eg me, but I still have enough pride to be in denial) go to spawn. So I usually avoid it, but it really does have good information every once in a while when it's not spouting "YOU CAN'T DO THIS" and "SO VERY FEW OF YOU WILL EVER TASTE SUCCESS AND THAT IS ONLY AFTER YOU SHED BLOOD, TIME, MONEY, AND BITS OF YOUR SOUL."

So I applied to a few jobs, and I was getting kind of panicky, because there weren't many listings and the listings they did have had some requirements that I could not match. So for about 10 minutes I swung into the internships segment and found a couple that I thought were agreeable.

One of those was a "development intern." Basically it boils down to reading screenplays and telling the producers what I think. Which is the kind of shit I do most of the time anyway, the few readers (if any) of this blog can attest.

So I did this maybe a week before I left, hadn't heard anything, decided to write the whole thing off. I got a phone call on...Wednesday?...and set up a meeting for Friday for an interview.

This pleased me greatly, because it meant I would use every item I had packed in my suitcase. The OCD switch in my brain liked that very much.

So I get the address to the place, plug it in my iPhone, find my bus route. I'm a navigational expert by this point. I could find anything in this town. May as well stake permanent residence.

The address he gave me was a very large crane and a construction site. And he'd already mentioned they were on the 9th floor, and there is not a single nine-story building to be found.

I waddle around on the sidewalk in Beverly Hills for about twenty minutes, trying to decide what to do. Finally I concede and give the guy a call, and he points me in the right direction. I'm about eight blocks due south, which would have been a HUGE DEAL if I hadn't stashed my walking sandals in my purse, lol. I probably would have given up and gone all Britney barefoot if I hadn't done that. As I'm walking, I look around. I was at the right address. 116 N. Whatever. But the numbers go up to about 300 N...then turn around and go back down to 300 S...then go up again and finally hit the 116 N. that I want.

What the everloving fuck?

Anyway, the interview was one of the best I've ever had, probably because it was the first in which I was not egregiously lying to myself. "Yes, I am very excited for this opportunity." "I have so much interest in math textbooks." "I plan on staying in Wisconsin for years." It was pretty sweet, it was just this young guy and I shooting the shit about movies and TV for like twenty minutes. I got to use phrases like "storytelling capacity" and "subgenre" and sort of made it sound like I knew what I was talking about. And when he said something like "I really believe we are in a golden age of TV," omg I was just beaming. Like, "YES, EXACTLY, I TOTALLY AGREE YOU AND I ARE COMPLETELY SYNCED UP WAVELENGTH-WISE RIGHT NOW." It was a really good interview.

He e-mails me a sample script to cover, which I burn through in two days to prove my dedication and punctuality.

Anyway about that phantom address shit...turns out, my dad explained it to me later, different municipalities all clunked together like that use their own street numbering systems. He said that used to happen in Texas all of the time. I did not expect this. In Chicago: STATE AND MADISON IS 0. For everyone. In all of Chicagoland. Boom. In Brookfield...I mean, I don't know what the actual origin is because downtown Milwaukee has streets going in three different directions but I know that Brookfield follows the same numbers that Milwaukee establishes.

So my Google Maps-iPhone system is not flawless. Nor is it flawed enough to reject outright. I just have to...keep my eyes open *sighs*

Any way, tension dispelled, I got the internship. Which really just gave me an excuse to stop working Tuesdays and fucking up my entire circadian cycle, so...yayyy...actually I'm really excited though. I'm getting the practice reading screenplays that I need to write them better, and I get to be a huge critical dick which I love so much that I do it for free, even if there is no promise of establishing experience and networking.

The best, and very possibly worst part of all of this?

I can do this internship in Wisconsin.

This does not provide the urgency to leave the Midwest, my family, and all of my troubles behind that I was looking for.

So once again I am stuck in the quagmire of my own indecision.

I mean, this is a foot in the door, just a foot that I can hold safely wedged inside from 2000 miles away. There will be a point that I have to take another step. It's just...unknown when that will be.

SO YES, I ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE ON MY BREAK. After my interview, I found out I was actually really close to Rodeo Drive, which was another tourist destination I wanted to hit.

This is 2 Via Rodeo...or something...and basically just a little sidewalk that I guess is supposed to look like a quaint European village or something. And shops. And a restaurant. That was not egregiously overpriced. I think that's the thing that surprised me the most about Rodeo Drive--for some reason, that's where I expected all of the $500 steaks and lavishly rich bottles of wine to be hiding, but the few menus I glanced at weren't priced much more than the places I used to eat at in Chicago with my gay posse. Which either means a) the demand curve for food kind of flattens out or b) I was eating a lot better in Chicago than I ever realized I was.

Anyway, to be perfectly frank, Rodeo Drive kind of...bored me. I mean I didn't even bother walking inside any of the shops, because I was vaguely sure that the salespeople would recognize my peasant's body and the foul stench of livestock and manure from the Midwest and summarily escort me from the premises, and the rest was really just...not as touristy as I thought, I guess. In fact, the whole thing was kind of like the 1000 block of Michigan Avenue but with palm trees. There was more stuff, but what the fuck do I care about the difference between Versace and Gucci? All just Italian words that use "c" the wrong way imho.

But there was some cool stuff:

For the record, I was not the only person who took a picture of this car. I wasn't entirely fascinated by the fact it was a Rolls Royce...or Bentley...I mean I'm pretty sure it was a Rolls Royce...lol...but the fact that it was bright. fucking. yellow REALLY interested me. Why the fuck would you spend 200 large on a car and then make it the UGLIEST FUCKING COLOR IN THE WORLD? Like the fact it's a Rolls doesn't stand out enough? You have to make it the same color that bicyclists wear after dark? GROSS. No accounting for taste, I suppose, even in ~*~Beverly Hills~*~

I ate lunch at this little French bakery and it was fine. Then I got bored, was tired, went home.

DOWN THE LONGEST ESCALATOR EVER!!!

So at this point I'm ready to call it a day, I mean, I'm not tired or anything but I'm feeling pretty good about getting an internship, and I've seen everything that I can think of, at least everything I'd wanted to REALLY BAD.

But not so. And thank God.

brenden and I have something of a texting war to go see a baseball game that night. For a while, I thought it wasn't going to happen, which was fine, we were planning to go out gay club hopping which was cool with me. But fortunately, our *close mutual friend* came through for us and got us tickets to the Angels Division Series game!

I have to admit, I was nervous. I'm really not a huge fan of meeting people from the internet in the real world. I'm really just this super awkward nerd irl and I am about 80% more charming on the internet, where I can edit what I say and hide behind a monitor, you know? But thankfully, for all the awkwardness I had stored up Brenden made up for with his general awesomeness and self-confidence. We bonded over Disney music on the 2-hour commute to Anaheim and DIDN'T GOSSIP THAT MUCH ABOUT YOU E-FOLK but we did a little :'3. Then Brenden performed the entire Disney Fireworks Show^TM for me in his car and it was amazing.

The game was...both amazing and terrifying:

I think these were the best seats I've ever had at a baseball game. I mean, generally when I go to baseball games it's either because someone I know knows someone else that has some clout, or because it's some cheap incentive for performing well academically, but either way...the people that people I know know never had THIS much clout. And at a PLAYOFF GAME? Fuhgetabutit.

So it was amazingly cool to be that *up close and personal* and all right in the nosehairs of the players, but it was also...frightening. Because these seats were undoubtedly expensive. And economic principles...the pricier tickets go to the people who want them more...ie really, REALLY serious fans...the kind to whom baseball is not a game, pastime, or hobby, but a RELIGION...and I was very afraid of blaspheming in the church of latter day all stars.

Fortunately, when testosterone and alcohol mix, as long as there is something shiny to yell at you're generally safe. I even got a little tipsy (off of one big beer...it had been a long time since I'd drank djmp) and I just had a shitload of fun.

BRENDEN:

Got drunker than me and had that blanket the entire damn time and was waving it around like a drunk fan at a baseball game...hmm...and the Angels won and we had a good time, and we spent some time afterwards drunkenly trying to find our *close mutual friend* (I'm beginning to reevaluate the point of being coy in this livejournal that NO ONE READS) to no avail.

We even went to the dugout! BUT NOTHING :(

Afterwards, Brenden took me to get an In 'n Out Burger, which was like my last vague goal of the trip, and it was pretty good but idk I really have to figure out some way to get you Californians to try a Butter Burger because I really can't decide which one I like better.

A couple of final pictures:

This was the view from my hotel, and I finally decided that LA is like a big-ass theme park plunked down in the middle of southern Italian mountains. Because this view, with all of these houses precariously clutched to the mountainside like that? Reminded me just of my tour of Sorento with all of those support beams and squat white buildings and overall enviable opulence.

Finally, I had no idea what to make of this. I have no idea how to classify a city that has a restaurant that feels it necessary to post instructions on how to use a toilet in the bathroom stall. I feel like this is definitive, I just don't know quite exactly what it defines.

Anyway, that was basically it. I got about three hours of sleep after the game. My goddamn shuttle picked me up at 5:00 in the goddamn morning and I didn't sleep until that night, and then Katie knocks on my goddamn door just as I started to drift off UGHHH but I had a really good time and that was it!

Oh wait here is my flight back:

I know smog is supposed to be all *disgusting* and *carcinogenic* but all I saw when I looked at it from the plane was a bunch of floating, three-day old slush. Caught in a huge bowl of mountains. Seriously, after you get over the mountains it's all gone. Just stuck in that one little industrial, massively populated valley. How bad can one little boil really be for Mother Earth?

and finally:

Good old industrial, less-populated Milwaukee, WI. Right on the edge of a body of water. Prone to some urban sprawl. Really, how different will it be?

It was kind of scary when I could name freeways and thus cities when were we landing. And the weird part of that return flight was this couple I was sitting next to...despite my greatest efforts, we engaged in small talk and I admitted that I was trying to figure out if I wanted to move to LA, and they ended with saying like "well even if you didn't like it, it's definitely amazing that you traveled by yourself."

and I was like you know what? Small victory, but it kind of was. :)

So that was my trip. I'm sick of *blogging* but I REALLY WANT TO WRITE MY REVIEW OF PARANORMAL ACTIVITY SOON HOLY SHIT THAT MOVIE WAS AMAZING I HAVE NEVER LEFT A THEATER LITERALLY SHAKING BEFORE HOLLLY SHIT.

The Warner Brothers Studio Tour (PART TWO OF A TRILOGY eta'd)

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:37:39 GMT

All right, so now I'm like all settled into LA, I've got my hotel, my money, my clothes, my belongings all figured out, I'm ready for this trip to really really start. I never really switched over to Pacific Time, which was weird but not too weird, since my return flight was at like 7:30 anyway, so I kept waking up at like 7:00 in the morning and going to bed at about 10:00, which worked pretty well for me. It was sort of weird to be nodding off before Glee was over, though, and GOD DAMN I'd forgotten that they play shows on the west coast at like a second time so you can't have this awesome opportunity to watch all the primetime stuff at 5:30. Oh well. I watched Jim and Pam get married and I kept up my Mythbusters and Cash Cab (holy shit I know I should be writing about my trip but there was this one hilarious question...the contestant was like this 65-year-old guy and the question was something like "What is the art of temporary tattoos practiced in India and Indonesia?" or somewhere I can't really remember but I was like "Oh Henna" and I was pretty dubious about this guy getting it right, but he's like "I KNOW THIS! IT'S HENTAI" AND OMGGGG I WAS DYING AND THE FACE THAT THE HOST MADE WAS JUST PRICELESS IT WAS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN D: AND :X AND OMG he must be so talented to be able to navigate a cab in Manhattan, host a game show, and react in a non-condescending way when that's an answer you get).

lol anyway

So, on Thursday, I decided to take some studio tours. Well, I didn't know how much time I had, and I didn't know how much they were going to cost, and I wanted to make sure I took the best one, so I wasn't really sure what to do. The pamphlets down at the concierge really weren't any help, since they were still advertising the NBC tour at the old building EVEN THOUGH THE NBC BUILDING WAS NOW LIKE LITERALLY 500 YARDS AWAY, so I decided that "I'm Feeling Lucky" about Google and I just let it tell me where to go.

That actually turned out to be a good decision.

I found this website: http://www.seeing-stars.com/StudioTours/ just on a google search on my phone, and it first it looked a little like some psycho's travel blog, but the closer I read I found that it is pretty psycho, but in an OCD-detailed way, not in a schizophrenic the-aliens-are-telling-me-to-kill-the-President way. That's what's so great about the internet, is that everyone on it is a fucking lunatic, but they're a fucking lunatic about something that is generally helpful in a very small, esoteric, specific niche that you might actually need someday. Myself included. I hope.

Anyway, I read through his reviews, and he recommended the Warner Brothers studio tour, for a few reasons. 1) He said it was the most comprehensive, and they actually showed you relevant stuff, people working, not just some remote stupid animatronic sharks and explosions that are completely removed from the actual studio, you know? and 2) the trams only had like 8-10 people, so you could actually expect interaction with your tour guide. So I said "sign me up" even though it was by far the most expensive tour at $45. I hadn't binged on something in quite a long time, and though I hadn't really budgeted this trip, I mean, deliberately, I said "why the hell not."

So I called, they said they had a bunch of openings, and then came the task of figuring out how to get there.

At this point, I feel pretty confident about getting around LA. I've figured out the train, and more than once, my iPhone had helped me. So I use the map feature to figure out where this place is in relation to my hotel, and for some reason, Google Maps draws driving directions for me.

"If only it would tell me what bus to take!" I lament.

Then I actually look at my fucking phone.

See that middle icon, between the car and the person walking? THAT'S FOR FUCKING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION.
eta: oh it's not on there but normally it is...um lol
Now, I don't know how *good* this trip planner is, as in, if it gets the fastest route from A to B, with the least amounts of transfers and walking and all that fun stuff. All I know is that I couldn't decipher the fucking hieroglyphics of the LA Metro website's trip planner, and the Apple-dumb aesthetic is very easy to follow, so I tried this. And you know what? It took me over an hour to get somewhere like 2 miles away, and it made me walk to a bus stop like a quarter mile away when there was another stop for the same route RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY HOTEL, but it fucking worked.

And the REALLY nice thing about this feature, that totally decimated any lingering insecurity I felt about the Metro? YOU DON'T EVEN NEED TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET SOMEWHERE ELSE. The GPS tracks you, so anytime you input directions, the starting direction is automatically "Current Location" unless you change it. I mean, I loved my iPhone before this, but this is when I really realized...holy shit, it really can do ANYTHING.

So I get to the Warner Brothers studio, I ask the security guard where to go, I find my way, and I use my iPhone for EVEN ANOTHER FUNCTION, and that is to take pictures.

So all of these were in the waiting room, basically, like a gift shop with a gelatto place and a Starbucks. God it is amazing how skinny that costume is, like all delusional dreams of me ever being a movie star were just totally squashed by the girl!costumes I saw, because I think even if I had negative body fat and schlepped off a couple of pounds of flesh for my homeboy Shylock, I'd never fit into this shit. This Perton bone structure was built for pulling plows and supporting weight through the winter, not appearing on film you know? Anyway, I got a Chai Tea and a bear claw and sat outside where all of these Fantastic Lady Hollywood Executives^TM were having a meeting about Twitter and it took a more-than-comfortable amount of self-control to keep myself from going "I HAVE A TWITTER LISTEN TO ME I CAN BE A FANTASTIC LADY HOLLYWOOD EXECUTIVE^TM TOO!" lol

Anyway, the tour started and of course it started with a fucking movie montage in this dumb little theater, God what is it about movie montages and why do they always work? I was actually trying to figure this out while the montage was playing, and I think it has something to do with the *collective unconscious* which was a term I learned in my Media Aesthetics class that basically means, I think, I mean it's been a while, that the more we can recognize and share with each other, the less lonely we feel...or something. I mean in my English 101 class that was the reason the teacher gave us for reading *classic literature,* it's only that we don't want to feel like dumbasses for having not read something.

So maybe that's why I spent precious hours of my life slogging through The Fountainhead.

Anyway, we get out of the theater and onto our tram, and it's our tour guide's second-to-last day so of course I am expecting some preferential treatment, but that never really happens lol. First we go to the backlot, where they have all of the outdoor sets that they use for...pretty much everything.

My thumb was such a camwhore on this trip, my sincerest apologies.

So this was like the first "area" they had. I think it was divided into three areas: The first was like any Downtown, USA...they've used it for New York outdoor shots in Friends, future Washington DC shots in Minority Report, outdoor Chicago shots for ER...hell, 40% of the tour was just the tour guide rattling off every project that had ever used a space, which was kind of cool, but at the same time I was sort of like "Why don't you just print off the wikipedia page for us?"

It was kind of cool when he took us inside these buildings:

So this was in the "usable set" or...shit what did he call it...I don't remember, but basically it meant that it wasn't only a facade, it actually contained a room that could be filmed in. God it's going to kill me trying to remember what he called it, oh well. Anyway, this was the ceiling, and this is when I started asking obnoxious questions, like "Oh what do they put up there?" (Lights and shit) and then he started telling us that if you see a stairway in a movie, the stairway never actually goes anywhere, and then I asked another obnoxious question like "Is there ever a TV show or movie that shows characters going upstairs and then uses the same set as the second floor?" And he was all "YES THEY DO THAT IN THE BIG BANG THEORY NOW SHUT UP YOU FUCKING NERD" lol it was his second-to-last day, I couldn't blame him for being so short :3

This was what was between the facades on the first street and the second street. He told us he wasn't supposed to bring us in there but somehow I doubted it was a problem. I asked again, "What do they use this space for?" And he said like storage and lights and a bunch of boring shit, and then I asked "Is this like where all the actors hang out and eat catered food?" but he misunderstood my question and said "No there's no catering for us in there right now, unfortunately" so at this point I was a little >:/ that he was blowing me off, but whatever EVERYONE ELSE WAS JUST SILENT I WANTED TO LEARN OK

Hay there thumb. So this was the third "backlot outdoor set" which is basically like Anywhere-not-Downtown, USA. He used a lot of Stars Hollow Gilmore Girls examples even though it was pretty clear he hated the fuck out of that show, but this set was kind of cool because it was the only "dressed set" we saw--that is, the only set that was currently being used for something. And apparently there's this show on ABC that I've never heard of called "Eastwick" with Rebecca Romijn whom I don't care about but they're the ones using this set now soooo now I'm kind of obligated to watch an episode :/

He showed us Rory/Lorelai's house which was actually Chef Sookie's house in the front. It was really weird, the back of the house was just another front of a house, to save on money or whatever. He showed us the inside and idk I thought this was sort of funny:

Like the entire house is unfurnished, except for the drapes, to hide the fact that the house is unfurnished, and they didn't even bother picking up the plastic wrappers, lol. Like how I used to spread peas around my plate to make it look like I'd eaten more or something, idk. Just like the absolute minimum work done that still *maintains the deception.*

Anyway, that concluded the backlot part of the tour, and then came the coolest part, and the only part that I couldn't take pictures of.

They had this little museum on the lot that had all of these costumes and shit from various projects, and the weirdest part is there seemed to be no central theme. Like they had the outfits that Sam and Dean Winchester wear, they had the "period" costumes from Sweeney Todd, the costumes from Willy Wonka, they had the Batsuit, a bunch of Agent Smith costumes, some costumes from old movies that I sort of ignored, but I think they had the prison outfit worn by Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (which, incidentally, filmed the scene where he busts open the parking meters on the Anywhere, USA lot)...god I feel so dumb but I can't remember any other costumes. They had like 5 Oscars in a glass case, which I thought was pretty awesome, especially to see how they've weathered and how the design has changed over the course of 80 years...they had a whole set from The Corpse Bride, with the actual figurines they used to film and the set they filmed them in...idk, they had some pretty awesome shit.

The most awesome thing they had, at least on the first floor, was the suit that the actor who played Doctor Manhattan filmed in. It was this really weird like white jumpsuit with a few heiroglyphics on it, and for some reason, the whole thing was covered in blue Christmas lights. And one of the docents had come over to yell at some kids for grabbing at the new Batsuit, so I ask him "Are all of those things little sensors for the CGI, like they used for Tom Hanks in the Polar Express?" And he's all "No--" and I'm such a moron that I keep trying to rephrase my question because I know I'm right, and finally this other guy goes "Oh it's so they could get the blue glow off of all of the other characters he filmed with." And the docent is like, "Exactly! They even put Christmas lights on the bottom of his feet so they could get a glow off of the floor."

and I am just like 8/ DUMBASS lol then I told Katie about it when I got home and she figured it out right away and I felt like even more of a dumbass lol

That was only the first floor, though. The second floor was ALL HARRY POTTER SHIT which was really cool. They had all the costumes from all the movies--a bunch of *normal kid clothes* that were in tatters and stained with soot and mud and blood for the *climactic battles* and a couple of Quidditch Uniforms and they had McGonagall's and Snape's and Dumbledore's robes and Umbridge's pink tweed and all of that shit, they had the whole set of Harry's place under the stairs done up, they had a replica of Norbert, they had the tiny little figurines they used for the Dragon challenge in the fourth movie, they had a LOT of prop Daily Prophets that I tried to read, but the font was too...weird, and I was pressured for time, they had Snape's Potions book from the sixth movie that I couldn't fucking read either...I mean they just had everything.

But that shit wasn't even the coolest shit they had.

They had the ORIGINAL ARTWORK that Mary GrandPre did for the American versions of the book. They had the covers for the Chamber of Secrets and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and they had tons of framed papers that each had three or four of the little beginning chapter drawings in each book. Like they had the picture of Dobby bowing from the second book, and...GODDAMN I WISH TO SHIT I HAD SNUCK MY PHONE IN THERE DAMMIT. Oh well.

We could only spend 20 minutes in the museum though, which I thought was sort of a bust, but it was definitely the coolest part of the whole tour.

After that, we went into the actual sound stage lot, which is really drab and featureless when you think about what goes on inside:

god I was hoping so hard we were going to see someone famous. The website I talked about earlier said he saw Robert Beltrane on one tour and OMG I WOULD HAVE FLIPPED IF CHAKOTAY WAS ON MY STUDIO TOUR LOL

anyway I was actually kind of disappointed with this part, because of all the stages he could have taken us in (he mentioned the new Christopher Nolan movie, and a lot of shows I actually care about), he took us in the Two and a Half Men studio. I was like UGHHH ARE YOU SERIOUS but there were actually a couple of fans in my tourgroup, lol. I wanted to yell out "OH SO YOU'RE THE PROBLEM" so badly lol.

Anyway I was so disappointed that I didn't even bother taking a picture of the set...or maybe we weren't allowed, I can't remember...but it was sort of cool. He kept talking about tvtickets.com, where you can sign up to get free tickets to any show you want, including game shows, which I might do if I ever move out to LA. Free entertainment is nothing to scoff at. And he did mention that they're free because for shows like this, the laughtrack isn't canned, and if a joke falls flat they actually have to do something to fix it. But he also said that filming Two and a Half Men takes like half the time of normal three camera shows (which, incidentally, Desi Arnez and Jackie Gleason invented, so we can blame them) but that's only because until only very recently the half a man was younger than 16 and thus limited by child labor laws.

Each of the soundstages had one of these plaques in front of it, which I thought was neat and would have loved an opportunity to take pictures of them all:

idk if you can read all of that but w/e

Anyway, after that, we did a little sanitized tour stuff, like he took us into this other lot that had a bunch of famous cars from the movies:

This was some shit from Minority Report (the car and motorcycle actually work, but the *hovercopter* does not)

the old batmobile

the new batmobile or the *tumbler* or w/e it's called (my camera started betraying me and the lighting sucks in a couple of these pics, sorry)

The Ford Anglia from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (and a wax figure, which there are FAR TOO MANY OF in Los Angeles)

The Mach 5, which CANNOT actually be driven

There was one more thing after that, which was he took us into this other storage area, where I kind of realized that all the plays and shit you put on in middle school aren't that different from what goes on in the big leagues:

I mean doesn't that look just like your high school's underbudgeted theater department?

And finally, the *grand finale* was that they'd recreated the whole Friends set in one of these little hidden rooms, because Friends is like the fucking Mecca of the Warner Brothers lot, it's one of only two projects that became a soundstage namesake (I can't remember the other but I'm sure wikipedia knows if you're interested):

And a bunch of people took their picture behind the couch but I didn't a) because I don't really care about Friends and b) because I was feeling surly after the tour guide called me the "loner" or something and I was too chicken to snap back "I'M NOT A LONER I AM JUST AN *INDEPENDENT WOMAN*"

but that was my Warner Brothers studio tour :') After that, I pretty much went back to the Citywalk and screwed around for an hour. When I got to the hotel room, SOMETHING UNEXPECTED HAPPENED!

I GOT A PHONE CALL FROM A LOS ANGELES AREA CODE!!

I THOUGHT IT WAS BRENDEN, BUT IT WASN'T!!!

to see the thrilling conclusion to this egregious cliffhanger, tune in tomorrow!

My Los Angeles Trip! PART ONE OF A TRILOGY (?)

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:56:30 GMT

hey everyone. So I finally took my LA trip. I got back a few days ago, but just getting the four days off for the trip itself was almost impossible, and I'd requested off from Captel like two months ago. I be busy, you know? But today I finally have a day off so naturally I'm going to waste it posting in my livejournal.

I was very nervous about this trip, for a number of reasons. This trip was basically my deadline for finally getting over myself and moving out. Traveling alone itself is scary, so that made me nervous, and finally, I had no plans. I hadn't done any research about LA, I hadn't figured out even where I was staying in the context of the city itself; I knew nothing. I wasn't even sure I could find my way from the airport to the hotel without getting lost. I was terrified.

So I barely sleep the night before the trip, but I get a couple of hours, and Katie takes me to the airport at 5:30. I'm stressed out about flying, too, just because there's so much to remember with all of the Homeland Security bullshit. Take your laptop out of its jacket, take your shoes off, no liquids, powders, or gels in bigger than three-ounce containers, blah blah blah. But I was pretty sure I'd covered all of my bases and expected no trouble from TSA.

I put my baggage through. That's fine. They run my purse again.

"It's probably because I have a big wad of chapstick in a pocket of my purse," I say. They sort of ignore me.

They start to take apart my bag, and pull out my big wad of keychain.

Let me describe this thing a little bit. I used to be a key chain enthusiast. It was one of the first things I liked to collect. And I've kept a lot of them over the years. This keychain is massive. I have at least two carabiners, a nasty old Koosh thing that's at least 10 years old, a wallet-keychain that was massively convenient when taking the CTA and for quick cash, etc. All in all, my keychain probably weighs four pounds.

So of course I wasn't thinking about the pseudo-brass knuckles I got from some random guy in the flower depot when I used to deliver flowers like 4 years ago.

He pulls it out, shows it to me, and a part of my sleep-deprived, 4:30-in-the-morning addled brain goes "oh shit." He asks for my social security number, I ask why he needs it, because even though I've been caught, shit, I haven't done anything wrong, have I? I'm not a fucking criminal for owning a keychain. I give it to him anyway, give him my phone number, and he calls over the Sheriff's Department.

It takes them like 10 minutes to get there, all the while I'm sitting in this chair being watched by the TSA agents on display in front of all these other travelers, feeling totally humiliated and exposed. Finally the Sheriff's Department comes, I hear them radioing in my report on their walkie-talkies. The first one comes over, this lady strapped with a gun and nightstick and all of that other fun stuff, and says to me, "You know that's illegal, right?"

No. I did not know a keychain could be illegal.

The other one was nicer, and I asked all my stupid paranoid questions, like "Am I getting arrested? Can I still fly today? Am I going to be fined?" blah blah blah. They finally let me go, without really giving me any definitive answers. I ended up following the sheriff's ladies out of that horrible TSA security place and they were still fucking radioing about my dumb ass to headquarters. God I wanted to die.

So then I get to my terminal, they get us on the plane, and THEN THE CAPTAIN COMES OVER THE RADIO AND IS ALL "our takeoff has been delayed to let the weather clear up a little bit. We'll take off an hour after we're supposed to and get to Minneapolis five minutes before your other flight is supposed to leave."

I am ready to fucking snap now. Like ready to start crying. I'm in the grid, the government thinks I'm a terrorist, and now I'm going to be stuck in Minneapolis for the rest of my life. Great.

Fortunately, my dad decides to call me and see how things are going. I tell him things are not going well.

My dad is kind of a dick. I've written about this here before. He's pretty immature, self-centered, and I'm still about 75% sure he never really wanted kids, so he resents us most of the time. But if there is one thing my dad is really good about, it's crisis management.

I ask him if he's ever had anything confiscated by TSA before. He said yes, no wait, no, they almost took my fishhooks but I talked them out of it. He tells me about his colleague who had to throw away a pocket knife/heirloom because he knew he wasn't going to get it past security. He assures me that though yes, I am in the system now, if they were going to do anything, they wouldn't have let me on the flight. Then he tells me what to do if I miss my connecting flight.

And lo and behold, he actually calmed me down.

I hung up the phone and said, "you know what? That's the only bad thing that's allowed to happen on this trip."

And it was.

I made my connecting flight, thanks to my row buddies, who I think were flying to Vegas and getting eloped. Or maybe not, I just made up little stories about all of my row buddies on all of my flights. I had to run all the way through the Minneapolis airport, but they let me on the plane. On the way to Los Angeles, I took tons of pictures of *America* just because I'm a nerd like that. I kept trying to figure out what state we were flying over but I never could, but then I looked at a map when I got home and figured out we flew over like, Nebraska, Idaho, and Utah, so no wonder I couldn't figure it out. HERE ARE SOME PICTURES FOR U:

This was some mountain somewhere. I was really excited about the mountains since I've never really seen one before. There was some snow on the ground in Wyoming...or Montana...or wherever. That made me a little sad, but I thought the way the clouds capped this thing was pretty cool.

I thought this was really encouraging too. I saw this, which I think is like a sun farm, like that one scene in Gattaca, in Arizona or Utah or somewhere. I also saw lots of windmills, I think in Iowa or Nebraska. Just kind of cool that all of that *green alternative energy* you hear so much about isn't just hypothetical and made-up to calm down the liberals.

Whenever my dad has to go to LA, he always says how unsettling it is that half an hour before you land, there is THIS MUCH city. LA is huge. And it made me feel very small and insignificant, like how can I ever hope for success if I move out here if there are just SO MANY PEOPLE, but then I saw a palm tree and I was like "omg I'm in LA :)"

Okay, so then I landed, got my luggage (I had to check it since I was like the last person on the flight :/), and found my airport shuttle VERY EASILY. Katie called me, I vented to her a little bit about the whole keychain incident, and described all of the scenery, mountains, and smog to her.

Then I got to my hotel.

When my dad and I picked my hotel, we pretty much just picked the one closest to all of the "Hollywood bullshit," I think was the term my dad used. Anyway, that turned out to be the Hilton in Universal City. When he reserved my hotel, I had no idea what this meant. I thought it would just be some scummy semen-covered hotel like the ones we used to stay in for my volleyball tournaments.

This is when Lady Luck finally caught up with me.

"Universal City" is like how Disneyworld has its own city, for tax purposes or something, or Notre Dame University isn't technically in South Bend, it's in "Notre Dame, IN," so they can get federal snow plows or some shit. Universal City is like the Disneyland for Universal Studios, and my hotel was a resort hotel. They treated me nicer than I ever expect to be treated, my room had DOWN PILLOWS and a DOWN COMFORTER and the place was just like BANK. It was so much more than I expected. Not only was it swank, but there was a free shuttle to the "Citywalk," which is basically where they have all the touristy shops that are decked out in a bunch of flashing lights and glitz and sell all the kinds of stuff you spend way too much money on in places like Disney World, like gimmicky holographic pictures and overpriced souvenirs and caramel apples.

God did I buy caramel apples or what.

Anyway, here is a picture of my favorite store:

It was basically this little comic book store that had lots of really expensive, detailed figurines (like action figures that don't move) in glass cases of Hellboy and Abe Sapiens and lots of lady superheroes with the *most common superpower* and Luke and Leia and Darth Vader and the Predator and all of this shit, and they had a chess set with all of the characters from Mario which would have been cool except for some reason Luigi was the Queen instead of Peach, and Koopa shells were pawns on the *evil side* and Toad was the pawn on the *good side* and they had these cute-ified big-headed stuffed animals of Yoda and Darth Maul and shit, and omg im_chris_hansen they had the Yoda-backpack thing I was so close to buying it but it was like $50 and I had no idea how I was going to bring it back with me.

Anyway, the most important thing this shop had was a corresponding Autobot magnet to go with my Decepticon magnet, which I planned to give to Katie so her car could be mortal enemies with my car.

Speaking of Mario:

You don't know how close I came to buying a stuffed pink Yoshi.

All right, so that was where I went immediately after dropping my shit off in my room, and directly after that, I decided that if I was going to do anything fun during the week I had to confront my fear about LA public transit *immediately.* Fortunately for me, Universal City is a stop on the Metro rail, which made it VERY VERY easy to get around all week.

Quick tangent about LA public transit: Another thing I was very nervous about. Everyone I've talked to said "LA public transit sucks" so I had no reason to doubt that it would be very difficult to get around LA. What these people didn't know, I guess, is that I successfully navigated a public transit system that sucked for three years, and to be totally honest, in a one-on-one death match between the CTA and the Metro...my vote goes to the Metro.

A few very important reasons why:
1) Both seem pretty similarly dependable. But if you ever get in a situation where you have to wait 45 minutes for a bus at 1:00 in the morning, I would MUCH RATHER do it in LA weather than Chicago weather.

2) Cleanliness. I think this mostly has to do with weather, too. With no rain, sand, or rock salt to melt ice, LA buses and trains aren't covered in a layer of grime and shoe-crap half an inch thick. And I was only there four days, but the denizens of LA don't seem to have the weakness for shelled sunflower seeds that CTA riders do.

3) I'm not really sure whether to file this under "weakness" or "strength," but...LA is just so fucking weird. Let me back up. When you go on the CTA, well, what I did is buy a Chicago Plus Card. Basically it's a magnetic card that's hooked up to your credit card, and to get on a bus or train, you just touch the card to the reader and it unlocks the turnstile so you can go. Otherwise, a bus ride costs...I think it's $2.50 now with two free transfers, which you get with a magnetic paper card that you dip in the reader on buses and at train turnstiles. They were changing things while I was in school--you used to be able to buy these cards on buses, but after a while they stopped that because they were trying to get everyone on the Chicago Plus Card system. You could still buy them in train stations, though.

There are no turnstiles in LA.

I bought my ticket at the dispenser, and kind of absentmindedly looked for the card reader to dip it in. It took me half of my first train ride to figure out that I hadn't done anything with the ticket I had bought. "Great," I thought, "I did something wrong and now I'm going to get fined or something."

The next day I learn that the Metro works on the "honors system."

They have no way, besides the vague threat of a $250 dollar fine and 18 hours of community service, to ensure that people who ride the Metro bought a ticket at all.

LA is just so fucking weird. The other thing...I rode the CTA for three years, like I said. And at no point during that time did anyone think it was a good idea to climb down the platform and lay down on the tracks, I don't know, just for shits and giggles.

LA is just so. Fucking. Weird. To be fair, there were posters announcing "TURNSTILES ARE COMING!" at a few train stations, but even the buses...a day pass costs $5. No reader, just show it to the bus driver, who doesn't really check and just waves you on. I didn't try it, but I'm about 75% sure you could buy one daypass and use it for the rest of your life.

Okay so that wasn't really quick but ANYWAY I went to Hollywood/Highland, which is where the Walk of Fame is, the Grauman's Chinese Theater, the Kodak Theater, where they have the Oscars, etc. etc. Honestly it made me uncomfortable.

A couple of pics:

Grauman's Chinese Theater

The Scientology Center was like, two feet away from all of that other stuff. Sort of unsettling, I could almost smell Tom Cruise's fingerprints all over the money that flows into this place. I was going to go in there all ironically and have them diagnose me with their dianetics or E-readers or whatever, but I chickened out. All of the windows were papered up so you couldn't see inside and I was vaguely frightened about getting brainwashed. But I think the fact that this sign looks like a movie theater sign pretty much says all there is to say about Scientology.

Anyway, like I said, Hollywood Boulevard made me uncomfortable. It gave me the impression that LA is one big theme park plunked down in the middle of a bunch of mountains. All these people were dressed up in costumes...I saw like three Jack Sparrows, a Hello Kitty, um, a Batman...shit I can't remember anyone else. It was sort of entertaining, but also sort of scary, because at least at a theme park you know that the people in costumes are doing it for money. Not for fun (I hope that's the main motivation) or because they're crazy, or even worse, because they want to be *stars.* Eesh, that's just bleak and depressing.

Not only that, but like, Grauman's was really no different than the replica they have at MGM Studios in Disney World. Even the Kodak theater was more of a store front than an independent thing. It was all just very...commercialized, I guess. It was like I was walking around main street, USA in Six Flags except cars are allowed.

Oh, also, I thought this was weird:

They were selling these at a gift store. I really, really wanted to know why two of the nine of them were from Wisconsin. Do we just have cool license plates? Is there some weird, Californian Wisconsin fascination? Is it those stupid, insulting "Happy Milk comes from Happy Cows^TM" commercials? Idk, but I thought it deserved photographic evidence.

So after that, I'd deemed the day acceptable, retreated to my hotel room, watched a little Discovery Channel (the amount of Mythbusters and Cash Cab I watched during my break is...sad, I guess) and summarily PASSED OUT.

The next day, I woke up panicking a little bit, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I really wanted to take a studio tour, but I couldn't figure out how to get there using the Metro. So I stared at the map for like 15 minutes at the bus stop, and finally figured out that getting to the beach wouldn't be that hard.

So I went to the ocean.

This may not be a big deal to a lot of you, but this is the FIRST TIME I had ever seen the ocean in person. I'd flown over it in a plane, but before this, the closest I had ever been to an Ocean was Orlando, Florida. I mean, we have Lake Michigan, so I'd been to a beach, but even then I kind of knew that was an ersatz representation of "beach."

The bus ride took a really long time, but I was happy to have figured out how to get there just by staring at a map for a little while. I'd feel really dumb about staring at a map for 15 minutes LATER, which I'll talk about, but right at that minute I was proud of myself. So I listened to my iPod, leaned back, and enjoyed the ride.

I think this might have been my favorite part of the whole trip.

First of all, the "beach" itself, like the sand part, is like, four football fields long. You're lucky if you get 20 feet worth of sand at a Lake Michigan Beach, and that is the actual "beach" part, like the park. The rest of the shoreline is all nasty sharp rocks and piles of seaweed and garbage. And not only was there sand, but for the most part, the sand was CLEAN. I mean, I noticed a few cigarette butts, but there actually seems to be a place in the municipal budget for cleaning up the sand, which I very much doubt Milwaukee gets since "cleaning up the roads after snow" is probably much more important. So I took off my shoes and just walked around a while. I earned a lot of respect for beach volleyball players. I never think beach volleyball looks as competitive as indoor, and NOW I KNOW WHY lol I was huffing just getting from the sidewalk to the water.

But I made it finally, and I just stood in the surf for literally like forty minutes. My God, I could have stood there for the rest of my life, just listening to the water, jumping around like an asshole when the tide came in a little bit too much, finding a place perfectly distant from the water so my feet could just sink into the sand. I don't know why it was so soothing, but that was the first time in the trip where I thought "yeah, I could do this for a couple of years maybe."

So finally, I convinced myself to leave the ocean and went up to the pier. It was so neat, they had these little foot-showers right by the sidewalk so you could wash the sticky sand from your feet before putting your shoes on, and I didn't think about the parasites and athlete's foot I was sharing and just went with it. Then I went up to the pier, got my first corn dog in years (I'd tried to get one from a fast food place like maybe 6 years ago but it was frozen on the inside when they gave it to me so it sort of turned me off of corn dogs for a while), shopped a little, and then just sat on a bench watching the ocean for another half an hour with a bunch of pigeons just chilling on the edge of the pier. I honestly thought my vacation could get no better than that, and halfway convinced myself just to go back to the pier the other three days, but I'm glad I didn't do that.

All right, one more thing before I break this off:

They had Continental Breakfasts at my hotel. I thought this just meant what "continental breakfast" usually means to me: a bunch of nasty, Sam's Club pastries, mass-produced bagels, and fruit cups they empty into a big metal tray so it looks like the fruit is fresh. Not so, because there was one very important element missing from this "Continental Breakfast."

And that is the word "free."

I had to pay for my breakfasts, and though I'm pretty sure that was the biggest single expense of the entire trip, I'm glad I did. The food was good. The first day I had this thick-sliced, Challah French toast which even just retyping that is making my mouth water, and most importantly was I binged on a $3 glass of Orange Juice the first day.

Fresh squeezed orange juice.

Now I've had a lot of "fresh squeezed orange juice" in my day, but I think this was the first orange juice that was actually "fresh squeezed." That machine in the background actually ground the oranges up and made juice. And I know this sounds kind of pretentious, but I could actually TELL. Like orange juice never quite tastes like oranges because you don't get the actual TASTE of the flesh in orange juice--you get the pulp and consistency, but not the way the flesh actually tastes. That comes in as sort of an aftertaste with this stuff, and idk, it was just like the most delicious thing I had on my entire trip. Even more than those caramel apples, lol. The big glass was $5. My orange juice budget came to a grand total of $13 for three days, but GODDAMN it was worth it. Actually now I'm kind of sad that I didn't try the fresh squeezed pineapple juice and grapefruit juice and shit. Oh well.

More tomorrow. This entry is like a fucking novel.

I need more than 140 characters

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:58:27 GMT

Hi everybody. I'm posting a livejournal entry. And no, I don't just need an opportunity to whine, I actually have something to say today!

Though a little whining is in order: I am getting very close. Very, very close. I said I'd high-tail it out of Brookfield when I had $5000 saved.

I technically have $5500, and that doesn't count what's left after this terrible economy nibbled at my retirement fund (I know, I'm such a tool.) I mean, last month's credit card was brutal because of that fucking car insurance payment, but even after that's paid...I'm close.

I'm very, very close.

And I'm almost over my fear, too. Or at least, so frustrated with my current situation that I'm willing to introduce myself to the devil I don't know. I have no one to talk to. I have no friends here. I need to go live my life, whatever that entails.

Anyway.

Saving all of this money has had an effect on my recreational habits. I still go to movies, but I usually save them up and binge on some massive theater-hopping film festival. I haven't bought new clothes in months. I eat out when I need to, and then it's just the cheapest aorta-clogging shit I can find.

I'm reading a lot. Reading, pound per dollar, is the cheapest form of entertainment. A movie, at longest 3 hours, is going to cost you at least $8.50. A supermarket paperback which costs the same could last you 10, 15 hours, depending upon how much the text wraps you up and how slowly you digest it. And if you're smart and patient about it, you could probably buy that same book for $3 shipping on half.com.

I haven't been that smart or patient, but the Perton Family Library is pretty extensive, so a lot of it's been free.

Right now, I'm reading The Stand.

I started this book, I don't know, a couple of years ago, read about 40 pages, and stopped. This is probably my worst habit when it comes to reading. 80% of what I've been reading is stuff I started years ago and lost patience with.

I'm really into it now. Usually when I read books, I compulsively check how much is left, which chunk of pages is bigger, how many pages until the next chapter break. Not this one. That's rare. I kind of don't want it to end. I'm sure that will change by the end, because 1100 page books like to ramble in their falling action, but w/e, I'll deal. It's well-paced, sharply written.

I mean, it's Stephen King. No matter how many people argue he's a pulp writer with no credentials, let's face it, he's the voice of our age. Or maybe the generation before me. Either way, he's important. I don't read a lot of King. In fact, the last whole book of his I read was Carrie and that was like, in fifth grade. It was the first *grown-up* book I read. It freaked me out. I saw the Brian de Palma movie. It freaked me out. That hand coming out of the grave...ughghghghhh

Fifth grade was a time before I knew about *well-developed female characters.*

I haven't finished the book yet, so you'll have to bear with me, but I mean, it's sort of funny reading it in *today's day and age.* The first 300 pages are devoted to this plague that kills basically all of humanity. So yes, this is post-apocalyptic fiction, my absolute favorite, more than likely driving my fixation on it. But the way the plague kills everyone is...I mean, even with my generally loose suspension of disbelief, pretty unbelievable. There's this military take-over, which viewed through today's lens is like, where the fuck did we get all of these troops to barricade every entrance to every city, big and small, in the country? There's this terrible detail about the army censoring footage of an overcrowded inner-city hospital and the army digging mass graves to bury all of the bodies...I mean, a whole revolution was basically squashed in Iran and most of the news, though hearsay by definition, was delivered instantaneously via twitter. I literally stopped reading and said aloud, "WHY DIDN'T SOMEONE TAKE A PICTURE WITH THEIR CAMERA PHONE AND POST IT ON TWITTER?"

Oh yeah, because it's 1990.

Still...we weren't fucking cavemen in 1990. Were we? Well idk, but the way King writes his female characters, you'd think so.

I mean, I know I'm not exactly a *conventional girl.* HARD AS IT IS (lol), I've come to accept it. So yeah, I can deal, to a degree, with every female character *wanting to be protected by a man* and *wanting help warming the bed* and whatever, because hell, who knows how anyone would really act in the apocalypse?

Out of the four main survivors, there's one girl. She's a knocked-up 21 year old. Her age may say a lot more about her than her gender. So I can forgive most of it.

But this really, really disturbs me:

"Women's lib, Frannie had decided (thinking that if she was going to be bald, she might as well go totally bald), was nothing more or less than an outgrowth of technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could--every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath. Liberation--that one word said it all. Before civilization, with its careful and merciful systems of protections, women had been slaves. Let us not gild the lily; slaves was what we were, Fran thought. Then the evil days ended. And the Women's Credo, which should have been hung in the offices of Ms. magazine, preferably in needlepoint, was just this: Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I'd like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.

"And what was there to say?...But lying here in the night, she knew that she needed a man. Oh God, she badly needed a man." 515-516

Now maybe I'm just having trouble with this tone. Maybe this whole thing is one big, sarcastic FUCK YOU to patriarchy and I am just retarded. Maybe this, even more likely, is just the flaws of this character, and one of the top five rules of close reading is that character's opinions =/= author's opinions.

Let me just address a couple of things though, that piss me off. Men invented bridges, and flew the first airplane, and did most of the things that humanity defines as great steps forward. But that doesn't mean women were absent from the process. The work women do in the house accounts for like, $40,000 of unearned GDP per capita or something. All of those errands that men in previous generations could ignore so they could devote their minds to inventing internal combustion engines and rocket ships and nuclear bombs were done by women. Without that work, without the *fairer sex*, I'm pretty sure we'd be at least a few hundred years younger than we are now.

There's another woman in the group that Frannie is traveling with. And she is a bit more adult, I guess, and a little bit more *solid female character* than Frannie: "She had taught anthropology at NYU, she had told them, and she had also been an active member in a number of political causes, including women's rights and equal treatment under the law for AIDS victims." 529
Great! A woman not defined by a man! Perfect!

Except, in the same paragraph (just before and immediately following), we get this: "She had a horsey sort of face and a thick peasant's body, Fran, who saw everyone's best features long before she saw the less fortunate ones...noticed that Peri's hair, a soft auburn shade, was almost gorgeous, and that her dark indigo eyes were fine and intelligent." 527
Okay, I'm even mostly okay with this. There are lots of hot professors, but anyone who looks like a model usually ends up being a model because it's much easier cash.

But this..."Mark, she had told Frannie once, had been better to her than she had ever expected a man to be. The others she had known had either ignored her or lumped her in with other girls as a "pig" or a "scag." She admitted Mark might have been in the group which had always just ignored her if conditions had been normal, but they hadn't." 527
I mean, some backstory is in order now. Frannie & co meet up with Peri (the woman in question) and Mark, and discover that they're *together* and *trying to make a baby.* Like all of Peri's academic work was just biding her time until some man deigned her worthy to bear his spawn.

*Shudder*

EVEN THIS, I mean, not quite acceptable, but not yet definitive, you know? It's not like the women are weak and the men are gods, but the men are at least well-developed. Flaws AND stengths, they aren't defined by this one overreaching subservience. I mean, there is that old black lady, and she's pretty interesting, though about 90% of what she does is all about serving patriarchy too...

Mark gets appendicitis. One of those neat little post-apocalyptic plot twists. Like finding gas in The Road Warrior or...I don't know, finding food in every other one. Without society, simple shit like this becomes intractable.

Peri kills herself after Mark dies.

That was just it, for me. Peri was the one interesting female character in this thing, and her definitive action was as bad as those self-immolating widows in India. And this isn't Shakespeare, you know. You can't forgive the overt sexism because it was *500 years ago.* This was 1990. This was while I was ALIVE. I mean, Jesus Christ, is it that hard to find one independent, well-spined female character in this lawless country?

There is. They run across this harem of unwilling women who are guarded by these four bastards with guns. And one of the women ends up beating one of the guys over the head with a rifle to death. But even then, it's disturbing and demonic, not justified.

I don't know. I've got half of the book to go, so this issue isn't irredeemable. Yet. And maybe I'm just being too critical. Feminism is my one self-indulgent academic issue. I guess because it's the most personal. Injustice irks me, but nothing actively pisses me off like women being mistreated or misrepresented.

I buy the arguments. I don't think they're invalid. The whole "women are at the mercy of their bodies" pisses me off, but that doesn't mean it's untrue. My econ teacher actually convinced me that unequal wages aren't due to the viciousness of patriarchy but to some very logical reasons. And that was even despite the fact that "women still have to have the babies" was his final evidence. But still, trite as this sounds, men weren't born with wings, but we still fly around, you know? Nights are dark by definition, and for so long that meant we couldn't go out at night, but then Edison invented the lightbulb and that forever fucked up the fact that humans are meant to get 10 hours of sleep.

I mean, I'm not arguing for some crazy sci-fi birthing cylinders or whatever, but...if man, as a race, not as a sex, defined himself by his limitations, there is so much we would have never achieved.

Fuck, I don't know. I'm not really pissed about this, but to_be_king is right, I need to direct my frustrations at more productive outlets than yelling at John Mayer on Twitter.

sleep is so good

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:39:41 GMT

So about four days ago I was at the end of my rope

running off the rails

running on fumes

whatever you want to call it

I was STRESSED OUT.

Kaplan has been giving me lots of work, which is great, because they pay well but it's gotten to the point where it's like "Oh does this fill a free hour of my day? Okay then!" I can't say no. I'm missing that gene. If the time is free, I give it away. I never think of my physical or mental stability and relaxation.

I'm just whining though, really. I do like me a day off, which I don't currently have, but I've got a few days off in a couple of weeks that I'm really looking forward to.

I have discovered a great cure for this, though. And that is oversleeping.

Like 10, 12 hours a night when I can afford it.

I think the main reason I'm doing this is that two days a week, on opposite sides of the week (Tuesday and Friday :/) I have to be up at 5:15 to go to work at 6:30.

It's killing me.

I always get really anxious about having to wake up so early the night before, so I only get like 4 hours of sleep. Then if I nap when I get home it totally throws off my rhythms. So I have to force myself to stay awake until at least 7:00 so I can just sleep the rest of the day away.

I can't do this for much longer. A month, at most. My eyelids will twitch themselves off of my face.

I'm actually really looking forward to the Autumnal Equinox so we get that extra hour in the morning. Waking up with a little bit of sunshine is infinitely better than waking up in the dark. For every...how the fuck do they measure light intensity...hold on...CANDELA. For every Candela of additional light, it's easier to get up by a factor of 10.

I need a 9-5 job that pays enough for rent, food, gas, car insurance, and health insurance. That's all I want right now. Should it really be so impossible with a college degree?

I don't know.

Why couldn't I have been 10 years older so I graduated from school in a fucking boom? On the back of a bull? I don't know. Fuck you bear. Fuck you Bush. Fuck you anyone whose potential fault this is.

Boring money

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 03:53:51 GMT

The cat is sleeping.

I'm kind of just sitting here.

Katie and I were talking about how hard it would be to buy a house today. Apparently, it's not that hard. All you need is a down payment (which I have no idea how much that would be) and then your mortgage is like your rent.

I probably sound so retarded talking about all of this finance stuff. I hate that they never sat us down in high school with a class that taught this practical shit. Like, "Here is how you balance your checkbook. This is how much of your income you should devote to housing. This is how you save up to buy a car. Here are your options. Here are the consequences for each. This is what debt REALLY is. This is what bankruptcy REALLY is."

Not that I'm in danger of any of these things. I have this unnatural fear of debt. Like I went into a little for school, not a lot, by no means overwhelming. Irritating, sure, but debt is the basic reason that I've indefinitely postponed grad school.

There's just so many choices! And it's so easy to fuck up any one given step and spend a lot more money than you had to.

Anyway Katie says her friends are starting to buy houses, and all you need is a down payment, you rent out your second room which covers your mortgage, and all you're really responsible for is upkeep. That doesn't sound bad, right? And then you've got collateral for loans, you're building some credit, and oh yeah, YOU OWN A FUCKING HOUSE.

I don't know. I'm still in this mental stage where shit like that...moms and dads are supposed to buy cars and have credit cards and buy houses and take out second mortgages, not me. I can barely keep track of my allowance.

This transitional period sucks. I really just need to push myself out. Going back isn't working.

I'm overwhelmed

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:45:52 GMT

I think I lost the cable remote

And it's Sunday night :(

lol whoops

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:54:22 GMT

Sooo I think this is the longest stretch in years that I haven't updated my livejournal, and I am going to place the blame entirely on my iPhone.

Holy shit, is this the coolest toy ever.

I mean, I hate the people that use all of their vocal power of conviction just to jerk off Steve Jobs, but really...this is one amazing piece of technology. Like you remember watching Star Trek, and thinking "Boy it would be cool if holodecks, transporters, and replicators were real, but I would sure as fuck settle for those awesome tactile-controlled computers?" Well, the future is here.

It can do ANYTHING.

There's probably even an app to julienne fries.

But I got to be honest, the function it is serving most for me right now is very, very portable boom box. I know I'm just killing the battery, but ear phones can be so troublesome, and I am getting a lot of important work done with it. No incentive like listening to my music to clean the family room which I think hadn't been cleaned in over six months. It was nasty. But the Transformers soundtrack, care of my iPhone, was there to nurse me through it.

It is just really, really cool.

It's also a perfectly acceptable digital camera. And I never take pictures. But it's so easy just to take a fucking picture, post it on your twitter and share it with the world that there's really no reason, not even my own terrible insecurity about having pictures taken of me, not to. So here are a couple of pictures I took with my iPhone:

I have no idea how big this is going to be but this was just the kitties being cute. They fucking hate each other. Well, Marcella, the orange one and kind of the Alpha Dog, hates Leroy for some unclear reason. I think she's very territorial and jealous, but she kind of patrols the house while he skulks around silently. And she's always at a disadvantage because she has a jingle bell on her collar and Leroy doesn't even have a collar because he's Katie's cat and she's an irresponsible person. But that's a dilemma for another time. Anyway, there was a really cute pose where they were staring daggers at each other but when I crept up to try to capture the image for posterity they both looked at me like "what the fuck are you pointing that rectangular replacement friend at me for" so I was like "ah well this is just as cute"

lol that was quite a story.

Here is my Decepticon magnet, because hoodiefan asked me to post it. Isn't it amazing? It's basically a warning to any other cartoonishly nerdy people that ride my tail gate, I might just turn into a giant robot and smash your ass. I don't know if it's working, though, because I've been getting tail gated a lot recently and I always drive 10 over if I can help it. Maybe it's because I've been doing it exclusively in the left lane. Driving stresses me out.

Anyway, I am getting a little pissed about this, because my sister and her gay bff keep going outside, sitting on my car to smoke, and moving the magnet to the right of the Nissan emblem. This should not piss me off at all, and I am aware that it shouldn't, but I picked the left side for a very specific reason, and...no, it's not even that, I just hate it when she fucks with my shit. Like today she's like "Jenny can I read your Entertainment Weekly?" and I said no because I hadn't read it yet, and I felt bad but fuck her, and then SHE TOOK IT ANYWAY! She is such a bitch! Ugh!

lol I sound like a 12-year-old. I really feel like an adult squashed into a child-sized box. I need to strike out on my own. I'm close. I'm visiting LA at the beginning of October and after that it's basically a matter of summoning the courage and, well, paying for new tires and brakes because I don't think my dad will let me drive all the way out there with my car as it is now. It's going to be expensive. But that's what I've been saving up for.

Anyway. I love my iPhone. I'm still downloading new apps and stuff. Games, a lot, but I've got Dictionary.com's entire archive on there, I've started reading the news more because of my NYTimes app (what the fuck at this Garrido guy? I couldn't fall asleep 2 nights ago because it freaked me out so much), and I am tweeting...well, I am tweeting a lot. The iPhone keyboard isn't feasible for long entries like this (hence the not updating for over 2 weeks), but godDAMN if 140 characters isn't the perfect amount of space before I get frustrated with "MOTHER FUCKER I SAID MOTHER FUCKER NOT MOTHER DUCKER, YOU ARBITRARY SPELL CHECK!" So after I tweet a couple of times I get mad, and then I take out my rage by yelling at John Mayer or Ashton Kutcher, because I believe both of them are too famous for their own good and they both say stupid shit and Kutcher always uses the wrong "to" or "there" so, idk. I yelled at Mayer for tweeting something about DJ AM's death and then I felt kind of bad about it, because maybe they were really friends, but idk I feel like famous people shake another famous person's hand once and all of a sudden they're besties, you know? Hollywood is a bunch of people taking advantage of other people for their own benefit and I got sick of it and snapped.

Why am I talking about this. This entry is so stream-of-conscious. I better cut it off.

Oh, but wait, this is my favorite app, and the only one I've shelled money out for so far: Simplify Media. My relative-who-is-not-actually-related, who works for Consumer Reports, recommended it to me, and by some magic witchery of technology, it streams your entire iTunes library from your computer to your iPhone so you don't actually have to use up any hard drive space for music. It only works maybe 80% of the time, but I think that might be more because my library collapsed and got repaired and it has been licking its wounds since then, so...it's pretty sweet. And if other people with iPhones have it, you can friend them and stream their libraries, too. So questionably legal. So wonderful. Anyone out there with an iPhone want to sacrifice $6 and share in this orgy with me?

Okay now I'm done.

movie review time!

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 21:20:46 GMT

I saw two really good movies yesterday! It was a very good day because of this. Well, that and the fact that I was gone for the daily, obligatory, "what are we having for dinner" deadlocked bureaucratic debate.

Anyway, I saw District 9 first. I really liked it. Trying to figure out if I like or dislike a movie is always hard, because I always have an initial, visceral reaction which is generally positive, and then, once I leave the expansive theater and deafening sound system and overall immersion into the story, my brain starts working.

For the most part, my brain was happy with it, too.

There is this whole cinema-veritas trend that is happening, that I'm generally a fan of. I guess it started with Blair Witch. Kind of the beginning of the age of ubiquitous digital recording, where any douche bag with an electrical outlet and an iPhone can become a feature director. I like it. It's very real. When big shit happens, people record it. It's our culture now, so of course it should influence our art.

This film used that, blah blah blah, which was really sweet and made effects that might otherwise be hokey and unrealistic gritty and real. You get all of these clipped-in interviews with various "experts" and "eyewitnesses" that makes the whole thing feel like a PBS documentary, except for the regular story parts which are just normal filmmaking. Overall, it works pretty well, except for the last scene, but I won't ruin it.

So, aesthetically, it was pretty well done. I won't say original, because we already got the cinema-veritas genre movie with Cloverfield. Well, and I guess Blair Witch. But this movie made me realize something about the way I watch movies, which was kind of unsettling.

Plot-wise, it wasn't perfect. Plot-wise, I found some holes. Not fridge logic, either, holes I recognized while I was watching, in the theater. For some reason, I consider these unforgivable. You've had how many drafts of this script? And how many people have read it? And how many people were watching as you filmed it? It just seems like a crime of laziness for there to be any logical hiccup in any film. Movies should be entirely functional and internally cogent.

But you know what?

I really didn't mind.

A good, original plot is important. But I've written about this before, and this movie just proves it even more, that plots are secondary to character.

You get a really, really good main character in this movie.

He works so well because they strike this perfect proportion of you hating and sympathizing with him. He's a bureaucratic snob, a racist, douche bag government employee who represents the villains in all bureaucratic government occupations and genocides. He's like a less-vicious version of Amon Goth from Schindler's List.

But in addition to this, he's entirely sympathetic. He's a putz. A beta male shoved into an Alpha's position because of nepotism. He's gawky, unsure of himself, desperate to make himself seem powerful when he's really not suited for it. You feel bad for him. He's acting like a dick only because that's what everyone wants him to act like.

So his character growth throughout the movie...it makes a lot of sense. Without giving too much away, he confronts what he fears while working to get what he wants. And that's really the best progression you can expect from any storytelling.

So, I liked it. It was original when it needed to be, derivative when it needed to be, and very personal throughout. A little unexpected genre-mashing, I guess. It was sort of like gory speculative fiction. Not really like Alien--I mean, it was about aliens, but there was a pretty powerful political point shoved down in there somewhere.

Jesus, holy alliteration Batman.

The second movie I saw was Ponyo. I was going to theater-hop into G.I. Joe, which I realized would have disappointed me since I just saw a movie I really liked, but then I noticed a movie I didn't recognize, or thought I did, so I went over and checked out the poster and--oh yeah! Miyazaki made a new movie!

So I saw it.

I was really nervous before it started. The whole theater was full of high-brow parents and their little kids. Lots of little kids. In a Miyazaki movie. The same mastermind who brought us this:

and this:

eesh. I have plenty of traumatizing experiences from movies I saw too early stored up in the upper quadrants of my spinal cord, so I was a little uncomfortable about bearing witness to that for these tykes. I was expecting the worst.

But, fortunately, Miyazaki took more the Kiki's route with this one than the Mononoke route.

It was actually a kid's movie! And it was weird, because it was still very Miyazaki. He has such a weird aesthetic, but it's always consistent. There's lots of weird imagination out there, but if I pulled a Rorschach card with a Miyazaki image on it out of some stack filled with Dr. Suess and Guillermo del Toro and a bunch of other imaginarians I am too prosaic to name, you'd be able to pick him out. I don't know what it is. They're all so fucked up, but they're stylistically consistent and fucked up. It's weird.

But it was cute! It was cute and fun and the stakes were pretty low but you still cared about the characters and you got to see some beautiful animation, so I liked it! Sort of a fable, I guess. Weird. Both these movies fall under my favorite genre category. I guess I served myself well yesterday.

Anyway, I need to find the soundtrack for Ponyo. I think Joe Hisashi is secretly my favorite film composer. I never say his name when people ask, but his stuff deeply lines the pockets of my iPod.

Okay enough wankery. I need to go to work in 25 minutes >:(

bragging

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:06:46 GMT

so today was MY FIRST DAY OFF in like a month and boy was it fantastic.

I slept in. Only made it till 8:30, but, you know, w/e. Went to the grocery store and bought some comfort food, baked a little (like in the oven, not in the pipe), then I went to the mall.

Boy do I love the mall on weekday afternoons.

I had a couple of purposes in mind, of course. First of all, I needed quarters, since I got two new tutoring assignments (thank God) and they're both at the downtown center. So I bought Bram Stroker's Dracula (which for some reason was printed on really oblong paper in the children's section) for like $7! And the cashier humored me when I requested all of my change in quarters.

Second of all, I wanted to take the plunge and ask all of my iPhone questions.

I learned a lot.

I learned a lot THAT DID NOT DISCOURAGE ME.

Yes, the phone itself is going to cost anywhere between $50 and $300, depending on how cheap I want to be. I think I want to go for a new, 16g 3GS, because the word "refurbished" is a synonym for "deathtrap" in my mind. So I poke around the display for a while until someone finally asks me if I need help, to which I respond, "Yes."

I know this makes me sound like some misanthropic, Rain Man-esque social-phobe, but I fear and loathe salespeople. Whenever I go shopping, I usually only last long enough in a store until someone asks if I need help. I don't know what it is. It's such a strange relationship, between seller and buyer. People entering into strictly monetary contracts with each other, and playing all the social niceties just to advance that relationship. UGH SEE THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS I OVER-ANALYZE IT.

I just hate salespeople.

But I said, upfront, I wasn't buying an iPhone today and he was very nice and answered all of my questions. First, I asked about "tethering." I did not know that is what is was called until he informed me. But what's sweet about cell phones with satellite internet, at least some of them, is that you can plug them into your computer and use them as a remote internet device.

This is my biggest concern for my new phone. And now, thankfully, I know I'm taking this route.

The iPhone doesn't offer this yet, but it will in the fall. That means, when I finally move out, I have no reason to buy wireless internet for my apartment.

The $30 mandatory fee for the iPhone plan is essentially my wireless internet.

How sweet is that? If that $30 covers two bases, it's like the iPhone plan is really $45, which is only $10 more than I am paying now! And my phone can only save 50 texts, 700 contacts, and calculate tips!

This made me very, very happy.

I asked about other things. The Nike-iPod thing, which for some reason doesn't work on my iPod classic. I asked about something I heard from Marc Perton, my completely unrelated "relative," where you can stream your entire iTunes library from your home computer, so you don't actually have to use any hard drive space on the iPhone for music.

The salesman said that didn't exist, but he didn't sound sure so I will ask Marc Perton.

What else...I basically gushed about apps. I mean, that's the main reason I want to go for the iPhone instead of a blackberry or that LG one or anything. Apps are a pretty cool thing. I love that they're opensource, that anyone can make an app if they want. I love that a lot of them are free. I love what they can do. I love the potential they hold. And no other phone offers anything similar.

So yeah, I know I disparage Apple a lot, but I'm not going to lie, you guys. The iPhone is a pretty cool thing. I hope it doesn't disappoint me.

So I told him thank you and he definitely convinced me more than turning me away. I left with sweaty pits and a dry mouth, but so is life, I guess. Then I remembered something way in the back of my mind and went to Spencer's gifts.

You guys all remember I named my car Starscream, right? I'm still happy with the name. The only thing I am unhappy with is that there is no way to tell my car is secretly an evil, transforming robot.

I've gone into Hot Topic, that fucking sinkhole of "nonconformism" a bunch of times, looking for a Decepticon window cling that looks like this:

No luck. I even asked the douche bag cashier once, and she's like "ANY WINDOW CLINGS WE HAVE ARE IN THE FRONT DISPLAY CASE SORRY :(" douche bag. Whatever. I'd half-given up. But I go into Spencer's just cruising, and one of the first things I see is a messenger bag with a big, fattie Decepticon symbol right on the front.

Why had I thought Hot Topic was the only bastion of "nonconformity"? Why had I ignored this place?

I guess I thought of Hot Topic more as a misguided attempt to reign in malleable teenagers who don't fit into the Abercrombie/American Eagle mold, and Spencer's as more of a dumb gift shop. And I think I was right, but Spencer's has been adding more useful items to their stock recently. I bought some really cheap cartilage earrings with the bead in the middle there a while ago. And today I go in, and the sales lady actually TRACKS ME DOWN. Having just had a rather self-esteem boosting encounter with another salesperson, I decide to let her try to help me.

She shows me like, three different things that were vaguely like what I was looking for. And then she showed me exactly what I wanted, without even knowing it.

Not a window cling.

A magnet

I HAD FORGOTTEN YOU CAN PUT MAGNETS ON THE BODY OF YOUR CAR. Like those stupid "POW/MIA" and "breast cancer awareness" ribbons. And what she had was basically that image above. The exact thing I wanted. The exact size.

I found exactly what I was looking for.

It was a stupid $4 thing, but you know what? That's usually why I'm so averse to the idea of spending money. Whenever you do, you may only be getting like 80% or 90% of what you really, really want. Spending money is a really easy thing to fuck up. So even if it's on a stupid magnet for the body of your car, I think it should be recognized!

I think this was the most boring blog entry I've ever written.

Like, the mall

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:36:27 GMT

So this schedule is about two blips from driving me stark, raving insane. I haven't done it yet, so this may just be an opportunity for me to whine, but I really think I would prefer working 12-14 hour days 5 days a week than to working any schedule 7 days a week. You need some time off. You need at least one day a week where there is no where you have to be. Not to mention the miles I wouldn't be putting on my car if I only had to drive downtown 5 days a week instead of 7.

Gahhh. So Saturday is really my only "weekend" day, because it's the only day I get to sleep in. I made it all the way to 9:00 today, lol. And I always expect to be able to relax for that extra 10 hour break I get on Saturdays, but I never do. At about 9:30 I pulled out of our driveway to go buy milk so I could have Trix and a protein shake, and my dad pulls up. "Let's go together and do big shopping," he says.

Shopping with my dad is always stressful. Shopping with men who are not gay in general is stressful. And he's the kind of prick to say things like "Oh blah blah blah hunter/gatherer society, women browse and men PINPOINT." Yeah, whatever you say, douche bag. lol I just called my dad a douche bag in my livejournal, oh well. Anyway it's even worse because the grocery store arbitrarily decides to reorganize all the aisles, so it almost overwhelmed him :(

Of course, he wasn't the really bad part. The really bad part was old people. My captioning job and summertime in Wisconsin in general is turning me into such an agist. Old people suck. You know why? Because they're almost entirely unpredictable! Half the time they're sweet, old, slightly senile people who smile kind of vaguely because they don't really know what's going on, and the other half of the time they're crochety, get-off-my-lawn misanthropes. Is this a vast overgeneralization? Yes. I will concede that when you come across an old person, there is about a 1/1000 chance they will be one of those sweet, professorial, climbing-Kilimanjaro-for-their-83rd birthday who still tell the story about how they had sex with Keith Richards at Woodstock. Were the Rolling Stones at Woodstock? I feel like I should know that. Oops they weren't. How about Carlos Santana?

Anyway, old people drive slow, take way too long at the deli counter, and don't follow traffic laws in grocery aisles. DRIVE ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE AISLE, JUST LIKE THE STREET. WHY IS THIS SO HARD FOR PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND? UGH! So we finish shopping (at least we didn't forget anything this time) and now I am kind of already stressed out.

So then I played some Sonic 3 and Knuckles to calm down (there is a big entry brewing about this game, don't you worry). Then I decided to finally restock my incense reserves and go to the mall.

You know that one store in the mall, that kind of sits in the corner and mostly gets ignored? The one, that if you do acknowledge, it's usually only with the thought "how is that place still open?" That is where I buy my incense. It's called "Egyptian International Art," and mostly sells really expensive imported art, chess sets, and bearskin rugs from Northern Africa and the Mediterranean, but they're the only place I know of that sells my flavor (scent? perfume? w/e) of incense besides Hot Topic (puke), but I really hate supporting that bastion of misdirected nonconformity. So I go in there, pick out my Nag Champa, go to check out. To my surprise, there are actually other customers in there, looking at jewelry, but I get helped pretty fast.

"Oh, that's 2 for $9.99," the Egyptian shopkeeper says.

"Really? Sweet! Let me get another one!" I respond. It's normally $6.99 for one, so Adam Smith's invisible hand really gave me no choice.

"Okay, that's $10.56," he says.

"Wow, you sure know that one, don't you?" I asked as I pulled out my $20. It was a lame quip and he didn't say anything and I didn't blame him, but then he smiles and gives me $10 in change.

He ate up the tax! Like they do in Europe! I basically assaulted the $10 before he could change his mind, saying, "Wow, thank you so much!" And then I felt a little guilty, because "Oh no what if he doesn't realize we don't do sales tax like that in America..." but w/e, he works in a store, I think he would have figured it out by now.

So a $.57 gift from a stranger totally changed the outlook on my day. And I've got incense, which I need for my thinking-time, and it makes my cat smell nice, so all in all, not too shabby of a day. I really hope I can pull off this 7-day-a-week crap for 8 more days. Next Monday is the first day in 4 weeks that I'll have off, and lol that's when I'm supposed to get my period, so we'll see.

boy oh boy

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:34:01 GMT

I sure do love naps.

idk

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:50:10 GMT

Time to update my damn fucking livejournal.

Nothing new has happened! Ooh I saw some movies. Saw Bruno, liked it, but less than Borat. Saw Harry Potter. Liked it, but you know, these long book adaptations are never much more than clip shows from the whole season, you know? Lots of stuff I would have liked to have seen. It's really pointless getting excited for adaptations of your favorite stuff, isn't it? It's never going to be right, and you're just going to focus more on the stuff they got wrong than on the stuff they managed to nail.

Or maybe I'm just a pessimist. But we've been over this.

Work has been...exhausting. Like between both jobs I'm only working maybe 36 hours a week, but it's a 7-day schedule I've got going here. Six hours a shift at one job, between four and six at the other, but DAMN weekends are necessary just because they give you the assurance of NOT HAVING ANYTHING TO DO THAT DAY. Of course most people use them to run errands, take the kids to soccer, so lol I guess I'm just lazy and whiny.

The other thing is I only get one day a week that I don't have to be at work by 9:00 at the latest, so that's...no good.

lol what else...my sister made me take this quiz online that gave you your Dungeons and Dragon's good/evil and lawful/chaotic association. Here's a list according to the greatest internet resource since google:

Lawful Good
Neutral Good
Chaotic Good
Lawful Neutral
True Neutral
Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Evil
Neutral Evil
Chaotic Evil

And I got True Neutral

lol

According to Katie that means I am spineless and unpredictable. I don't think of myself as unpredictable. Definitely undependable. But idk, I think it's kind of interesting that on each axis I'm smack in the middle. I assign myself to nothing.

I wonder if that's my problem.

In other news, I have gotten myself into a very sticky hangnail situation on my thumbs. They are both shredded and gross and I should just leave them alone but I've had a picking tic forever. Can they medicate that? Nevermind I don't want to know.

micro catastrophes

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:02:18 GMT

Yesterday my dad took James and me out on the boat.

I love the boat, I really do. But being outdoors and in the sun is one of those things that can go very badly very quickly. And just when I was starting to realize that I was burning, and kind of had to pee, and was getting sort of hungry, my dad almost catches a huge fucking fish.

He loves to fish. It's his thing. If he had unlimited money and no obligations, he would just fish all day. I kind of envy him, that he knows what his love is. I don't know what I would do all day, if that were the case for me. I get so restless when I have nothing to do, and my hobbies...well, I don't know, they're not entirely fulfilling. Whatever, off track.

On track: He gets excited. Obviously. He tries to chase it down some more, which I think is stupid, because even a fucking fish is smart enough to be scared after its prey starts pulling back. But I got to drive the boat for a while, which was pretty cool.

Later, we came across this other guy that was fishing, and for some reason my dad pulls up next to him and tells him where he got his bite. "Over there, by that boat dock with the green awning. About a 36-incher."

"Oh yeah?" The other guy said. "Well, there's a biggun about mid-40s over there, by that silver awning, you know, in case you're interested"

That made me laugh a little. A) Because I do not believe that mid-40s ever existed, and B) because everything is about numbers with guys, isn't it? Salary, horsepower, bowling scores, dick size. Whoever has the highest number wins. It's so easy. I wanted to call him out on it, but I'd done that before and appeared to hurt his feelings, which makes me both a bitch and, you know. Right.

Anyway, that was yesterday. Also yesterday, I started a new ACT class, which brings me to the topic of my entry.

I've always viewed life as a perpetual obligation to cope with micro catastrophes. I think that might kind of be a dramatic name for what they really are, but bear with me. Every day, something goes wrong. Something bad happens. "I'm caught in traffic and will be late for dinner." "I fell down the stairs, but I think I'm all right." "I don't know if my credit card bill got there in time." A lot of these, thankfully, are under our direct control, and to be honest those scare me less. Blaming something on human error is a lot more comforting than blaming it on the randomness of the universe.

The thing about these micro-catastrophes is they always start off small, you know? It's always something little that has the small potential to snowball out of control. "I have high cholesterol" can turn into "Ow some pain just shot up my arm" to "Call 911" to, you know, morbidly enough, calling a funeral home. But that usually doesn't happen. Usually it's something small and you either fix it or it just goes away.

Yesterday, I had one of these. 11 people are signed up for my class. That means I needed to hand out 11 folders with all of the registration stuff. Kaplan made me two extra, just in case some people signed up at the last minute and came to take the diagnostic.

Four extra people came.

I was panicking. I didn't have a test or answer grid for them...OH WAIT I DID HAVE A TEST, I had one extra in my car for reference, but I didn't have an answer grid, and if EVERYONE came, someone was going to have to take Test 2 instead of Test 1. But they could just take the test in the test book, and I could transfer the answers downtown.

I didn't figure this out right away, and I was fucking PANICKING.

I don't deal with these micro-catastrophes very well. I am a panicker by nature. I need a low-key job with a laid-back atmosphere and low responsibility. When something really, truly goes wrong, my first instinct is to run. I'm not a very brave person.

Anyway, this happened AGAIN today at my other job, which I like precisely because it is low-key and laid-back. There is precisely ONE exciting, terrifying thing that can happen. A 911 call could accidentally get routed through us, which apparently is not supposed to happen. In this event, you are supposed to caption as normal and call a supervisor.

I got a 911 call at 6:58 this morning.

I only remember that because fuck, it was 6:58 in the morning and I was only about 20% conscious and I almost had a heart attack when the first words I had to caption were "911 Emergency response." This big red banner appears on my screen "CALL A SUPERVISOR." I TRIED, BUT THE SUPERVISOR BUTTON DIDN'T WORK I WAS FREAKING OUT. THEN I KEPT CAPTIONING BUT I WAS DISTRACTED TRYING TO TELL KATIE, WHO WAS SITTING NEXT TO ME, TO PRESS HER SUPERVISOR BUTTON and why is everything I type coming out in caps I didn't press capslock OH GOD "ARE THEY BREATHING" SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE BECAUSE OF MY INEPTITUDE WHAT THE FUCK!!!

The call only lasted like 3 minutes, and by the last 10 seconds I figured out that the reason the supervisor button wasn't working was BECAUSE my caps lock was on (why don't function buttons work with capslock?) But Katie had pressed hers and the supevisor came about a minute after the call ended, and said "Oh well the 911 calls automatically call a supervisor, Katie what did you need?" WELL IF THAT WERE THE CASE WHY DID IT TELL ME TO PUSH IT AND WHY DIDN'T YOU COME SOONER?

I felt like I'd just almost gotten in a car crash. It was not what I was expecting. They told us in training that that never happens. IT HAPPENED. My sister was like "eh, whatever, it's not even supposed to come through here it's not your responsibility" but lol omg I felt like I was going to cry.

Anyway.

That is my theory about life. A whole bunch of nothing until something goes insanely, horribly wrong.

Or right. Maybe things sometimes go right. And maybe I am just a pessimist by nature. I don't know.

grr

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:34:06 GMT

I am frustrated right now.

A bunch of boys are sitting in the kitchen/game room and talking about how womens are terrible and decide the rest of/ruin your life.

And all I want to do is go play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with Knuckles and get the last Chaos Emerald :(

OH GREAT NOW THEY ARE BEING RACIST

UGH

Man

Man

I am just frustrated!

okay idk. POSITIVE. I got paid double time yesterday, that is very positive. I am teaching a new ACT class this week. I hope that will be positive, but we'll see. Um, what else...Bruno comes out soon? Man.

Man

idk update

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:08:36 GMT

Okay so I haven't updated in a really long time, pretty much because my life is a boring vortex of boring.

There's no TV to discuss.

There's no good movies.

There is so little pop culture for me to cling to in a desperate attempt to belong that I'm floating, free-wheeling, like some sort of zombie.

Um, what has happened to me lately...I filled up the air in my tires! That was fun, one of them was almost completely flat.

I was going to go to Summerfest yesterday, but for serious my period just decides to DROP BY whenever I want to do ANYTHING FUN so those plans were 86'd right away. I might go today but I feel even worse :( I even had to leave work early, something I promised myself I would never do, but W/E I WAS DYING. Little bastard banging on my uterus like a timpani or some shit. ORGANS WERE NOT MEANT TO BE PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS.

I guess, as far as *life* update, for some reason I have decided on *leaving for the coast* in October, though that becomes more and more dubious when I have to pay $100 to heal the cat's ear yeast infection and it turns out 694,000 jobs were lost last month, leaving me with a very workable 9.5% national unemployment rate. Part of me thinks I should be happy with the job I have and stop whining, but the other part of me WAAANNNNTSSS MOOOOOREEE...

It's just a courage thing at this point. And self-confidence is the one trait I lack nearly absolutely. It only ever seems to appear when I get really really mad, so maybe one of these days I'll just get so mad that I storm out of the house, never to return.

Maybe.

the one good thing that came out of transformers

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:54:09 GMT

I almost forgot:

I have my qualms, like everyone. But goddamn, when the camera peeled away and revealed the Fire Nation armada outside, EVEN THOUGH THAT NEVER HAPPENED, I had a little squee, nerdgasm, chill-down-my-spine thing going on.

That arrow looks fucking retarded though, and it better not be some cryptic hieroglyphics or prophecy shit that becomes a plot device, I swear to God.

But hopefully, this movie proves my theory that a movie directed, but not written by Shamalamadingdong will better align his talents.