Look at the cool box of loot I got for my birthday from Steve and Denise. Somewhere a kid is crying because the Star Wars store is empty.
My favorite item:
The Wampa (from Episode 5, in case you forgot {that’s Empire Strikes Back, the one released second, in case you don’t understand how the numbering works}) He looks like a yeti vampire. I love him.
Yesterday I had a doctor appointment and I would love to tell you all about it but my husband recoiled and shuddered and curled into the fetal position when I explained it to him so I’m guessing you wouldn’t appreciate it either. Let’s just say it’s amazing what the human body can grow in out of the way places that can be removed with a little yank and then stuck in a jar to be studied later, and leave it at that. (The Dr. is going to study it, not me.)
Bob is on spring break and he came downtown with me yesterday and he wandered around while I worked and we met at the doctor’s in the afternoon. I took the rest of the day off so we could have some adventures. First, we went to Henry’s and had a snack and I had a beer.
Nothing tastes better than an adult beverage in the middle of a week day. I’ve said this before but it feels like I’m getting away with something and for about 3 minutes I wished my life could be like this all the time: wandering around having adventures and sneaking a beer in the middle of the day. But I realized if I could have a beer in the middle of the day whenever I wanted (which I suppose technically I could), it wouldn’t feel special or taste extra good.
The real purpose of this post is to tell you without spoilers, about the movie we saw, Match Point, which Woody Allen’s latest. I do not think this is a bad movie but I found it brutal to sit through.
I am an anxious person and go to a great deal of trouble to create a life with as little distress as possible. That’s why I like to be appallingly early to the airport, always put my keys in the same place when I come home and compulsively organize and tidy all my stuff so that I can easily find things.
This movie is a slow, steady burn, cranking up the tension one tiny notch at a time for two hours. I could feel my blood rusting behind my knees and my hair turning gray. This guy makes a mistake and then more mistakes and even more mistakes trying to fix the other mistakes and who’s going to find out when and how? Brutal. If I’d been watching at home I would have turned it off. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Just stop the tension, please. I can’t separate anxiety as entertainment and anxiety, period.
Now that it’s over I can tell you it is a brilliant film. Great writing. Fantastic acting. Jonathan Rhys Meyers (better known as the dreamy soccer coach from Bend it Like Beckham around my house) is especially good. But should you see it? I don’t know.
This morning I sent Rubbermaid a message telling them that their Seal n’ Saver product is flawed. I don’t normally do this, which I explained to them, but after wrestling with the stupid cake saver this morning and uttering my favorite cuss word: godf*kingdamnittohellpieceofsh*tmotherf*ker, I felt they’d earned it. (Technically the epithet wasn’t uttered, it was shrieked at high volume because I was very frustrated and in a hurry to get out the door to work.)
They’ve changed their product and since my dear husband has this very tiny flaw of leaving food savers in the trunk of his car for extended periods of time with food product still in them until even bleach won’t banish the odor thus rendering the item fit only for garbage, we need to replace the older and better designed product, with the new blue-lidded product which is all they have at Fred Meyer (other than cheapier, crapier food saving items.)
And the updated version of the product sucks. As I explained to Rubbermaid in my note, we have small, medium and a cake saver version of the updated verision and they are consistently difficult to get the top on. “This is a design flaw and should be looked at,” is what I told them, which Bob thought was hilarious.
So their reply is to give them the product number. WTF? How is the product number going to help anything? I already told them that ALL products with the blue lid are difficult to close. I am an able bodied person with strong hands and arms. What is a differently abled person going to do? What about my mother-in-law? is what I actually asked them.
I knew it was pointless when I sent my first message, which could only be sent after filling out an extensive data-mining form including needing my phone number to which I replied: HA HA HA HA.
If I could invent something, I would invent, I guess it would be software, that can calculate how stuff fits on the page when its going to be printed and will not print the last page with only one line. Have you noticed when you print stuff from the web or email there is always the last page with almost nothing on it?
We have HBO again, now that the Sopranos are back.
Yeah, premium channels! I scanned through the movies for stuff I’ve been wanting to see and impulsively taped Pretty in Pink which I have not seen in I don’t know how long. Has to be over 10 years.
It was released in February 1986 which means I was basking in the light at the end of the tunnel of my college education. I have zero memory of my first time seeing the film but I suspect I liked it a lot because I loved Sixteen Candles (84) and Breakfast Club (85) and had some sort of girl crush on Molly Ringwald which is hard to imagine right now.
Two things I do remember about Pretty in Pink was being hypnotized by her amazing accessories drawer, shown in the opening credits and the soundtrack.
On the former: she was poor, yet had oodles of beads and hats and belts. I wanted those accessories. I think I still have the single extra-long strand of plastic “pearls” that I bought for .99¢ at Express at the mall. My quest to amass an impressive accessories collection ended quickly probably because I wanted to spend my money on other things, I was too lazy to scope out thrift shops and garage sales and I didn’t really want another box of crap to lug around every time I moved.
I obtained the soundtrack through a prehistoric method of illegal song sharing that involved taping a vinyl recording onto a cassette tape. I listened to it in my car for years. Psychedelic Furs, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order. Still a classic.
My intent in watching the movie now was to see how well it holds up after 20 years and the answer is: I don’t know. Am I watching as my grown up self who no longer squanders valuable brain real estate worrying about accessories or the politics of being under 25, or as my 22 year old self who wanted to have cool bracelets and a cute guy to notice me and oh God, was a fully functioning human being in the 80’s which are flawlessly preserved in this film in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and exhilarating. (Hair! Clothes! ak!)
The story was then and still remains, completely stupid. A girl from the wrong side of the tracks, which is hamfistedly driven home by an establishing shot of a train chugging slowly across the screen and passing in front of a dilapidated shack, falls for a cute, rich guy, played by Andrew McCarthy who between this movie and St. Elmos Fire, we all loved and then something happened and then there was Weekend at Bernie’s and we drove him from our minds, seemingly until forever and then there was Kingdom Hospital and we remembered him and swooned all over again. The guy likes the girl. The girl wants to go to the prom with the guy. But oh, the other mean rich kids, mainly Steff, played in a classic pouffy haired performance by James Spader, try to drive the young lovers apart.
This is a staple of movie and TV plot development where high school is a world of absolute black and white cruelty. I remember high school. I didn’t love it. Yes, there were cool kids and not cool kids. Yes, there was meanness. But I never saw anything like the scene you see in every show where a cool kid will walk up to a not cool kid, trip him as he carries his lunch so that all the other cool people can laugh at him and then tell him that he’s hated because he’s [fill in the blank: poor, smart, of a certain ethnicity, of a certain religion, fat, handicapped, other]. I never saw anyone go to elaborate lengths to publicly humiliate a kid just because he was a nerd or especially because he was poor. The whole rich v. poor thing is more subversive than that and not like it disappears after high school.
Stupid story aside, what makes the movie so watchable is Duckie and to some degree, Iona (the loopy boss at the record store). Who didn’t love Duckie? He had his own funky intro music. Remember the scene when he’s in her room aching with his teen adoration for her? When he tells Harry Dean Stanton he plans to marry her? The Otis Redding number?
“I live to like you” he tells her after he finds out she’s going out with the rich guy and his little Duck heart is broken.
As legend has it, the original ending was to have Andie and Duckie end up together but TEST AUDIENCES which much be a euphemism for dumbasses wanted Andie to end up with major appliance named, Blane. So Andie goes off with Blane at the prom and Duckie’s consolation prize is a winking Kristy “I Ran Off with My Married Skating Partner” Swanson. I still hate the ending.
Two more things if you’re still here reading what has turned out to be a marathon post:
Did you not cry when you saw that abomination of a prom dress Andie made out of the adorable dress Iona gave her? Tragedy.
I thought I blogged about this but can’t find it now. Veronica Mars did an episode where they had an 80’s dance. Meg had on this horrible dress and I was thinking: it looks like that terrible prom dress in Pretty in Pink. At the dance, Duncan appears, dressed as Duckie which was when I figured out Meg’s dress was supposed to be the horrible prom dress in Pretty in Pink. To add an extra layer of irony to the whole thing: here we finally get to see a version of Andie end up with Duckie, yet on Veronica Mars we don’t want Meg to end up with Duncan. We want it to be Veronica (to end up with Duncan)
Yesterday, I actually said this out loud to another person:
It’s supposed to be nice on Sunday. 52° and no rain.
We moved into our first house in Vancouver 8 years ago. The photos don’t accurately show how extensive the moving team was. My whole family helped us move. Other than the 1 car garage, I still love our funky little house. And someday I’m going to paint it or decorate it and show it how much.
The last couple of times I’ve used my atm card the animated window has advised me that I can get my money even quicker with some sort of myatm.com thing.
An atm transaction takes less than one minute. How much faster can they do it?
1. Sex in the City (watched at least 3 episodes and didn’t work for me)
2. Seinfeld (watched and laughed occasionally but never went out of my way for it)
3. Curb Your Enthusiasm (you’d think we’d love this but couldn’t make it through 1 ep)
4. Family Guy (ditto)
5. Six Feet Under (watched a few and liked but not enough to track down the whole series)
6. Farscape (everyone tells me I should try again)
Do you ever look around and mourn for stuff that we used to use all the time and is now disappearing? For example, phone booths. Or travel agents.
There’s one thing that you’d expect to be obsolete. Something that the Internet and cellphones would seem to make less necessary. Yet somehow there are more than ever. I want less of these. I want to call someone or write an email and say: come on, enough already.
I’m talking about phonebooks.
I kid you not we have received at least new 5 phonebooks in the last month. Not counting the Portland books I swiped from [omitted] because a good set of Portland books can come in handy to the Vancouver resident.
We got a Verizon book, a Clark County book, several versions of the yellow pages including one “mini” book which is completely worthless. They’re almost all completely worthless. I tried to find a sewing store not long ago and found TWO listed in my new phone books that not only were no longer in business but from the look of the moldy newspapers on the floor and dusty wires hanging from the ceiling, had not been in business for a long time. And this could inspire a whole tangent about how sad it is that sewing stores are disappearing but we’ll save that for another time.
Where does one put all these phonebooks? Well, yes, the recycling is a good choice but let’s say that you felt that phonebooks had valuable information that you needed to keep close by in your home. Where would you put them? Ours go in a drawer of an ancient end table. That drawer is now full and can accept no more phonebooks. Please don’t send any. AND should we ever need something heavy to barricade the front door from zombies. We are good to go.
