Things I did on Saturday:

• Found that best friend from The Bad Time in New England had friended me on Facebook, felt much joy and happiness
• Ate oatmeal and leftover canned mango 
• Went to first Ashtanga class ever, and went to first class in DC ever (yes, it was the same class) 
• Moaned and complained about how difficult class was on my shoulders 
• A lot 
• Ate lunch at favorite restaurant 
• Watched Pirates of the Caribbean…again…while cross-stitching
• Congratulated self on how much surface area I’ve covered in the last couple of weeks of stitching
• Worried about whether the 2500 words that I successfully wrote yesterday while at work in the Friday afternoon doldrums (don’t tell!) were any good
• Read them, and decided they’re perfectly OK, and may need replacement when I see how the book is shaping up after the first plot point
• Did happy dance in brain that hardest part (starting) of writing new novel is over
• Refused to feel guilt about lack of homework, chores 
• Looked at clock, realized it was 6 PM and I’d wasted the whole day 
• Decided day had been spent, not wasted 
• Wrote in blog 
• Sent happy thoughts to TB and family
• Clicked “Publish”

BTW

In case anyone was wondering, as I was, where Taoist Biker has been for the last few days, I think I just found out. I hope he and his family are OK.

even Starbucks had direct deposit

There is one large reason I want to leave my job (the connection to BF’s parents and all its messy tendrils), and a hundred itty-bitty reasons. The shitty computer. The coronary-inducing parking lot. The dead cockroaches I find a few times a week during the summer. The broken front door. The rude downstairs office neighbors. The continual spraying with Lysol that happens every time someone is sick, which makes me choke. The total failure of temperature regulation (85 degrees in the winter, 65 degrees in the summer). And, likely the biggest and dumbest of all these little reasons, the problem with payroll.

If OG is too busy to process automatic payroll three days before payday, we get live checks instead of direct deposit. She is too busy about half the time, so about half the time I have to deposit my check and wait several days for it to clear instead of having the money right there and available on the morning of payday. While I know that this is how people dealt with their paychecks for many, many years and direct deposit is a brand-new convenience in the scheme of things, it has become so prevalent that I don’t think I’m out of line for complaining about this. It’s a serious problem for me, because of the cascade of automatic payments that get made after payday out of  my account, and because I like my payment to BF for the mortgage to be, I don’t know, ON TIME.

It’s happened again this payday. This is like four times in a row. I’m fucking tired of it.

The book I’m reading right now is The English Patient, which I’ve never read before. I also haven’t seen the movie, which, I know I need to see it, sooo romantic, yadda yadda, don’t bother to tell me.  The thing is…I’m not really enjoying the book much at all. I feel about the same way I felt when I watched Pandora’s Box (halfway down), as if parts of my brain have died or deserted me somehow, as if I’m no longer capable of understanding Art and Literature. But this book is so opaque, so poetic as to be difficult to decipher. Events are vaguely sketched instead of drawn, and dialogue is sparse. Maybe I’ve just become more attracted to specificity in my reading material over the years. I want to know just how long they had their affair, and just how each of them felt about it. You can leave me to draw some conclusions, but for God’s sake not all of them. It’s beautifully written, and I know that the author did a good deal of research in order to evoke all the surroundings realistically, but I think he went too far in the other direction in the writing part, and left the reader floundering in his language a little.

But perhaps it’s just me, and my brain has in fact deserted me. It won a Booker, after all. Although I’ve only really liked one Booker winner that I’ve read, The Blind Assassin. At least one that I read, Vernon God Little, was downright awful.

I spent a goodly amount of time cross-stitching last night. I’d forgotten just how soothing it is, how satisfying. There’s immediate visual gratification, but it’s nevertheless the saaame thing over and over and over, stitch after stitch after stitch. Aaahh. I actually can’t wait to get home and get to it again. Unlike knitting, it’s not an activity you can do for a lengthy period of time without it taking a toll on your eyes and neck, but I still love it.

I smell a slow day ahead. Maybe I’ll pull out my thumb drive and write a little…

linx/odd topics

I’ve got a couple of links to share that I keep forgetting about. First there is the comic below, which is too funny for me just to link to and take the chance that you won’t read it.

There is also this, a map of heavy metal band names, which created peals of laughter in our computer room when BF and I looked at it. TB and Heather, take note; I think you will like this.

I have a few other things I want to talk about, and each is a little weird.

BF and I have now watched the entire fourth season of Highlander together. In my view, this is not a great show; it’s a pretty good show, entertaining and rarely awful and with an excellent overall concept (taken from the movie, obviously), but it’s not a great show. That’s my opinion. But good shows can have great characters, and one of them is Methos.

For those of you not willing to click on the spoileriffic link there, Methos is a 5,000-year-old immortal*, a guy who’s passed entirely into legend among immortals who do not actually know him (such as the main characters of the show). He also poses as a mortal Watcher, part of the organization that…watches…immortals and their doings. His backstory is, shall we say, substantial. He is played by Peter Wingfield, and from what I’ve seen of him in this sole season of Highlander I’ve watched, he is marvellously characterized. The thing that I find most interesting (aside from the 5,000-year-oldness) is that he seems to admire Duncan (the main character), although it’s never explicitly put into the scripts or the characters’ performances. I think he thinks that Duncan is simply a better person than he is, and that current runs under all the ways he interacts with Duncan and the favors he agrees to do for him. That’s a pretty neat dynamic for a pre-Sopranos TV show.

*Stop, and think about that, for a moment…alive three thousand years before Christ, and still around.

He’s also cute, and charismatic, and great fun to watch. The actor is a Brit, one of those British men with vast noses and angular faces. I like Methos sort of the same way I like Butters on South Park; stuff that each of them says makes me spontaneously tell them I love them through the TV, and I am always happier watching an episode involving them. Although that’s where the similarities end; I am not remotely attracted to Butters.

So, the other night we watched an episode with Methos in it, and that night I dreamed about him. I dreamed that I was an immortal, and a group of evil immortals kidnapped me and were going to take my head. In the dream I was in love with Methos and had been for ages, but he didn’t know about it, except when he found out I was in mortal danger, he started to fall in love with me, and eventually rescued me. Squee! I woke up feeling happy and ashamed at the same time. I mean, this is Highlander, people. Peter Wingfield is no Hugh Laurie. (I suppose.) But it was still a fun dream.

Before I went to sleep and dreamed that dream, something else unusual happened. I had been reading my book, earlier I had been watching Highlander, and in my head a few scenes from various films were running around. (I get scenes from movies stuck in my head the same way normal people get songs stuck in their heads. It’s generally only movies I’ve seen many times, but there are a lot of movies in that category.) Suddenly, disconcertingly, all of that was swept out of my head as if a recycle bin had been emptied, and I was staring up at the ceiling inside my very own life. All the fictions, all the narratives I had consumed were pushed away, and there I was, unglamorous, unafraid, unsheltered by fiction, alive. I wasn’t comparing myself to any characters, I wasn’t distracted by any narratives, I was just there. In the moment. I explained this to BF and he said, “Moments of clarity are rare.” I seized on this phrase – this was exactly what had happened. It was a moment of clarity, a realization of being-in-the-world, as Heidegger would have it. I feel this sometimes during yoga, but it’s never been a snapping-back that was as sudden or extreme as this one.

Fun fact about me: I always win at Freecell. I suck at computer solitaire, I don’t get anything out of Minesweeper, and I like Spider OK as a pleasant time-suck, but Freecell has always been a gift for me. When I was in high school, I had something of a rep among my friends for being able to beat any Freecell game, and I set one friend to staring, openmouthed, at my quick (three tries, as I recall) solution of a game that he’d been working on for weeks. Last night I had to play one a few times before I got it, and BF was watching. He asked me if I was stuck, and I said “There’s a solution to every Freecell game.” He thought for a moment, and then asked me if this had actually been proven. I didn’t know. Anecdotally it was true; I’ve played hundreds of games of Freecell and have eventually won every one.

Until now I’ve found it somewhat comforting, my ability to solve every Freecell game I’m confronted with. It makes me feel that the same may hold true in life. Picard said in an aliens-kidnapped-me episode that there is an answer to every puzzle, no matter how long it takes to find it, and truly the first thing I thought of when I heard this was Freecell. All of life’s puzzles can have the answers to them teased out, too, I believe. You just may have to restart the game a few times.

Unfortunately, the metaphor collapses when confronted with Wikipedia. BF went to the other computer and found out that, in fact, Picard is not correct when it comes to Freecell. There is a single game out of the 32,000 numbered games of Freecell that is unwinnable. I don’t believe I’ve happened upon this game myself, but if I ever do, boy, will I be pissed.

the weather is no excuse for anything, you fools

So. On Monday it snowed overnight, and it snowed most of the day Tuesday, and the result was just over two inches. Last night it sleeted all night so far as I can tell, and this morning there was thick layer of ice over most everything.

Even though I moved away from New England just over three years ago, I still have a laughing machine in my head that’s especially reserved for how this part of the country responds to winter weather. The state is completely incompetent when it comes to judging when to start using trucks, sand or salt, and which one to use relevant to the kind of stuff that’s on the ground. COMPLETELY. INCOMPETENT. And people drive scared when there’s slush on the highway but they blaze by when there’s unsalted powder. It’s not their fault, they don’t have to cope with this often enough to figure out how to respond (although the state has no excuse at all), but it still makes me laugh.

This morning MD called me and said I could come in as late as I wanted to or not at all, whenever I felt comfortable driving. Yeeah. I’ve delivered pizza in worse stuff than this, guys…although never had I driven on town-roads that were so utterly neglected. The parking lot was covered over in ice. But I still made it in and parked fancy, because that is how I roll. And/or I have seven New England winters of experience. I would have been on time, too, except that BF was blocking my car in and wanted to go to work a little later. Also scraping off his car was a serious chore.

But I’m here now. I don’t think it’s going to be a terribly busy day; the state government is shut down and so probably a lot of law offices are going to be closed as well. When MD made it in himself, he thanked me for coming in through all the mess. He said my drive must have been awful yesterday morning, too. No! It wasn’t! And it’s no big deal! Nothing on the road, short of a foot of unplowed snow or six inches of ice, should keep business from running! CRAZYPANTS.

—

Our computers at home number three: BF’s PC, his laptop, and my Mac laptop. I haven’t used my Mac for well over a year, now, probably closer to two years, because I never bought Office for the thing and most of what I’d be using it for is Word. (Please reserve your comments about OpenOffice, and telling me that AppleWorks is just as good, so on. Not having Office was a huge pain, okay?) But I found out last semester that through the community college, I can get deep discounts on software, and so this past weekend I purchased the Office 2008 suite for my Mac for about $90. Last night I installed it, and I had largely forgotten just how wonderful my little Mac is. It’s so pretty, and so much fun to use, and so graceful where Microsoft hardware/programs are so clunky and dull. I look forward to using it lots more (again).

—

I have a secret interest in sexual deviance, because while I only have one mildly unusual fetish of my own, I am fascinated by people who have uncontrollable and weird ones, and this article talks about a book that was written about four of the main fetishes out there. It’s a terrific article (and likely a terrific book), particularly: “Perhaps the sickness in deviance lies not in the object of desire but in the view of the self, as perverted rather than simply different.” YES. That is exactly it, thank you for putting it out in the media. The movie Secretary posited this exact thing in a way that was also sexy and thoughtful.

If you are also secretly  interested in deviance, this book is a great primer. FBF got it when we split up and I miss it sorely.

—

Nothing futher to add this morning. I hope you’re all less exasperated by your surroundings’ reaction to the weather than I am.

procedural understanding

Yesterday afternoon when MM left, she passed by my office and of course started a conversation with me. Sometimes I really hate being trapped on the ground floor of this office, where anyone who walks by and has something to share will freely share it with me. She asked me when I started classes, and I said “Tonight.” Her face lit up, and she said “Ooh! Exciting!” “Yeeaaah!” I said, with mock enthusiasm. I tried to turn back to what I was doing (which was actual work, as I recall), and she walked on, and then she came back, and said “Smile! It is exciting!” and laughed. I smiled the same smile I smile at Thanksgiving and Christmas when someone is pointing a camera at me: I am smiling because you are forcing me to, not because there is any mirth whatsoever in my soul. Go to hell, all of you. I think if MM had to sit in one of my community college classes for even five minutes, she would take back the word “exciting” and any word remotely synonymous to it in half a heartbeat.

Last night’s class was Civil Procedure. Civil procedure is what I do every day for eight hours, so I knew this class was going to be pretty difficult for me to enjoy, but I think it’s going to be worse than that. I am pretty sure the instructor has never taught before, and if he has, it wasn’t at a community college.

Disclaimer: I do not intend to insult ANYONE with the paragraphs below. I’m just trying to parse a problem that I’ve noticed.

The problem with being well-educated is that you assume a base level of knowledge that just doesn’t exist for people who aren’t also well-educated. Assuming that everyone read The Catcher in the Rye in high school is one thing; assuming that everyone read Middlemarch or Ulysses in college is another. This guy, because he has a college degree and a J.D., assumes that everyone who is sitting in class at the community college knows the progression of the court system from District Court to the Court of Appeals, and what diversity of jurisdiction is, and what a pleading is, and the difference between interrogatories and requests for production of documents. There’s no reason in the world to believe this (in part because Civil Procedure can be taken in the first semester of the paralegal degree, before you know anything about the law at all). But because he’s been around people who have (or are getting) college degrees and J.D.s for such a long time, he has forgotten that there are people who make minimum wage and haven’t been to college, and that they’re likely to be the kind of folks who are going to be sitting in a community college class.

The lady who taught Legal Research & Writing last semester had the same problem. She had totally unreasonable expectations not only for the amount of work we were capable of doing, but the quality of it. I imagine it was a real shock to get back those first homeworks and find basic grammar and spelling mistakes, and/or a total failure to grasp the material. The instructor for Civil Procedure is going to expect us to draw up a complaint after the next class, and I think maybe 2 of us in the class have ever even seen a complaint. There was an unusual number of people working in attorneys’ offices or for the state in this class, but most of them were working in criminal law. How will they know the kind of language that’s commonly used, the kinds of disclaimers you have to put in, the format of Statement of Facts, Counts, etc.?

It makes me frustrated that the new teachers at the community college are so ill-prepared for the reality of what kind of students they’re going to have. It’s not the fault of the teachers, who have spent their lives in the same kind of well-educated cocoon I was raised in, but I wish the head of the program would take them aside and say, “Look, these are working folks, and they’ve never heard of George Eliot, all right?”

Aside from this problem (which frankly doesn’t affect me, because I do know what a pleading is), the class still looks to be pretty dismal. The guy has the same diarrhea-of-mouth that I’ve noticed most lawyers have (no offense, Tanaudel and any other attorneys reading), and he doesn’t seem to have organized the class in any recognizable way. He talked in a vague fashion about the way the rest of the semester will go, but I’m not sure he’s really planned more than about five weeks of work for us, and the semester is three times longer than that. He also seemed totally unfamiliar with the standard curriculum of the class – he plans not to use the regulation textbook, and didn’t know that A Civil Action was a recommended text. Siiiigh.

At least it’s my last semester. I will keep repeating this every time I get irritated about having to deal with any of this. At least it’s my last semester. At least it’s my last semester.

This is a tidy single-topic post, so I’ll put it up as is and perhaps post again later with more haphazard stuff.

Update: Reading this post again, it seems a lot more snobby than I intended it to be. I’m not trying to disparage community colleges or their students, nor am I trying to say that not having a bachelor’s or other degrees makes you somehow less. At all. Ever. I don’t believe that’s true. All I mean is that you can’t necessarily expect that people sitting in community college classes will have bachelor’s degrees, or be familiar with the same kinds of knowledge that a college-educated person is. They might instead know how to keep pipes from freezing or why your car won’t start – which is, by the way, far more useful information than who wrote Middlemarch. And, of course, because there are ALL kinds of people in this world, there could be people without college degrees who have read every one of George Eliot’s books and understood them better than someone with an M.A. in literature. But those people are unlikely to be bothering with paralegal degrees.

ma’am, would you like a career? no thanks.

Quite a disappointing weekend. I had that panicky feeling of not having enough time. I watched too many movies and still didn’t get any writing done. But I restarted on my cross-stitch project and finished my mom’s sweater. So I will be able to give it to her as a birthday gift. I’ll take a picture of it and post it here sometime soon – at this point it just looks like a sweater, so it’s not as interesting as the work-in-progress. I wish I could take pictures of the cross-stitch, but my camera is really too terrible to pick out the fine detail (and that’s all cross-stitch work is, is fine detail), so until I get a new camera you’ll just have to speculate, chin in hand, about what kind of marvelous magic I’m creating with my little needle and a zillion yards of thread. (Update: Although I found a picture of what the finished product will look like.)

If you like tea, particularly herbal blends, get yourself a box of the Sweet Rose flavor of Tulsi Tea. It, along with this Rainforest Mate (which is far more fancy-schmancy and expensive), is the only tea I’ve drunk that has delivered on the promise of its fragrance. Most herbal teas smell a lot more delicate and interesting than they taste, but this tea has the goods.

I had a great home practice yesterday. I made up a “Yoga Rebel Mix” with all the songs that would be way too hard for a class with anyone in it but me – there’s some Green Day in there, “Paranoid Android”, Beck, etc. (Hey, I know it’s not exactly Cannibal Corpse, but no reputable yoga teacher would be playing Green Day in one of her classes.) Some songs worked and some didn’t, but I pushed myself just hard enough and wound up feeling pleased and spent. Also? About halfway through I called BF out of the computer room where he was playing Heroes of Might & Magic (he has been playing this game since 2006…you really get your money’s worth out of a PC game these days), and asked him if my back was straight in downward dog. It was. “Look at my heels,” I said. They were fully on the mat. I’ve never had my heels all the way on the mat in a normal-sized, straight-backed down dog. It was a pretty remarkable moment.

Today is the first day of classes for me. I keep trying to remind myself that I only really have three months of classes – one week at the end of January, one week at the beginning of May, and hence just Feb-Mar-Apr – but I’m still depressed as hell. Settling in to having all that time to myself was pretty great. Of course, I’m taking two classes this time instead of my thus-far three at a time, and I’m hoping it’s going to make a big difference.

Because I like to be miserable, I’ve begun looking into a graduate program at University of Maryland. It’s in a field that I ruled out long, long ago (like, before college) as not having enough money in it for me, and which I was afraid would be 80% boring and 20% awesome, but recent new information has made me think about it again.  I’d have to take the GRE, get letters of recommendation, etc. but while all that would have seemed overwhelming a couple of years ago, I’ve learned that bureacracy stuff like that always seems like it’s going to be a lot more trouble than it actually is. (Learning stuff as an adult is so great.) Cost is the serious problem (I’m used to the community college now, so the tuition estimate took my breath away), but I think I may be on the verge of accepting that I’m going to be in student loan debt 4-EVAR, so that also might not be a total buzzkill.

I also think I’m near acceptance that “career” and “Crisitunity” are pretty much mutually exclusive. Finding myself reconsidering a field that I was sure I’d never consider again, along with being sure I want to teach yoga, completing a paralegal certificate, thinking always about film restoration, and wanting to write books for a living – all this jumble makes me sure that there’s not one thing I’m going to be doing for 30 years. I think this means that I ought to give up all the attachment I have to security, to having a safety net; that’s my mom’s philosophy, but the life I want is too variable and unfixed for me to be able to follow the secure path at the same time. I don’t ever want to be afraid again as I was in New England, but I also don’t want to be so haunted by that memory that I never try anything crazy that I really want to do. (Attaching the word “crazy” to the field that I’m considering the M.A. in is pretty darn funny, by the way.)

I’m not seriously considering this, at least not right now, but I’ve stuck a big bright Post-It in my brain, to keep it in mind. I really don’t want to live in Maryland for the next howevermany years, I really really want to get further away from MP and from even the mild winters that we have here, but UMD has an excellent program, geared directly towards my interest, and every one of the classes in the degree is offered in the evening as well as the daytime. How many master’s programs can say that?

Decisions, decisions. I can hear my mother now, telling me that I need to think about one thing at a time, that if I keep flipping between careers…something terrible will happen, the sky will fall, I don’t know. But that’s not who I am. I may regret saying that in twenty years, but I haven’t regretted any of my funky decisions so far.

In fact, it’s only the secure-type decisions I’ve regretted. Going to England (even though I mucked that one up via immaturity), taking the previous job at Unethical Company and thence to this current job, even getting the paralegal cert. It’s given me some perspective and some additional education, but I’m concerned that it may wind up being a giant waste of time and $5,000, and that if I get the state job, I will have gotten it on the strength of my other experience/education anyway.

Well. It’s Monday, and I’m not at all happy to be here. Nothing is really going on, but my sixth sense (aka paranoia) is telling me that I’m going to get asked about some large pieces of work that I’ve forgotten about this week. I don’t know if I actually have forgotten anything, but I feel like I have.

questions from the Taoist Biker

TB took the bait when I put out an open call for interview questions. (They are really good ones, y’all.)

1) It still boggles my mind when I think about it that, almost 16 years ago, you and I attended the same (very large) event on the same (very large) space, only to meet up bloggily later on. If you’d known that was going to happen, what would you have wanted to say to that other person to remember in the future, when you met again? About yourself, about life, about anything?

Oof. This is an extremely difficult question. I thought about it for quite a while, and the only answers I could come up with were flip ones. For one, I’m not sure my 12-year-old self would have had anything of interest to say to your college-boy self. If I could take my 27-year-old self and insert it into my 12-year-old self for a moment…

Okay, I thought of something. It is extremely lame. “The strength of my passion for all that interests me is exactly the same…the objects are definitely going to change.”

(BTW, it doesn’t boggle my mind, but I have long Navy-brat experience of what a small world this is.)

2) Is yoga primarily a physical activity, or primarily a mental/spiritual activity?

Geez, another toughie. At least one yoga master, Iyengar, would say that it is only a mental/spiritual activity, and that the physicality of it is just a means to an end. I bow to him, but my own experience has been different. I have found that when it’s really working, the physical and the mental blend with each other such that your body doesn’t feel like a remote-control car anymore (with your mind the gleeful kid, I guess). It feels as if your mind has become large and elastic and spread tendrils all over your body, such that your arms are your mind, your legs are your mind, and all your parts are moving peacefully, focused on the one task of being in the pose.

The spiritual for me comes later, when I’m finished with my practice. Seated, I bow to all who have come before me and all who will come after, bowing also to myself who endured another day, another practice, and feeling as if the air between the electrons and nuclei of all the atoms of my body is just as spacious as the air between my head and the ceiling as I bow – and if this is true, then surely we are all connected, and this all means something, and I am bowing to a purpose as well.

So I guess my answer is that for me, for my yoga, the physical is integrated with the mental, and they are both integrated with the spiritual.

3) If you had to choose one character to write about for the rest of your life – no blogging, no nonfiction, just an eternal series of “This Character” novels – what sort of character would you like to create?

Why, it would be MEEEE, because I am endlessly fascinating!

Just kidding. The character I have most liked writing was the main character in my ghost-story novel, and strangely, I disliked her a lot. She was cold, prickly, difficult; she refused to get close to other people and she deliberately shut out her struggling family. She dropped out of college because she thought it was a waste of time (she found success in other ways). She wouldn’t acknowledge that her brother’s mental illness was something that he couldn’t just shake off if he really put his mind to it. She had all sorts of other characteristics that were thoroughly unlike me, and that I’ve reviled in other people I’ve met. But she was so interesting to write about, because I had to figure out what made her tick, what caused her to be prickly and difficult, and that led to (I think) far better characterization than the semi-ordinary heroine that everyone can identify with in my V.C. Andrews novel.

I probably wouldn’t want to write about her specifically for the rest of my life, but I would do something similar – create a character who I wouldn’t really like in real life and figure out why s/he is the way s/he is.

4) If you could trade lives with me for a day, what would you like to do that I’d do, and what would you put on my itinerary to do in your place?

I would like to understand what’s so wonderful about motorcycles, and how you’re able to disregard the terror and danger of them; I would like to spend time with your son, to see what it’s like to have a kid that you love (and who challenges you); and I would probably want to fiddle with my newfound penis a good deal, because penises are hilarious and I totally can’t imagine what it would be like to have one, dangling there, all the time.

In return, I would book you some serious couch time, so you could understand the thing I’m most passionate about (relaxing); I would get you to watch one of my favorite esoteric movies that you haven’t seen; I would allow you to fondle my collection of ST: TNG DVDs; and I would set up a yoga class for you with Paul or Noelle. You would have permission to fiddle with your newfound boobs; tit for tat. Heh.

5) What do you wish I’d asked you? (With or without actually answering.)

Uhhh…I don’t know. If I were asking interview questions, I would probably ask someone what topic they refuse to discuss on their blog and why. Although the nature of this question is paradoxical, my answer would be, for instance, that I don’t discuss politics in detail because I don’t think my political views are a big part of my personality, yet they might give people an impression about who I am that is really generalized and untrue. But that’s not necessarily a question that I wish you had asked me. Your questions were creative enough that I suppose I wish you’d just asked me another one of your own.

If you want to be interviewed by me, feel free to leave a comment. If you want to interview me, feel free to leave a comment. If you think I’m weird or vulgar for talking about penises being hilarious, you are wrong, but feel free to leave a comment.

PS: Dys, if you’re reading, please do not interpret the answer to #4 as saying that I want to play with your husband’s penis. I do not.

ten terrible turkeys

There are a lot of “interviews” floating around out there on the blogs I read, and I haven’t left any comments asking to be interviewed because I don’t want to put anyone to the trouble of making up questions for me if they don’t want to. Thus, I invite anyone who wants to ask me five questions to do so. Leave them in the comments and I’ll reply toot-sweet.

A recent comment made me realize that I haven’t reinforced in a while just how many terrible movies I’ve seen. The answer is: a lot.  I hunt down and devour bad movies, particularly infamous Hollywood turkeys, the way most people seek out Best Picture winners. So I made up a list of the ten worst movies I’ve ever seen. Just for you. These are either awesomely bad or just plain bad, and I’ve marked them as such. No particular order here.

Snake People. This is an early-seventies cheapie flick with Boris Karloff that has the most ludicrous psychosexual junk in it that you could possibly imagine. It involves snakes, naked women, voodoo (sort of), zombie wives and nearly zombie sex, men standing around talking while a woman gyrates with a snake in the background, and so on. It is unwatchably awful, and in no way awesome.

Gigli. There is so much wrong with this film that I could write a damn book about it. It’s badly conceived, badly written, badly directed, very badly scored, badly acted,  and just plain bad. There is nothing giggle-worthy to be had out of this movie, as I’d hoped there would be; it’s just painful, hollow, bang-your-head-against-the-wall awful. There’s one scene where J.Lo is good to look at, because she’s doing yoga as she’s talking about how to go down on a woman, but aside from that scene she’s obnoxious and so is the film.

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe. Jesse “The Body” Ventura stars as a Terminator 2-esque Terminator character, some chick from Canada is a Terminator 1-esque Sarah Connor, and some little boy is a placeholder for John Connor. Pathetic beyond description. Avoid.

Gymkata! I’ve said enough about this movie elsewhere on this blog. If you like bad movies, this is a gem. Awesomely bad.

Dungeons & Dragons. OW. My brain hurts to remember the awfulness of this one. Poor Thora Birch. Poor Jeremy Irons! I hope they were paid well.

Various Godzilla movies. I’ve seen a good number of them, and I’m too lazy to look up the particular one I’m thinking of on the internet, but it involves the caterpillar version of Mothra, miniature twin sisters who ask Mothra “Why are you crying, happiness?”, and I believe also Ghidorah, covered in gold spray-paint. Awesomely bad.  I don’t think there are any (Japanese) Godzilla movies that qualify as either “good” or “bad”, because all of them are very fun to watch but none of them are any good at all.

The Spy Who Shagged Me. This is the only movie I have ever watched that, when I turned it off, I looked at the sky and said “I want that 90 minutes back.” No redeeming qualities in that film at all – not even gorgeous, sweet Rollergirl.

Manos: The Hands of Fate. I rarely consider MST movies when I’m thinking of all the bad movies I’ve seen, because watching it with someone making jokes is not the same as having to sit through it on your own. Also, since this movie didn’t get a major release, I usually leave it out of lists like this. But it really is the most poorly executed film I’ve ever seen. Everything about it is painfully amateurish. Just plain bad.

Sexy Nurses 3. At least, I think that was the name of it. Porn movies don’t really belong on this list either, but this was the weirdest porn movie I’ve ever seen. It involved black and white sequences with eyeballs staring up out of a grassy hill, a fish stuck in a tree, and a nurse who seemed to be wearing enormous dentures giving a bound-and-determined sort of handjob to a “patient” (this scene was deliberately unsexy). Bee-zarre. I’ve since tried to find it on the internet and failed.

Friday the 13th Part III. 3D movies don’t usually translate well to the small screen, especially if they’re horror movies that hang on the 3D gimmick, and this one is a very good example. I watched the first three Jason movies all in one weekend, and while I’d intended to go through the entire series, this one stopped me cold. It sucked. As I recall it also wasn’t much fun to watch, just plain bad. I highly recommend Part II, though; it’s your basic silly 80′s slasher flick, but the main female character actually has something to offer the film.

Honorable mentions: Satan’s Cheerleaders, Godzilla (1998), Waterworld, High Risk, Stanley, The Island (2005), Planet of the Apes (2001), The Phantom Menace (ouch, that’s two for Ewan), Super Mario Brothers.

Any comments with a sentiment amounting to “The Spy Who Shagged Me wasn’t that bad” will be deleted. It was that bad.

how did so much mousse survive the apocalypse?

I removed a hangnail the wrong way last night and it hurts to type, so for once I’ll be brief.

The interview went fairly well, I thought. I only said a couple of things wrong and the ladies who interviewed me were friendly and non-severe. I won’t hear anything for a few weeks yet, but I’m going to hope. I might be a bit overqualified, but I could easily see myself doing the job.

Yoga was great yesterday. Backbend-oriented class. I feel like I’m moving forward slowly, and I’m thoroughly satisfied with that, and it feels better to be satisfied than it does to be moving forward.

I have been feeling solemn and low lately. BF is of course making me laugh as much as he always does, but rarely does my mind seem to think non-serious or non-depressing thoughts.

We watched Beyond Thunderdome last night. Oh my Lord it was terrible. The first 40 minutes or so were silly, poorly-written, and great fun (except when Blaster was revealed, I was very very sad), but then…oh GAWD. BF and I both hate civilization-of-children plots for the most part, and this one was doubly irritating because of their weird grammar. And after “the tell” was over, I paused it and said “So…there was a plane crash? And it happened long enough ago that this civilization of children was never told anything about the world outside? Even though Max was alive and an adult for the apocalypse?” Gah. Sequels.

Hopefully I will have more to say when my finger hurts a little less.