Friendternets

I can't believe I haven't written about Blogbecue 2008. It's not like I don't have anything to say about it; if anything I have so much to say only not the right words to say it with or so much to say that I'm worried I might say the wrong thing...



I'm being weird about it, but that's kind of appropriate since I was feeling kind of weird about going in the first place. And by "weird" I mean "absolutely terrified for several unrelated reasons but so psyched at the same time." You know, weird. In addition to the prospect of driving on 95 -- by myself -- for the first time ever (and I ended up doing it in the pouring rain), I also had the usual fears anyone stricken by severe social anxiety has before meeting new people. How would they be? Would I commit some sort of major faux pas? Would my shyness give people the impression, as it has before, that I'm a major bitch? Would they all start talking about me behind my back the first chance they got? Gah!



But wait, you're probably thinking, didn't you already kind of know these people from the Internet? Too true, and oddly enough that only compounded the problem. I sort of felt like I knew them, like we'd struck up some sort of rapport; obviously I'd made enough of a (good) impression to be invited to the damn thing in the first place. And I felt like my blog had given them a pretty good impression of the real me. Problem is, upon meeting people, I don't give a very good impression of the real me. I was so, so worried about living up to ... well, myself.



And while I refrain from seeking out the type of reassurance a wallflower like me usually craves, I will say that I think it went well, from my end. No one was mean to me. No one looked at me like something the cats dragged in, like I wasn't cool enough. I think I was even deliberately funny a couple of times. Hours in, I finally started to relax, and then of course it was time to go. Time flew. Who knew? I was worlds (and years) away from being a thirteen-year-old cowering on a couch as other kids danced and strobe lights flashed, wishing it was time to go home or, barring that, that I was upstairs sharing a quiet cup of tea with the parents. I still bite my nails both before and after serious social interaction, but I'm not that girl cowering on the couch anymore. Thank you, God.

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But enough navel-gazing! This post is becoming kind of a downer, truth be told. Also, it's turned into All About Me time, when what I really wanted was to talk about these other people. These wonderful ladies, these other bloggers who have extended the branch of friendship to me. Thank you, naynay, for putting this thing together and for being my complete opposite; all fun and bubbly and outgoing. I needed that more than you know. Thank you, lengli, for being cooler than anyone that cute has the right to be. Thank you, armsweat, for being so damn you that I want to shrink you, then put you in my pocket and carry you around with me ... or something less creepy.



And thank you, Internet. Thank you, blogging, for making it possible, blah blah sentimentcakes. Seriously, I have to stop now before I make myself puke or break into the Golden Girls theme song. (Also, if you guys actually are talking about me behind my back, I will totally hunt you down like a Smut Monster.)

Tasty, Tasty Murder

I'm thinking about going meat-free. Again. Shane and I made the mistake of watching an episode of Crime 360 while eating dinner last night. We've done it before, but this was a particularly ... um ... unsavory episode. A body was found in a sewage drain and while it was mostly blurred out, you could still see the feet and hands, which were all pruney from being in the water, and the lovely maggot activity around the victim's ear. Awesome. Enjoy your grilled chicken salad and three-cheese Italian dressing! And then there was this extended post-mortem scene with lovely close-ups of the victim's fingers and shots of the coroners wheeling him around on a stretcher in and out of rooms just like a real, live patient. I don't know why, but that especially creeped me out.

Then -- wait, first you need to understand that Crime 360 is rather in love with its own graphics capabilities. I mean, the hook of the show is that they use this cutting-edge technology to capture and display the crime scene in 360 degrees. It's pretty cool but sometimes it seems like they want to take everything high-tech. Hey, let's use cool squiggly lines to illustrate the audio from this 911 call. Hey, let's show you a 3-D rendering of a double helix for the eleventy billionth time, and then morph that into a shot of these winding train tracks where the body was found.

So they've already gone overboard with the technology (just because you can doesn't mean you should) and they're well on their way to grossing me out. Not so much with Shane, who's got a cast-iron stomach. Actually, I'm surprised I like this show and The First 48 so much, given my issues with blood and gore. And then. AND THEN. The investigating cops go down to the local natural history museum, to talk to an entomologist about ... maggots. Specifically, the life cycle of a blow fly. There are preserved blowflies on pins, maggots collected from the crime scene, maggots in alcohol, maggots on raw beef...

While I didn't actually throw up, I did decide that I was tha-roo with my dinner. Surprisingly, Shane decided the same thing about his own salad. And just in time! Next up, a short CGI film of the life cycle of a blowfly, from wiggly maggot to chrysallis or whatever the fuck it's called (I was looking the other way and trying not to listen) to fully-grown adults. Which are then used to determine when the victim's body was relocated. Which is very useful in poking holes in the main suspect's story, and yay for justice and everything but I really didn't need the computer-generated visual evidence, nor the entomologist's droning explanation of said visual evidence. Even one of the cops was standing there with his arms folded and a vacant stare, like Ew dude, enough.

So maybe my problem isn't so much meat consumption as it is "meat consumption while watching real-life murder investigation shows." Still, this isn't the first time I've contemplated vegetarianism. Aside from the animal cruelty issues, sometimes I'll look at a piece of meat and it looks like exactly what it is. You know, it's a chicken leg. A leg. A leg that used to be attached to a chicken, who used it walk around the coop, probably blithely stepping in its own shit. Leggity leg leg leg. It's got ... like, tendons and stuff. And sometimes I can't get past the fact that when I bite into a chicken leg I'm biting into skin and muscle and whatever the hell else and really? That's gross. This grossness is really brought home for me when I'm the one actually preparing the meat; I've been known to say "Hey dinner's ready! Should be good ew no thank you I don't think I want any."

I don't know what the proverbial back-breaking straw will be, but I suspect that at some point I will finally have had enough and I won't be able to consume anything that once had eyes ... no matter how good Burger King smells when I drive past. Which, by the way, is really really good. Mmmm, flame-broiled...

I'm going to need some more willpower.

Lo, Some Words

You guys! I have a blog! Did you know? Did I know? It would appear that I have forgotten all about the existence of my dear little blog. Poor neglected blog. Whenever I paused to give it a thought at all, it was something like, Oh yeah. That damn thing. And that's not nice. I love my blog. I love blogging. Maybe I just needed a break.

And now I am back. From outer space. Okay, seriously I don't even know what the hell I'm talking about anymore (ha, "anymore," she says). Right now it is so damn hot outside it's hard to breathe. It's so hot there's a half-empty bottle of water on the steps outside, that's been there for a week, and every time I walk past it I kind of maybe sort of consider drinking some. It's that damn hot, y'all.

In other news, I've decided to take up a new hobby. I won't say what it is yet; not to be intentionally mysterious but because I may not stick with it. (To Shane: Kidding! After shelling out that money I am totally going to stick with it, even if I end up horribly mangling myself in a craft-related accident. Which totally won't happen! Except it probably will.) Oh, and now I've said too much.

So, what'd I miss?

Lost: There's No Place Like Home (part 2)

Season finale! For real this time; part one wasn't the finale of anything. It's two hours long, and rather than trying to turn my thoughts into some kind of cohesive blog post, I think I'm just going to be very stream-of-consciousness about this. So here we go:

• It hit me (again) what a challenge this show must be for the actors. Remembering who/what/when/where/why everything is going on, or was going on, and how you should be behaving toward another person in a particular scene ... it boggles the mind. Oh, I'm mad at you? And it's really only been two days since we last saw each other, even though like eight months' worth of stuff happened in that time? Got it.
• I also noticed that Locke's scar (the one under his eye) looks pretty good. Makeup department gaffe or more island magic?
• Oh, and now there's a big-ass shootout. On a supposedly deserted island. And some of the people are wearing fatigues, but somehow it all makes sense. This show is fucking insane, in the best possible way.
• Dear Sayid: please kill Keamy, please kill Keamy... Oh, or Alpert could do it. That works too.
• It's WAAAAAAALT! Aw, he's totally all growed up. I didn't recognize him for a second there. And now we know (I think) that the prevailing fan theory for the Six lying about there being no other survivors is true. Excellent.
• Oh, you did not try to explain the plan to Jack, Locke. You were trying to be all mysterious and Man of Faith-y about it.
• You just know Locke's all, "Oooh! Another filmstrip!" He's all sad when the VCR messes it up. And Ben is pretty much hilarious in this scene, loading a bunch of metal crap into the vault. Hee, "time-traveling bunnies." Yeah, that about covers it.
• Aw, Sawyer's odd man out in the Love Triangle (or is it Quadrangle?) That Never Ends. That sucks for Sawyer. Also, for us. Um, Keamy's not dead? Okay. I'll admit it: for a few seconds there, I totally thought he came back from the dead. Oh, like it couldn't happen on Craphole Island.
• I have some math for you: Ben = EEEEVIL. Eeeevil, I tell you. I don't care how, and I don't care why. "So?" "So?" That's damn cold, Ben. I don't care if we both hate Widmore, I hate you too.
• Oh, yay! A Pushing Daisies ad. Do yourself a favor and watch it when Season 2 starts.
• Okay, this helicopter scene is killing me. Don't do it, Hurley!
• Don't do it, Sawyer!
• On a lighter note, I'm digging FutureSayid's hair. It's all ... clean and stuff.
• Also, it's cracking me up that in the midst of all the drama on the freighter, there's this dude all intent on spraying down the deck. Now maybe he doesn't know the extent of the danger they're in, but he should be able to gather that something's going on, no? How much are they paying this poor redshirt?
• Not Jin! NOOOOO! I mean, I knew it was coming, but still. Oh. No. I have a really, really hard time watching scenes like this, where someone's racing to escape death but gets left behind at the last second. Ugh.
• I do love Cutthroat FutureSun. She kicks all kinds of ass.
• Yay! Sawyer's not dead! He was in good enough shape to swim all the way back to the island. See what staying in tip-top condition will do for you I'm not naming any names but seriously, Jack. Dude, this show has got to stop screwing with my emotions like this. Stupid fantastic Lost (TM srah). Note to Lost writers (who are of course reading this): I could get on board with a little Sawyer/Juliet. I'm just putting it out there, is all.
• Well, now we know how (Evil) Ben ended up in the desert wearing a parka.
• W?TF? There's a giant ... wheel? That moves the whole damn island? Okay whatever, show.
• I must say, Baby Aaron is remarkably calm about the whole crash-landing thing. This is what happens when you're born on Craphole Island. And you almost die a bunch of times, and then your Mommy does die and you have to be raised by a fugitive and a drunken doctor with a massive guilt complex. You learn to be very Zen about things.
• Oh! It's Penny! You guys! IT'S PENNY!!! O. M. G. I had (almost) accepted that she and Desmond were not going to be reunited, despite my fervent and hopeful 'shipping. Their reunion scene is nearly my favorite part of this season, second only to that wonderful long-distance phone call in "The Constant." I heart these two. I heart them so damn much.
• Oh, and the guy in the coffin is in fact Locke, as so many of us had guessed. That happened too.

And that's that, until next season. I'm terribly curious to see in what direction the show moves in terms of splitting time between the island and life off the island, though I have no doubt that the writers can pull it off. In the meantime, have you registered your interest with Octagon Global Recruiting? I have, and now yes, I am a little bit frightened, because all of those Dharma-related sites are damn creepy.

Things My Building's Hallway Sometimes Smells Like

Fresh paint
Weed (thanks, downstairs neighbors!)
Old shrimp fried rice
Wet dog
Weed
B.O.
Poop (no, really, and what the hell is that about)
Skunk weed, or maybe meth, I'm not quite sure what that smells like

(Lest you think I'm living in the projects or something, I should point out that this is actually a quite nice, up-and-coming neighborhood. Which is to say, my apartment building should not smell like any of these things, except maybe fresh paint.)

Finally!

Jose Saramago's Blindness is one of my favorite books of all time. I realize saying "of all time" is a bit redundant, but I want you to understand just how good this book is. As soon as I started reading it, I thought, This would make a great movie. Looks like someone was listening. I can't imagine the film will be as good as the novel (are they ever?) but it was the opening selection at Cannes and it looks like it has a decent cast (including Julianne Moore and Gael Garcia Bernal) so my hopes are still high.

And you thought I was excited about Twilight.

Lost: There's No Place Like Home (part 1)

I didn't care much for this episode. It's like there was a lot going on, but nothing really happened. I know people describe Lost that way a lot, but it really holds true here. I can't say that I'm surprised, though; this season has been really uneven in general. They give us one mind-blowing episode, and then a couple of mediocre ones. Hopefully part 2 of the season finale will be great.

I have a question: why are they all acting like getting on the freighter means they're home free? If the people from the freighter are coming to the island to kill you all, what's keeping them from killing you once you get on the boat? Doy.

I have a confession: Dammit, I'm all confused about the post-island timeline. There, I said it. Half the time it's making about as much sense to me as Algebra 2, which is to say, NONE. Anybody know where I can find it laid out in chronological order? Surely someone's put that on the interwebs somewhere. (I'm not looking for theories, just the facts, ma'am.)

I have a complaint (okay, a bunch of complaints): Maybe the weird whispering would be scarier if we could tell what the hell the voices are saying. Maybe Claire's mom should have kept that little bombshell to herself. Maybe I'll be at peace with Desmond's death (oh you know they're so killing him off, along with Michael and Jin) if Penny gets back at Old Man Widmore like Sun did with her dad. Because that scene was about 83 different kinds of awesome. Go Sun.

Aside from that scene, the only other part of the episode that rocked was when Hurley's mom testily informed him, "Jesus Christ is not a weapon." Hee. Oh, and Jack's response to finding out Hurley was in the line of fire and there was yet another kink in his plan: "Sonofabitch." Hee! My thoughts exactly.

Your thoughts?