Friday

Awards, Pomp, & Circumstance

I love the Awards. I love the beautiful dresses, and the pageantry, and the happiness of the people who win. I love movies. I love everything from silents to stupid comedies like Super Bad to tear-jerkers like Benjamin Button. Maybe it's because some of my happiest childhood memories involve going to movies with my mom and grandma, I don't know. I remember seeing Doctor Zhivago, Gone With the Wind, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Rocky, Jaws, all at the now long-defunct pleasure domes the Capri and Capitol Theaters in Ottumwa, Iowa. So, so much fun.

At any rate, I devour movies, watching at least two a week. I’m a movie junkie. If I like something, i’ll watch it over and over. (Just lately, it’s been Memoirs of a Geisha.) I almost never dislike a movie. I have the ability to suspend disbelief and enter into the spirit of the thing, something I can also do with literature but can't do at all in real life. I almost always like the actors, too. Actually, I suspect all the hate-on for Cruise and Pitt is largely the ol’ green-eyed monster. Cruise is at least underrated and Pitt is excellent.

Really, I don’t understand this need for everything to be Le Plus Bon Grande High Fucking Holy Hoity Toity Beaux Artes all the time. What’s wrong with just letting go and getting into a story?

There are people who would have you believe that all they ever read is Tolstoy and Pynchon. We know you’re secretly reading that Dean Koontz novel. You stayed up all night just last week to finish that Jennifer Cruisie story, too, didn’t you? S’okay, we understand.

Farewell to Socks

Socks Clinton has passed away at the age of 20. Socks was a fine kitty and never engaged in slash and claw politics. Socks never bit any reporters, and endured with dignity the many indignities of White House life, before retiring to live with his favorite person, Betty. RIP Socks. - This post made by Teh Kitty Cheese and Jackie, cats of the household of Candy.

Exhausted, lazy, or both?

I knew that I'd get crazy busy this semester, but I misunderestimated just how bad it would be. Now that I'm doing my internship, it seems I'm in motion from dawn to dusk. I'd become very spoiled, what with reading and watching movies only interrupted by the occasional test or paper.

Now I'm trying to get a reasonably good grade at the dreaded math and work my internship. My other two classes are easy - legal ethics is only an hour a week in class and I have an art class which is more of a treat than an obligation - so it's just the math and the stress of the new internship wearing me out. Not that the internship is stressful in a bad way, I've really enjoyed it so far and it's an amazing opportunity. If only I got paid for doing it!

But I've been busy and have become even more neglectful of this blog than I anticipated I would be. I'm going to try to post more. I think it will be good for me, discipline and all that. It's much easier to go read Sadly,No! than to actually do something myself.

I've kind of been in the doldrums since the election, with the excitement of victory having peaked and the cold reality of the horrendous wreck this country is right now settling in. As we knew they would, the Republicans are fighting Obama every step of the way on everything he's trying to do. I had a nice little burst of the old thrill earlier, though. I had my eye half on the T.V. and saw Air Force One on the tarmac, stairs extended. I automatically cringed, so used am I to seeing the Chimperor swaggering down those stepss, and it was a moment before I thought, no, not the Chimp, not now or ever again! Such a relief to see Obama exiting that plane! I should spend more time appreciating that.

There is another good piece of political news, and I'll try to make a post about it sometime this weekend. Iowa's horrible Congresscritter Steve King, he of the Border Fence to the Moon, is planning to take a run for governor. His evisceration will be a joy to watch, an absolute gift of opportunities to snark and point and laugh until the tears stream down my cheeks. Once he's outside his hick ass district he won't get more than one vote in a hundred. Joy, joy, joy! I await with great anticipation.

Mocking Birds

I'm drunk. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I drank a bottle of Malbec, 2007 Los Alamos, good stuff, deep purple and 11.00 a bottle. From Argentina. Like Ernesto Guevaro de la Serna. Faithful and true. Then I returned to my roots. I've been drinking Jimmy Beam straight since I finished the wine.

This isn't fashionable. I remember a time when drinking heavily was kewl. Well, ya know, I've done my time with fucking fashion. I did a lot of coke back in the days when coke was all the rage. I did a bit of meth too, if it was clean and the fount wasn't tainted too much with white trash. But you know, there is this whole ethic now that demands that you feel somewhat ashamed if you allow yourself to become drunk, or overcome by any mind altering thing. Screw that.

These things come and go. There's nothing wrong with getting fucked up, and I don't really give a rat's ass anyway. As long as you don't die - and even if you do - whose fucking business is it anyway?

Anyhow. I've been doing some thinking tonight. I've been wondering if there is any truth to the idea that our attitudes toward politics is inbred. I'm Irish. I've never lived in Ireland, and my founding ancestor left Ireland to get the fuck away from the faith and the violence. But let me watch a movie, say the Devil's Own, and I'm rooting for the IRA guys to kill the loyalist fucks to the last man. Me, Ms.Pacifist, screaming out to KILL HIM, SHOOT HIM! I swear I can feel my blood start heating up. What the fuck? Let me watch a non-violent Irish movie, for example The Secret of Roan Inish, and before the goddamned thing is over, tears will be running down my cheeks.

El Che was part Irish. He was a Lynch, from County Galway on his dad's side. He also had Basque blood. Sounds like a genetic prescription for a refusal to accept the status quo, if nothing else. Was his revolutionary streak inherited? Or was it just handed down from generation to generation by family tradition? It's interesting to speculate. Hard to prove.

Maybe we Irish are really all crazy. Maybe it's genetic. I'm listening to my beloved Mark Lanegan tonight. Talk about crazy Irish people. I love that man. There's a strain of self-destruction in his music and lyrics that speaks to me. I don't believe in woo, and I don't believe in ethnic predisposition per se, but

Aw fuck it. Judge for yerselfffff.