bloodyrosemccoy | Entries tagged with things were better then

So my niece, Burgie,* has spent this holiday season campaigning for an American Girl doll. Mom carefully put together her beloved Kirsten doll, which we kids pooled our money and bought her way back when, with a collection of doll stuff and sent it along for Xmas.

Yesterday morning I was in the shower and idly wondering how that reveal went down, and it occurred to me: Mom didn't send any of the books! Oh, no! How will Burgie get any context for her doll without the books!

Then it occurred to me that Burgie is 5.

Yeah, the books are not going to be an issue.**

But it made me realize that I was 8 when I got Molly, at a developmental stage when, as a young, autistic kid, I was RIPE for a hyperfixation. I read the AG books obsessively, absorbing all of the historical information they offered and charging off on re-creating the stuff from their time periods, basically diving deep wherever and however I could.

And I spent this Xmas season doing the same! I've been rabbit-holing nonstop the past few days. Trying to find context for Dad's stories of Grandma's Horrendous Oyster "Stew" on Christmas Eves, trying to track down what the hell the Spudnuts he was reminiscing about were (and tracking down the recipe), trying to decipher морозко in its original language (having seen the MST3k version), looking over how accurate the Muppet Christmas Carol is, looking up how the Japanese would say "eggnog" (エッグノッグ), and trying out a recipe for sweet potato pudding from the vintage Southern cookbook with the questionable illustrations my buddy Nick gave me. It's a blast, and lights up my synapses like a cosmic laser light show.

And I feel like Pleasant Company, at least early on, really got this. I developed my penchant for rabbit-holing from looking up Molly's stuff and trying to dress Felicity in her elaborate network of undergarments.*** I didn't have access to internet In Those Days, so it took a lot more Ghostwriter-type detective work to try to look shit up. Then in college I had the internet and got into weird AG doll fandom, and I could dive into all sorts of things to make DIY stuff for them! (I'm still inordinately proud of Daja. She took a lot of work!)I'm glad Burgie's got search engines and Wikipedia for easy access to more information, because she won't be 5 forever, and we'll just see where this takes her.

*Short for Cheeseburger. Don't ask.

**Brother says Mom had included one of those little brochures to kind of contextualize one of Kirsten's holiday sets, and Burgie pretty much glazed over as Bro was reading it to her. Meanwhile, he's rather astonished to discover that Kirsten settled in Minnesota. It might say a lot about me that I thought he knew that.

***No, seriously, do the stays go above the shift or below it?

Oh, my god. Scott Lynch gives us a brilliant summation of an excellent classic Sesame Street special: Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain.

My old library had a battered VHS copy of Don’t Eat The Pictures back in the day, and I swear we checked that shit out ALL THE TIME. It was awesome: as Lynch points out, we get to watch Big Bird aid a soul on its way to the afterlife and plead its case to the gods,* a thing that made complete sense to me at the time because OF COURSE Big Bird will defy the gods for you.** But he failed to mention the part where Cookie Monster teaches us that you should enjoy art with your eyes, by which I mean his shoulder angels have to admonish him to refrain from eating not only the priceless works of art in the museum, but also the MUMMIES.*** Yes, Cookie Monster has a crisis of conscience about whether he should eat the dried corpses of Ancient Egyptian pharaohs.

Tell me, when does Dora the Explorer ever deal with the real issues like this?

*Or, in small child terms, help a little kid find his parents again. These are the important things.

**Incidentally, I would like to submit that Carroll Spinney is one of the most badass actors on TV. Dude has spent forty goddamn years acting virtually blind inside a giant pressure cooker, he can motherfuckin' ROLLER SKATE while wearing giant three-toed foam feet, and somehow he manages to hide that Big Bird has a nonfunctioning right arm pretty effectively--took me years to notice. Also, he himself probably has a right arm like a California redwood. Or maybe an anaconda.

***Actual line from title song: “Mummy look yummy, but not for tummy!”

Current Mood: Constant Comment
Current Music: Traveling Wilburys ~ Cool Dry Place

Holding our annual Get Off My Lawn Fest a day early this year. It's a way better tradition than the Annual Holiday Plumbing Disaster. Though I must admit, sitting around for hours listening to the parents and their old-time friends talking about how all their favorite musicians are old now and how Things Ain't As Good Now As They Was Then* is a bit tough when one is still a young person. It's not easy being the one trying to broker generational peace, especially when any mention of something you found online immediately swerves the subject to What Good Is That Confangled Intertruck Anyway? Limits the conversation a bit.

*Movies, for example, are all loud and noisy and hard to follow these days, and who can keep track of which one is the bad guy?! And don't get me started on the computervideogames the kids play. They're just bloops and colors!

Current Mood: Peet's Holiday Blend
Current Music: the sound of geezing

Buggrit. I hate it when I charge headlong into a book only to find out it’s the third in a series. Whatever happened to book covers that helpfully told you that the title you were holding was "Book 3 in the wildy awesome Sorcerizer's Sidekick series!" or whatever?

At least this book has a page listing the other books in the series. Is it just me, or is that tradition falling by the wayside?* How am I supposed to know if The Sorcerizer's Shadow comes before Dragonbloodsword of the Star Throne or after it? It's not like it tells you on the cover, for chrissake. I am reduced to making educated guesses by publication dates. And hell, without a page like that, I don't even know I'm missing Book Two, The Sorcerizer vs. Samson, The Silver-Masked Man.

Thank god for the internet, I guess. And thank god for libraries that actually have the first books in series. That makes it a little better.

*And for God's sake, knock it off with the red-thing-on-black-background, tormented teenager, and abstract book covers! I want a splash illustration with lots of shiny colors and so much activity it looks like the book is showing you all the scenes at once, dammit! DON'T TELL ME I MISSED IT BEFORE I COULD PUBLISH MY OWN BOOK, YOU BASTARDS.

Current Mood: Raspberry Quince
Current Music: Annie Lennox ~ Little Bird

Doing a bit of WiiFit tonight and realizing—I’d probably have been a lot more interested in physical fitness if the school gym had been set up more like Legends of the Hidden Temple. Gimme a vague plot and a goal and I will do your damn pull-ups.

Although I suppose getting enough money to make the SHRIIIIIINE of the Silver Monkey would have taken much-needed money away from other important high school projects, such as sending the football team all over the country and buying a large electronic marquis because our rivals did. But I can dream.

Current Mood: steamed vanilla milk
Current Music: Piano Squall ~ Frog's Theme

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice

Flash photography really does damage exhibits.
I knew about the state dinosaur, but I had no idea Utah had an official state cookware. Upon learning this, however, I did correctly guess what it was: the Dutch oven.
The story of Marco Polo bringing noodles to Europe from China is a myth.
Every year in Teton National Park at least one family assumes that “bear spray” works like bug spray. So before going on a hike they line their kids up, and … well, I hear the park’s clinic is very good.
Never try to do a road trip after missing a day of Zoloft.
There are petroglyphs like EIGHT FEET off the road to Moab. Why have I never seen them before?
Grendel was a velociraptor!
Okay, maybe not.
In the study of prehistoric animals and so-called “transitional fossils,”* the question of whether an animal was reptile or mammal is settled by checking the jaw and inner ear apparatus.
Psittacosaurus was a great dinosaur—basically a badass parrot.
Those Wheel of Morality bumps at the ends of kids’ TV shows—Knowing Is Half The Battle, And Now A Message From The POWER RANGERS!—have a distant ancestor in medieval theater, when people would perform stupid farces in churches and conclude with a sudden random promo for Christianity. “And so the shepherds found out their friend had stolen the sheep and pretended it was his son, and they all had a good laugh, in conclusion Christ Child.”
Speaking of Power Rangers and tolerance, David Yost left the show one day when the homophobic taunts of the crew, who apparently never watched those bumps, got to be too much for him. AND UPON LEARNING THIS, ALL THE PIECES OF MY SHATTERED CHILDHOOD SUDDENLY FIT TOGETHER. All I had known of those dark times was that suddenly Billy was no longer on the show, and so I was no longer watching it.
Ear drops are more trouble than they’re worth.
Pets don’t always live their full life span.
Neither do people.
Even when you know it’s coming, death is a shock.
Losing a twin is more traumatic than losing a non-twin sibling.
Dad is a Led Zeppelin fan.
Magnetic clasps for necklaces are expensive, but totally worth it.
Ngila Dickson is my new hero: she designed the costumes for Lord of the Rings, and thus had to figure out what each culture would wear. Also, she had to have each costume made around forty times—and in the case of the hobbits, she had to weave the fabrics twice so they’d fit the same on both the actors and their smaller doubles.**
YES, CORN IS GRASS.
Quad-ruled notebooks are the best kind for clear thinking.
The Hawaiian Islands were, in fact, plagued by wild cattle after Captain Cook introduced them as an ill-advised gift to King Kamehameha I.
Major depressive disorder is insurable, but PCOS isn't.
Glass stovetops can be hazardous additions to any kitchen.
Mint is a thug. Never plant it in your container garden. And thanks to the Awesome Power Of The Internet, not to mention kitmf , I didn’t even have to learn this the hard way!
The Northern and Southern Air Temples were run by monks, while the Eastern and Western Temples were run by nuns. Just as I suspected!

*This phrase always bugs me. All fossils are transitional fossils, really. But it does make sense for the transition of our nomenclature.

**She also gets bonus points for something I noticed a while back: she does the same thing to differentiate Rosie Cotton that they do in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to set Belle apart from the villagers. Notice how both Belle and Rosie are the only ones in their villages to wear blue.

Current Mood: allergic
Current Music: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy ~ So Long, Farewell, Good-Bye

Okay, confession time: after my insightful Shakespeare = Strong Bad observation, I realized that I sort of was wondering whatever happened to The Homestar Runner. I haven’t been to that site in, like, five years, so this week I decided to go back and see if it was still funny.

The answer is: yes. Yes, it is.

I gotta hand it to them: I am impressed that they can still make me laugh outright despite being a) old meme* and b) a website entirely based on … guh … Flash.** Probably it's due to context-dependency: most old memes are inextricably tangled up in the context of a certain point in time, and their humor derives from reapplying and rearranging that meme and context. These, on the other hand, are just dumb cartoons.

It’s also reaffirming to discover that even this kind of site has a painstakingly in-depth wiki edited by compulsive fangeeks willing to cross-check a giant unrewindable corpus of daffy Flash cartoons for continuity issues. There’s something so wonderfully consistent about a discovery like that.

*What’s six years in internet time? I think that, unlike dog years, internet years are logarithmic, so that depending on your starting variables, 6 years internet time could be anywhere from 64 years to older than the current age of the Universe.

**Not to mention heavy flashback action. This goddamn site was hot shit among my high school proto-nerd brethren right around the time of my first catastrophic Fukitol failure. For reasons known only to my subconscious, anything that was going on around me during one of those episodes is now seared into my brain as some sort of halcyon bastion of Better Days, which itself is a sign of insanity, since those Better Days were the days of random moments of collapsing in a jellied heap sobbing about death or something during, say, jewelry class. (Let me tell you, nothing scares a shop teacher worse than a desperately sobbing student.)

I suspect it’s my brain’s attempt at a sort of do-over. I was supposed to be enjoying dumb shit like Flash sites and David Eddings books (another halcyon memory) back then. I didn’t really get the chance, so now my brain is making up for it with heavily edited memories.

Current Mood: hurr durr cartoons

Oh, man, y’all, Pixar once again proves that it is full of evil geniuses. Toy Story 3 is a thing of beauty ~~and totally did not make me cry~~.

I think it was the timing of this movie that was the most insidious part: it’s in real time. John Morris, who did the voice of six-year-old Andy back in the day, has come back now to do the role of … College Kid Andy. Talk about growing up with you. *

These movies have always had a really good grasp on the sort of built-in pathos of toys, and the bond with, well, inanimate things that we like to pretend isn’t a big deal, or is unhealthy, when it really seems to be an integral part of being human. So to introduce a movie about a little boy’s toys to you when you are yourself little, and then 15 years later show that kid starting to turn into an adult and trying to decide what to do with those toys and where they fit in his life—well, lemme just say it’s RELEVANT. Hell, if you have ever been a kid with any sort of imagination and even just one toy, this movie is relevant.

I keep wanting to tell you all the awesome things about this movie, but it’s all too hard, so let’s just break ’em down into moments:

1. The variation on the first movie’s opening. Death by Monkey never looked so awesome.
2. That they remembered to keep Woody's stitches. It's all in the details.
3. Closure with the Army Men, which also explains a lot about how your house always manages to have, like, three of them in it, and you’re not sure where they came from.
4. I love how blasé Woody is now about getting lost/left behind/winding up across town. From panicking that he's stuck in the house next door to “It's gonna take forever to get back.”
5. This is going to sound ridiculous, but the action sequences and “stunts” were actually kind of badass, despite being done by computer-animated toys and mostly set in a daycare center.
6. I have worked at that daycare center, yo.
7. Big Baby’s pen tattoos cracked me the hell up.
8. Actually, most of the “prison culture” details did … such as the Speak’n’Say Roulette game (“C’mon, goat!”)
9. Bonnie, one of the daycare kids, wearing a wizard’s cape, a tutu, galoshes, and some beads over her overalls during one of her games. She is just so hilariously four years old.
10. El Buzzo was funny, and I had way too much fun trying to picture the animators doing his flamenco in the room of mirrors …
11. … but I still love the shit out of Crazy Deluded Space Ranger Buzz. The names he makes up for the others never get old. (“QUIET, musical hog!”)
12. "Tin Toy" reference for animation nerds!
13. OH GOSH IS THAT THE GIPSY KINGS’ VERSION OF “YOU GOT A FRIEND IN ME” ON THE iPATCH? HOW DID THAT GET THERE ALREADY I SURE DON’T KNOW.
( And the ones y’all may not want to read yet )

Also, let’s never, ever, ever make any other movie with those terrifying cymbal-crash monkeys.** Where do those things come from, anyway? HELL?

Discussion Question: How do you think Andy found out Jessie’s and Bullseye’s real names? I seem to recall that he dubbed them Bazooka Jane and Cannonball at the end of the second one. Has Andy surfed the internet and learned of Woody’s legendary status?

*Movie Easter egg nerds may be amused to find out that Erik van Detten also reprises his role as Sid. For a minute. You won’t even know it. But apparently, Sid’s career path did not, as some of the writers suggested back with the first Toy Story, involve becoming a Pixar animator.

**Can I get a WHAT WHAT for Experiment #1003?

Today at the Liberry I found a new Dragonlance book—I lose track of them fairly quickly, but this one had a cover that caught my attention right away, what with the familiar figure on it.

Dragons of the Hourglass Mage. So they finally went back and told us what the hell Raistlin was up to when he disappeared from the Chronicles for a while.

… I was sore tempted, let me tell you internet.

Eventually, I put it back on the shelf. I kinda mostly hate Dragonlance. It’s not so much that it’s fluff as that it’s badly-written fluff. But the weird thing is, I think that’s because of the characters—they were almost universally uninteresting cookie-cutter people, and I really couldn’t give a shit about any of them,* and don't get me started on the female characters, if you could call them that.

And then, in the middle of all these boring characters who can’t even make friggin’ DRAGONS interesting, there’s this flash of brilliance that is Raistlin.** The character himself fascinates me, to the point that Dragonlance books tend to read: "Blah blah blah RAISTLIN blah blah OMGRAISTLIN blah blah blah LOOK RAISTLIN AGAIN." However, that doesn’t mean that dangling Raistlin in front of me will automatically get me to read a Dragonlance book. My Dragonlance Critical Mass Index is very low. The only reason I was tempted for this one is because it explains some stuff about a story I’ve already decided Counts.

See, I have this Fanon Critical Mass Index for stories. Each story/fandom seems to have a finite amount of canon that, as far as I’m concerned, Counts. If I like one book on a terrific character, that book Counts—but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the other 237 books detailing that character’s life story will also Count. And I will religiously follow the things that Count. As for things that Don’t Count, I may dismiss or even actively dislike them—hell, I may even like things that Don’t Count, but I’ll have already hit Critical Mass for that story and therefore this new stuff can be taken as an optional extra.

I know I’m not alone on the basic issue of whether or not something Counts, but I’d like to hear some of the details of other people’s systems. Do you have a Fanon Critical Mass Index, or some other strange relationship with stories and characters and The Way It Really Went?

*Well, okay, I did find it hilarious how much they troweled on Sturm Whatsisass’s foreshadowed death. I don’t think they could have made it any clearer if they’d named him Sturm Going-To-Die-In-Book-2’s-Climax.

**No, I really do honestly think he’s a brilliant character, as well as a god damn asshole. Maybe it helped that I read it as a teenager. He’s basically what would happen if you amplified the Napoleonic resentful misunderstood megalomania of adolescence and gave it magical powers and a smoker’s cough. What teenager hasn’t felt that the universe would be a much better place if they were running it? And what teenager hasn't wanted to DESTROY the universe sometimes? (Also, what teenager doesn't feel like they are the only interesting and worthwhile person in a world full of dull-witted one-dimensional idiots?)

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Dad's weed whacker buzzing away

So! Despite my getting a cold that laid me low for a few days, it’s been rather busy around here, starting with moving my sister into her new apartment on Monday. I feel a lot better about dumping her at this place, because unless

toast_zombie leads an implausible double life, this time there will probably not be perpetual drunken sex parties. This is encouraging, I think.

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Also, I shrunk a favorite pair of pants because I forgot they were in the load so I ran them through the dryer. They feel okay, but I am assured that in the butt region they do not look okay. So now I am down a pair of pretty brown harem pants.

I tried my damndest to find a duplicate, unshrunken pair, but all my efforts went to waste. That’s the trouble with hippie clothes. So I went the alternate route and added a couple of thigh-length dresses, which I treat as Long Shirts, to my Long Shirt collection. Now I’ll just wear shirts that cover the butt part of my pants. PROBLEM SOLVED.

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Also, today was the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL! I know this because I was there, at my old elementary school, right for that excellent Feast of Fools ritual when report cards are handed out, and once you get it you are FREE FOR THE SUMMER.* Which means that as kids streamed out we got to see the full spectrum of human tragicomedy, from tears at finding out you and your friend don’t have the same teacher next year to glee that it’s FUCKING SUMMER YES.**

The reason I was there was twofold: my first-grade teacher had offered to get me the name of a contact who can evidently help me break into the Writing Biz, and my sixth-grade math teacher is retiring. So I thanked one for the help (“I remember you being a lot taller”), and said farewell to the other. The waist-high chaos and anarchy was a bonus.

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Had to reschedule the cats’ Tuesday appointment, so they got to go to the vet today. The vet says that for old cats, they’re looking darn good, healthy and happy. Right at this moment, the cats would disagree with him. They had to go to the vet, so there is no justice in the world.

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The last thing I’m up to warrants an entry all its own, what with the dirt and the power tools. Basically, here’s the deal: I have decided that I need some useful skills. I have a whole list of things I want to learn how to do, but the first is small-space food growing.

So I’ve built*** a couple of self-watering container gardens. I’m conditioning the soil right now, and in a couple days I’m going to get me some vegables and herbs and try to see what will grow well out on the deck. I am a pretty clueless gardener, but I have the help of my mom, who is clueful, and a Book that tells me what to do. And, probably, a simple source of advice here in this blog.

For now, though, I think it’s time to make a snack and take a break. It’s been a busy day.

*Unless you have one of those darn parents who feels that summer is a gaping hole that must be filled end-to-end with Structured Activities, and you have no time to just do whatever it is you can think of because you’re constantly getting ferried from baseball to ballet class to Camp. There were a few wonderful Structured Activities in my summer, but not enough to get in the way of some good downtime.

**Though my favorite moment was seeing a small child’s Candy Radar go off. She was waiting with her mother for some sibling to emerge from their room, when another parent came up carrying a couple of shopping bags containing what were obviously carefully put-together candy packages. My brother and I both saw the girl suddenly fix her full, undivided attention on these bags.

The greatest thing was knowing exactly what was going through her head: the GET CANDY conniving. I recognize that all-important thought process: “That is candy. It’s obviously not meant for me, but rather for my sibling’s class. However, if I do this right, I can orchestrate it so that I get some candy too.” Kid finally went with the classic strategy of dragging her mom into the sibling’s classroom, on the familiar principle that once you are in the classroom, the grownups’ sense of fairness means that you will get a candy package too.

***Okay, jerry-rigged.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: The Ark ~ This Piece Of Poetry Is Meant To Do Harm

ME: I remember these Super Mario 64 levels being a lot bigger.

MY BROTHER: Harder, too. Remember the hours of frustrated attempts to get a single star? And oh god the 100-coin challenges.

ME: You know what’s really sad? This means that while we could never be assed to practice things like martial arts or our respective musical instruments or such skills, we actually practiced video games like FIENDS.

MY BROTHER: You’re right!

ME: Figures the one thing we’d become virtuosos at is the most useless talent ever.

MY BROTHER: If only viola had been half as motivating.

Also, forgot to link to this before, in case you haven’t seen it: You are hereby invited to write fanfic about John Scalzi as an orc and Wil Wheaton in his infamously ugly sweater riding a unicorn pegasus kitten in front of a volcano. If you’re like me, though, you can’t possibly do it* because every time you click the link you see the illustration and then you fall down laughing.

*Even though I suddenly want to write self-insert, because really who doesn’t want to hang out with John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton?

Current Mood: face-heavy
Current Music: Rainbow Ride!

- OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS. Super Mario Bros. Wii is … is … it’s like three parts nostalgia and two parts COMPLETE CRACK. It takes all the great elements from the old Mario side-scrollers (Mushroom houses, the Koopa Kids, bonus games, pre-Yoshi’s Story Yoshi,* the sound effects, warping, item collecting) and some new elements (the streamlined Wii graphics, Ice Mario, cooperative multiplayer mode**) and mixes them up in a blender as a delicious mushroomy smoothie of Super Mario goodness.

It’s almost strange. Damn game zaps me back over the last … criminy, eighteen years or so? … of playing the everloving buhjeezus out of Super Mario World, working to get EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY SECRET THAT GAME WAS HUGE, swearing and screaming at the evil designs of the creators, and feeling like the world champion whe I got it. A game that makes me think of that one? Reminds me why I love gaming. And why my brother has seriously considered getting a tattoo of my pithy summation of that game: “FUCK TUBULAR.”

This is what I was looking for with the New Super Mario Bros. FINALLY.

- I dumped a book truck today! It was spectacular. I gave it a tug to get it moving in the right direction, but the wheel stuck, so instead of turning, the thing toppled over, spilling nonfiction all over my feet.*** And I’d just gotten the damn thing sorted, too.

A regular patron who seems to want to be my friend helped me a bit and then noted that he’d have fainted of embarrassment if it were him (he seems easily embarrassed, though). I told him that if anything, the cart should feel pretty stupid. It’s the one that tripped, after all.

- Having lost track of our tastes long ago, my aunt has resorted to the ill-reputed but eminently practical solution of just giving us money for Christmas. So today I went shopping online for presents from her. Hooray for Epiphany presents!

- I am staring in some trepidation at a wordlist for the Torn Tongue. Remember how I realized that I tend to sort of fade out of group projects? I’m unconsciously doing that with the Torn World work. I’m sort of self-conscious about a group project, which is paralyzing. I need to get it done. At least I have Langmaker to help me out.

- You know, I could write a whole thesis, point-by-point, with cross-references and proper citations, demonstrating all the reasons why tomorrow is going to suck. But that would make me too bummed out, so you can just take my word for it.

*I blame that game as the final catalyst for the Elmo-ization of Yoshi.

**Okay, some old arcade games had a form of this, but it’s a little bit like comparing a sharpened stick to an iPhone.

***There is a reason I never wear delicate open-toe shoes on this job. Even my sandals have big rubber toes.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Gnarls Barkley ~ Smiley Faces

… And two seconds after a Fun With Books entry, I find out that Reading Rainbow is going off the air.

I think their philosophy for dumping it in favor of The Mechanics is a fallacy. Reading Rainbow was an excellent counter for Sesame Street—once you learned how to read, it showed you what you could do with it. A lot of kids with basic reading skills don’t really know what to do with the skill.

I wasn’t the kind of kid who needed convincing that reading is awesome, but I still have nothing but good memories about Reading Rainbow. It showed me a lot of interesting topics. I still get hypnotized if I ever catch it on TV.*

Still, 26 years is a good run for a show. Maybe I’ll binge on that next.

*Of course, nowadays it helps that LeVar Burton is ADORABLE.

Current Mood: sad

When you are 24 years old and estimate you are probably one of the oldest people in the sold-out midnight showing theater. And trust me, being amongst a group of rowdy tweeners is sort of like being in the middle of an internet forum. I hunched down with a book and pretended I didn’t exist.*

Anyway, I didn’t care for the nonexistent plot of this movie nearly as much as I did the nonexistent plot of the first Transformers, but it wasn’t bad. They did take out all the useless characters and put in new useless characters, many of which were annoying enough to make me rather miss the old ones, and while The Girl actually got to do a couple of things in it, the movie's erring on the side of the privileged was a lot less comfortably dumb than the last one. (Don't tell me The Twins were a good idea. They weren't.)

Robot-slamming, however, left no complaints. I was very happy to see that even though Soundwave got a badass upgrade*** he still had little minions like Ravage. Hell, his minions have minions. And Optimus … well, I’ll cut for possibly hinted spoilers, but let’s just say that he succeeds where ( another popular figure ) fails to get an emotional response out of me. I am not at all sure why.

It didn’t reach in and grab me by the inner child, and I think it was too dumb for me to just sit back and wave it off as "Dude, giant space robots, whatcha gonna do" but it did have lots of shinies.

gwalla, for example, gets his wish granted. Not a bad way to spend your midnight, but could have been way better. I’ll stick with the first, thanks.

*There was a Twilight: More Vapid Standing Around trailer. My ears will never be the same.**

**My revenge was to loudly advise everyone in the theater to boycott The Last Airbender for whitewashing when that trailer showed up. Letter-writing is all well and good, but dollars are what Hollywood understands.

***Which is a damn shame, because nothing can match old-school Soundwave in terms of pure awesome, by god. Fear the robotone voice and his cassette tape minions and his awesome powers of STREETLIGHT!

Had a brief attack of low self-esteem today at tae kwon do. My brother came with me, so he got to hear me lament about it afterward today. Lucky him.

I guess what bothers me is that I used to be coordinated, and now I flail around like a marionette being swung around by a two-year-old. I know this sort of thing takes time to get back, but I hate the feeling that my brain remembers how it used to be and my nerves just can’t be bothered to pay attention. I want the grace back again, and it’s frustrating that it’s not there.

But this does encourage me to practice more, so at least I’m heading in the right direction. I just have to keep going, I guess. But it’d be nice to have it now.

Current Mood: impatient

At one point during the week, my siblings, my mom, and I started chatting about our memories of elementary school, and once again I was reminded that, to my surprise, I was a Weird Kid in school.

I suppose we were all Weird Kids to some extent, but it always takes me a while to realize just how weird I was. I remember getting along with most kids, reading books the same way you eat popcorn—a fistful at a time, frenzied to get to the next fistful—and discovering music and language and science. I felt my best friend was my piano teacher (an SCA nerd 8 years my senior—terrible piano teacher, but a really great person to chat with), I had a lot of pen pals, and had a lot of friends who were not very close. I got along well with my siblings. I was into brain science, Star Wars, Tales Of The Paranormal, and notebooks.

And I was exploding with stories. Characters, plots, individual dramatic or comedic scenes, settings, backgrounds—they all spun to life in my head so quickly I sometimes had difficulty making enough universes to hold them all. Scribbling down my story ideas relieved it a little, but they all clamored for attention all the time, to the point where I often had to put my books down for a little bit to let them get their ideas in. Sometimes I would find myself posing or making the face one of them was making in the story in my head.*

I usually spent recesses alone, hands in my pockets, endlessly walking the quarter-mile circle of track around the upper playground lawn. It wasn’t that I felt uninvited to join kids. I did it because I had to spend school beating back the headnoise, and for a few minutes in the morning, at lunch, and in the afternoon, I could relax and let them crash around in there all they wanted.

And I was really content. I sometimes wished I had a friend who understood me, but normally I was just happy. Which is, I think, why I was surprised to find out that there was a concerted effort by teachers, counselors, and my own parents that year to try to get me out of my shell and to engage in the world of tween girls.

“You were baffling,” Mom said. “You weren’t like the child psychology books. You didn’t have really close friends.”

“I got along with people,” I pointed out.

“… You could be stand-offish.”

“Oh.”

“I worried you wouldn’t be happy without any friends.”

“I don’t remember being unhappy. I mean, my fifth grade teacher was a terrible human being, but that was my biggest problem.”

“Fifth grade was bad for everyone,” my sister said. “I had a bunch of friends, and they were always ganging up on me. Or one would get all snotty. I never knew quite where I was with them.”

“You had the normal experience I wanted for Amelia,” my mom told her wryly.

There was a pause as we processed that.

“Why, again?” I finally asked.

I can see that I could do with a little more understanding of how to make friends and influence people, but I’m not entirely sure why I worried people for being happy and friendless instead of constantly paranoid that my friends were going to dump me, but it was interesting to find out. It did explain that friendship group I was put in, though. School psychiatrist figured she’d cured me when I got along with them.

Poor lady. She tried so hard.

*Which did, in fact, lead to this situation once or twice.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

HEY YOU GUYS I TOTALLY HAVE SOME BABYSITTING MONEY SO WHO WANTS TO GO HANG OUT AT THE MALL AFTER SCHOOL TOMORROW?

Yes. I spent the evening wrangling an extremely amiable three-year-old. Cripes, I haven’t done that in years. I had forgotten a few things about babysitting:

-Other people’s houses are always kept at a temperature somewhere below freezing. I think it’s so the babysitter will be afraid to go to sleep.

-When you’ve put the kid to bed, it’s 8:30 and it feels like 4 a.m. because everything is dark and quiet and spooky. Not to mention cold.

-At some point during the evening, you may find yourself doing something you had never, ever pictured yourself doing, such as dancing to the Garbage Truck Song.

-I don’t know about you, but I never believed them when they said “Help yourself to anything in the fridge.”* I still don’t, and felt really guilty when I ate a chunk of their Italian dry salami.

-When you’re three and you go to bed and Mommy isn’t there, it’s the most traumatic thing ever because what if she never comes home. You had better stall the babysitter! Yeah, you’ll go to bed once you finish playing with your toys, and get one more glass of water, and read two bedtime stories, and get measured because you’re growing taller, and watch another truck DVD, and find your blankie. After that, definitely you’ll go to bed.

So I put him to bed and he cried about missing his mommy and I told him I’d watch for her and she was definitely coming home, I guarantee it, and then ten minutes later I put him to bed again and said no, she wasn’t there yet but by god she was coming home and she missed him too I was sure of it, and then ten minutes after that I put him to bed again and said really, she’d be there, it was okay. Then I sat around writing in a cold, spooky house till the ungodly hour of almost ten. It was surreal. It always has been surreal, whether you were the sitter or the sittee.

But dude! I got me some money! And I actually am going to the mall tomorrow, but not to meet Kimmy at the arcade and then get a burger and soda—I’m going to see if I can’t get a job there. (I has a prospect!)

Even so, I have the strangest feeling I got TARDIS’ed at some point. Anybody want to check?

*Except for that one time when we** got Stewart’s Peach Soda in those people’s fridge and loved it so much we chugged it all, and they always made sure to have some when we babysat after that.

**My brother and I did team babysitting a few times. Nobody believed he was better with kids than I was, he hated changing diapers, and I hated going alone.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Army of Lovers ~ King Midas

Aw, now, that was just too short. My brother the Dude came home for the holidays, and he’s already going back to his damn engineering school.* We had to cram a lot of geeking into a few days, so Mom and Dad had to put up with quite a bit of nonsequiturs involving Batman or Transformers or Pixar. I told him about the latest escapades of his favorite aliens from my stories, the uninhibited and somewhat bonkers wooslets (he helped create them), and he told me a bit about Tae Kwon Do and about how the freshmen at CSM this year apparently find it offensive that they’re called geeks and are trying to counter the campus paper’s “Geek of the Week” column with “Non-Geek of the Week.” Denial.

I also discovered that one of his favorite kids’ movies is The Sandlot, which occupies a real soft spot for him the way It Takes Two does for me. It’s made me wonder about nostalgia movies. What’s a movie you will always love no matter how old you get, flaws and all?**

Speaking of movies, as a historic family marker, the Dude was here for the Great Epic New HD-TV And Blu-Ray Setup, which means we got to introduce Dad to WALL*E. Dad has spent years not liking cartoons, and then he saw Ratatouille and decided it was the greatest movie ever—and so he was totally ready to view the world’s cutest post-apocalyptic movie when we put on WALL*E—and lo, he loved it. But if you ask me, the greatest Blu-Ray experience was Transformers—but then, I just love the hell out of that stupid movie.

Maybe when he comes back I’ll make him watch Cloverfield. Nobody else in this family likes it; maybe I can get one person on my side.

*Bastard’s actually acquiring a useful skill. He’ll probably manage to get a great job straight outta college. Jerk.

**Actually, The Sandlot is a pretty quality movie. If you want a movie I think is a quality family film that occupies a soft spot, I’d go with Secondhand Lions, but I think I was past kid-age for that one. It Takes Two isn’t in that caliber, but I was ten when it came out and it’s damn fun.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Nobuo Uematsu ~ Fight Against Culex (Super Mario RPG)

Hug Your Cats Day
Loomis Day
Memorial Day (Traditional)
Saint Joan of Arc Feast Day
Anniversary - First American Daily Newspaper Published
Anniversary - Lincoln Memorial

I stole this meme from

jill_calico: Draw Yerself As A Teenager!

Enjoy my clumsy first attempt at using fancy arty markers,* courtesy of the incomparable

lycheetwist!

( Amelia 2000 )

When I was 15, I
• Was in my last year of junior high school (9th grade)
• Was working actively to get my tae kwon do black belt
• Had my first depressive episode
• Played bass in jazz band and orchestra
• Finally got those braces off
• Had a birthday involving cycloptic sheep heads floating in formaldehyde and an impromptu abstinence-only non-sequitur lecture
• Was close friends with Jess and Heather
• Hiked a lot in the desert, which I was in love with (and still am)
• Began to develop crushes on people, none of whom were contemporaneous to me
• Got to go into the OR and watch Dad do a brain surgery (and passed out)
• Took all the honors classes available because they were the most interesting
• Took the same math class as my brother, even though he was a grade lower than me, and we had fun**
• Mismarked the National Spanish Exam demographic page and took state in the “native speaker” category
• Began to realize that people seriously believed in all that Bible stuff.

It’s kind of scary how damn consistent I am. There have been a few changes, but not a whole lot.

Partly I’m doing this meme because of all the artists who I want to see do it. So for this I specifically tag

lycheetwist, Liz the Art Nerd,

jadewing,

gundamkiwi, and

chibicharibdys. Add to this anyone else who is arty and wants to do it!

*HOLY SHIT those are fun. If they weren’t prohibitively expensive I’d buy dozens and go art bonkers

**To this day my brother and I remain the stereotypical male and female learning types. He was moved up to my level in math (which confused our already-confused calculus teacher, because while we didn't have the class during the same periods it turned out we had picked the same desk to sit in) and is now the great and mighty engineer, but he's not a fan of English or humanities and is good but not great with languages. I'm the language whiz with a penchant for the soft sciences and a flair for writing, but I'm average at math and have been known to get lost in 3-D video games.

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: Rhapsody in Blue

I know I’m a bit late to the game, but I finally figured out why I took the developments of Indy 4 completely in stride.

See, I loved Indy 4. It was exactly what I expected: a long, live action Saturday morning cartoon. As such, I was fine with the plot and action, and didn’t quite get why everyone was up in arms over it.

Here’s why.

Picture, if you will, Amelia at ten or eleven years old.* She has never actually watched Indiana Jones—at this point she’s a bit chicken about scary images in movies, and will be for a few years. But she knows the stories intimately, and one of her buddies is obsessed with it and has posters, video games, and his own Indy costume. Amelia loves the idea of Indiana Jones as having all these adventures and looking for treasure and swashbuckling around, and spends hours imagining and playing out scenarios featuring her in the role of intrepid hero going into volcanoes to meet volcano people or finding a lost jungle city or something, or going on a Legends of the Hidden Temple search for some Valuable Artifact.** This is the real influence of the Indy movies: adventure games and discovery.

Now open this same Amelia’s backpack, and take a look at the enormous number of book dealing with all the standard Legendary Mysterious Things—UFOs, the Nazca drawings, the Loch Ness monster, the curse of the Hope Diamond, Atlantis, Mothman, Area 51, and more UFOs. Yes! Eleven-year-old Amelia loves these stories! She is not sure if she necessarily believes any of it,*** but it’s so damn much fun to read about that she can’t resist the pure intrigue value presented by it. She will devour any story about saucers aliens (which she sees as a distinctive subgenre from other types of aliens, like Star Wars ones), has just seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and can tell you that the only interesting thing to have happened on her birthday is that it’s the anniversary of Betty and Barney Hill getting probed (at least till Talk Like A Pirate Day). Plus, she really likes neon lights.

Right. Got that all firmly in your mind? Now let’s come forward in time to last Friday. Here’s Amelia, who has increased her age by 100% since that last flashback, in the theater watching Indy 4. And on the screen gets projected … the exact contents of Amelia’s eleven-year-old head: UFOs and swashbuckling adventure.

I’m not so much saying this was nostalgia, though it was a hefty dose of that. I’m saying that as far as I was concerned, the content of this movie made absolute sense to me, because it meshes with an exact mindset I had. If they’d stuck in something featuring Super Mario, it wouldn’t have even fazed me. I wasn't bugged by the religious imagery in Raiders or Last Crusade or its lack thereof in Temple and Kingdom. It's not about cohesion with legends—the Indiana Jones world follows the Lancre Principle, which I named for Terry Pratchett's kingdom where it is a principle: all the folklore is true. All of it. Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff. ALL OF IT IS TRUE. God? Check. Aliens? Check. Voodoo? Check.

And that's how I was at that age. For me, that movie met me halfway, and so I have no complaints. Indy 4 was everything I could have expected.

*Coming up once I get hold of colored pencils: a bad drawing of Amelia at 15 years old, as part of the Draw Yerself As A Teenager Meme! I had a lot of fun with that.

**Such as Napoleon’s tambourine or, to cite an example given by

lycheetwistwhen talking about that game show, “Amelia Earhart’s jock strap.” I’m not sure what she was actually trying to say, but this is going to become my standard example of a Valuable Artifact.

***I certainly never believed in the Aliens Taught Us Civilization idea. As a kid I just thought it was weird that people thought we couldn’t, you know, invent farming or plumbing on our own; now I realize it’s the same reason I was always bothered by the idea that God taught us to do this stuff and we’d be a load of dumbasses without guidance. And with the folklore classes I’ve taken that deal with aliens as either messianic, apocalyptic, or in the same nebulous-moral territory as faerie rings, I see where my reaction was coming from.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Wynonna ~ Burning Love

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The Desert Mermaid

I Am The Boss Princess

Entries tagged with things were better then

Rabbit Tracks!

That's The Last Straw! I Was Going To Eat That Mummy!

Holiday Traditions

Don't Lie. You'd Read It.

Go, Blue Barracudas!

The Life Experience ~ Summer '10

(no subject)

I Think This Bakery Is ... HAUNTED!

Critical Mass

Busy, Busy

And Now For Something Completely Different

Post-Holiday Rundown

Bad News

Bad Sign Number Six Million And Nineteen

No Pain, No Gain

Weird Kid

Perhaps I'll Start A Club!

Family Movies

Back In Time

Indiana Jones + UFOs = Amelia/2