Baby Driver

I'm buying a house.

Well. We're buying a house, which is nice because I can foist most of the phone tag duties off on Ricky on the grounds that he's actually allowed to make personal calls at work. Real estate is cheap as hell in this area, we have a good chunk of money in the bank and between the housing market and that 10% government rebate, there's really never going to be a better time.

We just made an offer on a place. It needs a lot of work, but nothing we can't do ourselves (Rick's dad is a union carpenter, and we both basically grew up in construction zones so we know how to do everything up to and including a total overhaul of the septic system).

I'm swinging wildly between elation and panic.

Okay, you know what? I'm an adult. I have an education, a driver's license, a car, an apartment, and a full-time job that I don't hate and am not in any immediate danger of losing. I'm healthy, I have no drug addictions or criminal record. I have good credit. I love my husband and I don't have any serious family problems.

And yet, lately, I can't seem to be happy with anything. Maybe it's just spring, but for the past few weeks I've been crawling the walls, feeling totally useless and hopelessly incompetent.

I don't know. I always feel like I'm the last one to figure out how things are supposed to work, and by the time I do it's too late.

</self-pity>

This requires no commentary. What a fucking incredible performance.

So, um, yeah. God, I'm glad I didn't have to work today. My job's right down the street from the Civic Center. I used to live two blocks away. My cousins go to the high school that was locked down.

Fucking hell, what's the matter with people?

You know, when you have a job that requires you to be up at seven every morning and no social life to speak of, it really shouldn't be that hard to get in the habit of being in bed before three AM.

I'm so tired that I'm hallucinating things out of the corners of my eyes. I'm half tempted to keep doing this just to see how far I can take it.

I got into the graduate program at Syracuse! I am happy!

Now I'm going to go remedy the fact that I've had about fifteen hours of sleep, total, this week.

This just made a thought coalesce for me.

So, basically, daphnep  is ranting about reproductions of famous sculptures/art that are tweaked to conform to modern (insane) standards of beauty. And looking at the reproductions side-by-side with the originals, I realized why modern beauty standards are so ridiculous. The reproductions have been slimmed to a ridiculous degree, of course, but the proportions have also been changed. Waists, shoulders, wrists and ankles are narrowed, feet and hands made smaller, chins pointed--they're trying to make these sculptures look like thirteen year old girls instead of adult women. Even very slender adult women are rarely proportioned like that; the look is that of a girl who has just hit puberty and its attendant growth spurt, but hasn't yet filled into her new shape.

Adult women carry weight in our hips and asses. We have rounded muscle, dimpled thighs, breasts that sag a little unless they're teeny. We have more fat on our bodies than adult men--even thin women do. This doesn't mean that we're flawed; this is how women are supposed to look. There are some women who don't gain much weight, sure, and even some women who remain more or less the same shape as they were when they were thirteen. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's also no reason to make them the ideal.

Meme stolen from somewhere.

Post three of your favorite movies and three of your least favorite movies, and list why you love/hate them. These don't have to be Oscar winners, just movies you liked.

Three Movies I Hate, and Why


Interview with the Vampire
I just don't get this. It's got a cast of competent actors and is based on a very good book, and yet it's so bad it's painful to watch. I blame the makeup artists. Well, that and whoever tried to cast Brad Pitt as the Weepy Goth Man. There are some actors who could pull off Louis beautifully; Brad Pitt is not one of them.


Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
I loved the first two movies. I like action movies, I like apocalypse movies; this should be perfect. But it's so bad. The Terminatrix (seriously, Terminatrix? Whoever the hell came up with that should be banned from movies forever) was bad enough, but the complete mutilation of John Connor's character just ruined this for me. This is one of those movies that I just mentally edit out of the series' canon.


Ocean's Twelve
Another movie that gets edited out in my mind. The funny thing about this is that Ocean's Eleven was great and Ocean's Thirteen wasn't at all bad, but this one was just...awful. It's got a hugely incoherent plotline, culminating in Julia Roberts' character disguising herself as...Julia Roberts. I shit you not.


Three Movies I Love, and Why

St. Elmo's Fire
This movie came out the year I was born, and aside from technology and fashion tastes, these could be my friends. It was sort of eye-opening, how little some things change. Ally Sheedy and Andrew McCarthy in particular are great, and I liked that everything didn't just resolve itself neatly at the end.


Eagle Eye
It's got plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through, but the action is genius, the characters all have interesting backgrounds--there's a lot more emotional depth in this than you generally see in this kind of movie. And, um, Shia Labeouf. Yeah. (I always feel vaguely guilty for ogling him, even though he's my age, because my mental image of him looks like this. In this movie, though, I can't help it.)


A Streetcar Named Desire
"Stella! Hey, Stella!"

Need I say more? Okay, this movie is brilliantly twisted, and you have to admire the balls those filmmakers must have had, making a movie about insanity, adultery, prostitution, and rape in an era where married couples weren't allowed to share a bed on screen. This is my favorite Marlon Brando movie, and I love Marlon Brando. Stanley Kowalski is, I think, one of the most terrifying characters I've ever seen--awful and compelling.

You know what drives me nuts? Diet commercials that talk about how such-and-such program was so great for 'managing hunger'. Guess what? There's already a pretty well-proven way of managing hunger, and you don't even have to send in money to the starvation industry to try it out.

It's called food.

Seriously, except in really rare cases, people get hungry because their bodies need fuel. Nobody talks about how to 'manage' a full bladder; if you have a full bladder, you take a leak. If you're thirsty, you get something to drink, if you're tired, you sleep. When you're hungry, your body isn't punishing you for being a fat-fatty-fatass, it's telling you to get something to eat. I'm not really going to get into dieting because that's an entirely different can of worms, but I will say that if your diet means that you're hungry all the time, it isn't good for you. Even if it makes you thinner.

You know you live in upstate New York when it's twelve degrees out and that seems warm, because your face doesn't go numb between the house and the car.

The following videos never fail to make me happy.

( The Penis Song, Performed by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton )



( I Am/Lamb )



( Outrunning the Paparazzi )



( How to Avoid Killing Yourself While Doing Stupid Stunts )



( Crazy Frog )



( Knight Rider Burlesque )

Rick just got home. Neighbors were still playing their shit music at top volume. After about twenty minutes of this, he turned our subwoofer all the way up and played a bass test.

They've turned the music down. I love my husband.

This should be engraved on the walls of every college dorm room in the world. Because it is so fucking true, and it's not the kind of thing they ever tell you about abuse. Anyone I know who 'gets' that kind of thing learned it from personal experience. And that sucks.

Is there anyone out of middle school for whom any of this is news?

The next person who makes any mention of how I must be ignorant because I grew up in a big city (NYC) is going to get smacked. Seriously.

I was born in Binghamton, which is located in Upstate New York. Note that it is two hundred miles away from New York City. I grew up in Candor, New York, which has a village population of less than a thousand. I worked on a farm during the summers in high school. I know how to drive a tractor. My graduating class had sixty-three people, and we were in all the same classes from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I am from a small town.

This is actually something that happens a lot, and while it's predictable, it's still annoying. New York is a fairly large state. New York City is enormous, but it covers a relatively small geographic area even if you account for urban sprawl. Upstate New York is geographically, ethnically, and culturally very different from NYC. No matter what downstaters would like to think, they do not speak for the entire state.*

I don't expect people from other areas of the country to be intimately familiar with the geopolitical details of a state they've never visited, but I really wish they'd stop making assumptions (the fact that they're always delivered as 'what would YOU know, coming from a state that's coated in pavement' probably doesn't help the matter, and makes me want to send them photos of my hometown**)



*I'm a little bitter about this because upper-middle-class kids from Long Island and NYC have a tendency to come upstate for college, and they can be unbelievably arrogant and rude toward locals.

**For reference, the last photo is of Main Street.

I'm missing two fingerprints on my right hand. On my middle and ring fingers I have bubbly scar tissue instead of prints. There's very little nerve damage; I could probably read braille with those fingers, if I read braille, but it looks strange.

It's supposed to be impossible to burn off fingerprints. Even under scar tissue, they grow back. I was about a year and a half old when I touched a woodstove with wet fingers; I don't remember it.

When I was eight, a yellowjacket stung my left eyelid. I got stung all over my body, actually--I wandered into a nest in the middle of a raspberry patch and it took me a while to extricate myself--and my hands swelled up like baseball gloves; I was itching for a week. Everything else healed. There's no visible damage to my eyes, but when I smile my eyelids are lopsided.

When I was sixteen, I rolled my mother's station wagon three times down a steep hillside at 45 mph. The worst injuries I had were the bruises on the insides of my fingers from gripping the steering wheel.

I didn't die driving to work this morning, which was nice. Yesterday I got out three and a half hours early and there were six inches of sandy slush on the roads and zero visibility. I drive an old four-cylinder Escort with unreliable brakes and bad tires. The drive home, which normally takes me less than fifteen minutes, took nearly half an hour.

My shoulders are killing me. I think it was from leaning over the steering wheel like a panicky granny-driver. Or possibly from flipping king-sized mattresses by myself all day today.

Either way: ow.

I want a massage.

Okay, Johnny Depp is good looking and everything, but this is the real reason he's my favorite actor:

On an entirely different, slightly disturbing, but kind of awesome note:


Which Horrible Affliction are you?
A Rum and Monkey disease.