rsadelle

I should forewarn you that I was inclined to be cranky about this movie anyway because (a) I'm still upset about Fox canceling Sarah Connor Chronicles and (b) the theater we were in had the volume up to be the loudest thing I've ever heard. I don't think I would have liked it even if those two things weren't true.

( Spoilers for T4 and SCC )

Oh, yes. Seriously, this was awesome. People saying there isn't enough CAPSLOCK in the world to say how much they loved it are not wrong.

( Spoilers )

Overall: Meh. There was one part, though, that I would have rewound and watched at least once more if I'd been watching it in a rewindable context, and there was one other thing I really liked. Those two parts were amidst some stupidity and a lot of things I'd seen in the trailer.

( Spoilery )

I unironically loved it. I feel like I should have more to say, but I don't. I just had to post about it because I have an (also unironic) "i heart vin diesel" tag.

Okay, a few things:

• It was not quite as amazing as the first movie (what could be?), but way better than two and three.
• I was so excited I could barely keep still. Seriously, I had to bite my nails to keep from vibrating out of my seat.
• ( Spoilers )
• I kept thinking, "Vin Diesel, I love you forever."
• ( Spoilers )
• ( Spoilers )
• The one thing I really didn't like was Paul Walker's hair. The whole flat, no curls thing just isn't right.

I reserve the right to come back with another bulleted list of excited utterances if/when I see it again.

I've now had two email conversations about this week's New Yorker, even while the issue sits on the desk in front of me so I can write about it, so I clearly need to just make a post about it and be done with it.

Ariel Levy's Lesbian Nation (abstract only available online) is one of those articles that I might have read anyway but definitely remembered to read based on the fact that there was a Jezebel post about it. The article is an interesting look at the history of the Van Dykes, lesbian separatists who traveled around the country from Women's Land to Women's Land in the 70s. It reads much like any other similar story: a charismatic leader inspires a revolution, a new idea comes in that divides the community, eventually the community falls apart and people go their separate ways, and the charismatic leader ends up leading a relatively everyday life in the current day. Specific interesting points from this article:

• The first expert she quotes is a man, Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
• "The feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson went so far as to claim that her brand of celibate 'political lesbianism' was morally superior to the sexually active version practiced in her midst. Atkinson was not alone in this martyred line of reasoning; a 1975 essay by the separatist Barbara Lipschutz entitled 'Nobody Needs to Get Fucked' urged women to 'free the libido from the tyranny of orgasm-seeking. Sometimes hugging is nicer.' This argument was never particularly compelling to the lesbians in the movement who were actually gay."
• Lamar Van Dyke, the charismatic leader in question, says, "If you look at me, there's no question about it: I'm a dyke. I am gay. If you don't think so, there is something really wrong with you." I'm really bothered by this, and I'm not sure exactly how to articulate why. It's something about you can't know that about people just by looking at them. I think it's also part of the generational difference. "'Your generation wants to fit in,' she told me, for the second time. 'Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?' There was no contempt in her voice; it was something else - an almost incredulous maternal disappointment."
• The new idea that divides the community is BDSM. I'm actually surprised The New Yorker went there. I think of them as being fairly staid, but maybe they're not so staid as I think of them being.
• Lamar now works for Speakeasy in Seattle, "and she had just bought the first new car of her life, a black VW bug. Van Dyke also owns her house, but she doesn't use credit cards. That would cross some kind of line. 'I don't want to be a capitalist pig,' she explained."
• The article is an interesting historical counterpoint to a Jezebel post about lesbianism as a political choice from earlier this month. The most striking thing missing from the history lesson that shows up in the modern discussions is the way these kinds of communities look down on and exclude trans folks. The other thing that gets left out that I saw in the Jezebel article and discussion is the idea that men are half the population of the world; any solution to the world's problems needs to include them.

The second interesting woman-focused article is Rebecca Mead's profile of opera singer Natalie Dessay (abstract only available online). I particularly like the way she treats the push and pull between acting and singing in the opera world - increased theatricality bringing in more money versus the wish to keep opera pure to the singing - and her acknowledgment that opera plots are notoriously thin. I also like it that Mead mentions the way Dessay's job keeps her away from her family - "she can sometimes go a couple of days without even talking to her children on the phone" - without going into any kind of hysterics about her being a bad mother, or even, really, much more detail about it. The focus is on Dessay as an artist, not Dessay as an example of motherhood, good or bad.

The third interesting woman-focused article is Nancy Franklin's TV column about Dollhouse and the DTV transition. My mom said the article "adds nothing to the chatter, but Nancy Franklin writes well." She's right on both counts. Franklin says, as the rest of us have been saying, "Only people who are willing to cut Whedon endless slack could find anything much to draw them in to this show . . . at the core of the series is an unpromising performance by Eliza Dushku." She also says of Eliza, in my favorite part, "the primary qualification that Dushku brings to the part is that she graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Cleavage." Quite frankly, I think Eliza, or at least the folks at NBC Universal, know this; the best part of Eliza's Hulu ad is the part where she says, "eyes glued" just as her movement focuses your attention on her breasts. I also very much liked what Franklin has to say about actresses in general: "In terms of gender studies, it is notable that Dushku's demeanor as a zombie is much the same as the demeanor many actresses her age resort to when trying to project an image of themselves as unthreatening and 'feminine': a slouchy walk, a bobbly head, and ever-parted lips. Would someone please show these actresses a movie starring Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, Bette Davis, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, or Judy Davis?" Both norwich36 and I were struck by the inclusion of Cate Blanchett in that list. Like many people, I'm sure, I first saw her in Elizabeth, where she just blew me away. It turns out I've actually seen her in five other things and I have a number of her other movies in my queue. The only bad things about Franklin's column is that it makes the writing in Denby's movie reviews on the next page seem particularly uninspired in comparison.

There are a few love songs I considered for the Valentine's Day edition of 22 Days of Music. I love Shakira's "No Creo" off of her MTV Unplugged album, even though I sometimes think the lyrics are a little iffy in terms of what I think a relationship should be. Then there's the Lynden David Hall version of "All You Need Is Love" from Love Actually, which is both beautiful and amazing and brings to mind the movie. (Fun fact: allegram and dedalvs played this version at their wedding but put the Beatles version on their wedding CD.) In the end, however, I had to go back to my first impulse: "I've Never Been In Love Before" from Guys and Dolls. This version is from the 1992 revival cast, so, yes, that is Peter Gallagher as Sky Masterson, which sometimes weirds me out and I get this image of Sandy Cohen embarrassing Seth and Ryan by singing this in the kitchen. Josie de Guzman sings the part of Sarah.


I've Never Been in Love Before - Peter Gallagher and Josie de Guzman

(imeem sucks again; click the link to hear the whole thing.)

So way back in December, when Sarah Connor Chronicles went on hiatus for two months, I decided I needed some projects to get me through the time without it. I actually completed those projects quite a while ago, but keep forgetting to post about them. Since the show starts up again tonight, I figured I should write about them today. (Although if I'd done it earlier, I would have more to say in more detail. Consider this more in the way of a long overview.)

Project 1: The Wizard of Oz

I'd never read L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz before, although, of course, I've seen the Judy Garland movie version. Sarah Connor Chronicles references it fairly often, so I thought I would read it. I ended up getting The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1973 edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography by Michael Patrick Hearn from the library. The annotations were actually fairly interesting and often amusing (he spends a surprisingly large amount of time seriously considering the location of Oz), but I think I probably should have read the book without them first so I could really concentrate on the story. I think I remember more about the eighty-page introduction and the annotations than about the story itself. Amongst other things, the introduction includes a fascinating look at Baum's involvement in the early days of motion pictures that's certainly worth reading. It's also fascinating to note how much legwork Hearn had to have put into it that would be so much easier now with the internet.

The book holds up really well as a children's story, especially when you compare it to the story from the same era in the Denslow Appendix. (W. W. Denslow did the original illustrations for the book. Apparently there was later strife between him and Baum, and at various points, some of Denslow's Oz character illustrations were published with other stories written to go with them.) There's almost nothing that's confusing to modern ears, probably because most of the story takes place in the magical world of Oz.

I was also trying to make the analogy to the show, and it works in an interesting way. You would think John should be Dorothy, but he's not. In terms of experiences, Derek's Dorothy: he's the one who travels to a different world, and if you think of Jesse (or even Kyle) as his home, he does want to go home. Cameron's obviously the Tin Man: she's built without a heart, but she does learn to care and think of others (sort of, at least). Sarah's the Cowardly Lion: she started out not knowing what she's doing and she's scared to death, but she keeps going anyway. And John's the Scarecrow: he doesn't know anything/enough, and yet he's the leader and he's making choices and choosing strategies.

Project 2: Terminator Movies

It had been so long since I last saw the Terminator movies that I was having trouble tracking any conversation about Sarah Connor Chronicles that referenced the movies. The answer to this was obviously to watch the movies again. (I also wanted to rewatch them all before Terminator Salvation comes out in May.)

The Terminator had me laughing in the first few minutes because pretty much the first thing you see that's not just a place is the governor's naked ass. (Remember, I live in California.) Given my penchant for reading/surfing the internet while watching things, I actually found it hard to watch this movie because it's so dependent on visual imagery.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the one that relates most to Sarah Connor Chronicles - the show takes place after it, and I believe the powers that be have said it's supposed to follow from T2. I was amazed, watching it, at how well Lena Headey is playing Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor. Between the first two movies, Sarah toughens up a hell of a lot, and I could see the roots for Lena's Sarah in Linda's. I could also completely see Thomas Dekker's John in Edward Furlong's. (Aside the first: his voice keeps breaking, which is at once both kind of distracting and probably part of the point - he's a human being with all that comes along with that. Aside the second: I think of "douchebag" as a relatively recent insult, but John uses it in this, which is from 1991.)

One of the things I really appreciate about the first two movies are the special effects. I find myself annoyed with movies where the special effects are the point. In both of the first two Terminator movies, the special effects are secondary to the story, and they're kind of cheesy to modern eyes. I like the cheesiness. They're not afraid to make a movie that's a movie with some shooting lights added in to give you the sense of what the terminators are like.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines has kind of a bad rap, but I liked it when it came out, and I liked it again this time around. It doesn't really connect to Sarah Connor Chronicles - Cameron jumping them years ahead completely changes the timeline - but that doesn't mean it's not worth watching. The most relevant thing about T3 is that Arnie's Terminator says, "You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable." This is what I've been saying all season, and where I hope the writers are really going with Sarah Connor Chronicles. I want them to take a middle path: Cameron is teaching John that robots can be allies, and Ellison and others are teaching Weaver and John Henry what it means to be human. It doesn't have to be robots vs. humans; metal and skin can work together to make a future they can all live in.

Let me start with a seemingly unrelated story. We were chatting in belly dance last night about shows that get better (one of the women in the class said Lie To Me gets better after the pilot, and the current other fangirl in the class said someone tried to get her into Smallville by saying it got better in season 8, which I laughed at), and I realized that I forgot to turn on the DTV box, which means I taped static instead of Supernatural. I thought that it would be okay because I could just watch it online. So this morning when I was ready to watch while lifting weights and making lunch, I spent twenty minutes trying to find a watchable video. Of the two I could get to play, one of them had the audio so out of sync I wasn't willing to put up with it, and the other got all wonky and stretched out on full screen. (I'm sure someone will come along to tell me this could all be easier if I used BitTorrent, but that's not the point of this story. It would also be easier if networks would realize people will watch their shows on their sites with ads if they post them the next day, but that's also not the point of this story.) I finally got frustrated and decided I would just watch Burn Notice instead, since I also usually catch up on that on Fridays. So I'm watching this week's ep, and all of a sudden, "Hey, it's that guy!" That guy, in this case, was Joel Gretsch, who played Tom on The 4400. Here's where this story starts to relate. Push starts out with a scene that takes place ten years ago. Guess who's in that scene? Yes, that's right: Joel Gretsch, playing the father of Nick, our protagonist. Now here's where it relates even more: we also see Nick ten years ago. I was watching it thinking, "Wait, is that?" And then, "No, no, you're only thinking that because it's Friday and you usually watch SPN on Fridays." But, no, my first thought was right. Young Nick is played by Colin Ford, who also played young Sam in two SPN eps.

That seems like an auspicious beginning, and indeed it was. As far as sci fi goes, Push is not as awesome as Babylon A.D., but I still very much liked it. In fact, aside from a (not insignificant, I admit) point to be made about how our heroes are white and the villains are almost all poc, I don't think there was anything I disliked about it.

( Spoilers )

Today's song is again one I heard just the day before writing this post. norwich36 and I went to see Slumdog Millionaire yesterday. I thought it was very well done, and I enjoyed it, although I will warn you that there are a few moments of violence I had to close my eyes through. The music for the movie was amazing, and it certainly deserves the Oscar nominations. I considered both "Paper Planes" and "Jai Ho" as today's song of the day, but in the end, had to go with the one that was my first impulse: "O... Saya."


O... Saya - M.I.A.

The January 19 issue of The New Yorker has an article by Tad Friend about movie marketing. The article itself is interesting. He talks about the marketing for W., The Fast and the Furious, Saw II, and New In Town. He also talks about how marketers see people and how they make films relatable. He tells us that "the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women." When I read that to my mother over the phone, she was incensed that they would leave out baby boomers and perplexed that they would lump her and me into the same category. Interestingly, when I read his descriptions of the four quadrants, my actual likes fall into both the young women and older women categories, and I've spent some time enjoying the same thing as young men, although not so much recently. (Exception: horror movies, which I've never really been into, unless it's of the so-and-so fights the devil variety. "They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.") I don't like movies for older men (the examples marketing consultant Terry Press gives Friend are Wild Hogs and 3:10 To Yuma) at all.

Friend outlines five rules marketers have "for making their films seem broadly 'relatable.'" My favorite quote from them, from the section on movie posters: "Because stars are supposed to open the film, and because they have contractual approval of how they appear on a poster, the final image is often a so-called 'big head' or 'floating head' of the star. Every poster for a Will Smith movie features his head, and for good reason: he is the only true movie star left, the only one who could open even a film about beekeeping monks."

It's an interesting article that really does tell you a lot about how the movie industry works. What's even more fascinating to me is how well the article itself works as a piece of marketing. One of the movies whose marketing development Friend follows is New In Town ("a title no one actively disliked"). When I saw the trailer, I thought it looked awful, although the premise is the kind of thing I like. The article, though, with how it talks about how they twist trailers to make movies seem watchable and how Tad Friend says he liked the movie and that "Blanche (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), Zellweger's administrative assistant at the plant, had got many of the biggest laughs. 'Droll and folksy reads as quaint, reads as art house,' Palen said. 'I love Blanche, but I can't sell her.'" actually made me think the movie might be worth seeing. It also made me think that The Proposal might be better than its ghastly trailer, although that might just be wishful thinking - I love a good they have to get married story, and I'm at least mildly fond of both Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds.

(I am going to attempt to embed video here. I've never done this. I have no idea if it'll work or not. If not, check back later, because I'll keep trying to fix it. Also, if things start playing automatically and you find it annoying, you should install flashblock.)

Anyway, a few days ago, keepaofthecheez posted a hilarious video that needs to be shared, but I didn't know who I should share it with, which is why you all get to be shared with.

How To Give A Great Man To Man Hug


General Etiquette:How To Give A Great Man To Man Hug

Then, I saw a link to a Leverage behind the scenes sort of thing which asks cast members "Who is most like their character?" If you've been paying attention to me recently, you probably know where this is going. Whether you do or not, it's still entertaining enough to watch.

Leverage - Behind The Scenes: Most Like Character



(Also entertaining is the one where Aldis says he and Chris just wanted chairs with their names on them and they finally got them. This may explain why Chris looks so uncomfortable in the picture where Beth's in his chair. He just wants his own chair! Be forewarned that some of their behind the scenes vids are spoilery for eps that haven't yet aired.)

Even as I was entertained by these two videos and thought about posting them here, I thought, "But how do I connect them together?" And then I was watching/listening to videos of Kane live, and I came across a video of Christian Kane doing "Let Me Go" (which I love) live. The person taping was far enough away from the stage that there are people wandering in and out of the frame between the camera and Chris. Two of those people are a couple of men who have a man to man hug that is both quite long and also repeated. I'm not sure what the etiquette teacher voice from the first video would say about that.

Let Me Go (Live)



Now I'm watching Four Sheets to the Wind. Oh, Chris, why do you end up in these not that good, place-specific indie movies where you have sex scenes that last less than ten seconds? And more importantly, why haven't I learned that watching movies just because you're in them is not really a good idea?

I also just read through a transcript of an older Q&A (linked from dea_liberty's Steve/Chris Tin-Hat PARTY post) wherein Chris says, in response to a question about other skills and talents, "I normally cook on this whole thing, but Steve's an unbelieveable cook, so I can't take that from him, cuz when I learned, I learned from him. So I love to cook, I cook everyday, that's my favorite thing to do. But he [Steve] went to culinary school so...fuck him! You won. He's a really really good cook, so that's your thing Steve..." *swoon*

(I kind of want to ask if anyone's tried to make a Chris and Steve timeline for easy reference, but apparently there's been wank in the past over the whole Kane the band becoming Christian Kane the solo artist thing, and I don't know either of the communities I started watching well enough to know if asking is a good idea or not.)

I find The New Yorker extremely variable: some weeks I read nothing but the cartoons, other weeks I read nearly everything. The January 12 issue is a nearly everything issue.

Not all the articles are about Jews and Judaism, but it seems like a large number of the ones I read were. Let me tally the Jews and Judaism articles I read:

• David Remnick's comment on Obama and Israel:

  And, what is more, history has proved that the seemingly impossible can be achieved: the Irish and the English have all but resolved a conflict that began in the days of Oliver Cromwell, and on January 20th an African-American President will cross the color line and move into the White House - a house that slaves helped build.

• Jeffrey Toobin's profile of Barney Frank, which I found fascinating. This seems strange to me because I don't find either politics or the current financial crisis particularly interesting, and both feature strongly in this article. My favorite bit about politics:

  Before the meeting, the Democrats at the White House, including Frank, Pelosi, and Barack Obama, had caucused privately in the Roosevelt Room about their strategy for the day. "Barack said, 'I think we need to go ahead with this,'" Frank recalled. "He was being conciliatory, because he thinks it's very important for us, both in public policy and politically, that we don't get blamed for fucking up the economy. And that we not fuck up the economy."

  It also takes on gay rights, and as much as I'm uninvolved and relatively uninformed, I find messages of hope for the future so uplifting:

  Still, Frank is uncharacteristically hopeful about the future, including gay rights. "We're going to do three things in Congress," he told me. "First, a hate-crimes bill - that shouldn't be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come."

• Adam Kirsch's critic at large piece about Hannah Arendt. I don't actually know anything about Hannah Arendt and I'm completely disinterested in philosophy, but I love The New Yorker's pieces on the lives of philosophers.

  The fact that Heidegger and Arendt were lovers was no secret to her close friends - "Oh, how very exciting!" Karl Jaspers exclaimed when Arendt told him - and it has been public knowledge since Elisabeth Young-Bruehl revealed it in her 1982 biography. But the affair became a kind of highbrow scandal in 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger, a professor at M.I.T., wrote about it in a short book, "Hannah Arendt / Martin Heidegger." Ettinger, who had been granted access to the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence for the purpose of writing a new biography of Arendt, instead made it the subject of a sensational exposé.

• David Denby's movie reviews, which included a look at Defiance:

  Daniel Craig, it turns out, can embody a Moses figure without losing his sex appeal, which may be the highest compliment I've ever paid an actor.

I also read a few other interesting pieces:

• Ben McGrath's Talk of the Town piece about Caroline Kennedy, which points out that people had nearly the same things to say about how Hilary spoke, and which offers possible ways to address her image issues:

  Perhaps Mary Mayotte could help? Mayotte runs the Speech Fitness Institute and has experience in curbing the tics of fashion-industry types. ("I've seen people say 'fabulous' twenty-five times in a three-minute interview," she said.)

• Lizzie Widdicombe's Talk of the Town about the rich selling off their jewelry, which fits right in with the recent Gawker mocking of the rich-based coverage of the economic times:

  Sherman helps them prioritize: "I always say, 'Well, now, have you worn any of it? Or is there anything you're still emotionally tied to?'" She does a bit of therapy: "Most of them never thought about having to come up with money to pay regular expenses. I look upon it positively and say, 'Be glad you had these things, and be glad you had great taste, so now you can sell it in order to continue.'"

• Justin Vogt's Talk of the Town piece about official historians, which is could hilariously be about academia or fandom or any other semi-insulated community with an overbearing dean or BNF type:

  The allegations shocked the chairman of the advisory committee, Wm. Roger Louis, of the University of Texas at Austin. "Even by Texas standards, it was a level of vulgarity and crudeness that we found hard to believe," Louis said. Most troubling to Louis was Susser's apparent intolerance of any dissent. "We began to discover that it is the equivalent of a petty dictatorship in the Historian's Office," he said.

  Peter Hessler's article about a road trip in China (abstract only available online), which was good, but not as good as some of his previous slices of life in China:

  Periodically, he came through Beijing and slept on my couch for a week. The term of Peace Corps service is lifetime when it comes to guests. Sometimes I had three or four ex-volunteers staying in my apartment, all of them big Midwesterners drinking Yanjing beer and laughing about old times.

• Sasha Frere-Jones' review of Bon Iver, which I'm now going to have to listen to:

  The stack of voices is overwhelming - a combination of the secular and the religious in one cloudy mass - and is as exalted as any sound in American popular music today.

Yes Man is quite possibly the funniest movie I've ever seen. It was so funny, there were multiple times when I was laughing so hard I had to take off my glasses and wipe the tears out of my eyes. Brad laughed so hard he cried.

Below the cut are spoilers. I'm going to give away a few of the funniest things in the movie. You may continue to find them funny after you see the movie, but they might not be as funny in the movie if you know about them beforehand.

( Spoilers )

norwich36 came over last night so we could watch/mock The Christmas Cottage. (For some reason, IMDb is insisting the proper title is Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas, but the DVD itself calls it The Christmas Cottage.) I have only a few things to say about the movie:

1. Jared Padalecki has a limited acting range, and this role does not fall within it.
   
2. This movie has a surprisingly large number of recognizable names in it.
   
3. I clearly need more generally fannish people on my friends list because I didn't know Richard Burgi was going to be in it.
   
4. If you, for some crazy reason, decide you want to watch the movie, you should definitely watch the special features. The Christmas With the Cast things are mostly entertaining, and some of the deleted scenes are better than what made it into the movie. If you drink alcohol, that may also make the whole experience more bearable.

Since the movie isn't worth saying much about, let me instead tell you about what I made for dinner.

( Lentil Soup )

( Salad )

( Lemon Thyme Biscuits )

( Brownies )

As I mentioned yesterday, norwich36 and I went to see Twilight today. We tried to stifle our laughter, but we might have ruined the experience for the poor teenage girl in front of us.

( Spoilers )

Today I'm thankful for the library's DVD collection. I've put my Netflix on hold for the time being, so I've been watching movies from the library, which, in many cases, is a better bet. I would have hated to use up Netflix discs on Cheaper by the Dozen (wherein Jared Padalecki fills Tom Welling's locker with corn) and Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (wherein Hilary Duff's hair is the second worst thing about the movie). With the library, however, I can watch all the miscellaneous crap I want without having to pay for it.

We went to see Babylon A.D. today. One of the trailers was for Fast & Furious, which was awesome. I don't know if I can wait for next summer! The one thing I would change about the trailer would be to show the "New Model Original Parts" tagline first, and the actor names second.

( Babylon A.D. spoilers )

Full-Time Unpublished Novelist: Week 1
I did almost nothing last week. Well, okay, I went to dance, had coffee (for her)/hot chocolate (for me) with someone from my writing group, read a lot (norwich36 keeps reccing me stuff), ate a heck of a lot (a combination of stress eating and the time of month when my body thinks I should get pregnant and therefore eat a lot so I can provide for the baby [No, body. Just no.]), spent two hours just browsing at Barnes & Noble, walked to the grocery store, walked at least a mile three or four other mornings before breakfast, did yoga every day, plotted out half of a novel (see below), went to Sultan's on Friday night, passed on some recs, and sent a few emails. And wrote one sentence of the book.

I was trying to be kind to myself and tell myself it was okay to take a week off, but it caught up with me on Saturday, when I woke up cranky and later wrote, "I feel like a failure. I need to get myself in gear." in my one-sentence journal. On Saturday night, I sewed new elastic onto my good zils (one of those now that I'm unemployed I have plenty of time to do it tasks I hadn't yet done) and wrote a few more sentences of the book.

On Schedule
After spending a week doing pretty much nothing, I got back on track today. Yesterday I roughed out a potential schedule for myself, and I've stuck to it pretty well today, although it probably needs some adjusting. It's funny how just thinking about it makes me write. The day I turned in my resignation, I had trouble falling asleep, and I was pondering the book, and I thought, "Crap. Now I really do have to write the song" (there's a song that was supposed to be a minor plot point but became a little bigger in the telling of it), and then there part of it was and I had to write it down. I think I didn't quite catch all of it even then. Last night, after roughing out the schedule and telling myself firmly that I was getting out of bed by six-thirty today, I was having trouble falling asleep, and then there was more of the song and another three sentences and a phrase I had to write down. This is why I keep a pen and paper on the stool next to my bed that serves as a nightstand, and just enough light that comes in from the parking lot, even with the blinds closed, that I can see where there's writing and where the paper's blank, and I can write surprisingly well in the dark. Of course, today I wrote only a few sentences of the book and spent most of my assigned work time writing a 2700-word lesbian fantasy role-play short story instead. (I think it's a little flat at the moment, but I can probably spark it up a bit and make it salable if I can come up with a place to try to sell it to.)

Mawwiage. Mawwiage is wot bwings us togedder today.
In three out of the fourteen J2 Big Bang stories I read, they get married. norwich36 says this is more common these days, now that it's possible in real life. Apparently I missed this, which is what I get for pretty much only rereading fic for the last year or two. (Also, dammit! I should have done something about my Ted/Barney mpreg earlier because now they don't have to go to Canada, although that certainly has a flexible timeline, so it could be farther in the past. Except now I have to look up when the future bits are to see if that's true. Damn.) Between that and the joke I keep telling myself about the future - "A rich wife is not outside the realm of possibility" (I read Monika K. Moss's Life Mapping [It's fairly similar to other such books; if you've read a lot of them, you could probably skip this one. Also, if you're the type to be disgusted by The Law of Attraction, you should skip the prologue and chapter 1 and go straight to chapter 2. (I think it's mostly ridiculous, but I can also roll my eyes at that part and take the other things she has to say somewhat seriously.)] and worked my way through several of the exercises [I stopped when I got to writing down "Strategic Actions" because the one that kept popping into my head was "quit my job."], one of which is to write out your ideal day. I kept getting stuck and had to write three versions because I couldn't go for a more realistic one until I'd written the partnered version, wherein I write in the morning and volunteer in the afternoon and she works full-time at something she loves. We live in one of the houses in my neighborhood [but a few streets over] with two or three bedrooms - one for us and one to be my office, with a cottonwood tree outside my window, and maybe one more - and a detached garage that she's converted into a dance/yoga/workout studio for me. It has a wood floor with enough give for jumps, windows, one wall all covered with mirrors for dance and lush curtains that can be pulled over them when I don't need the distraction, a sink and mini-fridge because it's a good social gathering place too, and lots of cushions because it's a good gathering place and because doing shoulder stand with the head lower than the shoulders keeps the natural curve to the neck and because I maybe also have a harem girl fantasy where I'm the harem girl and she's the sultan.) - I have at least half the plot of a lesbian romance novel in my head.

One woman is a painter. She had a scholarship to a fancy private school when she was younger, and her best friend is still one of the rich girls, who drags her along to a party out in the burbs one night when she's depressed because the coffee shop she's been working at for years and years and years to pay her bills and buy her art supplies is going out of business and she's going to have to find some other kind of job. The party's at this giant house that two people who work all the time live in, and she's in a room that's mostly empty with great light and says, "What a waste," because it would be such a wonderful studio space. Also at the party is the businesswoman type (maybe an ad executive, probably not a lawyer) who's so close to making partner, and she knows that what they really want is some assurance of stability, something that says she won't leave them once she's got a name for herself that will get her something bigger and better somewhere else. She knows a wife who's tied to the community would do it. They meet, of course, and have some kind of moment at the party, something that's enough for the ad exec to get her secretary to track down the painter and ask her out again. I'm not sure exactly how to get to the proposal, but the ad exec suggests it would be the best thing for them to get married - she would get the wife that will convince the partners she's partner material, and the painter will get whatever space she wants in their house as her studio and money for art supplies. And because the painter's been worrying about what the hell she's going to do ("I can't go work at Starbucks. I just can't!") and she's three days late with her rent and she just used her last tube of red, she says yes. So they get married, and the painter plays hostess when needed, and the ad exec stays out of her studio and doesn't care how much she spends on paint and brushes and canvas. And then there's some kind of event, maybe New Year's Eve, and the ad exec gets drunk and they have the best, sweetest sex ever, and each one of them realizes she's fallen in love with her wife, but, of course, this is a romance novel, so they don't tell each other that. And then there's more that gets them, eventually to a happy ending. (Yesterday, my brain wanted the ad exec to be an alcoholic and send her to AA. I don't know.)

Releasing Ideas Into the World: If I Were An Editor
I've long thought that you could make a great erotica anthology out of the Chico News & Review's spicy personals. (For those who don't know: the CN&R is the oldest, most establishment of the local alternative weekly papers. There was a time when they were really good and did investigative reporting, and then the quality fell off. I think it's getting better under the new editor. The old editor, who maybe got fired over the dildo story they ran in the center of the paper a couple of years ago, started his own alternative weekly paper, and it's terrible.) You could assign one to each author, or provide a selection and let the authors tackle whatever strikes their fancy.

You could also make a good anthology out of the example sentences in Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Well-Tempered Sentence. There are some wacky stories to be told behind some of those.

Emblematic of My Reading Habits
I went to the library on Saturday morning. I checked out three books: a young adult novel I had to get through interlibrary loan (Beauty Shop for Rent by Laura Bowers), a romance novel I've read before that I had to request from another branch in the system (Strange Bedpersons by Jennifer Crusie), and my Dewey Decimal book for September, which I originally saw when it was on the new books shelf (Free For All by Don Borchert). This is pretty much what my reading looks like these days.

Why Jennifer Crusie Novels Are Better
This week, I read two romance novels by other people - The Bachelor by Carly Phillips (not very good) and Remember When by Judith McNaught (better, but still left me emotionally unsatisfied) - which made me develop a theory about part of what makes Jennifer Crusie's novels better. Both The Bachelor and Remember When are horribly gendered, beyond even what you might expect from such a pillar of heterosexuality as the romance novel. Roman doesn't just like Charlotte's scent; it's her "feminine scent" that he loves while he's waiting in her bedroom for her to get home. It's not just the qualities that Diana's looking for that she finds in Chase, but the "male qualities." Here's a suggestion: if you can drop the gender word and your sentence still makes sense, drop it.

On the other hand, if there's an actual reason to keep it, do. I've always wanted to write a Klaus/Dorian story where part of what Klaus likes about Dorian is that he's a man and smells like one. (Can I tell you how much the Dorian smelling like roses thing drives me crazy? Yes? Well then: Very much.)

Elevator Priorities out of whack. More whack is on order.
It's cool and all that my cousin Sada (Technical details: We're not blood relatives. Her grandmother and my grandfather got married sixteen and a half years ago. We've been cousins for over half my life, which is long enough that some of the kids on that side of the family weren't even born at the time. Weirdest, to me, is that I'm pretty sure I'm the only one of all of us who remembers their Grandpa Jack.) won the silver in women's sabre and that they took bronze in the team competition, but what really rocks is that David and Tina (her parents) got to talk to Anthony Lane.

You All Fail
I watched The Boondock Saints on Saturday (I'm working my way through my Netflix Watch It Now queue before I have to give up Netflix for the time being), and I loved it. Why hasn't anyone forced me to watch it before?

( Two spoilery questions )

Digital TV: Not Quite All It's Cracked Up To Be
Our local PBS affiliate finished their transition to digital on Friday. I decided I didn't want to miss another episode of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, so I went out yesterday and used my coupon to buy a converter box (the Zenith DTT901) and hooked it up. I don't get channel 9. I suspect I need a higher quality antenna (they're out of Redding, which is quite a ways away), and I really have to think about whether or not that's worth it or if I just need to be bitterly disappointed. On the bright side, I now get the CW. (Should I just pick up watching One Tree Hill without having watched the intervening seasons? Will I still like it? I'm sure not having seen several seasons will make absolutely no difference to my understanding of the plot; it's not like it's a particularly complex show.)

Chocolate chip cookies made without baking soda taste more like brown sugar than their properly made counterparts. The sad thing is not that I know this. The sad thing is that this is not the first time I've forgotten the baking soda. I suspect this is the real reason the recipe tells you to mix the flour and baking soda and set it aside at the beginning.

And speaking of chocolate chip cookies, homemade versions of the Chipwich are just not the same thing. Does anyone know where to buy Chipwiches and/or Good Humor's Chocolate Chip Cookie Sandwiches? Back in the day, Blockbuster had a Good Humor case, but I don't shop there anymore. And I really want a Chipwich.

Be very careful if you decide to open up your pepper grinder. If you aren't, you, like me, might dig out a bit of skin from your thumb and have to put off assembling the enchiladas until the next day.

I thought it was odd that everyone else (read: j_crew_guy and hederahelix) talked about Burn Notice just as I watched all of the first season on Hulu. But then I realized that, no, it made perfect sense. I was in a hotel the weekend before last, and I watched bits and pieces of varying Law & Orders USA (unlike my travel the week and a half before where the hotel inexplicably had the eastern feed so it was always Without a Trace when I wanted L&O), which had a lot of ads for Burn Notice's season two premiere. (Which, I think, was disappointing given the setup.)

While watching TV on Hulu, I kept seeing ads for DirecTV. Is this really the best avenue for your marketing? I'm not paying to watch cable; I'm watching it for free online. What makes you think I'm going to go for DirecTV?

I also watched all six existing episodes of In Plain Sight. Mary's just now starting to grow on me, but I've loved Marshall from the very beginning.

I read reccea's "In Production" on hederahelix's recommendation. I mostly enjoyed it. If you don't know the fandom, you might want to bug someone who does for a quick dramatis personae before reading it. At the very least, keep IMDb open in another tab.

And speaking of hederahelix, she always complains that whenever there's a fire anywhere in Southern California, people worry about her because they have no sense of geography. I don't know if I should be insulted that no one's asked me if I'm okay. Yahoo! keeps putting the fire in my county on its top headlines list. At first, I thought it was because they like it that it's Paradise; then I thought it might be because they're reading my IP, and they know I'm nearby. The state of things, since you didn't ask, is that the smoke is terrible. Living on the third floor of a building with no elevator and no central air in Chapel Hill for four years taught me how to deal with heat. But heat plus constant smoke is not fun at all. The nice thing is that my apartment seals really well; I didn't even know the town was full of smoke until I opened my door on the first day of it. I do work in Paradise, and while our building is a cooling station, we haven't been in an evacuation zone for this fire (we were for the last fire). My boss and another coworker were evacuated, and my boss brought her two dogs and her two chickens to work with her one day. Such is life in Paradise.

I tried watching The Tudors this week. Remember how when I was reading Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910 - 1939, I loved reading the Wikipedia articles about the people in them? The Tudors was like that, only more so. The history was more interesting than the show, I had no patience for the political blahblahblah on the show, the sex wasn't that hot, and I'm not into JRM.

Watched while writing this: Boy Culture. I hesitated to Netflix it because it's distributed by TLA Releasing, which has released some truly awful movies, but Netflix predicted I'd give it a 3.9, so I gave it a try. It's actually pretty good, and sweet to boot.

(This bit of rambling brought to you by 60% cocoa and indecision.) So I started writing this as an email, and then couldn't decide if it should go to fuseji, j_crew_guy, schuyler, or amatia, so you all get to read it instead. With more links.

I just saw an ad for In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. I said, "Hey, it's that guy!" (I did actually correctly identify Jason Statham) and then had to look at IMDb to see what the hell it was (because the "A Dungeon Siege Tale" tag made me think it had to be some kind of franchise sort of thing). I cracked up when I got to the user comments teaser, which says, "It's great! it's incredible! It's Uwe Boll!!" Now I know my instinct that it won't be any good must be right!

(Huh. And Kristanna Loken. Rashel of Unmata [or here if you want to watch her move and see what is probably my favorite belly dance video on YouTube, even if it doesn't go to the end of the song] always reminds me of Kristanna Loken in T3, but now that I look at Kristanna Loken pictures, she doesn't look anything like her. I always think it's because her look's a little butch and a little German, but Kristanna Loken's not that butch.)