howl's moving castle

so worth it.

on saturday, i drove to the U of Hartford in W Hartford to take the praxis ii, mathematics content knowledge. damn it was hard. much harder than the mtel. all this crap about sets and vectors and matrices and trig and inverse trig (what is the name of the group that consists of secant cosecant and cotangent?) and stuff i didn't really study. a lot of pictures of graphs that i was supposed to decipher, and a lot of _real_ _thinking_. which i have not been used to, sadly, at my school. on my first run through i think i answered 25-30 of the questions. thankfully i got a lot more the second time around, and i think i made good guesses on 5 questions and shot in the dark on maybe 5 more. the rest i'm pretty sure i got barring stupidity. it was 2 hours for a 50 minute multiple choice exam, by the way. strange that it's not available on computer since there is no SA or OR to speak of.

i drove back home afterwards instead of going straight to NY because it was only 11:30 and the drive took less than 30 minutes. i then last minute recruited zhu and susan to come to new york with me. it rained on the way there, which blew, and when we got there, which blew more.

dinner from saigon grill. delicious as always. i ordered 2 extra cartons of rice, which cost $1.25 each! by far the worst item on their menu value wise. but it paid off because i needed more than my single carton to go with my meal. how do you guys in new york not make saigon grill a tradition?

the movie! we arrived not early enough to get 8 seats together in a real nice spot. by that i mean in the center with an unobstructed view. we took the right side column, and i sat in the aisle, so my view was pretty centered. i wonder if it was worse for whoever was at the far end. by the way, i always enter a theatre from the farther door. it just seems obvious that it will be more crowded when one enters from the closer door, as people are sheep and atoms and follow the path of least resistance which their leader is on. stupid sheep atom people.

i overheard someone on her cell phone trying to explain to someone else what the movie was, in what i think was a last-ditch attempt to get him or her to join, and she said something along the lines of, i think it's howl's magical castle or howl's flying castle. i hated her instantly. what was she doing on its opening weekend watching it without knowing the legacy behind this movie? not to mention its fucking name. for shame...

when the totoro logo for studio ghibli came on, i broke my own inviolate taboo and involuntarily joined in the clapping. i caught myself, but i didn't even mind that other people were clapping. i guess if anyone or anything could hear (and appreciate, which is the important part) clapping in some theater, it would be an imaginary totoro.

the movie was great. from the very beginning, the visuals blew me away. that castle was awesome. i will live in a castle like that. or a mobile home. which is really the same thing, in spirit, if one considers it.

i really did think sophie was a little off-looking at first. and to me, she became more and more beautiful as the movie progressed. i wonder if they actually drew her any differently. besides the real obvious changes, that is.

christian bale did a great job as howl. he can not disappoint me. billy crystal is an odd choice for calcifer, but he was still pretty funny. yes, the ending seemed kind of rushed and pat, but maybe that's how it ended in the novel? by the way, has anyone ever read the novel that the movie is based on? i do like how they never explain the cure for sophie's curse.

the movie was absolutely worth the drive to NYC, the cab ride to loew's lincoln, the 10.75 for a ticket, and the subway ride back. and i suppose the drive back to longmeadow as well. when does it come out on dvd?

lion's head was a blast as well. thanks to the scruffy faced guy who gave us a round of irish car bombs on the house. i only ended up paying for 10 PBRs and i only tipped him $3 on the $15. i feel like a dick, but i was drunk and out of actual cash. i forgot to write a tip on the actual tab receipt, so i had only two bucks and one i borrowed from susan to tip him. i'll get him next time.

it was fun talking to raj. oh and i got his cell, again, and his aim name, again.