serenity

i watched serenity, and it's amazing. i have gripes, of course, but that's the way of the verse. fuck, though, i really wish i could unwatch it. i am a leaf on the wind. fucking whedon is such an asshole.

do you see movies in theatres, and watch movie rentals?

i remember being pissed when i saw the preview for narnia. all the fans who read the lord of the rings before it became a trilogy, who read the chronicles of narnia, who read his dark materials (i hope that movie is still happening, austin), who liked the x-men and spiderman comics or cartoons, and so on and so on, that is to say, all of us with GOOD TASTE, should get some reward more tangible than some vague smugness over being right all of these years. and all of the tools who only got into this shit after it got the silver screen treatment should receive an enema. huh, i left serenity off this list even though it is a shining example. i deserve something for being right all these years. i mean, christ, who are the movie executives that took 20 years to realize fantasy and comic books sell as movies? i guess someone could say something about movie technology and how some things have only been made possible recently, but then, those people could suck a dick. and fox... don't even get me started on fox. as soon as they cancel a show and put it on dvd, the sales go through the fucking roof. meanwhile, what kind of shit do they keep on the air. wow that enrages me.

i was thinking on the way home about how this life is not my life. teaching math at sci tech is not my job. my room that i grew up in is not my room. i posted about this before, but honestly, i feel like i'm still waiting for my life to really begin. back when i was in college, i knew it was going by, and i knew i would always miss it, but i had no idea how right i was. this town, with my one friend still here, in this job that makes me feel like i'm pretending just well enough that no one realizes, in my house that i don't feel like i really live in because i'm really just sleeping in the one space not filled with my possessions, none of it is my actual life. and what happens if i wake up and i'm 29 and i'm still teaching at hsst andliving in a small dinky apartment near work and that's my life and i've wasted it. terrifying.

slick

is anyone looking to buy a new computer? slick deals has a pretty slick deal @ http://www.slickdeals.net/#p6528

if anyone takes it up, add a 2nd 19 inch for 260. i'll pay you back. i'm still using the same 15" flat from my freshman year of college.

so tempting... i could get the cheapest component setup with the 24" (24!!) widescreen and the 19" for ~1600, before the coupon. not sure if the 20% is still up or if it's 15% now. even with 15%, that would be 1360, which is cheaper than the sum of the 2 monitors off the website.

we loves it

we love katamari is sitting in my lap, sealed and waiting for me to load it up. all i could think of on the drive back from the store was holding it close to my heart while i sleep, caressing it and calling it my precious. kind of like butters and backdoor sluts 9.

the real world: midgar

a couple of things that i can think of.

i wanted to say something a few days ago about how there is a demand for footage of hot people just doing stuff. i would pay money to watch jessica alba going about her everyday routine. all the nudity could be cut out, too, i wouldn't care. watching her comb her hair, or drive around in her car, or picking up fruit from the grocery store. i would watch that. all the time.

the problem is that hot people like their privacy (i just realized this must be why reality shows are so addicting. maybe i don't like them because the stars aren't hot enough. if the real world is any indication, the producers recognize that and are enthusiastically fixing the problem). like it's their right or something. whatever. regardless, this is what makes fake people so great. as in cgi people. as in tifa. i could watch an animated tifa drinking her coffee without losing interest. more importantly, i would pay to watch it. the problem here is that animating her costs money. when is there going to be self-sustaining cgi? once you have a model and a setting, you can just give it some guidelines and have it go about its routine. and if that model is a beautiful video game character and the guidelines are beach volleyball, so much the better. is that even a project anywhere in any company? the broader model, although the beach volleyball with beautiful characters is already reality.

i'm sure it must have applications beyond what i've suggested here. is what i've suggested perverted? i don't think so, but it's definitely creepy. austin, help me out here. are you considered an authority on creepy, or are you like those kids that are so innocent they don't recognize racism?

i had an actual dream, last night or the night before, about a friend who has been worrying me. the thing is that i'm not sure if i'm worried about this person because i ought to be or i think that it's funny to be. and that brings up the whole idea of acting as a certain person until you become that person. and i'd hate to really become the person that i've been acting as for these past couple of years, because he's kind of a jerk. even though he can be pretty funny.

my saving grace has always been that people overall say that i'm mean on the outside but nice on the inside. so if i decided that one day i wanted to be good, i'd have my inside reputation to fall back on. and if i decided one day to just fuck it, i could be a real jerk without really shaking up my routine too much. wow, that's amazing that i can't even commit to a basic personality.

i wonder when i will stop drifting. heh, i even float at my job - meaning i don't have my own classroom, but still.

oh, that whole watching celebrities thing came from watching red eye. the movie is not bad at all. i don't think i have to be gay to be intensely bothered by cillian's unshaven mess of a face throughout the entire movie. to get to the point, even though the movie was not too bad and overall entertaining, i kept thinking to myself, "even if this movie sucked, i'd be happy." goddamn, that rachel mcadams is a looker. she really puts the beauty in beauty mark. how many does she have? that's rare in an actress. i think she looks the best in this over wedding crashers and especially mean girls. i really could have sat through one and a half hours of her sitting on a stool in an empty white room and reading her lines. but of course, if i stake out her home with a pair of opera glasses, it's not art.

i started this post to say something about how i just wasted maybe an hour and a half at home grading papers, and how i'm disgruntled that i actually got the raise that made me happy enough at my job to work hard, which is why i have to grade shit at home and not at school, but it's pretty pointless to complain about something as silly as that, but i thought i'd stick it in the end since i said a couple things, and we all know a couple is 4 or 5.

analogies

i really love analogies. maybe it's the fact that they have the word anal, maybe it's the fact that they have the word log, who knows. although now that i've titled it i'm not sure if it's as much an analogy as a metaphor.

one that really sticks out was describing how steiner and eunji hooked up at the halloween party. that whole guided missile thing for steiner came from the party when matt isanuk brought his friends to a party of at EC. i still feel bad because i asked his friends for money for a beer run, but i didn't know at the time that they were about to leave. where did all that beer go? they must have thought me a jerk... although you need a jerk to shake the guests down for beer money. asian parties must be so much easier to supply. anyways, at some point steiner was gone, and someone suggested to him that he go over and talk to one of isanuk's female friends. he just took steiner and pointed him in a direction, and he was off. guided missile.

so usually at a party there's just one missile aimed at some target. pick-upper, pick-upee. that's why it was so great that steiner was fired directly at some sort of slut-nuke. no offense, eunji. two guided missiles! the dance, tao, the dance.

i suppose that i'm about to draw an analogy right now, between guided missiles and train wrecks. so normally you need two people to be a train wreck. what happens when an individual qualifies as a one-person train wreck? and what happens when that train wreck hits another person, which would under normal conditions create the two-person train wreck? is it some sort of train pile-up? heh, are there missile trains, or am i thinking of bullet trains? cuz then you could have a guided missile train wreck.

advent children

i have no idea what the actual release date is, but i just watched it. tycho's advisory does not come close. this movie is incredible. beyond incredible. there aren't words in any language to describe how fucking great it is. each scene is beyond gorgeous. each fight is beyond breathtaking. i'd like to think of something to go with the rule of three, but i don't need to. oh my god.

plus, tifa is the most beautiful thing i've ever seen, real or cgi, across any medium. not to mention she could own neo, john preston, aragorn and especially that pussbag legolas, and any other character from any other movie i can think of. yuffie's not too bad either. i think raj would be a yuffie man. not sure though.

every other movie ever made needs to emulate this movie. well, romantic comedies can keep using diane lane and drew barrymore. but every other kind of movie should be exactly like this one. hell, there don't need to be any more movies besides this one. maybe that's what i'll do. after i see serenity, i could abstain from all movies besides cgi based on the final fantasy franchise grounded in an actual game. i think that covers me. funny because i just bought final fantasy: the spirits within last week, and watched it last night. the difference between these 2 movies is like... two things that are really really different.

job satisfaction: high

i think i might actually love my job right now. sure, we've only had 6 days of classes, and sure, my kids are only going to get stupider and lazier, and sure, the workload will only get heavier, but right now, i'm feeling pretty good. amazing what an extra 8.5 grand can do for one's outlook.

something missing

i don't feel anything about new orleans. i didn't feel anything about the world trade center, and i was just a few miles north of that. right now, i know it has happened, i know people are suffering, but i haven't lost any sleep over it.

there's some disconnectedness here. after reading other people's blogs, i wonder if i'm missing some piece of emotional equipment that everyone else has.

i stood in line at st. luke's to donate blood until we were told that they would not be able to use all the blood they already had. i did not see the site until i happened to take a PATH train to new jersey. i'll donate money to red cross after i deposit my paycheck, after reading the suggestion on christian's blog. because it's the right thing to do. but i don't feel invested. what causes that, or doesn't?

i cried once at a funeral. uncle fred, a good family friend, had passed away, and he had always been really nice to my whole family. what a guy. he was so cool. when we walked up to his family, i looked into auntie lily's face and my heart kind of just surged with this sadness for her, knowing that they were such good people and that they should have had a lot lot more time together. i felt embarassed about it afterwards, because who the hell am i to cry at his funeral like that? when his family was being so brave and so strong. but i can't really go back and explain myself to everyone there, and hopefully they understood why exactly i did cry.

i knew him. i know her. but i don't know the people in new orleans. is that a different kind of empathy? is there some part of the human psyche that empathizes with people one knows and a different part that empathizes with people one has never met?

classic ed

this past week has been 8:30 to 3, and today was 7:05 to 2, so i took a long nap that just ended.

i wake up to my brother, screaming. he's back again. after the worthless shit couldn't find housing for his final semester of law school (he only had all summer to look, and he didn't start looking until the week before going back), he spent the past 4 nights in a ymca and came back, i don't know why. i wake up to him screaming his lungs out, my mom asking him to be quiet, and him saying, i can't, i can't!

when i was in college ed would come into my room and take out books or movies or so on, and use them in whatever fashion. and then they would get left wherever he was finished with them, and lost, scratched, or ruined in some way. i'm very picky about the condition of books. but just because only a few people would care if a book's spine was creased doesn't mean it's ok to crease it. the owner might belong to that subset of people. the example that stays with me is that he took all of my jd salinger books, and i found one of them in the trunk of my car, months later, with a hole punched through the cover. a fucking hole! straight through the entire book! how the fuck does that even happen? what level of disregard does that take? i still can't figure it. i only see someone with a drill fucking working away at the book to make a hole. hard work had to go into that!

i would ask mom to keep him the fuck out. i don't have a lock on my door here. she more or less harped on ed long enough that he would rather leave my stuff alone than listen to my mom if i had to complain again.

so i get out of bed, and ask what the problem is. his clip. a giant wooden fucking clip. $90. $90?? from linley, or some shit. ashwood? what the fuck? when i was moving my room around, i moved my bed. under my bed is a drawer of porn. i put that drawer in his room, on top of a plastic container thing. i'm not done moving around so it was still there when he got back. evidently there was a clip thing that got scratched (as in one scratch) by my drawer o' porn when i placed it in his room.

anyways, he's waving a bigass wooden clip around in my face, like the ones you use (oh, it's a clothespin) to hang up laundry on a line, and screaming about how it was a gift, and although it cost $90, it would cost way more than that to replace. when i bring up all of my stuff that he has screwed with, he says, how much is a book? max $20 (as if he's only ruined one book of mine in my lifetime). then he makes the claim that the value of his big wooden clip thing makes the value of any of my stuff that he has fucked up over the years worthless. after naming a figure for their worth, he goes ahead and says they are in fact worthless. that's his law school edumacation talkin. then he actually says, all of my stuff is more valuable and more important than your worthless books and movies. that's pretty much verbatim.

at this point i started laughing in his face. i wasn't faking or anything. i called him a stupid fucking moron for spending $90 on a giant wooden clip. and something about, you see a valuable item, i see a giant fucking waste of $90. i mean, christ. for a wooden clothespin? what the fuck is wrong with him.

he goes on to make the claim that his giant ash wood clothespin is art. he asked me if i knew what a picasso was. i started laughing harder. when i looked at him like _he_ was an idiot, he thought he'd drawn blood and followed up by asking if i knew what a monet was. wow. wooooow.

this whole time the kids are in the hallway also, asking him to stop yelling. mom is asking him to stop yelling. mom finally loses it and starts screaming about how tired she was (very valid) and that she needed to sleep. he throws his priceless clothespin on the ground, and tries but fails to slam his door. what a beautiful example of impotent rage.

he came in here afterwards, much calmer, and asked if we had an understanding. much more reasonable. accepting of the fact that i probably didn't realize that any of the crap strewn about his room (the place is a dump. there's shit all over the floors. literally no floorspace visible. and not in boxes or bags. just all over the place, like an actual dump) could be valuable. i don't know why he didn't do that in the first place, instead of uncontrollable screaming in front of his two kids right before they went to bed.

my brother, the biggest waste of everything in the entire world. the prepositional phrase in the entire world modifies waste of everything, in case you're not sure which way to read it.