Drunk-dial Pen-pal

I got a call at 1:30 this morning from my ex-boyfriend from 9th grade, John. I love it when John calls. He always leaves me the greatest voicemails. Sometimes they're about paying hookers with food. Sometimes they're about snorting cocaine in bathrooms. Sometimes they're about him pissing himself. They're always amusing though... always. I love that we live two totally different lives that only intersect when one of us gets wasted.

Disgruntled Mutant

I know I'm going to get major crap for saying this, but I don't care. Xmen 3 sucked.

We watched 1 & 2 before heading out to see #3 on Saturday. I had forgotten how awesome those movies were until I saw them again. So great. They gave #3 such a great set-up! All #3 had to do was give us a couple good fight scenes (already built up by the first two), introduce a couple of badass new characters w/ badass new powers, and throw in a couple witty one-liners. That's it! But it couldn't even do that right.

I can list a bunch of things I thought they dropped the ball on, but the one I'm most annoyed with is Mystique. What the hell happens to Mystique?? She was such a substantial part of the series, AND my favorite character. I can't believe they didn't even give her a proper final scene.

I Heart Wasting Money

Here are my current Netflix, and the dates they were originally shipped:

Sideways - 08/23/05
I Heart Huckabees - 07/13/05

Here's the total cost of having these movies for nearly 11 months: $177.49.

So yeah, I think it's time to cancel my Netflix.

This one's called "Punched at a PTA Meeting"

Got this from Nick. I was telling someone about it the other day, so I figured I'd just post it.

NYC & New Haven Rundown

First, a clarification. We did not go to the East Coast last week for a wedding. We went to see Brian's sister in a play at Yale. And since we'd be nearby, we figured we'd make a side trip to NYC to see Allison and also somehow link up w/ Andrea, one of my college roommates who lives in Worcester, Mass. So we had a lot of ground to cover, and only 4 days to do it all.

It worked out though. Thurs was spent mostly tracking down toy stores in NYC for Brian. We almost got thrown out of Toys 'R Us Times Square because I wanted a picture w/ Geoffrey the giraffe. They said we could take one of him by himself. We had to pay $10 for a picture WITH him. So Brian started taking Geoffrey's picture and I jumped into the shot at the last second. They didn't like that too much. Geoffrey saw what I was doing and turned away as fast as he could. Oh well, at least they didn't kick us out.

Thurs we also visited ground zero. There was nothing really to see there right now though - not even the big hole cuz it was surrounded by construction trucks.

Thurs night, we had Thai food and went to see Brian's sister's boyfriend in a play. Carson was really good, but I didn't really like the play. I'm not into stories about guys finding themselves usually, so yeah...

Friday we spent most of the day at the Museum of Modern Art, then said goodbye to our hostesses. We stopped by yet another toy store for Brian - yes, Allison, we made it to Toy Tokyo - before jumping on the train to New Haven, Connecticut.

Once there, we pretty much just loitered around the Yale campus and around the cute little New Haven shops, pubs and cafes. The coolest things there were Erin's play and this restaurant called The Place, which is this hippie backyard place where you sit on tree stumps and eat BBQ seafood. It was awesome.

Sunday Andrea came up from Worcester for lunch. It was really cool that we got to hang out, cuz we hardly ever get to see each other anymore.

So yeah, that was our trip. Thanks to Allison & Kelly for hosting us in NYC and to Andrea for driving so far on such short notice.

Here are more pics of our trip, if you're interested.

Blogfan

So last Wednesday night while we're having dinner at Pei Wei, this girl (the one <--over there in the picture) comes over and says, "This is probably going to sound really random, I know. Don't think I'm weird, but.."

Now in my head I'm thinking of all of the hundreds of thousands of bizarre things people have said to me before and I'm thinking, there's nothing this person can say that's going to surprise me. But actually, she did. This really was random.

"I read your blog and I recognize you from it," she says.

I was like, "Wow, really? Which one?"

Apparently, she reads both! (HI TARA!!) She was googling her home builder's name and happened upon Jen's blog, then got to Kat, then to me. She's been reading every day ever since!!! RANDOM!! So yeah, meeting her was quite the eye-opening experience. I had no idea anyone but my close friends read my blog. Now I'm all self-conscious!

Anyway.. It was nice to meet you and your husband Tara. You should start a blog too!! (One of us, one of us, one of us...)

Subversive Cross Stitch

Saw this book in a cool store in New Haven, Connecticut. Thought it was hilarious. My favorite is the "Go Fu%@ Yourself" pattern with the pink bunnies pictured at left. :-)

Bad weather, here I come!

We leave tonight for the East Coast. We're going to New York City to see my best friend Allison & her soon-to-be-wife Kelly. We're also going to Connecticut to see Brian's sister Erin, who's starring in a play at Yale. It's going to be rainy the whole time we're there, but that's cool.

Sayonara, over and out

Tonight was the last night of our Japanese class. I'm happy and sad at the same time. :-|

Too movie-licious for ya babe

When I was a kid, my favorite movie in the whole wide world was The Poseiden Adventure. I watched it w/ my dad every year that they played it on TV. It was my Wizard of Oz... except for unlike Dorothy's group in Oz, the Poseiden group arbitrarily lost people to watery, fiery deaths on their journey to see the wizard (or rather, to reach the rescue party.)

So I was a little miffed when I saw they were making, not one, but TWO re-makes of the film this year. The first was a made-for-tv-movie-copy-cat-piece-of-trash that aired a few months back. It suck-suck-sucked.

The second came out this weekend in theaters - Poseiden. My nephew wanted to see it (nudge nudge wink wink), so we went. It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. It actually did a decent job of replicating the suspense of the original, without being an all-out copy-cat. It was its own film, which I respected.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

All the characters were new. Instead of a sister and brother, it was a young single mom and her child. Instead of Shelley Winters and her hubby, the AARP rep in this one was an old gay guy played over-flamingly by Richard Dreyfuss. And Gene Hackman's hero role was split equally between Kurt Russell and Josh Lucas. They nixed the go-go dancer/waiter love story and went with an immigrant girl and her new gay friend instead. Oh, and the hooker/cop married couple weren't in this one. No substitutions either.

The death scenarios were different too. Amped up for the next generation, of course. One in particular was so horrifying, I couldn't stop laughing.

They threw in quotes here and there from the old one, which I loved. Way to head-nod us old-schoolers.

The one thing I thought was really lame though was the Armageddon rip-off scenario where the overprotective father gives his approval of his daughter's secret engagement plan - by killing himself. LAME!

SPOILERS ENDED

Overall, it was sufficiently entertaining for the matinee price. And it wasn't as horrible a rip-off as I thought it'd be. It used the Poseiden formula, and it worked. Overall grade: B.

Sweet sweet sweet

Jury duty update: The recording says I don't have to go! Yay! Now what am I going to do with the "I Heart COPS" tanktop I was going to wear today??

I found the secret to life...

...I'm okay when everything is not okay.

All in the same week, what are the odds?:

1) Two root canals
2) Police are called to my house (by one of my dial-happy nephews)
3) Cat runs away (he's back now)
4) Japanese final on two separate days
5) Pap smear
6) Jury duty

But the big payoff is coming next week. We leave for New York City on Wednesday night.

(How sweet, sweet, sweet, the sting.)

Dude, that is weak!!

So a few days ago, I was THRILLED to finally get a summons to appear for jury duty. "Maybe they'll actually pick me," I fantasized. "At least I'll get to take a quiet day off of work paid," I figured...

Enter the rain to my parade: My summons date falls on a MONDAY. That's right, IT'S ON MY FREAKIN' DAY OFF!! To add insult to injury, it's also the day of my Japanese final. I am SO getting an extension.

Necessito ayuda

I need help. So my best friend is getting married in September and even though she doesn't want bridesmaids and all that junk, she still wants me to be part of the ceremony. So I have to think of something to read or something to say or something to do that's going to melt everyone's hearts and make her and her wife-to-be love me more than they already do (as if that were even possible, I know).

It doesn't help that the OTHER best friend who's going to be talking is tiny, cute and Asian. And most likely clever. How am I supposed to compete with tiny, cute, Asian, AND clever, huh?? It also doesn't help that everytime I try and think of some funny story about my best friend, it usually involves some kind of debauchary... not so appropriate for a marriage ceremony, methinks. So yeah, I need help. Anyone got any pointers in this arena??

Schadenfreude

I have back-to-back root canals scheduled for Monday afternoon. And it's going to cost me about $1,000 out-of-pocket. At least they gave me happy pills to take before I go in.

Hope your week starts off better than mine.

Kitty Prozac

It's official. Enid is not dying, she's just nuts. So we're starting her on kitty prozac this week. The doc assures us it won't make her loopy, "it'll just take the edge off." I didn't even know they made mood-regulating drugs for cats. I'm still a little uneasy about the idea. Hmmm... what would TomKat do if they had a crazy kitty?

"And she can touch me, all over my body..."

Awe yeahhhhh... David's mom's coming over to my house tonight to give me a massage. There's nothing quite like an in-home massage from your friend's mom to help wash your troubles away.

Muy interesante

Guess who's living w/ me for the next three weeks? Good 'ole mama. Taking bets now on whether we'll make it the full run.

Easy come, easy go

We got our tax refund about a week and a half ago. Then last Wednesday, our fridge died. And took with it everything inside. So this weekend we went on a mission for a new fridge and ended up buying a new dishwasher, new stove and new mounted microwave. Sayonara tax refund, and then some.

"It's not called gym-NICE-tics"

So I went and saw that sassy gymnastics movie yesterday. You know, the one from the people that brought you the greatest cheerleading movie ever made - Bring It On. This time around, it was called Stick it, and it wasn't too bad.

On the plus side, it was total eye candy. Like a kaleidescope - just beautiful, mesmerizing, gratuitous eye candy. They did all kinds of McG-type music-video kind of stuff, for our guilty sensory pleasure. That certainly didn't move the story along, but I didn't have a problem with it, cuz it was just plain cool. The hard-bodied 16-year-old gymnasts weren't too bad to look at either.

It also captured the fun, sassy, youthful spirit of the classic teen-comedies. It had some really cute one-liners too.

On the negative side, the story was super-formulaic, and the main character bordered on obnoxious. Overall grade = B-.