Bipolar Legislative Disorder

Because a $2.9 billion state budget shortfall in the legislative session and super-depressing happenings in Congress and the Supreme Court mandate a lot of work-related heavy reading, I'm back on my fiction-only kick for the time being. (I think I was on it for most of grad school, too. Oh well. The book moods -- they come, they go... C'est la vie.)

Who knew Book Four in the Artemis Fowl series, The Opal Deception, would be slightly traumatic?

What's up with the magic-themed children's stories these days having sad, emotional death scenes of major characters?

It was, though, an excellent tool for escapism. The crazy, evil villain from Book Two comes back, intent on revenge. She plots to kill off not only the teenage genius/criminal mastermind title character, but the elves, fairies, and centaur who helped him defeat her. So she schemes to alert the human world to the existence of the fairy world, to start an interspecies war that will eventually allow her to rule the planet. A tale as old as time.

The larger story, of course, is Artemis Fowl's coming-of-age -- making new and different friends, being at a crossroads (whether to remain a criminal mastermind or become an honest kid), etc. It is, after all, a book series aimed at tweens.

Hooray for the Bildungsroman.

Next up: more medieval mysteries on order from the library. And Netflix movies. Mucho, mucho Netflix movies...

Moments of madness

Apropos of nothing, the other day a colleague, who also lives in West Seattle, asked me to feed his dog and watch his house when he and his partner go out of town in a few weeks.

Colleague: We're heading to the Olympics that weekend.
Me: Fun, are you guys camping?
Colleague: What? Camping? Oh my God, no! We're gay men!
Me: Oh, so you're staying at a resort?
Colleague: Resort? Nooooo. Way too expensive, especially with everything going on.
Me: Wait, so it's a day trip? Why do you need someone to watch the house and dog?
Colleague: We'll be staying with family.
Me: Oh, I didn't realize you had family out there.
Colleague: We do. But we'll be out seeing the sights most of the time . . .
Me: Yeah, there are some good hiking trails. Bit late in the season, though, isn't it?

Whereupon we realized we were having two very different conversations.

In catch-up news, I saw the new Sherlock Holmes with an old friend the afternoon of New Year's Eve. (I vividly recall reading trading the Sherlock Holmes books with her and reading them during boring documentaries shown in our middle school science classes. Future humanities nerds, indeed.)

At any rate, it was fun. I liked the quirky, edgy, disturbed-genius characterization of Holmes himself. In most cases, movies that stray from the books are not exceptionally brilliant, but I liked it here. Holmes wasn't the cold, calculating, sterile brainiac we're all familiar with from the books and other adaptations -- Robert Downey, Jr. portrayed him as a borderline OCD nutso. That part was fun.

The plot was eh. Most of it was predictable: secret society (this time not the Masons) uses "magic" and murder to try and take over the world. Holmes and Watson sweep in to restore reason, thinking, and sanity. What was cool was the re-creation of London and some of the action sequences.

What I didn't like was Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler. In almost a hundred years of film, have we seriously gotten no further than the Perils of Pauline?

The nose, she is still above the water

Good Lord, 2010 has been busy so far! But good.

I'd forgotten how ridiculously chaotic it gets the weeks before and the first week of the legislative session.

The only thing that could make up for leaving the office on Sunday at 11:30pm: this video of our campaign director accidentally running into the "anti-tax" sponsor of the initiative that voters smacked down this past November.

In other news . . . ZUMBA! Turns out, music in a gym class makes all the difference. I'm officially addicted. Two cool things about the class I'm taking: there is diversity of body type, and it's also ethnically diverse. Not that it's a Dove or Benetton ad or anything, but the difference is noticeable enough.

Seriously, it's like clubbing at a Latin dance club, minus the booze. (Also minus the men, but that's tangential.)

I mean, if you "dance" badly and secretly (sometimes in the grocery store, with your headphones on) to the same music anyway, why not just take the class and be productive?

Whate'er the course, the end is the renown

I finished the last book in my new favorite medieval mystery series. The Witch in the Well was a superb tenth book and series finale! It had everything: a castle (with secret tunnels!), a siege, a myth, a few happy endings, a few sad endings.

Sharan Newman wrapped up some loose plot ends by bringing all of her surviving characters under the same besieged fortress to wait and see if an ancient prophecy comes true. ZOMG, so cool! (Mainly, the secret passageways were the coolest part.)

The tale was appropriate closure for readers to the life and times of Catherine LeVendeur in 12th-century Paris. The series was predictable at times, but was creative and entertaining enough to make me rush to the library in search of each successive book . If nothing else, it's brilliant because it incorporates both the story of Abelard and Heloise and medieval Jewish merchant life into the narrative. (The intellectual, plucky heroine helped. Just sayin'.)

Sigh. Now I need to find a new series...

Whirlwind, part trois

It's amazing that there are only two and a half more weeks left in 2009! The last few weeks have gone by quickly.

• Thanksgiving in Michigan was a welcome respite, though I spent my nights writing post-election analyses after the kiddies went to bed. I thought I'd have more free time to read or veg out, but that didn't happen -- though I was able to catch up on "Glee," most of the TV I watched was Sesame Street. I miss my niece and neffy already, but will get to see them at Christmas.
  
  
• Mi Hermana and I woke up at 4 am on Black Friday to do our part to stimulate the local economy. (Hey, Michigan can use all the help it can get.) The main reason was that La Pinguinita wakes up at 7 and then runs around. So we woke up at 4 and took the 8-month-old, who required only to be put in a stroller. Oh, the suburban rebellion! The parking lot at the outlet mall where we did our holiday shopping was already a third full at 4:30am. (Stores opened at midnight, so we were already late.)
  
  
• The fellowship changes into a full-time position with the new year, though the organization is undergoing some reorganization and I won't have a title for a while. In the meantime, I'll be helping mobilizing constituents on progressive issues and it keeps me in the political mix, so I'm happy.
  
  
• I did have time to read the next installment of my favorite medieval mystery series, however. Sharan Newman's The Outcast Dove is, unfortunately, not about the heroine I've grown to like -- the star of this book is another character. There's a murder. It's Easter and Passover. There are monks, mobs, and Jew merchants. Like the previous books in the series, Newman throws in some heavy-handed stuff -- in addition to anti-semitism, this time we also have autism (or so the reader infers, since the concept didn't exist in the twelfth century) as well as slavery. It was a decent mystery story, though. A few plot threads from the earlier books were wrapped up. And I rushed to the library to pay my fines and check out the last book in the series...

Policy wonk alert!

ZOMG, the Washington State Secretary of State's office has created a redistricting boardgame!

SO COOL.

As the Washington Bus put it,

"What could possibly be sexier than redistricting legislative districts? Exactly: not a damn thing. With the 2010 census rearing its head, the prospect of a significantly re-drawn legislative landscape is looming large. Your local political world will definitely be shifting… and remember: all politics is, in the end, local. Want to get a jump on the good times? Check out the Secretary of State’s Redistricting board game. We kid you not."

Geekingoutgeekingoutgeekingoutgeekingout...

Retweet

I mentioned the death penalty in passing in that last post, taking for granted arguments against it and barely even relating it to the movie I watched.

But, as usual, my old roomie The Common Man is far more articulate than I. (I sputter -- "What? Who? That? No! So wrong! Gaaaaack! Arrrrgh.") He phrased his anti-death penalty arguments much better in his recent return to the blogsphere, in which he posts about the recent tragedy at Fort Hood and execution of the DC Sniper:

"... emotional reaction to these crimes is exactly why justice is not served through execution. Justice is a bitch goddess who constantly disappoints us; yet, to be effective, she must remain blind to the emotional undercurrents that make me want to slam Hasan and Muhammad into walls again and again . . . And, as several studies have demonstrated that execution does not substantially deter crime, there does not seem to be a rational reason for capital punishment. The world may be a better place without Muhammad in it tonight, but justice (whose guarantee is the basis of civilization and of our society) is not served by it."

Tomorrow is Another Day

I've been sitting on these for a few weeks. Now that the election's over and I have time on my hands again (at least theoretically), maybe I can catch up.

Set entirely in New York, Kal Ho Naa Ho is a Shah Rukh Khan movie I hadn't seen yet. While I do tend to hate romantic comedies, Bollywood dramas are perfectly acceptable. This one was, as expected, incredibly cheesy. But I do love Preity Zinta, who usually plays relatively strong-ish as well as book-ish female leads. Here, though, I was a little disappointed. It's basically one big love triangle: she likes Shah Rukh Khan, who is dying of a heart condition and wants her to hook up with her school buddy. I wasn't the biggest fan of the storyline. Also not down with the faint homophobia. But of course, it's a shameless tear-jerker, and I was sobbing by the end.

Changeling was one of the most pro-death penalty movies I've ever seen. I thought it would be a nice, quick film to watch while working from home one day, and it turned out not to be merely a movie about how the corrupt LAPD (is that redundant?) conspired to toss Angelina Jolie into a mental institution when she insisted they didn't find her missing son and "returned" a different child instead. While I appreciated the points it tried to make about how women have been traditionally dismissed and demeaned in society, I thought those themes were secondary to the larger point of the story, which was that a serial killer needed to die. It was rather disturbing.

Lastly, National Treasure has been on TV twice this election cycle --funny enough, one of those times was on the local CBC station! And I am a sucker for watching the thing in its entirely once I see that it's on.

So inaccurate. So improbable! Such a rip-off of Indiana Jones. Too ready to perpetuate the Founding-Fathers-knew-best-and-were-superhuman mythology.

So bad. SO GOOD!

Several drinks later...

I accidentally showed up in photos in both the PI and Times at a mayoral candidate's event.

Just like Forrest Gump!

Oh, what a night!

I have a backlog of blog entries, but the most important announcement: election night ROCKED!

The ballot measure I spent the most time working against went down big-time, even in more conservative, anti-tax counties. In fact, Benton County, which has never rejected an initiative by the state's resident anti-tax "Initiative King" rejected this one. It was heartening to watch the early returns. (I'll be back on the job hunt in a week, but for now it's great to bask in the glow of victory.)

And then, Washington voters approved the state domestic partnership law that the state legislature already passed this spring. (The same is not true of the state where I went to college, which, on the same night, voted to overturn the marriage equality law its legislature passed earlier this year.)

Setting aside the horrible idea of anyone's rights being put to a vote, here's a great local article that offers some hope.

Right here, right now, history is incubating (Seattle Times)

I'm proud of my state for being the first to not vote down a pro-gay ballot measure. It won by a narrow margin, to be sure. But it won nonetheless.

The tide is turning...

Entre el mar y una estrella

Few writings can make me feel intellectually inadequate. This one did:

After seeing Neil DeGrasse Tyson on The Daily Show a few months ago, I checked out his book from the library (after I paid my fines, of course). Death By Black Hole is not exactly written for astrophysicists, but for those of us who haven't taken any science course in over ten years, it might, uh, seem like it wasn't meant for our kind...

The book is actually a compilation of articles Tyson has written in magazines, so the chapters are fairly short. Tyson's humor comes through in every chapter, too! Though half the content was beyond what this bear-of-very-little-brains could hope to remember about planets and gravity and the speed of light, what I liked best about the book was its focus on knowledge. It wasn't about what we know about the universe, it was about the fact that we keep learning more about it. Each chapter was really just a history of what humans used to think about various aspects of the cosmos. The last chapter, in fact, was an incredibly beautifully-written essay against intelligent design in schools, and it fit perfectly with the theme of the book.

In other news, the new fellowship started last week, with an organization that provides online strategies for progressive campaigns. It's been extremely busy, to say the least! I'll be working with the No on 1033 campaign through the election -- including working with Micaela again! Woot.

Fingers crossed this horrible initiative doesn't pass; it'll be a ton of work for the next six weeks, but I'm already having fun, and it's a nice change of pace.

Whirlwind, part trois

As the world turns...

• Spent many days in August as a coalition volunteer, observing the signature verification process for Referendum 71. Unfortunately, it qualified for the ballot. Washingtonians now have to re-approve the domestic partnership law that our legislature already overwhelmingly passed this spring.
  
  
• Saw a local production of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. The hometown being rather small, it turns out an old colleague's nephew is the owner/proprietor of the theatre. Said former colleague saw Lily Tomlin in the original play, a one-woman act which ties together stories from a bag lady's perspective. Watching it was amazing, as watching most one-person acts are: the actress switched characters, voices, and personas so quickly but brilliantly and effectively. I definitely liked the second half of the play more than the first, partly because it incorporated more stories and characters, and partly because is deftly addressed the ideas of what art and life and craziness really are. And of course, I'm a sucker for the existential agonies.
  
  
• A friend and I celebrated her no-more-studying-for-the-bar-exam status by going to see Up, which I LOVED. It was sad, uplifting, cute, and bizarre all at the same time. We weren't the only ones sniffling in the theatre! Most of all, I thought the movie did a beautiful job of navigating the gulf between being kid-friendly and addressing "grown-up" issues like death and loneliness. There were talking animals, old-time adventure tales, and cool things that fly. Another theme I appreciated was the revisiting and reevaluating of childhood ideals and heroes as an adult. Also, the little boy is vaguely Asian. Kudos for that (if not the absentee overworking father, by extension). Wonderful movie.
  
  
• Some college friends were in town for a wedding, which was great. Got to show off the home town again, which is always fun.
  
  
• Heresy, the latest in the medieval mystery series I'm addicted to, was good but a little predictable. (Sometimes that happens with mysteries.) In addition to the theme addressing the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages, Sharan Newman has been slowly increasing the role of "heretical" fringe groups or cults in her stories. In this book it all weaves together against the backdrop of an ecumenical hearing, once the Crusaders from the last book have all left town. Also, one of her minor recurring characters had a more prominent role, and I figured out before I read the historical epilogue that he was destined to become one of the very real and more famous Archbishops of Canterbury. I credit taking Mediaeval History in a very cool medieval town with the fact that I remembered the name and the date for the particular character/real-life cleric.
  
  
• Inglourious Basterds is a good movie to watch after several strong drinks with friends. It's deliberately irreverent, and the viewer needs to pretend that WW2 didn't really happen as we all know it did. Once you get over that, it's a movie about the movies. The characters are all one-dimensional archetypes, but they're supposed to be; besides, they're all incredibly well-acted. Oddly enough, it's violent but not as violent as I expected it to be; the wacky factor might have detracted from that a bit.
  
  
• Saw Elephant's Graveyard at the same theatre mentioned above. Another excellent production! The play was incredibly well-written, though an utterly depressing true tale about a small town in Tennessee that decides to impose capital punishment on a circus elephant at the turn of the last century. Much food for thought, as there were several themes to unravel: the nature of public spectacle, justice, revenge, race relations, the role of religion, childhood/loss of innocence, etc. . . . With no intermission, little air circulation, and heavy subject matter, there was little choice but to try Seattle's new frozen custard place afterwards.
  
  
• Lastly and most recently, a nonprofit I've long supported had a film-going fundraiser, and attendees got to choose a movie to see. I opted for Ponyo, having seen a preview at Up. It turned out to be cute and weird and vaguely Little Mermaid-esque .... aaaaand also unexpectedly chock full of sexual imagery and innuendo, from practically the first scene, where a crowd of jellyfish float through the ocean with -- I swear-- penis-looking appendages bobbing happily up and down. (I wasn't the only one who noticed that and the many, many other similar scenes and themes. A friend called Ponyo, an inexplicable sea-water goldfish who wants to be human, the "little sperm that could.") There are several gaps in both plot and reality, as well as countless " WTF?!" moments. Like my friend, who in addition to the "sperm" comment read the film as an evolutionary and environmental warning, I got all the "life-cycle" themes: children/old people, mothers/fathers, high tide/low tide, ocean/earth, prehistoric/future. I love the ocean, so I also appreciated the scenes of a town that lives and breathes by the sea, adjusting to the magic and menace on a daily basis.

And now, for autumn!

Mountain lions or cougars and bears, oh my!

Not quite as funny as the bear that wandered around the city a while back, but the latest urban wildlife visitor has been caught after several sightings:

Cougar caught in Seattle park

Funny enough, when I was a kid I loved the huge slide at that park. But climbing up to the top of it involved maneuvering around heavily wooded areas, and I always thought some wild animal would leap out of the trees at me. I think I can feel justified in this premonition, a quarter-century later.

There probably really are monsters under the bed, too. And sharks in the bathtub...

In the jungle, the mighty jungle

David Horsey, seattlepi.com
(one of my favorite political cartoonists)

I also just re-read the eulogy Sen. Kennedy gave for his brother Robert in 1968.

Clunkers

The FG posted this on the FB, and I think I woke up the neighbor's dog from its nap with my laughter. HILARIOUS.

CASH FOR CLOGS

Whirlwind, part deux

In all the summer haze, re-learning to walk away from drama, and interviewing for various jobs, I left some draft blog posts unpublished. They're updated and condensed here...

• Mi Hermana was in town last week, with the new neffy. Mi Pingüinita is talking now! It's so damn cute, as is the new nephew. Perhaps because he has the same genes, he also looks like a penguin to me, so I've started calling him my Pingüinito. ZOMG, SO CUTE!
  

• Influenced by last month's current events, I read the Persepolis books while house-sitting and watching the news, and loved them! They were fairly quick reads, and I couldn't put them down, despite the heavy subject matter. The books are the autobiography of a girl coming of age in the new and changing Islamic Republic, and they're poignant insights into the personal interactions of citizens in an oppressive regime.
  
  I liked the first the best, though they're both excellent. The first had narrative amazement of a child who doesn't quite fully understand the political realities around her, who still plays around in her own filtered ideas about God, nationhood, and communism. The second book has Satrapi first in Austria, then back in Tehran after her life in Europe takes a vastly different turn than expected. The second book addresses more of the "personal is political" aspect behind subversive acts.
  
  
• In the Company of Men was both brilliant and horrifying at the same time. Aaron Eckhardt is, as always, excellent. Here he plays a complete asshole who makes a deal with his coworker where they both simultaneously date a deaf woman and then dump her at the same time. Eckhardt is the epitome of a smarmball: charming in public and to parents and clients, but the guy who cracks sexist, racist, and other offensive jokes in the company break room and is willing to step all over colleagues in order to get ahead himself. The film is more a harsh critique of corporate culture than of the central misogynist plot.
  
  However, I emphatically recommend watching your Netflix queue closely so that you don't accidentally get it shipped to you during a few weeks in your life where you are extremely cynical and slightly bitter about a certain more personal situation that, after watching this film, you see (perhaps unfairly) in an entirely new and unflattering light.
  
  Just sayin'.

• Ms. Tungsten moved back to upstate New York, in a chaotic apartment-vacating frenzy. I'll miss her in the Emerald City!

Oh, those hot summer nights

A few days ago, Seattle officially had its hottest day in recorded history (103!), and it was not pleasant. Even though The Scot and I escaped most of it by hopping from movie theatre to air-conditioned restaurant to movie theatre to air-conditioned restaurant, it was still not a happy time for the Northwest. Films, alcohol, and food were definitely the way to go.

So, ironically and not surprisingly, I had a massive one of these the next day:
(I did, however, manage to hydrate and be coherent enough to attend a city council candidate forum later in the afternoon...)

The movie itself was okay. It had its funny moments, its jock humor, its questionable portrayal of women and Asian men . But that was all to be expected, given the plot of the movie. Other than that, I liked the format: Las Vegas bachelor party lose the groom and has to retrace their steps from the night before. There are missing pieces, and totally random clues to their wild and "memorable" night, and I think the movie does a funny job of capturing that "OMG, what happened?" post-drinking state of mind that is, uh, familiar to many. I also didn't really buy Bradley Cooper as the teacher/family man, and the dentist's shrewish girlfriend was a little too over-the-top. There were places where the movie hinted exploring lost youth, growing up, etc. But then it didn't. It wasn't really that kind of movie.

Bruno was better. Unlike Borat, the line between what was fake and what was real was a little more defined, but still savvy and socially relevant. And I swear, there are scenes where Sacha Baron Cohen could have gotten his ass killed in a hate crime, which of course makes it all the more salient.

The film has been criticized for being an over-the-top stereotype of gays; but that's the point. (So was Borat, but there was no outrage in America over the over-the-top stereotype of Kazakhs or other central Asians.) You take it with a grain of salt, but the reactions in the interviews and scenes are real. Like Ron Paul. He got an interview with Ron Paul!

Like Borat, though, many of the scenes that expose ignorance were relegated to the South, to poorer areas, or to under-educated populations. There's a danger, I think, in thinking the intolerances Cohen exposes can only be found, overtly or otherwise, in those Americas.

...Which brings me back to The Hangover. At one point during the film, I thought maybe --maybe-- the communal memory lapse of four frat-boyish white guys could be interpreted as a messed-up journey to others' stereotyped realities: in a city where whatever happens stays there, they get tased by police, duped by a black drug dealer, attacked by an Asian gang, trapped into marriage by a hooker milf, have their money quickly disappear and their expensive car destroyed, and are each physically altered in some way. And in the end, they return safely to their suburban country club wedding with vague memories and some snapshots of their adventures on the other side.

That analysis was fleeting. When I walked out of the theatre, I realized ... nah. Sometimes imagery is just jumbled, and some compilations are just meaningless. Then again, sometimes they're not.

... Which brings me back to the other hangover. NEVER DRINKING IN 103-DEGREE HEAT AGAIN!!!

Sun breaks

Wow, it's been a long time since my last post! Meanwhile, Seattle's been experiencing a heat wave, and I've been trying to enjoy the weather. After all, it's the first summer in decades that I haven't been trapped in an office during most sunlight hours.

Apropos of nothing, this Onion article was hilarious:

Study: Abstinence-Only Lunch Programs Ineffective At Combating Teen Obesity
The Onion
WASHINGTON—According to the findings of a recent Department of Health and Human Services study, school lunch programs that teach children to avoid all contact with food may not be an effective method of reducing teen obesity rates.

Evolution

Lesson learned the hard way #1764: Even if you know you don't really want something anymore, your stubborn nature might make you keep fighting for it simply out of habit.
"Habit" can also be a euphemism for "desperation". . . Realizing this, however, indicates the possibility for growth-- or so one hopes!

In related behavior patterns, I discovered (and ate) ice cream sandwiches in my hosts' freezer, then ran to the nearest grocery store and bought good old, tried-and-true Ben and Jerry's.

Then I vegged out.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay surprised me. I liked it. I wasn't the biggest fan of the first movie, and I admit I watched this sequel after a number of cold dessert products and several glasses of wine (which, also surprisingly, went well with the ice cream). The two title stoner buddies set off for Amsterdam to follow Harold's dream girl and smoke legal weed; through bizarre, slapstick scenarios they find themselves mistaken for terrorists and dumped in Guanatamo. They escape and make their way across the South to Texas, where Kumar's ex-girlfriend is marrying a Republican frat boy. (And yes, guess who they run into in Texas?) Along the way, they encounter others' prejudices and stereotypes as well as their own; however, these are frequently dispelled only to be revalidated.

It is not a deep, poignant film about the great melting pot that is America, nor is it a particularly thoughtful movie about tolerance. It included a wedding-wrecking scene, a well-documented pet irritation of mine. It's just a story about two dudes who want to get high, check out chicks, and make bathroom jokes ... and apparently that's all the rest of America wants, too. Even El Prez in Crawford.

Also, I'm a fan of Kal Penn. And NPH. Rob Corddry was great as an irrational Homeland Security agent.

The whole thing was actually fairly predictable. But really, I just needed to sit there staring at a flickering screen, shoving spoonfuls of ice cream into my mouth and sipping shiraz occasionally.

Damn, I need to go running tomorrow ...

All astonishment once more

Thanks to the FG for posting this. I love all these social media retellings of P&P!

Pride and Twitterverse

My favorite excerpt:

Darcy:
DM to @LizzyB
In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire & love you.

[series of DMs between LizzyB and Darcy]

LizzyB:
WTF?

LizzyB:
Can you deny that you made Bingley quit Twitter thus destroying my sister’s chance for happiness?

Darcy:
I cannot. I even deleted all her comments on his blog so he wouldn’t know she was reading. Marry me anyway?

LizzyB:
And don’t even get me started on your offenses to poor Wickham.

Darcy:
Wickham? Oh yes, poor downtrodden Wickham. #eyeroll

LizzyB:
Gah! You are so haughty!

Darcy:
And you are such a hotty.

LizzyB:
Ugh. You are the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry. okthksbai

[Msg to LizzyB from Twitter: Are you sure you want to block Darcy? BLOCK]

EMAIL FROM DARCY TO LIZZYB:
You have blocked me on Twitter which leaves me no other recourse than to email you an honest account of my dealings with Mr Wickham. In short, he is a pedi-perv who tried to bone my sister when she was but 15. He had hoped to marry her for her fortune, but I stopped him. So there.

[Msg fwd to JaneB from LizzyB]

LizzyB:
@JaneB Oh shit. Have I ever made a mistake. Darcy = good. Wickham = bad.

Check out the rest! Love it.

All astonishment

One of the friends for whom I'm house-sitting was really excited for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou when it came out a few years ago. She was ultimately a little disappointed that it didn't live up to her hype; that might have colored my opinion while watching the film, because I was bored and indifferent to the characters and the plot.

It's supposed to be both a parody of and a tribute to Jacques Cousteau, I believe. Bill Murray's aging explorer deals with bad relationships, a possible son, an elusive sea creature, evil rivals, and pirates. (Actually, the fact that the pirates spoke Tagalog was kind of cool. It's not a language usually heard in American films.) His quirky, ragtag crew are all misfits of some sort, searching for a deep-sea jaguar shark that the scientific world doesn't believe exists. There are metaphors in there, to be sure. I just wasn't very drawn in by it all.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, on the other hand, rocked! I admit, the skeptical part of me, the Austen purist, thought at first that nothing --nothing!-- should be allowed to soil the sheer, brilliant piece of literature that is Pride and Prejudice. But that damn Intellectual Property class has affected my thinking more than I thought it could: the great thing about public domain works is the possibility for endless creative engines.

And it worked! Fighting zombies actually fit in with the much-beloved P&P characters; the fight scenes were a bit random, but also completely hilarious. The book followed Austen's original pretty closely, including most of the dialogue. Grahame-Smith took a few small liberties with the general plot (the biggest one involving Wickham's fate, which had me rolling with laughter), but other than that remained reverently faithful to the story itself.

All of England are fighting the zombie hordes, and I loved how the fact that the Bennet sisters studied with Chinese zombie-fighting kung fu masters still marked their class status, true to one of Austen's themes (wealthier citizens studied in the Japanese warrior schools).

A good, quick read that can really only be fully appreciated if readers are familiar with the original ... but enjoyable nonetheless for those that aren't.

R & R

Housesitting for some friends for the next week and a half -- a welcome, quiet break from the babymania! While trying to figure out dishes in order to use up all the perishable foods, I mixed myself a tasty concoction: Absolut Peach and lemonade. Normally, I'm not a fan of peach-flavored things, but it was good!

Whirlwind

Obla di, obla da, life goes on!

• The wedding was awesome. It was at a bar, which was a first for me. The ceremony itself was less than four minutes, and consisted only of the exchange of rings. Fun times!
  
  
• While I was preparing to head out to the wedding, La Otra Hermana was giving birth to my new niece. It took them a day and a half to agree on the name, but it's Repeka -- the Samoan version of Rebecca, pronounced the same.
  
  The neffy now demands more attention than ever, and wants to play nonstop (which is fine with me, since I've never quite been sure what to do around newborns) . . .
  
  Also, in the ever-small world of Western Washington, a classmate from middle and high school is a nurse at the birthing center where La OH had the niecester.
  
  
• I'm totally moved out of the old apartment in Boston! Woot. My back is killing me after sleeping on an inflatable mattress for a week, but a few hours of yoga today should start to remedy that.
  
  
• During my four-hour layover at the Cincinnati airport, I got ridiculously excited to try Chick-fil-A when I saw it at the food court. (A friend, who grew up all over the South, raves about Chick-fil-A; one opened up in Bellingham recently, and she seriously drives up every couple of weeks for some fast food chicken burgers. She ignores the company's religious indoctrination program.)
  
  At any rate, I decided to give it a try. Not bad, for fast food. I was also extremely hungry.
  
  Also: I realize Cincinnati is just across the Ohio River from Kentucky (a dorm-mate from the area would go on about this my freshman year in college), but I was not expecting to hear so many Southern accents!
  

And now, loads of laundry...

Wicked smaht

Xtina and I, once again known as Captain Blunder and the Awkward Silences (this time accompanied by a trivia newbie friend), finally came in first place at pub quiz!

My last night in Beantown, too. It makes sleeping on an uncomfortable inflatable mattress worthwhile...

Woot, woot!

The list, the list, the list is getting smaller...

Got back from a weekend camping trip in the Olympics to find an email from my program director that I passed the comps and thus have the degree.

The resume has been updated accordingly.

And now, off to Boston again for a friend's wedding!