I have done something I've never done before. I couldn't finish The Spoils of Poynton, so I cheated and looked ahead. I was happy, indeed, to find that the story went as I hoped it would.
I have the Tori Amos version of "I Don't Like Mondays" stuck in my head. It's fitting, today being Monday and all, and me being unhappy about that fact. It's a good song, all in all, except for the bad grammar. "...And he can see no reason / 'Cause there are no reason..." That's no good. Honestly, it's almost a deal breaker for me. Why didn't Tori pronounce the 's'? Did the Boomtown Rats not pronounce it in the original version?
I have this... affliction? ...problem? ...weird thing I do where I keep reading Victorian novels. Austen, the Brontë sisters, Hardy. I keep telling myself I'll quit (really, I can stop at any time), but for some reason, I keep picking them up. I think it goes back to my snooty post-dropping-out-of-college phase where I said, with an air of ridiculous seriousness, "I shall only read literature." Really, say that to yourself again, only this time stick your nose up in the air and be kind of haughty about it. That was me. What a lamer.
Anyhow, long story short, I have found myself reading The Spoils of Poynton. I can't decide if I think it's a rather dreadful novel (again with the haughty!) or if I find it amusing. It's a book about a girl named Fleda Vetch, a rather odd battle over home furnishings and, of course, the love of Fleda's life. (What kind of name is Fleda Vetch, anyhow?)
See, Fleda is in love with this chap named Owen, who she thinks is stupid. We are told that Fleda is rather brilliant, but she likes Owen because he's kind of dumb. She thinks it's sweet that he's a total idiot. What's that all about? What really intelligent woman wants a man who is a complete moron? So, I secretly think she's just stupid herself.
Here's where it gets good. The thing is, Owen keeps kind of surprising her by not being as simple as she thinks he is. Ooh, the intrigue. To round out the plot, Owen is engaged to Mona (boo hiss!) who is ready to call off their engagement because Owen's mom stole all the furniture from the estate he inherited when his dad died. Really, she plum took it all to Ricks, the little old maid cottage to which she has been banished. You see, both Fleda and Owen's mom have this weird thing where they place an undue amount of importance on home furnishings. Really. It's a little over the top. Since Mona doesn't have the same affection for home furnishings, Mrs. Gereth (Owen's mama) can't bear to leave them in her clutches, so she steals them all.
The morality in this novel is striking: anybody who does not place a high importance on the beauty of home furnishings is bad or stupid. Anybody who does is highly intelligent, though not necessarily altogether refined, as they might be prone to theft of said furnishings.
Are you still with me? No? Shocking!
Owen eventually asks Fleda to try to get his furniture back, on account of she and Mrs. G. are such good friends and all. She agrees, but she's all fluttery and she doesn't want to admit that she loves Owen, but Mrs. G. figures it out and says if Fleda can stage a coup get Owen all for herself, she will send back the furniture. So, here she can get her man and the furnishings all in one fell swoop, but she freaks out because it's not really moral and what about poor, dear Mona, even though everybody kind of thinks she's a skank.
I'm not sure what will happen next, but Owen just almost told Fleda he loves her and not Mona. Having spent so much time together discussing the old bag who stole his furniture, he realized that she is by far the superior creature. With a name like Fleda, how could she not be?
Because of Old Navy's new ad campaign, I got the Green Acres theme song stuck in my head. So then I had to go and find out when it Jumped the Shark.
JumpTheShark.com is my new favorite web site. Well, for the next week or so, at any rate.
It's blog madness. I feel the overwhelming need to say hello to Samantha and Jason and Lisa. Hi.
The way things are going, I eventually won't need to actually talk to anybody -- I'll just read all about them on their blogs.
I've switched my home page from Yahoo! news to news.google.com. You're probably not even wondering why. You're probably thinking, damn straight she did. Yahoo! news sucks. Yahoo! has too many damned advertisements popping up all over the place. Sadly, I really like the format. I just hate the commercial aspects of it.
The offending straw that broke the camel's back was the DHTML Bernie Mac advertisement that popped up in a layer OVER the text of a news story I was trying to read. When I clicked "close", it popped up another window, which I closed before the content loaded. Grrr.
Advertising in general has gotten to be too invasive. Of course, there are arguments for and against it, and I think it's funny to think of what advertising space will be sold next. I think "ad at bottom" advertising will take off soon. The bottoms of yogurt cups, pot pies, paper coffee cups -- anything where the bottom is obscured at first. They'll have to be clever about it, make it a sort of game, just to make sure people actually eat all their yogurt or pot pies so they can see it.
The thing is, this is just funny for me to think about. It's not a good idea, any more than selling bleeped out air time in movies is a good idea. It's not really that great an idea to have advertisements in bathroom stalls, although it is sometimes nice to have something to read. Still, I'd prefer poetry, like on the bus. It's not a good idea to have little screens mounted on the paper towel dispenser to display a slide show of advertisements. It's not a good idea to have huge, enormous, electronic billboards for people to read as they're about to go over a bridge.
The thing is, we've gone past equilibrium, and dilution is total. There is, simply, too much. Chances are, your ad does not capture my attention. Chances are, I could care less. Chances are, I don't sit at home thinking my life would be more fulfilling if only I drank Coke or had better tampons.
You won't stop, though, you advertisers. You will take this message and think to yourselves, "Hmm... Not getting attention... Must be louder, more repetitive, more frequent, more bright, bold, alarming, shocking, LOUD LOUD LOUD." And I won't be able to ignore you, and I'll hate you for it, and I still won't buy your product. So there.
My e-mail inbox at work:
"I've really enjoyed working with you all..."
"Take care..."
"Please keep in touch..."
"My home e-mail is..."
"So long..."
Layoffs. Urgh.
Another weekend gone, and still no chairs. I did manage to get a new bookcase set up and complete the installation of my garage door opener (mad props to Silky for doing most of the work).
A word on installing garage door openers: it's more dificult than you'd think. There's a whole lot to installing a garage door opener. For instance, if the ceiling of your garage is finished, you have to get extra stuff to hang the opener. And if your door is aluminum, you need to add vertical and horizontal supports so the opener doesn't screw up your garage door. I ended up learning a whole lot about angle iron and 1/4" hex bolts.
In the end, it took us two days (one day last weekend, and one day the weekend before) and three trips to the hardware store to actually get through everything. But we did it, with very few mistakes, and it works perfectly. It's so exciting to have a little garage door opener remote clipped to my sun visor -- I'm living in the lap of luxury now for sure.
No wonder I don't love Raymond. Does anybody?
Yarrr, it's National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yarr!
Now where's me bottle o' rum?
Oops, I guess I was wrong about the table. I got an e-mail from my mom today:
If I told you the table came from your great grandmother I was wrong. I bought the table from someone when we lived in Ketchum. I think he stole it from his grandmother. Just kidding.
Mom
It turns out that finding dining room chairs is a difficult, difficult thing. Why? No idea. It speaks to something larger and more fundamentally wrong with the world.
How are dining room chairs not everywhere? I mean, it's not like nobody has dining room tables. Is this a conspiracy? Have the dining room chair manufacturers of America all banded together and decided to tweak the supply and demand equation? Is someone stockpiling dining room chairs to drive up prices?
Okay, so maybe I just haven't looked around enough, but really, it's ridiculous. I should be able to go shopping for furniture on a Monday or Tuesday night and find at least adequate dining room chairs. Something better than Kitchen Kaboodle's $500 per chair side chairs would be nice. Let me say that again: $500 PER CHAIR. It's wood, stuck together in a chair-like fashion. Nothing fancy. Nobody sat there and carved exotic designs in it; they just slapped some finish on the wood and stuck it together. Oy vey!
So, if anybody in the Portland area knows of a good place to find chairs, please let me know. I also don't want to buy a table with the chairs, as I already have a table. It's a very nice table that once belonged to my great grandmother. It's the table my sister and I draped sheets and blankets over to make forts when we were little, back when walking right under it didn't require any bending. Alas, it's a very nice table with no chairs.
I'm not claustrophobic or anything, but I still don't like getting stuck in an elevator. Especially when it drops a little and goes ka-cunk as it jolts to a halt and the floor number changes to "- -" and none of the buttons work. Then, when you push the call button and it beeps, but nobody answers, that's not fun, either.
In completely unrelated news, I went and saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding yesterday. It was excellent. I highly recommend it.
During a phone conversation with my sister a couple of days ago, she interrupted whatever she was saying with, "No, honey, don't squeeze your banana." Presumably, this was directed at my 19-month-old nephew.
Then, a few minutes later: "Well, you're not stinky, but you have corn down your pants."
Moms say the darndest things.
My sister is loving the jokes. So far, I've told her the pirate joke (the one with the steering wheel) and the Yogi Bear joke. She is apparently looking forward to a daily phone call at this point, so I'm going to need more jokes. I'm pretty sure I can't keep this up until December, but I'd like to try for a couple of weeks at least.
On the family note: congratulations to my mom. I'm really proud of her. At the tender young age of 49, she just had "the game of her life" playing softball. My mom loves softball, and has been playing second base for something like 30 years. In her game the other night, she was making double plays, sliding in to bases, and just being an all around superstar. I'm super bummed I didn't get to go watch. She also just got a new job, so she's hitting home runs all over the place!
Congratulations also to my little brother, Luke, who is a bit of a superstar himself. He just finished filming a scene for the first movie he'll be in (other than the one he made for my sister and I a couple of Christmases ago). It's an independent film, and in it, he'll be the guy walking in the background juggling. I don't know the name of it yet, but the first screening is in December, so I can't wait!
Yeah.
Stupid jokes needed. My sister is stuck on bed rest for the next 17 weeks, and in an effort to save her from going totally crazy, I'd like to send her a list of really dumb jokes to keep her entertained. Actually, I thought it would be more fun to put her phone number on the internet and ask people to call her with dumb jokes, but I'd probably get in trouble for that.
I just called her with the following joke (which I got from stupid.com), and it went over very well:
Knock Knock
Who's there?
Ice Cream Soda
Ice Cream Soda who?
I scream soda people can hear me.
So, if you have any good dumb jokes like that, maybe put 'em in the little comments box and I'll pass them along. Thanks!!
Things I keep forgetting to link to and/or fully appreciate:
I'm disappointed in you, world. I just found out that Swimfan is number one at the box office. Who went to see this movie? Why? Why?
"I'm supposed to be married by now. I should have kids and a beautiful life." Or maybe he said 'wife'. It was hard to tell, as his comments were directed at the Pepsi cup sitting in front of him. Sweet, sweet public transportation.
Still, part of me feels like there's a general, pervasive sadness just kind of hanging around lately. Maybe it's just a 24-hour bug. Maybe he caught it from bluishorange.
Ooh, China has been blocking access to certain "threatening" web sites. Like Google and cnn.com. Yikes. Now you can check to see if your site is blocked in China. Apparently, the Chinese government doesn't consider me to be threatening, so that's good.
(Link via plasticbag.org)
Okay, it's not just China, and it's not all that recent. Why didn't I realize this? This list of The 20 Enemies Of The Internet is rather enlightening.
The weekend seemed to be all about not getting to things I was supposed to do, and watching action movies. Friday night, I didn't get around to cleaning the house or doing laundry or any of that. Instead, I went to Bones & Brew and watched the end of Starship Troopers. Corny though it may be, I dig that movie. I did miss the best line, since I started watching it late. It's the one where Dizzy is all hysterical and she says, "God damn bugs whacked us, Johnny!" That's okay, though, because they would have bleeped out the word "God" since it was on network television, leaving me to wonder why "God" is a worse word than "damn," and reminding me, momentarily, how irritating the religious right can be.
Saturday, I made a gourmet meal of Tater Tots and omlettes for Silky and Nancy because they make fun of me for eating Tater Tots. Apparently, I'm the only person I know who still eats Tater Tots. Then, we almost installed my garage door opener, but we bailed on the plan and will attack it again next weekend. We ate yummy cookies instead. Then we went to see Spider-Man. I love Spider-Man. The best part is when The Green Goblin and Spider-Man are fighting in the burning house and Spider-Man punches Green Goblin, and then webs his chest and pulls him back and then kicks him. So cool.
Sunday, I didn't even pretend to try to do stuff, although I did get a load of laundry done, and cleaned up my kitchen. I watched The Fifth Element in the morning. My DVD player is broken, so I stayed in bed and drank tea and watched it on my laptop. That felt good and lazy. In the evening, I went to a going away get-together for Nancy because she's heading off to Benin for six months. I will be sad to see her go, but we'll always have bacon weaving.
Two words: woven bacon.
The Pepsi Blue web site invites you to "drink in the sonic flavor fusion of Pepsi Blue and discover the cola revolution."
Sonic flavor fusion? Does that even mean anything?
The site's pretty funny, though. I love it when people try to be hip with a product like, you know, soda. "Prepare for the tricked-up flavor fusion of berry and cola. Grab a bottle and get ready to give your taste buds a buzz of blue." Ooh, watch out taste buds. Here's a buzz of blue coming right at you. Booyah!
Seriously, though, does anybody else find it amusing that soft drink advertisers are trying to sell an image? I mean, it's been going on ever since I can remember, but is it actually working? Do you actually feel really cool if you drink Pepsi or Seven-Up? Does anybody strut down the street thinking to themselves, "I am one hip motherfucker, drinking my Dr. Pepper"?
Yeah. Didn't think so.
(This all happened because of a link on highindustrial.com)
I think I ought to take up yoga.
Things get stuck in my head a lot. Stupid things. Things that, due to lack of sleep, stress, planet alignment, or whatever, are unlocked at odd times, sometimes many years later, and they play themselves back. Take just now, for instance. I'm drinking my first cup of coffee for the day, sitting at my computer, getting ready to code myself silly for a project I'm working on, and all of the sudden, my head plays back a scene from Summer School.
"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Tension breaker. Had to be done."
What's up with that?
This is so cute, in an exploding head kind of way. (Link via plasticbag.org)
Yesterday was all about Stonehenge. Not the real Stonehenge, but the one in Maryhill, Washington. Of course. Why on earth wouldn't there be a to-scale re-creation of Stonehenge in the middle of nowhere?
Fake Stonehenge was weird. It was so... 'tidy' is the word that comes to mind. All clean lines and no fallen down rocks or anything. Of course, it wouldn't make sense to re-create it in a state of disrepair, but I guess it just wasn't what I was expecting. It is, on the other hand, amazing that it's there, and I found it to be pretty interesting. It was fun to walk around and see all the different perspectives. Hopefully, some of the photos I took will come out.
Actually, I lied when I said yesterday was all about Stonehenge. We also went to the Maryhill Museum and the Maryhill Winery. The museum was unexpectedly cool. I mean, there's really nothing around for miles, and suddenly, there's this garden oasis outside a large, stately museum. Inside, there's a Rodin exhibit, royal regalia from Queen Marie of Roumania, and a whole bunch more. Apparently, Queen Marie was at the Maryhill Museum for its dedication. Craziness!
