I might as well have what fun I can with this; the city's still shut down, and really, what do they expect me to do with the idle time?

[click on the pic.]

The Human Stain

Our paper can't go to press this week because of the fires so I didn't end up having to write a review of The Human Stain. You know what that means - yup, I don't want that viewing to go to waste, so I'm going to write a shitty version of what could have been a spectacular critique, and post it here for you. "Yay!" you're thinking. I know.

Our paper asks us to give films a star value, max 5. At the time I found out I wouldn't need to submit this review, I was teetering between 3 and 3.5. I nearly settled on 3.5 because I wanted to give it credit for being bearable, being watchable, but 3.5 is so close to 4, which I consider a pretty fucking good score. I mean, I gave Belle and Sebastian's new album 4 stars, and I'd much rather listen to that twice in a row than spend the same time period watching The Human Stain.

But I'm a little torn about giving a negative review, too, because I'm pretty sure the critics I watched it with will be scathing, and they were so pretentious and annoying, I'd almost prefer to disagree with them, regardless of my actual opinion. The man across the aisle from me laughed with artificial loudness any time something on screen was forced or predictable. He had such a pompous guffaw. He laughed like a grown man who was proud of being able to outrun small children. It made me want to defend the small children, even though they really were slow.

Now you're convinced that my film-rating methodology is a two-step process of imbecilic logic (a: which is better? the film, or the latest B&S? b: what's the opposite of what all these snobs think?). Good. From here, I can only go up in your estimations.

Fine, then, a blow-by-blow account of my general impressions:

Sinise's character: good.
Kidman's character: bad. Could the movie be re-written without that element?
Hopkins' character: Hopkins. Come on.
Harris' character: eh. Fine. They wanted scary but bland, I suppose.
settings: couldn't have been tireder.
plot twists: more like curves, really.
Hopkins' character's car: good. Drivers of shitty station-wagons, unite.
Harris' character's car: sufficiently creepy. Drivers of worn, scary-looking trucks, sell.
Kidman's nudity: not much of a surprise.
Contrived acting in flashback scenes: not much of a surprise.
Kidman writhing in ecstasy at Hopkins' slightest touch: not believable.
Hopkins' character saying to Kidman's, "I can't leave you" or "I love you" or anything positive, really: not believable.
Kidman talking to a bird: might give you an idea as to how this movie was.

I'll tell you a secret. When I sat down to type this out, I still hadn't decided how many stars to give The Human Stain. But having gone back over all those elements in my head, I'm now saying it's fortunate with the 3 I'm giving it.

Anthony I'm sorry I love you please start making good movies again.

Tick ... tock ...

What I'm doing...

Now: Loading laundry. Cleaning. Preliminarily packing.

In 30 minutes: Shopping for warm clothes. Calling Her Lady Style for advising. Receiving strange looks from people as I purchase cold-weather gear at a mall heated and ashed over by a fire raging a mile or so down the road.

In 2 hours: Chatting. Writing emails. Reading weblogs. Devouring firestorm news and praying the airport will be fine (sorry; it's not that I don't feel for victims, I really do, but there's no use feigning total selflessness).

In 5 hours: More cleaning. More packing. Quelling rising excitement, very possibly with the cabernet we uncorked last night (the one that didn't get finished, at least I don't think it did). Very possibly calling my NYC darlings in a giddy FRENZY.

All day: Thinking about CUPCAKES and HALLOWEEN and AUTUMN and SCARVES and BREATHABLE AIR and WALKING THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE and WANDERING THROUGH THE VILLAGE and COSTUME SHOPPING and COSTUME WEARING and TALL VINYL BOOTS and GIRLY NIGHT and BRUNCHES and OPEN MIC NIGHT and most importantly about JASON and SHIVY and my darling soulmate KRISSA.

In 20 hours: Boarding.

In 30 hours: Running screaming into Krissa's open arms.

For the next 6 days: Fulfilling plans, above.

Notice

I accidentally fell asleep with terminal open the other night and used up nearly all my allotted units on my hated mail server. By tomorrow morning I expect it will not allow me to log in. Should be fine by Friday. Till then, my lovely and witty correspondents, please send email to:

kateloveswords at yahoo dot com.

Why I'm not going to work in the morning

(or, an excuse for pictures.)

[click.]

five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes minus a day

Something seemed familiar about the date, the way a road hints to you that you've been down it before. I couldn't quite put my finger on it for awhile and I've been trying to think of what autumn means because something recognizable is in the air, there's a phantom presence breathing into the curve of my neck and making me shiver. My skin's been feeling loose on me like there's a layer to be shed and stepped out of.

I realized it's been 364 days. Let's just say a year, because it was a Saturday, and today's Saturday. If today was last year, I'd be changing into my Lotus Lounge t-shirt and long corduroy skirt and jack purcells and headed over to a friend's for jack-o-lantern carving. I'd get my fingers sticky and pumpkiny-smelling and my jack-o-lantern, though not ugly, would soon become so, sitting on our gate and rotting away, dripping bug-soaked slime along the door because I'd never carved a pumpkin in California before, never imagined a climate in which a pumpkin wouldn't freeze up as soon as it was placed outdoors. I went out that night. It was going to be a fun night, but then, I didn't think I'd have to grow up.

I doubted myself when I mouthed the words "my heart is breaking apart" to myself, told myself I was a cliche in the making without a clue, told myself I'd feel pretty stupid in a few months when I'd realize my heart was in fine condition, just fine. It was cracking and crumbling and shooting shards into the reservoirs of fragility inside my skull, I could almost hear it, ripping and tearing and sending shocks out through my eyes, streaming, my fists, beating, hoping for collision with a plane of glass that would hurt me with immediacy, with physicality.

And it wasn't a fluke after all. I was every bit as hurt as rationality told me it was impossible - for me - to be. Healing was absolutely nothing like what I expected. Retrospection tells me my gut was right a lot more often than I gave it credit for. Change took an unforseen direction. And I fucking love where I've ended up. But I certainly haven't grown back part of what I felt so violently and unapologetically ripped out. No, not my heart - my vulnerability.

Cheers.

Dad?

Is that you?

God. Who knew my dad was so cool. Yeah, you're right, I did.

Incidentally, he was in his mid-twenties when this was taken, and the rest of the hair disappeared soon thereafter, so y'all can stop worrying about your receding hairlines. I've met you and you got nothin' on Pop.

Ladies and gentlemen, Stan Park.

I mentioned I had a video clip from Al Franken's Q&A. Well, the gracious ninja over yonder has generously offered to host it so I could show it to you!

Context: A man has just asked Al a very stupid question. He asked, "In your book, you describe speaking at a rally for Clear Channel. Now, many of us here have misgivings about Clear Channel. Have you revised your position since you wrote the book?"

Al replied, "Uh, that chapter was satirical. Shall I read it for you?" And did. Almost entirely. And it was obviously satircal. So obviously satirical. The laughs among the audience were aplenty, not only because the chapter was amusing (especially coming from Franken's own lips) but because it was inconceivable that someone wouldn't get it.

Al finally put the book down and said, thoughtfully, "Now, I was sure I'd made it clear that that was satire. But maybe I'll have to start making announcements." Laughter.

Then, Stan stepped up to the mic.

(27 MB.) (Click "continue reading" for the printed version, if you couldn't understand any of the audio.) (Also, sorry for the shakiness.)

Dear England,

I miss you.

So I'm coming back.

Two months is really not long to wait. And I'll be back in less time than that.

...and I'm bringing new boots with me.

...and the garter.

Boys

Dik Soks? Ass panic?

I wonder about love you guys.

Pal Franken

To be honest, I was very sad for a lot of Wednesday. Elliott Smith's suicide hit me really hard. I won't get into why. But with the evening came a tremendous amount of enjoyment. It really couldn't have gone any better unless rush hour had ceased to exist. Even with the rush, I managed to get to Cal Tech just past 7, having left San Diego just before 4. Not bad for the busiest three hours of the day.

Why was I in Pasadena, you ask? To see Al Franken speak, answer questions and do what he does best: be gut-wrenchingly hysterical. His talk was fabulous and the Q&A session very funny as well. (I have video footage of my friend Stan stepping up to the mic and proceeding to make 1200 people laugh and applaud, which I so wish I could show you, but I have nowhere to store it.) And afterwards, he signed books.

Stan and I waited in a long line for about half an hour to get his book signed. (I'd left mine in the car, but it was the audio version anyway.) When we reached the table, I took out my camera and Stan asked if Al would pose with him.

"Okay," Al said, "but only if she gets one, too." He pointed - at me.

Cross my heart.

Oh my god, no.

No.

Please, no.

Finger-pointing

If you're anything like me, you want people to know when they've gone wrong.

And what better way to do it?

38 hours and still rolling

I like the work I have to do. It's just a shame there aren't enough hours in the day to accommodate as much of that work as I have to do at the moment. Not without sacrificing work or sleep.

And well, a girl's gotta pay the bills.

I need three masseurs right now and I know exactly where to put each of them to work.

Joe

I spent the year I was 16 leaving my fundamentalist Christian youth group, learning how to drive through snowstorms and pretending not to notice now Joe tried to look up my skirt from across the room in American History class.

Thanks Manue

I find it really telling when someone re-composes an email that's fallen victim to a hotmail crash. That speaks volumes. I personally don't have much patience with that kind of thing. I can't say for certain I wouldn't give up on whatever I'd been writing if a hotmail server ate it. I'd be more likely to curse under my breath, remind myself it's free, and then grumblingly write a cursory summary of the novel I'd just lost. So when a friend tells me in an email that it's the second one she's composed because hotmail murdered the first, I'm quite touched.

- - -

Hey, know what's not good for blog content? An adrenaline hyper-rush around the thirtieth hour of wakefulness. Sorry folks!

Curses

Sometimes - and this has been recurring since JULY - I want to write a "How-to" sort of post, but I totally can't do that in this corner of the blog world anymore without my blog looking like a Londonmark rip-off. It's like when you get a new shirt, and then you see someone else wearing the same shirt, and you're like, "Hey, you have my shirt!" and they're like, "No, you have my shirt."

Not cold

I go through phases of high emotion, and phases of low emotion. Maybe it's not how much I feel actually, but to what extent I wear it on my sleeve. Anyway, the point is, it's low right now. I'm not a come-to-work-weeping-on-bad-days kind of girl. I'm a shrug-off-the-problem kind of girl.

So imagine my surprise when last night, at a table of ten friends, a newcomer hassled me to tears.

Tears, people.

Eh. Whatever.

I need your help

Does anyone have a recipe for a really good soup? Okay, okay, wait, hold on - it can't be just any soup, it's got to be thin and brothy. Stuff in it, to be sure, but not creamy. Brothy. And Hot.

See, my throat, which HATES ME, is threatening to close down, and I'm all, Oh No You Don't, MoFo, I'ma Spring Some Soup On Yo' Ass.

A dash of surreality

• The graduation application FAQ page for my college has a FastCounter by bCentral and says "R U Ready to Graduate?" on the top banner. It's like a 17-year-old's fledgling blog or something, except it does actually spell out "to" instead of using the letter-conservationist "2".
• The temp who's temporarily seated next to me has on his desk a tiny Buddha figurine, two cans of Diet Coke with lemon, and a large jar of Thai peanut dressing - and a cup.
• My cell phone features not only music, but also several animal sounds, such as cat, dog, horse and duck, as possible tones. It does not, however, offer a plain "ring" or "ring ring".
• Between typing list items I have been drinking Nesquik Strawberry Milk. Yeah, seriously.

Rufus

Now this. THIS. Is an interview.

Special

I'm a special girl. The only reason I know this is that I can be pulled over for passing a cop on the highway going 80 mph with expired registration tags and non-current insurance and get off with a fine-free citation and lecture, but the next day get a $40 ticket for leaving my car parked fifty minutes past the "it's okay, you can park here" time.

($40 for a parking ticket?! Is that normal now? I haven't gotten one in years, or ever, I can't remember. It's probably just West Hollywood, that snobhole. Grrrr.)

Blog On

I have reservations about replying to the questionnaire (about this blog) that someone at Web User Magazine emailed last week. Answering questions about fauxhemia as though it were something worth profiling*. I'll probably get back to him eventually, though really, I'd rather turn it into a joke or something, like by having all both of YOU compose responses. I was going to send a holdover reply saying "hold on, lemme think about this," but then I realized I could just post this drivel instead!

Thoughts? I know some of you UK bloggers have been targeted for this before...

* Not fishing for compliments or gratuitously slagging myself off, honestly.

You are putty, Internet. Putty.

It's easy - too easy, don't you think? - to assume I've had good reasons to do a fair deal of traveling over the past few months. You might think I went to London to take a course at the LSE. Or that I took a week in New York because a steal of a ticket turned up and because I'd been wanting to visit for years. Maybe you think Boston looked like a fun weekend destination nestled into my New England vacation, and maybe you guessed that I have family in the Bay Area. Those would all make good reasons for me to jet or drive out to those places. On top of that, it would be reasonable to think I'd done it because I love traveling.

That's all a total lie. I'm only traveling in order to CHARM THE BLOGGING WORLD TO PIECES, ONE BLOGGER AT A TIME. Yes, it is only to meet other bloggers that I have bothered to touch down in these cities.

Forget museums, forget rivers and oceans and skylines, forget Manhattan and Camden Town and little villages inside of big cities, forget the Tube and the NYC Subway and the T and BART. Cities and their components and attractions are just pawns in my careful plot to take over the world meet as many bloggers as possible.

Greg, Mark, Dave, Pix, Krissa, Shiv, Ful, Bryan, Peter, Jennn, Helen Jane, James, and Dan, you may be witty, wonderful, wiseass, badass, spectacular, inspirational, hysterical, fascinating, smart, lovable, fun, funny, and downright amazing people, but you're also just check marks on my to-meet list. Bwa ha ha.

...melted toblerone under your dress...

This is the itsy bitsy review of Belle and Sebastian's new release I was asked to do for the uni paper last week. It's a space-holder, because it'll be afternoon before I get to work tomorrow. (Work = Posting time.) It's second-rate, because it was required to be very short and because I wrote it very fast at the very last minute while very, very tired. The album's worth getting hold of, though. Four stars (of five).

* * *

With Belle and Sebastian's latest, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, the Scottish group reestablishes itself as lyrically original, rhythmically and melodically catchy, and as always, exceedingly likable.

The album throws off some of the simplicity that characterized previous albums If You're Feeling Sinister and The Boy With the Arab Strap and that has come to define the band's sound. But it retains foot-tapping beats, as in the driving single "Step Into My Office, Baby", and shows Belle and Sebastian still capable of sweet, spare guitar riffs like those in the tender ballad "Lord Anthony."

Belle and Sebastian is nothing if not endearing, and remains so with this album. Fans expecting the more skeletal arrangements of previous records will be disappointed by the extensive orchestral accompaniment. But the skill with which this fullness of sound is used adds a great new spin on the same melodic talent we've come to expect from this band.

* * *

PS: Speaking of music, Dan made one of the most fanastic mix CDs I've ever listened to. Like I was lacking reasons to adore him.

15 hours of highway later...

I totally forgot to say I'd be out of town these past several days. Part of me is glad I can forget about the internet for awhile, while the rest of me gently reminds that first part, "Um, Kate? Sure you didn't post about being gone, but while you were gone you totally thought about having not posted. You're teetering on the edge of needing a 12-step program to fight blogoholicism."

So much for a valuable degree

Go ahead and joke. You don't have to get your college diploma signed by this man.

Reasons to pity the man at Financial Aid I just spoke with, who told me I need to take responsibility for my life and my mistakes:

• he could sound like Carson if he wanted to chipper up a bit, but he's opted for Ben Stein on bad speed
• he's been recently dumped and his ex-lover is seeing someone much more attractive and less Ben Stein-y than he
• his hair is starting to look inexcusably awful but he can't cut it because then everyone will see his receding hairline
• he doesn't realize that no one cares about his receding hairline, what's more bothersome is the dandruff that collects on his shoulders in amounts that rival the ash of Mt. St. Helen
• he works at Financial Aid
• he has to take out the miseries of his failed life on others
• he lives with his mother and she went into his room last night and saw all the porn
• his mother gets laid more than he does
• in fact, he hasn't been laid in a very, very long time
• he isn't good in bed
• his co-workers make fun of him when he proclaims himself King of Financial Aid and comes to work with a robe and crown and staff
• he's lusting after someone who thinks he's the grossest thing since Species 2
• he was the only one who sounded like an idiotic asshole by the time I hung up the phone

Recall day

Seriously, I will be angry with you if you don't vote. It doesn't mean I don't love you, or that I don't want to talk to you, or that I think you're a deeply evil individual. But I will be angry. And I'm sorry for being such a hard-ass about it, but - wait a minute. No I'm not. I'm not sorry one bit. I don't think anyone should be able to get away with thinking that the choice not to vote is something so insignificant that anyone who gets worked up over it should have to apologize. I hate that every time the ballot boxes pop up, there are innumerable scores of people with reasons to avoid them, reasons they actually think are legitimate. It makes me feel so powerless. It reminds me that the masses are willingly - willlingly! - giving themselves up to a deeply flawed system which they won't even bother to try fixing. You don't even care? How couldn't you? I don't understand, I just don't. Every non-voter makes my vote seem more worthless. But I'll vote anyway.

I said Monday.

It's Monday.

And here I am.

Total stress case.

I forget what time is. No, not what time it is, but what time is. I got none.

No no - no sympathy, thanks. It's mostly good kinds of busy. But astronomically, mind-bogglingly busy nonetheless.

Does anyone have a time-creation machine? I need, like, six hours extra per day. Thanks.

Weekend

This weekend's like some sort of hurricane. It really just blew in and destroyed everything related to the work week, like my ability to work today. It's 3:35 in the afternoon and despite having sat at a desk for the past six or seven hours I feel like the weekend must have begun when I left the office yesterday, because I certainly haven't accomplished anything really useful since then. Nothing my employer or professors would consider useful, at least. I haven't even posted. And not for lack of blogable material, either. I've got content just WAITING to happen, like the fact that I think Austin Powers was in the bathroom stall next to me just awhile ago. But it's just too weekendy, I suppose. My mind is already socializing and playing and partying and frankly I think it's had a bit too much to drink already. So I'll leave you with best wishes for a fantastic weekend - the actual weekend, the one that runs Saturday-Sunday, as well as whatever additional vacation your brain wants to take - and I'll see you come Monday.

I didn't know how much air I inhale in a week until I exhaled it all at once

There are loads of things I don't like about this university. I'm nothing more than a number, every file I hand to an office is gonna be mid-pile for at least a week, bureaucratic errors are costing me extra cash, accommodations aren't made for students who won't or can't buy the textbooks (hush about that NY trip, now), but.

But.

I won't be bothered by that just this second. At least my appeal went through. At least I'll graduate this year. Hurrah!

What's this funny feeling in my chest? Is that - no, it couldn't be - breath moving in and out without the constraints of anxiety?!

UCSD, I love you when you allow me to leave you.

Housecleaning

Staying up all night will put one in an unimaginably foul mood.

This is not the correct day for foul moods. Foul mood, may I direct you to this past Monday, where you'll fit right in? Today's a busy day.

Ugh. Anyway.

I reorganized my links, so let me know if I've misplaced you. Mistimed you, rather. In other words, corrections requested, por favor. And please note my thanks.