Irrelevant

I'm posting this link here so I can easily access it when I need to do a presentation for my Comp and Rhetoric class. Let me warn you that it's unexciting and doesn't make a lot of sense outside of the context of what I actually did for the class.

In the meantime, here is an animated GIF.

Q: So what have you been reading lately?

A: I haven't been reading as much as I'd like these days. But I've still been reading. Let's see. I re-read one of those Anastasia Krumpnik books from my childhood just for the sake of nostalgia. That was nice. I read Audrey Niffenegger's new book. Wasn't as good as The Time Traveler's Wife, but it's pretty hard to follow up on a book like that. What else? No Exit by Sartre. Re-read White Noise. A lot better the second time around, that book. I'm reading Twilight. Oh. And I read No Country For Old Men a couple of...

Q: Woah woah woah. Back up a minute. Did you just say that you're reading Twilight?

A: Uh...yeah. Yeah, I know. I'm reading Twilight.

Q: Why?

A: Well, it's one of those books that seem to be a really big part of pop culture these days.

Q: You're not turning into a twelve year old girl, are you?

A: No, No, I'm not.

Q: You're not trying to woo a twelve year old girl, are you?

A: That's fucked up. Who the hell are you?

Q: Seriously, though. So it's a big part of the pop culture. So was Transformers 2, but I don't see you rushing out to see that.

A: Fair enough. But that's not as huge of a cultural force as the Twilight books. Plus the books are so damn polarizing. People love them or hate them. There's no in between. So I kind of wanted to read one of them. Just to see what I think for myself. You know?

Q: Hmm. So what do you think?

A: It's alright. There's nothing really remarkable about the writing. For a five hundred page book it really zooms along. A good amount of action, a good amount of romance, a good amount of high school bullshit that the book's target audience probably appreciates.

Q: The romance part. That part's pretty ridiculous. The girl just falls in love with the vampire guy the first moment she looks at them. It's not sending the most encouraging message young girls about what to look for in a guy.

A: Wait. Have you read the books?

Q: I saw the movie once. Plus I read the Wikipedia article. Like you said it's a big part of the culture; it's kind of hard to escape it.

A: Right, okay. But about the romance. At first I thought it was pretty ridiculous too - and that's not to say that it isn't ridiculous - but to give Stephanie Meyer a little credit, I think she realized how crazy it all is. She kind of hints that vampires have some sort of evolutionary advantage, being remarkably attractive to people. So they can attract their prey or something. She doesn't really state it explicitly, but it's there. So I think there's a bit of an explanation there. Combine an evolutionary advantage with hormones and you have yourself an insane attraction sort of thing going on.

Q: And when the vampire guy goes outside he sparkles. Sparkles. How fucking ridiculous.

A: I thought that when I first heard about it too. See, I haven't seen the movie, but I would assume that that part just didn't work in the film. But it works okay in the movie. From what I understand in the movie they really made the guy sparkle, like he was part disco ball or something. But in the book they leave his level of sparkliness to your imagination. So it doesn't come off as quite as weird. It works, I guess.

Q: So are you going to read the other books?

A: Well, like I said, this isn't an amazing work of literature. It's a decent book. It's a very quick and readable sort of thing, you know? And it's by no means boring.

Q: You like it. You like Twilight.

A: No no no no. It's an okay book. I don't regret that I'm reading it. I don't think I'll re-read it. As for the other books in the series, they might be my new go-to Intellectual Detox books. Something quick and easy and mindless to read in between more mind boggling books. So I don't know. I guess the conclusion I've come to so far is that it's not god-awful, but it's not brilliant either.

Q: But are you going to see the movie?

A: Hell no. Not if I can help it.

Trip, The Facebook Photo

Visited back home this weekend. That was nice. The whole thing was kind of a whirlwind, though. Spent a lot of time in transit. The highlight of that was probably my cab driver, who informed me that he once drove a passenger from Chicago to Des Moines. The whole thing cost the passenger about $600.

I was on Facebook not too long ago and saw something on my news feed. It was from this girl that I had a crush on in high school. It was a picture. I'm kind of a Facebook creep - and aren't we all - so I took a look at it.

The thumbnail picture showed her in some sandy locale. Maybe a beach. Even from the little picture I could tell that she was wearing sunglasses and smiling. And then I looked at the full picture.

She was indeed smiling and wearing sunglasses. But that sandy locale was not a beach. It was a desert. There was a tank not too far behind her. She was wearing a camouflage jumpsuit. There was a big black rifle strapped to her side.

Holy shit. She's in the army?

A lot of stuff went through my head. Pride, surprise, a little bit of fear. But more than anything a sense of overwhelming weirdness. And the feeling that I'm getting older.

Effort, Singalongs

If you really wanted to, I think you could separate all the posts I make into two categories: posts I put effort into and posts that I just kind of write.

The prior category involves longish, thought-out posts. Sometimes I outline them. Sometimes when I'm done writing them I go over them again and make some little changes here and there for the sake of readability. But with the other posts, I just write them and hit the post button. No proofreading, no outlining. Sort of stream of consciousness stuff. Not really. But almost.

Lately I've had a lot of ideas for posts that I think would fall into the prior category. Posts that I would have to put a little bit more effort into to really make them live up to their full potential. There's one about Wrigleyville that I've been meaning to write. I've also been meaning to write on about Lost and its finale, too.

But instead I'm settling for these throwaway posts. That's mostly because I'm busy. Attending class, walking to places, hanging out with people. Writing. Mostly fiction. I've learned that the DePaul library is a really good place to get writing down, mostly because I can't access the internet there.

One last thing.

Last night I went to see Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind with a couple of friends. A great show as always. Every time I go to the show I leave with a bunch of random moments and images lingering in my mind that come back to me afterwards, may it be hours afterwards or days afterwards. But there's always one moment that is like the king of all moments of the show.

Last night, that moment happened in a play called random! nostalgic! uplifting! singalong! written by the kind and generally awesome Megan Mercier. The evening's particular performance of this play entailed a spontaneous and audience-wide singalong to the theme from Tiny Toon Adventures.

I sang along with the rest of the crowd, grinning like an idiot. But after the first few lines - "we're tiny, we're toony, we're all a little loony" - my lyrical recall went downhill. So I just sputtered nonsense syllables. Phonemes and noises held together only by the melody of a cartoon theme song I'd last heard years ago. I think the crowd - and some of the Neos, for that matter - were in the same boat, but it didn't really matter. Everyone was having fun. It was a bizarre but wonderful expression of collective joy.

After the play ended I thought about what had just happened. And I thought about the strange and exultant expressions of rapture that you see in videos of overzealous churches.

Call me crazy. And I'm only half joking when I say this. But I realized that that is probably the closest I'm ever going to get to speaking in tongues.

Addendum to Addendum

Okay, I'll stop with these movies of May 2010 now. For real this time.

Saw Junebug last night, which was a cute movie. Kind of reminded me of the movie Waitress in its tone. Amy Adams is wonderful; she manages to play one of the ditziest ditzes ever without becoming annoying. I'd probably put it at number eight on the list below.