Two plus two is ten

I feel rather off today, and I'm not sure why. Normally, I'm in a really good mood the day after I spend the night at Nate's -- I always sleep well there, and I heartily approve of Nate's overall "sleeping curled up together like cats" policy -- but today I just feel kind of tired and grouchy and unfocused, and I don't want to work at ALL.

Some of this, I think, is the weather. It's cold still. Really, really fucking cold. And as much as I like chilly weather and rain, I'm starting to get incredibly sick of it...especially since it's almost freakin' May. This is the point in the year where I want to be wearing t-shirts and lightweight hoodies, sneakers, that sort of thing. Instead, it's still peacoats and scarves and heavy-duty winter socks. Blargh. Annoying.

My job also annoys the hell out of me, but nothing new there. Basically, I think I'm just pissy because I had to march through the rain and the cold to a job I don't like, and I didn't have time to do my own coffee so I'm stuck drinking the swill here at work. Taken singly, each of these might not be so bad, but combined? Perfect storm of low-level crankiness.

Also, I have to do groceries tonight, and that's never something I look forward to.

Eh, I should probably just allow myself to be grouchy for a while. It's been ages since I've had a randomly pissy day, and in terms of the big picture, everything is going well. Nate and I are probably going to the beach this weekend, whether the weather cooperates with us or not (Northwest beaches are awesome in the rain anyway, although I'm the sort of person who always pushes it with wave-dodging and ends up soaked to the knees when the inevitable misjudging occurs); I got my notice of admissions from Clark, which means I can fill out my FAFSA form, apply for the border county waiver, and -- come May 8 -- register for my class; I got the CNA course brochure from PCC and I think fall or winter might end up looking good for getting my certification; the attorneys got giant food and wine gift baskets for the staff yesterday, so now I'm up to my eyeballs in cheese, truffles, and alcohol; and I think I might bake bread this Sunday, just for the hell of it.

Not too bad, really, all things considered. Now if only I could be home with a book instead of here at work...

Sweet fancy Moses, it's cold out today! Apparently, the snow level is going to drop (or has dropped, I'm not sure) to about five hundred feet, and in spite of my scarf, greatcoat and arm-warmers, I was still shivering by the time I reached the office this morning. We're only a few days away from April! This is bullshit!

On the plus side, there's cake remaining in the fridge and it's looking pretty good as a breakfast option, my workload is still pleasantly light -- not in an "oh god, I might get fired" way, but in a "most of the attorneys are still gone and the ones left don't want to work either" way -- and Nate continues to be one of my favorite people in the whole wide world. So, you know. Those things are always good.

Also, I started the second book in the Monster Island series, and it's already shaping up to be better than its predecessor. The Dark Tower series is like that for me as well -- I'm apathetic about the first book to the point of dislike, even though it's so essential for the rest of the series, but every other book is just so incredible that I can overlook the faults of the first. I'm hoping these zombie books with be similar, because hot diggity damn, I sure love me some zombies. ♥

Doomsday? Is one of the most cracked-out movies I've ever seen. It's INSANE. It's a giant, giddy, sprawling mess of a movie that steals liberally from pretty much every other post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian film already made, but it's so much FUN that I didn't give a damn. It has everything you could ever want in a movie: gun fights, car chases, proper action and shit cannibals, deadly plagues, Mad Max villains, boobs, fist fights, tanks, knights, a dystopian government, bad-ass technology, anarchy and chaos, every British accent imaginable...

At one point -- I'm not sure which, but it might've been when the leader of the cannibalistic Road Warrior ripoffs was dancing spastically across a stage to the tune of the Fine Young Cannibals' "Good Thing" -- I leaned over to Nate and gleefully whispered, "This is the best movie ever."

He grinned at me, wide-eyed and ecstatic, and said, "IT TOTALLY IS!"

And then the heroine got into a sword fight with a hot tattooed chick, and we both made this face for the rest of the movie: 8D!!!

It's funny -- most of the reviews I've seen have been negative, because critics generally hate giant, silly, cracked-out movies that make no fucking sense and rip off everything else in the genre. I, however, maintain that this is exactly why it's awesome. Doomsday is a movie that exists for the sheer love of the sci-fi dystopia, and I fully expect that it's going to end up as a cult movie once it's gone to DVD and people rediscover it lurking there in the shelves. No, the film doesn't make any sense -- afterward, I was trying to figure out where all the gasoline came from for the cars, and my head started to hurt a little -- but it's not the sort of movie that's supposed to make sense. You see it for the cannibals and the fifteen minute long car chase with a Bentley and motorcycles decked out with skeletons, for Malcolm McDowell as the insane leader of a neo-medieval society, for the dudes with mohawks dressed in fetish gear. You see it because it's gloriously over-the-top and doesn't take itself seriously at all, and there's something wonderful and refreshing about that.

I suspect it's one of those "love it or hate it" movies. I love things like Reign of Fire and Army of Darkness and Mad Max, so it would've taken an act of God for me to hate Doomsday. Hee.

P.S. Happy Easter, everyone!

The problem with weekends is that by the time they arrive, I'm usually so worn out by the rest of the week that all I want to do is hang out in my pajamas, drink coffee, and read until three in the afternoon, at which point I grudgingly get ready and spend the rest of my day...hanging out in my jeans, drinking coffee, and reading.

I live such an exciting life.

Anyway, Friday night was In Bruges, which I loved. LOVED. I'm going to try to be more on the ball about posting reviews (I have a folder of half-finished ones on my desktop -- way to be on task, self), but suffice to say, the movie really isn't what the previews imply. It's not an action-fest, and it's not really a black comedy -- it's a dark, sad movie with some wickedly funny sections, and it definitely brings something new to the "British gangster" genre. So much love for In Bruges.

Of course, the actual filmgoing experience left something to be desired, but that's because people are obnoxious.

See, they oversold on seats. I'm not sure how they managed to do this, since we all bought tickets in advance, and they kept insisting at the door that they didn't oversell, but that was very clearly what happened. I arrived early, but almost didn't make it in -- they let the people in front of me in, and then stopped the rest of us so they could get things inside the theater figured out. Which was fine and all, because I was there by myself and knew that if a single seat opened up -- almost a guarantee, once they get everyone to scootch in towards the middle -- I would be able to get it since I was next in line.

Then this stupid hipster couple pushed in front of me, ignored my protests, and did their very best to be horrible, conniving little seat-stealers. However. One of the volunteers asked for single folks, I flailed like the dickens ("me! me! PICK ME!") and was promptly led to a seat. The line-cutting hipsters? Got split up. She got a seat, he didn't, and she ended up leaving in disgust when no one was willing to give up their hard-earned seat so they could sit together.

HA! That's what you get for being rude and cutting in line!  And being a hipster!

After that, everything went more smoothly, except for the two older women next to me who felt compelled to discuss every fucking aspect of the movie while it was onscreen. Why do people do this? Seriously, WHY? "Oh, he's going into the cathedral now." For crying out loud, WE KNOW! IT'S ONSCREEN RIGHT NOW! And every time something violent happened -- and this is a movie about gangsters, mind, so no matter how genre-bendy it gets, you know violent things are going to happen at some point -- they commented on it.

Every. Fucking. Time.

Ladies: "Oh, how horrible." "Well, I don't see why he had to do that." "Oh my, this is just awful."

Me: *quiet, seething rage*

I...don't understand this. I mean, I really don't. You deliberately go to a movie with gangsters in it...and then complain about the violence? The hell? I don't know. My best guess is that they didn't read anything about it ahead of time, and thought it was about, I don't know, sightseeing. In Bruges. Or something.

To conclude: Ralph Fiennes is hot, Colin Farrell is a surprisingly good actor, Brendan Gleeson just needs to be given a leading role already, because...damn, and line cutters will always get what's coming to them.  :P

I want to write a fantasy novel about a pregnant lady going off to rescue her husband, because he's been kidnapped by monsters or pirates or something. And since no one else is around to take care of their other three kids, she drags them along too. The older kid looks out for the younger ones, they have all sorts of crazy adventures, and instead of fighting shit (on account on being pregnant and whatnot), the mom has to use her smarts to keep them out of trouble. And in the end, they kick all sorts of ass, rescue the husband, and save the day. It'd be awesome.

I think I'm tired of novels where the family unit is treated like a bad thing. OMG, the hero or heroine's parents are, like, soooooo unfair, so he or she runs away to have AWESOME ADVENTURES. SANS FAMILY. Or the family is killed off to provide a tragic backstory. Or sibling rivalry leads the villian to get all butthurt and turn to the dark side. You hardly ever see pregnant heroines, and women are either supposed to stay at home and be domestic, or they get to go out and wear chainmail and seduce barbarian warlords or...whatever. They never get to be domestic and kick ass, which is sad when you think about it. Having a family shouldn't preclude a character from being an ass-kicking heroine, or vice versa.

As always, Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels do a fairly good job of avoiding this issue, but I can't think of too many other books that do. If anyone can think of any, let me know. I'll be over here writing about a little pregnant lady angrily scolding a would-be bandit after her 11-year-old daughter beaned him upside the head with a skillet.

( So...that Vicodin stuff. )

Okay. Enough of that.

Lately, the firm has been sending me out to these little technology seminars being given at various other law firms around town. I'm not sure why I'm the person they decided to start sending to these things, but I'm certainly not complaining. It gets me out of the office for one to three hours, I'm learning some interesting things about hardware and software trends, and I get to write memos about the seminars when I get back.

Memos! MEMOS! :D

I realize my genuine delight in memo-writing unequivocally labels me the dorkiest dork in Dorksville, but honestly...I'm the kind of person who loves to take notes, and I'm the kind of person who loves making lists. These memos? Are my notes distilled into list form. FUCKING A. I LOVE THAT SHIT. I can geek out to my heart's content and gleefully blather on about how hardware/software use differs depending on the firm size, and I can look at how change theory affects things, and examine the potential impact on our firm, and while there are only two people here who honestly give a shit...they're the ones sending me to these seminars. So. It all works out!

So I haven't quite figured out what I'm doing when it comes to the tablet, but...whatever. Have some works-in-progress!

( Susan Sto-Helit )

( Cartman )

( Kenny and the Death of Rats )

And that's it! Everything else is too fugly to post. XD

I hung out with my folks last night, and this morning we went out to see where the tornado hit the other day. It's so fucking surreal. I mean, it touched down less than five minutes from my parents' house, and it threw grocery carts across the street at the Winco I used to do my groceries at. I'm glad no one was hurt by the whole thing, but I'm still astonished that tornados in Washington are basically like earthquakes -- they happen all the damn time, but they're usually so small or in a remote enough area that no one thinks anything of it. The things I learn.

This is unrelated, but...The Road, by Cormac McCarthy? Is incredible so far. I've been wanting to read his stuff for a while, but I'd heard mixed things about his writing style, which is one of those that's very different and therefore polarizing. It took me a few pages to get used to the lack of quotation marks, and for a while I felt like someone had given him a very small box of commas to work with -- hence all the fragments, and the clauses strung together with various conjunctions -- but now that I've settled into it? DAMN. The guy's good. Quirks that would annoy the crap out of me with lesser writers end up serving the story in this case, and I suspect I'm going to finish the book tonight, because I desperately need to find out what happens to these two characters. Given the kind of world the story's set in, I'm worried the outcome isn't going to be a pleasant one. My heart is already clenching up in self-defense.

Man. MS Word really has a hate-on for dinosaur names. It also doesn't like that I'm doing the Orwellian Newspeak thing and smooshing certain words together. Cheer up, MS Word! It's not the end of the world because you don't like the word "pachycephalosaur."

Today was one of those obnoxious days where I was incredibly busy, but not on anything interesting. I miss the days when the thought of being busy and bored at the same time was a wholly foreign concept. Also, I kept thinking it was a Wednesday, which was mildly depressing. Every time I realized it was actually Monday, my soul died a little. Not a lot, mind you, but...a little.

Although...Monday night is almost Tuesday, and Tuesday is just next door to Wednesday, so...hooray, almost!

Oh, the things I tell myself to get through the week. Hee.

This has nothing to do with anything, but the song "America...Fuck Yeah!" has been stuck in my head for hours now, and it's driving me slowly insane. *weeps*

The headache opted to stick around another day, but it's not nearly as bad -- tylenol seems to affect it now, and I was actually able to do stuff today, as opposed to the laying around and feeling sorry for myself I did yesterday. The vast majority of my day was spent reading and watching movies, and then I dinked around with my tablet for a while, trying (and failing!) to remember how I used to color things in Photoshop. Man alive, am I rusty. XD I'm finally getting the hang of sketching in the computer again, so I figure the other stuff will come with time. I hope. Heh.

As for right now, I think I'm going to write -- I joined novel_in_90 a few days ago, which is a wonderful little community that I totally recommend for anyone working on a book at the moment -- and after that, I'll...I don't know. Read, probably. Watch old South Park episodes online.

Hee, my life is so boring. So wonderfully, peacefully boring. *happy sigh*

Haha. Apparently, I've turned into Rincewind. Go me. XD