Monkey Thoughts

I don't know why I do certain things- certain things that I know I dislike or make me uncomfortable. For example, there's my need to continue to smell something bad. I also try to force this on unsuspecting bystanders with a friendly "Oh my god, this smells disgusting. Here, smell this!" It's like I mentally try to dissect how something could possibly smell so bad.
But it's not a bad smell that has me in a fix tonight. It's the film Elephant. I freaking hate this movie. I loathe it. Despise it. And yet, every damn time it's on, I force myself to sit through it. Some of the scenes are excruciatingly laborious that it's not unlike sitting through a root canal. I just want it to be over, but I can't get up and walk away. Worst of all, I'm trying to figure out why oh why this has 3 damn stars according to my cable provider, not to mention how it won the Palme d'Or. I'm going to attribute all of it to the subject matter and not on the merits of the actual film. It can't possibly be the film.

Eastern Promises
My brother says this movie should be called Viggo Promises (to show you his balls). I'm inclined to agree. My only issue is that I never figured out where the hell they were located. I figured some place in Russia, but there was a ridiculous amount of British people there. Maybe England, but then the issue I just mentioned is reversed. I should probably look it up. I just don't feel like it.

30 Days of Night
I forgot this was out and put Grizzly Man on my Netflix first. Haven't watched that yet since I managed to forget where I put it in the whole 3 days I've had it, so we picked this up at Blockbuster. Damn fine vampire movie. Still would like to read the graphic novel. Gory, scary, and perplexing as to why there was not one, but two vampires that looked like Marilyn Manson. Remind me never to move to the northern tips of the hemisphere - unless there is a zombie invasion. Pretty sure the cold would slow them down.

Dan in Real Life
Cute little film. Had some absolutely hilarious moments. Also had an actress that I was trying to figure out where I had seen her before. I finally narrowed it down to "She was on a sitcom about a dude who was single...and she was one of the friends." (Oddly enough, the show was "The Single Guy")

No Country for Old Men
Crazy, crazy flick. Javier Bardem is incredible, but I absolutely cannot figure out how he's a supporting actor when it seems he gets the most screen time. I dunno. But well deserving of an Oscar.

...where I should have mentioned I was playing a video game.

Me: I AM STUCK IN A STAIRWELL! AIEEE
: why are you stuck in a stairwell?
Me: Cause I can't find the door out. And I have no flashlight
: seriously?
: do you want me to call the fire dept?
Me: Well, in silent hill 2
Me: hehe
: A HOLE
Me: Call them...tell them the game lies and I can't find the door
: I thought you were really stuck
Me: lmao..i'm sorry
Me: that would be awesome though
: it's okay
: I wasn't too concerned because i figured you had your laptop
Me: WIRELESS BABY!

Twenty minutes later, I finally found the door. Another twenty mins later, I found the flashlight. Five minutes after that, I figured out how to pick up the flashlight. I am a Playstation genius I tell you.

Ever notice in movies, people driving along the road are always capable of not looking at the road? They will have their head turned to the side engaged in a conversation with their passenger and just keep driving along merrily- well, until the passenger has to say "Oh my god, lookout!" or something. Maybe it's just me, but I am so accustomed to talking with the eyes straight ahead on the road with the occasional glance towards the person, but not a long lingering stare. I can't do it. I would drive off the road, no doubt. I understand they aren't "really" driving and all. The lack of seatbelts drive me nuts too. I feel naked without a belt and cannot understand how people can do that for long periods of time.
Then again, maybe I'm the freak here. Maybe this is like the pinky situation. (I always found long pinkies disgustingly freakish. Then one day, I realize that I have shorter-than-normal pinkies, and I am the one with the freak fingers. Gave me a whole new perspective on life. Mainly that I had freak fingers.)

Once upon a time, there was an odd man who decided that he was going to camp with the grizzly bears in Alaska for months at a time. He did this for thirteen summers until the last summer, he was attacked and killed by a grizzly bear. There's irony in there, I'm sure of it.

This documentary follows the experiences of Timothy Treadwell, who may have had a screw loose or something. I mean, they're freaking grizzly bears. Besides that though, this offers a really intimate look into Treadwell's life with the said grizzly bears. Very captivating and sometimes surreal. And then there's those moments where the calm, seemingly passive bear-hugger breaks out the obscenities. Actually those moments were the most disturbing because they created such a juxtaposition of his character. Example "Hello Mr Fox. I love you Mr Fox. GIVE ME THE FUCKING HAT BACK!" Yeaaah.

There were some moments of eerie foreshadowing as Treadwell spoke about how he wouldn't die at the hands of a bear and how he figured out how to live amongst them. Gave me chills. the only issue I had with this film was that some of the non-footage scenes seemed over dramatic and not so much raw documentary.
And then there was the bear poop scene, which was unintentionally funny and disturbing and disgusting all at the same time.

And now I leave you with my favorite line from the film - "This will be the motherfucker!"

I read this bizarre article on Newsweek that described the 'rebel movement' occuring in Chile's youth. They call themselves "Pokemones", love their anime and gadgets, and entertain themselves with a little thing called public orgies. I say bizarre because to me, technophilia and anime doesn't seem to have a logical connection to public orgies in my mind, but hey...what do I know? And I realize that I'm not quite *that* old to be making comments about youth today, but what the eff? Seriously?
We used to rebel by stealing street cones or knocking over signs or sneaking out of the house and breaking curfew. Maybe some underaged drinking. But not public sex romps for spite. That's just...well how is that even effective? I predict an upsurge of STDs in Chile.

I've seen this story making the rounds on the internet, and I figured I'd weigh in too.
Basically, a 72-yr old man in Kansas was convicted of 'aggravated indecent solicitation of a child'. Part of his sentence was that he needed to post signs on his house and car identifying himself as a sex offender. Now a few years ago, I would have been like 'you're goddamn right, but this isn't nearly harsh enough', but I seemed to have shaken my vigilante-esque attitude of late that encompassed the belief of removing body parts off of offenders. I guess I began to understand that such an action, aside from being completely insane and barbaric, would not really accomplish much especially since the core of the problem does not stem from a couple of nads, but from the mental aspects. This punishment just seems..off. As I've seen other people mention, if the man is truly a danger and the judge feels people need to be warned, then lock the dude up. If not, there is no point in doing this unless the intended result was to stir up some true vigilante nuts and have them harass the guy. It's a difficult issue to be looking at, especially as a parent. I cannot honestly say that if someone harmed so much a hair on my kids' head that I wouldn't go utterly ballistic and unleash some raw animalistic maternal ass-kicking to reciprocate, because I know I would lose it completely. (I am the person that called my son's first soccer coach's wife a rather unpleasant name because she was getting a little too close to my son with her car, but in my defense I did not realize it was the coach's wife. Had I known, I would have chosen a much less controversial insult to toss her way completely behaved myself. Yeah. He didn't rejoin that team the next season. Too awkward.) I suppose it's quite easy to allow ourselves to dismiss those deemed unfit for society , dehumanize them and condemn them to a sub-standard lifestyle, but there is just something in my gut that tells me this accomplishes nothing in the long run for our society. I certainly don't want to seem like I'm sympathizing here with the 'bad guys', as I cannot possibly understand what would make a person think it was okay to do something of a sexual nature to someone who's not anywhere near sexual maturity in the physical sense. I just don't feel like this was the most effective sentence the judge could have come up with. It'll be interesting to see if it holds up.

Recently, I downloaded the Opera browser to take it for a spin. This was following my disappointment in the Safari for Windows trial a week or so ago (sadly not impressed at all). There are a few things I like about Opera, and a few things I'm missing from Firefox (mainly add ons), but a strong feature I've grown fondly of in Opera are the little widgets. There's useful stuff like a weather widget, and completely non-useful-but-pretty widgets like the lava lamp. The one I really really like is the Sim Aquarium. It's a little tank that you have to 'care for' - feed the fish, watch the water pollution, give the fish meds if they get ill. The other night, I had a moment with my Sim Aquarium that reminded me of a traumatic childhood experience. You see, I had always had fish growing up. I'm not sure what the attraction was there, but I just loved having pet fish. However, my luck with fish was just non-existent. With the first fish I got, I knelt down in my bedroom, staring at my new pet with amazement and glee. Around that very second, my youngest brother, who was in his toddler years, came walking up and managed to trip over my feet. This sent him flying forward where he subsequently cracked his head on the corner of my wooden dresser. Panicked, I ran to tell my mom what happened. After shouting up the stairs to her, I turned back around to see my brother walking up behind me, his hand smearing the massive amount of blood pouring from the gash on his forehead. That image was burned in my skull forever. Up till that point, I had no idea that head wounds bled so profusely.
But I digress from the truly traumatic fish experience I've recreated with the Sim Aquarium. At one point in my childhood, I had gotten a rather nice aquarium. I went to pick out some fish and settled on some orange and black type. The clerk asked me if I wanted 2 boys and 2 girls. This seemed like a logical set-up to me, as I was clearly not thinking of the consequences of such an action. A few weeks passed until one day, as I was peering into the aquarium, I noticed teeny tiny living things in the aquarium with my four fish. I peered closer, initially thinking it was some kind of disgusting issue that I would need to clean out the tank for. I quickly realized that what I was looking at were baby fish. It was really cool at first, but soon there were more babies, and more babies, and my 10 gallon tank was suddenly home to about 40 fish. Let me tell you, the impact 40 fish has on a simple task of cleaning the fish tank is really quite tremendous. Around this time, our family vacation began to sneak up on us. Being responsible fish owners, my mom purchased an automatic feeder for the aquarium to assure that the massive army of fish living in my bedroom were well taken care of for that week and some days of our absence. Everything was hooked up, and I was feeling confident. We left for our vacation and I didn't give it another thought. Then at some point, one of my parents decided to joke- "Wouldn't it be funny if we came home and all the fish were dead?" I'm not sure why this would be funny in retrospect, but this was no doubt what literary folks would term "dramatic irony". You see, as we returned from the trip and walked inside the house, we were met with a very sickening smell. I approached my room with a sense of dread, already knowing what I would find. Sure enough, there was an aquarium full of dead fish. At some point in the trip, the feeder had malfunctioned. The water became increasingly polluted and there was no food coming in. If you've never smelled a large vat of polluted fish water with 40 fish corpses floating about in it, consider yourself lucky. It is a vomit-inducing stench, no doubt. To this day, I still blame it on my parents for cracking the joke and dooming my fish.
And back to the Sim Aquarium. I have this horrible tendency to forget I have it running. The first night I used it, I got distracted doing other things. By the time I clicked back to the screen, my two fish had multiplied into twenty. Once again, I forgot about the program. I clicked back over in time to see that the water was polluted and my fish were dying off. I didn't learn my lesson, and forgot again. All in all, I managed to kill off a couple hundred simulated fish last night alone. As I was speaking to my mom, I mentioned 'Remember that time you guys laughed about my fish being dead and then when we came back they were? This is JUST LIKE THAT."
I am clearly not meant to own any sort of fish, real or simulated.

Sure, a New Kids on the Block reunion is unintentionally funny to think about. But I would be lying if it didn't make me giggle with girlish delight. I did, after all, dedicate a good portion of my early adolescence to collection Teen Bop posters and buttons and t-shirts all smothered with the face of Joe McIntyre. (He was way cuter than Jordan, no lies.) I remember that fateful day when I decided I would like them. Seriously, I decided to like them. All the girls at school and my best friends were on their way to becoming groupies while I absolutely detested the band. Feeling a bit more socially awkward than usual, as is the case when you're a tall, brainy 12 year old with glasses, carrying around so-called 'baby fat' and a bad spiral perm, I decided to give into peer pressure and force myself to like them. And sure enough, when I did, I ended up with more than one female friend that year. Yes, 6th grade was a great year. Then 7th sucked. And in 8th, I ended up befriending a bully that I had to deal with for the entire elementary school run and we found out that neither one of us sucked as bad as we thought each other did. In fact, we even had a nice hug at our 'graduation' as we were going to different high schools. Sigh. Memories. High school kicked some ass though. That's right, I actually enjoyed high school. Considering I had put up with bullshit for 8 years of my life, I think I was entitled to enjoying myself. I give credit to the track system my high school had, so I was no longer the 'smart girl', but a regular girl in classes with other equally smart people. Emily will totally rat me out and bring up the point that when they highlighted the "top 6%" at our graduation, I was rank 11 out of the top 11. The dumbest of the smartest. HA! There is a small part of me that thinks they made it top 6% and not top 5% just because they liked me and felt sorry for me.

This has nothing to do with the fact that NKOTB is reuniting and I would like to take this opportunity to inform my husband that should they tour and come this way, we will TOTALLY be going. MUHAHAHA!

For the memories:

This

Much thanks to Scooooot, I had the opportunity to go to HorrorHound Weekend this past Friday. If you're not in the horror/nerd circuit, this is a nice little convention with a good list of actors and other folks in the movie biz and a lot o' vendors. Scoot won some passes courtesy of the fine folks at the Night Of The Living Podcast and of course he had to take me cause I kick all the asses in the world. That's right.
I had big plans for HorrorHound. I was going to meet Tom Savini and get his autograph and maybe meet all these other people. I was excited. I was ready to go.
Then I got there. And saw Mr. Tom Savini sitting there at his table. And you know what? I could merely tiptoe in an awkward dance around his presence. I seriously got so nervous, I couldn't make eye contact, let alone speak with him. It occurred to me 'What could I, a mere lowly mortal, possibly have to say to the likes of Tom Savini?' There was nothing I could come up with that wouldn't reek of lameness, not even "omg, I am such a big fan of your work" cause I'm sure that was coming out of everyone's mouth. I approached his table several times, but just couldn't get my nerve up enough to say anything.
Then there was Dante...er...Brian O'Halloran. Just sitting there...hanging out. Scoot finally got me to go up there and very nicely spoke up for my chicken self, thus resulting in a pic of me and Brian. Good stuff. While we were waiting for our turn, Scoot nudges me and says "It's Danny Trejo!" I scoffed, knowing full well Danny Trejo was not scheduled until Satur...omg it's Danny f***ing Trejo! Scoot insisted on walking up to get his picture taken with Danny, despite my desperate pleas of "Don't do it! I've seen him in movies! He can totally kick your ass!" I'm happy to say Scoot got his picture and did not get an ass kicking.
I will never live down the fact that I was scared to talk to people who purposely showed up to a convention for autographs and fan pictures, but hey, it's just one of the many things that make me the nutcase that I am.

I did get a sweet pic of Bill Mosley, Danny Trejo, and Tom Savini:

Booya!

The problem with being a cat owner is that they don't really make a lot of cutesy outfits to dress your cat up with. There's a reason for that...it's because cats don't like to put up with that kind of shenanigans.
I did happen to come across some 'hats' designed for cats and I had to get them. It was a totally useless impulse buy- seriously, what do I NEED cat hats for?
This is what happens when I put these adorable hats on my unsuspecting cats:

Pez, with a lion hat, really trying to pretend I'm not there



Sake, with a giraffe hat, plotting out my destruction