really?!

It's way past my bedtime, but this just defines my life at the moment:

I worked all night, I'm beyond exhausted, and when I go to brush my teeth there's a fucking GREEN SPIDER on the bristles of my goddamn toothbrush!!!!! Why me?!

What really gets my goat, though, is that of the trillion places in the bathroom he could have chosen to park his green ass, he had to pick the fucking brush bristles....not even the handle.

Now I'm too infuriated and tired to look for a spare brush, which probably does not exist. Bah.

That was a whole corndog!

2 days ago, my mate and I went to see Adventureland. When it was over he leaned across the armrest and said, “That’s not at all what I thought it was going to be.”

Without the benefit (or detriment, depending on your angle) of any flashy previews for this film, we weren’t sure what we were getting ourselves into. Paul was going on my word that it would be good, and I was going on Jeff Simon’s glowing review in the Buffalo News, a typically unreliable source as far as I’m concerned. But still, I had faith. And for once, praise God, I was not short changed in any way.

Adventureland is a really special movie. Instead of the bland teen-comedy my mate was clearly expecting, we were treated with a little piece of charming nostalgia.

The year is 1987, and James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) has just graduated from college. Financial difficulty forces James to put his plans to tour Europe on hold and get a summer job. The only place hiring, of course, is Adventureland, a crappy amusement park where James will learn more about life than his hefty Renaissance lit anthologies could ever teach him.

The reasons this movie works are many, but one biggie is the fact that it never resorts to irritating teen melodrama. It doesn’t pull any tasteless gags. It gives us young people in a way that they’re rarely portrayed on the big-screen: as real people. Not just poptarts looking to lose their virginity on prom night. But scared, vulnerable, vibrant kids who are figuring out life and like to smoke pot on occasion.

There is a sentimentality here that, thankfully, never gets too sticky-sweet. It’s the best sort of coming-of-age story. One that’s affectionate, delightful, and subtly funny. I left the theatre in very high spirits. And that is always a nice thing.

I still like to read

David Sedaris is not a great man. A petty, sometimes shallow, pathetic man. An out-and-out asshole, even. But without a doubt, my favorite asshole in the world.

This is just the type of cheeseball thing that Mr. Sedaris would dump on in one of his essays, but here it is – I love him because I feel very much akin to the man. I don’t, regrettably, share his enormous wit, but I do share almost every one of his snarky prejudices and his self-serving musings (a declaration that adds nothing to my credit, I know). The way he pretends to be knowledgeable about art as a teenager and is distressed when his parents become enthusiasts themselves…I get that. The way he purposefully self-eulogizes while imagining himself dead…I get that.

Probably not a good thing, to align myself with the most egotistic qualities of another, but then, we’ve all been there. If we’re honest with ourselves, I think we’d find that what’s so appealing about Sedaris’s writing is that he presents himself the way he actually thinks, the way he actually interacts with others. And ugly as it usually is, it’s the way we all think and act.

I know it came out a year ago, but I finally got around to reading Sedaris’s latest book, When You are Engulfed in Flames. I think my boyfriend wanted to chuck it right through the window after I shrieked for the 17th time: “God, David Sedaris just gets it!!! He gets everything!” He does, though. He really gets why certain things are funny, even when most of the world so easily forgets why. He makes me absolutely giddy.

This is on a wholly personal note, but I also enjoy reading about his relationship with Hugh. Strange that a male homosexual relationship should remind me of my own mate, but it does. It’s not fair to say, maybe, but there’s this cutesy grownup/child dynamic going on there with David, of course, as the huffy, sensitive adolescent-type and Hugh as the responsible mature adult who pays the utility bills on time. The way Sedaris becomes exasperated whenever sensible Hugh “rains on his parade” – it smacks of a scene in which my mate is hovered over the TV tray, his brow furrowed in deep concentration while I attempt luring him into a cuddling position.

“But why do we have to do our taxes now?”

“Because, Liz, if I don’t do your taxes now, you’ll never do them yourself.”

“So?”

The last quarter of the book, entitled The Smoking Section, follows Sedaris through his first bummed cigarette 3 decades ago all the way to his recent struggle with quitting the habit. When I saw that this struggle would take Sedaris to Japan, I smiled, knowing what good material this kooky (sorry, had to say it) country would supply for the humorist. And supply it did.

Viva la Spring

I've got to get myself back into the habit of writing everyday. It's funny - you know, I don't even always enjoy the actual process of writing. Really, I don't. It's hard and I slave over every freakin' word and it takes me over an hour to plod through a measly paragraph and then I backspace the shit out of it leaving myself with one word, if I'm lucky.

Mostly what I like is the finished product. It sounds indulgent and bigheaded of me, I know, but I get pleasure from reading some of my polished work. Oh, I wrote that, did I? How positively clever! How quaint! If that sounds dick-ish, well, I don't care.

I saw Monsters Vs. Aliens last week, and I liked it OK, but I think I mostly liked it because we saw it in Imax 3D, which was just top-notch.

I’m excited for warmer weather so I can bike like a maniac. I will just bike and bike and bike until forever. Until my lungs explode.

I also would like a tattoo. Soon, but not too soon.

Burn After Watching

They say good things come in twos, and I can’t think of a more fitting justification for this platitude than the varied body of work that is the Coen brothers’ film repertoire. Time and time again, the duo has tickled our funny bones while offering that something extra for the finicky tastes of moviegoers whose palates desire a little “oomph”.

That being said,

I hated Burn After Reading.

I mean, I really, really hated it. I hated it for much the same reasons that I hated the film Juno, though that hatred exists on an entirely different plane (don’t even get me started on Diablo Cody’s dialogue). The hype circling these two movies was such that I expected nothing less that 4-star treatment. Instead, what I got was a lot of confused plotlines and too many character names, the combination of which left me yawning to high heaven for 2 monotonous hours.

Generally, I dig quirky oddball movies, but this was just boring with a capital B. I kept waiting for it to get better. To at least match the hilarious previews with which I was bombarded all Fall. I'm lost - why did people think this movie was so great again?

The one thing I did enjoy was watching Brad Pitt rock it out as a dim-witted fitness trainer glued to his iPod. That one really got me. (always a sucker for Brad - how can you not be?)

Other than Brad though, well, this movie can go suck it.

Fiction/Poetry Update

Volume 2 Issue 3 of Sub-Lit is now live!!! You can still check out my story "Reincarnation" in their archives.

Also, these just in -

3 of my poems appear in the current issue of Clockwise Cat.

I have a short piece of fiction, "Nude," in the current issue of Mud Luscious. (scroll towards the bottom)

And lastly, my short story, "Performer's Lot" appears in the April issue of The Battered Suitcase.