just one reisen

Friday, oct. 21, 2005   |   0 comments

Unemployment sure seems to have slowed my pace. For instance, I just ate the very best microwaved egg + cheddar + english muffin + hotsauce sandwich possible ever? And I am completely done for the day, all I want to do is crawl right back into bed (which wouldn’t be too far a leap as I’m still wearing my pajamas at half-past noon). Yesterday the only thing I did all day was get my teeth cleaned. The day before that, I…wait, I can’t remember what I did. Oh! I didn’t do anything! Because I thought I needed a day off.

Also I am watching the very, very worst movies ever made: anything I’d be unable to get someone else to watch with me, I’m now watching alone. For example: Cody Banks. Also: Princess Diaries Two: Royal Engagement!

Anyway, despite my fatigue, there’ll be no rest for the weary today: big events loom! For one, my perfect bag is due to arrive today, I hope, and I hop, and I hope! Also my overpriced but be-wheeled and also motivationally cute (and when it comes to filing, I need plenty of motivation) filing cabinet has arrived, so now, sadly, I can officially start filing away all the strange pieces of paper that keep arriving in the mail (bills or statements or whatever), which heretofore I’ve just been throwing into a dumpy cardboard box (I hope my mother doesn’t read this). Also, I have a recap to finish — I’m only on page eleven, so you know…miles and miles to go yet! (Oh my god.) And then: camping this weekend! So, you see, I am very, very busy. Chip, chop! Oh but before I forget:

A few weeks ago, when Jill, Marco, and I were making a mad dash to go see Tootsie in Dolores Park with Jeff and Caroleen.com, I was STARVING so I flew into Safeway and bought a banana and also a huge bag of Reisen chocolate chews. As we waited for BART, I just sat there furiously, frantically throwing Reisens into my mouth, and gleefully chewing, chewing, chewing them up good. When all of a sudden: SCREECH! I bit the live-long DAY out of my tongue. It was such a bad bite that I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t even move for like thirty seconds. When the shock finally wore off, I did some prodding and found, amidst all the chocolate, BLOOD! Holy shit, the terrifying PSI of my love for Reison chocolate chews is enough to draw BLOOD? Anyway, my mouth was bleeding, so I started digging around my purse, surely I had a napkin, or a receipt, or a dollar bill…something that I could use to absorb the blood? Yet all I had were tampons. Digging, digging…wait a second: I need to absorb blood and all I have are tampons. Something about this equation makes a mad kind of sense! Sure, even I know that stuffing a tampon in your mouth in a public place is, how do you say, off-putting. And yet, why so? It’s amazing how an object’s intended use can blind you to its other potential applications, especially if its intended use is as a nether plug. It reminds me of a slightly similar breakthrough I had one day while struggling to walk a 12-pack of toilet paper home because the handles of the plastic bag it was in weren’t…quite…long…enough to clear the top of the TP tower, so my fingers were getting all pinched and pained. And then it just occurred to me — pop! — Why not take the toilet paper rolls OUT of their plastic sheath, and just let them clump in a more rounded pile inside the bag, thereby freeing the handles to do their intended handling duty! So simple, and yet so REVOLUTIONARY. Anyway, so I discreetly unwrapped a tampon and, with the telltale string hidden in my grip, I held the fluffy, clean, absorbent cotton to my bloody tongue. And then we went and saw Tootsie! Which was even more hilarious than I oh-so-vaguely remembered: I laughed and laughed despite the pain it caused my bloody, swollen tongue!

That’s actually my new movie barometer: “Good? Why Serenity was five bloody, swollen tongues GREAT!” I really mean it, too: Serenity was that good. I know that Jill was somewhat disappointed in the movie, but I really, really loved it. Perhaps my opinion was tainted because I was so hoping the movie would do well, because my feelings for the franchise are so very strong, that in the days leading up to the movie’s release I had begun to really worry that it was going to come out and not be worth even one bloody, swollen tongue. Seriously, it got so bad that I was checking Rotten Tomatoes multiple times a day (see? unemployment is a full-time job!) just to see if the rating for the movie had posted. So when the reviews started coming in, and they were GOOD, I felt an embarrassing surge of relief, like “will the socially outcast little boy with the too-big baseball cap catch the game-ending pop-fly ball just this once, oh please, please?” And then YES! He catches it! And slowly my urine of relief darkens the seat beneath me. So, again, maybe my love of the movie was all mixed up in that profound sense of phew? Also, I agree with the critics (both pro and anti) who said the movie was made for the fans. I felt like Serenity really built on top of my pre-existing love of the characters and story. Maybe new-to-Firefliers were confused or put off, but I really enjoyed how the movie added to what the TV show had created: they all said more funny, witty things typical of their character; they continued to reveal that they were complicated, flawed beings (Captain Mal, for one, is becoming more self-preservationistic, making him both less likeable and more human); some of the people whom I dearly hoped would finally have sex actually did, some didn’t, and some DIED!; and there were some good fight scenes. All in all, well worth my (student rate) $8, yay! Though I wish they’d actually played the theme song that I so loved to hate. How hard could it be to just toss it on while the credits were rolling?

Okay, I have to start recapping, jesus christ!