Today started off bad. I woke up late, there were issues with the water in our building (this is an all too common occurrence), and a lovely hairball was waiting on me in the living room when I made it in there. It only got worse from there…

Some twat apparently decided that Diverse Universe would look better with a brick through the window last night. I mean, the moron didn’t actually make it through the double paned glass, and it looks worse now, what with the duct tape and plywood to protect it, than it did after he had his little bit of fun, but he did manage to do enough damage that repair is going to cost more than I make in a month.

(I have never understood the need for destructive vandalism. As a teenager, I won’t deny that I left my mark in a few places with the aid of a Sharpie from time to time - though now I couldn’t for the life of me explain why I needed to do that - but I never felt the need to actually cause real damage to anything. What is it that drives people to do such stupid things?)

Then there was work to do, and customers in the stores, and busy, busy, busy. The people that technically own my leased car called to inquire as to why I had not yet made the March payment. (Um, because I don’t have the money at the moment?) And with the whole running late thing, I didn’t have a chance to grab something to take for lunch today and we were too busy for me to run over to the lovely Drug Mart across the street to grab a snack, so I didn’t have anything to eat from about 12:30 till closing. Not eating for more than 8 waking hours makes me a little grumpy.

What I mean to say is that today sucked.

But then, I got home. As soon as I walked in the door, I knew something was weird. The smell of garlic permeated the air… I looked at David and said “What did you try to cook?” (A. He RARELY cooks. B. I wouldn’t think he would cook with garlic if he was going to, since he’s always complaining that I use too much garlic in my cooking. C. When he does try to cook, it usually means a big mess in the kitchen for me to clean up.)

“Um. Dinner for you. Or at least I tried to… I don’t know if it’s any good… I think it might be too garlicky.”

Sweetie, I have tried to tell you before, there is no such thing!

Anyway.

Fearing the worst, I peered into the dish. Ok, it looked alright. I took a bite. I nearly drooled on myself.

“Yum! Honey, this is wonderful! Thank you!!”

After consuming a large serving of the most wonderful garlic/olive oil/red pepper pasta (low carb pasta of course) dish I’ve had in a while, I noticed he’d cleaned up the kitchen too.

“Yeah, I made a big mess when I was making that so I had to clean it up.”

Wow… I was speechless. (Knocking me speechless is a real feat, ladies and gentlemen.) Sometimes he can really be sweet. These are the days when I start to feel guilty about occasionally plotting his demise.

Stuffed, and feeling oh so much better, I went to change into my around-the-house-clothes, and noticed the mail. Why was there a letter from my dad there?

I opened it. Cute card, we miss you, letter inside. Unfolded the letter and a check fell out. A BIG check. No, like, nearly a month’s salary big check. I - and I mean this quite literally - fell to the floor where I had but a moment before been standing and began to hyperventilate a little bit.

The timing - for both my boyfriend and my father - couldn’t have been better.

Now, the real reason I’m telling you all this is really just that I wanted to share the letter my dad enclosed. (Which I read after I’d managed to start breathing normally again.)

Dear Grown Kid, [I’m guessing they sent one of these whoppers to my step brother too]

We just wanted to give each of you a little lift today. Not expecting eternal gratitude and not trying to buy love, but thought how nice it would have been when we were younger just to get a little unexpected prosperity once in a while.

Only thing we ask in return is that you read the following paragraph, and consider that you might be getting good advice from some older souls:

Only condition for cashing this check is that whatever you do with the money, you spend at least a little having a good time. We have all kinds of wants that sometimes feel like needs, but which we deny ourselves because of what seem to be more pressing needs. Don’t neglect to give yourself something you want, for no other reason than it’s good to be good to yourself - as in all things, with something like moderation.

Night on the town would be our advice, but your old thirtysomething heads might be somewhere else; so disregard that specific advice as much as you want to.

Also be moderate about being moderate. Any virtue taken to an extreme is a vice.

With love,

Reading something like that might give you a tiny bit of insight as to why my mind works the way it does. I was raised like that. (Though, I was NOT raised with extravagant gifts of large checks. This is a new development - as we were poorer than dirt when I was growing up. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.)

Just a few hours ago I was dead tired and dragging my ass home from work. Right now I’m so hyper and jazzed up with happiness and a good dinner that I didn’t have to cook, I don’t think I’ll sleep for a few more hours.

And of course, I’ve got some product research to do. Though I know that many of you will think me crazy for wanting to spend a windfall on such an item, I’ve been talking about buying one of these for over a year, and now, I really can. (Though I haven’t yet decided on the exact model, this is the one I like best so far.)

With this, I might be able to go from a roller coaster day to actually fitting my big ass into the roller coasters at Cedar Point comfortably. (Don’t ask, you don’t want to know.)

Cartoon Network, what’s happening to you?

We used to get along so well. I’ve always loved you so, and you - in your own way - showed me love in return. But, you’ve changed. I’m writing this open letter to you to try and save our relationship, a relationship that means a lot to me.

I can well remember the first time I laid eyes on you. As a lifelong cartoon fan, I was in heaven to find such compatibility, and though I’m sure you had no idea I existed, you made me very happy. Those heady days when I was falling in love with you are peppered with fond memories of 2 Stupid Dogs, Cow & Chicken, Dexter’s Lab, I Am Weasel, and the late night joy of Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Over the years you’ve given me so much to love, what with Sheep in the Big City, Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, The Justice League, Duck Dodgers, Camp Lazlo, Time Squad, and of course the beautiful brilliance that is Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. When you presented me with a diamond in the form of Adult Swim, that cemented my devotion. Though I still miss the weirdness that was Oh Canada at times, the strange wonders of The Brak Show, Harvey Bidrman, Home Movies, Sealab 2021, Squidbillies, Perfect Hair Forever, The Venture Brothers, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Mission Hill - not to mention the reruns of Family Guy and Futurama - have kept me happy while I battled the usual nightly bouts of insomnia.

To be fair, there have been moments where I’ve doubted my complete devotion before. You bore me from time to time with such offerings as Mike, Lu & Og, Ed, Edd & Eddy, and Whatever Happened to Robot Jones, but even with those I will still choose you over many other channels. Some of my doubts have been proven wrong over time, so I can forgive you a few boring moments here and there. I have learned to love Courage the Cowardly Dog, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Teen Titans, Codename: Kids Next Door, Tom Goes to the Mayor, Robot Chicken, Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi, and Juniper Lee. I even discovered a place in my heart for anime with the epic story of Fullmetal Alchemist. (And yes, I will admit that I’ve enjoyed InuYasha a time or two.)

As in any long term relationship, there are things about you that I feel we need to work on a bit. Whenever you’re around little kids, your mentality goes to such schmaltzy pap as Muppet Babies, Captain Planet, and Krypto The Superdog when I’m sure there are better choices out there. I realize at those times it’s not me you’re trying to reach and it’s just a quirk of your personality that you have trouble treating kids as though they have a brain, so I try to be forgiving. You have, in the past, been guilty of spending too much time with old standards like Scooby Doo, The Flinstones, and the myriad sappy Land Before Time movies. But even without my complaining to you, in the last few years these transgressions have not been so great, and since your friend Boomerang appeared on the scene, many of the old (and bad) Hanna-Barbera toons have stayed at his place instead. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from some betrayals completely - Totally Spies, Super Milk-Chan and 12 Oz. Mouse come to mind - but I’ve always felt that in time I could work through it.

However.

Lately there have been moments where I feel like this love affair might be coming to an end, as sad as I am to say. Recent selections for the Cartoon Theater have really rubbed me the wrong way. Small Soldiers and Dumb & Dumber are not only awful choices in a general sense - they’re not animated. How can you still call it Cartoon Theater when animation isn’t present? I have to cop to loving The Goonies - but again, it’s not animated and really has no place in our life together. And with tonight’s announcement, I fear you may have struck the final blow.

Please - for the sake of my heart - please, please, please reconsider the addition of Saved By The Bell to the Adult Swim line up. If you don’t, I honestly don’t know if I can go on loving you, and that saddens me more than you will ever understand. I will always want to be friends - but I might just start spending more time with Nicktoons. He’s a poor man’s substitute, to be sure, but Invader Zim and Angry Beavers can be enough to help ease the pain, if need be.

(Though it may be that “Saved By The Bell” is a joke - please, oh please, let it be - I still maintain that showing live action on the channel is a BAD thing overall.)

live action programming on cartoon network, saved by the bell on adult swim

** Edited a bit later to add: I am such a geek. If you are a cartoon lover like me, and you agree, please take a moment to sign my petition to Cartoon Network. Yes, I know this is not a life altering sort of thing and it shouldn’t matter that much to me, but it does. I love my cartoons.

I’ve ignored most of the holidays as they’ve come and gone, at least as far as my writing here goes. I have nothing good to say about Valentine’s Day or its bastard child, this weird “Sweetest Day” thing that’s big up here in Ohio. Since I found out my family is NOT actually Irish (as we thought we were for many years - but no, we’re Scotch) St. Patrick’s Day means nothing to me anymore. (Ok, I’ll be honest. It never really has meant anything to me. I hate beer, much less green beer, and not being a Christian - and definitely not a Catholic - I don’t have any special reverence for that St. Patrick fellow. Not that drinking green beer actually has much to do with him anyway.) Easter, aside from being the time of year that Cadbury eggs are abundant, hasn’t meant much to me since my last Easter Egg hunt at about 10 years of age. (And since I do the whole low carb nutso thing now, the Cadbury eggs are more vexing than happiness inducing, since I can’t have any.) I’ve never understood Memorial Day and Labor Day, aside from the fact that it means a lot of people are off work. (I mean, I know the reason for them, but I’ve never quite understood why it means cooking out and drinking large quantities of alcohol.) Thanksgiving has never been a big deal in my family, so I never really got into it either. Halloween used to be fun, but somewhere along the way, I just sort of lost my exuberance for it. I haven’t dressed up in a costume for Halloween since I was 16. (I really ought to think about changing that one though. Halloween’s a cool holiday.)

Most of the holidays throughout the year mean nothing more than “We’ll be dead at the store today.” or “We’ll be swamped at the store today.” or the more rare (but relished), “Wooo! I get an extra day off cause we’re closed today!”

And really, April Fools’ Day doesn’t even mean that to me. I’m working, but it’s not a holiday that really has any sort of impact on sales of porn or gift items, so we’re neither swamped nor dead, but reveling in the normal Saturday traffic. So I was planning on mostly ignoring it.

Then I was reading a couple of the lists of the creative April Fools’ jokes on the web, like the pretty spiffy WordPattern (of special note are the trackbacks on the announcement where you can’t even tell if some people are taking it seriously or not, and the actual existence of a download file… great attention to detail guys), and Google Romance, which actually isn’t as creative and well done as Google’s usual April 1 fodder. I always dig most of them - they’re good for a few laughs. But I kept finding comments from people, or links to their own blog rants, about how much of an annoyance April Fools’ Day is to them, lots of snipes at the “lameness” of certain ones, or even that April Fools’ has no place in the technology world because it apparently messes up stock markets worldwide. (I had no idea, really.)

Come ON people, LIGHTEN THE FUCK UP!

A sense of humor is really one of the best tools you can wield in the face of real life. (And, just as a personal note, it’s the one trait that can trump nearly all shortcomings when evaluating whether I like people, and wow, can it up a guy’s sexy-o-meter rating.) It’s the only thing that keeps most people sane I think, and you folks have really got to get one. April Fools’ is only one day a year (in my ideal world, something that inspires this kind of creativity would be a monthly or weekly event), and most of the intelligent people in the world (of which, admittedly, there are too few) know to expect some silliness on this day. As for the people that are actually falling for these jokes - well, all I have to say is that it became known as April FOOLS’ Day for a reason, you know?

Sorry about the pissy nature of my post on this humor holiday, but I find it very sad that people can’t let the corn cob fall out of their ass for one day and laugh a little.

To the rest of you, happy April Fools’ Day, and if you’ve found a particularly good web prank, please share. I love these things, and obviously, I could use a good laugh right about now.

Ahh, the lure of the idiot box.

In reality, I’ve never been much of a slave to the television. It’s the one category of the pop culture edition of Trvial Pursuit that can snag me (but that is the only only category that trips me up - I still remain the champ among my crowd). I know the major points, but really that’s just what I’ve picked up in conversations or from the bits I’ve read while partaking of my ritual-like reading of Entertainment Weekly¹. The trivial details mostly escape me. I just don’t watch that much TV overall.

The reason why is hard to explain actually. I just find that TV shows rarely capture my attention. Cartoons, both kiddie and adult in nature, are the biggest exception to the rule. But occasionally a TV show featuring real people (or at least real people portraying characters) will snag me. This happened with Queer As Folk (even though the last season pretty much blew chunks, I watched it all the way through), Battlestar Galactica (the latest season isn’t quite as gripping as the first season was honestly, but it’s still a good show) and most recently - as I mentioned previously - Alias. (We’re watching it all on DVD though, as I’d never been able to catch up for the broadcast.)

Alias is just brilliant to me. Every time I think I’ve got something figured out the writers reach through the screen, smack me on the head, and say, “Silly girl! There’s no WAY you could have seen that coming!” The story line is complicated and complex, it’s twisty and turny, and the setting (that being the world of intelligence, via the CIA) is ripe with deceits and ulterior motives. The background story has mystery and a bit of a riff on the nature of religion. Even the underlying love story is decently written, and while it does get a little smoochy for me sometimes, even one as jaded and cynical as I can appreciate the soul mate nature of the relationship.

All of this praise has held true through the third season. (Well, except for one cheesy little gadget moment that broke all bounds of believability… but I’ll forgive them that for the rest of the brilliance.) But we’ve just started watching the fourth season (thanks to, um, tapes that someone made…) and I have to say that I’m getting a little disappointed. The underlying stories seem to have taken a back seat to the mission driven stories, and it seems dumbed down. It’s not as complicated, not as twisty, and well, boring. The episode we watched earlier this evening (that being season 4 episode 4), despite what I think was a bit of a reference to Cat’s Cradle (my absolute favorite book in the world), really left me cold. (Which is a pretty good pun if you’re familiar with the show. Ha, ha.)

This makes me sad. I don’t know if it’s that the writers have gotten bored with the story, or if they think it needs to be simplified to attract new viewers, or if this is really all part of the bigger story and we’re just not being shown why yet… but whatever the reason, it bums me out. I’ve actually decided to wait until the fourth season DVD is officially out to watch the rest of the season now (this is also partially due to the fact that the sound synch is off in the last 15 minutes of every episode on the copies I’ve got, and while that was amusing for the first few minutes, it makes it hard to concentrate on the show), which means I still won’t be up to speed with the broadcast. (Don’t even get me started on how ridiculous it is that they’re aren’t releasing season four on DVD until *after* season five has started airing…)

And why am I writing about all this when it’s clearly quite trivial in nature?

1. This - the fact that I’ve watched three seasons (that’s 66 45-minute episodes) of Alias in about a month - has been a major player in the lack of time to write. I shall have more time on my hands now, at least until November, when I hope to get up the guts to take part in NaNoWriMo (whose site is down as I’m writing this, sadly).
2. I am lacking any real creative thought at the moment, having spent the last few days’ spare time re-writing a friend’s resumé, building a pretty little MySpace page for another friend, dealing with a scary (but really great) number of orders from the DU website, and working on our latest little project from the store (which I’ll probably talk more about later). I’m in tech geek mode, and I just needed to take a break to write *something* even if it was about something as lame as TV.
3. Dan, bless his soul, has got to be very tired of hearing me ramble about Alias by this point. Even though while I was writing this I recieved a note from him that season four does get better in response to my earlier message about not liking the first episode, I feel like I’ve driven him nuts with my relentless Alias dissection over the last month, so I decided to vent some of my frustration here.

I promise to write of things that mean a little more soon. Or at least regale you with tales of debauchery from my youth.

¹ I religiously read nearly every word of Entertainment Weekly every week. I’ve had a subscription for about 5 years, barring a few weeks here and there when I’ve let it lapse due to lack of funds. And here’s where I reveal details of my ritual that only a few have been privvy to till now: I read it, cover to cover, in order (I don’t flip through - I read first page to last page, though I do occasionally skip over stories when it’s something I don’t care about the first time through but I do go back and read them eventually), leaving the magazine turned to the page I was on when I left it, and it stays in the bathroom until I’m done. I’m not normally very OCD about things, but this is one that I am. If the magazine is removed, or my boyfriend inadvertantly leaves it open to a page other than the one *I* left it one, I’m liable to explode. I really lose it when he reads ahead and tells me about something he read that I have gotten to yet. And no, I don’t know why I’m so psycho about this. I just am.

After a busy day at the store that left me feeling like I’d been run over by a semi followed by a necessary grocery shopping stop to pick up some essentials, I didn’t want to do much when I got home. My darling boyfriend cooked up some dinner for me (begrudgingly, to be sure, but hey, he offered) and I sat down to completely veg out in front of the TV. He had turned it to the movie Monster, and rather than muster up the energy to change the channel, that’s what I watched. Well, ok, I did kind of want to see it a little, seeing as I’d heard mostly good things about it.

After watching it though, I have to say I don’t understand why this movie was so critically acclaimed. As just a movie by itself, it’s a manipulative film with one dimensional characters and no real entertainment value, unless you just like watching movies that make you feel like you’re superior compared to the pitiable characters. As a portrayal of a real life story, it’s pure crap.

SPOILER ALERT - but geez, if you haven’t seen it yet, do you care? No, of course not, so keep reading.

Even if I knew nothing more about the story of Aileen Wuornos I would immediately recognize this movie for exactly what it is: an attempt to explain why a woman would become a serial killer (as though it is a territory only meant for men), and in turn inspire sympathy for her. Wuornos is portrayed as a basically good person at heart who is a victim of a cold and cruel world and is left with no other choice than to murder really creepy men.

This is but one example of the pure manipulative nature of the film (though there are plenty more): At one point Wuornos decides to “go straight”, to find a job more respectable than turning tricks on the highway. In presenting her plan to her girlfriend, she babbles on about wanting to be a veterinarian, or even President of the United States, though she has no education or skills that don’t involve sexual favors. Though what we should be thinking at this point is “Hey, um, she’s got no grasp on reality at all!”, what the scene leaves you with is a sense that she’s just sort of psyching herself out… getting ready to really give it an honest go. So she goes job hunting. After a few rejections (in a montage that is calculated to appeal to your own experiences in rejection) she is shown in a lawyer’s office, where she’s applied for a position as a legal secretary with no education, no experience, no typing skills, and hell, no resume. Again, what this sort of situation would normally lead to is a clear picture of the disconnection between her fantasy land and the real world. Instead, we’re presented with an uber-prick of a lawyer who dehumanizes and ridicules her, and suddenly, we’re supposed to feel bad for her. Because he was a jerk about it, we’re supposed to see this job hunting experience as a completely demoralizing process that forced her back into hooking.

Again and again events similar to this unfold in the movie, and ultimately we’re led to believe that Aileen Wuornos was just a poor victim of circumstance who was forced to kill all of these men to survive. I’m usually able to suspend disbelief long enough to watch a movie, but this was really unbelievable even as a fictional tale.

As a movie that’s based on a true story… well, they’re stretching the idea of “based on a true story” pretty thin here. Aileen Wuornos did have a hard life - that much I’ll grant - but she was, by a great majority of accounts, not a good person. Her very real turpitude may have been nurtured by her lot in life as an abandoned and possibly molested child, but as an adult she was said to be a schemer and a manipulator (one thing the movie does actually have in common with the true life story, I suppose) and seemed to know full well what she was doing.

The movie shows the first couple murders as nearly justifiable homicide: a man who beat and raped her who she killed in self defense¹ and another pervert who asked her to call him Daddy while he fucked her, seemingly because he was a child molester which gave her enough reason to shoot him several times. She’s shown later letting a few men off the hook, because they’re basically good guys who happened to pick up a hooker, and finally we’re shown her pure anguish over killing a man she didn’t want to because she was under pressure to get a car. This all basically comes off as fiction when you know that not only has it been said that Aileen Wuornos craved fame by whatever means necessary, but that she actually admitted to killing these men in cold blood in the latter days of her life.

As well, her girlfriend is portrayed as some poor, dumb, confused hick of a girl who knew nothing of Wuornos’ activities until nearly the end, when in reality she knew all along and stayed with Wuornos anyway. Tyria Moore (inexplicably renamed Selby in the movie) testified that Wuornos came home after killing her first victim and plainly stated that she had killed a man that day. Moore was never charged in the murders, as Wuornos took full responsibility (and I’m sure Moore’s cooperation with the investigation helped her avoid accomplice charges), but it would be a challenge to look upon her as a fully innocent bystander.

The true story of Aileen Wuornos (and Tyria Moore) is fascinating as a study of depravity to be sure, but not for the reasons the movie would lead you to believe.

And on a shallower note, why did Charlize Theron win an Oscar for this role? She gained a few pounds and donned a few prostheses that made her ugly. Ok, so, the special effects were good. Honestly though, there was never a moment where I really felt like she completely shed the bubbly blond underneath, and aside from using some bad grammar to convey that she was a redneck, in my opinion she wasn’t overly convincing as a poor ugly woman led to a life of crime.

I gain a few pounds and make myself look ugly (albeit unintentionally and without the aid of a prosthesis) on a regular basis, but no one gives me awards for that. Maybe I’m just bitter because I can’t clean up as well as she did after she was done with the role.

¹ Though it was revealed later that her first victim had been in trouble for abusing a woman as a juvenile, her account of the circumstances surrounding his murder was a story that changed over time. It is likely that he was at least a violent “John”, though it is doubtful he was as brutal as shown in the movie. The ultra-violent portrayal is based upon her testimony, which contradicted both her earlier and later accounts, according to what I’ve read & seen about the case. Of course, we’ll never know the truth either way, as both parties are now deceased.

Let me me make a couple of things clear before I even get started here:

1. I do not actually live in or work in the city of Cleveland, but living and working in Lakewood is very close, and I would be affected by the addition of a Wal-Mart as much as the residents of Cleveland.

2. I am not very good at expressing my politically charged opinions. This is because I am not always well informed when it comes to the things I feel strongly about, yet, like a good American, I still feel strongly about them.

Ok, I’m not quite that bad, but I do tend to go with my gut or instinct on some things, and I can’t always express why I feel the way I do without sounding like I’m completely uninformed. This is one of the reasons I tend to avoid political topics on my blog.

However, I feel like I need to say something about the impending doom that is coming to Cleveland in the guise of a Wal-Mart store as part of the Steelyard Commons project, despite the fact that I likely do not know half the story.

I do not know much about the whole local deal that was done to get the Wal-Mart to come to town, but apparently there was a bit of backroom politics played and a lot of people are very upset about that. I find it disturbing, and irritating, but it seems as though backroom politics is the name of the game these days, and I don’t have enough information to argue that particular point. If what I’ve read in other places is true, I do think it stinks, but I just don’t know enough of the facts.

What I do know is this: I do not like Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart uses their powers for evil, near as I can tell. I have been told that that’s the way business goes when I’ve presented my arguments, but I have issues with business being that way in general. (Thus my giving up the corporate life to do something different.) I think they are hard on small businesses - both retail and manufacturing - to the detriment of our way of life. Yes, you can buy things at Wal-Mart cheaper than anywhere else, but what’s the real cost?

I know of a small manufacturer that was dealing nearly exclusively with Wal-Mart when they wanted to break into the market. Their product was retailing for $0.96 in Wal-Mart stores, and Wally World was one of the few places you could find said product. Not long ago, they finally decided to make their wholesale business available to other small businesses, and I talked to them about buying the product for our stores. I found that their regular wholesale price was higher than the retail price Wal-Mart was using, meaning they were supplying their product to Wal-Mart for a much lower wholesale cost. (The average markup in retail is twice the cost, so I’m estimating that Wal-Mart was paying around $0.50 a piece.) I can’t imagine this company was making any money on the product they were selling to Wal-Mart; in fact, I’d venture they were probably losing money on the deal. I happen to know that they have since stopped selling to Wal-Mart, and the fellow I spoke with at the company hinted that it was because Wal-Mart tried to negotiate an even lower wholesale cost, which I’m guessing would have put this small business under. But not having their product available in the nation’s largest retailer is hurting them too.

They can’t win.

(more…)

Why do I watch Queer As Folk? The show makes me groan out loud at least 5 times per show, and that’s not because of the gratuitous sex scenes and full frontal male nudity. (I’m not complaining about those, mind you, but I do think they make my boyfriend a tad uncomfortable when we’re watching it.) No, the groaning sounds are due to the fact that there’s so much cheese in the dialogue it makes me want some tortilla chips to go with it. Pour that cheese sauce on top of the most predictable story lines in the history of television and the one dimensional characters (or is that caricatures?), and really, what you have is the makings of the worst show on TV.

Yet, I still love it. I truly do. And I’m terribly sad this is the last season of the show. I will really miss it when it’s all over.

The new season started tonight, and there’s been no improvement, yet I was still glued to the TV for every second of it, both episodes. I can barely wait until next week to find out what’s going to happen to my boys and girls in Pittsburgh, even though I already know full well what’s coming. You know, that whole predictability thing.

As an aside though, someone get Lindsay (Thea Gill) a sandwich, will ya? She looks like she hasn’t eaten since filming stopped for the last season. What is it with these actresses that look perfectly fine suddenly losing a bunch of weight? She was perfectly gorgeous before… now she just looks gaunt.

Anyway, tonight was pure mindless entertainment night, since we went to see Revenge of the Sith earlier in the evening. I know you’re all dying to know what I thought of it, so here’s the official FruitFly review: Eh, it didn’t completely suck.

I definitely don’t think it was nearly as awful as Anthony Lane made it out to be in his scathing review in the New Yorker, but I do love this quote from it:

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

I’m a pretty easygoing kind of person. To all except those who know me best, I seem to be eternally happy. One of our regular customers even commented on this one night. “You are always laughing when I come in here… you are always in a good mood!” He looked at me sort of strangely when he said this, as though this made me some sort of mutant freak. I asked him if being happy all the time was a bad thing. “No, no, I just find it interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone as happy as you seem to be, except those under a chemical persuasion.” I laughed (of course!) and assured him it’s all natural. I’ve always been this way, without the influence of recreational drugs or alcohol. I’ve been known to laugh too much, if there is such a thing.

The truth is, of course, I’m just like everyone else. I get moody, I have moments where I’m not in such a great mood, and I get mildly depressed from time to time. The only people who really see this part of me though are those that are closest to me. For some reason those are the only people I feel comfortable showing my moodiness to. I’m generally nice all the time to everyone else, even when I don’t really feel like being nice, and I laugh a lot. (Mind you, that could be just because I’m very easily amused.)

But sometimes… sometimes other people cross a line. Sometimes the anger and hatred that other people display spills over and pollutes me. At these times I have a very hard time controlling myself and maintaining my happy-go-lucky attitude. In fact, I generally can’t control myself. It just erupts. When that happens, these people are in for far more than they bargained for, especially if they affect me personally.

I have actually been in several physical altercations due to this defect in character. All three instances of me completely losing my cool were at general admission concerts. All three fights were with men; men who could not respect my space and who bullied me and those around me. In the first two instances, I was literally knocked to the ground by assholes who decided I would be the person who should move out of their way, even if they had to forcefully move me, so that they could be in the front. Both of them were later escorted (one of them had to be supported a little as he walked) out of the venue by security, with more than a few bruises and scrapes after my wrath was unleashed, while I was just told to settle down and left to watch the rest of the show. (It helped that I knew most of the security guards at most of the shows I went to back then.) The third fool was a mosher (at a PLACEBO concert for chrissakes) who decided to rip my glasses off of my face in retaliation for me yelling at him to stop being an asshole. I blinked once and let loose. He was only able to stagger away after the people around me (who were just as through with him as I was) finally decided he’d had enough and restrained me from pummeling him further. (And I had to put my glasses back together with Superglue later in the evening, since they were trampled in the melee.)

I’m not proud of this really - I honestly think violence is an awful way to handle things - but in all three situations I found myself in a blind rage that knew no limits.

In every day situations, I sometimes find myself boiling over. Thankfully this hasn’t led to violence outside of a concert (yet), only verbal exchanges. Almost every time that this has happened, it has been because someone full of anger but lacking in brains is bullying someone else who is either not in a position to defend themselves or won’t. There is just something about bullies that raises my blood pressure and adrenaline, and I’m unable to stand by and watch it happen without saying something. There’s probably some deep-seated psychological trigger for my loss of control; maybe it stems from the fact that I was bullied quite a bit as a young girl, before I learned not to fear the bullies. (Though sometimes simple egregious discourtesy will push me over the edge too, as in the case of the prissy bitches at The Bravery’s show.)

I’ll provide you with an example, just to illustrate my point.

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My boyfriend and I met through the Yahoo! Personals. We hit it off immediately, and neither one of us actually even went on another date with anyone else after we met. That was four years ago, and I plan to be around to nag him for a while yet, so I guess you could say we are a personals success story. But it’s not a course of action for the faint of heart; I had to go through a LOT of losers to get to my man.

The truth is, I love the personals. I love the concept of being able to get to know someone before you meet them, and I love reading through ads, even when I’m not really looking. I loved that rush that came with reading a personal ad that seemed to connect, though those were usually few and far between. I first fell for them before I was even supposed to be using them, though we didn’t have the big fancy Internet back then. No, personal ads were found in the back of Creative Loafing, the weekly alt rag in Charlotte. My friends and I read through the ads every week. They were a big joke to us for the most part, but occasionally I’d see one that sounded interesting. I’d never call them because that would require calling a 900 number, and being a teenager meant not getting to do things like that without unwanted parental scrutiny. But placing an ad was completely free, as was retrieving the messages left for your ad. So, at the tender age of 17, while still a senior in high school, I spent a few minutes whipping one up and mailed it in.

I don’t actually remember most of the messages that were left for me in the first few weeks of the run, but I know I wasn’t inspired to call any of them back. The last week that the ad would run though, I got a message from a guy who sounded sort of interesting and lacked the redneck accent. He said he was a musician / recording studio engineer, and that he was new in town. Something about his message struck me, and I called him.

His name was Pat. He was much older than me - in his mid-to-late 30’s at the time if I remember correctly. I fessed up to my underage status fairly quickly when talking to him, and we both concluded that dating would not be an option with the age difference. But we connected, if only as friends. We talked on the phone nearly every night for several months, discussing everything you can possibly think of at some point or another. We made plans to meet a couple of times, but somehow, the plans fell through every time. (To be fair, sometimes it was my fault, sometimes it was his.) Around the time I graduated from high school, he had to leave town suddenly, some family emergency I believe, and I didn’t hear from him for a while. Over the next year or so, I would occasionally get a call from him. Sometimes he claimed he was on the road with some musician or another (never anyone really cool), sometimes he said he was out of town working in some recording studio, but Pat was never in Charlotte when he called. To this day I don’t know if he was telling the truth about anything he told me, but it didn’t really matter. He was interesting, and he entertained me for a while, though we never did meet in person.

And that was how I got hooked to meeting people through personal ads. I figured if I could meet one interesting person, or at least talk to one on the phone, I could probably meet more. I ran a number of ads in Creative Loafing over the years, eventually ditching them for the Internet based ads later. I’ve met a lot of guys through ads - even a straight girl once who just liked my ad - some of the experiences good, some of the experiences plain awful.

Though there are lots of good stories to tell resulting from running these ads, but for now we will start at the beginning.

The first date.

I didn’t actually meet anyone that responded to the first couple of ads that I ran. Most of them were boring enough on the phone so I didn’t need to meet them in person to know I didn’t want to date them. Hell, most of them I didn’t even call back. The first guy that I did meet in person, who went by the name of Todd, almost made me want to re-think the whole personals strategy.

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I have actually permanently lost some of my hearing due to many, many years of standing far too close to speaker stacks at concerts. I am quite aware of this and it has the impact of making me look a bit like a dumbass quite frequently, as I have to say “Huh?” or “What?” a lot. I can’t hear people very well if I can’t see them speaking. Do NOT walk in front of me while talking and expect me to know what the hell you just said. I generally watch the TV on a higher volume than most people, and I like to have the captions turned on when possible. It’s kind of annoying, and I do sometimes wish I’d been more careful when I was younger.

Still, I always forget to get earplugs to wear at concerts. And wooooooooooo… could I have used them tonight.

The opening act, alaska!, wasn’t horrid, but was just sort of… average. (And yes, they are apparently called ‘alaska!’, exclamation point and all.) The singer/guitarist seemed hellbent on making sure we knew he was a weirdo, the bassist tried very hard to come off as cool (and soundly failed), and the chick drummer seemed altogether nonchalant about the whole affair. The stage banter was mostly a string of non sequiturs and lame drug references. That part was entertaining, if only in the head-shaking, ‘WTF?’ sense. If the music had been interesting enough to pay attention while they were playing, it would have made for a good show. In doing a little research (even when I’m not terribly impressed by a band I end up researching them) I found that they were an opening act for Elliott Smith a time or two. This actually makes perfect sense, as I saw Elliott Smith many times, and only twice did I really enjoy the opening act (Grandaddy and Rilo Kiley). The others were all forgettable, average rock bands, something made all the more obvious when having them share the stage with someone as luminary as Elliott Smith.

They were quite loud though.

The Bravery… well, The Bravery rocked the house. High energy, tight sound… and good showmanship, if I can use such a nerdy descriptor of a rock show. Though I’m not sure if anyone else in the band did much because the lead singer (Dan’s boyfriend Sam) has this amazing stage presence that I found riveting and I was unable to watch anything other than him. It doesn’t hurt that he’s incredibly hot; his pictures simply do not do him justice. (Hey, I can be as shallow as everyone else sometimes. Shut up.)

I watched him all night and ignored everyone else. Except for the annoying little twats in front of us who found it necessary to drukenly flail about in an attempt at dancing, thus making it physically impossible to ignore them. There was a small altercation at the end of The Bravery’s set that involved those little prissy girls and me, though I will not bore you with all the details. It would just sound childish and petty if I tried to relate the story, mostly because it was childish and petty, and it’s probably the sort of thing I shouldn’t be involved in as a responsible 30 year old. It was entertaining to be a part of though, and I got to exercise my smart-assedness a bit more than I usually do. It wasn’t a terribly proud moment for me, even if I do take some comfort in the fact that their good time was dampened a bit, since they sapped some of the fun out of my good time.
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