Best/Worst of the '00s!

The end of the decade feels much more salient for me right now than the end of the year.  The end of 1999 seems, in that cliched way, like just yesterday--didn't we just fill up the tub with water in A&E's apartment in Inwood so we'd have drinking water when the world ended, then head out in our chunky heels and matte lipstick for Times Square, although we'd get sidetracked by some bar containing pool tables and questionable gentlemen?  Ahh, good times.  So here are some assorted Top 5 lists for the Zeros:

 

Personal Top 5

1.  Meeting Mr. TA (aww)

2.  Regular vacations with friends from college

3.  Formation of cult/urban tribe (whatever you want to call it) in DC

4.  Evolution from boring jobs to stressful jobs

5.  Getting into law school  (for law school itself, see below)

 

Top 5 Moving Pictures on Screen

1.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2.  The Wire

3.  The Big Lebowski

4.  Bridget Jones' Diary

5.  DVD commentary tracks (as a genre)

 

Top 5 Things I Hope I'll Never Have to do Again

1.  Having random roommates

2.  any Bush presidency (I'm looking at you, George P. and Jenna)

3.  Moving without paid assistance

4.  Going to Lubbock

5.  Law school

 

See you in the Tens!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twilight, a very bad movie

I took everybody's advice and did not read the Twilight books, but my curiosity about the phenomenon got the better of me, so yesterday I watched the (first) movie. 

 

Oh.My.God. it was bad.  Luckily, I found it literally laugh-out-loud bad, rather than just annoying bad.  Here is the movie:  Bella, a shy, pretty girl, moves to small town in Washington state.  She speaks only in monosyllables and generally looks surly or nauseous, but everybody immediately loves her, and she acquires a group of nice, funny friends.  All the boys in her group of friends ask her to prom, and she acts irritated and says no.  This does not upset the group dynamic, and instead the boys ask the other girls in the friend group.  Bella goes prom dress shopping with the girls but makes it clear she is uninterested in their whole silly prom thing.  She really only wanted to go so she could buy a book about Native American myths, because ...

 

Edward is a pale, cute boy who acts like he is going to vomit when Bella's in his vicinity.  She stares back, also looking like she's going to throw up.  They do not flirt; instead they act angry at each other.  He does stuff like follow her around all the time, save her life repeatedly from various perils but act pissy about it, and have very cold fingers.  She does some detective work using the aforementioned book, as follows:  she opens it to a random page, reads one caption ("The Cold One"), then Googles that, and discovers--Edward's a vampire!   She confronts him--angrily, nauseously--and he angrily and nauseously admits that he IS a vampire.  Further, for several months he's been sneaking into her bedroom at night to watch her sleep, and he has a very strong urge to kill her because her hair (or her blood? unclear) smells delicious. 

 

Now--ta da!--they're totally in love!   

 

Uh oh, now another vampire wants to follow Bella around and has a strong urge to kill her, but this is not OK because Bella is already Edward's special tasty ladyfriend.  Then more peril for Bella ensues, Edward saves her again, and Bella and Edward go to prom.  Ta da! 

 

I may spend the rest of my leisure period rewatching Buffy, to get Twilight out of my system.

Beaucoup vacation haiku

Toolstein commented on my two-day absence, and flattery will get you everywhere, so here I am. I am on Day 2 of my Lady of Leisure interlude, and so far it's pretty great. Let me tell you about it in haiku, shall I?

Getting up at ten
Is better than getting up
At seven, no doubt

Daytime yoga class
Do these people not have jobs?
Who knows. Must be nice.

DVD player
Died during first Mad Men show
It is a cruel world

Researching Blu-Ray
Is not what I want to do
But I am selfless

Maybe I should clean
Whoa, where'd the afternoon go?
It gets dark early

Tomorrow I will
Make dessert for a party
And watch Gossip Girl

Want to play hooky?
We could drink Bloody Marys
Let me know, I'm free!

Last day of work!

Today is my last day of my current job!  Which I have been at longer than I was in high school!  So far it's like any other day, except with less work to do and more papercuts from packing up boxes.  Cleaning out my office has been a little disconcerting.  I like to think of myself as an organized person--so being faced with incontrovertible evidence that, in actuality, I am a person who leaves an invoice sitting in my in-box unopened for months because I assumed it was just a copy of something I'd gotten by email, and who has dirty socks I dont even remember owning in my filing cabinet, is making me reassess my self-image a bit. 

In other news, if you are in charge of organizing an office holiday party to which you are inviting the new employees who have not yet started, please do not send an email to everyone in the department, including the new people, suggesting that the new people "reply all" with information about their favorite books, movies, etc. so that whoever has them in the "Secret Santa" exchange will know what to get for them.  Holy god.

Bad tipping will out

Many years ago I read someplace that Tiger Woods was a bad tipper.  There is a special place in hell reserved for rich people who tip poorly.  It could be that that place looks something like the inside of a fancy house in a gated community where you watch your reputation slip through your fingers on TV while you wait for the the mysterious scratches on your face heal and hope no more of your girlfriends leak voicemails to the press, and that your wife doesn't decide to use your golf clubs to "rescue" you again anytime soon. 

Math would help you win The Amazing Race

SPOILER ALERT:  In The Amazing Race this week, the only team in which the players are always kind to each other -- Harlem Globetrotters "Flight Time" and "Big Easy" -- got eliminated because Big Easy didn't know math.  Here's why you should pay attention in math class, kids! 

Technically he did not need to know math--he needed to figure out how to unscramble the letters N, A, R, F, Z in a "Kafkaesque" challenge involving a bureaucratic nightmare in Prague (dozens of ringing phones, repeated filling out of forms, etc.)  (So, absent math,  you could have figured it out if you'd recognized that "Franz" is a word, but I could see not noticing that because of the whole it-might-be-in-a-different-language thing.)  The more annoying brother in the Evil Gay Brothers team told Big Easy they'd work together, but when Annoying One figured it out, he would only tell Big that the word started with an F. 

What a douchebag!  But, OK, a word that starts with an F, and has four other unique letters.  Combinatorics, my favorite branch of math from my olden days as a math major, teaches us if there are 4 options for the second letter, then there are 3 for the third letter, 2 for the fourth letter, and only 1 for the last letter, the number of possible words is 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24.  Twenty-four words!  Even if it took 2 minutes to fill out the rest of the Kafkaesque bureaucratic form, it would only take 48 minutes to go through all the possibilities.  Instead, Big Easy got totally flustered and the Globe Trotters took the 4-hour penalty rather than complete the challenge.  The HUMANITY!  The LACK OF MATH SKILLS!

Now The Amazing Race is left with the aforementioned Evil Gay Brothers, the Whiny Miss America and her Excessively Patient Husband (accompanied by their unofficial sidekick, Their Interracial Relationship), and the Two Boring Blond Ones.  I guess I am rooting for the boring blondes out of a lack of options.  So sad!  Globe Trotters, I hated to see you go.