Winter Reflections

Not much has been going on, but it’s been so long that certainly something must have happened. Random thoughts include a mish-mash of  TV moments, which sadly illustrate how much of my time these past few months has been spent (it was cold). Celia having a not-so-fresh face; Kelly being a rotten, miserable egg jogging down Fifth Avenue in the middle of traffic like anyone would do that in real life and live; Alexis being voted off way too early; cooking every recipe Mark Bittman posts on the NYT all winter, then finding out I have high cholesterol; and being lief, then not.

I got into school this winter and went and sat in on some classes to see how I might like it. School means being subjected to others in a way far worse than riding the subway, even. The girl next to me went to great lengths to ignore me, while she basically spoke what I imagined to be the contents of her diary. Of course this was not relevant to the topic at hand. So I fixated on a large booger, poised at the entrance to one of her nostrils. Would it stay in? Fall out? Nothing happened, but it was fascinating nonetheless. At that moment I decided that I will like school. There will always be something interesting to focus on.

Gay Watchman

Last night I went to see Watchmen at the IMAX theater near Lincoln Center. I had never been to an IMAX film before and I knew nothing about the graphic novel that the film is based on. Quite actually I don’t know what a graphic novel is in the first place. When people say “graphic novel” I usually think of Edina and Patsy responding to Marshall’s proclamation that his project “is in a really exciting stage” and that a Japanese company has agreed to do it in animation form.

“A cahr-tooooon?!”

Which was my feeling last night, too. There were way too many people there taking another comic book movie way too seriously. In fact there were way too many people there, period.

The six o’clock showing that I attended was sold out but my friend had faithfully saved our seats an hour early and this was a good thing because it really was already super crowded by the time I arrived a half hour before start time. As the auditorium filled with people, so filled I with panic. They were all breathing my air. Our seats would have been in an optimum location in a regular theater, but here being midway between rows and columns only served to increase my panic. Trapped, I clutched my Freitag bag and imagined myself one of a mass of bodies, tumbling over each other in the mayhem that would ensure when the fire broke out.

Once I calmed down, the movie was pretty good. My main complaint was that, at 2 hours and 40 minutes, it was too long. There should have been an intermission. Also, though, there was the gay thing. The evil mastermind turns out to be this gay narcissistic megalomaniac, played by Matthew Goode. A super hero gone bad. Because there is no context given for his obsessive need to save humanity from itself, at all costs, other than a desire to be super fabulous and because his sexuality is not openly referenced, he was kind of a caricature.

The action in Watchmen, which culminates in the 80s, is full of symbolism and references to real life events and people. Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan, the War in Vietnam, and the Cold War all play major parts. But no where is the AIDS epidemic referenced so I guess what struck me later was that evil gay Watchman Adrian Veidt probably had much more productive things to do, or at least a real motive for his desire to save at all costs. That stuff all got left out. Lame.

Fashion Week

It’s fashion week, so please enjoy an old video of the model Katie Fogarty falling on the catwalk. Models falling on the catwalk are funny.

The Horses Had It First

I’ve just purchased a Snuggie from a friend of a friend who had a surplus. Maybe it fell off of the back of a truck, but I don’t care! I’m going to pick it up, hopefully, any minute now. However, now that I’ve seen the Snuggie Stable Blanket, I’m wondering what the Snuggie craze says about us, as humans. Also, I want a hood on mine. And I think that it should be gold.

My Money Was Taken

Last night I went to see Taken, starring Liam Neeson and that girl who played Shannon on Lost. The movie was really bad but it was, like, funny bad. Add to that the funny badness of the trailer for the new Beyonce movie, Obsessed, that played during the previews and it was almost worth the money. Taken is about Liam Neeson rescuing that girl who played Shannon on Lost and, more importantly, saving her virginity just in the nick of time. It’s about how the Algerians have taken over Paris and how valuable white women are as a commodity. This sheik, not Duncan Sheik, wants them and he seems to want all of them all at once. The bad guys are all foreign “others” from places where Middle Eastern bad guys wear lots of eyeliner. The best part of the movie and the part that I totally loved featured Camille Japy, a seemingly untroubled, happy French mom and housewife, who goes from asking Liam Neeson if he wants white or dark meat at her dining table the one moment to writhing on the floor the next after he shoots her in the arm. It’s only a flesh wound though! 

Miracle on the Hudson, Tonight at 9PM

Have you heard? A plane crash landed in the Hudson River last week. It was really quite extraordinary. I was at work, on the 21st floor of our building on Seventh Avenue, luxuriously situated above New York Penn Station. Here, for the last month or so we’ve all been waiting to be laid off. Some sadly have been. It reminds me of a commercial I’ve seen recently, where “photos” stand crowded, waiting to be deleted. Then, poof!, one will disappear. 

I’m so happy that everyone got out relatively okay. Though doesn’t two broken legs classify one as “seriously injured”? Anyway, though, I believe that I am appropriately over the media coverage. There are frankly only so many ways to describe this five minute flight. The absolute worst was the super slow motion video of birds flying into a jet engine. I think it’s time to move on… to casting the Lifetime made for television movie. Here, I give you, the cast of Miracle on the Hudson: The Flight 1549 Story.

Captain Chelsea “Sully” Sullenberger: Lindsay Lohan

NTSB Spokeswoman Kitty Higgins: Meredith Baxter

First Officer Jeffrey Skiles: Lou Diamond Phillips

Flight Attendants: Mercedes Ruehl, Rumer Willis, Dina Lohan

And introducing Joseph Wurzelbacher as Tugboat Capt. Conrad H. Roy, Jr.

My 2009 Prediction

I predict that everything this year is going to be Turkish.

Sloth

I’m on my couch now, trying to come to terms with the fact that tomorrow is a work day. I am hungry, yet too lazy to get up and fix dinner. And there is, appropriately, a show on the History Channel about the Seven Deadly Sins and they are talking about sloth. If the Snuggie infomercial airs, I will probably buy one. The Sunggie people should air their commercial right now, right at this moment. Because I can’t be the only one who is home, laying on their couch, watching a History Channel special about sloth, and trying to come to terms with the fact that vacation time is over. Hungry, yet too lazy to get off the couch to get food. 

Tomorrow I will hopefully change back into a Roe Deer, which are not lazy at all as they sleep something, like, one hour a day.

Blankets Don’t Work!

Bad news. Since I left work Friday afternoon I’ve been basically laying on the couch watching TV or sleeping next to the drip-drip of the leak in the ceiling in my bedroom. I can proudly say, though, that despite being nearly 100% inactive I have had reason to shower and change clothes… until now. The Snuggie promises to change all that. Finally, an outfit that can go from the StairMaster at the gym to my desk at work to the couch to the bed. Ultimate versatility. Check out the book light. It reminds me of Twiggy from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Ah, Gil Gerard… Nevermind. Why did I do that?

Sufganiyot!

Tonight I made sufganiyot, which are these (turns out) delicious Hanukkah doughnuts. Nothing says “Merry Christmas let’s celebrate the birth of our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ” like Hanukkah doughnuts. It was not my idea to make them. A friend was making some for a Hanukkah gathering and I totally copied his idea and hopped online and found the recipe at Epicurious. I cannot overemphasize how yummy they are. Tomorrow I leave for Holy Cross Monastery and I had thought about taking them up there but the sad fact is that they are not going to last.