The New England Society for Tea Fetishism

I just ran one of those popcorn carts for two hours and I feel so greasy! The smell is all over me and after three washings my hands still feel all slippery and dirty. I did a good job, though. I only had to burn one batch before I figured out the supreme popcorn popping technique used by wise and ancient poppers the world over. Oh, god, I stink. Shower time and a change of shirt before I go hear the MFA speaker tonight. So, I made lots of popcorn and gave it to a lot of passers-by, but no one stopped for information. The whole fair was kind of a bust, and not at all helped by the monsoon we're having at the moment.
It's restaurant week in the Hamptons, and ridiculously expensive bistros that most year-round residents of the Hamptons can't generally afford are offering three course meals to the tune of 19.95. I'm going with a bunch of other people from the program. This is two social outings in one month. I hope I don't let it go to my head.
Weird dream last night. I've been reading and seeing too much about zombies lately thanks to Dawn of the Dead, and it manifested itself in the form of a zombie attacking me in a classroom at college (coulda been Hood, coulda been here). I think part of me realized that it was a dream because I took off running and didn't stop until I ran all the way home to Salem. We're talking a distance of approximately 500 miles. I sufficiently changed the dream so that the zombie couldn't return. I was also very confused as to how I ran 500 miles and wasn't dead of a heart-attack, but since the legions of the undead were gone, I didn't question it too much.

I was on Slate and saw that they re-ran an article about "Left Behind" and the antichrist, in response to the release of the final installment of the series. The article was written in 1999 by a Jewish contributor who wonders if he could be the dark spawn of satan. He talks to Falwell and one of the authors of the books about the possibility. Very interesting article. Also, coincidently, it's the first article I ever read on Slate.
Hey, did you know that because of all the hooplah around "The Passion" Monty Python is re-releasing "The Life of Brian?" Also, it's the 25th anniversary or something like that. I would pay to see that on a big screen.

Sorry, Amy. It's just so disappointing, especially since it felt like spring was actually gonna have a go at it last week. Now the sky is overcast and people are talking about snow and freezing rain. You don't suck. Nature sucks.
Secret Window was a very odd movie. There were all these great actors creating these interesting characters--at least, Johnny Depp and Maria Bello created some interesting characters, but everyone else was pretty good too--and yet there they were, in a not very interesting movie. I think that they should stop making Stephen King horror/suspense films and just stick to his more mainstream stories for film adaptations, like "The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." They just don't make 'em like Kubrick did anymore. Although, it would be super-cool to see live version of "From a Buick Eight," just because of all the weird creatures involved. The Jim Henson Company could have a field day making nasty alien puppets. Of course that would never happen because the story is missing very important things that most major Hollywood films need, like a love interest, and a plot.
In other news--where did Kirsten go? I would say that it's time to monopolize her comments with IM-like conversation, but I don't think she'd notice. I misses the Kirstenator.

I had a workshop today and my story went over really well. I think I say that every time I have a workshop. Maybe I should come up with a better description. Anyway, it irks me that I need praise and/or constructive criticism to feel good about my writing, but such is the nature of the beast. And with each workshop I do become more confident, so soon I'll be able to write something, sit back, and say "That's a damn good piece of prose" before anyone even sees it.
I took a nice walk today and thought about the park in Frederick, which subsequently made me think of that woman who pretended to be abducted from Rosemont Ave. and then sexually assaulted. God, what a heinous bitch! I stopped walking to the park after that because I was too scared to go alone. It was one of my favorite things to do in the afternoon when the light was getting kinda slanty and all the pollen and little bugs were like little golden snowflakes. Did you guys go to the park at all, or at least drive by it?
I keep forgetting to write about the movies I saw over break. Tracy and I had an animation exchange. I introduced her to the sweet and wonderful "The Iron Giant," one of my favorite movies animated or otherwise, and she introduced me to the indescribable weirdness that is "Spirited Away." Honestly, it's one of those movies that you watch with interest, but the whole time you keep asking yourself, "What the hell is this?" I think part of my problem was the deep involvement of Japanese legend and superstition built into the plotline. Later, after you've had some time to think about it, you suddenly realize, "Holy crap! That was a great movie!" I will definitely have to see it again. By myself I watched "Whale Rider." Ladies, (and possibly Russell, although I have no idea if you are the sort to openly weep at movies) I have to warn you that if you are in a "mood" when you watch this, you will probably cry for a good half-hour to forty-five minutes. I highly recommend it. It's a lovely little independent film about a girl whose twin brother was supposed to be the new leader of a Maori tribe, but he died at birth, taking their mother with him. The whole movie is about her trying to find her place in the world and proving to her grandfather that she can take her brother's place. I saw "Pieces of April" last night with Patricia Clarkson, that lady from "The Station Agent" who was distraught over the death of her son (although there was no dwarf-kissing in this, so it's completely safe for Amy). Quite good considering Katie Holmes plays the titular April. Blackly comic.
And so ends Sarah's movie reviews. I don't know how that topic came up after faked sexual assault, but there you go.

Sunday night I got four hours of sleep and, considering, felt remarkably alert all day on Monday. Monday night I got a nice solid eight hours and felt like shit all day on Tuesday. I think that sleep deprivation is like muscle strain--you don't really feel it until two days later. So last night, in lieu of my usual chocolate milk with dinner, I had two cups of regular coffee in preparation for my film class. Everyone knows I have Fiction into Film on Tuesday nights because dinner is usually spent trying to bribe undergrads to go in my place and generally throwing fits and crying "I don't wanna go!" Fortunately, there was really no need for the coffee because we watched "Lolita," with James Mason and Peter Sellers, for the entire class. Considering that it's a movie about a pedophile, it is very funny, and I am now officially in love with Peter Sellers. At the top of my notes I wrote "Buy Strangelove." I assume that next week we'll be watching the remake with Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain, and since it's a more modern version, it might be more accurate to the book and therefore a whole lot oogier.

Holy crap, am I a bad blogger. Being home just doesn't inspire me to do it, probably since there's no crushing boredom that forces me to actually think about stuf just to keep from going crazy. I've been on a writing jag, trying finish a story for my advanced fiction class. Writing, when I finally get on a roll, is highly addictive. I stayed up until 4 am Monday morning because I didn't want it to end. Most of my life is spent doubting that I should have even been accepted to this school, and then I get a bright moment of affirmation that makes me realize, no, I am not a hack. And then I go back to wallowing in self-loathing again, but those little moments make it possible to go on. I'm thinking of doing something really cheesy and feel-good, like putting a sign on my mirror that says "You ARE a writer," or "Snap out of it, jackass!"

I had an interesting if morbid thought this morning--if you kill a person while in the air on a plane, how do they charge you? I guess what I mean is, if it was first degree, premeditated and all that (and thus punishable by the death penalty in some states), do they determine which state's laws you've broken by the air-space you're over when the murder is committed, by where you took off, by where you are landing, or are there special rules for when you're 35,000 feet above the U.S? And to go further, what happens when you're in or over international waters?

Sorry I haven't blogged in a bit, but I was alone in the house and feeling good about it, and to keep that good feeling I decided that the basement was off-limits. The jitney is a good way to travel. They even give you packaged muffins and the New York Times. Tracy picked me up on the red line, took me to her house, fed me pizza with super-secret pepperoni bits hidden under the cheese, took me to my house, and then left after giving all the closets and other hiding spots the once over. She went to Jeff's house and I stayed alone for two nights. I was fine. The only weird thing is that it didn't feel like my house. No mom, no Brian, no noise, no smoke--just me. I can't explain the wrongness of it.
Tracy came home yesterday and we took her sisters out to eat at Vinny Testa's. Lisa pulled a wicked mood swing while she was at my house because Tracy hit her on the head with a plastic bottle and decided, about five minutes later, that it hurt not only her head but her feelings. Tears were shed. It was like a flashback to the days when Tracy and I made her cry until she sounded like she was going to vomit. Good times.
Apparently I have a possible new occasional reader, Heather, which surprises the hell out of me because whenever I put my name into Google I come up with Amy's blog, not mine, even though my name is in the title. If she's from the North Shore we could be related.
Okay. I will try to be a good little blogger this week, or at least get online and comment.

Various and sundry things to blog about today:
Tonight I'm going to an MFA reading and then to a mixer afterwards at someone's house. Perhaps I shall find the future Mr. Muise tonight. Or perhaps I shall just have too much to drink and stay out too late and then wake up angry tomorrow and go to work. Either way--Socializing! What a novel concept

Last night in my fiction into film class we got onto the topic of Martha Stewart and Oprah, and if they are good role-models for women who want to break into the business world. This one woman (who is in my advanced fiction class and super-duper-hip-hip-hooray for getting to skip that on Friday) loves Oprah but hates Martha because everything she puts forth is about having the perfect family when she herself is a stone cold bitch who has alienated all of her family members. But it's okay for artists to be vile human beings and still be appreciated (and also not to do jail-time for crimes) Artists get off the hook for being evil, but not Martha Stewart. Randy brought up Roman Polanski and asked if she thought it was a good thing that he got away with feeding a 13-year-old girl champagne and drugs and diddling her, and she said yes, because we would have lost the art he produced since then. Then she went on to talk about how wrong it is for the government to regulate sexual relations and that some 13-year-old girls can handle having a relationship with a grown man, etc., etc., crazycakes. This woman is in her forties, by the way. And she admits to buying Martha Stewart sheets.

New Topic: Old men who think you owe them something. Not old-old. I'm talking about those men over forty who make silly jokes while they're talking to you, trying to get you to laugh, thinking that they're damn charming when they're really just unfunny and annoying. Russ, does this happen when older guys talk to other guys, or is it just an old man/young woman thing? I'd like to know, and you are now in the position of being the token male around here (unless Amy decides to make friends with Mr. Pinky). I bring this up because the gentleman who cleans the classrooms under my dorm and bangs erasers together at 7:30 in the morning says hello to me when I go to work. I smile and say hi back. Sometimes I even say hello first. The other day I guess I wasn't cheery enough for him because he said "Where's my smile?" And I wanted to say "It's not your smile, it's my smile and I'll give it to whoever I want, whenever I want!" This runs along the lines of my assistant principal in high school (You remember Mr. Tracy, Russ and Tracy?) who I generally liked, but he saw me once in the hallway and said of my expression "Smile, it can't be that bad." And you know what? It was that bad, and probably worse.
Okay, so, a point. In the case of Mr. Tracy and those like him, I think that it might do people much more good if perhaps they were asked "what's wrong" or "can I help you" rather than being told to put on a happy face. In the case of Mr. Slap-Happy-Eraser-Man, I wasn't put on this earth to be pretty and pleasant for him. I wonder if he would say "Where's my smile?" to Randy as he walked to work. I understand that he's just being friendly and doesn't mean to be rude or paternalistic, or any of the things that I am getting from his "Where's my smile?" but for Pete's sake, can't I just say "hey" and get on with my life?

Well, I've had an exciting afternoon. A bird was stuck in the chimney in Alice Flynn's office all day. I could hear it while I was sitting at Alice Cilio's desk. The Advising Office is set up so that you walk into a large room that's a reception area. We share it with the Friends World Program. On each side of the reception area is an office, one for Alice and the other for Ron, the FWP Director. About haf an hour ago the bird finally got out and flew right into the reception room, bonked into the walls and the windows, and generally made a good go at snapping its neck on the ceiling. Katie, Ron's assistant, let me put on her Isotoners, and when the bird was on the floor by the door, I crept up and snatched it. The poor little starling was so stunned it didn't even struggle. As I kneeled on the floor I turned and looked into Alice's office to see another starling flying around in there. So I went in and shut the door, opened the window, threw the bird in my hand outside, and waited until the other one was done smashing into the closed window and shooed him out. I am now a bird-catcher extraordinaire. I should charge.
About your e-mail, Amy--I'm thinking about it. I'll write to you about it later.

Class rosters aren't so bad. Not nearly as time-consuming as degree audits and they're small enough so they can be sent through inter-office mail. The only bad thing is that they create more work, because soon professors will send them back with red marks next to all the students who haven't shown up, or who are absent all the time, or failing. Then it's my job to send out mass e-mails to warn these kids that their grades are on the line. It's kind of a downer when you send one kid three different warning letters for three different classes.
But guess what? I'm going home on Friday!! My mom left me money to go grocery shopping, so I'm thinking that a vegetarian feast is on the way. And maybe we'll get some meat for Tracy. Hell, I could even cook fish. Mmmm....haddock. And I want to go to the Weathervane and to Bugaboo Creek for lunch, and to Boston for the flower show at Bayside, and to the Peabody Museum because I haven't seen the expansion yet, and maybe, if Russ isn't busy, we could go and karaoke our hearts out. And perhaps Tracy and I can have mixed drink night at home. Maybe we should invite Nick Federico if he's around and not still suicidal about his girlfriend leaving him last year.
And I keep forgetting to tell Tracy that my dad's girlfriend works in the cafeteria at Salem State. So, Tracy, if you see a black lady named Renee behind the counter, that's her.

You remember last year (Or was it two years ago? Well, we were in college) when the snakehead fish were dumped in that pond and the media were like "Oh, it's the end of the river ecology!" and all the environmentalists were tearing their clothes and gnashing their teeth, and generally everyone was making way too big a deal about this "eating machine" of a fish that can kinda flop around on land and supposedly "walk" between bodies of water? I remember an article in which an Asian gentleman laughed at those reports and basically said the equivalent of "There's good eatin' on one them things."
Okay, so the SciFi channel (which, in its infinite wisdom, decided to cancel the very popular Farscape because it was too expensive to produce and instead create shows like Tremors, Scare Tactics, and Mad Mad House, and show endless reruns of Stargate, its last good show) will be showing a movie called "Snakehead Terror." Yes, my friends, soon all the slightly dramatic things that we experienced in Maryland will have their own television movies, like the Blizzard of '03, that hurricane that hit us with a heavy drizzle, maybe even that weird cow smell that drifted onto campus every now and then. The commercial for "Snakehead Terror" never actually showed a snakehead fish, but there were numerous shots of large, blackish-green, shovel-shaped heads filled with pointy teeth, and a quick sequence of someone impaling something on the floor of a bedroom, which I assume must have been a snakehead that walked out of the lake.
Maybe I need to stop hating the SciFi Channel and just learn to love hokey movies about nature gone wrong.

I don't know why I think a cup of apple-cinnamon tea, while quite tasty, is going to hold me over until lunch, especially since I drink it straight-up, no sugar, no honey. So basically I'm relying on spicy water to keep my stomach from trying to suck down and digest my esophagus. Maybe I should switch to a shake for breakfast . . .
As you know from your comments, I separated and categorized degree audits for almost eight hours yesterday, so that when I went to bed I still saw credit hours flash before my eyes. Over 90 is a senior and they get a special letter attached to alert the advisor. For some reason I kept seeing 43. Maybe it's my new lucky number. Or an unlucky number. How does one tell. They get printed out on big sheets of pale green and white-striped paper with the holes on the sides. I kept seeing those colors, too.
In film class we watched a quick commentary by Peter Bogdanovich, a man so far up Orson Welles' butt he can't see the stars anymore, on "The Third Man." After we watched it, Professor O'Doherty asked us what we thought. One guy raised his hand and made a comment about how Bogdanovich takes all the credit away from Carol Reed, the director, by saying that the look and feel of "The Third Man" owes everything to three previous movies directed by Orson Welles. (Orson Welles was in "The Third Man," but apparently had little input during filming, except for a speech about a cuckoo-clock). This girl Tracy pipes up and argues that he didn't say that. They went back and forth until we were forced to watch the effing commentary again, in which it is very clear that Bogdanovich gives total credit for the movie to Welles. When O'Doherty asked Tracy what she had to say about that, she said that Bogdanovich may feel that way, but that doesn't mean it's true, as if the whole arguement had been about whether he was right or wrong, and not about what he actually said on the tape.
Some might have found this an annoying waste of time. Oh, but it was entertaining. It's especially amusing when you know absolutely that a participant in a heated argument is wrong, because you get to turn to your friends, roll your eyes, and make rude comments. You may remember Tracy from a previous blog about my Short Story class in which she went on and on about how there's no real way to write a fictional diary entry and we're all ridiculous for expecting this woman's story to conform to our ideals. She reminds of those girls in Monhollan's class who kept going on about how everyone has a different opinion and you can't expect to convince them of anything or conform to anything.
Well, I'm not feeling hungry and it's almost eleven. Maybe the tea does work.

The other night, I think it was Saturday, they kept running a commercial for Dawn of the Dead. Okay, so it starts out in a bright, sunny bedroom with a man and a woman lying in bed. It's a nice image. They look happy. The camera cuts to a blurry shot of someone in the hallway. It goes back to the happy couple and the dad sits up and says something like "What's wrong (daughter's name)?" and the camera goes back to the daughter who looks ill. Then the dad hunches down to pick her up and AHHHHH!!! She 's a zombie!! That freaked me out the first time and five times after that I found it mildy disturbing. And then there's the commercial with the shot of the girl at the end of the hallway doing some kind of icky variation on the Exorcist spider-walk.
I hate zombies! I hate people who eat people! They don't feel pain. They can't be reasoned with. Your mom could turn into a zombie and try to suck out your tasty brains through your ear. It's just all so, so . . . oogy.
On a related note, The Passion of the Christ, ladies and gentleman. Well, Jesus did rise from the dead. I found an Aramaic dictionary of phrases on Demagogue.

B-kheeruut re'yaaneyh laa kaaley tsuuraathaa khteepaathaa, ellaa Zaynaa Mqatlaanaa Trayaanaa laytaw!
It may be uncompromising in its liberal use of graphic violence, but Lethal Weapon II it ain't.

Shbuuq shuukhaaraa deel. Man ethnaggad udamshaa?
Sorry I'm late. Have I missed any scourging?

Een, Yuudaayaa naa, ellaa b-haw yawmaa laa hweeth ba-mdeetaa.
Yes, I'm Jewish, but I wasn't there that day.

Peletaa kuullaah da-Qraabay Kawkbey.
It's all an allegory of Star Wars.

Fun stuff.