bad metaphor

Heading home for the holidays later today, so will likely be Internet-free – I’ve probably surfed like the Internet by now at work, so this is likely not a bad thing. I’ll be off to Wichita for a few days, squeezing in some Chinese movies, and also hopefully finish up my round of Christmas presents for everyone. Then it’s off to Baltimore to visit my big sis and her new husband (who never updates his blog and really should by the way >:[). Cheers to Baltimore, land of crab cakes (which my sister unfortunately cannot eat, sorry sis) and funny accents! Here I come!

So far I’ve made 4 and 3/4 hats for Christmas presents since Thanksgiving, and that’s with finals and papers included. I am a hat machine! Maybe if I had spent that time studying a little harder and starting my papers earlier, I might have been a little less miserable last week, but it probably wouldn’t have made that much of a difference. So far I’m pretty pleased with the way the hats have turned out. Here’s one I knit for my dad, and 3/4 of the one I’m knitting for my brother:

My brother’s is the one on the right that’s unfinished. I decided to make his the inverse of my dad’s, so that they would match (aww…). They’re a mint green and off-white, not hunter green and yellow as they seem to be in this picture.

Hat making, though probably harder than making scarves (more stuff to do besides just plain knitting and purling), certainly goes a lot faster. Maybe I will tackle gloves next, as my current pair is getting a bit ratty.

Originally, when we were both mired in finals and papers, the boy and I had quiet plans for Saturday night – a bottle of Pinot Noir, cheap sherry, cheese and crackers, and just the three of us that were still left in the apartment – the boy, my roommate Paul, and I, relaxing and recuperating from being steamrolled by this awful semester. No house parties, no going out to the bars, just a blissful, slightly snooty, tres exclusive evening of repast and recreation.

Then the boy asked if it was all right if two of our friends came and joined us, since we have about fifty friends we are supposed to see before we leave for the holidays. Sure, I said, and then I had the idea of inviting my friend Yasmina, who is going to be catsitting for me over break. Then Cathy, one of Paul’s friends, was coming into town, and Paul invited her. But this was fine – it had not yet blown up into a thing, which has happened to us before (college kids have an uncanny ability to find clusters of people with booze).

So we were hanging out, getting drunk on cheap sherry, and watching cheesy music videos from the Internet, and then both Cathy and Yasmina decided to leave to go to other parties. We were tipsy enough to let Yasmina persuade us to come along with her. “C’mon, guys, you’ll love the people that are going to be at this party. Let me warn you, though, they’re kind of hippies*.”
“Oh, not those people,” I said (I don’t think Yasmina was quite aware of the fact that over 80% of the people we hang out with live in eco-friendly cooperatives, are vegetarians or vegans, and pretty much are as close as you can get to hippie without actually taking a pot-powered time machine to the early 60’s). It sounded like a good idea, and she even offered to drive, so we went.

Haha. Big mistake. We walked in and knew nobody, the first time in years that I have walked into a party and seriously recognized nobody at all, not a single person, which was nuts. Those of you from big cities probably don’t think of this as a big deal, but Lawrence gets almost claustrophobic after awhile – I’d thought myself enough of a townie that I’d seen everyone that lives here at least twice on Mass Street, in coffee shops and bars, or the grocery store. It was like a bizarro parallel universe Lawrence, and it was unfamiliar and scary. Yasmina saw us look around, bug-eyed in wonder, and said, “Great! You will get to meet new people! This is awesome!”

I didn’t quite know how to explain to her that we were like the Untouchables when taken out of our comfortable social niches, without sounding irredeemably lame. So I tried to be merely redeemably lame, and attempted to start up conversation with people that were already trashed and I had, horror of horrors, already sobered up. Word to the wise: this doesn’t really work so well. To make matters worse, Yasmina saw me floundering, tore me away from Paul and the boy, who were left in peace to be socially awkward together; took me under her wing, and introduced me to some of her friends.

Now, a bit about Yasmina – she’s notorious for being extremely beautiful. No joke. She’s been stalked by half of the basketball team and the football team; she’s like some sort of goddess among nerds because she’s the daughter of a math professor. She’s sweet and is obviously aware that she’s gorgeous (she’s not blind and owns a mirror), but doesn’t really lord it over other people or anything. If she decided to drop out of college for whatever reason, she could sign up to be a supermodel the next day, and a week later be making tons of money to spend on cars and cocaine. So that’s her.

Then there’s me. I walked out of the house wearing jeans, a pajama shirt and a hoodie tossed over it, hair in pony tail, crooked glasses and a red eye (the red eye would be the reason that I was wearing those crooked glasses). I don’t think I’m an ogre or anything on even my worst days, but that night I was standing next to Yasmina, and following her around as she introduced me to her also attractive ex-boyfriends, who then began flirting with her. I felt incredibly awkward, as I had the sense that Yasmina (though she certainly meant well) was kind of offering me up as her new protegee or something. Like in “Mean Girls” or “Clueless,” when they slap some makeup on the dorky girl and turn her into a totally hot bombshell. I kept smiling and trying to be witty and cute, but the entire time I kept thinking, wow, wasn’t this the worst idea ever.

I’m not nearly as shy as I used to be – I used to be so cripplingly awkwardly shy that I wouldn’t raise my hand in class, or even talk when called upon! – but there are certain situations in which I revert back to my instinctual tendency to hide in my hypothetical shell (which I really wished was an actual shell that night), and one of those situations is talking to very attractive men who are not obviously nerds. It’s not even a matter of me finding them so attractive that I am tongue-tied – I’m typically attracted to nerds, case in point, my current beau – it’s just that I find them really hard to talk to. Frat boys are generally included in this category, as well as other guys that look like they could be in movies (as the starring hero role, not the brainy / goofball sidekick). So on top of feeling frumpy next to stunning potential pinup Yasmina, surrounded by other not-as-beautiful-but-still-quite-beautiful-people, and trapped (she drove, remember? I wasn’t terribly keen on being sour grapes and taking her away from her friends / cadre of admirers), I was also bored and acutely aware of my social loser status. Forget taking the time machine to the 70’s, I’ll just go back to my middle school years, thank you.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me at the time, the boy and Paul were entertaining themselves by seeing how many things they could take from the snacks table without the really drunk people knowing. Paul reached over and snuck a lighter by the chex mix, no big deal. When retrieving said lighter, Paul notices a little film canister. It wasn’t film that was in the canister. Paul knew what was in that canister, and goaded the boy to get that canister. The boy, using his extra-special-careful touch (that, according to his dad, should some day be put to use in some medical field, say, surgery, but more than likely will just be used in the culinary arts and in situations such as the one being currently described), reached over and grabbed some Chex mix and the canister as well. All this while carrying on a conversation with two inebriated guys sitting next to them. Sometimes it pays to have a ridiculously high alcohol tolerance.

Finally we met up again, me having escaped from the beautiful “O.C. cast member” type circle of people, and discussed what to do about the party sucking and us escaping. I scrolled down my list of phone numbers looking for people who would rescue us, which turned out to be zero: the potential people would either 1) be already wasted at this time, 2) be already in bed at this time, or 3) would probably save us but then we’d have to endure their company, so no. So I reluctantly told Yasmina that we wanted to go home, and she was fine about it, and she took us home, and that’s when I discovered what the boys had done.

Paul: Heh heh. I got this pretty sweet lighter from the party.

Me: Cool. At least -you- had some fun, while I was being dragged around and displayed like a pet toy poodle -

The boy: Heh heh. We also got this. Smell this.

Me: Holy SHIT! You guys didn’t -

Paul: Heh heh. Yeah we did.

Me : I can’t believe – ohmigod, you guys STOLE POT from someone – holy shit!

Paul: What’s he gonna do? “Hey officer, someone stole my illegal drugs.”

Me : Holy cripes, I can’t believe this, that is so totally wrong, you don’t -steal- drugs from people that they paid for, that’s so mean, but hey, can I try some?

So we went out on the back porch and smoked our ill-gotten weed, and took shots of arak (horrible, nasty, licorice-tasting, vicious 120-proof liquor that the boy brought back from Lebanon, oh god why did we do that), while musing on what an awful idea that was, and wasn’t this so much better. Yeah, we actually got crunk, like in rap songs featuring the artistic stylings of Lil’ Jon (WHAT WHAAT?), off of stolen weed. This is probably tame to most normal people, but hey, I KNIT and READ for fun, and subsequently don’t get out much. By far, this was the craziest night of my life, especially considering how it started and where it ended up.

Being hyper-paranoid, I am a little worried about the owner of said weed somehow stumbling upon this blog and getting angry and tracking me down and sending me harsh emails or something. But the only people that read this anyway are a) from Baltimore, and b) people that are also probably unaware of this bizarro parallel Lawrence, and as such likely don’t know the individuals involved. In the event, however, that you are reading this and we took your weed, buddy, I’m sorry. The party sucked, though, and your unwilling contribution made three people much happier, if that’s any consolation!

Also, this was the first time that I’ve gotten high. I tried smoking once before, but probably was doing something wrong, as it just made me feel kind of tired and uncoordinated. I thought this was probably the same case and that I somehow was immune to marijuana – “I don’t feel anything, man, gee this sucks,” and then all of a sudden, bam, instant cloud around my head and a strong sense that everything was cool in the world, everything was really nice, wasn’t Yasmina nice for taking us to the party, isn’t this arak stuff really awful and burning our throats, but that’s okay, cause it feels tingly and warm now, like the universe. Good times.

* – By the way, these people weren’t actually hippies by any means. They were far too clean. Sheesh.

[Okay, I tried to spoiler-proof the post using fancy CSS skills, and lost. Though, I'm not really sure why I bothered to try to spoiler a review of a movie that basically everybody knows the plot to: giant ape steals pretty blonde lady, climbs up Empire State Building, gets owned by fighter planes. Regardless, if you want to know what I thought of this movie (as opposed to, say, people that write for the New York Times or other reputable critics), but don't want to read about specific changes that Peter Jackson made to this updated version, just skip down to the recommendation at the end and try not to read all the junk in between. Yeah.]

Yesterday afternoon, after napping for several hours upon completion of finals, I got up and went to see King Kong, the new epic remake by Peter Jackson. It’s not a movie I would ordinarily feel like seeing – I never saw the original, and I’m not usually a big fan of monster movies from the 30’s with somewhat racist subtext (“oh noes! That monster has stolen a white woman! Let’s git ‘em!”) – but I’d seen nothing but good reviews of it, and my roomies were going.

It was actually pretty enjoyable, though much longer than I expected a movie about a giant gorilla to be (run time is something like 3 hours and 25 minutes!). My roommate Simon wasn’t too fond of it, having seen the original, because he thought they made the gorilla too sympathetic – I didn’t have as much of a problem with that, though, as that change made it less of a film-with-mildly-racist-undertones and more of a fun Hollywood epic.

There was a lot to enjoy in the movie, mostly in the second third of the movie (island part), and that included scenes like when Kong beats the everliving fuck out of three T-Rexes one handed, holy shit did he just snap that T-rex’s jaw in half, that was AWESOME. Also, the cinematography, though I admittedly know nothing about cinematography, I thought was pretty impressive at times. The beginning montage of New York city was pretty neat: the bustle of the city, the vaudeville and theatre shows, interspliced with images of slum towns and the poverty of New York in the Depression era. One visual that I particularly liked was of Jack Driscoll trapped in the cage on the boat, typing. The orange lamp glow and the stark black lines, and the tiltedness of the scene from the motion of the boat, all added to the visual effect. Very Kafka-esque. Also, the moment the boat approaches the island shrouded in mist, and they discover the huge ass wall that the natives have built to section off the Kong, is magical.

Of course, I’m kind of a bitch when it comes to movies, so there are a number of things in the movie that didn’t work for me. The main thing that irked me was the abundance of overwrought sentimentality. This is the problem I had with the LOTR movies, also (yeah, you heard me. I didn’t like the LOTR movies. Feel free to bitch me out at karenology@gmail.com). Peter Jackson seems to have a propensity for taking scenes and snippets of dialogue, that, in the original works, were funny and lighthearted, and turning them OMG SAD AND DRAMATIC AND DEEP.

At the end of the Fellowship of the Ring, for instance, the scene in which Frodo is invisible and is leaving in the canoe, and Sam jumps in the water and almost drowns – that’s actually a comic moment in the book. In the movie, PJ cues the tragedy violins in the background and turns the comic moment into a weepy “oh no Sam almost just died” affair.

Exact same thing in King Kong. It also happens at the very end of this movie, when Jack Black’s character (whatshisface) looks upon the giant ape corpse and utters the line “beauty has killed the beast.” Again, in the original movie, it wasn’t meant to be a serious philosophical and emotional commentary on the state of things, and again, in PJ’s version, the way it is conveyed is over the top. Also, Jack Black has exactly one facial expression the entire movie: the “whoa, what have I done” open mouthed face. Seriously, that gets really quite old in a movie that is over three hours long.

And though I said before that I actually liked that the gorilla was more sympathetic in this movie, and that the connection between Ann and the gorilla was stronger: there is a scene in the movie in which Ann and Kong are ice-skating on a frozen pond, I kid you not. What the fuck, Peter Jackson. This is not a Tom Hanks-meets-Meg-Ryan-cute movie, this is supposed to be a movie about a giant gorilla that DESTROYS things. Now if T-Rexes had suddenly burst out of the ice at that point, the scene would have been forgivable.

Bitching aside, I liked the movie. It was much better than any of the horrible previews that preceded it will probably turn out to be, and aside from the lapses into weepy sentimentality, and the whole entire first hour before you get to see King Kong, and the random subplot with the black captain and the plucky sailor lackey that reads Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (what? how? why?!), it was well worth my money, if nothing else, to see Kong just totally destroy things. And the movie definitely delivers on this aspect.

My recommendation: see it, but go to the bathroom first, or you’ll be really miserable during the last stretch. Trust me!