“Machete” screened the other night at The Plaza, and I have to say that aside from “Inception,” it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen this year. I suppose it’s a good way to end the summer blockbuster season, which has been a little disappointing overall.

Overall it’s been a miserable week at work, although the first few days were lovely. I even received a pretty vase of flowers from someone awesome, but in general I’ve felt pretty taken for granted at work. Considering a big change, and even starting to look for other opportunities. Somewhere I can be appreciated for the things I can do, to be paid appropriately for such work, and to have a real opportunity to grow.

Well, fuck all of that. I’m going to Dallas in about eight hours to spend the Labor Day weekend with the boyfriend.

Life update:

Work picnic this past weekend. I bring a friend, and we hang around together, join up with a coworker to hike Stone Mountain, eat lunch, then walk around the mini-town at the base of the mountain for a while. Ride the train around the park, see the interactive movie, and then sit atop the mountain again in the late afternoon. By then the sky has cleared and we bask on the open rock as if we are at the beach.

Read the rest of this entry »»

• Under the Dome – Stephen King
• Go Ask Alice – Anonymous
• Alien – Alan Dean Foster
• A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
• The Walking Dead – Robert Kirkman
• Johnny Got His Gun – Dalton Trumbo

Added another to the list. Hell yes. And I’m about to finish “The Other Queen,” a Philippa Gregory novel.

It’s been a good month for books so far!

Trumbo’s book was another on the Top 10 Most Disturbing list… Number four, to be precise.  But you know what? It didn’t disturb me that much. It was about a soldier during WWI who got his arms and legs blown off, but also had his face destroyed too. He is unable to speak or hear or otherwise communicate and is trapped inside his body.

So… again this didn’t disturb me as much as I thought it would. Am I simply becoming numb?

As a side note, it also reminded me of the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (it might be a book, too?), about a man who suffers a stroke that leaves him unable to move, talk, or make noise.

I don’t think it deserves the number four spot, but once more, I suppose when I get to the end, we’ll see.

Today I tried to do something spontaneous and romantic, and it was ruined. I ended up trudging back to my car in the rain, becoming slowly and surely soaked to the bone.

It was due to bad planning and unfavorable weather conditions that I ended up back at home, here, on the couch. I suppose worse things could have happened, but even as I drove to the airport with a single bag with me, ready to spend the rest of the weekend in Jackson with the boy for his birthday, I was becoming more and more excited.

I even caught the courtesy shuttle in the economy lot (which I never manage to flag down!), and when I checked in downstairs, I was disappointed to learn that the flight was delayed.

A whole two hours delayed.

The sky had been dark, sure, as I drove in on 85. Menacing, even. I hope the weather doesn’t ground the flights, I remember thinking.

Yet that’s exactly what began to happen. The skies grew darker and darker, and then the rain started. Flights were delayed, then cancelled.  I wandered up and down the C terminal and checked into the book and magazine shops close to the gate and debated with myself if I should purchase anything.

About thirty minutes into my wait, I saw that the flight was cancelled. Shortly after that, we decided I should go home in the rain.

Even though I know this has no bearing on the future, sometimes I secretly wonder if that’s what odd occurrences like this mean.  Don’t say that, the boy said as I made my way back to the parking lot. I told him that I know… it was just bad planning. But saying that ‘it wasn’t meant to be this weekend’ is my way of absolving myself of the guilt of not planning this very well. Had I been on an earlier flight, I might have made it to Jackson and back tomorrow.

Oh well! Such is life.

And yes… eventually I will talk about our week-long trip to DC and back again. And in other news, I have two puffers, but again, that will be in a later post!

For now, Buffy, popcorn, OJ, and a lazy Saturday night.

• Under the Dome – Stephen King
• Go Ask Alice – Anonymous
• Alien – Alan Dean Foster
• A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
• The Walking Dead – Robert Kirkman

This is August, so far. Hot damn, I said! It’s been a good month so far, and I even have a few books lined up to finish from the library.

Stephen King’s novel was lengthy… overall  it was all right. Not my favorite. The characters annoyed me more. The plot seemed to stretch on indefinitely, and I was dissatisfied by the resolution. I still like King though.

Alien was the novelization of the movie, so it went just like the film itself does. Considering I haven’t seen that movie in ages, this was something neat. It made me want to re-watch the series. I suppose my interest was piqued because I recently watched Predators and was thinking about the whole franchise.

And The Walking Dead is awesome. Just awesome. I haven’t quite finished yet–I have about fifty pages left. A friend gave me the compilation for my birthday (THANK YOU SO MUCH), and I’m loving every second of it. It does, however, remind me of Lost a little bit… only with zombies.

Well, it should be a good month for books. Boy has left for Dallas, and I have more nights to myself to read. Not that I don’t miss him, of course… but I have to fill all the suddenly empty time with something

Movies Seen:
Predators – Very quick to get into the plot. Silly one-liners. Seems sort of hopeless, because how can humans possibly defeat predators on their own turf? They can’t. Adrien Brody was incredibly jacked, and although I like Topher Grace, he plays most of his roles with the same plucky demeanor and it can be sort of annoying.

500 Days of Summer – Sorry, but this movie still bothers me. JGL aside, I think Summer was an annoying bitch to him.  I thought maybe a second viewing  would change my mind, but it did not.

Restaurants visited:
Carpe Diem for brunch. Tasty, although the service was slow.  Had a bacon omelette, which was egg with bacon, tomato, onions, cheese, and one leaf of basil.  The sides were potatoes and fruit, and with the potatoes some sort of giant, tasty bean. The chai was excellent.

California Pizza Kitchen for my belated birthday dinner with friends. The food was decent as usual. I got the margherita pizza and some water, because I’d had a terrible headache the entire afternoon.

Books Read:

The Pillars of the Earth – Finished this one, finally. What a good book. The style of writing is simple but pulls you along. The characters and plot is engrossing. It reminds me of GRRM (who wrote later, but whom I read first) without the fantasy elements. If you like historical fiction novels, this one is definitely a book to pick up.

Under the Dome – I’m about 350 pages into this one.  It’s okay. The binding is actually falling apart because I took the book out to the pool and it was so hot in the sunlight that the glue started to dissolve… I’m hoping that it won’t be completely dead by the time I return it to the library…

The Walking Dead – Well, the small neighborhood they found was full of zombies. The kid was shot, and now they’re staying at a farm where the farmer has been keeping the dead locked in the barn. What will happen next?

It was a good weekend. Friday night I helped a friend out and wrote a paper for her Shakespeare class. We did this while listening to music and drinking pina coladas. Later we started to watch  Daybreakers and freaked out when a giant insect crawled up the wall, scaring the living shit out of both of us.  It took me ten minutes to get up the courage to go kill that nasty insect and then vacuum up the remains.

Other than that, it was pretty good.

• I, Mona Lisa – Jeanne Kalogridis
• Survivor – Chuck Palahniuk
• The Parable of the Sower – Octavia E. Butler
• The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
• Under the Dome – Stephen King
• A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

­This month’s reading list is a bit ambitious, especially considering that two of the books (Follet’s and King’s) are over 800 pages a piece.  Realistically, I think I can finish Stephen King’s book if I devote some serious time to it, although I need to return it by the 30^th so that I don’t have it hanging around collecting late fees once it is overdue, which it will be by the time we return from our trip to Maryland.

I, Mona Lisa was rather boring. Nothing spectacular. Forgettable, etc. That and I kept getting the time period mixed up with that of The Pillars of the Earth, for some reason. I suppose reading books concurrently doesn’t always work… Oh well.

The Parable of the Sower was actually listed in the comments below the Top 10 Most Disturbing list.  Others had recommended it on the basis that it was incredibly moving/disturbing, so I decided to get it out of the library when I saw it.

It’s about a girl named Lauren who lives in the time during the decline of the States as a powerful nation; the economy has completely collapsed, and the government has turned a blind eye to everyone’s problems. Food is expensive and water is nearly unobtainable. The country is rife with conflict, cannibals, and gangs of thieves, rapists, and arsonists.  The story itself follows Lauren and her daily life, beginning from when she is fifteen and living in a neighborhood that was thought to be safe, and then continuing to when she is on her own, struggling to survive. It essentially reads as a diary of the apocalypse, divided into entries, and chronicling the growth of her own spirituality, a doctrine she comes to name as Earthseed.

The book contains disturbing elements, of course, but overall, is not one I cringed away from or found hard to read. In fact, sometimes I found it a little difficult to force myself through, as it moved a bit slowly.  I found the spiritual aspects of the book interesting and less intrusive than in other books.

So, my final verdict is that while it’s an okay apocalypse book, it does not warrant a spot on the Top 10 Most Disturbing list.

Oh. Survivor by Palahniuk was weird. He’s such a bizarre, off-kilter writer. I can only take so much of Palahniuk before I have to read slightly more mundane fiction.

Under the Dome seems suspiciously like the Simpsons Movie, where an entire town is kept inside a forcefield/dome. I’ve only read the first 100 (out of like… 800) pages, and so I’m not quite sure what the actual story is.

As much as I like King… I feel like he’s becoming very predictable.  Maybe I’m just outgrowing his style or something though.  This is hard for me to admit because to be honest, King was a lot of the reason why I wanted to attempt writing stories… His early work is incredibly inspiring. But lately… Ugh. Especially after Duma Key, I really just stopped paying him attention. I have yet to read Cell, but then again … maybe I’ll just take it out of the library instead of spending $9 on it.

Finally, A Thousand Splendid Suns was my book club pick, and they picked it. So I get to read it again and revel that I picked possibly the best book since Eat, Pray, Love!

That’s all for now.

I’m 25 now.

It feels sort of odd, being 25 years old. Kind of like I should probably figure out what the hell to do with the last two-thirds (or, optimistically, 3/4) of my life.  I feel old yet still feel young, so really nothing has changed except the knowledge that I am, in  fact, one whole year older.

Read the rest of this entry »»

It is my birthday week. I’m not supposed to feel this grumpy during the week of my birthday, right?

But, grievances:

• Last night while running, my headphones broke and then the power went out, so I nearly fell off the treadmill as it abruptly stopped
• Sometime while sleeping I bit my lip open and it keeps scraping against this tooth I have that juts out, so it has been raw for a few days now
• My car is acting retarded… needs two new tires and a balance, oil change, and also has to pass emissions tomorrow so that I can renew my registration

Ugh. This week needs to get better, now.

Do yourself a favor this summer blockbuster season, and see Inception.

We saw it last night at Atlantic Station.  My overall impression of it is that it’s got a few script irregularities, but if you’re willing to lose yourself in it, it is a beautiful, rich, imaginative film.

(Spoilers ahead… reader beware): Read the rest of this entry »»