Saturday, May 11

 
it is fun having a cinema major for a friend because his obsession makes him very knowledgeable on films. case in point - a brief excerpt from a conversation we had yesterday:

me: i don't understand. if anakin is so evil, how can princess panda (note: i was later informed that i meant amidala) love him?
cinema joe: because girls are weak.

i love joe.
posted by from shannon at 8:18 PM

Wednesday, May 8

 
... this new Christine, so oddly calm and determined, suddenly quite frighteningly composed and grown up...

This is a quote from my favorite book, Susan Kay's Phantom, describing the heroine after an intense life-altering experience. I've always loved this quote about Christine, who grows form a child to a woman in the course of this book. And, to tell you the (ridiculous) truth, I spent this past semester dreaming that I would grow up like this during my time abroad, and that I would come back mature, so changed that my friends and family would hardly recognize me. I actually concocted this daydream in which I descend the plane steps (in slow motion, of course), the wind whipping my hair and Italian leather coat around me, looking so much older, so beautiful and exotic, that my friends don't even know it's me until I come close, whip off my huge pink Euro-sunglasses, and say something incredibly witty and undeniably me. Yes, this was my dream for myself.

So you can understand how appalled I am to find myself planted in front of the television - slavishly attentive for the third morning in a row - watching Unsolved Mysteries.

I'm utterly repulsed by this program, and yet I can't turn away. And what's worse is that I actually find myself terrified, wondering if these events might really be true - that little girl really must be seeing dead people with no hands, I say (i mean that the dead people are handless, by the way, not that the girl is using her lack of hands as a means to see them), and that woman really is producing gold from her pores.

The only thing that keeps my feet planted on the ground is the fact that every episode I have seen in these days featured people from the South. I just find it hard to believe that all of the paranormal activity in this country occurs south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I don't, however, find it difficult to believe that that's where you'll find our nation's highest concentration of crazy people. Once I think about it all logically like that, I feel a lot better.

(Note: I just noticed that, for the first time in my blog's history, I wrote an entry with proper capitalization... I hope that other people noticed too, and that the next time it happens, you pause to wonder if it's really me writing this blog at all - or if it's like that episode of The Simpsons in which Homer knows too much so they take him away to a secret island and replace him with a spy Homer who looks just like him but speaks with a Russian accent... just keep on your toes, is all I'm saying.)
posted by from shannon at 9:24 AM