Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Wow. There's too much to blog, so this is going to have to be selective. Sorry. I was lazy and didn't blog at all when I was home. For this I apologize. Profusely. But you know how it goes.
Sheesh, I have all the way back to, what, Thursday that I haven't written about yet? Holy cats. That's a lot of time. OK. Lessee. Thursday night was the guest artist lecture, as always. This (past) week was actually really good, because we had two people from Pixar. The Michigan Theater was packed, since all the art students were there, and tons of engineering kids showed up for this one too.
The speakers were a guy (who does sculptures of the characters) and a woman (who did the setting work on computers). The sculpture guy, before he went to Pixar, did sculpture work for Skellington and helped make Nightmare Before Christmas, which is a supremely glorious movie that I probably should see again, since I haven't seen it in years.
Friday we had a 'going home' lunch with all the people on my hall who were going home for the weekend. Yeah, it was just the usual lunch crew, but quoiever. I left for the airport at around 2:30.
The flight to Boston was pretty uneventful. There were four or five kids in the shuttle over, and one girl (Ashley) lives in Alice Lloyd (next door to me) and is from Andover, MA. She wasn't on my flight, because she was flying into some other airport... Manchester, I think. But our gates ended up being pretty close together, so we navigated the Detroit Metro airport together.
I didn't know anyone on my plane. I was sitting next to two small children who were compulsive gamblers. They bet on every little thing that happened. "I bet you $5 that the plane takes off from a stationary start." "I bet you $5 that man goes to the bathroom before the flight's half over." "I bet you $5 you're gonna spill your juice." They weren't too bad though, they left me alone.
Friday night I went to see Kill Bill with Maddie, Corey, and Noah. Massive good times. Yes, I am aware that we hyped ourselves up for that to a ridiculous point, but it did not disappoint. Which is quite rare in such a highly-anticipated movie. I don't think Noah was quite as obsessed as, say, me or Corey had gotten, and he seemed a little bemused by the whole thing.
Oh, it was so ironically funny, so subtly making fun of so many movies and so many conventions in said movies. The whole Japan sequence was visually ambrosial. The soundtrack is excellent... bizarre but oddly perfect. Some of the cinematography made me so frelling happy. I'm pretty sure I was giggling at inappropriate bits (at least, no one else in the theater was laughing at them), but that's OK, my mind works in unfathomable ways.
Our moviegoing experience was vastly enhanced by the crowd. People were reacting to everything onscreen very loudly. And, for some reason, the reactions were coming about a minute after something happened. Someone would get their arm cut off, and a minute later people would scream, "Nuh uh, she didn't!" And the like. Quite entertaining. Not sure why they all reacted so late, though, unless perhaps one considers the fact that we were at a late night showing, so our fellow movie viewers may have been drunk. Slows your reaction time, you know.
you thought that was uma thurman, but it ain't so, that there is mr. bruce lee. it is nerdy little references like this which make quentin tarantino so glorious.
We got back from the movie around 1 am. Of course, since I was home, and Noah was home, we just had to go stand outside and talk for hours. Musn't break with tradition. We discussed everything, as usual, from the social life at school to detailed reports of Noah's script-writing ideas to discussion of how very slightly weird everything at home looked now. Yes. Good times.
Saturday I did homework. Well, some homework. OK, not so much homework as I should have done. I sat around and spent quality time with my cats and read and just generally let my brain resolidify. Saturday night I went out to dinner with my family.
We went to Legal Sea Foods. The Red Sox game was on, of course, since that's such a quintessentially Boston restaurant. All the waiters were keeping one and a half eyes on the game at all times, and there were tons of people standing at the bar watching it. The restaurant patrons, of course, were all craning their necks to see the TV.
When Pedro dumped the elderly Don Zimmer onto the grass, the place erupted. It was glorious. Hystericality.
I got three new CDs this home weekend. Had to make use of my proximity to Newbury Comics, of course. There is no CD store to compare. Anywho. I got the self-titled CD by Ima Robot, A Jackknife to a Swan by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Radioactive by AM Radio. I greatly enjoy them all.
The Bosstones are the Bosstones, if you don't know their sound by now a) I can't really describe it to you and b) what crater have you been living in? Ima Robot is good, sort of like Spoon in a couple of their songs, sort of like Hot Hot Heat in some of them, pretty thoroughly technoed in most of them. AM Radio is splendid, I'm already well on my way to listening to that CD way too many consecutive times. A bit PaloAlto-ish at times, but while the PaloAlto CD is only really good for the first half, Radioactive is solid the whole way through.
Sunday night I went out to Asahi for Japanese dinner goodness with Maddie, Jess, and Corey. We had sushi, but I had vegetable sushi, 'cause I don't do the whole raw fish deal. Nor do I eat invertebrates. So shrimps were right out. The vegetable stuff was pretty good in any event, and although I made a monumental mess (I cannot eat sushi properly... all my instincts rebel against just shoving the whole thing in your mouth, but that's what you've got to do) it was scrumptious.
Then we ended up at Whitney's house (?) for a bit, before we went to Maddie's for pie and chatting. Lots of chatting. Very nice and very low key, very low drama, which is always crucial to my enjoyment of being in Swampscott. Certain people bring large amounts of drama with them, but none of them were present Sunday night, so all was well.
Monday I went to brother Eli's soccer game for a while. He had a couple of good plays, but they were playing Danvers, and Danvers has a very, very good soccer team. I left when it was 4-0 Danvers, because I couldn't take it any more. It ended up being 4-1, so I didn't miss too much.
Then shopping was done, and massive amounts of homework was done, and Red Sox watching was done, and all that jazz.
Today I communed with the cats all morning. I had a 2 pm flight. When I got to the airport, however, I was informed that it had been cancelled. Apparently the plane had some sort of mechanical issues, so it never even made it to Boston. Woe. I had to go home and then come back for a 6 pm flight. It was good because I got more feline time. But annoying.
The flight back was OK, I was sitting between two business people who didn't talk to me or each other. There was some nasty turbulence at the end, though, because there was heavy rain in Detroit and the clouds were very thick.
We spent a good amount of time flying through this one endless series of clouds that completely surrounded the plane. Outside the windows everything was this sickly shade of milky white, tinged a weird yellow at the bottom. It lit the interior of the plane very oddly and gave me a whanging big headache.
The shuttle home had two kids from New Jersey, one kid from Atlanta, and me. Me and the Atlanta kid had a spirited discussion about the Red Sox (he was a Braves fan, but he hates the Yankees, so all good there), while the New Jersey kids sat in front of us and muttered sullenly. After a while we all quieted down because it was late and we were zonked out (I know I was, in any event). The rain was torrential, and the shuttle driver was playing music very quietly.
So I'm sitting there in this van, back in Ann Arbor, heading back to my lovely little dorm room with my lovely little fellow occupant of said room, and it's pouring raink, and I'm wondering whether he's going to drop me off at the Mosher or the Jordan door, and how wet I'm likely to get going from the van to the door, and what I'm going to eat for a very late dinner, and right at the very edge of my consciousness, very, very low, I hear Ace of Base. I thought I was going insane.
I think that I am coming down with something. I'm not stuffy, but my throat feels horrid from post-nasal drip, and my nose is drippy. Aaaarrrrgh and such. Utter, utter, utter evil.
Right. Early morning class. Way past my weeknight bedtime. Off I go.
*edit: The net, she is buzzing over this guy Jack Chick, who has his own series of online comics called Chick's Tracts. They're very fanatically Christian, and they go on about how this and that is the Devil's work, and all good children can find salvation in Jesus. One which especially tickled me was this one about Dungeons and Dragons being a satanic cult.
Now, I'm the first to admit that hardcore D&D players creep me out, but that's because a lot of them are skeezy and even geekier than I am. Weird though they may be, I highly doubt that they are all Devil-ridden witches. Plus, check out this Chick guy's artwork. Just look at the blond girl's face in the 6th panel. C'mon, the worst artist in my drawing class could do better than that.
Yes, so check out these 'tracts' for a good laugh. The guy is certifiable, and yeah, lots of them are full of hate and prejudice and just plain old stupidity, but the key is to bear in mind that you just can't take this idiot seriously. I don't know how people like that can exist in real life.
11:52 PM
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