When I Heard the Learn\’d Astronomer

Ben Folds & girlish melodrama July 26, 2006

In retrospect, the tempo was too slow.

You can’t imagine how good it feels to realize that.

Life is Oratory. Oratory = CKS Tour. April 11, 2006

Yet another example of why Apple Valley speech is a global phenomenon.

Emotional Porn April 11, 2006

Why can’t all Monday nights end as the last one did? Having little or nothing to do (such a lie!), Pierre and I set off in search of “healthy food.” This search proved pretty futile — except that we discovered the fabled Special K Challenge, which we earnestly promised to take… tomorrow. After scouring ABP, the Garage, 7-11, and CVS, we headed back to Pierre’s room, where he had a bag of Ruffles and a Guinness-spiked chocolate cake — of which he partook, but not I, since I have temporarily sworn off alcoholic substances for reasons best left unsaid on this here highly public blog.

Anyway. Pierre and Tom, my two magnanimous blockmates, might very well be the best of company for watching The Princess Diaries 2. That’s all I’m saying; Disney + Wigg E12 = Amazing. They allow me to swoon when appropriate, laugh along when I criticize, and provide sexually explicit background commentary for most of the suppressed moments of the movie. Terrific guys.

And, as shameful as it should be, despite all assumed protests from various friends (coughcoughLizcough) and all my newfound academic disdain, I really do like that movie. I like it because it glorifies what’s still good in this world (thumb wars, waltzes, and Julie Andrews) and can usually make me tear up every time Mia asks the orphans to join her in the parade, tiaras and all. I like it because it allows me to entertain the delicious idea that Chris Pine (or, y’know, men like him… sure…) is willing to kneel down and confess that, despite Anne Hathaway’s clumsiness and logorrhea (!), he is so in love with her that he will deny the crown of Genovia. — No, that can’t be it; I don’t like the movie because of that. As noble and as sickeningly idealistic as it is, that’s not the appeal. The appeal is that archery scene. That hot, skin-tingling archery scene.

So that’s all there is to that; I’m pining away for Chris Pine.

This brings me back to a conversation I had earlier with Liz about Meg Ryan. With each reflection, I’m beginning to realize that I was raised to love movies that glorify imperfect, irrational women. While there’s nothing wrong with providing a new, flawed heroine to counteract the ego-shrinking, Aphrodite-does-Hollywood image of onscreen perfection, I feel as though this can be an awfully dangerous cinematic addiction. There’s no encouragement to better oneself; “just wait for the right guy, sweetheart, and he’ll love you for all your flaws.” It’s hardly fair to a guy. I know that, at times, the legitimacy of my existence needs to be reaffirmed by a call home to the parents, but I don’t plan to end up with somebody who puts up with me. I, like most people, get turned on when someone calls my bluff. This is what we do, as friends and family members and fellow human beings: we sort of whet ourselves (hot imagery alert!!) against each other; we learn and grow and figure it out together. It’s not fair to a guy to ask him to be okay with all my imperfections, since I don’t plan to be so lenient with him. Maybe that’s why chick flicks are so easily identified as “emotional porn”; just as it’s not fair to expect a woman to squeal á la Jenna Jameson, it’s not fair to expect a man to sacrifice a crown and a night of “boning” — as Tom calls it — for a gal who is “deathly afraid of jellyfish” and just wants to slow dance to Norah Jones.

[I’m sorry, but Norah Jones?! I consider that a flaw!]
I’m waiting for Billy Watson to discover this blog and have a field day.

Nostalgia March 20, 2006

I miss the days when I was financially foolish enough to believe that I deserved a massage. I figured, as long as I had three figures in my checking account, I could surely manage a weekend at the day spa. I was so wrong.

Konstantine, my beloved Russian masseur, has apparently left Giuliano Day Spa and opened up his own place. I am told he now specializes in karate!?

I hate change.

Romanticizing March 16, 2006

If your day is filled — but you’re efficient! — was it well spent?
If you don’t stop moving — but you get everything done! — do you regret it?

If you need me, I’ll be plotting a course to
the source of the purest little part of me.

…Or I’ll be at rehearsal.

Too Perfect March 12, 2006

“Certainly there are many new ideas always forming in my head. For one, that I am going to enter a nunnery these next months; & let myself down into my mind;” — Virginia Woolf, March 29th, 1929