the ocean

Another Line Crossed

We have started watching Murder, She wrote every night before bed. Frankly, I should have known this was coming; after we made the switch from Friends to Frasier and then to The Golden Girls, it was really the next logical step. At this rate, it'll be Little House on the Prairie in another six months.

Anyway, it's magical. Jessica Fletcher is such a nosy old bitch, always calling random police departments and asking to see old murder files and fingerprints and car registrations and such. And everyone totally puts up with her, subject to some mild eye rolling. Actually, that's generally how you can tell she's about to solve the murder -- someone finally tells her she's being ridiculous and then she just launches into it. Occasionally the murderer threatens her with a gun or something when he or she is revealed, but even that is kind of halfhearted. Mainly they're just thrilled she's there, which is especially weird given that she's such a harbinger of death. If she ever showed up at my house, I'd definitely head for the hills.

There are lots of fantastic guest stars as well. Morgan Fairchild, Julianna Margulies, and the guy who played Stan on The Golden Girls are all on the episode that's playing right now. This past weekend they played a Murder She Wrote movie that had Phylicia Rashad and Taraji P. Henson (playing a slave, no less). Angela Lansbury had a dual role in that one, as both J.B. Fletcher and her distant relative from the pre-Civil War South who was always complaining about slavery but never really doing anything about it. You could tell she was playing a different character because she didn't have the sassy glasses.

Spoiler alert from twenty years ago: Morgan Fairchild was the killer. Also, she was wearing a lace dickey.

Speed 3: Liftoff

Went to see Gravity last night. I had assumed it was a sequel to the classic Sandra Bullock feature Speed 2: Cruise Control, but it turns out it's just another one of your standard Sandra Bullock Struggles in Space features. For the first ten minutes or so, I thought I had made a huge mistake and was going to have to either walk out or slam my head against the wall until I passed out, because the dialogue was so faux-chatty and clever that I thought maybe Aaron Sorkin had written it, and he was using again. But once a bunch of crap slammed into the shuttle and radio communications cut out, things improved a great deal on that score. The movie turned into a series of terrible things happening in stunningly visual fashion, which was immensely suspenseful if ultimately kind of ridiculous. After a while you do kind of have to start wondering what horrible thing can happen next; I would propose the following:

-- It turns out there was a cage full of tigers in the space station and they all attack SB, weightlessly.
-- Somebody left a needle filled with the AIDS virus on the seat of the escape pod and SB sits on it, weightlessly.
-- SB forgot to do her taxes this year and she gets an interstellar audit, weightlessly.
-- It turns out Kirk Cameron lives in space now and SB is forced to watch one of his movies.

Feel free to use any of those for the sequel. All I ask is that I be invited to the premiere or, better yet, the after party.

Anyway, it was pretty good, if not quite as great as it was all hyped up to be. Clooney actually kind of bugged me and I swear to God if they give Bullock a second Oscar for this I will hunt ever single member of the Academy down individually and force them to watch The Lake House until they vomit, which should take about forty-five seconds. We saw it in IMAX 3D, which did practically nothing for me. I guess I just don't know what to do with my Ds.

Monae, Monae

So I went to the Janelle Monae concert earlier this week. It was fairly amazing. I'm not sure that I've ever seen any performer of any kind put out that much energy during the course of a performance, not even Shiri Appleby in the classic Lifetime movie unstable. Her sound is pretty difficult to describe since it's so eclectic, but let's call it Outkast meets Prince meets Lauryn Hill before she went crazy. In fact, she even covered Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," which caused me to squeal like a little girl. She also had two backup singers with identical haircuts who did drill-team-like feats of arm waving throughout the concert. And the band was good, too, although the levels were sometimes uneven -- at one point she pretty much got drowned out by a funky Stevie Wonder sounding keyboard line, which I'm pretty sure was not the intended effect.

But of course, I am far too old and crabby to be attending concerts at this point in my life. It was at the Vic, which is small, which meant that I had to stand the whole time, with a lesbian couple engaging in heavy PDA (or, actually, heaving petting) right next to me. They for some reason selected a hilariously mopey local band as the opening act; they were so uninterested in being there that they introduced themselves in a mumble before instructing the audience to not "bother to look us up." Then there was almost half an hour of people moving things around on the stage before the headliner could take the stage. Also, I became very paranoid that a rat was crawling up my leg because I saw one at that theater like five years ago. All legitimate concerns on my part, obviously.

Anyway, I enjoyed it! Anything that keeps me out past eleven on a Monday has to be pretty compelling.

Could It Be That I Was Never Really That Interesting?

I've been struggling to think of things to blog about lately. Everything I do just seems so ordinary and uninteresting. Does anyone really want to read a discussion of how I bought a coat this weekend? Or the thrilling tale of how I thought about going to Walgreen's on Thursday but then didn't? I could of course summarize the six hours or so of television I DVR and watch each week -- or the dozens of articles I read on the train, if we want to be slightly more highbrow about it -- but how could I ever compete with the geniuses at Entertainment Weekly and Reader's Digest? The official magazines of my parents' and my grandmother's bathrooms, respectively, deserve a little bit of breathing room.

What's somewhat confusing to me is that I can recall that I used to blog every single weekday back when I started this thing. Granted, that was almost ten years ago, so I was also popping the collars on my polo shirts and watching The OC religiously, but I did have a lot more enthusiasm for this project. Of course, reading some of those old entries does make me feel a bit better. I don't think that my experience dogsitting for my coworker really merited two paragraphs, while subjects like "I went to Home Depot" and "I had a weird dream" were barely subjects at all. So at the end of the day, I have to conclude that I just found myself a lot more fascinating when I was 26 than I do today. I blame our culture's obsession with youth. And Miley Cyrus. I just kind of what to throw that in there.

Anyway, I am trying to be more interesting, just for all of you. My amazing martyrdom continues.

Professional Development

So today I found out that it is possible to make a triple murder boring. I got the record in this case this morning and there are more than thirty volumes of record and transcripts. Two boxes worth, in fact. Including copies of every single subpoena issued in the case and the response. And all of the exhibits, some of which are, yes, gruesome crime scene photos, but some of which are just diagrams and shit. And jury instructions. My god, the jury instructions. That jury must have felt like it was assembling a 1998 Taurus from scratch with all the instructions it got. But I do need to be complete, just in case there's a confession from some other killer somehow buried in there or something, I don't know. So I have many days of fascinating reading ahead of me.

In other news, my mother texted me today to ask me for a legal referral. Well, technically she emailed my phone number, which resulted in no fewer than three giant texts, including one that was just her email signature block. But regardless, it seems one of her friends has gotten into a bit of a scrape (slap fight at the Dress Barn, I would guess) and needs some assistance. Is it weird that I actually suggested one of my high school classmates? Somehow I'm not sure I'd want to tell a friend to hire a lawyer whose senior prom I chaperoned.

Goodbye, Columbus

I had the day off yesterday for Columbus Day. Unfortunately, I sort of forgot that I had the day off and got up in a panic thinking that I was running late, ran around the house like a madman for ten minutes, and then realized that I didn't, in fact, have anywhere to be. By which point I was already too awake to go back to sleep. So I just said fuck it and watched The New Adventures of Old Christine for a while. Good times.

This actually was my second rude awakening in as many days; on Sunday, I was awakened by the door buzzer at 6:30 AM, when a houseguest who had left very early in the morning to head back to Michigan unexpectedly returned to our place because she had thrown up in her car. And of course the button that opens the front door wasn't working for some reason, so I had to head down the front steps in my boxers. Fun, sexy times.

At least in that case, though, I had been planning to get up fairly early for the marathon, anyway. This year I wanted to see my friend who's actually one of the fast runners, you see. And of course I utterly failed at that task. I got out there at the beginning -- handbikers, Kenyans, three hour wonders -- but see my friend I did not. Instead, I spent a hour staring at every man in a yellow shirt and holding a sign that said "Jeff, I'm pregnant" and seemed a lot funnier the night before when I was markering it out. True wit seldom survives marker fumes, it seems.

Anyway, Columbus Day happened. Hooray for America.

Good Times

You can tell a day is going well when you are counting down the hours to your next Zyrtec. That thing on the package about every twelve hours is just a suggestion, right? Because right now I'm contemplating just taking the whole box and calling it a day.

By the way, you have to get your Zyrtec directly from the pharmacist in Illinois now. You even have to sign a little statement promising that you won't use it to make meth. Because most drug dealers really draw the line at perjury, you see.

So apparently I'm allergic to fall now? It started last month as just a little bit of chest congestion, but now my throat is as raw as Sandra Bullock's performance in Gravity and my eyes hurt more than when I saw Sandra Bullock's performance in Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous. Why can't I be allergic to something I don't want to be around anyway? Like broccoli or that paralegal in my office who spits when she talks.

I'd go to see my doctor, but last time he just made me take off my pants and tried to convince me I had asthma. I'm just not ready for that level of sexiness, I guess.

Photo Evidence

You probably knew it was coming: a few photos from my amazing Homecoming weekend.


Here is the dance team, as seen from the president's box. For some reason I was very excited about the dance team. And no, I had not yet had any alcohol at this point.


This one is kind of blurry, but I really wanted to share Liz's attempts to seduce our campus statute. Little does she know that this guy's been around.


So this is not just a shot of a urinal. The point is that the wall NEXT to the urinal in this bar used to be completely covered in questionably hilarious graffiti. They painted over it! Also, this photo is art. Suck on it.


Here we are in that same bar, The Winery. Liz was saddened to find out it is not an actual winery. They may not even serve wine; I've never tried to find out.


Here is another shot in the president's box. Yes, we are very classy.

Journeys

So I went back to my undergrad for homecoming last weekend. It wasn't my reunion year, but I had to go because they were giving me an award. (Yes, I'm kind of a big deal.) No, it was not Prettiest Eyes or even Craziest Driver, unfortunately. It was the Young Alumnus of the Year award, which I really deserve, given how hard I work at being young. I was twerking and tweeting all day long to get myself into the appropriate mindset.

Let me say that they told us in advance that we would have 1-2 minutes to accept the award, which I figured meant that we would just basically say "thank you" and head back to our chicken. But it turned out that all of the other honorees actually prepared remarks, which meant that I spent much of the dinner typing notes into my iPhone which I then couldn't use because I didn't want people to think I was texting from the podium. So I winged it, which actually went all right. It's a forgiving crowd, perhaps because some of them remembered me as the only person in their class who actually read all of David Copperfield.

In addition to the dinner, they also introduced us honorees at the football game, which meant that I attended a football game. We were in the president's box, though, so there were sandwiches and cookies involved. Also the dance team completely blew my mind with their rendition of Cotton Eyed Joe. Words of comfort in a troubled time, let me tell you.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much just eating, drinking, and failing to remember people's names. I have to admit that I'm sort of disappointed that it wasn't more like the classic Mischa Barton Lifetime movie Homecoming; no one tied me to a bed or swung an axe at me. Maybe next year?

Mixed Messages

I am beginning to fear that I am watching too much Lifetime & Hallmark Channel. I am now aware of so many products and services that most males in their thirties cannot even imagine. I have experienced the triumph of the lady who loves her mini catheter because it's so small and unobtrusive she can just take it with her everywhere she goes. I have felt the pain of the woman who wants to crawl under her desk because flower-scented sprays can't mask the odor of her light bladder leakage, or LBL for short. I have joined in the puzzlement of the woman from Dancing With The Stars who dances in an adult diaper "even though she doesn't need one" to demonstrate how slim and trim the new designs are. I actually considered calling to order that long, narrow tube you can hook on to your vacuum to clean the lint out of your dryer. (Is it called a Lint Lizard, maybe? I'm too lazy to google.) None of these things are good signs.

Also, I am aware of the fact that the Andie MacDowell series "Cedar Cove" exists. Let me be clear that I have never watched it. Okay, maybe the last five minutes once because it was on right before the Frasier reruns. Bruce Boxleitner is unrecognizable.

And don't even get me started on Dance Moms. That woman haunts my dreams.