My Uber Fandom is Out of Control

I figure it's almost election day, might as well post something of transcendent value. Anyway, somehow in the last month, El Esposo and I have become "huge fans" of the kid from the movie Holes.

The place we stayed in Vermont had satellite TV and we watched the movie Transformers. Then the weekend before last we went on a double date with our friends we've been meaning to hang out with for over a year. We saw Eagle Eye. And finally this weekend, we rented the new Indiana Jones. All movies starring our friend from Holes and Disney Channel fame. I feel like it is my duty to review each film and particularly the performance of the kid from Holes, as I am now an expert on his body of work.

Holes

In the movie, Holes, the kid from Holes begins to establish his street cred as the go-to young male actor for the harmless outcast/underdog role. He plays a kid with a long history of bad luck who is trying to change his fortune and break the "curse" on his family. He is sent to some sort of juvenile prison camp in some random out-of-the-way desert area in the lovely United States. There he interacts with several outcast/reject types with various issues, teaches a boy to read, escapes, brings down the evil prison camp, and clears his name. This movie is good fun. I watched it with five or six thirteen year old boys and we were all equally satisfied. It's a touching film.

Next we have Transformers
In this film, the kid from Holes plays a high school outcast who bought a car that turned out to be alive. The car "chose" him because his grandfather was the discoverer of this thing-a-ma-jig that will destroy earth or something. Anyway he fights the evil machines with the help of the good machines and saves the world. This movie plays especially to the adolescent male crowd with the fantasy of the nerd/underdog getting the "hot chick." That angle was pretty amusing, but the dialogue in this movie was also quite amusing. I think a fun game to play with the movie Transformers might be to count the non sequiturs. The plot is not very developed, but the random things people say in the movie make for some good entertainment.

Eagle Eye


To continue the historical journey we should have the Indiana Jones movie next, but I'd rather go in the order that I saw the films. So next we have Eagle Eye, complete with family baggage and evil machines. The kid from Holes plays the less-favored, less-capable, dare-I-say "outcast" twin brother who is thrust into this mega- super- hyper- uber- intense series of high impact action where he is being monitored and told what to do through technology. It's a classic fear of technology film, but I found it to be good fun and I would highly recommend it. It's quite enjoyable to make jokes about technology controlling our lives after viewing this film. The kid from Holes continues his accidental action hero routine.

Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Finally, we have the new Indiana Jones movie. To be frank, it is not very good. Ten minutes in, we paused it to get our frozen pizza out of the oven and El Esposo was already saying Harrison Ford is not delivering the goods as normal. I assured him that it's Harrison Ford and if anybody can charm with witty remarks amidst unlikely action it is him. He just needs something to work with. Wait for it. So we waited and waited and then it was over. The Holes kid plays the secret son of Indiana Jones, who has a bit of a tough kid outcast act (though of course he's loveable and harmless) and, oh yeah, family baggage from not ever knowing his father. The action in the movie is pretty inventive and it's not like the acting is actually bad, just adequate. It's mostly a weak script here that is at fault, but the difference between this movie and every other movie on this list is that this not fully realized script has pretty much no redeeming qualities. No entertaining non-sequitirs, no playing on real fears in real life, and no classic Harrison Ford wit.

In summary, I remain a huge fan of the kid from Holes, but break from the super-fan sentiment that he can do no wrong and every picture he is in shines.

Bobby Pins

Something woke me at 7:57 am. It was not my alarm. No, that had long since failed. It must have been my conscience. Or my instinctive fight-or-flight mechanism. The thing that sometimes motivates me when nothing else will:

OK, the fear of getting fired.

I woke, I turned to my trusty phone and saw the numbers 7-5-7. "What?" I said. And then for good measure, "What?" El Esposo mumbled something and turned over. I was supposed to catch the 8:05 bus.

As I leapt and ran across to the bathroom, I briefly considered going as is. But then I remembered that I had not showered post-yoga last night. Cute as my hair looked curled in a nest atop my head, I was not going to work stinky. We have no showers there and grossing out the client is not good business practice. My best hope was the 8:17 bus.

About 8:13 I was clean and dressed and looking at my partially dry, mostly wild-looking hair style in the mirror. No time for niceties such as hair product, I turned to that trusted and true standard of hair taming, the bobby pin. Grabbed a few on my way out the door, ran all the way to the stop, and have been living fabulous ever since. Wikipedia says this hair fastener became the standard in the twenties when the bob was in style. What I could not find out, though, was exactly when it was invented.

My mini epiphany about doctors

So not that long ago, I am sitting in my doctor's office on the bed with the butcher paper for a checkup and I say:
"So doc, I started taking this herbal stuff for this annoyance of mine. What do you think?"
And doc said, "If it works for you, you should use it."
"You don't have any recommendations about it?"
"Not if you like it."
"And on the bottle there's some bit about seeing your doctor about whether to use this stuff if you get pregnant*. But it's really just like a type of sugar, so I'm thinking, how bad can it be?"
"Right. Sounds like BS to me," says the doc. "I wouldn't worry."
(*I'm not pregnant, just thorough.)

I nod, but I immediately start going over the conversation in my head and I realize that all the doctor had really done is agree with me. So I start to think what use is his expertise. He's the doctor, not me. Shouldn't HE be telling ME whether or not this stuff works well? And then it hits me. The answer to this question is NO. The doctor does not know more about me than I do. And why, in fact, should he? He's trying to see as many of us as quickly as possible and why should I blame him as something has got to keep my insurance premiums down?

A short few weeks later I'm rowing a canoe with el esposo (see pic below) and I start telling him what I think about doctors. I tell him I think sometimes people get the wrong idea. They expect doctors to be like this omniscient being that knows exactly what's wrong with them and how to fix it. So then when the doctor misses something and gets a diagnosis wrong or gives them a medication that doesn't fix everything, people get so angry. On the other hand, some people assume their doctor is preaching the truth even when it doesn't seem quite right to them based on their experience, because as everyone knows doctors are omniscient. I think we can assign both too much power and too much guilt to doctors. I tell El Esposo that we are the ones that are really responsible for our own health.

El Esposo agrees and offers the addition that people often don't keep track of themselves and their illnesses enough to give their doctors all the info they need to make the correct diagnosis. His grandfather has always received excellent medical care because he keeps excellent notes.

I'm not saying doctors don't do amazing things and don't have loads of valuable experience and knowledge from years of intense schooling. Of course they do. I respect them and their expertise. They can also be responsible for the severe errors in judgment they sometimes make. However, I think in most circumstances the onus of responsibility for our health is on us (or the parents of a child, of course). Feel empowered. I do.

And I'm not even going to talk about health care coverage. I'm just not. Because that is a whole other topic.

The most relaxing vacation of my life

It's not really that hard to earn the title of "most relaxing vacation of my life" since I am used to family vacations where you wake up around 6 AM every day to cram as much high-velocity action! action! action! as possible into the minutes and hours. And of course there's often some sort of melt-down to add to the excitement. In short, my family is awesome. But just as there is a time to be awesome, there is a time to chill . . . (That was definitely a quote from the Bible, yes?)

This vacation also easily beat out the honeymoon for most relaxing since I did not have vertigo and we made zero stops at the emergency room. Though true that you have never lived unless you have spent hours just sitting in a chair trying not to move so as not to disrupt the ear canal or better yet walked down the street in a jaggedy un-pattern just waiting to fall on your face, sometimes you just want to have some control over a few simple bodily functions . . .

This trip was basically perfect. It was beautiful, tranquil, and felt very much like the calm before the storm. (No, I'm not pregnant.) Though by the end of the week we were pretty much ready to get back to the semi-city life. Ah, Vermont. Land of the unpopulous, where the only major chain restaurant is Ben and Jerry's, where hippies and kids that belong in the movie Juno (wielding pipes--what WERE they doing?)roam the streets of your capital city by night, where reside the paradoxical friendly/guarded folk, where everyone is conscientious and conscious and McCain stands no chance, where every town is a small town, and the hills/mountains roll on in unobtrusive beauty. We probably couldn't live there long term (well maybe if I become a famous writer and am asked to teach at Middlebury), but a week was wonderful.

Quick, before the memories starts to fade, here are some photos:


This is the view from our back porch where we stayed on Lake Elmore:

This is in Burlington:

El Esposo is standing on the remains of a cabin overlooking a vista on our hike up Mt. Elmore.

This is the only picture we remembered to take at the Ben and Jerry's tour. I think it's supposed to be a giant straw or something?

Us Canoeing. The picture is kind of odd, but I kind of like it.

Middlebury:

BACK to work on a holiday

The hard thing about coming back to work on a federal holiday after a week's vacation is the nagging conscience that seems to think it might be a good idea for me to consider at least pretending that I might possibly care about trying to complete any actual work with 3/4 of the workforce at my office gone.

I would insert a youtube clip of Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tennenbaums if that didn't conflict with my desire to do nothing.

Ch- ch- ch- changes are my favorite

So I've been living in the same metro area for over five years! It's insane. The only plausible explanation would be that I did it for a boy, and that would be basically true. And of course it's worth it.

I have also now been working at my same job for two years, which is easily a record. I sort of tried to leave earlier this year but then I got one of those offers you can't refuse.

Interestingly, one of my biggest fears is stagnation. (Okay I'll confess "interestingly" is an inside joke between me and a co-worker that does not read this blog, based on an email that was sent to us that included a bunch of work for us to do. "Interestingly" was the first word in the email and it had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the contents, which were the opposite of interesting. Just a common case of adverb overuse, I guess.)

So, yes, staganation. I used to fight stagnation by going to some random location (like a national park) that I'd never been to work for the summer. Now I have to live vicariously through others doing really exciting stuff and take on random projects like say teaching a class, taking a class, doing some pro-bono freelancing, planning a wedding, writing a novel, what-have-you. This way I can ingore when my job gets REALLY boring so that I can continue to collect a paycheck and sock it away for an eventual world takeover (or to buy a house, gosh darnit, silly willy little short sale madness arrgh, me matey!!!).

Also, I occasionally get massive haircuts. Like the one I'm getting today. Two fun bonus things about really massive haircuts: a) you can congratulate yourself for doing good by donating your hair to make wigs for kids and b) you can get someone at a decent salon to cut your hair for free. I would say that these two items are of equal importance to me, but the thing I like most is the big change in appearance. There is some fear involved, certainly (like I hope I don't get really terrible looking too-short boy hair), but that makes it all the more exciting.

Before and After photos to come as events unfold . . .

OK. So no real "normal" before pictures. We were in a hurry, but there was some documentation, via camera phone, as follows:


My luxurious locks. If you look closely, you may see the photographer.

The stylist is cutting into my defenseless little braid!

The look immediately after first chop

The final product, from the back.

Still working on the exact stylin' but I think I like it. Perhaps I'll get a better photo soon, also.

In the meantime I am going on vacation with El Esposo and will be sans internets. "Catch you on the flipside."