The Rabbit Hole

I didn't ride my bike to work on Wednesday because I had to hold my Dad's hand as he bought a present for my mother in the Apple Store. I was never going to get back from Grand Central in time on a bike. So I used my stationary bike at home that night, and, as a complement to the biking, I did all of fifteen--you are in shock at prowess, I can tell--push ups. My arms are fine--they're mostly used to supporting a lot of force and weight from the regular biking I do. My abs, on the other hand, are all stupid and achy. It took me most of yesterday to figure out why. So, not only am I not especially strong, I'm more than a little clueless about this exercise stuff. Better not do too much of it, just in case.

In other news, I almost bought stuff on Threadless yesterday for Christmas presents, but I couldn't hit the cap for free shipping without buying a bunch of bullshit. I was all set to abandon it as a hopeless quest when they e-mailed this morning with a change not only to their minimum for free shipping but in the costs for their shirts. The shirts dropped to $10 (from $12), which left me maddeningly below the cap again. Luckily, I chanced upon this shirt which I will get for my mother. (She likes moose. At Christmas, our entire staircase is filled with mooses. Moosen. Meese?) Free shipping and my holiday stuff that needs to be done asap is mostly taken care of. There are still a few outlying presents and one that I have to actually take to a post office, but otherwise, whew.

Happy Birthday to my best friend, feiran ! Truly, this has been a momentous year, filled with lots of life changes. In your case, all for the better. In mine, less so, 'cause, you know, maybe I, like, miss you a little (sometimes).

This is also a milestone year for she and I as we will have known each other for TEN YEARS at this point. For those of you not in the know, we met our freshman year at the Columbia University Science Fiction Society. I exposed my general ignorance of literature and declared the literary heroine I most admired/wanted to be like was the Dark Phoenix. feiran  came up to me and was all "YOU LIKE X-MEN COMICS?! I LIKE THEM. LET US BE FRIENDS." Why she'd want to be friends with someone who just declared that a genocidal super-being was her favorite person is still somewhat beyond me. But it worked out okay in the end. Much abuse, and many, many years of cohabitation later--TEN YEARS TO BE PRECISE--and we're still going, even in separate cities. Let's hope that continues for another decade.

A decade. Holy God, am I old. Lucky for me, feiran  is older (for the next 3.5 months)!

Happy Birthday wishes to my friend and co-Twilight Scene It-winning teammate kent_allard_jr  as well! You, sir, are a gentleman and scholar and an extremely good sport about all the dolphin-rape-related teasing we heap on your just about every time we all hang out. We kid because we love!

Have a great one, solstice babies!

This does not mean the show will get better. This does not mean the show will get better. This does not mean...


But...but...but...Ray Park! And and and Robert Knepper! Robert Knepper, playing Samuel in that clip, is absolutely mesmerizing. If he weren't kinda weird looking, he'd be a huge star. As it is, I've enjoyed him in everything I've ever seen him in. He makes the practical impossibility of a man a) having his hand chopped off b) while on the run as a fugitive c) before getting it sewn back on by a veterinarian with no anaesthesia d) only to have to pull the stitches out with his teeth and remove the re-attached hand....seem oddly plausible. (Prison Break was such a fun show, sometimes.)

All right, show. You've piqued my interest. I'm still watching the premiere drunk, though.

When am I ever going to learn? Stunt casting =/= making the show better, no matter how much I like the actors.

But...but...it's T-Bag, and he'd be awesomely creepy. Maybe he could fix Heroes?

::wibbles::

And and and! Ray Park! SERIOUSLY.

No, no, no. You have to control yourself. There is no way this will ever be okay. They brought Daddy Luthor out of retirement and while he was awesome, they got rid of him and the story he was in was stupid, and STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT.

I hate this show some times. Only Heroes could make me MAD about Robert Knepper and Ray Park getting more work.

I had too much goddamned sugar today, that's my excuse.

I just called Time Warner Cable to FREAK OUT all over the poor guy who answered the phone because I mistook my renewing my magazine subscription for an out-of-sync, over-billing on Time Warner's part. (Which has, to my defense, happened before.) I mean I really, realllllllllllllly flipped the fuck out about this and lectured the guy about how fucking irresponsible Time Warner Cable is. I then didn't wait for them to tell me to go suck eggs (as happened last time) and immediately call my credit card company for info. The guy on that line is super friendly and gives me just that extra bit of info--the word "subscription" in fact--and I start flashing back to some point in this almost blissfully continuous long weekend (I took off today to watch the inauguration; best use of a personal day ever!) to when I realized that my Entertainment Weekly subscription was almost up.

Since I can't call back and apologize in person, you all will be my karmic cleansing and witness my apology: Sorry, Joe! My bad! Egg on my face! I am made of fail! This event proves to me two things: one, holy shit, girl, don't do your goddamned banking so late at fucking night when you're not thinking clearly about anything except sleep (which, due to your massive fail, you will be getting less of--more karmic realignment!); and, two, Science H. Logic, see #1.

I did discover that Time Warner had, for some mysterious reason, dropped my credit card again, as they had done last time. I got to update it. So maybe the panic attack was worth it to correct the billing error that, as debt delayed often does, would surely have come back to bite me in the ass another day had I not fixed it. So perhaps I was destined to find and correct a non-existent error in order to correct a real one. The fact that I received a notice this same evening from my bank telling me that I'm an even bigger dipshit than this little anecdote would indicate contributed to my paranoia in no small way. (Short version of that anecdote: I need to be more careful about amounts when I deposit and make sure I am actually depositing those amounts.)

The Force is not strong with this one.

I submitted my second part of the Heroes premiere review. At one point I got excited because I thought I recognized Bruce Boxleitner. Apparently, I had the wrong guy. He was playing the Governor, who I totally didn't pay any attention to because once again all of Niki/whoever's scenes pretty much bore me to tears. Thank goodness the nice editor at Pink Raygun caught it. She laughed at me. I'm so embarrassed. I feel like a poser--being all YAY and being totally wrong.

We just watched Tron, too. ::facepalm::

Saturday:
I finally remembered to bring the hair clips for viridian to a place where she was going to be. Unfortunately, I dropped them inside a bag of clothes I was donating to goodwill, and left them in there when I tossed it in the bin. I ended up crawling halfway inside the thing to try and reach the bag. Failure. A paramedic watching from the parking lot of the shopping center seemed quite amused. He also told me not to fall in because inside of the bin it was a billion degrees and if I fell in, it would mean the fire department getting involved and cutting me out before I died of the heat. He kindly tried to break the lot with something but it didn't work. He drove off, promising to come back with something if he could.

In the mean time, I charged over to Old Navy, talked an employee into coming out with one of their clothing hooks, and tried using that on the bin. Success! Of course, by this time the EMT had radioed a fire truck which had pulled into the tiny parking lot. I was brilliantly red from embarrassment, I am certain. They told me not to be if only because the real embarrassment would have been me falling in and needing to be rescued. They had a point, sure, but still. Gah. So unnecessarily stupid.

Another amusing development: I seem to have figured out how to turn off a bad movie without finishing it! I mean, results are still out on that one--I haven't started to crave knowing how either Eragon or A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints ended, but there's still time for it to annoy me enough that I give either another look. I doubt it. Eragon I read, and the movie was truly low-rent-but-thinks-it's-Lord-of-the-Rings. The other was just, from what I could tell, a bunch of kids yelling variations on "FUCK YOU!" at each other in between bouts of complaining about the heat. Well, fuck that, 'cause it's too hot to be watching anything that complains about it being hot. No thanks.

I realize I hadn't shared this late-breaking thought I had after finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Again, NO SPOILERS.

So, like, everyone except me must have known Lupin was a werewolf the second he was introduced in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, right? Okay, so that's my dumbness on one level. Then we got introduced to Fenrir Grayback, who, duh, we're told up front is a werewolf. And I swear, I go, "Wow, that's weird that he ended up a werewolf with a name like that. Kinda like Lupin being a werewolf. Weird!" That's stupidity on another level.

Then there's this brilliance I just unleashed upon earthrise: "Wait, do you suppose wizarding law states that people who become werewolves have to change their name to, basically, I. R. Werewolf, Esq?"

That's intelligence, folks. And stupidity on a scale not previously imagined. I are smart.