People Pick the Most Inconvenient Times to Die

So, last weekend we drove down and back from Nashville in two days, because Shawna’s grandfather decided to up and die on us. Now before you go all sniffling and making ‘awwww’ sounds, he was old and he’d had a full life of making people miserable. I am talking about one of those people so mean that when we found out he died in the hospital, Shawna asked if there was a wildcat loose in there, because there is no way this man kicked it any other way than facing down an animal bigger and meaner than himself. He’d been shot like three times, by different men, for being with different wives. Let’s just say, he’d lived his life. And that’s not even the point. The point is, we have things we need to be getting done, important things to make a difference in our own lives, lives that are not where they should be or where we would like them to be. But this old geezer kicks it and we had to go, because there would be too much fallout if we didn’t show up. So we spent a whole two days driving to and from Nashville, with only a small pit stop to do some laundry and hear that if we find Jesus we will live with him in eternity, but if we don’t, we will burn in hell. Ah, I love a good revival… er, funeral. 

I just can’t wrap my warped mind around the idea of the funeral. People will live right next to someone their entire lives, and never make the effort to walk across the lawn and visit, but the person dies and they are at the funeral home for three days in a row every hour it’s open. And they think that it is an important thing to do to honor the person. Well, here’s a thought. Why not honor them while they are alive? Why not go visit once in a while or engage in a conversation where you come away actually knowing something about them? Just a thought. 

Funerals are really just absurd. Most of the people there aren’t really that close to the person. They are just room fillers. And for those people who are very close to the person, why is it such a good idea for them to be out in public for the world to see when they are trying to grieve? But, of course, since we heard stories about people at the funeral competing over who got the most flower arrangements, and people stealing food from the funeral home, and more than one person wonder aloud when they would be reading the will, I guess maybe funerals aren’t about the dead person at all. 

My brother, in his infinite wisdom, told us that he wants a roast instead of a funeral, everyone getting up and calling him a chump, instead of being all depressed. I’m really starting to think he is onto something. I also read recently, in an interview with Rachel McAdams : ), that you can be dumped into the ocean to become part of a coral reef. So, fodder for my friends and relatives or dolphin food, right now either one seems preferable to lying in a wood box and listening to “Go Rest High on That Mountain.”

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Putting the Ho in Ohio

So last night we went to see Christina Aguilera. An hour in a dark and silent room and two Relpax later, and I am well enough to tell you all about it. 

First off, I’m just going to say it right now so that all of you haters can be in disagreement from the get-go, I think Christina Aguilera has, quite possibly, the most amazing voice ever. Whether you think she’s a dirty slut or not, it doesn’t change the fact that the woman possesses an incredible instrument and she has mastered it beautifully. 

It is clear that she is trying very hard to be like Madonna, borrowing liberally from last summer’s Confessions tour, but she does it with such panache, it’s easy to forgive her those transgressions. And I appreciate anyone who brings stripper poles into a stage show. 

What can I say, Christina did, in fact, rock my world last night. 

But here’s what I really want to share with you – The Pussycat Dolls. Yes, that’s right, the Pussycat Dolls, Christina’s very special opening act, intended to get you sufficiently greased up for the dirtiness to come. I admit it, I have no choice, they are sexy. They are sexy in a girl you’d meet in a club and fuck up against the brick wall in the alley out back kind of way. At least two of them are, and I’m not naming names. (Nicole and Jessica) Sitting there last night, I was able to verify that my pre-live performance thoughts on the Pussycat Dolls held up. They are smoking hot and it is fun to watch them dance, and their music… well, their music… it sucks so bad I would get up from a coma to change the station. 

Two especially disturbing occurrences marked the Pussycat Dolls performance last night. The first frightening occurrence took place at the beginning of their set when the lead singer, Nicole, yelled something like, “Who wants to have some hot, raw, freaky fun with the Pussycat Dolls tonight?” and the three seven or eight-year-old girls in front of us screamed like banshees. Apparently, they left the house on the prowl for some hot, raw, freaky fun. 

In the second, more traumatic event, Nicole wanted to demonstrate her bond with the Columbus crowd (She went to school in Dayton, Ohio apparently). She did so by trying to start a popular Ohio cheer. She yelled out “Does this mean anything to you? H-O… And after a confused pause, everyone yelled “I-O”. “H-O,” she yelled again. “I-O.” they dutifully responded. “H-O.” “I-O.” “H-O.” “I-O” See, what she meant was O-H. O-H-I-O, that’s how you spell Ohio. She, on the other hand, was spelling ‘Ho’. Together with her adoring flock, they were spelling ‘Hoio’. But I guess with both the Pussycat Dolls and Danity Kane (who I didn’t actually see but I do know that they are basically the Pussycat Dolls with a couple of black girls and a name that sounds like they should be Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter) in town, you could say that last night Hoio was an appropriate name for it. They are in Cleveland tomorrow. I do hope the poor thing heals up that dyslexia thing before then.

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All We Need is… more & better love

I have a hard time buying into on-screen love stories. Half of the time they are entirely unnecessary, just subplots dropped into an otherwise sort of okay film. And when they are the focus, they are seldom worth actually focusing on. Take, for instance, the films Loving Annabelle and Imagine Me & You. Anything with potential for girl-girl kissing, I am going to see, which in turn is going to leave me either disappointed or pissed off. Disappointed most of the time, pissed off much more seldom, like in the case of Femme Fatale, in which Rebecca Romijn spends the first five minutes making out with a complete hottie, and then her character proceeds to act absolutely disgusted by the woman later on, even though Rebecca Romijn was clearly the one with the bad haircut, but that’s another rant. Most of the time, it’s just disappointment. 

In the case of Loving Annabelle, let’s just say I am tired of any film that uses sex as the climax (no pun intended) of a story. If sexual tension is the entire plot of the film, where the hell was it? The sex scene was hot, I’ll admit, but if you are going to make the screen explode, I’d better see you light a fuse. And if you have to show me one character daydreaming about the other one, you probably haven’t shown me enough tension in their interactions to get the point across. And you didn’t. 

Imagine Me & You, while on the complete opposite end of the gay film spectrum, suffered sort of the same problem. At the end, when the mom asks the main character how she can be sure she’s in love because it happened so quickly, the chic responds “I knew after three seconds.” Did you? Did you really? Because it seemed to me you knew after several days and finding out that she was, in fact, gay. Now, the three second response did provide the cue for the “I’ve heard of love happening that fast. The French call it Le Flash. / They would. Bloody perverts.” exchange, but it doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t SEE love after three seconds. I barely saw it when it was held up right in front of my face an hour later. 

So, anyway, in tribute to this rant, here are the eleven movies that work for me as love stories, and the sad thing is, at least four of them weren’t meant to be love stories at all. 

 (*BEWARE* - There are spoilers below that I would be royally perturbed to read if I hadn’t seen the movie. Read at your own risk!)

1. Malena – This is hands down the most beautiful, intense love story I have ever seen. It is unrequited, but it is so fucking powerful. They do use fantasy sequences, but in a clever way and only for artistic value, and it’s the things that the boy does outside of those fantasy scenes that demonstrate the strength of his feelings.

2. Matilda – So I’m going to whatever your idea of hell is for this, but I don’t care. Mutual affection has never been so transparent, and from the get go, as it is in this movie. It’s the way their eyes dance when they look at each other, the vehemence in Miss Honey’s proclamation when she says she loves Matilda. She may have adopted her at film’s end, but someday Matilda is going to grow up and Miss Honey is going to realize that she isn’t *really* her mother.

3. Love and Sex – Wow! A romantic comedy that I actually accept as a romantic comedy. With anyone else, I’m not sure it would have been much greater than the tripe that Hollywood produces left and right in this genre, but Famke Janssen and Jon Favreau made this movie freaking great. Of course, some of the genius is actually in the comedy.

“Two guys walk into a bar. One is a thirty-year-old stand-up comedian who lives with his mother.” 

4. Brokedown Palace – It doesn’t matter what comes before it, and this movie has both its high and low points leading up to the finale, but in the end, when Alice gets down on her knees and begs to serve both her time and Darlene’s, that is what love looks like.

5. Fingersmith – Ah, love is complicated, isn’t it? Especially in a time when propriety and expectation ruled even more so than today, and twice as much when you are trying so hard to double cross each other to meet your own means and you still can’t fight it.

6. Get Real – It’s high school romance for sure, but it is romantic, and when those two very pretty boys are kissing in the pool at night, I almost wish I were a gay man.

7. Fire – There are kisses. There’s a sex scene. They are nice, but completely extraneous. When Radha breaks all tradition to let Sita have a sip of water, that’s all we need to see. Don’t let it escape your awareness that she lets her sip from her own glass, so that if it someone were to notice, it would be Radha who takes the fall.

8. The Movie Hero – Though technically the relationship isn’t the focus of the plot here, it’s so essential, and so much the best part, that it’s pretty much a love story. It’s the quirky courtship that makes this work so well.

And I am always grateful when Dina Meyer is in anything that I don’t have to drink to get through. (I have sat through more bloody drivel for her…) 

9. The Princess Bride - There are a whole lot of things that make this film work, but if we weren’t rooting for Westley and Buttercup, none of them would matter. But how could we not? Is[n’t] this a kissing book?

10. Run Lola Run – So it’s a sort of real time, experimental action film. And yet… Anyone who would go through all of this shit for another person must really be in love. The scenes where they lie in bed talking are some of the most romantic moments on film.

11. School for Seduction – I know. It sounds like Jenna Jameson should be the star in this one. Well, she isn’t. It’s a little English film about an “Italian” woman who teaches English women how to be seductive. The two main women in the film develop a friendship that, if you squint your eyes not too hard and give a half smile, looks like an awful lot more.

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What can you do with boobs at work? Part Two

I have had one, and I mean exactly one, good day at work since I started working. Here’s what happened. 

I was doing a temp job answering phones for a week for an auto accessory supplier in a dumpy little city in California. It was about as okay as any job ever is. At least with temp jobs, you can get away with a lot more stuff. 

So, one day, I am sitting at the front desk, minding my own business, which consisted of writing and pretending the phone wasn’t ringing, when a car pulls up in the parking lot.  It wasn’t a huge car, it was of fairly average size, so I was shocked and amazed when like ten people clambered out of it like a clown car. They should have been wearing big shoes and red noses, but they weren’t. All of the men were dressed in black jeans and tight t-shirts with phrases like “Hellraiser” and the women were dressed in everything my mother never let me wear out of the house as a teenager. 

I put everything I was doing aside to watch their entrance, because that’s what you do when there are sluts.  Slowly, they approached the desk, and I waited for it. 

“We’re here for the photo shoot.” 

Had my lips been sewn together, it would have broken the thread. It was that impossible to hide the smirk, and I vaguely remember responding with something like “Of course you are.” 

So, while I waited for their liaison to reach the lobby and escort them to the g’d out vehicles they would be writhing atop, I got to watch five trashy car magazine models wiping lipstick from each other’s mouths and reaching down in their shirts to rearrange their cleavage. 

I’ve had worse days.

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What can you do with boobs at work?

After several days of feeling so far under I was practically waltzing across a ballroom on the Titanic, I feel oddly okay today. If I were committed, they would probably call it the manic state, but since I am still free for the time being, I’ll just dub it hopeful optimism. 

So, first read this, and then read what else was said later that day, along with my snappy comeback, below. It always sucks that I can’t be this quick or witty when I am actually standing face to face with someone. I only seem to be able to say something of value when it is someone else who has stood face to face with stupidity and they tell me about it at a later date. 

The conversation overheard by Shawna (and I include this with much gratitude for my luck at having the privilege of being with a person who realizes that this is a conversation worthy of public acknowledgement and ridicule, and who will also willingly admit that she got her formatting from years of being forced to read my screenplays): 

Read the conversationà  HERE 

Then, later, this same boob-greasing bimbo, had a short exchange with her clearly equally gifted husband, who also works there. 

Boob-greasing bimbo: Are you coming?

Equally gifted husband: Not yet. 

What should have been Shawna’s response according to me:  And you never will be once I slam your dick in a drawer. 

Now, this response cannot be altered in anyway. It can’t be buffered at the beginning, and it can’t be said without the crude terminology. It needs to retain both the candor and the shock factor in order to get the point across that you do in fact find him to be a complete and utter moron, and you honestly believe he should be fixed in order to prevent him from littering the future with moron spawn.

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Today’s Lesson

Typing one-handed is difficult, but for some unknown reason, typing one-handed while holding half of a grapefruit in the other is twice as difficult.

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The Bloody Charred Cook

There are times when I actually enjoy cooking. It’s the times when I have actually said “Hey, I’m going to try to make… this or that or this with a touch of that in it.” Then, it’s almost like a creative enterprise. “Let me rummage for ingredients and see what I can invent!” 

Last night I made scones, and I felt gloriously British. 

I am a decent cook as well, but I am starting to realize what a careless cook I am. Dangerously careless. I do a lot of hitting my hands and arms against extremely hot pans and getting little burns all over me. I also like to do everything quickly, so when I am cubing or dicing or chopping, it sounds something like this – Chop, chop, chop, Ow, chop, chop, Dammit!, chop, Ow, and I am left with tiny little slices resembling paper cuts all over. I have even been leaning over the stove checking on things before and smelled something singed, and realized my hair is too close to the open flame. 

So I think that I should star in a reality show for the cooking network. It can be a cross between a Nigella-type cooking show and those reality shows that pull in the viewers, like Survivor and Fear Factor. People will tune in for the recipes and stay for the calamity.  

When I have a mishap, I’ll just turn to the nearest camera and flash my pearly whites in a hangdog smile. My studio audience will do that long drawn out “awww” that always happens when something bad or touching occurs on set, but they won’t mean it, because of course the pain is what they have been waiting for the whole time.  

And I’ll have a really cool catch phrase that people will always hope to utter during an episode. 

Using a 12” chef’s knife to chop a 3” onion, I’ll cry out in agony and they’ll patiently await confirmation. I’ll glance up at them, looking totally sheepish. 

“There goes a finger,” I’ll say. 

And after a dramatic pause, they’ll respond in perfect time. 

“Put it in the soup!”

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