aaand a new obsession begins, or How I Lost My Entire Weekend

I caved.  I finally read Twilight.  All the way through.  (for those of you who have been here a while, I attempted to do so back in… February?  March?  but couldn’t finish because it was mind-numbingly awful of my many social obligations.)

However.  A new day breaks, and a new obsession begins.

(Except when I say “obsession,” I mean, you know, a mild sort of amused interest.  obviously.)

I bring you a new word, guys.  ”Lolfan,” defined as those who have read Twilight, understand the insane compulsion to somehow finish the books no matter how bad they get, and can still function in society without beginning a desperate search for “their Edward.”  (or comparing their significant others to the aforementioned fictional character.)

“I pretty much made up this word just now to describe the kind of people (i.e., me) who read these books for the sole purpose of snarking on them and yet cannot stop oh God please send help. Levels of affection for the subject matter may vary; macros and icons are often involved. Twatlighters (see below) are a good example of lolfans.”

Thanks, cleolinda.

These are my people! They counted out 165 references to Edward’s beauty. My long-lost tribe, my band of brothers!  (I fear, however, that no one will ever share my strange fascination with quoting obscure sections of Henry V.  Thanks, Dad.)

And my favorite part of cleo’s snark-filled recap?

…he still has her Snapple cap in his pocket, because Edward Cullen is a thirteen-year-old girl.

and

(His excuse for showing up uninvited: she left her jacket in Jessica’s car the night before, so he brought his for her to wear. “It was cold. She had no jacket. Surely this was an acceptable form of chivalry.” I’m just saying, “chivalry” doesn’t look like a word anymore. And I am so not making his obsession with it up. Entire drinking games could be organized around variants of this word as appearing in this book. Also: chivalry.)

But.  I still can’t stand Bella.  Sorry.  I tried.  (but blech.)

If you would like to add joy to your life, regardless of your status on the whole “fan” scale, read Growing Up Cullen, in which Edward is characterized as a 40 year old mother on a bad day due to all the other Cullens’ constant crazy-making and poor angsty Edward is all on his lonesome… scrapbooking and listening to Nickelback cds.  Nobody understands him, you guys.

(and oh, the late-to-the-party glee I have: there’s more).

…hours of clicking later…

Oh sweet lord of the rings.  What have I stumbled clumsily across?

He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room — maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman’s idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.

Nightlight, a Twilight parody.

There goes my entire November.  See you guys on the other side.

oh.  and yes, I’m going to see Jacob’s abs that movie.  but only because my boyfriend’s sister is dragging both of us!

Public television fail

I have many issues with the educational policies of our government.  (We’ll save those for another time.)

But it looks like now they’ve taken their toll on one of my favorite programs as a child!

(Yes, I do hope the song gets stuck in your head.  It’s a great show!)  :)

Signs

…one of the cutest videos ever.

Nostalgia

I love that we value childhood so much more when it’s in our past.

[If I had to choose an album to describe my early 20s, it would be Coldplay's X&Y.]

I love this picture.

what all the boys want

I’m not going to pretend that this exact thought hasn’t gone through my mind.

[No, I do not have three different traveling sewing kits at home.]

Saw it here.

More unsent letters

Dear State Credentialing People,
Thankyouthankyouthankyou!  Finally.  Life can begin.

Dear economy,
Please create more job opportunities so I don’t have to leave the state.  I like where I live.  And I just got my credential.  Thanks, much obliged.

Dear Shopaholic,
I think I can relate to you more than a little bit.  This worries me.

Dear work computer,
I’m still afraid of you.  Please don’t break on me.

Dear internet,
I love you, but I’m thinking of entering a 12-step program to get over you.
I’ll miss you.
(But we both know I’ll be back within the week.)

in which I nearly destroyed the world as we know it

(and I use a lot of parentheses)

Funny thing happened the other day.

While I was on my computer at work, typing merrily along, a small corner of my mind absently wondered why it was running a bit slower than usual.  I poked that corner with my Mary Poppins persona and told it to straighten up, because in my past experience, when I wonder “what if,” it usually means that the worst-case scenario is about to occur.  This has resulted in a near ostrich-like fear of technological glitches, where I bury my entire body in the sand at the first hint of trouble.  (move over, Congress.)

My whole problem is that when I look at technology, it breaks.  I once managed to destroy my computer three times in a year, all at incredibly inconvenient times.  Pseudo says the fact that I now own a Mac is better for everyone around me.  (His tone is reminiscent of a parent telling a child that Playskool is just the same as the real thing.)  I don’t care; I love my Mac.  It doesn’t break on me.  Or get infected and die.

When my computer began freezing at the simplest of tasks, I finally gave up and asked my co-worker for help.  She’s one of those stealth-nerds; she looks human, but has a vast array of technological knowledge that puts cyborgs to shame.  She fiddled around with my machine for a bit, then said, “Hmm.”  Great.  When she uses that tone, it means it’s time for the Big Guns.

Sufficiently cowed, I put in a call to the IT branch of our department.  They sent over one of their friendly oh-so-helpful minions, who very carefully refrained from using the phrase “It’s not your fault.”  (He even resorted to elaborate verbal gymnastics to keep from saying it… as if I didn’t feel guilty enough.)  After he spent a couple hours shaking my computer to see what would fall out, he finally found the problem.  He then spent the next day trying to dislodge the 13 or so Trojans (not condoms) from my computer.  No such luck.  Stubborn little buggers.

He finally turned to me, shoulders slumped, all friendly demeanor quashed out of him by my Evil Machine, and said that they would have to call the Even Bigger Guns, aka the real IT department.

No!  Pseudo works there!

They’ll probably send him over… or worse, he’ll volunteer!  (He would just love to have this to hold over my head for the next twelve years.)

The soundtrack of my life is occasionally eerily similar to the theme music from Psycho.

Of course, because I was considering praying to whatever deity in charge of my dumb luck (I think it’s Loki, no joke) that they would not send him over to help “solve my problem,” guess who shows up.

That’s right.

His laughing face appeared over the counter as I was frantically cleaning everything in sight.  (I figured that if I was going to wreck everything, it might as well look nice and not covered in the carpet of dust that has magically accumulated while I’ve been there.)  I held up the 409 bottle and threatened him with a dousing if he said one word about my situation.  (which would’ve been a shame, because he was wearing my favorite shirt.)  He was visibly holding back, but settled for snickering at me the entire time.  He gleefully informed me that when he saw the work order, he had to beat two others back so he could have the priveledge of “helping” me.  The fact that his tone was dripping with sarcasm the entire time was not lost on me, my co-worker, or the twelve student workers standing around, gawking at my path of destruction.

I took some small measure of satisfaction in the fact that I had neglected to mention that my computer was chained to my desk.  (Apparently they think that I’m going to make off with the hard drive in the night.)  They have the key to the lock… over in his building.  (What?  I forgot!  Really!)  He had to walk alllll the way back over there to get it.  I tried to rearrange my face into a properly remorseful expression, but I was too busy feeling vindictive for his patronizing attitude.

Anyway, five days later, I now have a bright-shiny-and-new computer at my desk.  Well, it’s the same machine, but it’s been scrubbed clean.  And now I have Microsoft Office 2007!  I’m now only 2 years behind instead of 8!  And Pseudo left a note with helpful directions such as “click on this button to destroy the world.”  Gleefully sadistic jerk.

I am now afraid to access the internet at all.  Seriously.  (I have to, because it’s part of my job… dammit.)

Oh, and the best part?  They sent me a copy of the work order, and near the bottom, one of the gurus said, “I don’t think this computer should remain on the network while it has this level of contamination; it could infect the network and render us useless for the next decade or so.”  Or something along those lines.  I don’t speak techie.

In summation, I nearly single-handedly brought down my entire work’s computer network.

What have you done lately?

(My co-worker said that hey, at least I’m giving them something to remember me by.)

The BBC is snobbish but I still want them to like me.

Apparently the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.  (I tried to find evidence of this, but I couldn’t find an actual article, so who knows?  It’s the Internet.)  How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read and put ‘y’ after those you have watched. Copy the list and post it, and update your total.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (X,Y)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (X,Y)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (X, Y)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (X, Y)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (X, Y)
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwel (X)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (Y)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (X, Y)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X, Y)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (X, Y)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (X)

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (Y)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (X, Y)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (Y)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (Y)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (X)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (X, Y)

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (Y)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (X, Y)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (X, Y)
34 Emma – Jane Austen (X, Y)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (X,Y)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (X, Y)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (Y)

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (X, Y)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (X,Y)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (X, Y)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (X)

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibb
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (X, Y)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxle (X)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold 
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (Y)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (Y)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula – Bram Stok (X, Y)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (X, Y)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (X)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce 
76 The Inferno – Dante (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (Y)

80 Possession – AS Byatt 
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (X, Y)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (X,Y)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (Y)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (X, Y)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (X, Y)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (Y)

My totals:
Read: 43
Watched: 36

Your turn!  And tell me if my life sadly lacking if I haven’t read your favorite book on the list.

Oscars

I watched them while dying, so I’m not adding a witty commentary, except to say the following:

I pretty much adore Jennifer Aniston and Anne Hathaway, and think everything they do deserves an award.  ”You got dressed today!  Here’s a shiny bald gold man!”  (yes, even including Bride Wars… only because I identify maybe a little too much with her character.)

And Hugh Jackman?  Please call me.  Your future (wedded bliss) is waiting.
What?  You say he’s happily married?  To his first wife?
Ah, well.  (There are good marriages in Hollywood.  I do believe!)

Grammy’s

anyone watch them?  anyone?

U2 played a phenomenal opening with “Get On Your Boots.”  I don’t know why they are so incredibly awesome.  I think it has something to do with the fact that they hail from the UK, and they will most likely live forever and make beautiful music until the end of time.  I can’t think of a time in my life when their music wasn’t playing as the soundtrack to my life.  (Some of that is retroactive editing of my memories, but that’s because they belong in my head.)

One of the most amusing moments followed directly after The Awesome, when Whitney Houston (looking absolutely fabulous, btw), came onstage and tried to make a sexy funny by slyly commenting, “I should’ve worn my boots tonight.”  I think her pose was the best part.  She stuck her leg out of the slit in her dress, and waited for the howls and cat-calls.  …and waited.

Clearly everyone was in shock at how good she looked.  That’s why there was muted applause.  (All kidding aside, I do love her and think she looks fantastic.)

The Rock was quite painful, yes?  (I don’t know why I want to like him, but I’m constantly confused and disappointed when he fails so very much.)

JT + Rev. Al Green + Boyz II Men + Keith Urban = a pretty amazing (cover-up?) moment.  Really.  I loved it.  (and how cute was JT?  you could practically feel the glee he was exhibiting at singing with the Rev.)  Here’s a clip for your enjoyment as well:

Sugarland: your acceptance speech was awkward, not cute.  We know Paul was in the audience.  And Blondie, please cut down on the caffeine.

Kid Rock: what are you wearing on your head?  It looks like you killed a turtle and made his shell into a hat.  Also, no.  sorry.  you are not the rock-and-roll Jesus.

Taylor Swift: you’re tiny and young and I think I would be a total fangirl were I a teenager at this point in time.  also, can I just say that I love the shape of your eyes?  Seriously, they’re perfect.  If I could pick eye-shapes, they’d be yours.  (I know that sounds odd.  I’m okay with that.)

Miley Cyrus: stop yelling into the mike.

JoBros: you’re cute and adorable, and the way in which you awkwardly ran around stage reminded me of a baby horse lurching about.  I want to carry you around in my pocket.  But have some respect for your musical superiors!  ”Come on, Ste-vay!” is not a good way to introduce the Wonder unless you make a big deal out of him at some point either before or after the song.  (See JT for a perfect example with his intro of the Rev.)

Adele: I don’t care how sweet and British you are, (and believe me, you are) but for the love of God, spit out your gum before making an acceptance speech.  Thanks.

Jennifer Hudson: I want you to win every contest ever, just because of the way you truly seem to appreciate each new award.  (Give her more!)

And there we have it, folks.  A somewhat brief, certainly spastic rundown of what I watched last night.  (Here’s a full list of who won, in case you care and haven’t looked it up for yourself yet.)

Well, that and HJNTIY.  But more on that later.  (Teaser: Justin Long’s kiss might’ve made me start to hyperventilate.  No joke.)