So let’s say there’s a movie that includes both the Scottish yummy-ness that is James McAvoy and the saucy, Kohl-eyed Angelina Jolie, who — as you may or may not have noticed — is also far from unattractive. Now let’s add to the attractive cast lots of guns, knives, butt-kicking, sports cars, general fight scenes, and… well, derailed trains… it’s okay, stay with me. Now, just for kicks, let’s throw in an R-rating that suggests that you may or may not get to see one or both of these assassin hotties all nekkid. (Spoiler: you get to see Angelina’s bare butt, but only one brief bare chest shot of a beefed-up James… to which I say “What the hell-crap is up with that?!?” I can only assume that the director had absolutely zero idea that there would be any chicks going to see this movie, and therefor left out any gratuitous male skin.) Truly, the R-rating is for insane head shots with spurting blood, and a bunch of exploding rats that will have PETA all up in arms, and a boat load of F-bombs… but, sadly, not for any hot nekkid-ness.
The director, Timur Bekmambetov, is the same guy who did the screen adaptation of the Russian vampire book Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor), a movie that frickin rocked the socks. T’was the bee’s knees. Night Watch also had over-the-top violence and some of the action sequences and camera angles from Wanted were very reminiscent of Night Watch.(Anyone who saw Night Watch will recognize that “Anton” is also in Wanted, and plays none other than “The Russian”.)
For the second time this year, James McAvoy assumes an American accent, which sort of annoyed me. They could have kept him Scottish… he could have had the assassin call-name “The Scotsman” or something. (As a side note: I’ve always wondered if it’s hard to learn an American accent.) He spent a large portion of the movie getting pummeled as part of his training. Magical “healing pools” allowed for quick recovery from broken bones and severed limbs and whatever else the training required… so after a few hours he was always good as new to be re-pummeled. Angelina Jolie was, you know, hot and stuff. She could curve a bullet with rest of the boys. She was a man’s woman. Hot and skilled at fighting, and you just got the sense that she probably also knew a lot of stuff about sports and wouldn’t care if her man went out to party with his friends, but none of that was ever actually addressed in the movie. As a woman, all I could wonder the whole time was “I wonder if this movie was filmed before or after she had her kid…?” because girl was hot. And skinny. And could lie down on top of a train going through a tunnel without her gut hitting the roof of the tunnel. (In retrospect, Angelina Jolie movies aren’t the best for chubby pregnant chicks to see…)
This movie isn’t a “thinker”. If a thinking man’s movie is what you are looking for, check out The Love Guru or something. Wanted is a movie for people who like exploding heads, exploding rats, exploding trains, exploding buildings, more exploding heads, and Angelina Jolie looking hot. Though the last scene in the movie is James McAvoy (sadly, fully clothed), shooting someone through the head asking the final line of the movie: “What the f**k have you done lately?” And that did make me think… And I had to answer him honestly. “Umm, some laundry, the dishes…” And my answer seemed kind of lame.
So I’m Googling whether or not the world needs a pregnant assassin. I’m pretty sure with some training I could balance myself in a horizontal position on the top of a train.
You’d think that with me being a grown up and everything, I would be okay. You’d think I’d be all “Yay for you! This will be such a great adventure for you and your family!” But no, I am crusty and rude about it. Instead of being supportive, I’m all like “Hey, I have a great idea that primarily benefits me! Porter (husband) can move, and you and Byron (son) can stay here and live in our basement! I mean, Porter’s the one getting his PhD, not you! Let him move, and you can stay and live with us, like a big sleep-over that lasts for, like, two years! It sounds fun, right?!” But then she tells me some load of crap about how it’s important to be supportive of her husband, and — after all — they are married and they’re, like, a family and stuff… which all sounded like a basket full of weak-sauce excuses to me. But whatever.
My heart is heavy. I already miss my friend. Who will listen to my constant whining? Who will go out with me to chick movies and laugh at my quick one-liners? Who?? WHO??? And who is thinking about ME is all of this?? I was virtually left out of the school application process, which, as the spouse’s best friend, you would think I would have been an integral part. But no — not so much. And when I was told it was between Michigan and Maryland, I was all “What’s wrong with University of Utah?” And they gave me all sorts of bull about how one does not receive all the different degrees from one school. Which I think is dumb because — hello! — I live by the one school, so that should be a factor. But I guess it’s not. So then I worked it from the angle of trashing the two remaining schools. Michigan is cold, so they could not move there. My BFF doesn’t do well in the cold. (Yeah, I’m totally looking out for her.) And Maryland, well… Dude, I grew up there. I am a product of Maryland. Clearly my friend does not want to raise her child in a state that cranks out the likes of me. Plus, there’s the whole “Maryland Accent” that took me a good two years to lose after I moved out here (and I still sometimes say “arnge juice” or “harrible” on accident, just because some words are coded that way in my east coast genes). My sweet friend will start talking like that! She will start calling people “ig-nernt” (which means rude), not to be confused with “ignorant” (which means “stupid”). Ig-nernt is a Maryland-only word. We Marylanders invented it. And my dear, sweet, smart friend will start down that Maryland path. And then what?? Where will the madness end??
I’ll tell you where it will end: it will end with me being 2,000 miles out west, being all lonely, going to movies on “girls’ night” by myself, making jokes to myself, having people throw popcorn and Junior Mints at me, telling me to shut up, and then I’ll cry because I miss my friend. And I know that I’m being selfish and ig-nernt about the whole thing, but I can’t help it.
Or maybe I will find another reason to go back to visit Maryland; a reason that isn’t a wedding or a funeral, which are currently the only valid reasons I go back anymore. Someone has to die or eternally hook their cart to one horse for me to drop $500 on a plane ticket. (I’m that cheap.) But no more. Now I will fly back to Maryland every Tuesday night just so Diana and I can go to a movie and eat nachos and talk about life and laugh together and cry together. Okay, maybe not every Tuesday. A girl could pick back up an accent being there on a weekly basis. But I will go more often.
And for those of you in Maryland, especially around U of M campus: if you see my friend, be kind to her. Be her friend. Take her out (she likes Sour Patch Kids at the movies). Make her laugh.
(Just try not to be funnier than me, or she may forget me all together… and that would be really ig-nernt of her.)
Sure, I have lots to tell you about. Sure, I still haven’t posted pics of Jachin’s birthday (which was several weeks ago, but I can’t get the pictures off the camera). Sure, there’s all kinds of TMI I could be giving you about my pregnancy thus far, because tons of weird bodily things have occured in the last 13 1/2 weeks (not the least of which is that I’m in that weird limbo where I don’t quite look pregnant yet, but I just look like I’ve let myself go and I can’t button the top button of my jeans anymore). But no, I’m skipping through all of that and I’m just opting for a no-brainer Meme. Stephanie (known in the blogosphere as “Bad Mom”) tagged me for a Meme… and, well, it sounded easier than writing a real post. (But Yay for me! Because I have been steadily working on my book. So as my blog whithers, the novel grows stronger.)
So the rules for this Meme are:
1. Pick up the nearest book. (which I didn’t. I cheated and looked through several nearby books for which one had the best sentences.)
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you. (yeah right, I don’t know 5 people with blogs anymore.)
The winning book: Dave Barry is from Mars and Venus, by Dave Barry
“Overseeing a modern wedding is comparable, in terms of complexity, to flying the Space Shuttle; in fact, it’s worse, because shuttle crew members don’t have to select their silver pattern. This is done from them by ground-based engineers:
Command Center: Okay, Discovery, we’re gonna go with the “Fromage de Poisson” pattern, over?”
Ahh, yes, Dave Barry. You can trust that man to have three great sentences on page 123 every time. Other books lying around my bedroom that also have at least 123 pages (that weren’t chosen for the Meme, but nonetheless they may be worth your time):
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
The Screwtape Letters, by CS Lewis
The Talisman, by Stephen King and Peter Straub
I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
I’m not tagging anyone, but if you’d like to play along, go for it. All two of you.
Charming and witty. You are always the first person to come up with a wisecrack. Sure, you have an attitude, but that’s why people love you. You keep them on their toes. Sometimes you can be misleading, but always end up doing the right thing for the people you love.
My kids have a new favorite word: random. They use it all the time, everyday. And while they actually use it correctly (sort of…most of the time), it’s still been bugging the crap out of me… just because of the sheer frequency in which it’s used.
For instance: We will be in the car, driving along, talking about swimming lessons, and Jachin will suddenly blurt out “Taco!” To which Zoe will say, “Wow, that was random.” (It’s not really all that random, though, because Jachin has taken a shine to yelling out “taco!” in the middle of conversations lately. Kind of like Tourette’s syndrome, only more obnoxious and without an actual medical basis.)
At least five times each day, the kids will come up to me and ask, “Hey mom, you want to hear something really random?” And then they’ll tell me something that — to them — is completely out of left field. Or they will say, “You have to see this random thing I created…” And it will be an interesting Lego/Playdough/MyLittlePony sculpture.
Here are some random things I’ve come to learn about randomness:
1) You can say random things… they just have to be weird. Even if repeating it over and over in an annoying fashion makes it mathematically less random. To my children, this is “random”.
2) You can do random things. Again, it helps if the things are weird or appear out of place… like when Jachin does an armpit fart to the pharmacist at Target, and then immediately segues into the Chicken Dance. To Zoe, this is “random”. (To me, this is just obnoxious and rude, and calls for Wii privileges to be revoked.)
3) You can act/say/do/make/create/destroy things in a random fashion. This one is too lengthly to explain. Just come visit my house this summer. We’ll show you a random good time.
My funny blogger friend Leslie did up a funny video post of how she came to have 17 cats… and now she needs to give them all away. So check out her post … and if you live in Ohio, maybe take a kitty or two off of her hands. Cuz’ she’s a busy lady even without taking care of 17 cats.
As a side note: if you live in Denver, my sister has 4 kittens she needs to give away before she moves out this way. Those tiny little furry faces are the one thing standing in the way of her move. So if you live in that vicinity, take one or two of hers. Because I’d like to see my sister soon.
I’d been planning my HUGE post about me being pregnant, unveiling the AWESOME news of me being with child. The post was going to be fantastic and hilarious, and it was going to contain witty stick figure drawings and pie charts and several other ha-frickin-larious things.
I’d been planning it for weeks. Because, I mean, I found out about this baby over a month ago. But the hilariousness just isn’t coming to me. Along with everything else (like the birthday party planning and the cub scout planning) the Ultimate-Prego post is falling victim to my “pea soup brain”. It’s a real medical term, or at least it should be. I found out recently that I can’t crack jokes now that I’m pregnant. It saddened me to learn it. There I was, at my mom’s house, joking around with my brother (my family gets totally goofy and jokey when we all get together) and I can’t even remember what I was joking about (the memory also faileth) but the basic punchline was something about chainmail. You know, like, metal shirts. But I couldn’t think of the term “chainmail” so I was just saying “blah blah, haha, you know, like, that metal shirt thingy?…” and everyone was trying to figure out what I was talking about. And it totally made the joke not funny. So then I started crying and I screeched, “Damn it. I can’t crack jokes anymore.” And then everyone gave me a pity laugh, and assured me that I was still frickin hilarious, but I knew that they were all pity laughs just meant to apease the hormonal prego chick, so I stabbed them all, and then went to the kitchen and ate some pickles. *sigh* Just another thing that goes out the window when you’re baking a bun… And sadly the same is true in my writing. It’s not funny. I can’t think of what I’m trying to say. Or when I do know what I’m trying to say, I will almost definitely spell it wrong. Which also makes it not funny.
So because I have lost all humor mojo, you will just have to deal with a regular non-funny post describing the events surrounding my pregnancy. Wait, no… I don’t mean the sexy parts about getting pregnant (we all know how that’s done, right?)… I just mean how I found out that I’m pregnant. So sometime around the end-ish part of April, I got the flu. I was down for several days, like, the kind of sick where you seriously can’t get out of bed. Towards the end of my flu-week, I noticed that I was picking up on smells like I do when I’m pregnant. Like, I could smell the candle in the living room while I was still standing in my bedroom… and the candle wasn’t even burning. I have bionic nostrils when I’m pregnant. So that was my first clue. I went to Rite-Aid and bought a generic test, just to rule out being pregnant (since I had a doctor tell me a few months ago that I have bum ovaries). So I take the test, and it comes out negetive, but then I notice that the control line never actually showed up. Meaning that maybe the test didn’t work. But I think to myself: Suz, stop being so neurotic. It says no. So a few more days go by, and my bionic sense of smell gets stronger (I can smell french fries from the Burger King two miles down the street…) So one day after picking up Zoe from kindergarten I decide to go the my doctor’s office to do a real test. Once again, I’m thinking that it’s going to be negetive. I’m just ruling it out. So I go into the office with Zoe. Zoe sits in the little blood pressure chair while I go into the bathroom to tinkle in a cup. I put the cup in the little cubby thing and wash my hands. In the time it takes me to wash my hands and round the corner, the nurse says to me, “Well, it’s already positive.” I think I said, “What?!?” or something… maybe it was something in Yiddish. I don’t really remember what I said, but I started kind of crying because I was just shocked. Zoe, reading my face, looked at the nurse and said, “I. Am. Going. To. Die.” and fell out of the chair onto the floor. (I’m not kidding.) Then she started crying. But she was, like, sobbing and saying “I don’t want another baby! No! I don’t want a baby!” while the nurse told me my due date and tried to smile while my daughter was in the obvious throws of a panic attack. I drug Zoe to the desk to make my first appointment, and she was still begging me to not make her have a brother or sister. She was on the floor, sobbing, when a nurse asked her if she wanted a lollipop. She chose one from the basket while she wailed, “Pleeeeeease, mommmmmyy….” But let’s face it: a lollipop was not going to fix everything that was broken in her world now. Had I known the whole thing was going to be so traumatic for her, I wouldn’t have taken her with me. But again, I was honestly thinking it was going to be negetive. *sigh* The whole day was a blur of tears.
But we’ve had a month to get used to the idea. Zoe is okay now, because I told her that now she will get to be a little sister AND a big sister. For the moment, that seems pretty cool to her. Jachin is so excited he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s already a great big brother, we have no worries about how he’ll do.
I’m due December 20th, and both of my other kids were 5 days overdue. Do the math on that one, sparky. (Zoe was in tears again when she heard that, because what if she has to open presents Christmas day without me?? What if Santa misses me and I don’t get any presents?) I assured her that I’d already have the baby and be home by then. It’s all about being induced, baby. And all I want for Christmas is an epidural.
(ps- My apologies for the shifting tenses in this post. Grammar, along with humor and partying planning, goes right out the window.)
So it took me a week or so, but I finally realized that in my post about pets, I totally spelled Betta fish “Beta” fish… like beta testing. Which is pretty much what my hubby does for a living. Which is where my mind is. So our fish are not Chinese Fighting Fish, they are nerdy test fish. (And by the way, testing isn’t going so well, because they just all kind of die eventually.)
And more of the nerd-stink rubbing off on me? I’ve been walking around for days singing “Still Alive”, the end song to the sweet spacial intelligence challenging game Portal. If you have no idea what I’m talking about — if you’ve never heard that song or you’ve never heard of that game — it’s okay. It means you are not a nerd. I, on the other hand, am becoming a nerd via osmosis. I bump up against my husband and I get a little smarter (which is nice), but then I invariably start talking about nerd-ish stuff. Even if I don’t want to. Because I sort of hate that song!!
…but I 5-starred the vocals to it on Rock Band…
on Hard mode.
uber-Nerd.
In truth, though, the game came out last fall and I’m just now singing about it. Hard Core nerds were singing it at Thanksgiving. At least this is what I tell myself as comfort… while I practice my Rubik’s Cube algorithms.
My kids are currently obsessed with the show Unbeatable Banzuke. It’s a Japanese show that airs on the G4 network (by the by, it’s just about the ONLY show on G4 suitable for kids… even the commercials are unkid-ish). The Unbeatable Banzuke is a close cousin to the show Ninja Warrior, if you’ve ever seen that. The premise is a crazy array of obstacles, done in a variety of ways. There is a course for mountain bikes (a short video below).
I think it’s awesome that the word “mountain bike” in Japanese is “mountain bike”.
There is also a course for pojo sticks, a course for unicycles, a course for stilts, a course for walking on your hands, a course for skateboards, etc.,… and there’s a special course called Niko de Drive in which one person pushes around another person in a wheelbarrow painted like a cat. It’s fantastic fun.
So when I asked Jachin what kind of party he was thinking of for his birthday (which is in 4 days), it should have been zero surprise to me that he shouted out “Unbeatable Banzuke”!! I stared at him blank faced for a moment as he stared at me with is mouth still hanging open from shouting “Unbeatable Banzuke” in a Japanese accent, eyes wide, waiting to see what I would say. So I finally said this:
“How the crap would we do that?”
To which he said, “Just make some sweet obstacles in the backyard for me and my friends.”
“Well, okay, like what kinds of obstacles? Like, a balance beam?”
“Cooler and harder than a balance beam, mom,” he said, in the voice that always indicates that I’m a big nerd.
So I imagined painting up our rusty wheelbarrow to look like a big, pink cat. Then I said, “So, like, a rope climb?”
“No!” he shouted. “I can’t do a rope climb! I can’t have something at my party that I can’t even do!”
(At this point, Zoe ran off to fashion a pair of stilts from the take-out chop sticks in the kitchen drawer.)
So then I tried to think of something cool, awesome, creative, and harder than a balance beam but easier than a rope climb, which kids would find entertaining but which wouldn’t (knock on wood) cause any broken bones. And dude, I’ve got nothing. Have I mentioned that my brain has been pea soup as of late?
At this point I said, “So, like, Chuck E. Cheese?”
*a SIGH bigger than I knew his lungs could produce*
Tuesday, Zoe had her official Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony at her school. There was a lively music presentation, a slide show, and many, many pictures taken by all parents in attendence. Unfortunately for Zoe, her mom takes really crappy pictures. I’m going to call around to see if anyone else took any better shots of my kid. Ridiculous. Also… I never clean off my memory card in the camera. So when I get to a big event — like my daughter’s graduation — I always encounter the “Memory Card Full” message flashing on the screen. And there I am clearing off pictures from our Disneyland vacation from 5 months ago, swearing under my breath, while she does cute stuff that I’m totally missing.
Here is a crappy shot of her in her mortarboard cap thingy.
Yeah, that’s where all of that tuition money goes. Caps and gowns for 6 year olds. But man, it’s stinkin cute. And where did the last year go? I wasn’t even finished being freaked out that my baby is IN kindergarten, and now she’s DONE with kindergarten. I can’t keep up. My brain is slow. I should probably start calling around for wedding venues now… just so this mental lag doesn’t screw things up 15 or 20 years from now.
But the ceremony was fabulous. School is finished. The graduate is doing well. She’s planning to do some backpacking through Europe this summer before starting first grade in the fall. Also, all kinds of shinanigans are planned for Cabo next month. The bikinis and beer bongs are packed.
