Right
now over the back fence, in the house behind my house, I can hear
dudes gutting rooms, installing new windows, and getting ready to
turn the whole thing into a big pile of cash. They should be me.
I stared at the pricetag on that house, talked to Gray about buying
it and flipping it, and then reluctantly decided not to go through
with it. So now somebody else is doing it and it's driving me crazy.
I went in there and talked to the guys and to see their progress,
and they aren't doing anything we didn't do here, it's nothing we
couldn't have handled. What's my problem with pulling the trigger
on risky things? You get nowhere financially if you don't take risks,
I know this like the back of my hand, and still I clutch and stall
and eventually lose out on golden opportunities that are right in
front of my face. Ugh.
===
Now
I must talk about Ashely Parker Angel's new show on MTV, "There
and Back". It, too, is driving me crazy. I'm a sucker for these
shows; I love them with a burning passion. And come on, Ashley from
O-Town? Who wouldn't want to watch him after all the awesome O-Town
reality half-hours? Therefore it pains me to say that I just can't
stand it. From the beginning of this past episode where his pregnant
girlfriend (strike one) is talking about how her mom who they live
with (strike two) saw him standing at the refrigerator naked and
sporting wood at 5:30am (strike three), to him constantly talking
about how poor they are and how they might not be able to pay rent
next month but yet shopping at Bristol Farms (strike four), the
most expensive supermarket in LA, I just can't abide the insipidity,
which is a word made up exclusively for them. Also, there is nothing
that gets my goat so much as someone using the word "we"
when somebody else is doing their work for them -- for example,
if someone says, "We rebuilt our kitchen," I always assume,
most of the time wrongly, they mean that they themselves installed
the cabinets and laid the floors -- and in Ashley's case, it was
"We did a great job on this (weird kid's slide)" that
he invited Jacob (also from O-Town) over to build for him, but yet
did nothing but offer to make Jacob a veggie burger. I think that's
like strike nineteen. ALSO, when people look at ultrasounds of a
baby and it's a boy and they go, "He's well-endowed like his
daddy!" as Ashley did, my eyes roll back involuntarily and
all I want to do is tell them how borderline retarded they are.
Strike one hundred and eighty-two.
===
The
Golden Globes were last night, and I find it hard to believe that
half a billion people watched, given that it seemed so barely advertised.
Hugh Lurie's speech was good, and so was Steve Carrell's (have I
talked about my love for The (US) Office? Steve Carrell is kind
of a genius. That whole cast is, actually. The girl who plays Angela
is a friend of my neighbors' and I've met her a few times but next
time I will fawn over her genius. It's a pretty perfect show.) And
the photo in this morning's paper of the Desperate Housewives all
lined up in a row kind of summed them up: all of them are smiling
at the camera, except for Teri Hatcher, who's bent over with her
mouth open, laughing, in a way that looks like she's going to swallow
your head. I won't watch that show. Also, it seems The Hollywood
Foreign Press loves the gays, what with all the Brokeback Mountain
fanfare, and when Dennis Quaid announced it and said it's the kind
of movie that rhymes with "chick flick," everybody in
the audience frowned. Ha. You can't have gay cowboys without a sense
of humor, people. Please.
I think it's appropriate that both Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin
Phoenix won because they were both really good in Walk The Line,
but man was it just me or did Joaquin look like he was going to
die up on stage accepting? Very heroinesque with his eyebags and
white lips and sweaty brow. He looked like a zombie compared to
the healthy, tanned and Scientological John Travolta. Who called
Pierce Brosnan Pierce Bronson, by the way. L. Ron didn't have your
back there, Barbarino.
And
now I'm boring myself because last year's movies pretty much bored
me. When I think about them my brain is inundated with a lot of
hype-y images, but there wasn't anything wonderful. Even The Squid
And The Whale, which I liked and was an indie, was eh. Whatever.
Is that the best American filmmakers have to offer?
===
Now
I'm going to go have some coffee to celebrate the 12th anniversary
of the 1994 Northridge earthquake. I lived in Long Beach when it
happened, and the dang 5am earthquake jolted my ass out of bed,
literally, and that was way down south by the ocean. Simultaneously,
whoever lived here in this house then was listening to their chimney
fall down, and that is why I live in a chimney-less, fireplace-less
house, because they were too cheap to build it back up, and so am
I. Sad.
