First
of all, thank you for being upright citizens and not stealing stealthpunch.com
while I once again neglected to pay my domain hosting fee and it
stood waving in the breeze rife for poaching. If I were to write
you all individual letters of thanks, I would begin it with "Highly
Respected," just like all the junk mail I've been getting lately
is addressed.
So
I was just at Barnes & Nobel in the "Parenting and Childbirth"
section, and this guy comes up to me. At first I think he's an employee
offering help, but then he holds a book out and shows me the picture
on the back cover. It's him. "Can you believe it?" he
says. "That's me, twenty years ago." I say what I always
say in these strange, awkward situations where unattractive semi-mentally
ill men try to talk to me, which by the way happens more often than
it should -- I say, "Cool." I try to resume my perusal
for "Ina May's Guide to Natural Childbirth" (this will
encompass another entry altogether) but he keeps going. He says,
"It's about astral projection." I flash back to that book
I read when I was in junior high -- by Lois Duncan, I think? Where
the girl astral projects and floats above herself looking down at
herself -- but he's talking about something more complex. "I've
had 87 lives. Eighty-four as a man and three as a woman." And
he's more interesting than natural childbirth, so I give him a few
sentences to sell me on it. "And one of the times I died as
a woman I was in a Nazi concentration camp and I know it because
I traveled back in time to see myself die." And because if
there's one thing I'm tired of it's people always thinking they
were Joan of Arc or Napoleon or someone other than a peasant in
a past life, I kind of tune out. He couldn't have been a farm girl
peeling potatoes, he had to be a holocaust victim. Not to mention
the time travel thing. Then he goes, "And one time, I was a
man who traveled back in time to meet a woman I was married to in
Shanghai, but I told her she was formerly a man I used to know in
India --" and that's when I resumed my search for Ina May on
the bookshelves as un-rudely but also as pointedly as possible.
He saw me look away and kind of hesitated and said, "I could
keep talking," and I said, "Yeah," and then he went
away. Now just imagine if I'd been at the HOLLYWOOD Barnes and Noble.
===
Okay,
so while I was out I went to my local record store with the intention
of buying BT's new This
Binary Universe CD, but they didn't have it and so instead I came
home with Angels & Airwaves and... um. Kelly Clarkson. I make
no apologies!
Then
I went to Fry's (apparently all I did was spend money today) and
stood in front of the hard drive section for a solid half hour talking
to myself about which configuration would be most economical and
offer the best performance. SATA enclosure plus internal SATA drive?
External firewire drive? SATA card plus enclosure plus Sata internal
for super editing speeds? I ended up with a raincheck for an external
500 gig drive plus a SATA enclosure and a 500 gig internal SATA
drive. Oh my god, I am so nerdy, it's true. Always at Fry's it's
just me and a bunch of unshaven geeky boy-men all looking at the
same hardware. And sometimes, if they've been in their computer
caves for a long time, they look at my gigantically tall body and
give me a glance like they might like to climb me.
===
The
spending spree will continue tonight; Gray should be home in a few
minutes and we're going to go to dinner and then go see not one
but two movies -- Invincible and Idiocracy, which I can't believe
is already out. It's Mike Judge's new flick (Office Space, King
of the Hill) and I read about it a few months ago and thought "dang,
this is brilliant!" But there have been no previews, no print
ads, not even a trailer on apple.com as far as I can find. So I
half expect to arrive and to find out it's a private screening or
something, but it's listed right on the Burbank movie
page, so my hopes are up.
Is
anybody else confused by the fact that Ashton Kutcher is starring
alongside Kevin Costner in that military-water movie? I keep expecting
it to be Josh Hartnett, and I double-take on the billboards every
time.
==
Update:
Thursday, September 7, 10am.
Last
night we went to dinner (bad) and the movies as planned, but we
only saw Invincible. Why? Because when we tried to sneak into Idiocracy,
we got CAUGHT. Yes, it's horrible that I'm still sneaking into second
movies at my advanced maternal age and I wouldn't recommend it if
you're trying to be a law-abiding decent human being, but the point
here is that we got caught for the first time ever.
We
walked out of Invincible, and I noticed a little usher man standing
there with his broom, and he in turn noticed us. Gray went to the
bathroom and I meandered further into the theater hallway, stopping
to stare intently at the standee for Running With Scissors. But
I could see the little man watching me in my periphery. Then Gray
comes out of the bathroom, and I whisper, "Don't turn around,
but the usher is watching us." So Gray opens his cellphone
and begins to talk to no one on the other end, and we wait for the
usher to go away. He's twenty yards off, and he's not leaving. Then
some guys go into the Idiocracy theater and Gray runs in after them,
and I wait until the tiny usher's back is turned and then I rush
in, too. When I get into the darkness, Gray has walked across the
entire front of the theater to the other side, and I follow. When
I'm halfway across, I hear the theater door close and get an uneasy
inkling of what's coming. I sit down fast next to Gray and skootch
down in my seat, and I see the usher walk in. He doesn't pause,
he strides across the whole front of the room, up the stairs, and
right to us. By now all fifty people in the theater are watching
our exchange, rapt, as the midget usher asks to see our tickets,
and pretty quickly, because I've had years of anticipation to develop
this lie, I say, "Oh, we're just watching the previews while
we wait to meet our friends outside." He goes, "You have
to pay to watch a second movie. Please exit through the front of
the theater." So he stands there and waits, our adult chaperone,
while we get up, march all the way back across in front of everybody,
and leave. Utter humiliation. Mostly though, of all possible emotions,
I am not happy that an AMC theater employee outsmarted me.
In
other news, right now I am craving fritos and gin.
