Miss Anthropy

We're doing an L.B. Abbott series at my theatre! Finally, something interesting! I think I like the new programmer after all.

Tonight was Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Day the Earth Stood Still. I watched the second in the theatre with my boss. Who would pass up an opportunity to hear "Klaatu verata nikto" in optical sound with a crisp 35mm print?

Close to the end of Journey, a guy came up to the box office and squinted at our sign. "Damn!" he exclaimed. "People here really pay eight dollars to see these?"

"Nine dollars is regular admission, actually." We don't discount people who want to just see the second half of a double bill, unless they really let us know it matters to them.

"Nine dollars!" he said. "To watch something anyone can watch for free at the library, and you charge more than a Dallas theatre?"

"Well, some people think it's worth it," said my coworker.

"It's not worth it! It's a scam. I'd never pay this kind of money to see a pair of old movies, and here you are charging for them like they're brand new!"

He ranted some more and then he started to storm off. My coworker, not exactly polished now and then, mumbled out the closing, "Well, everyone's entitled to their opinion."

The guy spun right around and advanced back at him. "Which is another way of saying that my opinion doesn't matter. But it does. It matters a lot."

And then he stomped away.

My coworker and I exchanged a look.

"He must get that a lot," he said.

"Yeah. He had that one cocked and ready to go."

"Burrrrrn."

Hey, I'll be the first one to agree we're charging highway robbery for these movies. The thing is, we're not alone. In case the dude hasn't noticed, Los Angeles, especially on the Westside, is one hell of an expensive place. It's so expensive that it nearly costs me an hour's wage to see these movies myself. Think about that. We're two dollars cheaper than the rest of Westwood's theatres, and you should just see what the Arclight charges. Dallas? What does Dallas have to do with anything? Dallas ain't got nothin' on Westwood.

For that matter, really? People aren't coming here because of laziness or decadence. Well, maybe a little out of decadence. If you truly can't tell the difference between watching a movie on video on your little TV and watching it on a huge screen in 35mm, you're in no position to question the logic of our patrons' actions. We are not the NuArt with their weekly midnight Rocky Horror revivals. We're a classic movie theatre. Our place is full of snobs-- upper-middle-class art snobs with disposable income and a purist mentality. If your blurry, scratchy public library videotapes are enough for you, by all means, go embrace them as lovingly as you have before.

But like we observed, this guy is probably quite accustomed to being thoroughly laughed at.

That's so cute. I tried looking up my polling place for the February primary and discovered, just like last November's elections, the polling place is in the common area of my very own apartment building.

;__; How cute. I can walk downstairs in my slippers and vote.

You can always tell a quiet day in Westwood when you can hear the chimes of Powell Library clearly from my apartment. On occasion they've even been distinct enough for me to wake up to them-- very pleasant and old-fashioned for Los Angeles.

But it's an especially quiet day when you can hear the Metro 2 trundle past with its mechanised voice.

I like what Patton Oswald says about LA at Christmas time. "It empties out. It turns into a ghost town. It's like Omega Man but I can get a latte somehow."

I don't know what it says about me that I can feel more at peace in a city like this than in desert suburbia. Perhaps it's the same calm I experience around computers. Everything here, with few exceptions, is a mechanical and automated process. Even the people are themselves just cogs in a giant clock. You don't often realise it, until you hear the chimes toll the hours.

There are reasons I couldn't write "Somnia" successfully until I lived here. There are definitely reasons why there are still stories I get stuck on. I used to think that simply observing how other authors approached a subject would make me just as competent to articulate them. Even now, I believe there are some things so ineffable that one cliched depiction is as good as anything more informed-- but there are definitely things to be learned through experience.

The experience of a space. Atmosphere. Worldbuilding. That is the essence of a storyteller, I think. The story falls flat without the right context to support it. Right now, that makes sense to me.

That's the genius of haiku. The expression of immense complexity in the smallest window to convey it. That's qualia. Experience as a singularity.

The chimes are ringing. It's time to go looking for food.

Merry Christmas, whatever it means to you.

I woke up just now and stepped out to the communal bathroom and noticed it seemed a bit chillier than usual. No worries, except that when I checked my UCLA mail, the temperature display in the corner announced it was 41 degrees.

"I call bull," I thought and brought up the weather.com engine.

Actual temperature?

38 degrees.

Yeah, I know. Rest of the country is a frozen tundra, but damn it, LA is supposed to be warm!

And yet, you'll still get people in shorts and flip-flops in this weather.

I've had a little bit of a cold war going on with ants in my apartment for the past few months. I see one, I kill it. I see a few, I kill them. I could never figure out where they came from, so I didn't pursue it. Scouts in my territory are spy planes just begging to be shot down.

Well, they invaded this morning. It was my fault for leaving the empty take-out by my desk-- I noticed two ants crawling across my .hack game case and looked down to find a veritable swarm covering the take-out bag. There was a thick trail along the base of the computer desk, going along the baseboard behind my food cabinet and storage bin, around the main electrical socket, up the cabling to a hole in the ceiling. Bastards sure were taking the scenic route.

I took out every last piece of trash and sealed all the kitchenware in plastic bags. Then I sprayed Lysol. Everywhere. Unfortunately, it just made them scatter and seek out a new trail, including along the ceiling. I spent a good hour spraying, wiping away the corpses, squishing the errant workers (there were even some large males in there, though wingless... huh), but I just couldn't reach the ceiling ones, ended up inhaling and getting Lysol in my eyes more than hurting them. At wit's end, I decided to just buy some traps when I came back from costume-scouting that afternoon, but as I chucked my trash in the bin outside I told myself it just couldn't wait that long. I called upon the RA, who was remarkably at home, and asked if he had some spare traps.

"No, but we've got some pesticide."

"Gimme."

This isn't your average can of Raid, friends. This is the industrial-strength shit the RA uses on the lawn. Some small dogs couldn't survive a hit with this stuff.

I nuked the motherfuckers. I may die of poisoning now, or at least be nauseous for weeks, but I stopped those bastards cold. I have created an insect-sized nuclear winter, just for them.

I felt bad as I did it. I know, it's one of those trite unrealistic things you hear in stupid children's books, about sensitive girls who are loathe to hurt another creature. There was also the half-formed thought that they weren't behaving all that differently than Americans, what with all the coming in and eating everything with utter disregard for that ecological equilibrium we're taught so much about. But I pay for my territory, damn it. They can bother the Korean couple next door for all I care. They keep stealing my detergent anyway.

...Detergent. FUCK. I forgot to buy detergent while I was out.

It is with fascination but moreover horror that I discover that the Thai place I occasionally call to order out from has an online check-out system.

Ruby red sunrise this morning.

The fires haven't really affected Westwood, other than making the air especially nasty. But we're getting more and more smoke and less and less light. My head feels like the nose has been sanded off.

I've got no right to bitch, of course. I have friends that've lost houses to this shit. I'll echo karotsamused here that I'm none too patient with the Katrina comparisons.

~

First true rejection letter for "Somnia" came yesterday. Four to go.

~

Beast Machines may just be the best animated television show --in terms of sheer production value and narrative cohesion-- to ever appear on US TV. Yes, I'm well aware it's pretty much universally reviled within the Transformers fandom, but if you ask me it's like a really, really good AU fanfiction, you know, the kind that makes you wish the canon was a little more like this.

So there.

So, Sir Anthony Hopkins. At my place of work this Monday, as well as probably ~50 of his closest Hollywood buddies. I did my best to get out of doing a shift that night, but one coworker had to back out for midterms and then another decided his stomach just couldn't take the inevitable stress. So the current line-up of student workers for the evening consists of me and the three classmates I happened to get jobs there.

It's sort of funny. Among the four of us you have an entire film crew: a screenwriter, a director, an editor and a critic. But we are merely undergraduate film brats, which in itself is probably more than Sir Anthony will ever know about us. If we even register in his universe, we'll be the unsightly wage slaves that streamline the evening and then vanish in the name of good taste. I can tell you that neither we nor our manager will probably be invited to the after party.

Now hey. I'm sure Sir Anthony's quite charming and nice, but in the hierarchy of Hollywood culture, my classmates and I are termites. We will not impress him, we will not be noticed, we effectively do not exist. Even if he teaches masters classes at our school, as undergraduates, we have no more solidarity with him than we do with, oh, say, the dean of the film school. Who also shits upon undergrad, by the way. Suffice to say, no-one likes undergrad, and as a result, even undergrads hate undergrad. The self-fulfilling prophecy of our forcibly engendered suckitude upsets me more with every day.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes. It saddens me, because I like Sir Anthony. Not in a fanbrat way --trust me, that starphiliac mentality vanishes pretty quickly the closer you get to the bona fide industry and no-one has anything good to say about roughly anyone (except Keanu Reeves, who everyone agrees is very polite)-- but simply a deeply-entrenched fondness that film school has only served to reinforce. And I dislike the reminder that I'll never be part of the same sphere that he inhabits. I don't really want to make all the sacrifices that go into getting there, nor do I think all the problems I'll encounter once I arrive will be worth the detriments to my health, but I'm sure every decidedly-indie-but-still-aspiring-success-story looks back with a modicum of longing when they see what a different and vastly divergent path they're on by comparison. And then there's class difference. Don't get me started on class difference.

There's nothing to fix, of course, because nothing's wrong. My role as a film student is incidental. I could be a Business/Econ major for as much as it would influence what goes down Monday night. On Monday, Sir Anthony and his many friends and fans will be gathered to celebrate his distressingly self-indulgent directorial debut (he also wrote and scored it! and look at all those cameo appearances!) and I will do my monkey's job as I do every other night. I have no relevance to him. He will never know me. I will connect with no-one new. No-one will acknowledge my brain or presume I even have one. That's not what I'm there for.

I'm not saying it matters. I'm just saying I wish I wasn't working that night.

BUNCHA. SAVAGES. IN. THIS. TOWN.

I came down today and someone had torn all my curry boxes out of the cupboard and spilled packages of oatmeal on top of them. Another cupboard had had its contents emptied directly onto the floor. Nothing missing from the fridge, surprisingly, but a LOT of trash in the eating area, two open containers of hookah flavour shit on the counter, beer bottle caps, and someone's keys and credit card on a table.

I knew I'd've felt like a thief if I'd taken the keys and credit card, even with the intent to put up signs. After all, there's every chance this was an innocent's stuff getting a practical joke played on him. But after cleaning up my cupboard items and going out on a scheduled lunch with Dave, when I came back the items were gone and I so wish I'd taken them. I'm sick of this reprehensible behaviour and the manager and RA that shrug and say 'nothing we can do' and a social context that can facilitate these kind of subhuman antics.

I never thought I'd miss my pretty-pretty-princess roommate.

~

Lunch with Dave was great, though. We talked about my grad school options and the waitress basically called us a pair of gluttons. Dave didn't let me see the check but I do hope he gave her a shitty tip. Look, I work in the service industry too-- I know most of your customers are despicable, but telling them that is just bad training.

Dave did tell me to just grow a spine and tell a particularly oppressive director that I need an assistant. Yes, even if said director is evil. If the options are to ask or let the entire art department flail and burn, the choice is pretty clear.

~

Dave remarked that they didn't have cool film school shirts when he went here. I think I know of a gift to get him sometime, then...

ETA: Oh god. I wasn't imagining it. Emily and Dan really are shooting in the same week. Orson Welles*, please send me a set builder!

*As an atheist, I pray to different gods. In this case, planet-eating space gods.

*Corey Burton* "Those bitches!"

Ahem. Yeah, people have been stealing food from the fridge again. Cans of soda strewn around the dining hall, used wrappers, crumbs. One of my parfaits is gone, and they squished my bread. I can only imagine they didn't take my milk because it's soy.

They also left my eggs out on the counter, presumably since about midnight. None taken, but I guess the act of thieving tired them out so much they couldn't put the cartons back or, indeed, some poor person's frozen dinners that they left stacked on the tile.

Fuckers.

I went to talk to the RA and the building manager, who were sitting around on their asses, as is their favourite sport. They laughed. Nothing they could do. "Many people have minifridges," the manager said, shrugging. Uh, yeah, because trying to enforce any level of decency in your building is just so hard. I know-- why don't people buy their own hotplates and mini-ovens as well, and also their own portapotties? It's simpler than keeping the bathroom stocked with toilet paper. Very capitalist. Ayn Rand would approve.

I have a minifridge. It's where I keep my booze and leftover take-out. It's really not big enough for much more than that, but christ, I'm at wit's end. On Friday I'm going to stop by the all-night pharmacy on the way back from work and pick up one of those large plastic bins. Apart from being the one thing Nemesis cannot destroy, I'm hoping the opaque plastic and my room number scrawled across the front will be enough to suggest, at least, that I must be some crazy neurotic Asian whose weird homebrew concoctions you wouldn't want to steal anyway.

If that doesn't work, I suppose I'm buying a hotplate.

It turned out to be a damn good thing that I didn't chicken out of going to the gym today, because I needed to burn off a little steam after that morning's discovery. Unfortunately, it's going to be beyond annoying to try to stick my alternate clothes in my satchel, and I'd forgotten how annoying backpacks are. So I bought a new shiny satchel with extra storage space, and I'm just going to mentally block out the price tag. Because really, I did need more things with the UCLA logo all over them.

The unfortunate thing is that this one has more pinnable surface area than did my last bag (which holds 15, and also 4 keychains), meaning I must get more pins. Yes, I do think I need 37 pieces of flare to express myself.

The director's coming by tonight to pick up the last boards and pay me. I have eight pages left to sketch. Can she do it, folks?

(I love this song. In essence, it's saying "make love AND war". Check out the lyrics here. So dirty.)

Pike, at least, warns you when they're gonna pull one of their shitty parties. Whatever rationale Sigma Nu has for playing the same three fucking helium-voiced children's songs for four straight hours while a scant handful of drunken fratboys amble about the courtyard, it is insufficient.

I called the police. Yes, I said, I was fine filing a noise complaint, just send someone. I didn't realise till I was on the phone just how much of a headache I had.

After that I took some trash down and found a bum digging through the apartment dumpster. He had most of the bags hauled out and a pitiful collection of bottles and cans at his feet.

He looked at me. I stared at him, holding my trash bags.

"Evening," he said.

"Evening," I said. "Uh."

"Just set it down there," he said, gesturing to the grass. "I'll get to it."

I had no idea what else to do so I just did what he said, like I was dropping off a donation for the Goodwill. "Right, thanks," I said hastily, and ran back inside.

No wonder all you East Coast folk think Los Angeles is divorced from normal reality. It is.

The frat guys, at least, have stopped, after a brief spate of "MMMBop". (FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.) Now we're back to the screaming domestic abuse from Zeta Beta Tau. O student life.

I love my brown work shirt. It is a dark chocolatey colour with cowboy-esque buttons and sleeve fasteners and it is a size smaller than I usually wear, because dark brown is one of the two colours that look flattering when they aren't peasant shirt size on me (the other is olive green). I iron and overstarch the crap out of the collar, because it makes it look smart and good with a lot of my chokers and earrings. It's the perfect work top. I only wear it when I give an extra special crap about my customers.

So I ironed and starched my brown work shirt today. The apartment was so inhumanly hot that it defies any decent description and certainly having a hot iron in one's face doesn't help matters. But I ironed like a trooper, because it was Saturday and I always work the Saturday shift at my theatre gig, and there was no possible way this could be any different. No-one has any control over the AC in the box office and it's always ridiculously freezing, and damned if I wasn't going to wallow happily in that ice box for as long as my boss would let me.

So I get to the theatre at... sixish. I can't say my boss puts too fine a point on what qualifies as timeliness. But I get in to the staff area and enter my boss's office and my boss is not there, but rather my boss's boss. Don't you love the not-entirely-corporeal existence boss's bosses occupy in one's job cosmology? But our conversation goes like this:

"...There's no show tonight, is there."

"Nope, we're blacked out till next Friday."

"...Quite so."

"I'm just here for the AC."

"Er, that was my plan too. *pause* Can I just go grab my dinner and eat it here?"

".........No."

So we disembark in fairly short order, but he mentions he'll be seeing Ratatouille at 7. (I slightly can't believe I spelled that right on the first go.) I'd been nervously contemplating seeing it forever because as disappointing as Cars was, and how worrisome it is to me that Pixar's going to lose its uniqueness under the force of the Disney machine, but it's been in Westwood for nearly two months, and nothing in Westwood lasts that long. Even PotC3 got flushed out in about two weeks.

I was impressed. It was a lot more rewarding than Cars, and clearly learned a lot from the rough parts in The Incredibles. Their texturing has come a long way since Monsters, Inc, without a doubt. I can't remember being so wowed by fur since Advent Children, which, yanno, only looked as nice as it did because the wolf hardly moved and certainly wasn't out getting wet and messy.

The third act frustrated me a good deal, but I don't feel it was ruinous to the whole. It may merit revisiting, since I was so caught up in the general goodness of the thing through the end of the second act that I forgot it was a kids' film and some things are just expected. (It's not often I worry about being unfair to the creators, but I tend to give Brad Bird the benefit of the doubt since he is Animation Jesus.)

And so, really, a waste of a good collar starching, but an expensive evening well-spent. A pity the apartment is still too hot for words and it's a long weekend, but at least I can now say I went and saw The Rat Film.

I believe in hallmarks in my life. I strongly maintain that the 2006-2007 New Year's was when my warranty broke and everything that could start to malfunction suddenly did. I also believe that providence sent me to this apartment complex to give me ridiculous things to write about.

So I've ranted before about the mysterious dish-thieves in this building. We have a communal kitchen, and for a great while things were wonderful and no-one stole anything. Then my cups started vanishing, and my plates and my silverware. My peanut butter and milk got used up faster than I could swear I was capable, likewise my dish soap and salt and pepper. The food stuff I was willing to write off as inattentiveness, but there's something very smoking gun-esque about one of your scant few plates vanishing for a week and then turning up absolutely filthy and without a word of apology.

I've debated what to do about this. It pissed me off considerably. I theorised that one of the tenants who moved in after me brought their social autism with them, or maybe someone was mistaking my dish set for their own in some weird fashion. After one of my cups that I'd completely given up on as a lost cause suddenly turned up in the sink, I thought of nothing else but going to the RA about putting up a goddamn sign, something to the effect of "hey kids! communal kitchen != communal dishware! SO DON'T FUCKING USE STUFF THAT'S NOT YOURS". But I always had to run to work or class and so that thought sorta stayed stationary.

Then tonight I came home and I made the mistake of taking the stairs past one of my party members, who stopped me and prompted the so-how-was-your-day routine. It was then I elected to excuse myself by quickly ducking into the kitchen to wash the work-grime off my face, and lo, there was the RA, making a steak. With my salt and pepper shakers.

Guess who thought communal kitchen = communal dishware. And condiments and peanut butter and milk, apparently.

Ah, this building. Tarantulas loose in the hallways, showering in pitch darkness, and RAs who steal your salt and pepper. What a life.

I think I could do a whole series about this stuff.

For starters, there's an Animorph prowling the streets. I swear to god. Sometimes when I come home from work I see this tortie angora cat without a collar hanging outside near the curb halfway between Sigma Nu and my apartment. I can go up to her, pet her, scratch her behind the ears, and she won't budge. I'll walk away and she'll stay right there. I go into my apartment and come out two hours later to grab dinner and she still won't have moved, just keeping vigil over the dumpster.

She shows up irregularly, every few days, and nothing I can do can shift her. I'm about ready to write her a note saying I'm on to her.

Then there's the yelling I hear late at night or in the morning, from someone down below close to Sigma Nu or the abandoned frat next to them. Different speakers, often, and lots of swearing. It may be some elaborate joke but it sounds like nothing so much as a generous helping of domestic violence. If I could just trace the sound I would sure as hell be investigating it.

The behaviour of my female neighbours in the communal bathroom continues to baffle me. There's the one woman who will snort-spit in sinks and flush the toilets repeatedly if she comes in while someone's showering. There's the woman who will wait patiently with her magazine for me to get out of a stall, even though there's an open one right next to it. And fortunately my last roommate enlightened me as to the practise of washing one's hair in the sink and soaking everything in the immediate area in the process, so that's no longer surprising.

The dish thieves are apparently just socially awkward, as my missing plate and silverware turned up again the other day, filthy but at least accounted for. I'm sure to dry things immediately after washing and keep things locked up in my cupboard now. The one cup that's gone missing I don't think I'll see again, but it was just a plastic tumbler anyway. I refuse to buy grown-up dishes until I have a real place.

Oh yes, the abandoned frat. Have I mentioned this? It's a continued subject of fascination to me, and I'm undeterred by the smell. Every single time I've tried to ask people if they've heard its origins, something ridiculous happens that interrupts them before they have a chance to explain. Clearly, it's cursed.

Maybe I'll ask the Animorph sometime.

There were maggots on the kitchen tile this morning.

Apparently, someone had left something to rot at the bottom of the garbage can and then the flies had gotten in. I came down at around 10 in the morning to find the RA sweeping and mopping.

"Er, can I come in?"

"You might not want to."

"But you're just cleaning, aren't you?"

I was halfway over to the toaster before I took a proper look down.

"Oh god, that's not rice!"

I still ate breakfast, though.

This new apartment building's really turning out well, isn't it? The second floor windows are level with the neighbouring frat's chimney, there's no AC, the guy on the third floor keeps a tarantula that gets out of its cage, the washing machines flood the basement, the vending machine eats your change, the postman only remembers to bring the mail maybe two times out of the week, the stoves don't work, people steal your dishes and food constantly, anyone can kick anyone else off the LAN, all the lights are broken in the shower room, and the kitchen is officially a breeding ground for maggots.

...But at least it's cheap and I don't have a roommate.

I do so love when my reverse-engineered critical theories coincide with that of leading experts in the field who've worked it front-to-back. Either I'm doing something very, very right or they're all doing something very, very wrong. Either way it doesn't seem much to one or the other's credit.

Hate to say it, but work and class are running me into the ground. Especially work, which, alas, is more in the exertion of getting there and looking professional than in actual job performance. I'm also pulling far too many shifts at the theatre in the evening. I tell myself I'm earning major bank doing this, but at the rate that I spend money, yanno, alleviating depression and stress-induced ailments, it's probably not bound for a terribly distinct manifestation.

On a related point, there's a new sushi bar in Westwood with $0.99 sake happy hour, and I wish I had someone to go to it with.

(missanthrope.com is back up, but we're still ironing out the kinks. I'll let you know.)

If there's one Transformers shirt I wish they'd make, it's G1 Ultra Magnus yelling "I can't DEAL with that right now!"

Because I cannot. Which is another way of saying I refuse to. I've got far too much on my plate already. Now stop shoving shit at me.

(Not directed at anyone particular, unless you're the anonymous Fates That Be. In which case, fuck you.)

...

One of my party members (see this post for more explanation) came by this evening looking for reading material. After unsuccessfully offering her Catch 22, Armor, Time Out of Joint, Dispatches AND Neuromancer, I offhandedly mentioned that, well, I did have HP7 in a bag waiting for when I finished 6. And her eyes lit up like Christmas.

I love it when acquisitions that to me seem so grudging are able to bring others joy.

...

I'm burned. Two term assignments today. A third I should have done, but I'm down and out exhausted and my head hurts and I need brain novocaine badly.

Hm. Simon Furman? Why, yes please.

Trope: I just defeated a GIANT TARANTULA.
Bitstream: ooo
Bitstream: in what?
Trope: ....................I love how I say that and you automatically assume it's in a videogame.
Trope: No, dummy. A real giant tarantula.
Bitstream: you mean in life? o_O
Trope: YES.
Bitstream: I -almost- asked if you meant for real
Bitstream: but then I thought they werent native...
Bitstream: so I thought, nooo
Trope: Two of my neighbours came to my door asking if I had a tarantula.
Trope: Cuz there was a BIG FUCKING TARANTULA loose in the hall.
Bitstream: how big are we talking? o_O
Trope: Size of my fist.
Trope: Big mo'fo.
Bitstream: scary
Bitstream: so, uhh... did you go up a level?
Trope: I gained new party members.
Bitstream: awesome

( What actually happened. )

Man, today fucking blew. I woke up to an email from the Academy of TV Arts & Sciences trying to play it cool about what inept bastards they've been about this whole thing. Calling them on their shit in the reply left me with a nasty headache, and drawing up tutorials all day at work didn't help matters. Neither did the wind and the heat. Nor did several hundred incoming freshman mobbing around Ackerman Union and denying me food. Nor calls from Jack's annoying friends over whether Megatron or Galvatron would win in a fight.

And to top it all off, the police woman who scheduled me for fingerprinting (for my job; don't get any ideas) failed to actually pen my name in AND told me a completely fictitious time. Nothing like wading through a sea of gawking freshmen over to the police station at half past nine to be told the fingerprinting staff went home two hours ago.

Sah. So yes, gilliotina, your teas came in handy tonight. (And I don't mean a cell phone. Oh gawd no English-speaker's gonna get that.) I made the chai with some vanilla soy milk and took some very deliberate me-time.

In a not entirely unrelated point, I am level 84 in .hack//G.U. volume 2. Mind you, I'm substantially overleveled as always, but I seem to have arrived at that point in the narrative where it stops sucking and starts being COMPLETELY FUCKING AWESOME. I should actually have been taking notes, because oh man, my thesis paper is gonna be all over this shit. This is the sort of pop culture brilliance you just live for in Japanese narratives. And the localisation was some of the most fabulous I'd ever seen in this or any game since, like, the original Lunars.

But I could go on. I'm just sure you people would brick me if I did. And my headache's still really bad.

Are there any special dances or rituals for when one first goes into debt?

Mind you, it'll be a short debt, but... yeah. I'm not happy.

In better news, the new apartment is bigger than expected. It'll be another two weeks before I can get the rest of my belongings from the AV, though. And my desk is also being held hostage on Hilgard.

gilliotina, dein Paket kam an. Tees! Leider holte ich meines Teegeschir nicht nach LA mit mir. Wenn meiner Bruder zurueck zu Hause geht, wird ich ihn fragen, es zurueck zu mir holen. Danke auch fuer die Buecher!

...That was probably beyond horrible of me. I really don't have any skill even with the grammar anymore. So much for testing out of German 103.

I watched Tree of Palme, because Netflix sent it about three weeks ago and I have to be dutiful and watch everything before I ship it back. (Reviews-in-brief: Cat Soup is fucking amazing and the answer to What the Bleep Do We Know?! is "not a whole lot".) Two things struck me:

-The style suggests that it is both a high-brow satire of Disney and that it was done in the mid-90s. The latter is incorrect, which sorta disappointed me. For mid-90s the calibre of animation is phenomenal, but for 2002, it's only an 8 of 10.

-Oh look, another friend of Otomo. Funny how no-one in the West seems to acknowledge superflatism or its children, but inevitably all the anime they like can be traced back to the same five people in a room together. HM.

It also had some issues with its beats I'm just not in a mood to be forgiving about. I won't go into structure because by now everyone should know an anime that doesn't follow the "awesome first act, inert second act, convoluted third act" structure is doing something crazy, but one of the cardinal laws of illustration is that if an audience can't get what's going on from the pictures, you're doing something wrong.

With a medium as methodically laid out as an animation, it's really not acceptable that an entire scene should go by inexplicably, when it's clear that wasn't the intent. And I'm hardly one to sit back and zone out at the screen and then whine about incomprehensibility afterwards-- that's the definition of the people I'd most like to murder. So when I mean I couldn't get what was happening, I really couldn't get what the fuck was going on, and I don't think most of Japan did either. And it's not a batshit Gainax stunt, it's just bad angles and editing. For shame, uh, guy who's only directed like five things in his life.

...

Anywho. Time to go initial kitchen utensils.