hey, it's the old scorpion-down-the-back trick!

I'M BACK.
Kind of. Wireless connection at Dad's house is variable. But I've been away from LiveJournal and YIM and all sorts of things for a few days, which is FUCKING YEARS to a person who checks her friendslist compulsively most of the time. HI EVERYBODY.

My horoscope for this week: It's true that your talents and interests make you unique; however, some of the credit should go to your mother, for ingesting the thalidomide.

Tuesday: "Happiness." Oh my God. Watched it at 4 AM after my roommates had gone to bed. Something told me it was not a "watch with other people" movie.
Definitely one of the most wrenching movies I have ever seen, and I rarely have major emotional responses to movies. Same thing with "Welcome to the Dollhouse" (which was coincidentally on a few hours ago). I do like movies about pathetic people with messed-up lives that never get any better. It's the sense of slightly disgusted self-recognition; nobody wants to admit that they're as secretly, self-loathingly perverted as Bill Maplewood, or as pathetic as Dawn Weiner, but Solondz makes it impossible not to sympathize.
I hadn't watched "Welcome to the Dollhouse" since the summer I got out of middle school. I almost couldn't finish watching it, back then; I think it fell under the "too soon" category. I cringed--and by "cringed," I mean "curled up in a ball and tried to hide under the sofa pillows" during the part where she gets yelled at for other people bullying her. "Who ever told you to fight back?" If you're not supposed to fight back, if you get in trouble for raising your hand and telling, if you can't even whisper, "Hey, cut it out" to the person who's throwing little bits of paper into your hair, then what the hell are you supposed to do? Sit there and take it? None of my guidance counselors could ever answer this to my satisfaction. The phrase "Stand up for yourself" only has so many meanings, after all, and I think I exhausted all of them.
I still don't know what was so terrible about trying to stop other kids from picking on you. My theory is that it's a type of what Prof. Tifft calls "savage discovery," the idea that people in terrible circumstances deserve what's happening to them because of something intrinsicially wrong or different about them. "The other kids wouldn't pick on you if you weren't such a geek in the first place, so shut up and take your lumps." (This is the kind of thing my dad actually used to tell me. Paraphrased slightly, of course.)

Wednesday: Ah, home. The most notable change in my mom's house was my little brother's room; he's decorated his walls with cheap punk posters, take-out menus, brown paper bags with cartoons drawn on them, and things he seems to have photocopied from an Abnormal Psych textbook.
I spent the afternoon reading "Killing Yourself to Live," the new Chuck Klosterman book. It focuses mainly on his ex-girlfriends, rather than his usual "what this particular piece of otherwise schlocky or bland pop culture has to say about the human condition." I was expecting to dislike it because of this; most of the reviews I'd read of it are somewhere along the lines of, "Stop whining about your love life and get back to talking about how great KISS is, Chuck." Oddly, it's my favorite thing he's written. I finally figured out why: I don't read Chuck Klosterman books because I truly care about how "Saved By the Bell" reruns changed peoples' perception of time in some profound yet unnoticeable way, or what your favorite Traveling Wilbury says about you; I read his stuff because his thought patterns are disturbingly similar to most of my own. I imagine if he hadn't gone into rock journalism, he'd be a great semiotician. (Minor points to anyone who knows where I cut up "Manifesto Puffs" from.)
In the evening, Boyd took me to see "Rent." It was quite entertaining, although I spent the more melodramatic parts making up parody lyrics to "West Side Story" to entertain her with once we got out of the theater. (Also, watching her tear up and sniffle. I like watching other peoples' reactions to movies. It's sometimes more interesting than the movie itself.)
Also hung out with Dan, Ben, & Kovnat for a little while. Ben is creating an RPG: 8th_day_rpg that he is recruiting people to work on. I shall be working on the spells. I'm terribly excited about this. I'm going to do research and everything, and I won't even get lazy and crib stuff from "Mage: The Awakening." I promise. Well, not much.
Went back to Boyd's house to spend the night and showed her "Re-Animator." I think she enjoyed it. At least, she seemed to be impressed at the homoeroticism and didn't actually throw up during the gory parts, which is all one can ask for. I really must get a DVD copy of "Bride" so I can show it to her. Boyd is wonderful for bouncing ideas off of. Quite insightful. Also quite warm and soft and pleasant in so many ways.

Thursday: Mom's family has very, very low-key holidays. We have Grandma and Grandpa over and play board games, and that's about it. (The board games, however, can get fairly cutthroat.) We also invariably have kielbasa and sauerkraut instead of whatever traditional holiday food we are supposed to nosh on. I never have any objection to this. We do not need no steenkin' turkey.
This is in violent contrast to Dad's family, where "Thanksgiving" means "standing around outside waiting for Aunt Maureen's redneck husband to finish deep-frying some poor bird and there are tables where tables are not supposed to be and too many people including your second cousin twice removed from the moon and everybody is talking over each other and you have to go hide in the basement or under a table or something." I used to do this when I was younger; Dad's family would come over, and I'd disappear into the backyard or the bathroom to detox from all the damn people. I spent 30 minutes in the bathroom reading at my own birthday party once. I've gotten better at coping, through. I used to be able to invite a couple friends over, and we'd escape into the basement and play pool and listen to Ramones records (I still think that this is the best possible way to spend an evening). Unfortunately, Dad got rid of the pool table and the new basement is unfinished and unwelcoming, so I don't know what I'm going to do this Chanukah. Probably stand out on the deck and freeze.
Had josephwaldman over, which was quite nice. We stayed up talking until 2:30 AM. I'd forgotten just how satisfying face-to-face conversations can be. Unfortunately, this meant that I only got 2 hours of sleep, because I had to wake up at 6 AM to go with Mom on...

Friday: Shopping. Bleah. Well, "bleah" is more of a knee-jerk reaction than anything: I automatically hate shopping for anything except books, and I particularly hate having to try on clothes. Oddly, going to Mervyn's at 6 in the morning and attempting to choose between 5 different kinds of mock turtlenecks, all of which choked the hell out of me, was a very serene experience. This was probably because I hadn't had enough sleep and thus wasn't really conscious enough to be bored. Instead, I made up plots for a 30-year-old Berkeley-teaching!George/semi-swinging hippie-mama!Lorraine story. (OMGWTF het. I should be working on spacematchbook or that Jay/Bob Chanukah thing I signed up for instead.)
Went to the schvartze mall in Livonia. This is the saddest, tattiest mall you've ever seen. Only half the the storefronts are even filled; the other half are nothing but blank dark holes behind dusty glass. The stores themselves are marvels of shoddiness. Wires hang from the ceiling, overstuffed shelves slump against each other, the carpet rears up and attacks you. Half of the existing stores are fly-by-night places, stocked with cheap plastic trinkets that fell off the back of a truck; they will close their doors the moment their stock runs out.
The most notable thing in the mall was the little Scientology booth run by the most inept recruiter that I have ever seen. Brian stopped for an E-meter test, and the guy didn't even explain what the needle swishing back and forth meant. He just shoved the back of the "Dianetics" book into our faces and asked, "Now doesn't that make much more sense?" He also had a German accent.

Dad picked us up afterwards. One thing I like about Dad's: He subscribes to a ton of interesting magazines. He also bought fifteen time-travel novels off Amazon. It actually wasn't until this year that I discovered that Dad also liked time travel books, but there you go. I actually inherited something from him other than maladaptive personality traits, a tendency to get obsessive over music, and my Jewfro. (When he dies, I'm planning to hold onto his DVD collection. I envy it.)
Watched "Diamonds Are Forever," with Crispin's daddy. Admitted to Dad that the only reason I wanted to watch that particular film was because of this, & he was most amused. We agreed that it was indeed amazing how much Bruce resembles his son. And Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd are a very cute couple, for deadly assassins. "She's very attractive." *glare* "For a lady."
Oddly, I have a craving for another Bond film. I will have to ask Dad which one he recommends. Perhaps the other one with Blofeld, "You Only Live Twice." I like evil geniuses who try to blow up the earth. I always enjoy guessing at their secret motivations. Perhaps they were teased too much in school. It would not surprise me if that was the case; I don't think a boy with a plummy accent and a large white cat would have been very popular.