i'm a molotov cocktail, you're dom perignon.

So I had an interview to canvass for the Sierra Club in Ann Arbor. I got there a little late and chatted with a couple of other people who were also waiting for an interview, both U of M students dressed all college casual-chic. I felt like a total graduated dork in my sweater-vest thing and nice pants, but sweater-vests vs. college chic is not important when your job is going to be saving the world.

The application was short, and the longest question was an essay on what we felt the biggest problem facing society today was. (Everything.) I wrote a little essay on how all our problems stemmed from the twin evils of apathy and ignorance, and that if people just started to care about one problem then they'd start to care about other problems, and that raising awareness by means such as canvassing was the answer to all our societal ills. Woo. Then it was a while before my interview, so I sat down and flipped through some copies of "Adbusters" they had lying around.

Man, I really dislike "Adbusters." It is such an obnoxious magazine. "Our article writer got herself addicted to Facebook, and bloggers use the word "I" more than they use the word "we," so therefore anyone who uses social networking sites is a narcissistic Internet addict!" "Here's a picture of a fat person, doesn't that make you think about how awful having enough to eat is?" "Here's a picture of an X-rayed baby and a sad poem about technology, doesn't that make you THINK?" They did have an article on Andy Warhol talking about how awful mass-produced art was but maybe it was a valid artistic statement if you squinted a little.

Ironically, I'm currently engaged in writing a screenplay with anivad that the collective readership of "Adbusters" would probably shit itself in delight over. We're drawing the majority of our inspiration from Sociological Contexts, though, which is a constructive and analytical look at advertisements and other cultural artifacts and is a lot more comprehensible than "Adbusters".

ANYWAY. So the interview went well, and I am going to go for an "observation day" on Thursday to see how I can handle the door-to-door stuff. I have a spiel to memorize for them, which isn't terribly long, and I'll get a chance to practice. And then tomorrow I have an interview at Employment One trying to winkle job openings out of random employers, so we'll see how that goes.

I didn't go right home afterwards, since I don't get a good reason to go to Ann Arbor often. I walked around, had lunch, checked out an art gallery, went into "Aunt Agatha's Mysteries", a bookstore devoted entirely to mystery and crime novels, and bought a collection of all the Raffles the Cracksman stories. THIS IS A GOOD INVESTMENT. Raffles is a Victorian thief who steals shit from the deserving along with his BFF, Bunny (yes, Bunny) who was his fag (I don't know exactly what this means, but it involved copying out poetry and covering for Raffles when he snuck out at night) at school. The stories start with Bunny losing all of his money at gambling, wandering into Raffles's room, and threatening to kill himself. Raffles is so impressed by Bunny's suicidal tendencies that he suggests that they go steal some jewels together to make up their debts. Then they both enjoy it so much that they keep doing it. To make things more awesome, the writer of these stories was Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, which brings me neatly to the next thing I wanted to talk about:

I really liked the Sherlock Holmes movie, and I want to see it again. RDJ never really quite gelled for me as Holmes, but I can believe that he's sloppy-stubbly AU Holmes, and everything else was awesome. Jude Law with a 'stache, Rachel McAdams being criminal in Victorian men's togs, occult shenanigans with creepy hot villains, and a plot that was simple enough to carry satisfying amounts of jokes and action scenes and complex enough to be satisfying when it was all unraveled. The friends I ended up going with made me watch a few episodes of the Jeremy Brett series afterwards, which was also pretty good--not as many explosions, obviously, but excellent acting, and the slower pace didn't put me off or bore me.

one last thought and then I'll shut up and go clean: Vietnamese coffee is really fucking good.