Top 5 non-human things I miss about Monroe, Michigan

In no particular order:

1. The creek. Specifically, being a nine year old and walking from my house to the field behind my subdivision that led to the creek so that we could catch frogs.

2. Tim Horton's French Vanilla Iced Cappucino. Better than Starbucks, better than Dunkin Donuts, better than any iced coffee drink I've ever had. Two points to the Canadians.

3. Frenchtown Mall - now the "Mall of Monroe" - where fourteen year old girls walk around attempting to look way cooler and far less awkward than they actually are and succeed in looking even more like awkward, awkward teenagers. I used to be one of those girls. I also used to work at Olga's Kitchen in the mall. That I don't miss so much.

4. The fact that on any given Saturday night, you will run into at least five people you grew up with/went to school with/generally haven't seen in a decade or more. And their conversations with you almost always start with "I had a baby! Don't know where that loser daddy a his ran off to, though..."

5. Monroe High School will always, no matter how it tries, look like a state prison.

I can't make this shit up, people.

riddle me this

Why is it that people in movies always seem to fall in love within absurd time frames? It's always two days, or a weekend, or hours, depending on what you're watching.

Note to Hollywood - just cause your characters have been humping like bunnies for a few minutes does not mean they're in love.

I was watching Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and I don't have any real comment on its political message - it was  liberal as fuckall for its time and it had good intentions, but watching it now with some of the obviously outdated terminology makes me wince through parts of it.

Whatever. The point is, these bitches have been together all of ten days and then spring their parents with the news that they're getting married. Fuck, if I was Spencer Tracy I'd be pissed too.

So says the cynic in me, anyway.

But when Tracy gives his big speech at the end (and if you've never seen it I'm probably spoiling the best part - not counting the half a second you get to see Sidney Poitier shirtless of course) I bawl my bloody eyes out. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he died seventeen days after they wrapped filming, or the fact that he was so sick they used two shooting scripts, one with him and one without.

Mostly it's that when he looks at Katharine Hepburn and says "The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel, for each other. And if it's half of what we felt- that's everything." And in that moment, when her eyes are completely welled up with tears, she's either the greatest actress in the world or she's not acting at all.

It's also the most clever way to sell the ludicrous notion that two kids who spent ten days in Hawaii are actually in love. By implying that twenty five years later they could maybe, if they're really lucky, turn into Tracy and Hepburn.

And if that doesn't make you cry, please continue on with your life of puppy kicking and soul killing.

i suck at this part 2.

Well it's a little late to talk about Salinger now, isn't it? Procrastination wins yet again. Suffice it to say he's dead and I was sad and I spent a good portion of my formative years falling in love with Holden Caulfield every time I read Catcher in the Rye. But Franny and Zooey is still my favorite and I've spent my few adult years (obviously using the term adult in the loosest fashion possible) being in love with Zooey. So, whatever this says about me as a person, I don't know, but Salinger was one of the reasons I wanted to write when I was a kid and ten year old me, sixteen year old me and twenty-three on the cusp of twenty-four me is still recovering.

Speaking of writing - this is a terrible segue I know - I signed up for Script Frenzy, which as I understand it is the script equivalent to NaNoWriMo. It starts April 1st, so I guess I should probably finish that fucking outline, huh? Right.

Here's the thing. I detest outlining. Like, I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with Sarah Palin than outline. At least she'd have a shotgun. So I started outlining this script and then I stopped about halfway through, because it seemed like self-imposed torture. Unfortunately the idea itself is convoluted enough that it requires writing down, so, goddamnit about sums up my thoughts.

Oddly enough I do pretty well with lists (never said my logic was anything other than ass backwards) so, I'm making a list of shit I need to get done this weekend and the outline is going on the list. Only way it's gonna get done. I won't put the list here cause honestly I don't think anyone cares that I haven't done laundry in three weeks. If they do, bigger issues at hand.

So I will, in theory be babbling incoherently here more often. We'll see. I might just get distracted by something really shiny instead.