"I'm from Kerry, close to Dingle, can I put my SIM card in your phone?"
Random evening, on many accounts, but tonight I received my first international text message. It’s from my friend/lover Paul and I wanted to text back, but I had no idea if my phone could do such a thing and, if so, whether it would charge me some random change amount or fifteen dollars. So, as I do with most things, I googled it when I got home.
I really didn’t find out how much, though it seems to be about a quarter each, but that’s not that point. I was completely turned off almost immediately because I came across a message board, one of those “ask a question” yahoo boards that are so not helpful because of the people who use them. But it got me thinking; who actually takes the time to respond to these messages?
I was put off by two responses that were particularly dick-ish, as I find is often the case, so I first thought that some twat that both believes that he/she (though, sorry, probably he) knows everything AND has absolutely no fucking life would be the kind of person that would engage in these boards on a regular enough basis. But there’s more to be thought.
So let’s just keep with my text example. Is there someone out there, or multiple someones as it seems, that considers themselves to be a texting expert, so much so that they peruse the message boards in their spare time so that in the event of a texting crisis they may impart their knowledge to the masses? Seriously, I may happen upon such boards when I’m searching for something, but I’ve never felt the need to add my own response, probably precisely because I’m looking for a answer anyway, therefore I am obviously not privy to the matter at hand.
But it’s not like I look around film message boards and think, “Here I am, ready to save you from your film knowledge quandaries.” Nor do I do this with any other topic for which I may have some sort of knowledge. And it’s not like I don’t have free time, I spend more than my fair share on Jezebel every day, so what makes a message board expert different from me, your average person?
And to go even further, what kind of person actually uses message boards at all, even to say something like, “I know exactly what you mean. My pee smells funny, too, and I haven’t been eating asparagus, WTF?” It seems that there are people out there that use the internet far more than me, which on some levels is just shocking, but I just don’t know who these people are and what they are like. I feel bad making such a snap judgment, but I can’t help it, I think that these people are totally lame, I’m just saying.
"Does it looks like I'm in a fucking coma?": How LiLo inspires me to be true to myself
Last night I was lucky enough to catch a screening of a film that was out earlier this summer, a film that will be regarded as a classic of the medium. Not a classic in the way of Renoir or Bergman or even Spielberg; no, I’m talking about the
Showgirls, badly computer-generated animal print cover-up, vh1 marathon, midnight showing kind of classic that is Lindsay Lohan’s, errrr, Chris Sivertson’s
I Know Who Killed Me.
I was treated to one of the most entertaining blow by blows of the absurd plot after two friends, Jan and Natalie, braved it opening night in July. If memory serves me right, LiLo had just been busted with the “not my pants, therefore not my coke” incident and the execs behind the film decided to lay low in terms of promotion (as if they were going to promote it tons anyway, I think they knew this was a tosser). From what my friends said, nothing made sense, plots points were seemingly, or possibly literally, pulled from Lohan’s ass, and apparently there was not only gratuitous violence but I was promised excessive stripper scenes for Lohan complete with random limbs and digits falling off, possibly even onstage, mid-show. Oh me, I had to see this.
Luckily (again, I use this word because I mean it, my luck has never been this good), my good friend Kristen alerted the Tacos to a weekend of not one, but two midnight showings at the lovely
Brattle Theater. Sadly, one Taco, who would have choked on her own laughter, missed out, but three of us boldly made the sojourn to Harvard Square, pumping ourselves full of our drink of choice (PBR for Kristen, pretty drinks for Em, and Hendrick’s for me), courtesy of one great guy we know and another we don’t, but sure would like to, then marched over with a very nice buzz and high hopes of a good crowd.
We weren’t disappointed. Choosing the balcony, we were mostly alone in our own viewing world, save one girl in the back who was joined by a male companion halfway through (I’m guessing Brattle workers, finishing their duties early to catch as much LiLo wonder as possible?!) and responded positively to our ridiculous commentary throughout. But the crowd below was a crowd for us; the title credits began and we saw our star’s name fade in and her face creep out from behind a lush, red curtain, ready for stripping action. I was beside myself, truly, for my friends didn’t tell me that we get to begin with such titillating material, I thought this came later on and that I had more time to prepare myself. But I didn’t, so I gulped, sat up straight, and drank in the oh-so amateur moves.
Being the blog-whore that I am, I recall Lohan commenting on how much dancers having learned to “dance” herself. We’re not talking respect in the “their life is so hard and degrading and I would never wish that upon anyone” kind of Hollywood fake sympathy; no, no, no, we’re talking, “OMG, pole-dancing’s hard! I had bruises everywhere! It is not easy!” Well, sorry to say, my favorite train wreck, your dancing was “eh” at best. You kind of just slid your back down the poll and remained in a squat position, arching your hoo-hah out to the crowd. I definitely think those little Kardashian sisters (yes, the tweens) had a better grip on the art of the pole, but I guess when you have one installed in your house and several older sisters and a mom who encourage and bestow their secrets upon you, you’re destined for pole-dancing greatness.
I have to say that Jan and Natalie, the two lovely ladies who went opening night, provided me with the best synopsis ever, enabling me to know exactly what was coming up so I would know, and could relay, why we should continue to be excited about this film. And when I couldn’t remember, I was more than pleasantly surprised to hear a juicy line of dialogue that I’ve attached to a memory of my friends’ faithful rendering; “Did Aubrey fuck you like that?” or “You just bought one [baby] off the crack-whore down the hall who had one to spare.” and of course the Ask.com query “bleeding wounds unexplained.”
Something I wasn’t warned about, though, was that it is really, actually creepy at parts, esp when Lohan ventures into a shed that turns into a cellar with a hundred or so prosthetic limbs hanging from the ceiling, all the while being pursued by a Blue Man with a baseball cap (Tobias Fünke’s evil brother?! Kristen thinks so) wielding ice-like glass shards designed by way of Māori tribal carvings. Strangely enough, the gore was done well, or at least well enough to make Kristen and me squirm while Emily slept through the madness (How she did that, I do not know, we were literally shrieking out of disgust, horror, and lack of normal movie-going inhibitions (read: manners)). I feel like I could write pages more about the stigmatic twins video, the hilarity of Lohan’s amputated limbs and battery operated prosthetics, and the red herring wannabe gardener that really has no place in the film whatsoever. But sometimes words cannot do justice to genius.
The technical elements of the film were, well, just crazy. Kristen thought the DP was obviously channeling Kieslowski, the Three Colors Trilogy, while I kept throwing out “Godard!” when we’d get a random filter change or a switch to negative. Feeling that there were too many connections to begin referencing, Emily deemed it “Art House Mad Libs,” a description we all found fitting. But what we all found most fabulous about the film was the script; especially out of LiLo’s mouth, we couldn’t remember the last time we had heard such profundity. Though upon further reflection, I believe I can pinpoint my last time as being LC’s opener on the first season of
Laguna Beach: “I’ve always been the nice girl. But this year, I realized sometimes you just have to go after what you want.”
Funny, that seems to fit nicely with the theme of
I Know Who Killed Me. Jan and Natalie initially concluded that Lohan chose this piece to kill off Lindsay as Aubrey from the public mindset and usher in Lindsay as Dakota, the chain-smoking, sex-loving “adult” who prefers the word “fuck” to just about any other in the English language. But I don’t know if it’s that simple. Perhaps she just saw the script as her moment to rise above Hollywood superficialty and get down to the nitty-gritty of real life struggles, like little girls that turn to stripping when their moms turn to crack, communities that come together when the innocent go missing, and all the limbs that unexplainably fall off when you’re so cosmically linked to the twin you don’t know you have that you end up
really feeling their pain.
I think LiLo sums it up best when she says, “Sometimes you get cut, that’s life.”
Labels: bad movies, Brattle Theater, Lindsay Lohan, prosthetics, Tacos
A New Fiscal Year?
The New Year is so convenient for rethinking the way I live and the things I do, especially when school doesn’t begin until the 16th and I have no “real” job to occupy this time, but that’s exactly the first thing that occupies my mind when evaluating where I’m going. I’ve never quite adjusted to my TA pay, I’ve actually handled the over 50% cut in income very poorly. I still live like I did this time last year to the detriment of my bank account and change is very, very hard. Living alone definitely compounds the problem with having to foot the entire bill for all the utilities, trying to cook economically for one, and either failing in that or just deciding to meet a friend for dinner to make up for the lack of human companionship that comes with not having a roommate to come home to.
But it’s not the pain of seeing my dwindling account and mounting bills that stings the most, it’s, rather, the resentment that builds up when you don’t feel adequately compensated. It’s also problematic, for me, that it seems COM doesn’t quite respect student payment in the first place; maybe I’m spoiled to always being paid, be it at Berry or Settebello or even the Fannin Inn, on a biweekly basis, but I’ve found myself five steps behind every month due to COM (or is it BU’s?) end of the month pay schedule. It’s not just that we only get one check at the end of the month, it’s that I’m not paid in a timely matter and so I find myself working and then getting paid several weeks after the fact. I almost had a meltdown at the beginning of the school year when I found out there would be no monies for a month and that after a summer of not being paid I still had to wait till October in order to have any cash in my account.
And then there’s my odd job I did for the Haneke Conference at the end of October for which I was finally paid just last week. Two months later! And what was even more stressful about that is the added burden of having to foot the bill for the DV tapes myself; the $94 was paid over a month ago, a purchase I made on my credit card because I naively assumed I’d be reimbursed and paid before the bill came due.
But what always takes the cake is the unpaid internship. 95% of the time, I really don’t mind working at the museum for free. Not only do I have nothing else to do with that time, I am learning so much, getting experience I’d never get elsewhere, and really enjoying myself. But there’s always a moment, every few weeks or so, when it’s very clear that someone I’m working for is taking the volunteer for granted and using me to pick up the slack when they’ve lollygagged for three days straight or just plain do the work for them. It is on these days that I’m ever thankful that I live where I do and can have a therapeutic walk home rather than stuffing myself on a train. Maybe that was the problem in DC, not being able to have a moment to breathe in the stuffy swamp.
So here I am, the beginning of my last semester, and even though I have a great thesis to tackle (another entry here soon) I’m overly excited and optimistic about getting a job this summer. I’m just so sick of thinking that I could be at Taco Bell right now making more money and doing half the work. There’s a part of me, I guess this would be my brain, that realizes both that the kind of work I’m looking into doesn’t pay very well and that getting such a job will be very difficult, but the way I feel it, in my gut like Colbert, at least I’ve got a choice when this is over. It may suck for a while if I can't find a job quickly, but I’ll have the degree and I will not hesitate to tell people to piss off if their offer isn’t acceptable.
And that is what I'm looking forward to in 2008.
Labels: COM, monies, museum bitch, new year
