Happened this time, too - he got called into the office on an emergency, so instead of coming down to deliver K.T.'s furniture, he just sent her stepmom. Denise turned out to be very nice, and promised to carry back word to K.T.'s dad that I really do exist!
Sitting around before the game, we had a great conversation about the nature of Stuff. We observed that it seems like every time we move, our Stuff expands to fill our homes right away. Based on this, Matt hypothesized that Stuff is a liquid, since it conforms to the shape of its container. Kevin thought maybe Stuff was a gas, since it tends to expand to fill the whole container - except near the ceilings, but one supposes it could be a heavy gas. K.T. mentioned that Stuff sure felt solid when she was moving it, to which Kevin replied that Stuff just had very large, heavy molecules.
Intellectualism abounds.
We also got to hear about Kevin's rule of pets. According to Kevin, you can have no more of a particular type of pet (mammal, reptile, etc.) than there are people living in the house. So K.T. and Kevin are at their limit, having two cats and two lizards. Well, I suppose they could get two birds, but I think K.T. hates birds. Or fish, but I know she thinks fish are especially boring as pets. They have lots of insects, but those aren't pets - they're food for the lizards.
At any rate, they can't get any more cats or lizards. If they got another cat, K.T. would have to have a baby to bring up the number of people in the house. She says so far this has kept her from wanting another cat too much.
K.T. told Kevin about my categories of snow drivers and Kevin said (a touch arrogantly, I thought) "I really can drive in the snow!" I forbore mentioning to him that that's precisely the response expected from my category of driver that used to live somewhere with frequent snow and still thinks they know how to drive in the snow.
After all, hardly anyone is actually willing to admit to falling into one of those categories - each person thinks that the way they drive is reasonable, and it's the other people who are completely incompetant. It wasn't worth the effort of argument. Not that I'd wish ill-luck on Kevin, but I don't know how well I'd be able to hold my tongue if he did have an accident in the snow. Of course - like most of us - he'd probably blame it on the other idiot.
Apparently, K.T. read my dream about the squishy snake and it took up residence in her own brain, and she dreamed that it was lying in wait for her, trying to make her touch it. As revenge, she loaned me her copy of the movie Reservoir Dogs.
Now, let me make something quite clear, here: K.T. and I have wildly different tastes in movies. There's some overlap, but even when we both enjoy a movie, it's usually for different reasons. So I tend to take any movie recommendation from K.T. with a grain of salt. In particular, K.T. especially likes high-body-count, big-explosion, big-gun action movies, while my own reaction to the vast majority of these movies is something like Was there a good reason to make that so gross? Could the plot possibly be more inconsistent? Am I supposed to give a shit about these people?
See, when I go to the movies, I want to care about the characters. Comedy, action, drama, tragedy, whatever - I want to feel a connection with the characters and care about what happens to them. I tend to lose myself in the movie, feel like I'm actually there, and I really prefer happy endings, though occasionally I enjoy the release of a good tear-jerking tragedy.
But both K.T. and Matt were recommending Reservoir Dogs for a while, and I like the soundtrack, and the teeny bit of plot they gave me made it sound sortof like Usual Suspects, which I absolutely loved for being funny and thoughtful and intelligent and surprising me at the end.
I should've known better, from a Quentin Tarantino movie. Quentin Tarantino doesn't write intellectual movies. He writes brain-fucks. The basic gist of any Quentin Tarantino movie is, "Here, can I fuck you in the brain? Would you mind turning your head a little?"
I'm going to spoil some things right now, so if you haven't seen Reservoir Dogs and you're planning on it and you do like unnecessary violence, skip to the next divider bar or something.
Ready? I hate movies involving torture. Hate it. Hate it when they show it, hate it when they imply it, hate it hate it hate it. I've learned to put up with a certain amount of body-count and violence in movies. That doesn't bother me too much. All the cops that got blown away? Sure. Why not? They're cops; it's a criminal movie, you've got to shoot some cops. And you've got to have a bad guy who's completely disconnected with reality and is threatening all sorts of horrible things so you feel justified and righteous when he gets scragged, sure. But I can't handle torture and mutilation, whether the actor playing the victim screams in agony or passes out right away, it makes me sick to my stomach. Don't care for it much in books, either - I've got comic books that involve psychopathic killers, and I skip over those scenes when I re-read those comics. I just can't handle it.
The one moment of real joy I got out of the movie was when the psychopathic asshole got blown away. I felt good about that. I'll also confess to a feeling of nauseous relief when the mutilated cop got shot. The poor boy. I was glad he wouldn't have to grow old getting bitter about the way people looked at him when they saw his face. But I am never again going to enjoy the song "Stuck in the Middle With You" and that makes me, frankly, furiously angry. I liked that song, and for at least the next month, I'm going to have to change the radio station whenever it comes on, and even after that I'm never - never - going to be able to sing along, dancing while I'm driving. It upsets me.
K.T. tells me that Reservoir Dogs is the movie that introduced her to Steve Buscemi as an actor - that she really enjoyed his performance. I have to disagree with her on this one. He didn't perform. He brayed like a donkey about being a professional. He whined. He sounded like a stooge - in fact, for the first twenty minutes of the movie, I was convinced that he was the stooge. I couldn't stop staring at his awful teeth. (I have this thing about teeth lately, I guess, because I couldn't stop watching Alan Rickman's teeth in Dogma, and I adore Alan Rickman and really enjoyed Dogma.) The only really good acting he did was in a one-second shot, where he was in the background of the scene, lifting his hand to his eyes with a lovely "Dear God spare me this" look. Other than that, I thought his acting was pretty mediocre. Not bad, mind you - just not anything special.
And in the end, it turned out to be a pointless movie. There were a couple of good scenes, a few amusing lines, but at the end of the movie, I could only be glad that it was over. The only characters I'd felt any sympathy for were dead. Heck, everyone was dead. And they weren't tragically dead; they were stupidly dead. Every one of them. The only one to survive the movie wasn't a strong enough character to give a shit about. What was the point of that?
Well, as I said, Quentin Tarantino movies don't have a point or a real plot. The only real purpose is to fuck you in the head. There was no point. There was no message. There wasn't a happy ending, but it didn't have the emotional release of tragedy. It just ended, and left me feeling very cold and wishing I could detach.
At any rate, I guess this was K.T.'s revenge for my giving her my snake dream. Because the cat woke us up at 5:00 this morning, and after I put him in the garage, I lay awake in bed, trying to go back to sleep and being unable to because the stupid fucking torture scene kept replaying over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and fucking over in my brain. I couldn't turn it off, I couldn't look away, I couldn't think about anything else no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't go back to sleep.
So now I'm tired, short on sleep even though I went to bed early last night, and I'm tired enough to want to have a cup of coffee, but still brain-fucked enough to be afraid to get one because I'm scared it will taste like blood, and I'm crying because I know it's stupid, and I'm grateful my officemates aren't here yet because I don't think I could explain it. I spent the morning trying to act normal and smile at my husband when he complimented me and made jokes, but my smile felt wooden, and I spent the whole morning dreading the moment when I'd have to touch him to kiss him goodbye, because that's what pointless excessive violence does to me - I want to withdraw into a shell and not touch other people because then I'm reminded that they're made of flesh, too.
Someone remind me never to ever again watch another Quentin Tarantino movie, no matter how good everyone says it is. One of the worst things is that, without that scene, I think I could've enjoyed the movie. It could've been an enjoyable kind of brainfuck, like Usual Suspects was. I could've ended that movie thinking, Wow, what fantastic irony, if I'd actually cared. If the asshole psycho had been shot right after, oh, I dunno, after he slashed the cop's face with the razor - if I could've enjoyed the acting without having to see just how gruesome a job the makeup department was capable of - I could've understood just how fucked up Mr. Blonde was without having to be this traumatized by it. But instead, I spent the last half hour of the movie just wanting it to be over so I'd know for sure I wasn't going to watch any more psychopathic assholes carving on innocent people.
Okay, I'll stop raving. I was hoping that if I wrote it out, I'd feel less rattled by the whole thing, but it's just making it worse.
My first paycheck from Syscon, which was supposed to arrive on Friday, hasn't come yet. I went and asked HR about it, and they shrugged and said, "It's late. I didn't get my pay stub, either." I'm slightly miffed - I'm not on direct deposit yet (that usually takes one or two paychecks) and I have a mortgage payment to make this week. I think a company has an obligation to get paychecks to its employees on time.
So, with no remorse, I'll be on the clock when I finally get my paycheck and go to the bank to deposit it. If the company isn't going to pay me in time for me to deposit my check on Saturday, then the company can just pay for me to go to the bank.
It snowed Saturday night and most of the day Sunday. I mentioned before that I like snow, didn't I? It only took about five minutes of watching our next door neighbors having a snowball fight with their daughter and the two little boys from across the street before I decided I wanted to join in.
Of course, by the time I'd gotten dressed and got outside, they'd gotten tired and gone home. Sigh.
I made a few snowballs and threw them at our garage door, then wandered around outside some. I noticed that thick green shoots are coming up from the pot in which I planted some tulip and daffodil bulbs, and I went around to the front of the house to see a couple of shoots coming up where I planted the daffodils, so maybe I'll actually have a few flowers in a couple of months!
I took some pictures of the house in the snow, and of the tiny snowman the next door neighbors had made, and of the green shoots (as proof, I guess, that I don't kill every plant I touch). Then, for a while, I just sat on the porch and watched the snow come down. Then I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood and see if I could get any ideas for landscaping our yard. I even got some good ideas! (And some ideas of things not to do, too.) Of course, now I have to remember the ideas and actually get off my ass and go to Lowes and a gardening store when spring rolls around.
The extra-cold weather has dried my skin out completely. Dry skin is relatively new for me. I didn't even get it when I lived in Blacksburg, where there was an actual winter that lasted more than a couple of weeks. But about three years ago, I found myself scratching compulsively at my shins because they itched so badly. One night I actually sat down and looked at them and was astonished to discover that my skin was flaking off, and after a couple of days in a row of rubbing in some moisturizing lotion, the itching subsided.
(It took me so long to bother to look because I have a very mild case of psoriasis that only shows up in the winter - that started while I was in Blacksburg - and I just assumed it was that.)
I'm still not very good at remembering to put lotion on my skin; it's a holdover from my high school and college days, when my skin was oily enough to start with that lotion never soaked in and left me feeling greasy and dirty. Now, I can even put lotion on my face and it will absorb pretty quickly, but I never remember to do it regularly, so I still get itchy skin during the winter. I'm writing about it now because my forearms are driving me crazy.
Yeah, just what you wanted to read about, I know.
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