Forget the Pulitzer. The greatest goal of my life is now to be able to do this workout.

I don't really know what this ad is supposed to accomplish, but it just makes me hungry as hell.

What is the scariest movie you've ever seen?

For the record, the one that's been at the top of my list since I first saw it at fifteen--the lean, mean scare machine--is still the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

I don't know if this is just because I have read hundreds of short story submissions this term, and am therefore burned out on the whole enterprise right now, or what--but if you're the writing type, if you have friends who profess to be the writing type, if you ever come in contact with the writing type, then I have an announcement that pertains to you, schmookie.

Come closer.

Closer.

Closer.




IF I HAVE TO READ


ONE MORE STORY


WHOSE ENTIRE PLOT CONSISTS

OF SOMETHING HAPPENING AND THEN SOMETHING ELSE

COMPLETELY UNRELATED HAPPENING

I swear to God I will cut a bitch.

This kind of story, and I tell you I am not exaggerating in the slightest, makes up a good 80% of what I read. And it's always someone going through something difficult and then seeing something random, usually part of the natural world, that makes them feel better in some oblique irrational way. Like: a woman's daughter dies, and at the end of the story she sees the caterpillar her daughter was raising EMERGE FROM ITS CHRYSALIS! Or, a man is going through a divorce, and SEES A DEER! Or, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer, and SEES A FLOCK OF CANADA GEESE RISING FROM A BARREN, WIND-SWEPT FIELD AND TAKING WING IN THE HARSH, GRAY NOVEMBER SKY! And you know, yes, these moments do happen, and they're nice, but this kind of story is such a cliche and more importantly it's NOT REALLY A STORY. I know I'm far more inured than most people to sort of mannerist, formalist, old-fashioned things, like...oh...structure and revisions and a plot. And I know taste is relative.

But.

The next person whose two-unconnected-events story passes through my inbox will be subject to a slasher-worthy visit from me.
Writers, you have been warned.

Yon minions, haven't you been thinking to yourselves that it's been FAR too long since I became obsessed with some random thing, like watching all the Friday the 13th movies, or collecting outdated analog equipment, or Alec Baldwin?

WELL. It's funny you should ask. There's a new craze in Sarahland, and for the record, I didn't see it coming any better than you did.

I'll give you some time to guess.


























Figure skating.

And just in time for the Olympics.

(Watching it, not doing it, by the way. Universal Sports has been playing a ton of the competition leading up to Vancouver--the Nagano Grand Prix, Cancer.net Skate America--and I don't know why really, but I've been watching skating pretty much every night. I really don't know why I wasn't ever interested in it before.

And in retrospect, you know, we should actually have seen this coming. Do you guys know how many times I have seen The Cutting Edge?)

This was a phrase that I came across in the reading for my women's studies class this week, and I SWEAR TO GOD, I spent a good minute or so wondering if three-year-olds could actually get pregnant, or if that was a typo, or what. The brain, she is a-dyin'.

ME: (dials number provided on the website for "Fat and Sassy II," the play which I'm seeing with Emily to fulfill the feminist gathering requirement of both our Women's Studies Classes)
GUY WHO ANSWERS PHONE: Hello, mumble humble mumble mumperdinck.
ME: Hi, I'd like to reserve two tickets for Sunday's matinee of "Fat and Sassy II"
GWAP: You have the wrong number. This is a cleaning company. (Hangs up.)
ME: Why could I have not been trying to reserve tickets for something else, like "Long Day's Journey Into Night," or...ANYTHING ELSE?

I still have high hopes for "Fat and Sassy II" though. Oh, you have NO idea.

Oh God, I think I might have swine flu.


Dear God or whoever, is this punishment for watching Rhinestone last night?  I hope not.  I hope that you, God, of all people, would have the sac to admit the Rhinestone is the best movie ever.  And the compassion to not give me swine flu.  Amen.

Two days off school (well, more like one and a half) and I feel like I'm dying.  I did my women's wellness checkup, got my last HPV vaccine shot, watched installment 5 of the Ehle-Firth P&P, got a huge headache, drank coffee with a mini candy cane dissolved in it, ate chili, and watched Dirty Harry.  I'M SO BORED, you guys.  Someone put the kibosh on holidays, okay?  I want to go back to school.

I think we can all agree that Body Double is basically the best movie ever.


Also, RPattz was all over the cover of the copy of Vanity Fair I got in the mail today, with his ridic hair and gay porno lips.  A good day?  Yes sirree bob.

I can think of about twenty-seven thousand things I would rather do tomorrow than go to my classes.  I feel like I'm about twelve years old.  At what age does it become unacceptable to fake sick, as opposed to just putting on your big girl panties and dealing with it?


Whatever.  When all else fails, white people trying to sing gospel still never fails to make me happy.


Whatever.  I still think he's superfoxy times a million--just in more of a marshmallowesque way than before.

Oh, Gawker.  ...Will you marry me?

Eleven Things You Could Do Instead Of Reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Book About Not Eating Meat

1. Eat a cheeseburger.

2. Eat some pork buns.

3. Eat some steak.

4. Eat some Grey's Papaya.

5. Eat some wings.

6. Eat some tacos. Pork tacos.

7. Eat some bacon (but don't be obnoxious about it).

8. Eat a bacon cheeseburger.

9. Eat some turkey. Some jive turkey.

10. Just be a vegetarian, and understand that most meat-eaters do respect your views, but that they're not as complicated and complex as you'd like to think they are, and that most people are actually, yes, quite aware of the arguments you'd like to "respectfully" make, what they're doing, the various reasons why it's uncool, and that we should eat more vegetables, and that we don't need to be guilted about it, and if we did, we'd read Michael Polan's book instead, or at the very worst, Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker review of Jonathan Safran Foer's book, which is both (A) quite great and (B) will save you $15 or $20 and save us from hearing you opine on what you read by the guy that wrote Everything is Illuminated talking down to all of us about eating our vegetables.

11. STFU.

Throughout every summer for as long as I can remember, I've had these constant, fleeting moments of guilty, kvetchy irritability, like "the sun set FORTY-ONE SECONDS EARLIER tonight than it did LAST NIGHT, and soon it will be WINTER, and I will have SQUANDERED the BLISS of SUMMERTIME."  Good weather makes me so nervous, actually, since all it makes me think of is how awful winter will be, and every time I spend an hour or god forbid an afternoon inside, reading or watching a movie or answering emails I feel like I'm wasting moment after moment of happiness, and then I feel the big black cloudy toothache sky of November coming on, and realize that soon we'll have five months of darkness and Bergmanland, and then I just want to hang myself.

Well.

Every year I ALSO seem to forget that I am, for the most part, perfectly happy when it's rainy and gray and miserable (like today) because I have no reason to feel guilty for staying inside reading and listening to classical music or watching endless movies because, let's face it, that's pretty much what I would always choose to do.  No guilt!  No intimations of mortality!  (Yes, I get those in July.)  I love it.  I love winter.  I have full permission to lie around doing indoor things until March, when the whole miserable cycle begins again.

Okay, show of hands.  Who loves the hell out of Serial Mom?

So apparently there was some kind of retrospective in Jerry Goldsmith's honor, and something called the Tenerife Film Orchestra & Choir played a concert of a bunch of his music, including a suite from Omen III, which some of you might remember I actually sort of liked (yes...LIKED)--partly because of Goldsmith's music.



Here's the thing, though: imagine being a highly trained, highly dedicated musician.  You've been playing since you were five, you went to a conservatory, music is your life.  Imagine what it's like to go to some really swanky cocktail party and have someone ask you what you do, and you say, "oh, I'm a professional violinist," or whatever, and the person says "oh, really?  Do you play in a philharmonic?" and you say, yes, yes, you do...maybe getting a little nervous as you say so, maybe gravitating just slightly toward the spinach dip--but all the while knowing it's too late.  "So," the person says, "what did you last play?"

"mumblehumblemumble"

"Sorry, what's that?"

"A, uh...a suite from Omen III."

I imagine this would put an end to any chance at romance.

I'm trapped in the library, and I want orange juice more than ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW.

...Oh, dammit, nanowrimo started yesterday.  How do I always forget about that?

Also, I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear that my Halloween movie quotient consisted of a 3:1 ratio of Jane Austen adaptations to horror.  I accuse my parents!  Although, watching the Joe Wright version for the first time in a couple of years, I had to crack up at the scene where Darcy gives Lizzy the letter and then GALLOPS OFF into the TWILIT FOREST on his STUPID HORSE.  He has so many feelings!  And is apparently a vampire!  Oh, Darcy.  Why must you always come off as such a pathetic nerd?

ALSO:

GEROGIANA: Do you play duets?
LIZZY: Only when forced.
GEORGIANA: Well, my brother must force you, then!
MY MOTHER: Yes!  Right here on the carpet!

And people ask my why I turned out this way.

Live in a Jane Austen novel or a Bronte novel?
Be able to feel perfectly rested on four hours of sleep a night, or have your IQ go up twenty points?
Live as the opposite sex or as a house cat for a day?
Become a B-horror star (a la Linnea Quigley) or a country singing sensation?
Live in a painting or be turned into a fish? (And yes, your choice of painting and of fish)

Happy Happy Halloween!  Silver Sham-rock!

Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew.

I can only assume that Salman Rushdie is world literature's answer to Ron Jeremy.  Either that or...no.  I just don't want to think about it anymore.

You know, no matter how many times I try to write paper, say, more than ten hours before I have to turn it in, I always end up writing it at six int he morning on the day it's due, listening to "Kiss Me Deadly" and licking Sriracha chile sauce off my hand.

On a related note, I will NEVER get tired of this song.

Stories I hope I never have to read again:

• Disaffected quarterlife travelogues in which the narrator goes to Morocco/The Dominican Republic/Turkey/Russia/Brazil/any other location that affords him (sometimes her) the opportunity to stare at poor people and think about how many problems he has.
• "Bitch broke my heart and you're gonna hear about it!"
• An old person sits on the beach and thinks about their life, hopes, and regrets.
• "The time I smoked pot the first time!  What an outre fourth grader I was!  Aren't you shocked?  SHOCKED?"
• "It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!"
• "Everybody has AIDS!"
• The Horrors of War Story (aka Has Platoon Been On AMC A Lot Lately, Or What?)
•  I Just Read Some Raymond Carver.

15-year-old girl brutally gang raped outside homecoming dance; 15 bystanders watch, some participate, all decline to help.

I suppose this is a suitable answer to everyone who thinks feminism has accomplished its goal and is now going too far.

Seriously, Mickey Rourke, what the fuck happened to you?  I know bagels that have aged better in the last twenty years.

God, it's amazing how fast I can go from "AHMIGAN MCDONALD'S ICED COFFEE IS THE BEST THING EVARRR!  GO!  TEAM!  SARAH!" to "world shaking.  make it stop.   mrehhhhhh."


If I weren't seeing Paranormal Activity with Emily tonight, I would probably just have to eat my own face.

Oh, God in heaven.  I'm taking 20 credits this term, in addition to reading submissions and copyediting for the Portland Review (I read 79 stories last week and liked four of them enough to recommend acceptance), and I JUST NOW found out that my online Women's Studies class requires weekly postings and threads and chatroom stuff that I have not been doing at all.  For the last four weeks.

It occurs to me that if feminism hadn't happened I wouldn't be so far behind in my courseload, but I suppose that's neither here nor there.

I hate everything in the entire world.  Except McDonald's iced coffee.  And Nashville.  And Pizza Rolls.  And "Designing Women."  I hate the Internet, though, despite the fact that it allows me to complain to a more or less captive audience.  BLAH.

Am I alone in thinking that Mark Z. Danielewski should be shot?

What do you think was the best, or ballsiest (or best AND ballsiest) TV finale of all time?





(For the record, my money's on "St. Elsewhere"--in the ballsiest category, anyway).

I was working in the basement of the PSU library this morning, and I took a break to go to the bathroom before I came up here to work on a paper.  As I came out of the stall, I saw a guy come in to blow his nose.  Was he in the wrong bathroom?  No.  I was.

This begs the question of why I am even allowed out of the house before noon.  Let's not talk about it.

You know those movies that aren't very good, but that you love anyway?  And I don't mean the really, really bad ones, like Halloween III, or the classic comfort movies, like Pretty Woman.  I mean the ones that no one has really seen or talks about and that you stumble on somehow, and you know that they don't deserve any more attention than they got, really, but you really enjoy nonetheless.  The ones that just feel like an old, comfy sweater.  That's what When the Party's Over, which I watched on Hulu today while finishing my Iowa app, is like.

It's the traditional St. Elmo's Fire paradigm: a bunch of young, overemotional people in an urban setting, searching for love and happiness and ridic fashions-of-the-era.  There's the typical "Real World" cast list: the glamorous, nympho fuckup (Demi Moore in St. E's, Rae Dawn Chong in this one), the nurturing mother figure (Mare Winningham, Elizabeth Berridge), the sane, careerist, slightly judgmental one (Ally Sheedy, Sandra Bullock), the cockeyed romantic (Emilio Estevez, Fisher Stevens), the guy who loves his girlfriend but keeps somehow having sex with other people (Judd Nelson, Brian McNamara).  These movies are like Mad Libs, and I love them all.

The cockeyed romantics, though, those are my favorite.  That's what I want: an Emilio Estevez, a Fisher Stevens.  (A Knox Overstreet!)  Portland is full of guys who know lots of "I'm a cockeyed optimist!" come-on lines; what I really hate is the "you don't want to see my shitty band because you're AFRAID of falling in LOVE and getting HURT!" thing (for the record: no, I'm afraid of wasting two hours of my life seeing your terrible, terrible band).  But here's the thing: this quirky, offbeat romantic thing is so often just an act.  Most guys are depressive and boring and get upset if you like Pizza Rolls.  It's an act, and because of that the mannerisms of the Homo Sapiens Romanticus generally really piss me off, but if they're genuine--oh, man  I forgot how much I love that, and I really, really do.  And I discovered today, via Fisher Stevens, what I need: a true romantic.  Now tell me where they keep them, and I'll go there.

Some Greatest Hits:

As of three hours ago, we welcomed home two kittens, codenamed Butch and Sundance. We found them via a Craigslist ad: a guy found them abandoned in the woods yesterday, and we picked them up in St. Helens this afternoon.

The Craigslist photo (since the camera's being a pain):



They spent the day running and play-fighting around the living room, and now they're curled up asleep.
Kittens: the cure for all that ails you.  Amirite?

Tamino got run over today.



Living on such a busy road, I don't even know if it's responsible for us to have pets anymore. But I don't think there's much doubt about us going pethunting tomorrow, if only because it's the only thing that makes the loss of a pet feel better. Yes, it's selfish and awful, I know. But for my sake, please respond here with something to the effect of "no it's not." Or at least, "I forgive you."

The Office makes me believe in (a thing called) love.

MICHAEL IMPERIOLI



IS



FRANZ KAFKA.

Conservapedia on Feminism:

Specifically, a modern feminist tends to:

• believe that there are no meaningful differences between men and women^[4]
• oppose chivalry and even feign insult at harmless displays of it
• view traditional marriage as unacceptably patriarchal
• shirk traditional gender activities, like baking^[5]
• support affirmative action for women
• detest women who are happy in traditional roles, such as housewives,^[6] and especially dislike those who defend such roles
• prefer that women wear pants rather than dresses, presumably because men do^[7][8]
• seek women in combat in the military just like men, and coed submarines
• refuse to take her husband's last name when marrying^[9]
• distort historical focus onto female figures, often overshadowing important events (Eg: Henry VIII's wives take precedence in common knowledge to his actual reign.)
• object to being addressed as "ma'am"^[10]

You know, I could say something well thought-out and rational and so forth, but ultimately it would just come down to this: SARAH ANGRY.  SARAH SMASH.

Right after I got home today I saw an article somewhere that said the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced Thursday (for the record, my money's on Amos Oz, along with everyone else's), and I said as much to my mom.

MY MOM: Well, I really hope you win, honey.
ME: ...The Nobel Prize, mom?
MY MOM: Oh...no.  I thought you were talking about that Glimmer Train contest you entered.
ME: No.

Then, later, when I was talking to Amelia, we imagined a scenario in which I did win, somehow (magic realism!) and Philip Roth got all perturbed about it and called me, because clearly Philip Roth is fourteen (and I can't imagine having a conversation with Amos Oz).  It would go something like:

PHILIP ROTH: You know, Sarah, I have been contributing to American literature for fifty years.
ME: Yeah, whatever, PHILIP.  Let's just settle it like men, okay?  Let's play some ping-pong.

And Philip Roth and I would play ping-pong in my driveway, and I would win, because I'm pretty sweet at ping-pong, and it would be "oh look Philip Roth, guess you're just gonna have to be SUPER JEALOUS."

Listen, he just has to learn to take the hard knocks if he wants to be successful.

"I feel like I'm dying," Zoe had hinted just once on the phone.

"You're not dying," said Evan.  "You're just annoyed."

--"You're Ugly, Too"

Up until now, I thought I was happy; I thought I was content.  I thought.

But now I know I will never be happy--now I know that the rest of my life will be naught but a tedious collection of hours--if I do not somehow come to own Linnea Quigley's horror workout tape.

Have I mentioned lately that this is the best thing in the history of ever?  Or at least (because I know some of you doubt my use of the superlative) the best thing in the history of Jane Austen parody.

...spend one night with Robert Pattinson or one day with Vladimir Nabokov?  (Or, if you're a guy, one night with Kim Basinger c. the Vicky Vale era)

...watch every episode of "Two and a Half Men" ever made or see Wagner's entire Ring cycle...within one week?

...stomp grapes or work in a chocolate factory?

...sing as beautifully as Pavarotti or write as beautifully as Mozart?

...star in a brilliant, deep, profound arthouse movie seen by about eight hundred people or become a huge pop star for about three months?

...become a vampire or the President?

...live on a space station or live in LA?

...have a hamburger bed or a hookah room?

...have perfect health as long as you live or be beautiful?

How is it not obvious to everyone in the world that at least one and maybe all three of the Jonas Brothers is gay as an Easter bonnet, fruitier than a melon bouquet, and queer as a two-dollar bill?

(Or am I just saying I would like them more, probably, if they were?)

Also, if you want me to continue loving you (and...that's what you all want out of life, right?  right?) then please go to this site and demand that Paranormal Activity come to Portland.  (And your hometown, if you're into scaring the crap out of yourself AND POPCORN.)

Don't disappoint me.

Will any show ever be better than Sesame Street?