Oh, Hell & damnation...

Y’know, when I think of doing something rather important (i.e. remembering that I need to create a new car kit that includes things like jumper cables, spare bulbs, etc.) I should really take care of it right then else I forget, thereby damning myself to eventually getting stuck in a particular situation, away from people I know, w/out the proper means of extraction.

...like accidentally leaving the dome light on in my car, thereby killing the battery, and being unable to jump my car from Petunia’s (who was JUST.HERE) b/c I wasn’t smart enough to pick up the damned cables two weeks ago.

Normally, upon realizing I’d just been astoundingly foolish, I would just dial AAA or some such b/c I kinda hate all over asking others for help re:things I can simply do myself. However, it just recently expired. Procrastinated renewing a couple weeks ago (d-d-d-DUMB) and now can’t in the next few days b/c o/transitions re:my current bank account. (I have, apparently, worked very hard in the past couple weeks to make seemingly small, very poor decisions, just so I could be a moron today!)

If there was a drawing of my current situation, and I had to spot & mark all the silly things I did to set the scene like a badly written slapstick, I would get a BIG, Kindergarten-sized, super-fat red crayon, I would circle the whole thing, and I’d color it in.

::sighs:: Okay, I’m off to figure something out, though if anyone feels like popping out to Vienna to jump my car b/c I’m a nitwit to visit, do let me know. Ha!

Guh. More later.

~E.

Insomnia...

“It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A "bad night" is not always a bad thing." ~Brian W. Aldiss

Hm. ::smiles:: What a lovely way to put it. I think this has just become one of my favorite reflections on one of my most common, and least favorite, afflictions.

I really dig the second to last sentence.

More later.

~E.

Uncomfortably Energetic!!!

I believe I shall present you with one of my very favorite YouTube pieces of all time, a grand video named 'Powerthirst'. It's fantastic. Side effects may include abrupt guffaws, uproarious laughter, unattractive cackling, or possibly some particularly indelicate & rather uncouth snorting.

If this doesn't cause you to at least giggle or chuckle a little bit, well, I'm just not sure we can be friends.

Behold the glory that is 'Powerthirst'.

REPO! The Genetic Opera...

Have you guys heard about this? It’s a dark, rock musical movie brought to you by Darren Lynn Bousman (director of Saw II-IV) that combines gratuitous blood, gore, and impromptu surgery with a post apocalyptic story (in this case a worldwide epidemic of human organ failures). The movie claims a cast including Anthony Head, Paul Sorvino, Paris Hilton, Sarah Brightman, and Nivek Ogre.

No, really. I fully admit that the first time I heard about it, I thought it was a prank movie. You know, something a group of college kids made up & may’ve advertised on YouTube because the hypothetical movie would be funny. Apparently, however, it’s real and is set to come out Friday, November 7th of this year.

The film (previously a play performed in both NY & LA) is described as follows between the official movie site, IMDB, and Wikipedia:

An epidemic of drastic proportions devastates the planet. Panic erupts and scientists feverishly make plans for a massive organ harvest. Out of the tragedy, GeneCo, a multi-billion dollar biotech company, emerges. GeneCo provides organ transplantation for a profit. In addition to financing options, GeneCo reserves the right to implement default remedies, including repossession. For those who can't keep up with their organ payments, collection is the responsibility of "organ repo men", skilled assassins contracted by GeneCo, ordered to recover GeneCo's property by any means necessary.

At the heart of the story is Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega of Spy Kids), a 17 year-old girl with a rare blood disease who has lived locked up and protected in her house, kept from the world at large by her father, Nathan Wallace (Anthony Head). Shilo battles with her desire to leave the house and experience life while Nathan struggles with his job as a repo man and, more specifically, his next target, a woman named Blind Mag (Sarah Brightman). Born without sight but given the ability by GeneCo at the price of having to sing for the GeneCo Opera, Mag was a friend of Nathan's now-deceased wife, and is Shilo's godmother. She is marked for repossession and scheduled to deliver her final performance for the company.

Meanwhile the Largo family, consisting of GeneCo president Rotti (Paul Sorvino), his daughter Amber (Paris Hilton), and his two sons Luigi and Pavi (Bill Moseley and Ogre of Skinny Puppy, respectively), have their own plans. Rotti is dying, and the three siblings bicker and fight about who is to take the role as head of GeneCo.

The stories intertwine and merge at the GeneCo opera.

This is the most recent trailer for the film:


Official website for ‘Repo! The Genetic Opera’

Wow. More later.

~E.

7 random things I'm thinking about at the moment...

1. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m going to again: The Brad Sucks album has become one of my absolute favorite driving-home-late pieces of music. If I don’t hit too many lights on the drive & there’s not much traffic, it runs the perfect length o/time to drive from 509 to Vienna, walk from the car to the house, and *just* cross the threshold without skipping a single song. Sometimes this feels a little bit magical.


2. The Lifetime channel is showing Christmas movies in July. This is both ridiculous & fired. Lifetime was likely created for those who simply can’t get enough terrible daytime TV, and is really just a cross between truly awful soap operas & after-school specials for adults. For people with those kinds of needs, however, there is now a whole channel that shows outdated, poorly written shows all day long, all the time, forever. Pfft.
   
   ...having said this, I freely admit that I *still* check it regularly while channel surfing.


3. I’ve had a grand total of 5.5 hours sleep in the last 2 days. Night before last this was due to an inability to stay asleep past 3.5 hours. Last night it was my own damned fault because I stayed up @ 509, then got up early on purpose. Was invited to watch a movie back at the Reston apt.w/Katie & Nicholas last night, but I didn’t feel okay driving yet considering the alcohol & my severe lack of sleep lately. Decided to take a nap for a couple hours before going home to be on the safe side (worked like a charm), then got up at 5a, loaded my stuff into the car, & helped Maam pick up a metric fuck-ton of fireworks refuse left in the road of the cul-de-sac. It’d be way more impressive if I said something like, “Keeping the streets clean...for AMERICA!” but really it was just me in yesterday’s clothes, sweeping the street with a broom, & Maam in a nightgown with a plastic bag, putting away whatever I was able to shuffle over to the curb.
   
   After over an hour of this we decided things were good enough. She gave me a hug before I left, but both of us were so gross & sticky from being out in the hot, lightly raining weather for so long that it was sort of an “Aw!” moment, immediately followed by an, “Ew, gih!” moment as ea.o/us quickly pulling back & shared mutual, albeit amused, disgust with our yucktacular states.


4. Last night Debbie said she referenced our last 3 hr., multi-store grocery excursion & my love for all things culinary by telling someone, “E. shops for groceries like other women shop for shoes!”
   
   I thought the way she put it was pretty keen. Also it makes me sound like a little less of a complete fattie than saying something like, “Oh my God, she spends *hours* in food stores. HOURS I tell you!” ::laughs::


5. (This is a girly complaint you can totally skip if you like...) I am not friends with my ovaries right now. They are terrible, wretched little monsters that hurt me in my hurting place for no good reason. If they continue to misbehave so atrociously & wreak havoc on me in this fashion, I’m going to divorce them due to irreconcilable differences & an abusive relationship. ::looks in direction of said organs:: Did you hear that you little jerks? Keep this up & we’re going to have a very specific conversation involving a knife and an ice cream scoop. I feel kind of like I’m stuck babysitting someone else’s ill-raised, very poorly behaved toddlers, and I can’t kick them out, and I don’t know when they’re going home.


6. It is raining & dreary & beautiful outside right now. I think it’s lovely, and if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so humid and warm, I’d be out in the rain. Instead, I believe I’ll try to spend as much of the day as possible in pajamas, looking out the window on occasion, watching movies, & getting lost in other people’s fictitious lives.


7. In keeping with the tangent theme of this post, whenever you’re having a rough time of things & find yourself grasping at straws to keep your hopes up, try to remind yourself that things could likely be worse. You could be:
   
   
   • On fire.
   
   
   • Afflicted with some terrible sort of crotch-rot.
   
   
   • This guy. I mean...damn.

I like my women like I like my coffee...covered in (nano)bees!

A couple weeks ago I came back to the house after a long day of tromping around outside viewing some rooms & apt.’s, running errands, etc. Took my shoes off, started a pot of coffee, noticed no one else was around, then got on my computer. A little while later I got up, got a cup of coffee, and was returning to my computer when I saw a really tiny dot on the floor. I bent down to pick it up and make sure it wasn’t a stain or some such (it’s a light carpet) when I realized it was *not* a piece of random sumsing...it was a bee. Not a normal size bee, mind you, but what looked like a super-dinky-teeny-tiny version of a common yellow jacket, probably about 1 cm.long. Likely the tiniest bee I’ve ever seen.

Now first off, the thing was obviously either severely stunned or dead (it was just sort of lying there on its side, no damage to the body). Decided after a few seconds on squishing it to make certain of the latter. Said to myself, “That’s weird,” flushed it down the toilet, made sure there wasn’t any mess left behind, then got back to what I was doing. I mean I was wearing cuffed jeans that day, and there weren’t any windows open while I was out, so I figured it could’ve just been stuck in my cuff at some point during the day, then fallen out when I got home. Either way, aside from mentioning it to (who promptly called it a nanobee) & wishing I’d thought to take a picture before I crushed it, I didn’t really think about it.

Early, early this morning I got out o/bed briefly to grab my bottle of water from the kitchen and retrieve my lip balm from the living room when I noticed a dot on the living room floor. Turned on the light & bent down to see...ANOTHER COMATOSE/DECEASED NANOBEE.

What.the.Hell? Seriously? I feel like I’m in some sort of weird, ‘Blair Witch Project’ involving tiny, angry insects. Somehow I’ve pissed off an itty-bitty Queen around here so now, every so often, she sacrifices one of the hive to the living room floor when no one else is about, usually eliciting something along the lines of, “...what the...what the Hell is that?” from yours truly.

This time, however, I grabbed my camera phone & a bobby pin for size reference & took a picture.

Nanobee vs.Bobby Pin. Both are small, BUT WHO SHALL WIN?!


And here are a couple more failed attempts at clearer close-ups that actually ended up fuzzier...



See? Tiny isn’t it? The way it's positioned, with one wee little leg bent & lifted, I kind of imagine it suffering a massive coronary in the middle of can-can practice or a kung fu lesson.

::performed in a very tiny, buzzing voice:: "HIIIII-Y...ECH-!!!" ::clunk::

I don’t know, I’ve looked around the house & haven’t seen any place they could be coming from. We don’t keep windows or doors hanging open, I’ve looked around the house & not found anyplace where they’d really be coming from, and I’m not a beekeeper, so no clue really. Maybe a vent? Either way, should mention it to Freddie, obviously. Could be just a fluke, but just in case...ATTACK OF THE NANOBEES!!!

More later.

~E.