You know how some people can tie a cherry stem into a knot using on their tongue? Yeah, I can’t do that, but I have a pretty good party trick, too, that’s starting to catch on in mixed company—I have an uncanny ability to Sort people.
Sorting. You know, like Hogwarts houses! If we’re friends (and if you’re reading this, I’m betting we are, as I doubt my blog has reached “complete strangers find me entertaining” status), you probably know how obsessed I am with Harry Potter. What you may or may not know is that I often Sort people into Hogwarts houses to gain an appreciation for their personality type—it’s along the same lines as a Myers-Briggs personality typing construct, but 100% more magical.
I’ve written about Sorting before in terms of my favorite poets, but in talking with various people, I realize that some kind of real-world analogue to what being a each house means would be handy. So Megan gave me this idea…
Dogs. I could (and plan to!) spend some good time mapping out psychological profiles on what being a Gryffindor or Slytherin means when applied to real world personalities, but for the 99.8% of you who would rather poke yourself in the eye than read that, click the below link for an abbreviated introduction to Sorting through dog breeds!
A week late and a dollar short, but! As some of you might know, Nikki thew a surprise birthday party for her esteemed boyfriend, Kevin, in the form of a classic Thanksgiving dinner. I could regale you with tales of fun and merrymaking, but how about I skip that part and tell you what was on the menu?
Click through to check out two great recipes (with pictures of how it actually turned out, OKAY YOU GUYS?)
(p.s. I fully expect the only person to click through to be my dad—hi, dad!)
Let’s be serious: what are you really doing with your life on Fridays at 9pm? Going out? Socializing with friends? Sipping classy cocktails as you make eyes at a handsome stranger across the room?
NO! Chances are you’re crashing after a hard week of work and reaping the benefits of your Netflix account come Friday at 9. Well put down that red DVD envelope, friends, because have I got a treat for you! Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, a brand new show on Fox, is debuting tomorrow night at 9pm. On Fox. At 9pm. Did I mention it starts tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 13, at 9pm on Fox?
Forgive my excitement, but it has been a long time since Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, has occupied the airwaves; Angel, Joss’s Buffy spin-off, ended in 2004, and since then, anything Whedonesque has bubbled up via badass movie sequels, brilliant comic continuations, or innovative web creations.
Genre television is a hard sell to the general public—I know that. The thing that most people don’t understand about shows like Buffy, or Firefly, or, indeed, what I think we can expect from Dollhouse, is that the fantasy/sci-fi angle isn’t the point. It’s just good old-fashioned storytelling. And when it comes to storytelling, no one does it better than Joss.
So what’s he up to in Dollhouse? Joss takes his love of ass-kicking heroines to a new level with Echo, a young woman who contracts with an organization called The Dollhouse to become an “Active” or “Doll”: a human-for-hire whose memory can be erased and filled in with whatever a paying client requires. Does that sound creepy? It should—Dolls can be hired for any kind of job, crime, fantasy, wish-fufillment…they can be anyone except themselves. Eliza Dushku plays Echo, a Doll who begins, so it seems, to gain a measure of self-awareness…
Reviews have been good so far, claiming that it’s Joss’s most intellectually mature show yet. I’m attaching the Fox promo, and if you can get past the “YOU ARE NOW WATCHING FOX!” element of hyper-sexualization and blipverty-editing, you can see what lies underneath: a complex look at the connection between What We Do and Who We Are.
So tune in! I know I will.
No, seriously. Gimme!
Today, I got word that I’ve been accepted to my first grad school! University of Pittsburgh claims to be “delighted” to nominate me for admission! HIGH FIVE, EVERYONE!
It’s a truly phenomenal feeling to have the Universe tell me I’m allowed to keep going—that my writing is worth 3 more years of work, that I have the potential to be the kind of poet I’ve always wanted to be. No snark here, no sidelong glances or silly jokes. I am really, really happy right now.
Okay, so I saw it. I did! I paid $8 to see He’s Just Not That Into You. And I feel, preemptively, like I need to defend myself by sharing with you a list of 5 good reasons that led me to the movie theater on a Sunday evening (6:50pm movies FTW! I was in bed by 10:30!).
- Jennifer Aniston
- Jennifer Aniston
- Jennifer Aniston
- Ben Affleck
- Justin Long
Maybe I have a bit of a Jen Aniston obsession lately, what with binging Friends the way I have been. But also, and in a bit of a shame-faced way, I have a weakness for romantic comedies (hereafter to be referred to in the way God intended as “rom coms”).
This might come as a bit of a surprise to some of you what with my white hot rage at the existence of Sex and the Movie. But I went into He’s Just Not That Into You with low expectations and a predisposition to wanting to see some ridiculously contrived situations right themselves; as Shakespeare proved in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s always entertaining when a bunch of good-looking people are in love all the wrong way around.
And guess what? I wasn’t disappointed. The movie was silly, satisfying, and relatively unoffensive. And here’s why:
I consider myself a bit of an etiquette guru as well as a Truth Monger (in fact, I would very much like to get business cards that say that on them— Rachel. Etiquette Guru. Truth Monger. My birthday’s in May, if you’re brainstorming early for the perfect gift). So He’s Just Not That Into You, as a concept, appeals to me. The movie opens with a series of Stupid Things Women Are Told that Warp Their Brains, told to us through a little girl crying over a little boy’s insults to her mother’s defense of, “he’s only doing that because he has a crush on you!”
Bullshit. This movie is predicated on the idea that female-perpetuated fictions such as these are damaging humanity. Okay, so the packaging is a little ridiculous: a bunch of couples are in love in a whole bunch of different ways and age brackets, but the idea is the same—everyone needs to stop sucking so bad! Yes, of course I resent the idea that women are at fault for certain men sucking so bad, but it all comes down to reacting to poor behavior: don’t tolerate it and you won’t suffer from it. End of story.
So yeah, the movie was tripe, but it was my kind of tripe: the kind where Jen Aniston looks pretty and there’s a montage set to Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know. Nestled deep within scene after scene of people talking on cell phones and outdated references to MySpace was a plea to both sexes to please, stop hurting America with your ridiculousness. And I’ll take that over 4Fast, 4Furious or Sex and the Movie II: Electric Boogaloo anyday.
