On the Road Again

Let me start by saying it's summer in Bakersfield. If you don't know where Bakersfield is or what it's like, let me advise you against visiting. Ever. It is a craphole at the best of times and on days like this, in a motel with shitty air conditioning on the way to somewhere Better, it is even worse.

It was nearly too hot to walk across the parking lot to CoCo's for cold drinks and pie (PIE, four teenagers who nearly did not want to walk to get PIE!).

I prefer the driving to sitting in a motel staring at walls, but then again I've always liked driving. Cramped, overheated, noisy car full of teenagers and all. Even when it's boring. Even when you're driving down I-5 with nothing in sight but hills and stock yards full of too many cows in too little space with no relief from the stink of the shit they're standing in. Sitting in a car going Anywhere But Here is peaceful, thoughtless, and one of my favorite ways to spend time.

Sitting here with the cheap prints on the wall and the rose wallpaper and the mediocre tv and no relief from the heat is not.

But at the end of this road is the BEACH. Anything for the beach.

Going Home

It's probably strange that I still think of San Diego as 'home' after all these years, a place where I last lived permanently when I was 5. By now that's less than a third of my life and by any sort of logic San Jose, Morgan Hill, Sacramento and Folsom all have as much right to a claim on my heart as San Diego does.

The Coyote Valley was where I truly grew up (and so far the place I stayed longest) but it has less than no hold over me. It's a place on the map, a few mostly forgotten memories and severed friendships I was already growing out of before we left. Mostly it exists in stories that start with 'Back when I was a public school kid...'. And Sacramento...well, I don't think the greater Sacramento area will ever be home. No matter how long we stay, no matter how many friends live here, no matter how many memories we make. It remains a physical place to me, with no emotional connection. It's not a place I've ever planned on staying in, a glorified cow-town full over conservatives and white trash (not to say I'm any better). When I leave I don't miss it, when I come back I look forward to going somewhere else again. The mountains, maybe...the mountains I love, but not the valley.

Unlike the others San Diego remains a place I can call home in my heart (a silly romanticized notion 'Home is where the heart is', but don't teenagers love those things?) above all others. Maybe because above all else I love the ocean, and they have by far the best beaches in California (though I won't turn my nose up at NorCal coast in the middle of winter, if that's all that's being offered). Or because the weather suits me (hot and dry and hot and dry, a sort of permanent summer). Or because of the theme parks and museums that I hardly remember. Because of the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park that I utterly adore and could spend weeks in at a time. A romanticized notion of childhood, or because that remains the place I associate with family and yearly trips to visit them, though the family that I care about have all moved here by now and there's no excuse to visit anymore.

It's silly, pointless, stupid to have such an emotional connection to a place that only exists to me in cloudy memory, but there it is. And I can't wait to be going back, going Home, even for a little while.

Puppy!

So I recently got the cutest puppy ever.

She comes from Animal Control by way of The Grace Foundation of Northern California, from a litter that would have been put down thanks to apparent ringworm (which they didn't actually have) had they stayed at the shelter. Fortunately Beth DeCaprio of The Grace Foundation picked them up, brought them back, and found them all foster homes.

When I first saw her she was skinny and badly proportioned, with an angry red rash all over her body. When I picked her up from her first foster home she had gained a little weight and the remains of the rash were much faded.

In the past week and a half she's grown significantly and has no signs of the rash left, has gained a much nicer coat and a lot more energy (she's quite literally bouncing off the furniture when she's not out like a light).

We have absolutely no idea what breed she is--The Grace Foundation's guess was Corgi/Australian Shepherd, but while her siblings look much more like Corgis she appears more Chihuahua (ew) or Rat Terrier, with a Border Collie pattern, if not coloring. Oh well, I'm a big fan of mutts.

Not only is she adorable, she's incredibly sweet and people-motivated, making her easy to train despite her high energy. She sits, comes to her name, and has begun begging at the door to be let out. As soon as she gets her shots (and it stops being so damn hot!) we'll take her out and train her how to walk on a leash.

Of course, our cats hate her. And our old dog isn't really sure what to do with this bouncy little ball of fluff, though I'm sure he'll come around eventually.

Toy Story Is Proof That I Have A Heart

Toy Story 3 is not a children's movie...it's a movie for all the has-beens, the children that grew up and left childhood behind in the past eleven years. Four out of the five members of my family that saw it today cried--the only one who didn't is eleven years old, with a dollhouse made out of the entertainment unit and a collection of Bratz guaranteed to trip anyone who walks through the living room. This movie wasn't aimed at her, not yet.

It's a movie for tweenagers trying to forget their childhoods, straining to grow up but not quite there yet, and teens desperately scrambling back from the brink of adulthood and wondering where all that time went. Shown in snapshots of yesteryear that probably match the pictures on your mother's wall: Andy constructing fantasy lands out of linkin' logs and imagination, Andy asleep amidst a mountain of well loved toys that are, inevitably, forgotten in a dusty toybox. The toys scramble to hold onto what they've known; Andy grows up, forgets them, prepares to leave them in the attic with only one exception.

My own toys are gone: Barbies beheaded by a ten-year-old tomboy, toy cars crashed, action figures lost and left behind in multiple moves, a toy school bus that got dropped on the cat and was forgotten somewhere down along the line. There's no safe warm attic for them, they died in a dump somewhere. I have a collection of Breyer horses (missing hooves and legs, paint scratched, propped up against each other in the windowsill) and a pile of stuffed animals next to the bed, and nothing else. Somewhere there is a stuffed chihuahua with a pink bow tie named Mr. Snookums (you see, I've always been cruel) who went with me to Florida when I was ten and will no doubt go to college with me when I'm 18. No toddler is getting their grubby hands on these, they're mine, and I cried when Andy passed his off even though they went to a good home.

Andy grew up, went to college, and passed his childhood on to someone else...but it went out with a bang, and in doing so has made me want to cling to mine a little harder.

An Ode to Theoretical Writing Space

(Prompted the The Rejectionist's post about writing spaces http://www.therejectionist.com/2010/07/rejectionists-writing-room-also-yours.html)

My writing space is currently only theoretical, in that I have never actually written in it. Currently it is That Space With a Desk and Some Books and Notebooks and Crap Overflowing onto the Floor. It's actually a walk in closet, and it looks like this except less blurry:

There is no chair at my desk because I haven't used my desk since I moved it in there around a month ago. And yes, that is a Pirate's of the Caribbean poster. Everyone is allowed to go through a horribly depressing period of liking bad movies once in their lives.

As you can see, there is no space to actually WRITE in this 'writing space'. I cannot fit a computer or a spare notebook on the desk at this point. The desk is a crap catcher for books and notebooks and magazines and horse figurines and pens and incense and jewelry and pictures that don't fit on the bookcase (and a dead plant that I only recently removed, as I have a black thumb and cannot seem to keep anything alive, especially in the summer heat). You could conclude logically and perfectly accurately that this space has not actually been used for writing in a very long time.

But, you see, it's my writing space because as long as I have a named 'writing space' I can continue to labor under the delusion that at some point I will do some actual writing in it, and get out of this horrible slump of writer's block that has been consuming me lately.

Today I Nearly Scratched My Eyes Out

(Or Why Seeing Twilight: Eclipse Was a Bad Idea)

To start with, let me justify why I even wasted money on this horrible piece of cinema:

1. I just learned that if you go to the first showing of the day of any movie at a Century theater it's half price. So I didn't waste MUCH money on it. This makes me feel better about myself.

2. I feel the need to mock things from a position of knowledge because knowledge is power and if I know more about something than you do I can probably make you feel stupid even if you aren't (have I mentioned that I'm an elitist bitch? I'm an elitist bitch who likes to feel smart. There, it's been said.)

3. Honestly I just needed a laugh and to be braindead for awhile.

So yes, I saw Eclipse today with a friend. It was truly terrible. The first Twilight movie actually truly impressed me with the incredible amount of work that appeared to have gone into it simply to make it watchable. Sure the acting was terrible, the special effects were low budget, the script was overall cheesy and rather stilted, the characters unbelievable, and the entire plot (what little there was) gave me the creeps on a profound level; despite all this it was a Watchable Movie, taken from a book that appeared to have no plot until somewhere around page 300 (which I never reached, having gotten stuck somewhere in the first two hundred pages of He Hates Me, I Love Him) at which point SMeyer realized something needed to happen to make it marketable. In the first Twilight movie the pacing was managed impressively and the plot (entirely pointless and irrelevant to the main focus on the progression of Bella and Edward's ~twu wuv~) was interwoven into the utter schlock that was the rest of it, and was made relevant from the beginning. I at no point felt like falling asleep.

Eclipse cannot say the same for itself. I sat in my uncomfortable movie seat, next to the poor unfortunate boy I had dragged with me to the early morning showing, and constantly changed position just to keep myself awake. Next to me the boy slammed his face against his knees, whined, pouted, and mimed stabbing himself.

The movie jumped between scenes with nothing to connect them, leaving me blinking and thinking 'why is this relevant to what was just happening?'. Bella and Edward spent a lot of time speaking in monotone about their Epic Love and inability to be apart while making unconvincing doe eyes at each other. Jacob, who could previously have been argued to be the Better Choice, committed minor sexual assault. Charlie (Bella's father) found it amusing when Bella was forced to break her hand on Jacob's face because of this. Edward and Jacob growled at each other and treated the supposed object of their true and earthshattering love as just that, an object, giving her very little choice in anything they did.

At one point Bella got horny and tried to jump Edward's bones and as always, Edward knew what was best and made the decision for her and said No Sex For You. Bella is then portrayed in book and movie both as the uncontrolled seductress with no knowledge of what she's actually doing, and pure loyal all knowing Edward must protect her from herself by denying her what she wants. Edward proposes and Bella gives in because he won't sexually satisfy her OR turn her into a vampire unless she does, Edward is of course a manipulative bastard. Then Jacob and Bella cuddle on a mountain while Edward watches, and Jacob thinks loud dirty thoughts to piss Edward off. Down bellow a random clan of newborn vampires attack the Cullens and the werewolf pack. Jacob leaves to help them after emotionally manipulating Bella into kissing him and saying she loves him (she does, but 'not enough' because Edward is perfect for her, obviously). Edward sees all this but loves her all the same. Then Jacob kills vampires and Edward kills vampires and Bella is thoroughly useless.

At one point near the end Jacob tells Bella that loving him would be 'as easy as breathing' and she wouldn't have to change anything for him. But nope, Bella would rather abandon everything/one she's ever known to be get dead with a virgin a hundred years older than her.

Is this not making sense to you? Good, it's not supposed to, this is pretty much exactly how the movie was paced. NOTHING MADE SENSE, NOTHING WAS CONNECTED, THERE WERE RANDOM FLASHBACKS. NO COMMON SENSE WAS USED. Everyone did exactly the opposite of what they were advised to do.

The only watchable part of this movie was near the end, where vampires were literally punching each others faces off. But you can find a clip of that online and avoid wasting your money and your braincells like I did.