Leg hair

I don't remember the last time I shaved my legs, but it has been at least a year since I lathered up my games and took a razor to them to remove the hair there.  The hair grew in unevenly, in a patch of long thick hair on the sides of my legs; probably as a result of devoted Nair usage before I started using razors.

Unfortunately, or unfortunately, I do not have the right type of leg hair to make it into a font, as this Japanese art student did:

article on this can be found HERE
  No, scratch that: I probably could if I really wanted to, but don't feel up for the challenge.

Adaptation



Gah OMG it's just like in the book yay asjdflj;dflwj!!!!111

(image source)

I have been fervently following the progress of the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games ever since I finished the series earlier this year.  I was cautiously optimistic about it and with every little trickle of information-- casting information, the teaser trailer, character posters-- I feel more relieved and less anxious that it'll all build up to a disappointing finish.  My main concern is how the intense interior monologue of protagonist Katniss Everdeen will translate; the books are all written in first person and use present tense, which creates a lot of suspense and makes every action and thought heightened and more immediate, and much of the story happens in flashbacks to Katniss' past.  The most logical way to approach this is to use voice-over, and the teaser trailer features just that.  I just hope that there will be judicious use of voice-over and narration.

I'm forced to think back to the walk-off scene from Zoolander, and what David Bowie says: "First model walks; second model duplicates, then elaborates."  This is how I feel about adaptations.  While I love to watch movie scenes that are completely peeled from the original source material, certain changes need to be made to accomodate the different storytelling medium and enhance the experience.

mumble mumble mumble

In the first season of 30 Rock Jenna Maroney, one of the stars of the show within the show "The Girlie Show", is starring in a film-- but no one is really sure what the movie's called:

"Juror" is a word that easy to mumble and make it to "jurrr" or even "jrrrr".  The English language is so inexact, with so many exceptions to rules of grammar and pronunciation, which can be frustrating and/or endlessly amusing.

In addition to "rural juror", some phrases that are easy to mess up:
- horror whore
- edited it (for me this often becomes "eddddtt")
- Oedipal/ edible*

...aaand that's all I have for now.  I know there are more out there, more phrases that aren't tongue twisters per se but still necessitate a higher level of intention and clarity when uttered.  Ach, this will have to be edited later...

*added later

High school pep band

Without any irony or sarcasm I can truthfully say that one of my favorite memories of high school is attending high school football games while playing in the pep band.  Sincerely.


image source



In most high schools, pep band is Serious Business, requiring many hours of dedicated marching and playing-- and sometimes weeks of band camp.  My high school did no such thing.  It was a just-for-kicks volunteer kind of thing that didn't even count for community service hours for the graduation requirement.  On any given day there would be about 15 of us, and with just enough diversity of instrumentation to sound balanced, more or less.  We sat in the stands and played as loud as we could, which still wasn't loud when considering ambient crowd noise, the sounds of the field, and the wind, but we managed.

Playing outside can be pretty miserable, especially on those cool, crisp New England early afternoons.  Pep band wasn't about the playing so much as it was a chance to watch the game for free, socialize, and make fun of the players and cheerleaders.  Oh-- and cheer!  My favorite one:

The "bra" cheer, to be chanted when your team is playing defense:

Caller: Gimme a "B"!

Rest of us: "B"!

C: Gimme an "R"!

ROU: "R"!

C: Gimme an "A"!

ROU: "A"!

C: What do we do?

ROU: Hold 'em, hold 'em , hold 'em!

Lovely were those pep band days.  I might've played severely out of tune, my fingers might be like frozen sausages, it didn't matter because I was there to have a good time, and a good time was always had.

Nothing else to say

Seven trick-or-treaters tonight, as of this writing.  Halloween, in my town, was postponed due to the curious circumstances here in New England: power outages, fallen limbs (of trees, not humans!) all over the place, slushy snowy roads.  Good thing I didn't already eat up all the candy we bought.

BINGO progress thus far

I started playing last Tuesday, the 25th of October.
Happened once
Twice
Thrice
Four times
Five times
Six or more times

B Be my friend?	I Icky habits	N Normal, not atypical people	G Go.	O Oh the things you can hear!
Man wearing a kilt	Person sitting next to you reeks	Tourist couple	Delay due to inclement weather	Stranger attempts to engage you in a serious conversation
Someone reading a book on an esoteric topic	Someone eats something smelly	Woman applying makeup	Delay due to police action	Uncomfortably loud and personal  conversation takes place
Person with dog too big to sit in lap	Nose-picking	Free Space!	Unexplained delay	Loud baby
Musician carrying an instrument	An uncovered sneeze	Field trip school group	Someone almost falls due to sudden jerking movement of vehicle	Can hear every word of the song someone’s listening to on headphones
Someone who has almost completed the daily crossword	Someone who leaves trash behind	Man in business suit and sneakers	People cluster around exits rather than moving all the way into the vehicle	A mumbling vehicle operator

So in one week I got something in four out of the five categories I made.  Once I was tempted to engage myself in a conversation with a stranger but missed my opportunity.  Today I was in the presence of a personal text conversation, as the woman next to me was texting, crying, and wiping her nose on her sleeve. I was about to offer her a tissue but she got off before I could do so.

Carmen Sandiego

The third best thing about Halloween (after getting candy and dressing up) is seeing what costumes other people wear.  November 1st I peruse the internet for pictures and usually decide what to wear for the following year.  This year I decided that next year I'm going to go as Carmen Sandiego. 

And look at what was announced today!  J.Lo will be producing a live-action Carmen Sandiego movie!  I'm not saying I have premonitions about Hollywood decisions, but I find it strangely coincidental that this news came out only a day after my Decision 2012: Halloween edition.  Maybe we are all connected to each other, in a circle, in a hoop that never ends?  Or maybe I've just been highly nostalgic for my 90's childhood.

Eyeball exercises

I exercise my eyeballs a lot by rolling them upon hearing certain phrases, such as:
- "baby, you the most beautiful girl in the room"
- "why are women so needy?"
- "I'm addicted to tanning"

Perhaps this very post makes your eyeballs roll.  That's okay, I'm not offended, even if you want me to be offended.  It's important to keep your eyeballs mobile, and this kind of workout is generally overlooked when considering how to keep in shape.  Roll away!

Let there be light!

When I was a polichenelle in The Nutcracker, I was assigned the position of "light boy". 

Not all productions of this ballet feature this role.  In this production there were eight of us in each show: four 'boys' (wore pants and hats) and four 'girls' (wore dresses and a flower in her hair) who all emerged from and retreated to the Mother Ginger's enormous dress at the beginning and end of the dance, respectively.  I was a "poli boy", so every show I had to wear a bun on the top of my head concealed underneath my hat, which added an extra three or four inches to my height.

Offstage, in the wings, the eight of us would duck into the skirt part of Mother Ginger's costume and form a circle around the legs.  The man who played Mother Ginger-- it's always a man who plays this role, go figure-- wore stilts, and all nine of us had to step in perfect time to the music so that we'd get on stage together and not get trampled.  Getting on stage was half the fun, half the magic: the stage lights shone brightly on Mother Ginger, and we polis were bathed in a shocking pink glow within the skirt, all flushed from the lighting and the excitement of another performance.  We would get ourselves even more pumped up then, talking excitedly and counting the beats in the music in preparation for our grand entrance.

After our little dance we had to scurry under the skirt once more, and I had to perform my duty as the "light boy". There was a small keychain flashlight that hung on the inside of the frame of the skirt, and thanks to the order in which we re-entered the skirt it was just above my right shoulder.  It was my duty to turn it on and focus it on the stilted feet as we step-by-stepped our way back to the wings on stage left.  Lighting on stage and off stage was like day and night, and under the skirt it was nigh impossible to see anything without that flashlight.  Every night we'd wait until we heard the "okay" from the stagehand and saw the feet stop moving, and then we'd crawl back out and remember how nice it was to take a deep breath in the cool backstage air.

Horror movie in disguise

I've found many descriptions that dub Pan's Labyrinth as a fairy tale for adults, but I'd say that it's a well-crafted horror movie in disguise as a fantasy film and period piece, like a haunting "Alice in Wonderland" in civil war Spain.  I heard nothing but rave reviews about it since it came out, but it wasn't until almost five years later that I got around to watching it; it's not the kind of movie that I would toss into the DVD player and run in the background as I do chores or surf the web because its subject matter and it's spoken entirely in Spanish.  Initially I was daunted by the prospect of watching this movie but I was handsomely rewarded when I finally saw it.  If the story doesn't linger in your memory, the theme/melody will.  I don't really do horror movies, so this would be the film I would watch tonight (and I could because, after 20 hours, the power has come back on!  Alas, this is one of  the holes in my DVD collection.)

Terrifying/horrifying

One thing I find scary: watching women apply makeup on public transportation.  When it comes to eye makeup my fear is that the woman will poke herself in the eye, and with any kind of makeup I fear some kind of contamination, whether in the air or by contact.  The scariest things in the world are microscopic and deadly and can be anywhere.  Perhaps a public bathroom is only very slightly less gross than public transportation, but at least the former option not mobile.

lights out!

A 45-minute blackout isn't that bad, but when one strikes as a result of inclement weather there's no knowing how long it'll last.  I was anticipating having to wear a sweater or two to bed underneath my blankets in order to keep warm.  I was attempting to read by flickering candlelight.  I was wondering if I'd get to write a post tonight.  My mind invariably went to Weird Al Yankovic's parody of Gangster's (Gangsta's?) Paradise called "Amish Paradise"-- especially that line that goes, "I shun fancy things like electricity." 

I have a lot of respect for the Amish, but I have more for my electricity and modern technology.  No, I'm not glued to my (non-existant) smart phone, thank God, but I'm much more dependent on electronic devices than I'd like to be.  I fancy myself a Luddite, but I think I'm too much of a Gen-Xer to truly live without said devices.

Public Transportation Bingo!

I saw a man wearing a kilt earlier this week.  I did a classic double-take: from the waist up he was dressed like any other man, with a half-zip up black fleece sweater.  On the bottom, though, was the kilt and his stout, pale, slightly hairy legs.  This was on the train.  I didn't see any other people wearing kilts that day, or even in this month.  What are the chances of seeing a guy in a kilt on a non-holiday?  This question made me want to come up with my own version of BINGO based on the typical and the unusual people and events I've witnessed while riding public transportation:

B Be my friend?	I Icky habits	N Normal, not atypical people	G Go.	O Oh the things you can hear!
Man wearing a kilt	Person sitting next to you reeks	Tourist couple	Delay due to inclement weather	Stranger attempts to engage you in a serious conversation
Someone reading a book on an esoteric topic	Someone eats something smelly	Woman applying makeup	Delay due to police action	Uncomfortably loud and personal  conversation takes place
Person with dog too big to sit in lap	Nose-picking	Free Space!	Unexplained delay	Loud baby
Musician carrying an instrument	An uncovered sneeze	Field trip school group	Someone almost falls due to sudden jerking movement of vehicle	Can hear every word of the song someone’s listening to on headphones
Someone who has almost completed the daily crossword	Someone who leaves trash behind	Man in business suit and sneakers	People cluster around exits rather than moving all the way into the vehicle	A mumbling vehicle operator

I think I'll see how close I get to a BINGO this week, and see how well I fare for the next month.

Five senses of autumn

Autumn sounds like
- noses being sniffed
- leaf blowers mimicking the lawnmowers of summer and spring
- fallen leaves scraping, tapping the pavement
- swaying tree branches, dry leaves bristling in the wind
- seasonal sneezes
- people mourning the impending winter

Autumn smells like
- dry dirt
- warm spices-- cardamom, cinnamon, cloves
- apples
- earth

Autumn tastes like
- apples
- pumpkins
- herbal tea
- bitter air
- fear

Autumn feels like
- brisk, cool winds
- air that starts to dry out the skin
- red noses
- leaves crunching underneath shoes

Autumn looks like
- quietly flaming trees

meet cute on the subway during rush hour

Featuring two young professionals, male and female. 

Male: (getting up from his seat) Would you like to...? (gestures at empty seat)
Female: Oh, sure, thank you (sits down)
M: I'm reading that too, see? (shows her his iPhone display)
F: Oh! Yeah, cool (looks at her thick book)
M: I just started, I'm reading the first book.
F: Oh, really? This is the fifth book, I started the series after I finished watching the first season and I just started this book.
M: Me too!  I watched the series and I said I gotta read the series, if the show was this good.  Because the books are always better.
F: Yeah, that's true.  And, like, you really get to go inside the characters head, how they're thinking, even more than the show.  I don't know what part you're reading but--
M: I'm almost done.  After watching the first season I know what's going to happen but it's still cool to read it happening.  I want to be ahead of the curve, though.
F: Yeah, I know what you mean.  All the other books in the series are great.  Well, the fourth one is a little slow, but it builds up to the payoff at the end of the book.
M: Ah, cool.  That's the fifth book?  I thought it was a trilogy...
F: I think he was going to make it a trilogy, but then he wrote more.  I think there's supposed to be seven books in the series now--
M: Seven!
F: Yeah, and this is the latest one that came out.
M:  So what are you going to do when you finish reading that?
F: I don't know...I'm going to have to wait around to find out what happens next.  I guess I'll just reread the series from the beginning.
M: Cool.  Well, I'll let you get back to your book.
F: Thanks,  you too.  I think you'll really like it.
M: Yeah.
The two resume reading their respective texts.
F: This is my stop.  Thanks again for the seat, it was nice talking--
M: Yeah, of course, no problem. 
She smiles at him, then leaves.


If this were a movie script, the two would have exchanged numbers.  But this conversation happened in real life, right next to me a few days ago, and it went more or less the way it's written above.  I'd heard about Game of Thrones prior to this time; this conversation made me want to read the series.

I've never heard people on the subway discuss a book series before.

Deodorant

I don't glisten, I sweat.  Like an athlete, sometimes, even though I'm not one.  When I first started to purchase antiperspirant/deodorant for myself ( I don't count that first yucky baby powder-scented trial size of Secret all us fifth-grade girls got in our Puberty 101 class) I picked out one of the Adidas kind.  It was amazing and smelled cool, crisp, and clean-- like soap, but better.  I think it was called "arctic fresh" or "mountain breeze".  Alas, one day I went to my local CVS and there were no Adidas deodorants to be found.  I was devastated.  That sounds like a hyperbole, I know, but I was very fond of that product and to have it taken away from me without warning made me very unhappy.  How could they do this to me?  My one true love, the one inanimate object that would never let me down!  Ah, but I survived and moved on.

Over the years I have tried various other brands, and currently I am in possession of four sticks of antiperspirant/deodorant.  Why four?  Well, why not.  It's nice to have options, and deodorant isn't as expensive as scented body lotions or perfumes. My favorite of the lot is my small Degree for men invisible stick antiperspirant and deodorant in cool rush.  It smells cool, clean, and just a little spicy.  I don't use it to stop from sweating so much as for its scent, and sometimes I'll just apply it to my underarms when I have to go out and I either don't have enough time to shower or I'm just too lazy to bother.  The other two are Degree for women in Pure Satin and Dove for women in the original clean scent.  You know how pregnant women have weird, strong cravings and sometimes can't stand even the smell of a certain food?  I think premenopausal women are like that, too; my female friends and I crave certain foods depending on the week in the month, depending on our hormone levels.  Most of the time I favor my Degree for men, but sometimes I just can't stand the way it smells and that's when I reach for one of the other deodorants.  Both have soft, slightly floral scents (most female-oriented body products smell this way) and sometimes they smell better to me.  Or sometimes I don't want to smell like anything at all, and I reach for my fourth stick of deodorant, which is Secret's pH balanced unscented deodorant.

But sometimes I use that deodorant on somewhere other than my armpits.  In the summer I'll rub some on my inner thighs, á la Pauly Bleeker from the movie "Juno" so that it's not so uncomfortable when the rub against each other:



image source







World-renown very good sport, indeed

An appearance on Sesame Street is a good indicator that you're famous and noteworthy.  If kids should know your name, everyone should.  God bless Seiji Ozawa for his commitment to his role as conductor of this animal orchestra, not winking at the camera at all, taking his job seriously as he gives cues and gestures to draw out a crescendo of meows.



See those shots of  Ozawa from the front?  He could be conducting an actual orchestra, with that kind of dedication on his face.  What a very good sport.

Productive procrastination

Sometimes there's something you have to do, but you're really not in the mood to do it.  Sometimes I do what I call "productive procrastination", whereby I avoid the task that needs more immediate attention by doing other activities that are relatively less unfavorable. Examples:
- any household chore (cleaning the floor, doing laundry, dishes)
- writing letters to friends
- picking out my outfit for the next day
- flossing my teeth
- organizing desk miscellany
- trimming my eyebrows

Accomplishing any or all of these tasks makes me feel productive, and sometimes completing a boring but necesary task can be the first step to getting into the right and focused mindset required to accomplish the goal that I initially wanted to procrastinate on.  Now, this doesn't always work, as web-surfing is a much more enjoyable and time-consuming way of procrastinating and it can be productive, but that's unlikely.

Classical music rocks! Really!

Classical music is largely the genre composed by dead white (European) men, true, and has a reputation for being boring and pretentious—so much so that a few years ago some convenience store owners decided to blare it outside their doors to keep out ne’er-do-well teenagers.  I believe that the owners were successful in keeping out the bored adolescents that haunt these places, but I’m guessing they alienated other people, too (some of them "thugs"? eh, gives me uncomfortable feelings about classism...).

For me, baroque music is the hardest to appreciate unless you’ve actually played it before.  Beethoven straddles the line between this older, stodgier classical music and the more dynamic classical music, the kind that elicited polarizing reactions.  I wonder if any of those owners played any of Beethoven’s symphonies; I think those pieces are the easiest to get into for the beginning classical music appreciater.  I’ve recently gotten more into Rachmaninov, who is complex but not obtuse, emotional and passionate but also maintains nuance.  Maybe my favorite composer is Dvorak; in season 2 episode 7 of Glee the theme from the last movement of his “New World” Symphony was played for a few seconds to the slo-mo visual of a sneeze, turning it into an Epic Sneeze.  I’m not a rabid fan of that show any more, but I have to hand it to whoever chose that music to go along with that footage.  I squealed out loud at that part, because I instantly recognized that music and was delighted that thousands of Glee-watchers had also heard it and enjoyed it and have been exposed to some Dvorak.  Again, it’s not much, but I’m grateful for what it was, and I hope that other shows put in bits of classical music.
(could not find clip of the scene on Youtube, sneeze music starts at 0:16)

This genre is still changing and evolving, despite its name.  There are some pretty out-there, intellectual modern classical music symphonies out there—I’ve played a few of them.  Think of the soundtrack for Inception, which had the traditional symphony orchestra but included electric guitar—epic.  Really, how many things are more epic than that, than that movie’s soundtrack?!  I won’t begrudge Trent Reznor’s Oscar win, but Hans Zimmer is an awesome, cutting-edge composer who is building off this supposedly-dull music genre.

Classical music will never die, muahahahaha!

Impulse Hair Adventure

Come to think of it, that makes for a catchy hair salon name, yeah?  It sounds like a very trendy, cutting-edge (pun intended) place to get a new 'do.

Last night, on an impulse, I trimmed my hair.  I know, it doesn't sound like an exciting event, but it was and is a big deal to me.  For a while now my thick Asian hair has been weighing me down, particularly at the severely damaged ends.  They needed to be removed, but I just could not justify spending the time and money at a hair salon to get a little trim, to have the ends snipped off.  I didn't want any drastic change to the length of my hair, as I am trying to grow it out and see how long it can get before I can't tolerate it any more.

I gathered my hair into a high ponytail and made a scissor with the first two fingers of my left hand to hold my hair level, and before my mind caught up with my right hand I made my first snip.  Again, I have the kind of Asian hair that is very thick and coarse, so that first cut sounded more like a crrrunch and several thoughts ran through my head simultaneously:
1.  Dang my hair is thick
2.  I need better scissors.
3.  WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?
4.  ...and so it begins.

My next few cuts were more tentative, and I tried to recall what I had seen in YouTube videos of non-hairdressers cutting their hair at home.  Something like, "Cut into your hair at a 45-degree angle."  This resulted in a giant jagged lock of hair.  I was worried.  But I rearranged my ponytail, twist it slightly, and repeated the process over and over again until all the hairs were more or less the same level.

Alright, and every now and then I checked my progress-- and I was pleased with what I saw.  I probably should have wet the hair first, been more thorough with combing my hair, gotten a friend to help me out.  But I am thoroughly satisfied with the end result.  It was an adventure for me because I have never cut my own hair before, not even when it was the big thing to do in kindergarten during arts and crafts time when we were allowed to use real scissors and not those safety ones made of  plastic that only cut paper if you hold it at exactly the right angle.  I've already run my fingers through my hair enough times to feel really silly and vain.  Yes, hair is just hair, it will grow back and become damaged, but it's amazing how even a small trim can make such a big difference in how my hair feels and how I feel about myself.  Now I can wear my hair down!  Now I can whip my hair back and forth with greater ease, now that the dead weight has been snipped off !  I want to toss my hair over my shoulder like I'm in a hair product commercial!  In short, I feel pretty and witty and gay/bright and I pity any girl who isn't me today/tonight.