Dress Me Up

I’m trying to figure out what I want to be for Halloween this year.  I’m drawing a blank on what would be a good idea, and I really want to have a cool costume this year.  In the past I haven’t deviated too much from my usual dressing up as a girl costume.  In the last few years the only time I didn’t go as a girl was when I went as The Crow.

As I’m watching Monday Night Football, I’m attempting to think of some good ideas and I’ve thought of a couple actually, but I don’t know how feasible some of them are (or how much I really want to dress in the appropriate gear to sell the costume).  Anyways, here are some of my ideas so far.  You might notice a cartoon theme throughout and that’s intentional.  I thought being a cartoon character might be fun. What do you think?

--He-Man: Could easily do the costume, but I’m not sure I want to be dressed in such a small amount of fabric.  I don’t think I’m in good enough shape or self confident enough to do it.
--Danger Mouse: I don’t know if I’d be able to make a mouse head, but I could do the white pants, shoes, shirt, red belt, and eye patch.
--Inspector Gadget: This could be fun. I’m trying to figure out what would be a good gadget, though.  Maybe the helicopter blades that come out of the hat?
--Rick Hunter (from Robotech): I loved this cartoon as a kid, but I think making the costume might be a little hard.  It might be fun to try, though.
--Captain Murphy (from Sealab 2021):  It might be hard to find a bright blue uniform…

Anyways, those are a few of my initial ideas.  If you have any good suggestions or know of anyone that would want to help me make a costume let me know.  I want to avoid simply dressing up like a girl yet again this year.

The End of a Rampage

Today is a sad day in the comics blogoverse.  One of my favorite blogs to read, mainly for the snarky commentary on the oft overly nerdy realm of comic book based message boards, Fanboy Rampage is closing down as of today.  I only started reading it about six months or so ago, but I’ve really enjoyed it ever since I found it.

I never knew how nerdy, nutty, and totally out of touch with reality that some comic fans could be before running across this site.  There were more than a few times that I had to read something that Fanboy Rampage found on a comics message board and reposted for our viewing pleasure to make sure that my eyes weren’t deceiving me.  Comics fans couldn’t be that insane, could they?  Apparently they are.  

Now I have to find a new place to go to find my snarky nerd commentary (other than Fark and Slashdot).  So if you have any suggestions, let me know.

Acrobats, Frisbees, and Food, Oh My!

Finally, after these couple long and grueling weeks of work, I had a chance to go out and have a truly fun, laid back, and enjoyable day.  Lord knows I needed it!

So I did end up working a little during the morning yesterday, but once I finished that, the rest of the day was good, trust me.  I can only let work keep me chained down so much, even though I’m sure everything I needed to get done isn’t going to do itself over the weekend.  But that’s a worry for Monday morning.

With it being such a beautiful fall day, a round of disc golf was definitely in order.  I ended up shooting a round out at Hansen Park, a course I’ve never played before, but it was a very beautiful park.  With the leaves changing colors, a warm breeze blowing across the open areas, and mostly blue sky overhead it turned out to be one of the few wonderful fall days we get her in Minnesota.

Once disc golf was wrapped up, I grabbed some supper at a place called Panini, I believe. I should really have tried harder to remember the name of the place because they made a killer toasted wrap.  Imagine a Roli Poli wrap, twice as big, and toasted just so perfectly.  It was scrumptious, and more than I could eat in one meal (so I had breakfast for this morning as well!).

With a full belly, the main even of the night was yet to come—Cirque du Soleil.  I had never been to a Cirque du Soleil performance before, and all I really knew about them was from what I’d seen on brief clips shown on documentaries and the quintuplets episode of South Park.  I did know, however, that I wanted to go so when a friend invited me to come with her, how could I say no?  Wonderful company, a beautiful night, and a spectacular Cirque du Soleil show… what more could you ask for?

The performance we saw was Corteo, a performance about a dead clown and his trip through the afterlife.  Yes, I know it sounds morbid, but it was actually an amazing performance.  I’m quite the sucker for watching feats of human ability, and there were tons on display during the show.  Acrobats, dancing, juggling, aerial stunts… they had it all.  To top it off, the music was also very enjoyable and fit with the different scenes flawlessly.  So if you’ve never been to a Cirque du Soleil performance, I would highly recommend it.  They’ll be here in the Twin Cities until October 23rd, so catch them if you can.

In the end, as the day came to a close and I was driving back to Jared’s place, I had to smile and chuckle to myself at least a little—this was just the type of day I had needed for quite a while now.

War Wounds

I managed to do it yet again, although this time I actually found a way to do it worse than I have in a very long time. That’s right, I shaved and in the process somehow ripped half of my face off.  Not only do I have the little nicks, cuts, and scrapes along my neckline, but this time I added a nice, big, open, raw war wound on my chin.  

Somehow, someway while I was attempting to shave my chin area, my razor sheered off not just a little piece of skin, but a hearty chunk of epidermis.  In doing so, my chin was bleeding profusely for about 20 minutes.  While I was taking my shower after shaving, there was a pretty steady stream of blood that ran down my chin and chest.

After I got out, it still wasn’t done dripping blood all over the place so I stopped bleeding with a Kleenex for a while and eventually the pace of the bleeding slowed down enough that it had a chance to scab over.  So now I have a wonderful looking divot in my lower chin.  Hip hip hooray for shaving!  Man, I suck at it.

Speaking of stupid things I did today, I made up a word while I was on a call with a client today at work.  When we were discussing some changes to a document, I wanted to let the client know that I understood the concerns that were expressed, but I also wanted to express to them that they needed to understand some other issues with the document.  With those two thoughts in mind, I managed to eek out the sentence, “Yes, that’s quite understanded, but I think…”

Understanded.  Shows what dumb things you can say when you’re on the 10th day of work in a row, averaging more than 9 hours per day, and talking calendar days, not work week days.  It’s like I’m running some kind of work marathon right now.  I just hope it’s towards the end. If not, I might just end up speaking in complete gibberish, and I’m sure that’s probably not good for client interaction.

What's So Hard About Hello?

A smile, maybe a nod?  A hello, hi, or how are you possibly?  Any type of acknowledgement would be good, but instead all I get are cold stares, looks to the side, and the feeling that I’m not good enough to be said hi to.  I’m talking about my daily runs here in the suburban wasteland of outer Rochester.

Every week I try to put in 15 miles running.  Sometimes I get a little more, sometimes less.  I know it’s not much compared to the heyday of cross country when I was putting in upwards of 50-60 miles in a week, but ever since I destroyed my ankle freshman year of college I’ve never been able to do much more than 3-4 miles at a time.

When I go running, it’s usually after work, which happens to be the prime time for running in our subdivision.  I initially thought that would be a good thing.  Lots of people to say hi to and get to know, right?  I couldn’t be more wrong.

Just tonight I passed three different runners and not a single one even looked in my direction.  One even did that thing where she looks just enough away from you that she can still see what you’re doing in her peripheral vision, but doesn’t have to make eye contact.  I still said hello and tried for eye contact, but I got nothing.  No response. No nothing.

I don’t know if it’s one of the ten commandments of suburban lifestyle to be so aloof that you don’t acknowledge that other people exist, but I sure don’t fit this mold.  Growing up on a farm in the country, it was highly abnormal not to say hello to just about everyone you saw, regardless of if you knew them or not. Here in suburbia, that’s not the case at all.  I think I might have a better chance of winning the Powerball, twice, than I would of getting an honest to goodness “Hello” in this area of town.

A lot of it, if you ask me, stems from the elitist nature that this town perpetuates. There is so much money in this town and everyone is so concerned about their image that I think it’s more important for everyone to be competing with their neighbors, trying to be better than them, than it is to simply get to know them.

I don’t get it.  I’m just trying to be friendly.  Since when did being nice become such a rare trait?

Swords!

As I was cleaning up the basement a little this evening, trying to take a break from work, I remembered that I never put up a picture of the katana set that I picked up while I was on vacation with my family in the Wisconsin Dells a little more than a month ago.

When I go on vacation, I try to pick up a dagger, sword, or other such sharp, piercing object as a souvenier. This year I just decided to bite the bullet, empty out my wallet, and get a katana set to put up in the living room in the basement. You never know when you might need a set of three differently sized killing weapons, like if ninja squirrels were to attempt to overtake my basement because of the strategic value it holds in their ongoing war against the Clan of the Painted Raccoon.

So, without further adieu, and because I need to get ready for bed after a long weekend of work, which did include a fun trip to the Minnesota FallCon, which I'll get to later, here are my swords:

No More Time

Rick + totally crazy work deadlines = 12 hour or more work days

A side effect of this equation is the lack of time for blogging. Sorry, blame work. I do.

Push It to the Side

My memory, a picture show
Never ending and always sending
Images that I can’t touch
They’re there—vivid as the light to my eyes
People and places that will always be
Etched in my heart but no longer with me
A postcard from my past
How I wish I was there
But it is too far to travel
Too far? Too impossible…
As feelings are stirred up within me
What I see I realize can no longer be
Time and circumstance are my foes
They’ve taken so much, yet they leave with me
Reminders of their stolen spoils
With closed eyes I wish
That I could steal back what’s been taken
But my hopes have been forsaken
The joy of today is so happily swept away
To be consumed by the pages of the past
I have to forget everything from yesterday
Because memories have too high a price to pay
Everything ends up in the past
No matter what, nothing can last…

Sex and Violence

Being in some kind of movie watching fetish mood the last couple of days, I managed to take in four films in three days.  On Thursday I watched Dummy, which was a simultaneously cute and darkly funny.  Give it a look if you get a chance.

On Friday I watched Serenity, as you may have noticed from my previous post.  Yesterday I watched two movies—A History of Violence and Hero.  I’d seen Hero before and enjoyed it just as much the second time through.  What really impressed me, though, was A History of Violence.

You would think from the name of the movie that it would be a gratuitously violent, big-budget, piece of crap that Hollywood churned out to cash in even more on the graphic novel/comic book to movie craze.  You would be completely wrong in thinking that, however.  I was thoroughly engrossed throughout the entire film, mostly because of the realistic look it takes at violence, how it affects those who have experience with it, and what tools can be used to create violence against others.

There actually isn’t a whole lot of traditional violence to be found in the movie.  Yes, there are a few very gory killings to be seen, but what is much more interesting are the other ways in which you see violence manifest itself throughout the film.

What got the biggest rise out of the audience when I saw the movie wasn’t some of the nasty and brutish gore that was splattered across the screen, but the two sex scenes.  Both of them serve a purpose and add a great amount of depth to the characters involved.  Both scenes involve the main character, Tom, and his wife.  The first scene shows an instance of how sex can be used to express the love shared between two people.  The scene permeates good feelings and love.

The second sex scene shows a completely different side to sex.  It is no longer an expression of love, but instead becomes a tool of violence.  It isn’t a scene of rape, as you may assume, but of consensual sex, but in the aftermath you can see how it was abused by both parties to hurt one another.  Tom uses it as a way to release his hate in what he may think is a positive release while his wife uses the moment to exert her control over him, that by not kissing him and not allowing him to, that she no longer does it with love, but only to feed an animalistic urge.  

The transformation of sex from a thing of beauty to an ugly instrument used to bring pain adds a layer of depth that many filmmakers would avoid adding because sex is seen as taboo by our society.  As terrible as seeing sex used as tool of violence, the audience should have been just as aghast at the gory murders carried out, but there wasn’t more than a peep from those around me.  

Anyways, in the end, after all of this pointless rambling, what I’m trying to say is that this movie deserves your attention and it deserves to be seen before you indulge in the myriad of bad movies that Hollywood constantly shoves down your throat.  This movie has a depth and intensity that I haven’t felt in a film since Crash.  

Serenity

Being the gigantic nerd that I am, I went to the first available showing of Serenity yesterday.  Ever since there were rumblings about a potential movie based off of Firefly, one of the best sci-fi creations of this millennium so far, not so much because it blazed any new trails, but because it went down the same trails in style.  Serenity does much the same thing.

It is basically a chase film at its core, but what makes such a simple plot fun is Whedon’s characters and his trademark dialogue.  As opposed to some of the more well loved sci-fi of the last 10-20 years (Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Stargate), the good guys in Serenity aren’t really all that good.  There is no clear cut definition of hero and villain, but instead a stratification of villains.  Our protagonists are simply less antagonistic than the antagonists.  

Mal, the captain of the ship struggles with his sense of morality while living the life of a thief on the run. He is loyal to himself, and only to a lesser degree, his crew.  In any mainstream movie, sci-fi or other, you know the good guy’s MO and how he’ll react to every situation.  Throw those preconceived character stereotypes out the window before you see this movie.  The crew of Serenity will shoot first, will play dirty, and won’t hesitate to take advantage of someone for their own gain.

It’s this moral ambiguity present throughout the film that makes it seem so much more grounded and real than the majority of the other sci-fi films out there.  True, no sci-fi movie can really be “real” in a realistic sense, but it can be real when it comes to characters and character interaction.  So when you see this movie, if you do (I highly recommend you do), don’t go to it for the special effects or sci-fi atmosphere, do it for the characters and the dialogue. They’re what really make the film.

On a side note, I was quite intrigued by two of the trailers I saw before the movie—Jarhead and Stay.  Jarhead looks to be a tremendously deep and gritty look at the insanities of the Gulf War.  With Jake Gyllenhaal as the lead and the director of American Beauty onboard, you won’t be able to keep me from this.  Stay, starring Ewan McGregor and Ryan Gosling looks to be a psychological thriller full of angst and confusion, the only way a psychological thriller should be made in my book.  You can bet my ass will be in the theater when both of those come out.

Now I just have to find time to take in A History of Violence.  All the reviews make it sounds just as good as I imagined it might be.  Maybe I’ll try to see it today.  If not, I plan on catching it sometime this week.