Some thoughts

-I have been sick for almost an entire month.

-I'm really looking forward to July.

-I'm in the process of trying to write Amy a 200 page letter.

-I realized tonight there's no way I'm going to make it to 200 pages.

-Today I found this tumblr that specifically features pictures of lesbians.

-I love both of these, and I definitely see some Laura and Rachel in the first.

Deer. In my yard. I love them.

Books

I recently put a bunch of my teen lit novels upstairs. I needed to make room for new books. Boxing them up made me sad, even though I know I will never give them away. Someday I’ll have a place of my own and enough room to display them all. And I really do want to display them all, even stuff I read when I was 13 or 14. No matter how much I grow as a person or how far I go, I will always cherish The Realm of Possibility and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. Other books have greatly affected me since, but never more.

When someone gives me a book I like to write on the inside front cover who gave it to me. I especially love it when the giver does it for me. It’s my belief now that there’s no greater gift in life than story. When I was younger, in different phases of my life, I would have argued with this notion. I would have offered love or God or especially friendship as things that were the greatest gift. But now I understand that love and God and friendship…all those things are stories. Stories we believe in. Stories that change our lives. When I’m old I hope to have shelves and shelves of novels on display, of all the books that made me who I am. And when I look inside the covers I’ll see “From Amy” or “From Kate” or “From Dad” and I’ll know exactly who gave me each piece of my puzzle. I’ll know from whom I received each book and how the stories and the people I shared them with shaped my life.

Lumpie Insanity Part 1

Click for zee big big.

Deviosity Part 3

While Visions of Death Camps Danced in Her Head

This is just to say that last night I had a dream that Amy and Shannon and I went on vacation. We went on vacation to Poland. We went to Poland and we toured Auschwitz. Yes.

So, after touring Auschwitz for several emotionally draining hours Amy dissolved into tears and Shannon started throwing up. I don't really know. So Amy had this project...I guess it was for school or maybe it was just a personal thing she was doing because she's one of those intellectual people. Whatever. So Amy and Shannon were hanging out in the cafeteria trying to force themselves to eat something while I was standing in the crematoria taking pictures with Amy's camera. Some crazy dude walked in and started chatting me up and then two things happened:

1) Someone woman was saying how she didn't want to take pictures in the crematoria because it was disrespectful. So I asked her why it was "acceptable" to take pictures of the ominous iron sign under which a million people walked to their deaths and not "acceptable" to photograph the place where they burned their bodies. Which is actually a semi-interesting thought. Every piece of Auschwitz is horrifying...what makes any of it more or less horrible than other parts?

2) The dude who was chatting me up asked if I came here alone and I explained the situation and told him ya know, don't think me unaffected but my best friend has a project due and I ain't lettin' her get an F. So he asked why we made Auschwitz part of our vacation and I explained that it was really kind of Amy and Shannon's idea. When I think vacation, I told the man, I think of hiking and scuba diving, not a history lesson. Not that I didn't ever want to tour the place just, ya know, I thought we would save touring death camps for our forties.

I'm even funny in my dreams.

Deviosity Part 2

Deviosity Part 1

Today I Threw Away the IKEA Measuring Tape

So tonight Kate and I went to a lecture at Ramapo given by the fantastic lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Kate took off work, a fact that believe me, was not lost on me. But this was important mostly because the last time Kate and I tried to go to an event at Ramapo together I ended up having a crisis and then sobbing into the phone to Shannon for three hours. Let me explain.

You know how sometimes all the sadness/worry/whatever builds up inside of you and then the smallest event can make you freak out? I’ll give you an example. One time, when I was sixteen and new at my job I was prepping the start station and I ended up cutting my hand on the edge of a metal can. Seconds later I burst into tears. Now, in reality I was crying because I was new and this was the first job I had ever had and I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I wasn’t crying because I cut my hand, that was just what happened to trigger it.

So back in November Kate and I had journeyed to Ramapo to see a play together and something about where I parked my car and Kate daring me to do something triggered me to freak out. (In retrospect it was, of course, really silly.) But I got freaked out and Kate and I tried to talk it out but then I said some hurtful stuff and she said some hurtful stuff and the whole evening just made us both feel really horrible and we didn’t go to the play (which actually turned out to be terrible but that is neither here nor there.)

Okay, so I told you all that to tell you this. Tonight Kate and I went to Ramapo and it was fine, great even. We even got dinner beforehand. And beside me bugging out over a short piece that it has been killing me to write, the night was really great. Kate even got to see James Hoch in person. Alison Bechdel + James Hoch = an evening made of win.

I guess I wanted to go back to Ramapo with Kate to prove to myself that I can face my fears and not let shit that happened in the past prevent me from doing the things I want to do. I’d like to think Kate and I can get to the point where we won’t have bad days anymore.

Blogging Arachnid (2001) Part One

Netflix has ruined my life and because of this watching movies has become a new hobby of mine. So I had this idea that I could “live blog” movies as I watch them. Some movies, such as this gem, I’m going to blog as I watch them for the first time (i.e. because I’m totally counting on the movie being great or at least good or bad-good or maybe I am just aware that it contains a hottie.) I think I might also blog-as-I-watch some other movies that I’ve seen before if I have something in particular I want to say about them. So some of these movie blogs will fall under reviews and some of them will fall under random strings of thoughts and some of them will fall under play-by-plays. This one definitely falls under play-by-plays. Mostly because there isn’t anything I can add to Stacie Ponder’s FANTASTIC review (Stacie Ponder's Fantastic Review). Even if you have zero interest in this movie or even zero interest in horror movies in general you should STILL go read that review. It is complete genius from beginning to end and if it doesn’t make you laugh your ass off then you are a shell of a human being. So check it out. Seriously. Stop reading this post and go read that. It’ll rock your effing world.

And now without further ado…here we go!

Let me be upfront: Alex Reid is really the only reason I’m watching this movie. Not that I’ve never watched a good-bad creature feature but it takes a lot for me to watch one. A lot being it has to be past one in the morning, I have to be in that state where I’m tired as fuck but can’t sleep yet, and the only other thing on has to be a rerun of one of those white trash talk shows where the audience is supposed to guess the gender of each participant in a never-ending conga line of drag queens and ugly straight women. After I think “God, that’s degrading” I will then switch over to said creature feature. Like I said, it takes a lot.

A bad CGI water tornado thing springs up.

Oh, my. The beginning of it, well, to me....kind of looks like a penis. What kind of lesbian am I? I’m watching this movie BECAUSE IT HAS A HOT CHICK IN IT. Damn it, Trish, focus. Okay. Onward.

So a pilot who has a “mean an extreme” decal affixed to his helmet flies like…directly into the water tornado thing. His instruments go all wonky and he ejects and lands on an island in the middle of Bumblefuck. His plane, now unmanned explodes in a cloud of terrible CGI.

A terrible CGI alien appears for no reason I can think of. There is the suggestion that the water tornado thing was created by the alien. If this is accurate then does this mean that ALL water tornado things are the handiwork of aliens? I don’t know. (If Stacie Ponder’s review is accurate (which I’m damn sure it is) then I have the feeling I’ll be saying “I don’t know” a lot.) Then, out of NOFUCKINGWHERE comes a HUGE fucking spider that like…consumes the alien thing. Whatever. The giant fucking spider then LEAPS into the air and a giant spider web drifts down over the pilot. The giant fucking spider then drops down OUT OF THE SKY in front of the pilot. BOOM! The title flashes.

Cut to an airfield in Guam. Alex Reid is walking around whilst wearing a jumpsuit and carrying a clipboard. She has been on the screen for approximately four seconds and I already can’t keep it in my pants. Calm the fuck down, Trish. Alright. At this point Alex Reid is now driving a jeep (check, please) and doing that squinty thing I love. She walks into the (army base?) hospital wearing a man purse(!) and then spies a man lying in a bed who looks severely burned. Do they know each other? I don’t know. Alex Reid (whose name is apparently Loren Mercer in this fine motion picture) asks the doctor what’s up with badly burned dude. My focus is waning because her hair looks terrible in this shot. I’m not posting a screen cap because I don’t want you to meet Alex Reid like this. And I don’t want to remember her like this. Some dickhead named Ned Valentine appears and shakes Alex Reid’s hand. He clearly wants to do her and I can’t blame him–even with the current hair sitch. Valentine wants Alex Reid to fly him to Bumblefuck and even if I hadn’t read Ms. Ponder’s review I could have seen where this is going. (Jurassic Park much?) Valentine has apparently lead many missions into Bumblefuck. Alex Reid seems concerned but he convinces her that they’ll be fine and I can tell now that if this plot was held together by chewing gum it would be better off. Side note: I just realized Alex Reid is faking an American-ish accent. It’s kind of hot. And she’s doing it pretty believably. Alright, so badly burned dude made it back (barely) from the place they’re heading. Good to know. The doctor wants Alex Reid and Valentine to find out what bit badly burned dude. They set them up with a native-ish guide and we’re off! I think.

Alex Reid presses approximately fifteen thousand buttons on the plane’s instrument panel and prepares for takeoff. Then she suddenly jumps out of the plane to ask some dude what the fuck he’s doing. I don’t know. We find out, along with our heroine Alex Reid, that the dude was bent over coaxing an actual large spider into the palm of his hand. Alex Reid shouts the obvious: to put it the fuck down cause it could be poisonous. We learn that the dude who doesn’t look like he knows what the fuck he’s doing is actually a spider-loving science nerd. So I guess he kind of….does know what he’s doing. How ironic. (What I want to know is what Alex Reid, a really good actress in my opinion, is doing in this movie.) Alex intimidates the guy into putting the GD spider down.

The science nerd then whips out his book entitled Arachnid Fun Facts and Alex begins perusing the back cover. At this point I am completely sure that while I would watch Alex Reid reading from a phonebook I would also watch Alex Reid looking at a phonebook. Anyway, Alex Reid shows the science nerd her softer side (which I’m hoping Valentine never gets to see) and listens to his spiel about how he *~understands~* spiders. According to him all they really want is food, shelter, and a mate. Alex says she hates them and just likes to step on them. Atta girl, Alex Reid.

So Valentine and his band of idiots now arrive (and here I thought we’d be taking off for the island ten minutes ago). There’s the doctor who we already met, a Hispanic nurse (who isn’t hot. God. Damn.), Valentine, a black guy and a white guy who are both sporting very large automatic weapons (Note to Amy: No, I don’t mean their cocks), and the native/guide dude and two of his closest native friends. We learn from the not hot Hispanic nurse that badly burned dude has succumb to the spider venom. Womp. Everybody boards the plane and Valentine says the more guns he has the safer he feels. Great.

The doomed clan finally take off for the island in Bumblefuck with the giant fucking spider on it. The flannel-clad science nerd is yammering on about spiders while the rest of the group politely pretend to listen. Our heroine Alex Reid is not a member of his captive audience because she is busy flying the plane and looking hot while doing it.

It is quite obvious that Alex Reid will be our final girl (fantastic) because, well, she’s one of only two women and the Hispanic nurse is so not going to make it.

Onward!