Adventures Driving in Boston

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I don’t drive very much anymore, and that’s fine with me. In fact, I kind of hate driving. Well, “hate” is a strong word, but given a choice between being a driver and a passenger, I always choose passenger. (Please don’t read any deep meaning into that statement. My life is not a Volkswagen commercial.) I get nervous easily, as I’ve discussed before, and since I started driving ten years ago, I’ve been a nervous driver. But the last time I drove a car on a daily basis for more than a few months was my senior year of high school. In college, I couldn’t have a car on campus, and I could get pretty much anywhere I wanted to go on the T. After college, I deliberately chose apartments and jobs that had T access, and thus began my love-hate relationship with the T.

Not having a car means that I have to rely on rental cars when I do need to drive, and driving cars that don’t belong to me make me even more nervous. I joined Zipcar, but rarely used it, and after a bad experience with them, I quit rather than renewing my membership. I nearly had a nervous breakdown when I had to rent a car during a business trip to Georgia (and, for the first time in my life, got pulled over, due to a taillight that was out).

And then this past Thursday, I needed to rent a car again, this time to drive a longer distance than I’d ever driven before, and by myself at that. One of the authors I work with was having local sales reps, along with my boss and me, to lunch at his beach house in Narragansett, which is way the hell at the bottom of Rhode Island. About an hour-and-forty-five-minute drive. Eighty miles, according to Google maps.

I was scared to death.

I know it doesn’t sound like a long way or a difficult thing to do, especially for someone who’s been driving for ten years. Most people would just get up and drive there without a second thought. But although I don’t understand why some people are afraid of spiders, I know that it’s a very real fear. Be assured, so was this one. In fact, I spent the whole week worrying about it. What if I got into an accident? What if I hit a pedestrian or cyclist? What if the car broke down? What if the tire blew out? What if I got lost and completely missed the lunch?

The car I rented was also in a busy area of Boston, an area in which I’d never driven. After an initial bit of panicking in the parking garage I was leaving from (OMG it’s raining and the windshield wipers don’t work! Oh…yeah, they do.), I was off. I found the highway I needed to get on with no problem.

And then I got in the wrong lane.

I think I spent literally an hour trying to get back to where I was supposed to be. In the process, I drove over most of the city, on several highways. I went through a toll booth, something I’d specifically tried to avoid when I printed out the Mapquest directions. I swore out loud at people doing dumb or inconsiderate things. I paused at the end of a street, trying to figure out where I was, only to be impatiently honked at. Ah, road rage, I thought, feeling a flash of anger rise within me. This is where it comes from.

Finally, I got back on the highway. While driving around Boston, I’d been on the verge of tears, wondering if I should just call and say I’d miss the lunch and unsure if I’d ever get there. But once I got on the highway and realized I could get to where I was going, I started to relax. The whole driving around Boston situation started to seem funny. I even started singing in the car, the way I do when I’m driving around my hometown. When I finally got there, I was a bit late, but not late enough that I missed the lobster and clam chowder we were having.

It seems really easy to boil this whole experience down to some kind of platitude or cliché like, “Keep a sense of humor,” or “You have to face your fears,” but it’s not that simple. The thing is, you always know things like that in the back of your mind, but you’re so scared or upset that they never quite make it up to the front. There’s a great line in the book Empire Falls by Richard Russo that’s even a car analogy: “Not giving a shit, she’s realized, is like the defrost option on a car’s heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you’re headed.” And what is fear if not giving too much of a shit?

I’m glad I had this experience and that I made it to Narragansett and back unscathed. I think I may re-join Zipcar. A car of my own is not an option now for financial reasons, but when I finally get one, I’ll already have the worst of driving in Boston behind me.

But for the record, every stereotype you’ve heard about Boston drivers is true.

Katie Recommends: Winter’s Bone

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I had never heard of Winter’s Bone until I read a review of it in the Globe that compared it to Frozen River. As it happened, I was going to be in Brookline that night, so I decided to make a trip to the Coolidge Corner Theatre to see it. And boy, I’m glad I did.

Like Frozen River, Winter’s Bone takes place in a very poor, remote area of the country—in this case, the Missouri Ozarks. But while the protagonist of Frozen River was a world-weary mother, this one is a seventeen-year-old girl who’s been dealt a tough hand in life but hasn’t given up yet. Ree Dolly, played by a lovely young actress named Jennifer Lawrence, is basically raising her two younger siblings by herself. Her mother has an unspecified mental illness that has left her silent and in a world of her own, and her father, a meth dealer, is missing. Then the police show up and tell Ree that her father has missed a court date and has put the house up as bail. If Ree can’t find him, or at least prove that he’s dead, she and her family will lose the house. So Ree takes off into the scary underbelly of the world she lives in, in the process learning a lot of things she never wanted to know.

I’d never heard of Jennifer Lawrence until I saw this movie—IMDB tells me that previously, she was best known for playing the daughter on The Bill Engvall Show—but although the year is young, I’m already hoping that she gets an Oscar nomination. Ree is such a fantastic character. She’s smart and caring but rough around the edges, and Lawrence plays her with such strength that, despite the terrible circumstances Ree is stuck in through no fault of her own, you never feel too sorry for her. Parts of the movie are intense and frightening, and you probably shouldn’t see it if violence bothers you, but otherwise, see it as soon as you can.

Other movies I’ve seen recently:
Toy Story 3
What’s up with these Pixar movies making me cry? The marriage montage in Up was one thing, but this movie had me crying over toys getting left behind when their kids grow up. And that right there tells you all you need to know. It’s got every bit of the charm of the first two movies, and you won’t be disappointed.

The Runaways
I didn’t know much about the real Runaways, the all-girl group from the 70s that is the subject of this movie, before I saw it, but it didn’t really matter. It’s the same music industry story you’ve seen in a million other movies—band gets together, band becomes famous, band’s manager is an asshole, band starts fighting and drugs enter the picture, band breaks up. But in this case, it somehow works. Maybe it’s the novelty of a true story about an all-girl group. Or seeing Dakota Fanning, whom I still remember as the little girl in I Am Sam, playing Cherie Currie as a skanky drug addict. Or Kristen Stewart’s astoundingly convincing portrayal of Joan Jett (yes, that Kristen Stewart). Whatever the reason, it’s worth renting when it comes out on DVD.

Shutter Island
Holy shit. This is one freaky movie. I knew that it was based on a Dennis Lehane novel, so I think I was expecting it to be like Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, both gritty crime stories set in rough neighborhoods of Boston. Shutter Island, on the other hand, is more like a Gothic horror story. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a federal marshal investigating the disappearance of a woman from an institution for the criminally insane in the Boston Harbor Islands. But soon, the woman’s disappearance becomes besides the point. All kinds of strange things start to happen—so many that you can barely keep track of them—and it seems clear that the hospital is not what it seems to be. I still don’t quite know what to make of this movie. It’s definitely unsettling, so I think it did what it set out to do, but I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it.

Hypothetically Speaking, Of Course

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You’ve read all the updates on the Phoebe Prince case, which has made you cry, and you’re not alone. You read this story last Sunday in the Globe and felt terrible for Lexi, and you’re not alone. The increase in news about bullying lately has made you reflect on how mean people at school were to you when you were younger, and you’re not alone. But when you were in middle school, it sure felt like you were.

So you were awkward. Not because of one thing, but a combination of things that added up. You had long, tangled hair and an overbite so bad you couldn’t close your mouth. You didn’t make friends easily, and the friends you had were awkward for their own reasons. You liked to read on the bus. You did well in school, which often made you a target. You weren’t quite sure how other smart people managed to escape the labeling and being badgered about grades, so that people could either make fun of you for doing well or for not doing so well this time, but you certainly couldn’t. You weren’t good at sports and always got picked last in gym class. You could never figure out what the right clothes to wear were, and when you tried to wear something trendy, you weren’t comfortable.

To be fair, you didn’t do yourself any favors, either. You didn’t pick up on some social cues. You cried easily, when you didn’t do as well on a test as you wanted to or when you were upset with someone. You would talk about how much you didn’t like the popular girls in your class, which sometimes got back to them. If people made fun of you, you’d try to come up with a comeback, which usually backfired when they just laughed at you more.

But you certainly paid for it. People would ask you why you were wearing what you were wearing in a pointed voice. They’d tell you to get a haircut. They’d put two fingers in front of their mouths making fun of your teeth and call you a buck-toothed rabbit. You heard “nerd-girl” and “Miss Perfect” a lot. Every time people found out your grade on anything, they’d make fun of you, and they’d announce every mistake you made. People would ask if you and your equally awkward friends were lesbians. One guy asked you if you’d ever had a date, and when you asked him why he wanted to know, he said, “Because it doesn’t look like you’ll ever have one.” If a guy was teasing his friend, he’d call out to you, “Hey, will you go out with Mike?” because you were like the symbol of all that was uncool in a girl. It wasn’t just one person or group of people, either—it was pretty universal in your grade.

High school was better. It was bigger, first of all, and since everyone was trying to get into college, it was no longer uncool to be smart. Most of your classes were honors or AP classes, where the people were nicer and more like you. You enjoyed school for the most part, and you made new friends, but they mostly weren’t close friends. You never thought that people would miss you if you weren’t there. Some semesters, you spent a lot of time in the library during lunch. In group settings, you felt like you were always saying or doing the wrong thing and spent a lot of time beating yourself up over it. People mostly thought you were really quiet because you’d decided, to paraphrase an old saying, better to keep your mouth closed and be thought awkward than to open your mouth and erase all doubt.

Even now that people have long since stopped making fun of you to your face, the fear that they’re talking about you behind your back remains. In college, you thought you’d found a group of friends who’d actually miss you when you weren’t there, until you realized that, because you’d once again not picked up on social cues, they actually thought you were annoying and didn’t want you around at all. Sometimes now, you see on Facebook that your friends were invited to a party that you weren’t, or you see pictures from a birthday party or wedding that you weren’t invited to, and you can’t help but take it personally and wonder why no one wants to get close to you. The guy who told you you’d never have a date was right for a long time- you didn’t go on a date until you were in your twenties, and you’ve still never had a boyfriend. You wonder if the things in you that made people taunt you over ten years ago are still in you now, and people are just too polite to say so.

Someone you’re close to doesn’t like to hear you talk about how much middle school sucked. She never had a hard time in school herself, so when you bring up your own middle school days, she rolls her eyes and, in so many words, tells you to get over it and stop playing the victim. You wish you could just relax and have confidence that people do want you around, but it’s hard. You never assume you’re welcome anywhere without an explicit invitation, and you scrutinize everything you say, still beating yourself up if you think you made a faux pas somewhere.

You’re glad that awareness of bullying is increasing, at least in the media, but you’re scared about how school must be for kids today, now that there’s Facebook and Myspace and Twitter and Formspring. You know that rules and laws can punish kids for physical violence or saying outright mean things, but that there are some things that can’t be controlled—the spreading rumor, the subtle dig, the eye-roll. Bullying might never go away, and maybe you always would have been the awkward kid no matter what, but you do spend a lot of time wondering who you would have turned out to be if people hadn’t been so mean to you all those years ago.

Graduate of Life

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You may grow a new skin every seven years, but it seems like every four years, you start a new life. Four years of high school, then four years of college.

As of today, it’s been four years since I graduated from college. I guess that means that I’m no longer a…senior in life, I guess. But there will be no big changes. I’m not moving, I’m not heading to school, I’m not starting a new job. Life will just go on as usual.

But four years ago, all I could see was my old life ending. I’d been up all night with my friends, drinking the leftover alcohol and feeling more sad than nostalgic—friendships and relationships had changed so much over the course of college, and things, I thought, were only going to get worse. In the car with my family after the graduation, I kept falling asleep and then waking up in tears.

Life after college was really hard for awhile, for reasons I’m still not comfortable writing about on a public blog. But it did get easier. If I could, this is what I’d go back in time and tell myself on May 22, 2006:

-The first year out of college will be the most difficult year of your life. There will be a lot of tears and worries and stress-induced illness. But it won’t last forever. When you look back on it, you won’t know how you ever got through it, but you did. Like Chumbawumba, you’ll get knocked down, but you’ll get up again.

-You will be amazingly lucky in your housing situations. No bipolar roommates who throw things at you like in college. Christina will save what’s left of your sanity during that awful first year. You won’t have sewage leaks or flooded basements like some of your friends, either—in fact, both of your apartments will be fantastic.

-Right now you have it in your head that friendships don’t happen after college. Maybe it’s because you never made close friends at any of your previous jobs or because you remember Koren Zailckas writing about how cliquey and mean the girls at her first job out of college were in her book Smashed, but you’ll be totally unprepared for the friends you’ll make once college ends. Colleagues, fellow chorus members, and friends of friends will all become parts of your life. And you won’t just make friends, you’ll make close friends, the kinds who are always fun to be around but also support you and help you through difficult times. Like the Beatles, you’ll get by with a little help from your friends.

-Drama and cliquey-ness never really end (hell, they even happen in retirement homes), but they do get considerably better once you’re out of college. You’ve managed to reconnect with some friends you drifted apart from in college. In college, there was a friend-of-a-friend who disliked you to the point where she wouldn’t say hi back if you said hi to her and left a seat between you and her when you went with a group of people to a movie theater. A few years later, you’ll see her at a party and not only will she say hi to you first and ask where you live and what you’re up to, but you’ll actually have some nice conversations with her through the night. In college, you sometimes felt like everyone would eventually desert you or stab you in the back, but in life, you’re becoming more and more convinced that most people are good.

-Surprisingly, one of the things that will help convince you of that is work. While work will cause you some major headaches at times, the people you meet will by and large be fabulous. (Exceptions include that one girl who said, “Cancer!” in a cough after hearing you and another co-worker discuss your love for Diet Coke.) Pop culture has convinced you that cubicle jobs suck out your soul, that your boss will be a tyrant, and that coworkers will be the bane of your existence, but nothing could be further from the truth. Some of your happiest memories from the past four years have been work-related.

-You’ll always worry about money, but you’ll discover that however little you have, you’re pretty good at managing it.

-I wish I had better news for you regarding your love life, but I don’t. You’ve still never been in love or dated the same guy for more than a couple of months. You are out there dating, but not much luck so far. At least most of your friends are still single, too, and you’re mentally healthier than you were in college. Like Snow White, someday your prince will come. (Okay, feel free to roll your eyes at that one.)

-You still won’t quite feel like an adult in four years, and you still see “grown-ups” as a group separate from yourself. You don’t feel like that quite as much as you did right out of college, though. Also, college students annoy the hell out of you now.

-You’ve seen a lot more of Boston and its surrounding areas now that you don’t view it in collegiate terms. You mention Teele Square and the Fort Point Channel in conversation now when you didn’t even know what those areas were four years ago. You’ll spend the first couple of years out of school living within feet of your college, allowing yourself to retain some of the life you loved, but moving to Davis Square will prove to be a very good decision and a change of scenery that will suit you well.

-You’ll talk a lot about how much you miss college for the first couple of years. At a Christmas party that first year, you and your friends will be exhausted from work and will spend the whole night in your friends’ tiny basement apartment sounding like the Chris Farley Show from SNL: “Hey, remember when we did (fun thing) in college? That was great.” A year out of college, you’ll write this blog entry. But before you even realize it, you won’t say things like that anymore. You did love college and you do miss your friends, your classes, and the general college atmosphere, and you’ll buy a BC Snuggie to remind yourself of that, but after awhile you’ll start to realize how much you love your life right now. There are ways you’d like it to improve, but as you finish your fourth year of life, life looks pretty damn good.

Since I Haven’t Updated Much Lately…

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…let’s write a post about OTHER blogs! (But don’t stop reading this one—more entries coming soon, I promise!)

It came to my attention recently that I was not using Google to its full capacity. Aside from having to politely nod and pretend I know what “Google Buzz” and “Google Wave” are (I’m still not quite sure what they are, even after…uh, Googling them), I realized that I had nothing to say when other people started talking about their Google readers. Back in July, I resolved to set up a Google Reader but didn’t get around to it until a couple of weeks ago.

So now I have all the blogs I read, including the ones I constantly forget about and only manage to check occasionally, in one place, and damn, is it addictive. Whenever I’m online and my mind starts wandering, immediately, I think, “Ooh! Google Reader!” After I’d been on it for about a week, a friend informed me that you can also friend people on Google Reader and share items with them and view their shared items. When I went to add people to share things with, I discovered that nine people had already added me.

Since it took me about nine months to set up a Google Reader after resolving to do so, it will probably take me about as long to set up a blogroll on SSTS. In the meantime, I thought I’d share with you some of the blogs I have on my Google Reader. Over half of them are written by people I know, but some are blogs I discovered on my own or through word of mouth. Here’s a sampling:

Jezebel
Jezebel floods my Google Reader every day. I find about one out of five of their entries interesting, but since theyupdate so often, that’s a lot of readable content. Some of it is celebrity gossip I don’t care about (I really don’t need to read any more posts about Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan), but they also have a lot of well-written, feminist-perspective takes on pop culture and current events.

White Whine
Complaining about the large number of posts on Jezebel, I think, would qualify as a White Whine. Rebekah introduced me to this site awhile ago, and since then, I’ve constantly been referencing it. Have you ever heard someone complain about something like an iPhone app and thought, “Dude. You have an iPhone.”? That’s the whole idea behind this site. Example: “just arrived in Tokyo to find out that my BB doesn’t work here. Nice. I loathe using my laptop.” It’s hilarious not only for the dumb things people complain about, but because you can probably hear yourself in a lot of them. We all white whine sometimes.

What Claudia Wore
I’ve already blogged about this.

Tomato Nation
Sarah Bunting, aka Sars, is one of the founders of Television Without Pity, a site I used to spend a lot of time on and met some great friends on. She posts about all kinds of things, but she also has a semiweekly advice column called The Vine. While I dislike her opinions on baseball immensely (she’s a Yankees fan) and don’t always agree with her taste in TV, her advice is usually spot-on. The Vine also serves as a lost-and-found of sorts—people write in asking the readers to help identify a book/movie/song/product they’re looking for, and the readers are usually able to help.

So Much: A Diary of Decadent Desserts
Julie’s awesome blog on the sweet treats in her life.

Smart, Pretty, and Awkward
Rebekah finds a lot of cool blogs. She just introduced me to this one (via Google Reader!) this past week. Each post gives you three tips: one on how to be smarter, one on how to be prettier, and one on how to be less awkward.

Pamie.com
Pamela Ribon, aka Pamie, used to write Gilmore Girls recaps for Television Without Pity, but now she writes for TV itself. She’s been a writer on Samantha Who, Mind of Mencia, and Hot Properties and has written three novels, the most recent of which I just finished. She’s been blogging since 1998, back when she was a struggling twenty-something, and it’s encouraging to read her archives and see how far she’s come since then.

Notes on Popular Culture and Dissection and Introspection
These two blogs are written by Media Maven, a fellow twenty-something blogger who writes in a funny, accessible voice and has her own thoughts on the death of the song lyric away message.

Mjsbigblog
The largest and most popular American Idol blog out there.
….What?

Looks and Books
This is co-worker Jill’s blog, a very cool site about clothes and books…just what it sounds like.

Double X
Slate’s blog for women. Not updated quite as frequently as Jezebel, but they often have some good, female-focused posts. Just avoid anything by the obnoxious Amanda Marcotte, who’s a terrible writer.

Blonde Champagne
A few years ago, I read a wonderful book called 20-Something Essays by 20-Something Writers. One of those essays was by twenty-something Mary Beth Ellis (although I think she’s in her thirties now). Her essay was a funny yet poignant ode to living with OCD, and I’ve really enjoyed her blog as well.

Four-oh-what?

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There’s an episode of Friends where Phoebe is talking about a 401 (k) and pronounces it “four-oh-wunk.” Ever since I saw it, that’s how I hear 401 (k) in my head when I read it.

One of these days I’m going to say it out loud and it will be really embarrassing.

Dead AIM?

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My work friends seem convinced that no one uses AIM anymore. Everyone else I know is not so sure—I know a lot of other people who do use AIM pretty regularly.

So I don’t know if most of the world has moved on to Gchat or if my publishing colleagues are just ahead of the curve (those in the know, insert joke about publishing and media here). Personally, although instant messaging figured heavily into my college thesis, I don’t like talking online via any means. To me, it’s one of the most awkward possible means of having a conversation. I’m terrible at reading tone of voice online, I can never tell if the person I’m talking to really wants to be talking to me, I never know when to end the conversation (especially if I want to remain online but just not talk to the person anymore), and if someone disappears for awhile, I don’t know if she went to pick up her laundry or if something I said offended her.

However, I do remember college, where life revolved around AIM. Before the Facebook status or Twitter, there was the AIM away message. We were constantly on AIM, updating our profiles to reflect the new dorm room we were in, the colors of our mood, and whatever clever quote we’d happen to come across. And it was imperative that the away message inform our friends, classmates, and potential stalkers where we were at all times. Studying! In the shower! Out with my friends (see, world, I have friends)! “Why isn’t the guy I like answering my messages? He’s away but not idle!” “Ooh, look, the girl in my freshman philosophy class whose away messages I check even though I never talk to her just got arrested with her roommates after her party got busted!” (True story.)

One thing that’s been lost in the translation from away messages to Facebook statuses and Twitter, though, is the art of the song lyric message. Most song lyrics are too long to sum up our deepest feelings in 140 characters, but that wasn’t a problem with the AIM away message! No, we didn’t have to come right out and say what we were feeling because an artist we liked had done it for us, leaving us with cryptic lyrics to provide our friends, hoping that they’d decipher our mood. And there were truly lyrics for every emotion. Here’s a sampling of how melodramatic and self-important Katie’s buddy list thought she was in college (and yes, I know my taste in music is all over the place and often questionable and no, I am not ashamed):

The Life-Is-Good-Let’s-Enjoy-This-Moment Message
This is the time to remember
‘Cause it will not last forever
These are the days to hold onto
‘Cause we won’t although we’ll want to
This is the time
But time is gonna change…
-Billy Joel, “This Is the Time”

Turns out not where but who you’re with that really matters
-Dave Matthews Band, “Best of What’s Around”

The I-Have-An-Unrequited-Crush Message
I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now…
-Oasis, “Wonderwall”

Look at me
My depth perception must be off again
‘Cause this hurts deeper than I thought it did
It has not healed with time…
-Saliva, “Rest in Pieces”

The I’m-Having-A-Crisis Message
Back in the days when everything seemed so much clearer
Women in white who knew what their lives held in store
Where are they now, those women who stared from the mirror?
We can never go back to before
-“Back to Before” from Ragtime (a song I love from a musical I’ve never actually seen)

I just don’t understand how
You can smile with all those tears in your eyes
And tell me everything is wonderful now…
-Everclear, “Wonderful”

The I-Will-Survive-Whatever-That-Crisis-Is Message
It’s times like these we learn to live again
It’s times like these we give and give again
It’s times like these we learn to love again
It’s times like these time and time again
-Foo Fighters, “Times Like These”

It’s all right, I’m okay
I think God can explain
I believe I’m the same
I get carried away
It’s all right, I’m okay
I think God can explain
I’m relieved, I’m relaxed
I’ll get over it, yeah
I’m so much better than you guessed
I’m so much bigger than you guessed
I’m so much brighter than you guessed
-Splender, “I Think God Can Explain”

The I’m-A-Supportive-Friend Message
If I am only here to watch you as you suffer
I will let you down
-Nine Days, “If I Am”

When you come back down
If you land on your feet
I hope you find a way to make it back to me
When you come around
I’ll be there for you
Don’t have to be alone with what you’re going through
-Lifehouse, “Come Back Down”

The I-Like-Myself-Even-If-You-Don’t-You-Bitch Message
Sometimes I’m clueless and I’m clumsy
But I’ve got friends that love me
They know just where I stand
It’s all a part of me
That’s who I am
-Jessica Andrews, “Who I Am”

I don’t want to be anything other than what I’ve been trying to be lately
All I have to do is think of me and I have peace of mind
I’m tired of looking ‘round rooms wondering what I gotta do and who I’m supposed to be
I don’t want to be anything other than me.
-Gavin DeGraw, “I Don’t Want to Be”

The OMG-Onset-Of-Quarter-Life-Crisis Message
What do you do with a B.A. in English?
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college and plenty of knowledge
Have earned me this useless degree
I can’t pay the bills yet ‘cause I have no skills yet
The world is a big, scary place
But somehow I can’t shake
The feeling I might make
A difference to the human race
-“What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?” from Avenue Q

I wake up scared
I wake up strange
I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever gonna change
I wake up scared
I wake up strange
And everything around me stays the same
-Barenaked Ladies, “What a Good Boy”

The I’m-Pissed-At-Someone-I’m-Not-Going-To-Name Message
You were almost kind, you were almost true
Don’t let them see that other side of you
-Guster, “Either Way”

Look here she comes now
Bow down and stare in wonder
Oh how we love you
No flaws when you’re pretending
But now I know she
Never was and never will be
You don’t know how you’ve betrayed me
And somehow you’ve got everybody fooled
-Evanescence, “Everybody’s Fool”

The I-Just-Watched-Garden-State Message

They won’t see us waving from such great heights
“Come down now,” they’ll say
But everything looks perfect from far away
-Iron and Wine, “Such Great Heights”

It’s all right
‘Cause there’s beauty in the breakdown
-Frou Frou, “Let Go” (actually, I didn’t use these away messages much myself, but there was a time where it seemed like half my buddy list did)

The Has-No-Relevance-To-My-Life-I-Just-Like-The-Sound-Of-It Message
And football teams are kissing queens and losing sight of having dreams
In a world where what we want is only what we want until it’s ours…
-Train, “Calling All Angels”

Scars are souvenirs you never lose
The past is never far
Did you lose yourself somewhere out there?
Did you get to be a star?And don’t it make you sad to know that life is more than who we are?
-Goo Goo Dolls, “Name”

The Time-For-Bed-Message (yes, I had a few of those)
When you dream, what do you dream about? Do you dream about music or mathematics
Or planets too far for the eye?Do you dream about Jesus or quantum mechanics
Or angels who sing lullabyes?
-Barenaked Ladies, “When You Dream”

Someday we’ll all be gone
But lullabyes go on and on
They never die.
That’s how (buddy name) and I will be
-Billy Joel, “Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)” (remember that thing that would insert the buddy’s screenname into the away message?)

Plus lots of other songs that only worked on certain occasions. U2’s “Beautiful Day” for the first nice spring day we had. When I participated in a dance marathon, I was thrilled that it gave me a chance to use Melissa Etheridge’s “Dance Without Sleeping.” And around graduation time…do I even need to name all the sappy songs we had to choose from?

Writing this post has made me realize that I listen to music differently now than I did when I was in college. I think having the option of the away message gave me a more self-centered view of what I listened to. Now, when I hear a song I like, I often think of a story that the lyrics could be applied to, but it’s not usually a scenario that involves me. And being a few years removed from college has made me see how inconsequential most of the dramas I paid tribute to in my away messages really were.

I don’t usually beg for comments, but in this case, I know I’m not the only one who fondly remembers the days where AIM was the center of our worlds and the away message was the source of all your knowledge about your friends, roommates, and former classmates you haven’t seen since freshman year. What did you put up for your away messages?

Katie Recommends: Oscar Edition

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This year, I decided that I’d see all the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars. Unfortunately, I forgot that this year they’d upped the Best Picture nominees to ten. Nevertheless, I did see all ten of them before the Oscars, and here are my thoughts on the Best Picture nominees.

Up
I knew it wasn’t going to win, but this was actually my favorite nominee. It’s wonderful— funny, suspenseful, touching, and, at the beginning, incredibly sad. (The marriage montage? Tell me you weren’t crying during that.)

An Education
If I did a regular “Katie Recommends,” this would get top billing—it’s a gem of a movie that not enough people have seen. Carey Mulligan is fantastic as Jenny, a smart sixteen-year-old girl in the London suburbs in the early 1960s. Jenny’s well-meaning but overbearing parents are pressuring her to get into Oxford to study English. Then she meets David (Peter Saarsgard), a charming older man who gives her a ride home one day. Soon, he’s swept her off her feet, taking her to jazz clubs, the opera, even Paris—and charming her parents into letting her go. It’s so much more exciting than what she’s used to that she starts wondering what the point of all she’s been working toward is—why go to Oxford and then pursue the limited career opportunities she’ll have as a woman when she could have all the excitement David is able to offer her? The screenplay is by Nick Hornby, which is in itself a reason to see it, and combined with Mulligan’s acting, you start to find Jenny’s logic convincing, even as you begin to see that there’s something sketchy about David (not going to spoil the ending). It’s also unexpectedly funny—Alfred Molina as Jenny’s father, in particular, adds a lot to the movie.

Precious
I definitely recommend this movie, but you need to be in the right mood to see it. Precious is an obese, illiterate teenager whose mother physically and emotionally abuses her and whose father rapes her, resulting in two pregnancies. Mo’Nique is fantastically scary as the mother, and some parts of it are very intense. But weirdly, it’s as uplifting as it is depressing. Gabourey Sidibe, who plays Precious, is almost as good as Mo’Nique—I can’t believe she’d never acted before this. You’ve probably heard about Mariah Carey and her mustache, too (she’s not bad, but it’s not a terribly demanding part), but I’m really surprised Paula Patton hasn’t gotten more attention for her role as the teacher who helps Precious get her life on track. I wouldn’t say she was the character I remembered most, but she was up there.

Up In the Air
It seems like a lot of people are kind of meh on this movie, but I really liked it. For one thing, it’s very timely—George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a guy who works for a company that fires people from other companies, and considering they probably started planning for the movie before the unemployment rate started plummeting, the filmmakers are probably jumping for joy about the recession. Ryan is based out of Omaha, but really lives in the sky, flying all over the country without any connections to any one place or any one person. In a job where he’s paid to disrupt people’s lives, there’s no sense of accomplishment, so he finds a reward in collecting frequent flyer miles and membership reward points. But then his company brings in Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a twenty-something Ivy League grad, who has the idea to do the firing via videoconferencing. Ryan does not take this well—but first he has to travel with Natalie, showing her how the firing is done. It’s directed by Jason Reitman, whose last movie was Juno, a kind of unconventional romantic comedy. If you see this movie, you need to know that despite what you see on the commercials, it’s not remotely a romantic comedy. Also, while I love George Clooney, I don’t think he should have gotten an Oscar nomination—he’s playing the same role he always plays. Vera Farmiga, who plays a business traveler whom Ryan gets romantically involved with, shouldn’t have been nominated either. But Anna Kendrick is fabulous. Until I saw Precious, I was rooting for her to win Best Supporting Actress. Now I think Mo’Nique totally deserved the Oscar, but I hope this is just the beginning of a long, illustrious career for Kendrick.

The Hurt Locker
I probably wouldn’t have seen The Hurt Locker had it not been nominated for (and later won) Best Picture—war movies are just not my thing. That said, The Hurt Locker is extremely well-done for what it is. It’s one of those movies that’s easy to sum up in one sentence—it’s about soldiers dismantling bombs in Iraq. Jeremy Renner is great as one particularly reckless soldier, and the direction is fabulous. The script was written by a journalist who spent time with a unit like this in Iraq, and the result is a surprisingly apolitical movie, considering that it’s set in Iraq in 2004.

Avatar
You’ve already heard my thoughts on another James Cameron movie. While my thoughts on this one are not quite as enthusiastic, I will say that Avatar is definitely worth seeing, and if you do see it, you should see it in the theater in 3-D. Visually, it’s absolutely beautiful. The writing, however, is awful. It’s incredibly simplistic with one-dimensional characters and a plot that’s stolen from the 90s kids’ movie FernGully. I’ve heard people read a lot into it—it’s a metaphor for Iraq, it’s anti-American, blah blah blah fishcakes—but honestly, I don’t think James Cameron was thinking about it that hard. And one random little thing that kept bugging me—the protagonist, played by Sam Worthington, is a paraplegic. The movie takes place in 2149—they’re invading other planets, but they haven’t found a cure for paralysis by then? Really? On the plus side, Sam Worthington is quite attractive.

District 9
I actually didn’t like this movie at all. It takes place in South Africa after a race of aliens have ended up stranded on Earth, and the government has to round up and relocate the aliens, who are derogatorily referred to as “prawns.” I think the biggest problem with it is that it’s told in a mockumentary style, which would work for a comedy, but in this case keeps you from getting drawn into the story. It’s too bad, too, because it had the potential to be an interesting commentary on racism and xenophobia, but for that to happen we would have to care about the rest of the movie.

A Serious Man
I’m not usually a fan of the Coen Brothers—I liked Fargo, but absolutely hated No Country for Old Men—but this movie wasn’t bad. Starring absolutely no one you’ve ever heard of, it’s about a Jewish professor in 1967 Minnesota whose life is falling apart to the point of absurdity. His wife has left him for another man, forcing him to sleep in a motel along with his freeloading brother. His kids are stealing from him, the father of a student is trying to bribe him into passing his son, he’s up for tenure and someone is writing letters to the committee telling them he shouldn’t be granted it, and he’s in the middle of a property dispute with his neighbor. A friend suggests that he consult with three rabbis, which he does, but he never finds the answers that would help him make sense of all the chaos. None of this is as depressing as it sounds, by the way—it’s more of a black comedy than anything else. I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it…it’s somewhere in the middle of movies that came out last year.

Inglorious Bastards
A lot of people like this movie, but I just could not get into it. Don’t quite know why. Christoph Waltz is great as a Nazi, though.

The Blind Side
I liked this movie, but it won’t appeal to everyone. You’ve seen the commercials, and it’s exactly what it looks like—a sappy, feel-good sports movie based on a true story. Personally, I have a weakness for that kind of movie, so I enjoyed it. I don’t think Sandra Bullock was any better than the other Best Actress nominees, although her winning was worth it just for her great speech. However, I completely understood why she was nominated after seeing an interview with Leigh Anne Tuohy, the woman she portrays in the film. Leigh Anne seems like someone out of one of those Real Housewives shows— a bleached blonde, type A interior decorator from Memphis whose husband owns a bunch of Taco Bells and whose expression tells you that you won’t win any argument you start with her, and Bullock completely nails this woman’s personality, mannerisms, accent, and manner of speaking. My one issue with is it is that it doesn’t give Michael Oher enough credit for his own success—yes, he had a lot of help from his adoptive family, but many kids in similar circumstances wouldn’t have thrived the way he did. But if you like movies like Rudy or Remember the Titans, you’ll like this one, too.

The ATM, or Automatic Teller Machine

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Recently, when I was home from work over Presidents’ Day Weekend, I watched a show I spent a lot of time watching as a kid: Sesame Street. Recently, I’ve discovered a bunch of clips from old Sesame Street episodes on YouTube, and I’m surprised at how entertaining they still are to me as an adult. How can you not love Cookie Monster as Alistair Cookie on Monsterpiece Theater?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSiVZ524yW4]

Or “The Beetles” singing “Letter B”?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIpB-pCMfBE]

Or Ernie dancing himself to sleep as Bert grumbles?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk1Y4xo4XJ4]

Or an orange singing Carmen, in a clip that was probably done by an animator on drugs?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8TqOTe3ODc]

So imagined how disappointed I was to sit down and discover that the unthinkable has happened.

After forty years, Sesame Street has been dumbed down.

Gone are the pop-culture references that only parents watching along with the kids get. Rather than a cute commercial about the letter F, we get some Muppet on the street trying to get kids to say “finger” and “foot” as examples of words beginning with F. The show is divided into segments, with Ernie and Bert appearing as cartoon characters (blasphemy!) in one of them. Another is “Elmo’s World” and goes on for fifteen minutes. Elmo, a character good in small doses, is basically the star of the show now, with characters like Big Bird reduced to brief appearances in “Elmo’s World.”

The rest of PBS is in a similarly sorry state. (Yea alliteration!) Most of them are now cartoons, except for insipid shows like Barney and Teletubbies. Personally, that disappoints me a lot. And I know I’m not the only one. Back when I did my 25 things, in #12 I reminisced about the old PBS shows and I was amazed at how many people commented in agreement.

I was such a PBS kid. Until middle school, it was practically the only channel I watched. If I ever have billions of dollars, after I end world hunger and most major diseases, I’ll donate a ton of money to PBS with the stipulation that they need to create more intelligent, well-written shows for kids—shows like these ones:

Ghostwriter
Word! This wasn’t just a fantastic kids’ show; it was a fantastic show, period. I had some episodes on video, and upon re-watch, they’re still genuinely entertaining. The show was about a bunch of pre-teen kids in Brooklyn who were friends with a ghost they dubbed “Ghostwriter” whom only they could see. Ghostwriter couldn’t see, hear, or talk- just read and write, and he appeared only as a circle with a couple of curvy lines over it or as multicolored swirls of words. With the help of Ghostwriter, the kids solved mysteries that went over the course of four or five episodes.

I was so obsessed with this show. The character Rob was my first-ever crush. I’d write down all the clues and try to solve the mysteries on my own. I entered a contest and was thrilled to get one of the consolation prizes—a pen on a string like the kids on the show used.

Square One TV
Another high-quality show. It was all about math, and although it was aimed at elementary schoolers, they had a lot of short songs, skits, and cartoons like on Sesame Street—examples include “8% of My Love,” “ Nine Nine Nine,” and “The Mathematics of Love.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDqrW85RECE]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q53GmMCqmAM]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DzfPcSysAg]

But the best part of the show was “Mathnet.” It was a Dragnet parody featuring two detectives solving math-related crimes over the course of five episodes. It was hilarious—lots of jokes that only adults would get and recurring gags. There was one episode where they kept talking about an ATM, and every single time they said ATM, they added, “Or, automatic teller machine,” which is actually how I know what ATM stands for. And I honestly did learn a lot about math from it—I knew what the Fibonacci sequence was way before we covered it in school.

Wishbone
Wishbone was a really cute Jack Russell terrier who lived with a twelve-year-old boy named Joe and his mother and loved the classics of literature. Every episode would retell a story like Romeo and Juliet, Silas Marner, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among many others, with Wishbone playing one of the main characters. Meanwhile, in the real world, there’d be a story going on with Joe and his friends Samantha and David that closely paralleled the classic story being told. While they often left out a lot of details, the re-telling was usually pretty faithful. Even in college I was drawing on things I’d learned from this show—I didn’t read The Tempest until then, but had seen it portrayed on Wishbone.

Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?
This was a game show, and when I was seven, my life’s ambition was to be on it. There was one multiple-choice round with questions about geography; then a memory game round where you had to find the loot, the warrant, and the criminal in that order; then having to locate seven countries on a map of a certain country within forty-five seconds. The grand prize was a trip anywhere in the lower 48. There was always some kind of funny segment with the host, Greg Lee, in the chief’s office—something would happen like the chief’s head falling off or a rude message from Carmen Sandiego herself. I was so sad to hear that Lynne Thigpen, who played the Chief, died in 2003. The theme song and various other songs on the show were sung by the incomparable Rockapella. By the way, it turns out I couldn’t have been on that show anyway—Wikipedia tells me that the contestants had to be from the New York City area. But if I had been, I would have been awesome.

With Open Arms

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A few weeks after Christmas this year, I got a late present—the one I’d gotten myself.

Yep, I got myself a Snuggie.

And because I am, in fact, one of those obnoxious people who’s obsessed with her alma mater, it’s a BC Snuggie.

 

(Yes, my head is cut off deliberately. I have a bad feeling that putting a picture of myself in a Snuggie out on the Internet is going to come back to haunt me.)

It’s kind of funny—at first, it seemed like the Snuggie was going to go the way of the fanny pack and the scrunchie, things you can no longer wear even ironically. Those ridiculous commercials like the one below made it seemed destined for mocking by pseudo-celebrities when VH1 does I Love the 2010s.

But a funny thing happened—all of a sudden, a Snuggie became something desirable. People were excited about getting Snuggies for Christmas. Facebook statuses like “My roommate and I got each other Snuggies for Christmas!” and “Snowing out…drinking wine and watching a movie in my Snuggie” started popping up. The commercials even started making fun of themselves.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeM4GMGWInY&hl=]
Here’s my theory: if the Snuggie were a band, it would be Journey—so uncool it kind of became cool. 80s power ballads are as easy a target as blankets with sleeves, and as recently as 2004, you had characters like Luke on Gilmore Girls declaring that Journey freaks him out. But eventually, the backlash developed backlash. Journey was Ryan’s favorite band on The O.C. Dave Eggers reminisces about singing along to “Any Way You Want It” in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. “Don’t Stop Believing” has shown up on the Glee pilot, the Sopranos finale, and every major sporting event in between. At this point, if someone dares to be snobby about Journey, you find yourself looking at him with pity. Really, don’t you feel bad for someone who’s never sung a Journey song at the top of his or her lungs?

Just like I now feel bad for anyone who hasn’t curled up on the couch to watch a movie with a cup of hot chocolate and a Snuggie. All hail blankets with sleeves! Don’t stop believing.