So I'm sitting here at work at 4:23 on a Friday afternoon, 37 minutes away from a 4-day weekend, and I'm pretty sure I'm here because nobody remembered to tell me to go home. So. I just finished watching a couple of episodes of Notes From the Underbelly online, and that show is actually totally funny. It might help that the main characters are TOTALLY me, my husband, and my best friends, except plus babies. But in a few years. Just personality-wise. But it's really pretty clever, and I don't know anybody else that watches it except for my sister because I told her to, and that's sad. So.
I'm excited about people's year-end lists. I like summaries of things, they're so lazy, like my last post. Just all condensed and action-packed, like everything else that's good. Here's the beginning of mine, to kill time:
Favorite Movies That I Saw In 2007:
Lars and the Real Girl
Paris Je T'aime
Juno
Junebug
Paper Moon
Millions (I think I saw it for the first time this year)
Pan's Labyrinth
Streetcar Named Desire
Waitress
Favorite TV Shows That I Saw in 2007:
Pushing Daisies
Lost (we just started it and have watched seasons 1 and 2)
The Office (just can't beat it, UK or US)
Veronica Mars Season 3
Favorite Albums That I Got in 2007:
Phil Wickham - Cannons
I don't know because my iPod is broken and so is my CD player in my car and I have been on total music drought lately.
Favorite Books That I Read in 2007:
Harry Potter 7
Time Traveller's Wife
Ok I never really wrote about our trip to Vegas and I'm not very good at like travel writing or whatever (so much for my dream of taking over for Rick Steves some day when he retires). So here's what we did, in list form which is lazy but so am I.
Casinos Visited:
MGM Grand
Excalibur
Luxor
Caesar's Palace
Treasure Island
South Point
The Venetian
Paris, Las Vegas
Bellagio
Dollars Gambled:
$0.00
Restaurants Patronized:
Wolfgang Puck's Postrio
Hard Rock Cafe Vegas
Crappy restaurant/brewery in this train station near Fremont Street
Raisin' Canes Chicken Strips
Yummy like southwest/Baja Fresh type place in the Miracle Mile Shops
Shopping:
Miracle Mile Shops
The Forum at Caesar's Palace
Went to the Fashion Show Mall but it was closing
Las Vegas Outlets (yeah baby)
Smith's grocery store
Planet Hollywood
Movies Watched:
Lions for Lambs in the theater in the casino next door to ours
Cold Mountain
Most of Black Hawk Down
The Chamber
Fever Pitch
Anchorman
Die Hard II
Hours of HGTV
Comments From People on the Street (or in the bus):
"Baby's got BACK! Yeah!"
"Um, has anybody ever told you you look like that actor Joan of Arc?" I'm assuming there that she's talking about Leelee Sobieski, because I actually have heard that several times, and not Amber Tamblyn, but who knows.
Hours Spent in First and Probably Last "90 Minute" Time Share Presentation Ever:
> 3
Amount They Wanted For a 2-Week-a-Year Condo:
Approx. (Our Gross Annual Income) x (1.2) = (ha, haha.)
Consumed in Our Room in About 6 Days: (in our room, not on the streets vulnerable to theives and horrible Vegaspeople, Dad, and also, remember it's over 6 days and with 2 people, one of whom has a very high metabolism)
1 bottle complimentary Chardonnay
1 bottle Yellowtail Red
Approx. 12 Mikes Hard Somethings (Variety pack)
1 bottle Smirnoff Vodka
Dollars Spent on Stupid Bottled Toiletries that I Then Threw Away and Anyway I Had Them and Had to Leave Them At Home Because the TERRORISTS HAVE WON:
I don't know, but too many. And here's my little spiel about all of that. There are MUCH more effective ways, I am sure, of making sure people don't blow your airplane up, that do not inconvenience EVERYONE, immensely. My completely unfounded theory is that there are a few people out there, like say 10% of the population that hears about something like that whole near-incident and needs MEASURES TAKEN, whatever those measures may be, it doesn't really matter. And the other, sane, rational, un-paranoid 90% of us have to BUY ALL NEW SHAMPOO in the super expensive hotel gift shops and then leave it there half-used just because if something wasn't done, those 10% people would flip out. Doesn't mean it's effective, it means it makes those people feel safer because obviously, to a simple mind, horrible inconvenience = safety. Anyway.
Of course, I'm kind of the type of person that I don't sit around and think about all of the things I should be afraid of, and then when something does happen and a danger is suddenly brought to my attention, I'm kinda of the "the safest day to fly is the day after a crash" mentality, which yes, I'm sure that will change when I have kids. But as it is, I just don't waste time worrying about stuff.
Anyway,
Shows:
Cirque du Soleil, Ka (which was AWESOME)
Sirens of TI (which doesn't really count but it's kind of lame to have a list with only one show on it.)
Light show on Fremont Street (biggest LCD screen in the world, also doesn't count, but see above.)
Hilarious Trolly Drivers Who Quoted Entire Long Poems Impressively As A Wedding Gift to Me And Dane:
1, but that's kind of all you need, right?
Do you know who that is? Because you do, but maybe you just don't know it yet. He's this guy. Everybody knows this guy and he has been like 98% of the movies that were worth seeing in the past about 15 years, and even the ones not worth seeing he was the only part in them that was worth seeing.
Seriously.
28 Days Later (shut up, I liked it), Gangs of New York, Cold Mountain, Troy, The Village (I hated both of those but HE was good dadgummit), Breakfast on Pluto, Harry Potters 4 and 5, Beowulf, Far and Away (again, shut up, I liked it when I was little.), Braveheart, Michael Collins, AI, and he's about to be in this movie that looks hilarious with Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes called In Bruges and I'm totally going to see it. Anyway, you knew who he was, now you know his name because he deserves it.
So last night some friends came over and we had pizza and watched a movie. The movie was completely awesome. Well, bad, but really funny. It's called Mixed Nuts, and it has Steve Martin as this goofy guy that runs a suicide hotline, Rita Wilson as his eternally sunshiney assistant person, um, Juliette Lewis as a pregnant crazy hippie woman/Mary figure, Anthony LaPaglia as a drunken suicidal Santa/unemployed wall mural artist, JON STEWART and PARKER POSEY in total throwaway roles as these rollerblading christmas tree people, LIEV SCHRIEBER as a cross-dressing mambo-ing depressive, Adam Sandler as, basically, himself, except I'm pretty sure this movie was before the whole schtick was so tired, so it was still entertaining, Rob Reiner as a veterinarian, and Madeleine Kahn as this oldish lady who RAPS while stuck in an elevator along with a kiddie beat box thingie. Seriously, go check it out. I couldn't do it justice.
We also tried this ... imaginative concoction. It was, well, completely disgusting. I agree much more with the first reviewer commenter person, not so much with the main scoring thing at the top of the page. Yes, it actually is clam-tomato-flavored beer. Just what it sounds like.
I promise to post about Vegas soon. It's just going to be one with pictures and stuff, and I can't commit to that just yet.
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about the banana that hung itself today in our kitchen trash can. There's this banana that's kind of beat-up looking, and it looks like maybe somebody threw it in stem-side first or something, and it kind of poked through the trash can liner and then stuck, hanging down. It looks kind of tragic. Just thought I'd share.
Yes! Believe it! Two posts in one day! Not even about the same thing!
I saw Lars and the Real Girl the other day and I would like to recommend it to anyone. Except That Guy. You know, That Guy Who Probably Would Snort And Snicker Every Time The "Real Doll" Sex Doll Is On Screen. Because that guy would be disappointed, or would ruin it for everybody else. It's not that kind of movie. They never go there.
So there's this guy, Lars, played by Ryan Gosling, who is just so dadgum charismatic. I was rooting for him as the coke-and-meth-and-whatever-else-head elementary school teacher in Half Nelson, and I was SO rooting for him as the semi-unwashed, delusional, mustachioed, loner phobic in this movie. Anyway, he's, well, a semi-unwashed, delusional, mustachioed, loner multiphobic who lives in the garage apartment of a house that he owns with his brother, and his brother, Gus, and sister in law, Karen (Paul Scheider and Emily Mortimer) live in the main house, and are expecting a baby.
Anyway, after a coworker shows him these Real Dolls that are incredibly lifelike and that you can order online, Lars orders one (Bianca) and introduces her to the town as his girlfriend. A quick trip to the local doctor, and Gus and Karen learn that this delusion is there because Lars needs it, and will be gone when he stops needing it, and in the meantime they all need to play along.
It's pretty much just this love story between Lars and his community, or Lars and his brother and sister-in-law, and they are all so fantastic. You definitely have to give a little to the imagination, there is certainly some suspension of disbelief. I'm pretty sure that a town does not exist anywhere in this country where everyone would be that sweet about something like that, but if you let that go, it is the sweetest, funniest, most fantastically-acted movie I've seen in a long, long time.
It might also make you glad for a community of people who love and know you well, as opposed to all of these other fiercely individualistic movies out these days, Into the Wild, etc. etc. that tend to make everybody want to travel and move all over the place and Be! Their! Own! Person!
Last night I watched Vertigo, and it was just so different than I expected. I saw Psycho pretty recently too, for the first time. (I know! I know! Who do I think I am, reaching the ripe old age of 24 without having seen those!) It's interesting how narrative arcs in movies have changed so much, or at least the ways in which they present them, and even though it seems like I see really different kinds of movies all the time, I still have these really deeply rooted expectations.
Like, in Psycho, I was really surprised when they killed off Lila within the first like 40 minutes of the movie. These days, if the movie was going to star the boyfriend and the sister all along, they would have been introduced earlier, seems like.
I was also really surprised when the big scene with the jumping off of the roof came 45 minutes before the end of the movie, in Vertigo. It might have been different if I didn't have the DVD counter and the length of the movie on my netflix jacket, but I was like "wow, really? What's going to happen now?"
We recently watched the old Ocean's Eleven, too. The heist is over pretty quickly, and there is this whole, long, drawn out sequence of events afterwards that I just don't think modern audiences would have the patience for. I don't think anything was wrong with the way it was made, it's just interesting how we've been trained to experience stories.
Our last trip was into the Reef Mountains, to a small rural village called Chefchouan. It was totally different than the cities, and was really really cool. Here's a picture, kind of -- again, not many good pictures of like, what the town actually looked like.
We went to another rug factory, sort of -- but this one was this sweet little home with a whole family that worked on the rugs all day together. I actually bought a blanket there, and couldn't bring myself to haggle. Other people were all like "30 euros is a FORTUNE to them, this is so not worth that, you can't give them what they first ask for... etc. etc.", but I mean, come on. What's 30 euros to me? So yeah. The girls who had been suckered (read: intimidated) into paying like 200E for much smaller rugs were kind of kicking themselves. And we got to watch them make them.
We saw where all the women in the town did their laundry, in a river, and another market, which I REALLY wish I got a picture of. Oh well.
Here's my roommate Cynthia, and me making kind of a hyuck-hyuck-snort face. Not my most photogenic trip, that's for sure.
Right when we were about to get back on the bus to go, one of the Swedish girls (I think) said she had met this guy, and his wife did henna body art, and she'd do ours if we went with him. So about 6 of us or so followed this guy like all into the actual residential part of the town, into people's houses and back out, way deep into the town, and up into their house. She did it on the kitchen table for like 5E each.
I think I'm the one coming from the top left corner, for what it's worth. Oh yeah, and we had the most fantastic like multi-course dinners. That's the soup. Obviously.
Then we went back to Spain, which was so weird. I loved Morocco, but when we crossed the Strait and got to Malaga and saw, like, El Corte Ingles and grocery stores and stuff, everybody was kind of relieved to be back in the civilized world. And everything seemed so expensive. 1E for a coke! Every time we came back from Paris or Dublin, Andalucia seemed SO cheap and maybe a little old-fashioned. It was also always funny to me when I went on trips to be happy to be back "home" in Granada.
The next day we went to Tangiers, drove by the strip where all of the movie stars used to live, like Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson and whoever. Tangiers is GORGEOUS.
It's so weird, we went to this beach and looking at the sunset, it looked like the sky in the Lion King. So bizarre, because we were like not that many miles away from Spain, but somehow the sky just looked so African.
Another view, these are obviously outside the city on the coast. Um, duh. But the city is really big. I think I have a picture of it somewhere...
Well, that's Tangiers but it doesn't really show what it's like.
Need! Photographer!
Anyway, the reason we drove out to the beach near Tangiers was to see where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea "hug" each other, as Jamal said. You can't really see it in the picture, but there was actually a little ridge in the water where they kind of hit up against each other, and the water was a little bit different colors.
The African sunset.
We went to this really cool restaurant in Tangiers, where I got the "vegetarian" option, which naturally was chicken. Evidently, to people in at least Morocco, Spain, Italy, and France, it has to be red and bleeding to be considered meat. Who knew.
It was amazing, couscous and vegetables and an entire chicken, but it made me SO sick that night.
These are some of the only pictures I have of Cynthia from the whole semester. How sad is that?
Chefchouan will be later. Running out of time.
Part 2 of my world travels.
I went to Morocco either one day after I got back from Ireland, or I was back for one day before I went to Ireland. I think I went to Morocco first.
Anyway, my roommate Cynthia and I found the trip on the message board at our school. We were picked up by this random professor guy in Granada, and the three of us drove to Malaga in his tiny little car. When we got to Malaga, we met up with the rest of the tour group, which consisted of about seventeen Swedish and Dutch girls, all blonde except one, one more American girl, and one Dutch boy. So, all in all, twenty girls, one boy. They were all studying in Malaga. Naturally, with 18 Swedish and Dutch, 3 Americans, all studying in Spain, and visiting Africa, the entire bus spoke English the whole trip.
We got on the Gibraltar ferry, which was huge and amazingly fancy. It had like tons of snack bars and it was all solid shiny wood, with tons of seating (it wasn't very full), and lots of decks.
That's a view from the boat. I am a genius, and did not take a single picture of the boat. I always do that. It was cool though. I think what we're seeing there is Malaga (my excellent deductive skills tell me this, since it is a view of the wake of the boat.)
Our first day there we got a tour of Tetouan. It seems like most of the larger cities in Morocco, at least the ones we went to, are divided into quarters, or maybe 3 or 5 sections. Tetouan had a Jewish quarter, a Christian quarter, a Muslim quarter, and I think like a French quarter or something. I don't remember, I can't believe how little I remember from some parts of this trip.
Anyway we walked through some of the markets and stuff, and had to hold mint leaves under our noses so that we wouldn't be completely sickened by the smell. It was right after the end of Ramadan, so Cynthia and I had brought long-sleeved, muted colored, plain, loose-fitting shirts and jeans, and just to be safe we had brought no jewelry and as few gadgets as we could get away with. Pretty much every one of the Swedish and Dutch girls were about 6 feet tall, had platinum blonde hair, huge jewelry, tight-fitting, glittery tank tops, and like a million flashy phones and cameras. They were comPLETEly bombarded in all the markets by vendors, everybody either would stop and stare when they walked by or come up and try (very persistently) to sell them something. Cynthia and I and our little brown hair and boring clothes were practically left completely alone.
An unbelievably crappy picture of the end of a road in a marketplace, I'm pretty sure this was in Tetouan. I'm hiring a photographer to come on my next trip.
A paint store/stand. You mix it yourself.
Hannah from Sweden getting dressed like a local by some local ladies.
Hannah and Jamal, our tour guide. He was AWESOME.
This guy stopped and looked at us like we were the weirdest thing he'd ever seen until we were out of his sight.
We stayed in a really nice hotel that night, and all I really remember was that there was some football game on (no, not that football, the other one) that all the Europeans were FREAKING out over. We definitely didn't watch it. Oh, and we tended to get a cup of Yerba every single place we went.
While we were in Tetouan, I think, our tourguide took us to this Berber carpet factory place. I think he was getting some kind of kickback for it. It was kind of shady. We all went into this maze of a building with carpets everywhere, and they started doing this little presentation for us, showing us all of the carpets they had. When we walked in, there were like 2 guys in there. Then another guy came out with a rug, and another, and another, like just to lay them down to display, but there ended up being about 10 guys in there.
Then, once the presentation was done, (our tourguide was nowhere to be seen), they scattered, and each one of the little Berber carpetmaker guys came and took us in ones or twos to some other random corner or secluded room in the big giant house, and started pushing the whole sales pitch. I pulled my purse in and said "I don't have any money. No tengo dinero." before they even said anything. They were willing to take Visa, dirham, dollars, euros, probably even pesos. Cynthia and I swore up and down that we had no money at all until they let us go.
When we got back to the bus, all of these other girls had these rugs that they had bought for like 200 euros or something, just scared of the guys. Sketchy!
Tangiers in another post -- this one's getting too big.
Okay, that is seriously bizarre. I have been just totally antsy and discontented all day, partially having to do with my job, for a lot of reasons that it's not necessary to go into here.
But I remembered that I had written this post about other jobs I could have, at another time of serious discontent, vocationally speaking, and I decided that seemed like it was in the fall, which must have been about a year ago. So I looked it up in my archives, and it was EXACTLY a year ago, today. Cue Twilight Zone theme song.
So my question is, and has been for some time, do I have the best job in the universe, great pay, nice people, little responsibility, lots of time to do volunteer coordination/reading/translation/freelancing/etc.? Should I shut up and quit whining? Am I just restless because I've never done the same thing for this long before, and I need to just grow up?
Or should I listen to all of this and find a job that I actually care about? The people and the pay can be as great as you want, I don't think I'll ever give two craps about oil and gas. No offense, guys. Do I need to find something that has me outside, or active, or is giving back to something that I feel is worthwhile? I give back to what I'm passionate about now, as a side note, in my free time at work and occasionally outside of work.
These times pass, but they come back, too. And I keep my eyes open for something that would give me a creative outlet, or make a difference, or have me outside or active and healthy. But, obviously, this has been off and on bothering me for over a year now. So. I don't know.
Side note: Has anyone, or anyone that anyone knows, ever benefitted from a career counselor? I've yet to see the fruits of one.
