My Current Direction in Life

...is to become a media-consuming recluse!!

I'll get the diary-type stuff out of the way first.
Graduation. I, like Caroline, don't want to spend too long talking about it. Except I was kind of disturbed that I didn't cry. I took a very awkward picture with the twins, who I never ever talked to at Whitney, on the urging of their parents who work at the same place as my mom. Besides that weird moment, it was nice. Thursday, after playing Sims 3 in solitude for the whole morning (yes I know I'm pathetic) was pleasantly interrupted by a surprise phone call from Caro. (To Caro: You never call me to invite me out on stuff! You should do it more often. Call my home line if I don't pick up my cell. Otherwise I'll develop an abandonment complex). Went to ChikFila, however you spell it, with Caro, Tanya, Jodie, Jonathan, Alex. Ate free chicken sandwich, then bought random crap at Borders'.
I aim to exercise at least one hour a day this summer! I must get up in the morning to jog in the park, otherwise it is too hot and I don't want sunburn. Let's see how long this attempt will last.

My other aim is become more cultured this summer. It's been a long time since I regularly used the library, and seems like a good time to start again. So many books and movies that I am expected to have read/seen but haven't! Oh, the shame.
Current list from Cerritos Library
Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Mushroom Hunter's Field Guide. (The last book I highly recommend you check out from the Cerritos Library. It has color photographs of like 4 million mushrooms. I saw it hanging out of one of the shelves and I just had to grab it.)

Currently reading Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The former is actually a lot more agreeable than I thought it would be. I used to have this cool comic-book adaptation of it that I read obsessively as a little kid, but I never got around to reading the actual book out of sheer intimidation. But after finishing Middlemarch, I got the guts to start. It's quite fascinating. All of the characters are assholes in some degree or another, but I can't help being interested in them nonetheless. The thing that annoys me the most about it is the stupid accent of Joseph, Heathcliff's servant dude. I have to read it out loud to try to understand it phoenetically.

Oh right, the other book I'm reading right now. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I sort of regret buying it. I blame the power of the ever-mighty coupon. It started off relatively strong and pretty cute, but the zombie schtick is too tacked on. It's a shame; I think it could have been really good, at least hilarious, if executed properly, but this is more like, oh, Elizabeth is pretty, and has good deadly arts skills. I swear, do a Ctrl+F for "deadly arts" in this book and you'll find at least 300 hits. The cover is awesome, though. Well, I'm only through about 100 pages. Here's hoping it will improve later on.
Anyway, sat through 8 hours of traffic school today. It was excruciating. The horror, the horror!, etc. Look! This is a very lame cell phone picture of my doodling with the nifty red/black changing pen I got.
yeah... you get the idea.
I suppose traffic school is supposed to be like purgatory, where your sins are cleansed/burned away with fire. The fire in this case was a series of increasingly painful DMV videos about stopping at stop signs. There was one interesting video at the end: almost too interesting actually. It was the Extreme! Driving! What (not) to do in various horrible situations that are likely to happen to you. After watching it, I didn't want to drive or be driven ever again for fear of being stuffed in my trunk, beaten with a baseball bat at an intersection, drowned in my own car, or crushing my skull on the dashboard. This feeling quickly subsided once I had to drive home, however.
Yeah guys... be careful when you drive. You don't want to go to traffic school...
Now I want to find the emergency trunk latch in my car.
I fear this post is so long it will never be read. But oh well! this is for ME anyway.


Finished watching Das Boot (Director's Cut) just 1.5 hours ago. I never thought that 3.5 hours of German submarine movie would become my favorite film ever, but hell. I'm really glad Mr. Z showed the first 1.5 hours to us in the last day of contemporary media, or I would never had heard of it.
There are movies where I watch them and I laugh, jump up and down, maybe even cry. If I like them maybe I'll watch the special features on the DVD and look up the actors to see if they've done anything else worth watching.
Then there are movies that bother me for days. These are the movies that I watch the director's commentary on. (Am I the only soul in the world who watches those things?) These movies I stupidly end up buying hard copies of off Amazon because online money doesn't feel like real money to me, which I'm loose enough with as it is.
I'm in danger of buying the 5-hour German miniseries version of Das Boot. Then watching the commentary for it. That's the kind of movie it is.
See, I have this stupid, annoying tendency of always falling in love (figuratively speaking) with at least one male character in each movie I watch. Often this character becomes the only reason I finish watching a mediocre or bad film. This character is usually pretty good-looking, although my standards are often strange/unpopular. It's a really annoying problem. I fangirl, then cringe at myself, then end up fangirling again anyway. Rinse and repeat this cycle. Hopefully I will grow out of this eventually.
But my hormonal teenage girl method of gauging a really good movie is, if this character was ugly, would I still like it?
I ended up "falling in love" with the captain in Das Boot. Just typing that made me want to bash my head on the desk. Even saying these things in the privacy of my own brain makes me want to gouge my own eyes out! But saying stuff on the Internet is always less embarrassing than saying it in your own head, right?
Anyways, I think even if the captain was hideous (well for all I know he is by most standards) I would have become obsessed with this film. It hit on so many levels: cerebral, artistic, guttural, etc.
I doubt anyone will actually watch this movie based on this rather vague recommendation, but I still don't want to give away any spoilers. So uh, spoilers below.
The ending felt like I was having my heart ripped in little pieces inside of me.
I wept! Like, I burst out into tears. Normally when I cry in movies the tears slowly well up and such, but no.
The really sad thing about the ending was that I kind of wanted it to happen so that the characters I ended up liking so much wouldn't have to face the truth of what Nazi Germany did back in the land war and such... but oh God! It sucked that they had to be Germans to begin with... but that's the point of the film actually. You end up not wanting the Allies to kill them, even though you wish the Axis were defeated.
/end spoilers
I was really uncomfortable going into the movie knowing it was about the Germans in WWII, hoping that it wouldn't be some Neo-Nazi romanticised drivel about U-boat warfare.
It wasn't.
It was good that the Germans weren't universally portrayed as Nazi villains. But it was also good that they weren't heroic figures either. I initially felt extremely guilty for liking the characters, knowing they were German soldiers, but the U-boat navy supposedly was the least Nazi part of the German military anyway. And the captain is pretty anti-Nazi, which made me feel less guilty for liking him. Politics are pretty muchabsent from the crews' daily lives of monotonous routine and boredom, punctuated briefly by episodes of terror.
ok, it's almost 2 and I'm incoherent now. stupid blogging. it was funner than i remembered it to be.