I Despise HBO

I think I hate HBO now. I just finished Carnivale and what the hell was that? It was such a cool series, the second season especially, and then they give it the crappiest ending possible. It wasn't just the lack of resolution that bothered me, it was the way the show never explained things that it spent the whole time building up. Characters who looked so promising had their backstories thrown away totally and became static and really just kind of weird for no reason. I'm the kind of person who thought that the ending of Stephen King's Dark Tower series was a good fit, but that was really half-assed.

And obviously since I'm ranting about a TV show, I haven't really been doing much lately. I have to get up in a few hours to start moving into the dorms, then go to work until midnight. I'll be glad when school starts if only so I don't have to work as much.

Currently Reading Survivor: A Novel By Chuck Palahniuk see related

Things that made me happy this week:

10 Things I Hate About Commandments http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K6hOSxX-Xc

Must Love Jaws http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coAoZqQNhmE

OkGo On Treadmills http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv5zWaTEVkI

Currently Reading In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification By Victoria Pitts see related

I want to join the circus

Spent last night in Boone with my significant other visiting his sister Leila. We had a very nice mini vacation. Since I got back at about 4 I've learned to juggle 3 balls. (when I was 8 I could do two, and hadn't progressed since then.) I'm incredibly proud of myself. This may be the first productive thing I've done since May. I knew the Klutz juggling book wasn't a waste of money.

Aside from that I finally got around to downloading the Dresden Dolls' CD. It's the best, and definitely the most original stuff I've heard in a good while.

Oh, and any plans to visit Martha in NYC this fall are off. Plane tickets are way too high. And since I want to go to Europe and trade in my car within the next 12 months I'm going to need all the money I can save.

Currently Reading The Shadow of the Wind By Carlos Ruiz Zafon see related

Yay! I have four days in a row off work. I'll probably be bored out of my skull by noon tomorrow but for now it's just nice to be lounging around in my pj's. Hopefully Ira and I will get a chance to visit Leila in Boone, though.  

I was going to take serious advantage of my employee discount at work tomorrow, but I spent a little too much today as it is. I can't help it. I love Amazon.com so much....

I'm glad that school starts in a few weeks. It'll be nice to be out of the house and I'm looking forward to my classes which are all social science related. The soft sciences are so much more fun than the "hard" ones.

Also, I need to start filling out applications for UTC and Appy State. It figures. I can't go to UTC this year, and then I think that's a good thing because maybe I want to go to Appy State more, and now I probably won't be able to go there. But who knows. And either school would be great.

Currently Reading Assassination Vacation By Sarah Vowell see related

Today was a long day at work but much better than yesterday. I'm finally starting to get over this cold. I see a lot of interesting people in the store, I guess you do in any store, but man, sometimes I just don't want to deal with them. A highschool girl came in today wearing a shirt that said "I'm too pretty to think" and then threw a tantrum because her grandmother wouldn't buy her an Ann Coulter book. Wow. Maybe it's wrong of me to think someone is asking to not be taken seriously because of that shirt, but Ann Coulter? The woman who for all intents and purposes is against women's rights? (Not to mention that she's absolutely nuts.)  That kind of ditzy, I don't know or want to know, attitude makes me cringe.

On the bright side, I finished reading Assassination Vacation and it was awesome. It's about the first three presidential assassinations: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Not only was it informative, it was hysterical. I love Sarah Vowell's writing style. I'm working on Pet Semetary which is also great. Very creepy, close to home stuff.

While I'm talking about books, I should mention that production for the Golden Compass movie will begin in september. The His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman is my favorite ever. As far as fantasy that features British kids goes, Pullman kicks the crap out of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. I love Harry Potter, but the Golden Compass is just on another level. My problem with Harry Potter is that there's nothing great about the main character. He doesn't even DO anything, stuff just happens to him and he scrapes through. Harry being a blank slate is kind of a good thing because it gives every reader a first person experience, but the main character of Pullman's books is amazing. She's the half-wild, half-civilized girl from Oxford whose a compulsive liar and incredibly compassionate. None of the characters are replaceable and blank kids like in the Narnia chronicles and the story doesn't fall back on a prophecy to makeup for lack of character development. The cool thing about His Dark Materials is that they're kind of like the anti-Narnia, but in a very good way. Pullman has serious issues with organized religion that he takes on very well. Maybe the difference between the passive and blank quality of the Narnia characters and the active and emotional quality of HDM is religion. Perhaps it's a reflection of the attitude religious people take when they think they're part of someone else's plan. The kind of passiveness that prevents them from searching for anything meaningful in their lives because they don't really feel like it's their life or their plan anyway. Or to be a little more brutal, religion was convenient and it means they don't have to work on issues of meaningfulness because it was handed to them at birth. Not to make a generalization out of that though. I know that faith is not an easy thing for many people. But I do think it applies to more than a few people. So there's my little what-if theory. Back to the movies though,  the only books I've ever cried in are the seventh Dark Tower book and the third Dark Materials book. So yeah, I hope they don't screw the movies up.