Melancholy Thursday.

Do you ever have one of those days, when your hair is perfect and your dress is fierce and Gwen Stefani is playing on the soundtrack of your life? You float down hallways and people are just lucky to be looking at you?

Yeah, today is not one of those days.

I'm down. I'm angry about this priest. I am nervous about Earl.

I am sad , I am so so sad about James Lee.

I need something. A sabbatical. I want to get away from my life for a while, but I have to work every day.

It's not a Happy Things Thursday, and I'm sorry.

But, it could be Okay. I've got my iPod, and some oatmeal. I can make this work. I think it's time for a new tattoo.

bile and ire.

Woke up surly yesterday. Well, the clouds ain't parted yet, and I'm still stewing, so let me tell you what Imma do. I'm going home at four. I am letting out my dog and I am going to clean my damn kitchen. Then, I am going to take a damn bath. After that, I am going to make some damn dinner and watch some damn Stargate. And then! Then, I'm going to play some damn City of Heroes. Kicking the crap out of a death head gunner will do loads to improve my damn mood.

And I am not going to answer the damn phone unless it is someone who is extremely pregnant.

Thoughts on Twenty-something Singledom.

My cousin, Henry, is getting married this weekend. If his sister, Holly, marries her boyfriend after him, then we'll be going in birth order of the cousins. First my sister, then Henry, then Holly, and that leaves me before my younger cousins, Andrew [fifteen] and William [ten]. At least I have a few years.

Anyway, this wedding has got me thinking, mostly about being the free agent in a mass of couples. It's not as much of an enviable position as you would think, despite that they are all gracious in sharing their lives with me, and willing to include me in their day-to-day.

I don't have a vast and sprawling group of friends, but it isn't small, and it is certainly varied. And despite the different lives everyone is walking, I still manage to be The Single Friend [or Cousin...]. For everyone. No, really. Even if my friends are not romantically attached to each other, they are still paired off into their own functional units, whether it be with their roommates or neighbors or bff's.

Because I am now coming to be Of An Age where it's the natural way of my peers to pair off and settle down. Now is the time of weddings and babies and christenings. People I went to high-school with have families of their own.

So, I'm often at odds with myself. I savor my independence [such that it is owning a dog] and take great pleasure in answering only to myself. More and more often lately I've been wanting to strike off on my own [again] and find myself a little cabin in the woods that I can set up a forge next to and make metal things and write stories and have chickens running around in the yard. And maybe a goat. I'm flexible on the goat part.

But, I want babies. And an adult to cook for, and someone to be part of my functional unit, and romance and stupid, giddy love. So, where is my piece of the puzzle?

And yet.

And yet, here I am. Thinking. There was an e-mail going around a couple of years ago that talked about the quarter life crisis. Among other things, it highlights the battle of ennui and enthusiasm that we all feel when we're in our twenties. Snapping between wild confidence and crippling anxiety and the constant conflicting questions. What Next? What am I doing with myself? Who cares what I do? What will people think of what I do? I don't want to do anything with myself. I want to change the world. What the hell is wrong with me?

It's exhausting, and it's precisely the reason that I spend as much time as I do in my own head. Why I read constantly, or write this blog.

We don't want to inflict ourselves on the world, but at the same time, we're aching for it.

Or maybe it's just me.

<3

so, I'll whine at length about something else - **Watchmen spoilers.**

So. So. The Watchmen is my favorite graphic novel, okay? Hands-down, ultimately number one. So.

So, listen. It was a good movie, okay. I cannot deny that. The action was FANTASTIC. The acting wasn't half-bad. The love and sorrow and fear and all those delicious gritty things that made me love the books so much were pretty well executed. It was dark and wonderful - Rorschach and The Comedian especially were so perfect. The opening credits drove me to tears of joy and relief within the first twenty seconds. I am a very visual person, so by and large, I LOVE adaptations.

But, with Watchmen, I was left wanting.

I think it comes down to this: I must agree with my pal, Penny, when I say that I wish that they hadn't cut out the humanity. I use that word carefully, because the book spent so much time down in the streets with the regular folks. The Bernies, especially. Something tells me that they shot more than what made it into the film as the make-up and casting for the Bernies were great. For the two seconds of screen-time they got.

See, Alan Moore tells a hell of a story. He is very good at sucking you into the minutae of human emotions, and that, my friends, is what I missed most.

In print, we saw Josephine's [one of my favorites] conflicting feelings about her sexuality. And Dr Long's slow, painful withdrawal from reality during the course of his treatment of Rorschach. I missed the New Frontiersman, even. It just didn't feel right to not cut to the newsstand every once and a while, check in with the fellas.

And even with the backstory of our Heroes, I felt they came up short.

But still, despite all that, I was enjoying myself. Right up until the end. [I'm not going to actually discuss the ending, because I don't want someone to not see it because I gave it away.]

I cannot shake my dissappointment with how they chose to end it. It brought down my whole enjoyment. I could see it coming, creeping up on me from the corners. "No way," I told myself, "they can't be doing what I think they're doing..."

And they did. They freaking did. I was spitting TACKS the whole way home. My father, who did not read the book, was doing his best to console me. He made some good points - some of which I mentioned above with regard to the action and such.

But, I was just so bitterly dissappointed. And I know I'm biased. But I feel like they changed something huge and important that didn't need to be changed. They used so much CGI throughout the movie, how hard would it have been to keep to the story-line?

And the worst part is - I can sort of see the reasoning. AND I DON'T WANT TO. I am a stubborn person by nature, so when I have an idea in my head, god forbid it doesn't work out. So. This may be more a meditation on my own inability to let go, rather than the actual short-comings of the movie.

Or something.

If anyone wants to go see it again, though, I'm totally down. I need to form a really solid, rounded opinion, you know?

Yeah, that's the ticket.

world-weary

So, here I am worried about North Korea, when people are setting their grandmothers on fire in my own city.

What the hell is wrong with people? I'm too young to be this disillusioned. At twenty-three, the world should be my oyster, and I should have a bright future.


blah blah blah. Just give me a few hours, I'll be back on top. <3