Superhero Movie, or not

So the plan was to go to Superhero Movie tonight. I know it's going to be a bad, mass-produced comedy full of cheap laughs and physical humor. I saw the hero throw the old lady out of the path of a bus and into a chipper-shredder. But I've seen one of the more recent Scary Movie flicks on TV and it was entertaining in a cheap laughs and slapstick way. I also just wanted to see a movie. Maybe it would make for a review.

Yeah, that was going to happen. I was going to go to the first evening show, by which time it should be dark and my pasty skin would thus not burst into horrific flames. I would not have to scream and pinwheel my arms as I staggered, flames trailing behind, over to the point where the camera could cut away for a second and then a dummy wearing the same clothes could be knocked into the river. I can take a little pain, but I don't think I have two of the exact same outfit so I would have to set myself on fire in the clothes that go into the river, then strip naked in front of everybody, dress the dummy in the still-burning clothes, and then shove it into the river and go home naked. Maybe I'm just lazy, but that seems like a lot of hassle.

That was the plan until I got on my email and saw that my City of Heroes friends had a planned event and their guy with radiation powers had to back out at the last minute. Others could substitute, but it would have meant that the group was still missing a key component. Plus I'm a sucker. No problem. I'll go to the early showing and be home by 7:30 for the event.

I went on the internet and the internet told me that Superhero Movie is showing at 5:00 and has a running time of about 85 minutes. Once you lop off the commercials at the beginning and embedded in the movie as product placement, we'll be left with Leslie Nielsen and an interchangeable teenage boy in spandex having a five minute conversation about gladiator movies. The scheduling works out.

It's spring now, almost kind of if it wasn't where I actually live. I live by Lake Huron. The warmer seasons all drop back about a month and a half or two months. It can be pretty cold here through June because the prevailing winds come off the still-cold lake. We start to get spring in April and May before they shift, then they do and it's all cold again. When I was little it snowed in late June. Fall trails on and it can be pretty warm during the day up through the middle of October, even into November in a good year, but the nights cool off very fast. Evenings are chilly in mid-August most of the time.

So late March in town usually means it's very bright outside and not quite as cold as February. I haven't braved full daylight in quite a while and I know if I put off seeing the movie I'll probably forget all about it until it's gone. Films do not last long in the two local theaters with their one owner. I've missed some because they were only in town for a single weekend. I got all my layers together, got my Unabomber look going on, and hopped in the car.

I passed a police car headed the other direction and the cop gave me a funny look, but it's bright out. I'm allowed to wear shades in this level of illumination. Drove to the theater with no parking lot except the public lot down by the river half a block away and got out of the car sweating like crazy, ten minutes in advance of the showtime. I walked across the two busy streets, one with a bad blind corner that I try to avoid, and came up on the theater. There's my film's poster, with a guy that's supposed to look like Hugh Jackman in the one corner. Above it are the showtimes: 4:25, 7:00, 9:30.

Thanks, internet. I glanced ahead and saw on the door that they opened at 3:45, which sounds about right for a showing at 4:25. Yeah, it's not a mistake. So much for that plan. Maybe tomorrow. It can't be Sunday evening. I have an event I signed up for in the first place to attend.

Insomnia Attacks

This is terrible. The sun is shining. The world is drenched in arctic frozen light. I've been to bed twice, but I'm still awake. I was fixed for a whole month almost too.

Yesterday morning was worse, weather-wise. Slick ice over everything. I decided to go out to McDonalds for some high culture dining before I turned in. I know it's a bad habit (worse, I tend to sweat out the grease) and I don't do it very often. But I went yesterday. The parking lot was an ice rink. You could have played hockey on it. I had to shuffle across inch by inch, knees locked and hoping I didn't do the splits and crack my head open, knock out my teeth, or damage other precious parts of my body. I'm serious about the splits too. A few years ago I barely managed to stay on me feet and in the act I almost hurt myself in a completely different way.

That story would have gone around the ER for a few years. I think I'm legendary enough around this town as the pale freak that lives out in the woods and never comes out during the day. Yeah, that's me. Vampire Roamer. Out every night, asleep every day. I stalk the sidewalks in layers with an iPod in my ears. I guess I have to be up to no good.

I pick up the phone and...

...it's Kim. On her cellphone. I hate those things, by the way. People are always yelling into them in public, using them while driving, and they're always full of static. I just don't like the idea of always being in contact, or potentially in contact, either. Yeah, you can turn off the phone but I've been to enough theaters to know that doesn't happen.

She's on the way over to talk about that documentary. It's an hour before sunset. Kim's good at timing that, late enough to wake me up but early enough to claim it's a mistake and really there's no difference. Ok. I'm completely out of patience.

I mentioned my door policy before. Kim's coming over (She just announced this, no asking.) to irritate me probably for a year or two. She did wake me up. Close enough, and Kim has complained before about "indecent dress". Usually I'm so over-dressed that she probably thinks I agree with her.

I do layers, mostly so it's easy to shed a few if I get too hot or pile a couple on if I have to go out. The insulation in the house isn't great, so it can get a bit nippy this time of year. It's an old house
built back in the 40s, so the insulation isn't great and the heat vents come out along the central line of the house instead of around the perimeter. Along the outside it gets pretty chilly. Big rooms too. The original owner built most of it himself, which I think is pretty cool. The family told us he lived next door with his father and worked on the house with his brothers when they finished work every day. Nice story. His sister lived next door until she kicked off about ten years ago. She got kind of bad towards the end and started coming over asking for him sometimes.

Anyway, I dress warm inside too.

So last year I started using UnderArmour for my bottom layer. It's light and pretty comfortable. I wouldn't use it for anything but underwear, but it does the job. It doubles as pajamas, which I don't know why I wear since I live alone. I guess it's a habit. Since I don't talk about this stuff -even now it's kind of weird- Kim has no idea. Kim's school doesn't even let boys wear short sleeves. Girls have to wear skirts, though.

I was nice. I changed into fresh clothes, even a shirt with long sleeves. I went to the door and unlocked it for Kim, then got away from it because I didn't want to ruin the surprise. She got here about ten minutes later. She knocked and I told her it was open. She comes into the porch and there I am standing in the living room. Kim rolls her eyes.

"Did I wake you up?" she makes it sound like she's never done that and I blame her for it totally without reason.

"Oh, no I was about to get up anyway." I'm all smiles. I didn't even feel embarrassed, which is a first. I mean, they paint this stuff on. I'm one step away from naked. Maybe it'll kick in later.

"Do you want to finish getting dressed?"

"All done; I'm not going anywhere."

"Ok, [Wanderer], you made your point."

"What point? Do you want some breakfast?" Kim's not looking at me. This is really getting to her. By the way, the living room is pretty light on the colors. It's a big blob of almost-white space and I've got the lights on. I usually do; sunlight and I don't get along and I could maybe take an overcast day for a while, but why ruin my fun? This is all paraphrased, by the way.

"You're seriously wearing that?"

"Yeah. It's really comfortable." That's true, actually. Maybe I missed out on the men in tights stigma by being homeschooled.

"But that's not clothes; that's underwear." Kim has her teacher voice out in full force. Sometimes she tells people to do things by thanking them for doing them. This works on kids, I guess.

"No, it's real clothing. Want to see their website?"

"That's ok. Don't you want to put something else on?"

"Nope. I'm good. You wanted to talk about 1968." I laid down on the futon, propping myself up on a couple of pillows. I read that way a lot.

"Could you please put some clothes on?" Kim's really pissed now.

"I could."

"Would you?"

"Why?"

"You're not dressed, [Wanderer]."

"Are my shins making you uncomfortable?" I own a pair of full-length tights (I guess they count as tights? Now I don't know what I think about that.) but they needed washing.

"I didn't come over here to have you make fun of me. I really want to talk with you about that show."

"Kim, I am not making fun of you. This is really what I've been wearing around the house lately. If I get cold, it's very easy for me to throw another layer on. It's comfortable and practical. If you don't believe me, turn on the Olympics sometime."

"Eventually you're going to think differently about these things." This is a threat. Kim thinks everyone's conversion is inevitable, but you might be roasting in Hell before it happens. I'm sure the best thing anyone has to think about in Hell is their fashion choices. Oh Lord, I repent my shin-flashing ways!

Normally at this point I start getting annoyed, but the way she couldn't look at me was really great. You'd think I had snakes in my hair, if I had hair. Anyway, I shrugged.

"I just don't think people should dress like that." Kim's into this fake conciliatory tone now. She thinks I'm going to make some kind of concession. "It's not appropriate."

"Isn't that between me and God?" I actually have read a lot of the Bible, and I've got a great memory. I just don't believe in it. My parents thought it was important that I have a strong background with texts that show up a lot in allusions and are historically and culturally important. There's a copy of the Ramayana somewhere around the house too.

"It will be."

"No, I mean like David in his ephod in front of the Temple. I can be more undignified than this?"

Kim did a double-take. She always forgets that I actually have read the Bible. I think it messes with her head. Apparently non-believers are not allowed, unless they do so with the intention of converting.

"That's not what it really means. This is really bothering me. Please, put some clothes on." Kim still hadn't mastered asking.

"So I was thinking the movie started off evenhanded, but really turned one-sided towards the end."

"[Wanderer], if you're going to be like this then I don't want to talk about it."

"Sorry."

She left. I think I won that one. That almost never happens.

Don't scare me like that, Ayato!

There is no Kim content in this post. Except for that sentence.

My computer is Ayato. I name them after giant robot pilots. The last was Kaworu and the one before that Quatre. I'm going to have to watch some more anime before I get the next one, hopefully years from now. I'm all out of names I like.

Ayato freaked me well and good tonight. I turned him (ok, it, but it's strange to use a proper name and then default to a neuter personal pronoun) on and logged into my City of Heroes account. I played with some friends for a while, until I froze up. This happens sometimes in CoH. It was a pretty hard freeze and took all Ayato down. I was able to get out of the game, but not reload the desktop. The power button didn't respond. So I cut power at the surge protector.

Then I waited about thirty seconds and rebooted. All's well. I log back in and two minutes later the same thing happens while I'm trying to use the auction house. Annoying. I decide I'm done with CoH for the night. I reboot again and get into the Windows loading screen where it hangs. The drives are making the same sweeping sound I got in CoH. Oh boy.

I turned it back off and let it sit for a half hour. This time I got so far as the screen right after the BIOS screen. It tells me it's loading the PBR (Partition Boot Record, I think) and then says it's done. Nothing happens. This screen has always gone by so fast before I couldn't really read it. This time it sits. Same drive noise. Tried again. Same. I tried to boot from the Windows reinstall CD Dell gave me. Nope.

Ayato is a paperweight. I tried one more time and went to take a shower while it loaded. I came back 10 minutes later and it's on the log-in screen. Everything is fine now.

Don't do that again, Ayato. I know where you live.

Once a Year is Enough

Today, I made rolls for four hours. I'll be eating them for months. I used the recipe my grandmother got off some guy that used to be a cook on a cement boat. (That's a boat that hauls cement, not a boat made of cement.) We used to make them every Christmas. With how I eat, I'll be pulling the last few out of the freezer towards the end of March. The recipe makes a lot and they're not exactly health food. I left the dough to rise in a huge metal dishpan. It's too much food. Every year I mean to scale it back. It's a huge amount of work to make them, too. The most advanced ingredients are canned milk and yeast. But they taste good. The kitchen was a wreck afterwards. I have to go back later and finish cleaning up.

Along the theme of the post, I almost never rent movies. Once a year is pushing it. I see most of what I want to see at the theaters, usually a weekend or so after opening night. If I want to see it more than once, I'm probably going to want to see it at 3 AM or something and the local rental business closes at midnight. I scared the hell out of a girl working there last year when I walked up at 12:30 to shove one in their deposit slot. Anyway, I decided this year that instead of sitting through holiday boredom, or watching any of the DVDs I mentioned that I intend to watch, I was going to pick up three or four movies to space over a couple of days. I wanted to have a little Quentin Tarantino film festival. I've seen Kill Bill (both parts), and the last quarter of Pulp Fiction was on one of the movie channels a few weeks ago. I enjoyed that too. So I figured I'd get those and snag Reservoir Dogs too. It would be a mix of old and new stuff.

Back in the old days, the rental places had a stupidly diverse selection. I remember going into a glorified gas station with Dad and getting lost in the stacks they used to have. It's not like that anymore. I couldn't find anything except the first part of Kill Bill, which I've seen way too many times to care about on its own. If they had the second part too, I'd be there. No such luck. So much for that idea.

Once a year is also enough for me to run into Kim in the outside world. I was at Walmart around 8:30 yesterday buying the junk for rolls. I had everything and decided to run by the DVDs while I was there. I just made it into the clothing section, with the little girls' clothes on one side and baby stuff on the other when I heard "Hey Midnight Wanderer!" No, not really. She used my name. It would be worth running into her if she called out, "Hey Vampire Heathen!" though.

You know how your own name jumps out of the background noise? This was like that. I didn't realize it was her until I stopped for a second. By then I was caught. I had a cart so I couldn't really vanish into the crowd, plus I had my hood down and how many other pale, bald guys are walking around Walmart? I wish Walmart sold some really dirty, weird pornography. I'd go and grab something about people from Lithuania that like to have men with the bubonic plague hit them across the face with giant rubber casts shaped like Stalin while they all play out the Battle of Gettysburg and carry that around the whole store. No one would bother me. I could just leave it in the bags of chips at the check out.

Kim comes up to me and she tries to strike up a conversation. I'm being as transparently non-responsive as I can be.

"I caught you!"
"I wasn't trying to escape."
"I think I could probably outrun you anyway."
"Well yeah, but I could throw the cart in your way."

She's being her hyper-perky, intensely happy Jesus-self. Kim told me once in her church they believe that people are only ever upset or depressed for any length of time because they know they're wrong to reject Jesus. It's guilt. So it's really important to be happy all the time or someone might think you don't care about Christianity. I guess they must all be this forced. Then she sees what's in the cart and she starts offering her opinion about when to eat rolls and all this stuff. I'm just making indifferent noises here.

Kim told me I must be really happy today. Um, why? I told her I was just having a normal day and then realized that she thinks hostility is a sign of happiness. That explains so much about her. Then she had errands to run and needed to go. She can keep me stuck in the middle of Walmart with no interest in talking to her for ten minutes, but she's on a deadline. Whatever. She promised to get back to me about that documentary. I didn't bring it up; I'm not that dumb.

My Computer Hates Me

I bought a new computer. I didn't really talk about it here because there's not a lot to say. It's fast, it's quiet, it's almost everything I want. I watch DVDs on my computer sometimes, depending on whether I want to use it for anything else while watching and whether I want to get up and go across the room to put the disk into my PS2. I bought that for games years ago, but I only ever end up using it for DVDs. It's an expensive DVD player.

I've had the computer about a week now. The FedEx guy woke me up by coming a day early, so he got to meet my daytime door policy head on. If you wake me up, you get to see me in whatever I went to bed in. Usually that's the bottom layer of whatever I had on the previous day. He didn't stare too badly, but it's always at least as embarrassing for me as it is for whoever is at the door. Anyway, I was covered.

The new machine has a case fan over the CPU, a case fan over the back vent, and smaller fans for the video card and the power supply. My last didn't have a fan over the video card, but I knew that was coming because I saw it on TechTV. When it booted up, all the fans revved up really loud, but then came back down to almost silent for actual running. Perfect. It didn't even get loud when I loaded up some games from the past couple of years.

When I rebooted it after installing a few programs, the fans came on roaring and stayed on. I guessed it was still hot from before so the motherboard freaked out or something. I turned it off for about forty-five minutes. It came back on in quiet mode. That I can deal with. I just have to remember to let it cool for a little bit every time I need to do a reboot. That's not a big hassle.

I woke up today as the sun was going down and hit the power button before I went into the shower. I got out and freaked out for a second when I thought I heard someone in the driveway. Anyway, I think it was just someone going by in an old truck. I got back into the living room and the fans are roaring inside my Dell Inspiron. It's all booted up, but they never spooled back down to near silence.

I turned it off and let it cool. It was off all day, but maybe I just had some bad luck. On the old machine every now and then the hard drive would go crazy on boot up and not stop until I restarted. No big deal, just noisy and weird. This could be the same, except I guess I hoped for the best and I should know better than to do that kind of thing. The fans just kept on going. I cut power to it entirely and let it sit for an hour and a half, thinking maybe the current into the power supply was at fault. Nope. Still loud.

I stuck a DVD in. It's like it was on mute. Great. So I guess I'm out of options. I'm pretty sure the case fan is the noisy one. I could take that out, but then I'll worry every time something goes wrong that I just cooked my dual-core CPU. I looked all over and there's no way for me to directly control if the fans crank down or not. It's not in the BIOS. (I know this stuff because I took a couple of night computer classes at the college two years ago.) There's nothing in software. I guess that means I need to spend some money and get one of those fan speed controller units and plug it in. I can do it. It doesn't look hard. But then if I get one that runs on automatic I have to make sure it's set right and doesn't cook the CPU anyway. Either that or I buy one that runs on manual and I have to watch it all the time myself.

This sucks. I'm showing 3% CPU load right now and the fans are on full-blast. It's running between 1% and 3%. I don't know. If this is a one day thing I'll deal but I just hate fixing something I just bought. It's really bothering me, like I just lost the whole computer or something. I can't even hear my TV with it running like this.

Books, School, and Feet

So I get a coupon for 30% off any one book. I guess you're not supposed to buy anything on sale that you wouldn't pay the full price for. At least I read that one time. The theory's that you end up buying things that you don't actually want and end up wasting money instead of saving it. That kind of makes sense in a limited way, but it also makes sense to buy things on sale that you would not buy at the normal price.

The run up to Saturnalia/Mithra's birthday/the Winter Solstice/whatever isn't good for me. It's not that I have family I want to be with or anything. I can deal with not seeing my living relatives for a lot longer than they usually let me. But everything's so crowded. I hate crowds. I'm not crazy about the music playing everywhere for a month, or the lights on trees. Every now and then I catch some old ballet on TV. I think it's the same one from the Sixties every year. I get bored after around fifteen minutes, but it's cool to watch until then.

This year, Borders has been dropping a lot of coupons on me. I used one when I bought the manga from last post. In the lead up to the holiday, I've seen about three or four 30% off coupons go by. I ignore a lot of 20% off and 25% off, but a 30% off usually gets me to at least go to the store and look around.

Last year I got into the 1632 series by Eric Flint, et al. It's about a small town from modern West Virginia that gets thrown back into the middle of the Thirty Years' War. The first one was ok. It's up at the publisher's website to read for free, so that's what I did. It's not great. Later on Flint admitted he wasn't writing alternate history. He was writing Americana. That's what grated on me. I'm just not that patriotic and I've lived among small town people long enough to know he's being extremely generous in portraying them. I guess he's from a small town and had exactly the opposite experience from me. I kept pretty isolated from everyone else growing up, but you can tell a lot if you're the local freak just from the times you do have to go out. I liked the alternate history as far as it went, but the Norman Rockwell stuff wasn't good. Neither were the two romances he managed to shoehorn in. But ok, he wrote sequels with co-authors that go into a real exploration of what 400 years more knowledge would do to Europe. That's neat. I kept reading for three more novels and two anthologies. Some of it was really good, but he fell into a hard formula where every novel uses some kind of romance as a major plot element. That's a little much for me.

I think the sameness is a factor too. Even the town outcasts, the kids raised on the hippie commune by the pot-grower, the kids that play Dungeons & Dragons, everyone in this town wants to be exactly the same. Ok, I get that people with similar backgrounds are going to have similar ways of approaching life. That's culture. But the story of someone who's a little bit out of mainstream finding a way to fit perfectly into the mainstream happens again and again. The token Jewish male in town hated hunting and never shot at an animal, but he bought a gun and went out with the guys every year. For what? Just so he could be one of the guys. Um, ok. I guess I read that kind of stuff as saying that being different is only ok as long as you are willing to hide it and be a clone as far as everyone else cares.

So I read 1632. I read the sequel, 1633. It's got a big love letter to the American Navy, and sets out to redeem a jerk from the first book. A really racist, bullying jerk that did his best to get the Americans to set themselves up as a ruling class over a bunch of German refugees, and he was willing to play a little dirty to do it. He didn't succeed, but he came off as a pretty solid villain. Even his son hated him. He's still exactly the same guy, but I guess when you lock someone away with him for a while they turn into big admirers just because. They even appreciate how his bullying built character. That's just sick.

1634: The Gallileo Affair, is almost a political thriller. The plot diverges completely from the bullying Navy guy and moves down to Italy. Events there would overlap in time with what happened up in North Germany. Except it's about the pot-grower's kids. They were really cool in a short story from one of the anthologies but here, they're Extreme Typical and they fall in with a bunch of hapless Venetian revolutionaries who decide to rescue Gallileo from prison and are being used by a Huguenot working for Richelieu. He's trying to use them to assassinate the Pope and pin it on the Americans. Along the way, we get a Catholic priest lecturing us about how Galileo kind of had it coming because he was rude to the Pope.

That's it. I was done. The alternate history was still there, but I didn't need to read about some hormonal teenager who fell in "love" on first sight with a big-breasted Italian girl and does dumb stuff to impress her. Time passed and I did still wonder what happened. Not about the romances, the interesting stuff. There's another sequel. 1634: The Baltic War. I looked at it a few times, but knew I didn't want to pay full hardcover price, and the cover flap mentioned the romance right off. Oh boy.

So I end up back in the bookstore today. It's 30% off. That makes the book $20. I'm still kind of curious and I've passed it over several times. But it's still on my mind. I want to know what happens with the Dutch Revolt (not looking so good last time) and if things turn around (which was foreshadowed, but not certain). I've got the book now. I mean to read it eventually.

Before Death Note took over my reading life for a while, I was reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It's a neat exploration about what we now know, but hasn't really made it into the textbooks because I guess that would make kids in high school too sympathetic for the Indians. It screws things up if they had cities and farms instead of just being clueless. School sucks because stuff like that, and whatever the local politicians want, ends up deciding things. I guess colleges (not the one my cousin went to...that place is scary) are a lot better about that. I want to finish it but I might let it wait and read some more fiction before going back. I usually like fiction more than non-fiction. It used to drive Mom nuts.

I had to go out and get some foot stuff today. My shoes are old and I broke a big crack in the sole of one last spring. I don't walk when it's raining out, so I didn't really worry a lot. The shoe still worked. But now there's snow everywhere and I get water inside my shoe and soaked into my socks just going between the house and the garage. Shoveling isn't fun either. But I was stupid and didn't dry my feet out right after I got in, so now the side of my big toe is all peeled and cracked with athlete's foot. Disgusting. I'm not even athletic. At all. I hate exercising. I guess I kind of get how it could be fun, but I'm not that kind of person.

These post titles aren't very accurate, I guess. I pick them out for what I plan on writing about, then I end up writing about something else towards the end. Dad used to make me do pre-writing stuff to stop that. Nobody's getting graded on this, though. Contents may shift in shipping. Game experience may change during play.

A Reader and Worrying Quiet

I have a commenter. Hey. Um, welcome.

Kim hasn't called yet. I can live with that, but my good fortune isn't going to last. She doesn't forget this stuff. It's not like ways she could be less of an irritant to others. Those she forgets all the time. One of the boys at school probably took off his burkha and caused a riot or something.

Family is Hell

No progress on the DVD review project from prior posts. I've gained some ground on the sleep front, but now I'm getting these unpredictable fits of intense fatigue. I thought maybe I was forgetting to eat again. There aren't any good, obvious landmarks during the night to let you know when you should be getting lunch or whatever. So I get doing things and forget.

I tried to eat into one of these times, but it didn't really help. I guess I'm going to have to start huffing caffeine or something. I could try sleeping pills and caffeine pills simultaneously. I bet that would be exciting. Isn't that how Elvis died, passed out on the toilet and suffocated in shag carpet?

My cousin Kim called a few days ago and she really, really wanted to talk about some documentary about 1968. I haven't talked to her in like a year, and it hadn't been long enough. My cousin used to be interesting, but about a year before the accident she went crazy for Jesus. She went from being bright and quick to being plodding and rigid. You can see it just looking at her. It's like the church sucked all the life out of her body. She actually told me last year when we talked, inside of about ninety seconds, both that morality is absolute black and white and that it's full of gray. She didn't notice it either. That's what I'm talking about.

I guess that's not really why I can't stand her. I can't stand her because she decided to tell me at the funeral that I'd better get right with the Lord or I would end up burning forever in Hell. She tells me this while looking at my parents' bodies with this kind of smug insistent look on her face. I called her a sick pervert and told her to get out. Then suddenly this is a time for the family. She wasn't going. So I bailed.

Or that's what I would have done if it wasn't the middle of the afternoon and I had a car. Instead, since I didn't have a car and my ride was in my aunt's minivan, I got to sit through this. That aunt is Kim's mother. I should have thrown something, or whatever. But I needed the minivan because it was wide enough that I could lay down in the back seat and put a blanket over myself if the sun got bad. On the way home, she says she wants to adopt me. I don't think so.

But I didn't try to cut her head off, so Kim apparently thinks I got over this. She calls me at 8:30. That has to be an accident, because I'm awake. No one in my family remembers I sleep all day. Ever. Kim wants to know what I think of this History Channel documentary on 1968, which I have not seen because I haven't watched the History Channel in five or six years. She tells me -Kim is like this, she actually told me like it was an assignment for one of the kids at the unaccredited private school she teaches at- to go online and find out when it's rerunning so I can watch it and tell her what I think. She'll be calling back. I tried not answering my phone once, but she came over unannounced, during daylight, the last time I did that. She thought I "did something awful".

So the fastest way to get rid of her is to endure a three hour telephone conversation where she rants about how dirty hippies and feminists destroyed America. I programmed the History Channel back into my TV and caught about an hour tonight. I think I know what Kim is going to want to talk about. Right after Robert Kennedy gets shot, the show goes from talking about drugs, music, and protests into letting a bunch of guys who worked on the Nixon campaign and write for the Wall Street Journal lay into the whole decade for being the product of lazy, dirty, destructive hippies.

Kim's probably going to start with asking me to think about how undermining the foundation of the family (Mom: MA in History) has led to ruin. She'll make these leading questions about how people -she's not going to come out and say me that early- need to turn to Christ and faithfully accept his word and will or whatever. If I hang up, she'll call back. If I don't answer, she'll eventually show up. She might even bring friends from church. She's threatened that before. Sometimes she shows up even if I answer. Kim really wants a fight. She thinks when I argue with her I'm at some kind of crisis point where my heart might open up or something and she needs to be there to plant a seed. The fact that Kim's pissing me off means she's forced me open a sliver and deep down inside, I know she's right. My pride is just keeping me from submitting.

It would be funny if she wasn't absolutely serious. That's really how she thinks.

By the way, she's always talking about how women should lovingly submit to their husbands and how she wants to do that. Kim's never managed to get hitched, though. Not even to a nice Christian boy who believes all this stuff about women submitting. Especially not to one of those. She also wants to be a missionary, but somehow never finds it in herself to save up for a plane ticket or prevail on her church which does actually have a fund for that kind of thing.

When she does call back, she's going to want to know why I'm not showing up at any family gatherings. Apparently sitting in a corner glaring and not speaking is how people in Kim's universe show they're having fun.

Season Sets vs. Standalone DVDs

All my next up options are season sets. That's obviously going to take longer to review than a single story like Bender's Big Score. I think reviewing just the season in general would be a bit thin, and only work well for shows with strong and steadily developing plot arcs. Since my options are a fairly slow and scant plot arc (two, actually) in Everwood, pure episodic TV in seaQuest, and relatively thin and weak plot arc in Buffy, the only good option for a season arc review is Angel.

That would be a lot of watching and writing in one go, I think. I'm going to rule out Angel for now, at least for that kind of review, and watch some more of the episodic shows. I can review individual episodes.

I've had bad insomnia lately. I'm up at all the wrong times. I should see about getting some sleeping pills or something. This is really out of control. Monday morning I decided to go out for supper (Breakfast to you daylight people). I knew I'd get stuck out in the sun if I walked, so I took the car. I lucked out and the cop I drove by didn't notice me driving with sunglasses and a big hoodie over my head in the bright gray overcast. If I just walked I could have done without the glasses and stared down at the ground maybe, but it would have been full light out by the time I got home. Before that, really. That's not fun for me. Think vampires.

Insomnia is not fun

I think I got two hours of sleep yesterday. That sucks. I was the living dead all night. Then I slept for 14 hours and woke up during daylight. Not fun.

Guess I'm going to get that Futurama DVD at some point.