I didn’t like the original Hellboy movie. I don’t remember hating it, but I apparently found it forgettable, because I certainly don’t remember the plot. In fact, when I was talking to a friend about it last night, I was convinced it had come out at least two years before its actual release date (2004) because I could recall so little about it. So when Pan’s Labyrinth came out in 2006, marketed as being “by Guillermo del Toro, the director of Hellboy!”, I put off seeing it for months until the word-of-mouth (and the Oscar nomination) finally crushed my resistance.

Pan’s Labyrinth, it turned out, was one of the best films of that year, and it remains one of my favorite movies of all time. So when the Hellboy II trailers came out, and seemed like Pan’s Labyrinth reborn, I was all aquiver with delight. I was willing to forgive del Toro for the first Hellboy if the second turned out half as wonderful as the previews seemed to promise.

Unfortunately, for all its eerie, decadent splendor, Hellboy II is a fairly stupid movie. The plot is implausible, and not the “there’s a troll market under the Brooklyn Bridge” kind of implausible, but the “why didn’t they just kill him as soon as he showed up, thus saving themselves an entire movie-full of trouble?” kind of implausible. Things happened because the story demanded they happen, not because those things made any sense. The plot also hinges on several relationships—romantic, platonic and familial—that I didn’t believe FOR A SECOND.

The Dark Knight, on the other hand . . . The Dark Knight is everything we were promised by the previews and more. Heath Ledger is terrifying, gruesome, psychopathic and gleeful as the foul, capering, murderous Joker. The story is thick, intricate and meaty, while never losing focus or slowing down for an instant—bank heists are followed by skyscraper cat burglary is followed by hostage crises are followed by explosion after explosion after explosion. Christian Bale, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart form a believable love triangle, with believable consequences. Gary Oldman plays a family man whose job puts his family on the line. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman return as the wise, cheeky and unflappable butler and CEO/gadget guru. Plus: Heath Ledger as the Joker in drag!

I saw these two films almost back to back, and the contrast is stark: Hellboy II doesn’t even work as a movie, while The Dark Knight transcends the genre of “comic book adaptations” and shows us what a comic book adaptation can be.

Next up: Watchmen, whose teaser trailer played before The Dark Knight, due out in 2009. Here’s hoping it’s awesome like The Dark Knight instead of crappy and irritating like Hellboy II.

I’ve been using http://ping.fm/ to post to my LiveJournal, my Twitter and Pownce feeds, my Tumblelog and my Facebook status for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve tried posting to WordPress. I probably won’t make a habit of it, since it’s just as easy to go to WordPress.com and blog as it is to go to Ping.fm, and the WordPress interface is a lot prettier and more functional. But! I have to try it at least once, right?

As far as news from real life goes, I’m so excited about The Dark Knight I can hardly contain myself. The word is that it is an awesome rarely seen in the realm of comic book adaptations.

Also, I’m watching the 1960s show The Prisoner. It is really funny, though mostly unintentionally so. I think. It’s hard to tell with these shows from the infancy of television.

And that’s all for now.

I plugged “aloneandunobserved.com” into Wordle and this is what popped out. After I tweaked the color, font and layout, that is. Try it, it’s fun!

(Click for full-sized version)

I wasn’t hungry at noon today, so I spent my lunch hour exercising in the library’s tiny workout room. Afterwards I was changing in the likewise tiny locker room, feeling a sense of manly accomplishment, when I heard a noise from the bathroom stall. My immediate reaction was to think, There’s someone else in here. How long have they been there? What have they overheard??? Oh, right, they heard me holding forth at length about my underwear.

You see, I have a slight problem. I talk to myself, out loud, ALL THE TIME.

If I’m in a room with you but think I’m alone, I may treat you to:

• A monologue on my views on the state of health care in the United States, possibly compared and contrasted with the health care systems of other countries
• One half of a conversation with a person who is not physically present about how they have failed me personally in the past and what I will expect of them in the future if they are to return to my good graces
• A lengthy discussion of the circumstances under which I dropped a glass jar of instant coffee on my foot, and what the resulting lump looks like, and whether I think it will ever heal (I change my mind on this point hourly)

Or, as today, you might hear a one-sided discussion on whether I think my undershirt is too sheer to serve as a workout top (I decided it was, but I wore it anyway).

Some of these bizarre little soliloquies become blog posts, or inspire blog posts (like this one!). Some become stories, or ideas for novels. And some serve only as further evidence that I am a tool short of a shed. Fortunately, it turned out that I really was alone today in the locker room. So, while my secret is still safe and I won’t be committed to a mental hospital yet, I’m starting to hear noises on top of talking to people who aren’t there. Maybe there is a medication I should be taking?

[Photo of painting "LABYRINTH: Maybe I am Crazy" by Emin Sinanyan.]

As I feared, the weigh-in on Tuesday showed that I have made no progress towards my fitness goals in the last two weeks. And now that I’m done with that program and there’s no accountability, my motivation to eat correctly and exercise properly is very low.

Plus my goggle strap broke right before QUAC swim practice last night, which stole half of that workout—it turns out that trying to tie a knot in a thin, wet, slippery rubber strap with slippery, wet fingers is a very frustrating and time-consuming experience.

So I’m trying to think of ways to make fitness and exercise thrilling and new all over again. Lube wrestling on Sunday, anyone?

I have my final weigh-in and body-fat measurement with my fitness guy tomorrow. I’m nervous, because I haven’t seen him in a week and a half and . . . I haven’t exactly been following my eating plan. I definitely haven’t gotten down to my goal of 13% body fat; the most I can hope for is that I haven’t gained any fat since the last time I saw him. Wish me luck.

In other, related news, I’ve been exercising a hell of a lot lately, and I’ve actually had fun! Who would have thought that running on a treadmill could be enjoyable?

Unaccountably, I hurt all over.

When I was fifteen, my older sister and I went out to South Dakota to spend the summer with my aunt and uncle and their family. By then four of their seven children had left home: three were at college or at work in other states, and one, Kevin, was on a Mormon mission in South Korea. Their family dynamic was very different than the one I had grown up in. They had a proper house with an upstairs and a downstairs; they had a Super Nintendo; they watched television, and had a large movie collection; and their children were not homeschooled.

That summer was full of happenings. There was friction, and there were new experiences, and I made friends and enemies, and I had my first bout of seasonal allergies. We watched Twister on the big screen, and then huddled in a gym bathroom watching a tornado warning on the small screen. We painted the house, and we chased fireflies, and we went to church.

To keep busy, my sister and I took a handful of part-time jobs. We worked for a little while in a fabric store, stocking shelves, doing odd jobs and even helping with a little craft day fair for local kids. For two weeks we detasseled seed corn in a series of South Dakota fields. The pay was good for a fifteen-year-old, but the sun was hot, the corn leaves cut my hands, and I was called a faggot by the other teenage workers. I hated it.

About two-thirds of the way through the summer, things suddenly changed. Something was wrong in Kevin’s mission. There were a few fraught, late-night phone calls from him and his mission president in Seoul. We prayed for him especially hard during family prayer. At last, my aunt came and told us all that he was coming home in two days.

“I know you two were supposed to stay here until August,” she said to my sister and me, “but we’re thinking about sending you back right now. We don’t want you to be exposed to this situation.”

I got the impression that Kevin had had a defining crisis of faith, that Satan had gotten ahold of his heart, and that my aunt and uncle were afraid he would contaminate us, his innocent younger cousins, if they didn’t protect us from him. The idea seemed frightening and appealing at the same time. We did not want to go.

I don’t remember why—whether we whined and begged, or Aunt Joy and Uncle Mike simply changed their minds—but we did stay in South Dakota another month or so after Kevin came back. That was almost the best part of the summer. At nineteen or twenty he seemed so old and grown-up, and yet, for someone so very much older than we were, he was always nice and fun and utterly non-patronizing. Nothing was said about him coming home early, or what had precipitated it. The family simply welcomed him back and included him in the rest of their summer plans.

In August, my sister and I went back home. Over the next few years, Kevin came to visit California once or twice, but never our family. I heard that he had dyed his hair (!) and that he had piercings (!!), which seemed all the evidence necessary of his debauched and sinful life. When I was nineteen I went on my own mission, and I’m convinced the memory of Kevin’s fall from grace is one of the reasons I was able to serve out my full two years; despite my being gay and neurotic and terminally anxious, I didn’t want to end up with piercings and highlights.

Just about three years ago, I got an email from my Aunt Joy saying that Kevin had passed away. It was suicide. Even though he and I had been living forty-five minutes apart for three years, I still hadn’t seen him since 1996. At that point I no longer considered myself Mormon, and was just waiting to graduate from BYU to come out to everyone as gay and ex-religious. I went to his funeral, where I saw his grieving family, some of them for the first time in fifteen years. At one point, one of my uncles—not Kevin’s father—announced his conviction that Kevin would be with his family in the Celestial Kingdom. I remember feeling a sense of blind rage overwhelm me. What if he doesn’t want to be in the Celestial Kingdom?? I fumed. How dare they condemn him to spend eternity in a place that denies everything he is and wants? And then I felt guilty, because I had no idea how Kevin had felt about anything, and it was me who had no desire to find myself in the Mormon heaven when I died.

I still feel guilty about not have taken the time to visit him in Salt Lake City when he was alive, about not writing or calling or emailing. The more I learn about him, from his family and friends, the more I think he would have been a great person to know. If I had realized he wouldn’t be around . . . but none of us is going to be around forever.

My cousin Bill has written a poem about his little brother, and about that July. It makes me want to re-watch Kung Fu Hustle, and find and watch that movie about the cannibal samurai, and get to know Kevin before he’s gone.

Why I Hate July, by Bill Tibbitts

My online friend Misty (Hi, Misty!) introduced me to DailyLit a week or so ago, and since then I’ve been soaking up Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, delivered via RSS feed in easily digestible chunks to my Google Reader inbox every morning. This is obviously a sign of things to come: books will soon go the way of the dodo and everyone will read only ebooks or e-audiobooks. Libraries will be a thing of the past, but I won’t mind, or even notice, because I will be in my living room, taking in information through a cannula wired into my skull. NO ONE WILL EVER LEAVE THEIR HOUSE AGAIN.

Well, I don’t really believe that. But DailyLit is still a nice way to fit classic, open-domain literature into my day. I can even read it on my phone, on the go. (Maybe that cannula really isn’t that far off after all.) Thanks, Misty!

I just watched the best Doctor Who ever, where the Doctor inadvertently becomes Madame de Pompadour’s lifelong protector, secret friend and secret love, all over the course of a single episode. It was fantastic. I think David Tennant is a fine Doctor after all, despite my initial nostalgia for Christopher Eccleston, and the second series is actually better than the first. I know, it sounds impossible! But it’s true.

I wasn’t tagged, but I’m doing this anyway. I am aware that this is cheating.

20 years ago I:

1. Was seven.
2. Lived with my family in Hemet, California, in my grandma’s house.
3. Read all the time.
4. Had just finished my first year of homeschool.
5. Was the second of four siblings.

10 years ago I:

1. Was seventeen years old.
2. Had just started my third year of college and my first year at BYU.
3. Had just moved into the French House at BYU’s Foreign Language Student Residence (FLSR).
4. Was a senior in mathematics.
5. Was taking piano lessons and voice lessons, and the next semester would take my first ballroom dance class and sing with the BYU Men’s Chorus for the first time.
6. Was the second of nine siblings (a situation which continues, unabated, to this day).

5 years ago I:

1. Was 22 years old.
2. Had just gotten back from a Mormon mission to Southern Italy.
3. Was living once again in the French House, trying to get my French back.
4. Was a super-senior in mathematics.

3 years ago I:

1. Was 24 years old.
2. Had gone through my first three relationships—a girlfriend and two boyfriends—in rapid succession. (Two of those relationships were so short they probably don’t count, but they’re on my list anyway.)
3. Was living at my sister’s house in American Fork for the summer.
4. Was about to come out publicly (and briefly) for the first time.
5. Was a super-super senior in mathematics.

So far this year I:

1. Attended my graduation for my first master’s degree and finished the second semester in my second master’s degree (without actually failing any classes!).
2. Have started swimming with QUAC at least once a week.
3. According to Goodreads, have read 74 books this year.
4. Have been working at the Salt Lake City Public Library for 2-1/2 years.
5. Have been out as gay and an atheist, and out of the Mormon church, for almost three years.
6. Have hit the 3-year mark on this blog.

Yesterday I:

1. (See yesterday’s blog post.)

Today I will:

1. Finish downloading the first episode of the Doctor Who second series and the 2005 Doctor Who Christmas special.
2. Watch more Doctor Who.
3. Lie awake, sleepless, wishing I hadn’t finished off the pizza that was left over from last night.

Tomorrow I will:

1. Drink coffee.
2. Eat breakfast.
3. Work out.
4. Go to work.
5. Watch more Doctor Who.

In the next year I will:

1. Get down to 13% body fat.
2. Go on vacation (this summer) with my family for the first time in over ten years.
3. Go on vacation (next summer) outside of the country.
4. Start a story idea notebook.
5. Start actually writing again.

I tag Craig, David, Daisy, chosha, Nick and WHOEVER ELSE FEELS LIKE IT GOD I’M NOT YOUR MOTHER.

A great deal has been said by many people on the subject of the letter the Mormon leaders wrote urging Mormon faithful to “[d]o all [they] can to support the proposed constitutional amendment” against gay marriage in California. It was Cog’s post—and the subsequent discussion—that finally inspired me to write about it myself.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was personally involved in the Prop. 22 push in California in 2000, along with many, many other Mormons. When I think back, it’s like I was a different person. I wasn’t just a fanatical Mormon who despised gays, but I was also much more authoritarian, more punitive, and interested in legislation that would outlaw behavior I didn’t agree with—a philosophy that makes no sense to me now, at least when it comes to non-harmful behavior.

I guess the question is, is gay marriage harmful? And the answer is: it doesn’t matter, because it can’t possibly be more harmful than cohabitation, which is not illegal and happens all over the place, by gays and straights. The same goes for gay adoption: gays have and raise children, and there is no jurisdiction in which this is completely illegal—nor can I think of a way to consistently legislate against it, if the idea is so heinous to society. Consider a single lesbian mother raising her natural offspring. How is this scenario made worse by her having a loving lesbian partner, and the partner adopting the children? Now, how is it made worse if she and her partner are married to each other?

Gay people exist. They are not going away. Gay relationships exist. They are not going away. Gay parents exist, and they are not going away. Gay people, gay relationships and gay families are part of society. Society is strengthened when they are strengthened and society is damaged when they are attacked and denied legitimacy. The Mormon church and the “pro-family” groups are acting as enemies of society in their battle against gay marriage. This is a fact that should be openly recognized by gays, straights, Mormons, non-Mormons, the religious and the non-religious alike.