Now in Theaters!

June 29, 2008 – 3:17 pm

Despite the fact that I am perishing daily, hourly, minutely from the heat and from dehydration, I’ve had the time to take in several movies and a great deal of television over the past few days.

Friday I watched WALL-E, Pixar’s newest computer-animated tour-de-force, a hilarious and amazing film, right up there with Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. WALL-E is the name of a tiny, mobile trash compactor/robot, left behind on a deserted Earth to clean up the mountains and avalanches of garbage humanity left behind. He spends his days creating neat skyscrapers out of trash cubes, and, in his free time, he collects interesting items (bras, sporks, lighters) and learns about love and dancing from an old, ailing videocassette tape of Hello, Dolly. When a sleek, white, ovoid probe named EVE shows up on a secret mission, he instantly falls in love with her, and ends up following her back to one of the massive spaceships mankind is now living on. There, he inadvertently uncovers a seven-hundred-year-old plot, becomes the leader of a rebellion of broken robots, wins EVE’s heart and saves humanity from itself.

Friday evening I went out on the town with my friend Craig, listened to live music at a dueling piano bar, sang along to ’80s music, ogled hot guys and got drunk. That was the first time I ever had to spend the night on a friend’s couch because I was too inebriated to get myself home. The next morning, which saw me shambling through downtown Salt Lake with greasy hair and sweaty, slept-in clothes, was also a first.

Saturday afternoon I went with Craig to see Wanted, a film about an ancient fraternity of assassins, starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie . . . and Angelina Jolie’s Scary Scowl of Death. (Watch for it 24 seconds into the trailer.) The movie got mixed reviews, which is easy to understand in retrospect: the premise is interesting, and the effects are mind-blowing, stunning, unreal. On the other hand, the story lies somewhere between “Huh?” and “Meh,” which is a really good way to piss off the critics, who are forced to watch movies even if they don’t want to.

Saturday night I had my own little Doctor Who marathon, with the first of the “new” series—the season with Christopher Eccleston and a blonde I keep thinking I’ve seen somewhere else but don’t think I really have. I don’t like it as much as its spin-off Torchwood, mainly because there’s no sex or swearing [too wholesome!], but apparently I like it well enough to watch several episodes end-to-end.

This morning, while I was stumbling around getting my morning coffee, I dropped a mostly empty glass container of coffee granules on my left foot. It hurt a lot, but I didn’t really pay attention to it. After I was done swimming with QUAC, I noticed that I had a nice lump and a livid bruise on the top of my foot. So now I’m at work, hobbling around with my left shoe untied, trying not to bang the lump into anything. In my T-shirt, cargo shorts and untied Skechers, I make such a dignified librarian.

Tonight: more Doctor Who?

By Sean | Posted in movies, tv shows | Tagged , | Comments (10)

The Incoherent Ravings of My Fevered Brain

June 24, 2008 – 12:00 pm

In an ideal world, the temperature in my bedroom would never climb above 65 degrees. Unfortunately, this is only the case in the spring, after my landlord shuts the heating off, and in the fall, before he turns it back on. In the winter I roast, since the lady in the frozen little downstairs apartment leaves the thermostat set in the 80s (this is the same lady responsible for smoking me out of my house earlier this year). In the summer I have a dilemma. Uncontrolled, my room will easily remain above 80 degrees all night, leaving me to flop around on my sheets like a sweaty fish until the sun rises and it’s time to get up again. On the other hand, my crappy window-mounted air conditioner is very noisy, and if I run it all night I end up so dehydrated I can hardly stand up the next morning.

This is the situation I’m living with at the moment. This is why I’m exhausted all the time, and why I’ve taken to shambling around everywhere like a poleaxed zombie. This is the reason for the massive amounts of coffee I’ve been swilling (for the exhaustion), the gallons of water I’ve been drinking (for the dehydration) and for my short temper. When I’m about to despair, though, a sweet voice of hope and reason comes to me:

“This is only June,” it whispers. “You ain’t even seen hot yet. Just wait till August gets here!”

By Sean | Posted in me, random troubles | Tagged , , | Comments (7)

Little-Known Facts That You Should Know

June 21, 2008 – 3:24 pm

Martin Millar is the funniest author you may never have heard of. I just finished Lonely Werewolf Girl and am halfway through The Good Fairies of New York, the only two of his books (currently) owned by my library, and I am plotting to get my hands on his earlier works through the magic of Interlibrary Loan.

From Neil Gaiman’s introduction to The Good Fairies of New York:

Millar writes like Kurt Vonnegut might have written, if he’d been born fifty years later in a different country and hung around with entirely the wrong sort of people. . . . The Good Fairies of New York is a story that starts when Morag and Heather, two eighteen-inch fairies with swords and green kilts and badly-dyed hair fly through the window of the worst violinist in New York, an overweight and antisocial type named Dinnie, and vomit on his carpet. Who they are, and how they came to New York, and what this has to do with the lovely Kerry, who lives across the street, and who has Crohn’s Disease and is making a flower alphabet, and what this as to do with the other fairies (of all nationalities) of New York, not to mention the poor repressed fairies of Britain, is the subject of this book. It has a war in it, and a most unusual production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Johnny Thunders’ New York Dolls guitar solos. What more could anyone desire from a book?

Lonely Werewolf Girl, on the other hand, is about a dysfunctional and murderous clan of Scottish werewolves struggling to remain relevant in a modern Britain filled with cable television, haute couture, thrash metal, army boots and T-shirts. It features: a fashion-obsessed Fire Queen; a deadly knife; a band named Yum Yum Sugary Snacks; a seventeen-year-old laudanum junkie werewolf; and a young human woman named Moonglow. It also features several deadly werewolf battles and a great deal of fine Scottish whiskey.

Both books are hilarious, brilliant, inventive and highly recommended.

P.S. The sweet potato fries last night were fabulous. I ended up roasting them for about 20 minutes in a 350-degree oven with some broccoli florets. Yummy.

By Sean | Posted in books, food/beverages, humor | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

An Anguished Cry

June 20, 2008 – 5:34 pm

Because I am nothing if not lazy and gluttonous, my fitness program has been a rocky time, mostly because the idea of eating ONLY HEALTHY FOOD inspires the worst kind of anxiety in me, anxiety which can only be soothed by a gallon of ice cream and a whole pizza. Unfortunately, there are only two more weeks left to drop the remaining five percent body fat and gain the remaining four pounds of muscle. So the prescription for the next seven days is cardio, cardio and more cardio, on top of the regimented food plan I’m already struggling with. I hate cardio almost as much as I hate eating healthily. How am I supposed to choke down double servings of both? For SEVEN DAYS?????

Dooce is also eating healthily at the moment, but she is enjoying it so much that she is contemplating becoming vegetarian, or even vegan, a possibility which has apparently drawn a lot of people’s ire. For whatever reason. In any case, thanks to Dooce, I know how I’m going to eat my sweet potato tonight!

By Sean | Posted in exercise/fitness, food/beverages, random troubles | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Maybe I Should Change My Conditioner?

June 18, 2008 – 1:42 am

My hair did this (or a variation thereof) all day. Kinda wispy and swoopy and brittle and dry.

Flowing Brown Locks

That’s what comes of

  1. letting my hair get longer than it has been since I was fifteen
  2. allowing my hair to get damp and frizz and then bake in the sun until bone-dry—twice in one day
  3. thinking impure thoughts

Impure thoughts can be blamed for anything.

By Sean | Posted in me, photos | Tagged | Comments (4)

Music for Girls

June 18, 2008 – 12:07 am

Sometimes when I’m listening to my favorite music—like “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, or “Urge for Going” by Joni Mitchell, or anything by Neko Case—I get so overwhelmed with how amazing the artist is, how much I luuuurve the song OMG OMG, how profoundly the lyrics SPEAK TO ME, that I get a bit frustrated. Once I’ve shared a song with my friends and casual acquaintances, once I’ve given it a 5-out-of-5 rating in iTunes, sung it to myself every morning in the shower and happily listened to it hundreds if not thousands of times, what else is there to do???

There’s a special feeling of desperation that overcomes me in such moments: I gasp with ecstatic joy when I hear the piano sample start up on Lily Allen’s “Knock Em Out,” and I feel I must declare my undying devotion to it, but what act could be meaningful enough to convey such a dizzying height of unselfish love? My first impulse in these cases is usually to write a blog post, like I would for a book or movie that had changed my life (SEE: Atonement; Brokeback Mountain; Sunshine; etc.), but I can’t imagine a better way to make sure my blog really was alone and unobserved than to swamp it with incoherent gushings about how I want to have Sufjan Stevens’s babies.

So just imagine that I said something profound here about the coded ur-gender manifestations in Jonathan Coulton’s “Skullcrusher Mountain,” and we’ll leave it at that. And you can check out what I’m listening in the sidebar, or listen to my Last.fm radio station, and maybe sometimes I’ll mention an album I’ve particularly enjoyed, and we’ll pretend that I’m not hopeless at disguising the fact that I am a crazy person.

By Sean | Posted in blogging, essays/rants, me, music | Comments (7)

Happy Father’s Day 2008!

June 15, 2008 – 9:30 pm

A lot of things have changed since Father’s Day 2007. That was the day my feud with my family was set aside and an armistice was declared. The feud was characterized by tense email exchanges between me and my mother, complete telephone silence with my parents on all subjects and absolutely no contact between my sister and me.

Well, the chilly silence hasn’t been replaced by daily, gushing heart-to-hearts with all concerned, but it has been nice to not have to wrestle with myself about emailing or calling, worried that I might be conceding something to The Enemy. Today I called my dad and we talked about my schoolwork (I guess I didn’t tell them I passed all my classes), and about old-growth European forests, and about what he’s done for Father’s Day, and about the vacation we’ll be taking together in Northern California in a couple of months.

I love you, Dad!

By Sean | Posted in family, me | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Live from the Children’s Library!

June 15, 2008 – 4:15 pm

Compared to the two Utah librarians whose blogs I read, I have it easy during the summer. Slanted works daily (and voluntarily?!) with kids and teens at a medium-sized Utah library; Miss Nem is the assistant director of a small branch library in northern Utah, and has to deal with surly teens, rowdy kids AND hateful parents on a daily basis. Summer, for them, is when all the schools are out, the kids have nowhere to go, and screaming hordes of children descend on the library and rip it to shreds with their sweaty, grubby hands.

I, on the other hand, am safe in my ivory tower (the third-floor reference area of the largest public library in the state) where unaccompanied minors fear to tread. The beautiful summer weather lures the adults outside, leaving the reference librarians indoors and indolent, staring at the sunny, summery world outside. And for some reason this isn’t completely satisfying to me! I don’t know what’s good for me! So I volunteer quite regularly to work down in the Children’s Library, where the Summer Reading Program is in full swing, and where rowdy kids and hateful parents are packed cheek by jowl.

Today, we had a child throw a tantrum on the stairs because he couldn’t physically carry his bike, his helmet and his massive deck of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards upstairs at the same time. So I carried his cards, a security guard carried his bike, and his sister stole his helmet and ran away with it. The subsequent tantrum got them both sent home for the day.

Later, a group of children were stomping and screaming in one of the playrooms, and when I went in to quiet them down a parent got pissed and read me a lecture about denigrating him in the eyes of his child. Because he had decided to boss everyone’s kids around and tell them what to do, and was upset that I hadn’t “respected” his “authority.”

Only one more hour in today’s shift. Being a children’s librarian has certainly grown on me in the year since the first time I subjected myself to it, but I’m not entirely won over. Drunks and schizophrenics have nothing on the mental terror children can inflict.

By Sean | Posted in library, me, work | Tagged | Comments (2)

Battlestar Galactica Not to Return until 2009

June 13, 2008 – 1:15 am

This is Battlestar Galactica’s last season, which is already a crime. And now it’s official: after tonight’s mid-season finale (reported to contain a jaw-dropping cliffhanger) the Sci Fi Channel will be holding the second half of Season Four until at least 2009. On the plus side, BSG producers claim that tonight’s episode is going to be amazing. Hopefully it will have enough amazing to make up for waiting until January for resolution.

By Sean | Posted in tv shows | Tagged | Comments (3)

New Life Goal: I Want to Be a Seventeen-Year-Old Hacker

June 12, 2008 – 3:27 am

It’s been some time since I read anything that I have found as viscerally terrifying, and yet also verisimilar, as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. This is the story of Marcus, AKA w1n5ton, a cocky seventeen-year-old student cum hacker whose life changes forever when terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge—and he and his friends are arrested by the Department of Homeland Security as terror suspects. Doctorow does a good job of making the reader feel humiliated, powerless and angry as Marcus begins to fight back, first in small ways and then in large, while always keeping within the bounds of a possible scenario. And that’s what’s terrifying: the kind of picture Doctorow paints is stomach-turning, and yet it seems utterly plausible, given what we know our government has already done and continues to do.

Another frightening book in a similiar but more scholarly vein is Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians, an online, six-chapter introduction to the Right-Wing Authoritarian personality and its current influence on American politics that explains a lot about why the idiots running this country were elected, why the religious right has managed to steal so much power and what can—nay, must!—be done about it before Cory Doctorow’s fantasy comes to life right here on American soil. [Thanks to Dave Barber of The Great Whatsit for posting about Altemeyer and his book.]

I’m also reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which is turning out to be at least as good (or even better—is this possible?) than the movie, and earlier I was listening to the movie soundtrack, which is stunning, gorgeous, unbelievable, sheer genius. Especially the incorporation of typewriter sounds into the music. [TRUST ME.]

By Sean | Posted in activist issues, books, current events, music, political issues, rights violations | Tagged , , , , | Comments (14)