Best of 2013

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."
- Zora Neale Hurston

I've always like that quote. It's just so...accurate. Especially as I get older. I'd like to add, though - it might be a while before you know which years are which.

2013 was kind of a weird year. Intense. One of those slow burns, where you don't realize how much has changed until it's over and you do, suddenly, realize - how much it's all changed. It can take a while to comb through all the Qs and all the As. Some things might belong in both piles, some in neither. Some might make their way from one to the other over time. I'm grateful for all of them, though - even if, in the moment, my feelings were more akin to 'Are You Fucking Kidding Me?'

It'll be a minute before I dig into that deep shit. Also, I just got back from visiting my parents and my dog isn't home yet (sometimes we holiday separately), so I'm somewhat emotional, and I don't really need to hop aboard the New Year's Crazy Train of Emotion right now. It's a local, making frequent stops for tiny tearful outbursts. It's fine, it just takes fucking forever, that route is exhausting. So, for now, some lighter - but no less true - fare:

Hotel Experience I Only Need Once: The Yotel.

Almost every hotel I stayed in this year was purely lovely. It was an utterly charming year in hotels. Even the Holiday Inn Express near Penn Station - the bed was apartment-sized, and I had a view into a kids' fencing academy across the alley. I didn't even know that was a thing!*

The Yotel was...different. I think the concept was 'The Future' - specifically, the future envisioned by people in the year 1995. Which included a lot of purple track lighting and pod-like spaces. Man, we really toned down our cultural expectations in the 90s. In Back to the Future Part 2, everyone was like '2015: Flying Cars, Hoverboards.' By the Clinton administration, we were like 'purple, smaller.'

Bathcorner adjacent view

So, in the future, New Age Murphy Beds are a thing. Your tiny couch will extend into a bed, extremely slowly, via a vaguely hospital-looking button installed into the leg of your tiny desk. When extended, the bed will touch the wall, bathing your feet in the warm glow of the giant television, allowing you to wonder if your whole life is occasionally a terrible Truman Show performance art piece. (Note: I was basically standing in the bathroom when taking this. Excuse me, the bathcorner. It was not a room.)

Watching tv from the shower was pretty cool

In the future, you can see your toilet from your bed. I don't like that. It makes me feel like I'm in jail. Fancy jail is still jail, people. Also jail-like (clearly I have never been to jail): the body wash and shampoo/conditioner (a 2-in-1, SHUDDER) were in dispensers, bolted to the wall. I'm not sure, but I feel like this takes innocent toiletry-hoarding into misdemeanor teritory. Yotel: the airport-jail experience. Of the future.

Salacious Yet Inspiring Memoir: Pam Grier's Foxy: A Life In Three Acts. Do you want to read about the time Richard Pryor's mini horse destroyed in the interior of Pam Grier's Jag with its mini horse pee? Of course you do.

Trip I Will Make My Assistant Take Next Year: The answer to this question should be Buffalo, because Buffalo is the worst. (Sorry, anyone from Buffalo. Sorry on several levels.) We should just give it back to Canada and see if they can do better**.

Even getting to and from Buffalo is an exercise is late industrial depression. My flight was supposed to leave at 10:10am. At around 10:15, myself and the other sad individuals making their way to Buffalo on a Tuesday morning were permitted through the gate and loaded...onto a bus***. I'm pretty sure it was the bus that transported Andy Dufresne to the penitentiary in The Shawshank Redemption****. We were driven to a 'plane' with about eleven seats and nine seat belts. I don't think I heard an engine, we were just catapulted into the air and piloted on like, air currents and hope. The lone flight attendant was a cranky 80-year-old man who immediately reminded everyone aboard that alcohol was available for purchase. (He was Hall of Fame. I asked for seltzer water and he kind of rolled his eyes. He asked if I wanted ice and my affirmative answer earned a double roll with a side of 'of course this bitch wants ice' airs. I LOVE HIM.)

It didn't get a lot better from there. It was snowing, then slushing, and I spent much of the trip was sliding around in a filthy white VW Beetle trying to avoid hitting rogue Buffalonians trudging down the middle of unplowed streets like refugees from a nuclear holocaust. Outside the tiny historic district I was visiting, the city was ringed with big-box dollar stores and fast-food joints; relics of once-lovely early 20th c. architecture, now host sites for methadone clinics, windows boarded across the upper floors. Mega churches that could double as indoor stadiums, schools easily mistaken for 1980s courthouses. I got lost and the sliding was unsettling, but the streets - and the stores, and the buildings - were mostly deserted. Except, of course, for the refugees We failed you, Buffalo. My lord.

That said, everyone I met in Buffalo was so nice. Like, absurdly, ridiculously nice, the kind of nice that makes me sort of nervous, but that can more than compensate for a shitty snowy afternoon and road zombies.

So, my actual answer is New Rochelle. Holy shit. I was there for less than an hour, and I'm pretty sure I stared directly into the face of evil about four times. It was like that movie Fallen, except the evil spirit was just being passed around to wherever I was likely to look next. One guy looked exactly like Laura Palmer's dad at like, the height of his possession. I realize none of this is specific or seemingly based in reality, but believe me, it was deeply unsettling. And absolutely the place I visited this year where I felt most in danger of being kidnapped and organ harvested^. I was terrified it was all going to downward spiral into a Mouth of Madness situation, I'd never be able to escape the city limits, and some old lady would chain me up behind the desk of the Trump Tower (which HAS to be ironic, right?) and eat me. Also, I had a vicious hangover for a portion of the trip, which is not New Rochelle's fault, but  it really didn't help impressions.

Okay, sorry, the actual answer is: Buffalo and New Rochelle. Both. My assistant will have to do both.

Repeat Offense: One afternoon, late in May, I sat at the window of a tiny restaurant in Woods Hole with a perfect taco and a glass of red wine, watching the ocean turn indigo as the sky grayed. I had an hour and a half to kill before the next ferry to Martha's Vineyard, so I went to get lunch. I've made this trip three years in a row. In 2011, my father and I had a talk about families and mortality, surrounded by noisy teenagers en route to a varsity baseball game. How strange to grow up on an island. In 2012, Kyle came with me. We sat inside and made a list of the most efficient ways to cross water, depending on distance. I still have the list. Across the top, the game ending answer: 'Like Jesus: Walk^^.' In 2013, I went alone.
It wasn't raining, but it was more than fog, and from the window I watched the ferry pull in and thought about those trips, about those years. We all have our unexpected places, rearview mirrors we stumble across, angles that have become our own. I have this corner of this street, this hour before I get on the ferry, the air full of water, water everywhere.
You can learn a lot in three years.

Happy New Year, everyone. May it bring you love, and laughter, and plenty to remember.


*Maybe it was a YMCA class and not an academy but WHATEVER, those crazed little beekeepers just delighted me.
**I know it wasn't part of Canada. Actually, I don't know that at all.
***I am not even going to get into the passengers. Okay, briefly: they included an Australian lady who I'm pretty sure was lured to Buffalo in an organ-harvesting scam, and a noticeably drunk guy in a rumpled suit who was 'in the perfume business' and planned on 'starting his life over'. In Buffalo. 
****I will admit to asking myself at this point 'are we just going to drive there?' Given my limited handle on American highway geography and like, physics, this thought probably generated more pondering than it warranted.
^And...the second organ harvesting reference I've made in the footnotes to a blog post? What the hell is the matter with me?
^^Which is certainly not the most efficient way, but it made us laugh. We'd also listed 'scuba walking' and 'water skiing tubing' (short trips only)'. While we were on a boat with cars inside of it.

I CAN'T Forget the Lyrics

This morning I woke up in a mood so fabulous I was like "it must be Friday!" Not exactly, but kind of, because on real-Friday (tomorrow, would be an easier way to say that) I'm driving Baylor and myself up to the 413 for the first time in a YEAR, and I'm kind over the moon about it.

First, of course, I have to make a few stops outside Poughkeepsie and New Britain to take some pictures for work, and I am almost guaranteed to get lost, because at the rental car counter, I'll reason: 'You know what, I am an independent lady with a fresh stack of GoogleMap printouts, so I don't need to rent that GPS for the week'. So, tomorrow, some of you might get call from me-in-tears, reaching out from the wilds of Western Connecticut because I'm lost and I'm hungry and I really have to pee. You'll only have to help me with the first part, but I get really emotional when I have an empty stomach and a full bladder, so you'll hear a lot about those last bits. Get excited!

That probably sounds like a really shitty time, but it won't be, because I will be listening to the radio. I know, who listens to the radio? I do. I fucking love the radio. Hot 97 - or whatever the regional variation on that station is - makes me so happy. I love bad r&b. I love mainstream hip-hop. I love how bad r&b and mainstream hip-hop are actually good sometimes. I love all of it.

But sometimes (often) I get so caught up in the catchiness of a jam, it takes me like, eighty-five listens to realize that it makes absolutely no sense. And then I obsess about how nonsensical it is, and that's really fun for me because I'm a nerd. Usually this happens in my head, or only to the people in my life lucky enough to get one of those 'I am lost in central New York and I just drove to the LITERAL end of a road, like it just ENDED, and I have to pee so much and all I've had to eat today was blueberries and I think I sat on one, so now maybe the back of my dress is stained, oh my god, I can't pee outside, where AM I???" (Pops, I'm kidding. This never happens. Ever.)

Anyway, these three that are so straight-up befuddling, I thought I'd share.

1) Bedrock - Young Money

Yeah, I realize this was on the radio a billion years ago. So I have been pondering the following lyric for approximately a billion years.

Nicki Minaj's verse: "Okay, I guess it's my turn/Time to put this pussy on your sideburns."

I'm sorry, what? I mean, I am open minded as shit, but that particular sex act makes no damn sense. Does she mean like, she's a female MC, so open up your ears as she delivers vaginally-powered rhymes? That's as much as I can do with that one. But even that's unsatisfying, because if that's what she was going for, couldn't she just have rhymed 'year' with 'ear' instead of 'turn' with 'burns'? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE DOING WITH YOUR VAGINA, NICKI. I mean, not like it's really my business, but you were the one who brought up sideburns time.

2) Five O'Clock In the Morning - T.Pain, Lily Allen, Wiz Khalifa

Okay, this entire SONG makes no sense. WHO IS TALKING TO WHO? I get that they may all be telling a different story, but even the thread linking them together is madness. Like, okay:

"It's 5:00 in the morning, the conversation got boring." Okay, I'm with you.

"You said you'd go into bed soon/So I snuck off to your bedroom" Wait, in the middle of the conversation? In which the intention to go to bed soon was announced? That's abrupt. And wait, whose bedroom? Boring Conversation Guy's? Why don't you just go together? Anyway, that's hardly sneaking, because...wait, where are you having this conversation? Near the bedroom? Are you at a house party or something? Because later Wiz talks about coming home from the club, so...did you abandon the conversation, drive to your man's house, and then like, break in? Whatever's happening, this is the most poorly executed 'sneak off' in history.

"And I thought I'd just wait there/Until I heard you come up the stairs/And I pretended I was sleeping/And I was hoping you would creep in..." WHAT ELSE WOULD HAPPEN? Dude TOLD YOU he was going to bed soon. Also, this is his bedroom. Just get into bed authoritatively, man. LILY'S OBVIOUSLY NOT ASLEEP YET, it's been like, thirty seconds. Unless she just passed the hell out, in which case, there's no need to creep.

T-Pain and Wiz do not go on to shed any light on the matter. I just hope these three never get accused of a crime, because they cannot construct a coherent narrative.

3) I Love My Bitches - Rick Ross

I cannot tell you how much time I've spent thinking about this lyric:

"Am I really just a narcissist/Because I wake up to a bowl of lobster bisque?"

Well, the simple answer is no, man, you're cool. A penchant for cream-based shellfish soups is mentioned nowhere in the definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (Actually, I think they might have taken NPD out of the most recent DSM entirely? Doesn't matter. Bisque consumption is not a criteria. )

Now that we've got that cleared up -- what the fuck kind of question is this? Where in the world does lobster bisque come off as a narcissistic thing to eat? The only way this question makes ANY sense is if Rick Ross is entirely confused about the definition of either 'narcissism' or 'lobster bisque'. Or both.

A more appropriate lyric might have been 'Do you think I need a nutritionist/Because I wake up to a bowl of lobster bisque?' Seriously, Rick. Lobster bisque for breakfast? You really want a heavy, cream-based sodium bomb to start the day? Or do you wake up from naps to bisque? Either way. I don't know how you expect to keep running through jungles on that diet.

And I've been operating under the assumption that this bisque is being served to you, but alternately, if you're passing out mid-bowl, you can't just wake up and resume eating the bisque, Rick. You need to refrigerate that shit. Food poisoning is not boss.

Seriously, this is the shit that goes on in my head. So surprising I get lost all the time, right?

Wait a Minute

(Yeah, you remember)

HOLD THE TRAIN.

Whitney and Ray J were in a relationship? A five year long relationship? Are you kidding me? I've been all 'Don't blame Bobby, Whitney was a grown ass woman, there has to be some accountability...', but come on, Bobby. You had a child with this woman. You want Ray J around that child? Sexy, you canNOT.

This has been kind of hard to take. I lost my virginity to Whitney Houston. She was important to me.

Woah, I meant Whit was on the radio. I didn't lose it to her, physically. Although that would have been a way better story, sorry.

Notes on the Recent Past

Recommendations of Late:

R Kelly's new album, 'Love Letter'. If you are a Kells fan, this is him at his finest. If you are not an R. Kelly fan, something is the matter with you. Listen to this album, and remedy said matter.

Adele's new album, '21'. She's just fucking crazy.

Learning to make your own tomato-basil-mozzarella salad. I think grown ups call it caprese.

Occasionally substituting rosemary for basil because for some reason Whole Foods only sells basil in enormous quantities.

The movie 'Youth in Revolt'. I LOVED that movie. It's the best thing I've seen in recent memory.

Using a bag of frozen peas as a hangover headache remedy when you feel too barfy to take Advil.

Things to Avoid:

Drinking 12-plus mimosas in a sitting.

The movie 'Dogtooth'. Unless you want to be seriously disturbed by some Greeks for two hours. When it was over, I looked at Baylor* and literally said 'What the fuck just happened?' I get that it's incredibly daring and shocking and definitely causes a person to think, which is kind of the purpose of art and all, but...okay, there's one part where I was laughing because the Son character runs across the lawn in a particularly hilarious way that reminded me my favorite scene in 'The 'Burbs' (A movie I DO, whole-heartedly, unabashedly recommend. It's goddamned hilarious.) and then I cut off my laughter mid-chuckle, because suddenly he's stabbing a cat in the stomach with a pair of garden shears. I think I mostly hate it because no one else I know has seen it, and I just want to TALK to somebody about this mess.

Smoking a lot of cigarettes when you haven't in a while.

Licking a lot of envelopes in a hurry.

Wearing pants. Pants are the worst.

ps: I got this picture when I GoogleImage searched 'R Kelly Tomato'. I don't know WHAT this has to do with tomatoes, but it's R Kelly singing, wearing a t-shirt with a picture of R Kelly singing. Which is just amazing.

*Baylor's a dog, but he has pretty solid opinions on movies and shit.

More About the Homeless...

(Yes, same tune.)

Maybe it's just been on my mind: the homeless and their technical status, or lack thereof. Whatever the reason, this morning it seemed like the Common was fucking littered with possible homeless people. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean that the PHP were scattered, everywhere, in strange locations, in a way reminiscent of what occurs when my housemate's Boston Terrier gets into the bathroom trash. Okay, calling PHP trash is not the point. I'm just going to move away from that to get to the real point:

The crazy array of PHP this morning included one dude who was not only 'possibly' homeless, he also appeared to be 'possibly dead'. Like, as I passed by I tried to focus on his ribcage-area to see if it was rising and falling. I couldn't tell. I figured he MUST be alive, given that there were approximately 600 people around, including a bunch of dudes with hard hats on working on the historic cemetery wall against which his corpse-like personage was smushed. But what if EVERYONE assumed that? He looked like, seriously uncomfortable*.

What are you supposed to do in that situation? Call someone? The police? I don't want to call the police. Because if he's not dead, and he just passed out there, in the Common, all wedged against a wall...he probably had some weird shit happen to him last night, you know? He'll have enough to deal with when he wakes up, I don't want to cause an extra headache for the poor dude. His head probably hurts enough.

I am constantly haunted by the feeling that I skipped school the day They explained all The Rules.

*This bugged me out enough throughout the morning that I went back to check on him at lunch. He was gone. Which, I realize, means nothing. If anyone happens to learn the fate of the passed out Hispanic gentleman of medium stature wearing a grey t-shirt with a leaf stenciled on the shoulder, would you please let me know?

OMG, WTF

This is the most fucked up news I've heard in a while. And considering how fucked up the news is ALL THE TIME, that's really saying something.

They are outlawing smoking on the beach. The beach. The name we have given the part of the Earth where the land meets the ocean. The beach. THE MOTHERFUCKING BEACH. IT'S OUTSIDE. No. No, no, no, no. NO. We've taken it too far now, people. It's time to start reigning things in. We need to reorganize the whole system, or shut it down and start it over, something. This is not working.

No one is trying to argue that smoking is good for you, or that people should be allowed to smoke in hospitals or on airplanes anymore - although that period of history always seems quite naive and amusing, so excuse me and my conveniently invented nostalgia - and I totally understand why restaurants went smoke-free rather than doing the whole 'non-smoking section' thing - that sliver of raised PlexiGlass wasn't fooling anyone - but this is ridiculous. This is not something that should require government regulation. This is something that reasonable adults should just be able to work out on their own.

When you're paying about 37 cents per cigarette (Jesus, remember when the Loosey seemed like a rip-off?), you should be permitted to decide where you would like to smoke it, within reason, of course. Don't smoke at the waterpark, fine. No smoking at the zoo, I get it. Keep it in the pack at the movies - obviously, what kind of asshole do you take me for? But now I can't smoke at the beach? At the public fucking beach? FUCK OFF.

Listen, I don't even smoke (that much, anymore) but this is JUST MEAN. What are people supposed to do? What if I get to the beach FIRST and just post up on my towel with my book and my umbrella and don't bother anybody, and then Asshole Clan '08 sets up camp next to me, and their kids kick sand all over me while they shriek and eat trans-fats and squirt Capri Sun all over my towel, and then when I reach for a Camel because these stupid morons are stressing me out and ruining my lovely serene beach time I'm all of a sudden the bad guy? What, I have to go stand in the parking lot with all the other ostracized members of society on our sad little patch of sweltering blacktop all because your lungs can't handle second hand smoke outside? OUTSIDE, BEFORE THE SPRAWLING EXPANSE OF THE FUCKING OCEAN??? Enough. Seriously.

Lions and Tigers and...Well, that's Enough, Really.

There are some evenings when I'm home and it's freezing outside and all I want to do is be entertained without effort. On those evenings I turn to my television, and when its myriad channels disappoint me, I often think about disconnecting the whole thing and subsisting solely on my dvd sets of the The Wire and Chappelle's Show. But I don't, and next thing I know I'm sucked into Top Chef, or Real Chance at Love, or Rock of Love Charm School, and the night dissolves into a weird shame spiral that usually involves a lot of red wine.

Then there are other nights where my HBO subscription pays for itself, and all it's under-performing sibling movie channels, in one glorious swoop. Last night was one of those nights. Last night, I found 'Cat Dancers' .

"Ron Holiday, Joy Holiday and Chuck Lizza, aka the Cat Dancers, were one of the world's first exotic-tiger entertainment acts. For years, the trio shared a happy, if unorthodox, life as performers and lovers - until a pair of bizarre deaths brought their story to a tragic end. Premieres Monday, December 15 at 8pm.

I don't want to ruin it for you, because YOU HAVE TO WATCH IT - for Ron Holiday's performance outfits alone. There's one scene where I swear to God, he has constructed suspenders out of black index cards individually taped to his chest. There is so, so much spandex, and his mullets get progressively more glorious throughout the flashback footage - made all the more incredible by the present-day interviews in which he is completely bald, and expresses his personality via elaborate wigs. Seriously, in the first five minutes, dude looks so much like Buffalo Bill, I honestly didn't know where the story was taking us. I didn't even know if 'tiger' was going to be the cause of death.

See, Ron Holiday and his wife, Joy - who, when choosing between devoting her life to the dance or to the Lord, was told by a nun to 'dance for God' - had a dance act. They danced everywhere. Ron was a lead male nude dancer at the Folies Bergere (an episode to which they devoted like, ONE SENTENCE, to my great dismay) and they did odd sexual ballets at Radio City, and everything was sparkly and amazing.

One night Ron (I assume) overdosed on quaaludes and had a dream where Joy was dancing with a cat. So they just like, got a leopard. And trained it to dance with them. Then they got a whole bunch more cats, and travelled in a circus, and stole a man-boy named Chuck from a competing circus, and trained him to dance with the cats, and then he started wearing satin booty-pants and shirts made out of deconstructed party favors from an event at Studio 54, and it's just insane. Right? This was fucking riveting. And this is all BEFORE Ron tells us about his first sexual encounter with Chuck. Ron and chuck got down! Then Joy started banging Chuck, too. THEN EVERYONE WAS SLEEPING WITH EVERYONE AND DANCING WITH BIG CATS. The best part was how hard these three loonies dug the shit out of their lifestyle. I mean, this was so, so crazy, but watching them all be like "This rules. We just have sex with each other and feed our enormous jungle cats huge portions of raw meat. We're so happy."...it was really convincing. I mean, not like they were hurting anyone. OH WAIT.

Because then they ate a bad batch of mushrooms, and decided to get a white tiger, which I guess was questionable not so much in that they were adopting another thousand pound wild feline to live in a cage out back, but in that white tigers are often inbred, and therefore unpredictable. But they get one anyway, because these people are completely insane. So they get this tiger, and they name him Jupiter, and he's clearly an asshole, but rather than you know - getting rid of their UNSTABLE TIGER they decide he's just 'a brat.' Because tigers are completely analogous to toddlers, and they grow out of these bratty phases. OH WAIT.

Here's the part where I totally spoil this for you: spolier alert? Is that what I'm supposed to say? We already know this doesn't end well.

One day there's a crew of electricians fortifying the fence at Rancho Insano, and rather than leaving all the tigers in their cages until they're finished working, the Cat Dancers put their full grown wild animals on leashes and walk them around. And Chuck, while walking Jupiter, slips and falls - apparently because he has moccasins on - and the tiger BITES THROUGH HIS FUCKING NECK. And then I guess it cried. So Ron blamed the moccasins, and kept their MAN EATING TIGER in their backyard.

Except all is not well, as Joy becomes consumed with grief, and spends the next month in her bed without food, or, apparently, a shower. Which is sort of understandable, I guess, considering her child-lover was just de-throated by a giant cat that's still living in the backyard. I'd probably freak out, too. I'd probably shower a few times, but these people are working on a different scale of reasonableness, so I'm just going to move on.

After about five weeks of stewing in her own filth and hunger pangs, Ron convinces Joy to go out and like, pat the cats, or something. So they go into the garage, and Joy like, rubs her hands with meat and makes out with their ocelot, or whatever, and everything's going well, and then Ron decides to bring Jupiter into the garage. Like REALLY, Ron? Jupiter? Now? But apparently he loves traumatic shock therapy, so in comes the white tiger. Who, upon seeing Joy, LEAPS ACROSS THE GARAGE AND TEARS HER THROAT OUT. And then I guess it made it's 'crying noise' again, and Ron - putting all the pieces together at last - shouts: "Jupiter - YOU'RE INBRED!!!" No, Ron - JUPITER IS A FUCKING TIGER. IF THERE WAS A TIGER IN MY GARAGE, AND THE TIGER DID NOT EAT ME, MY RESPONSE WOULD BE 'WHAT IS THIS TIGER, INBRED?' HOLY FUCK.

Right. Exactly. It's the most fucked up shit ever. I scratched the surface, too - there's so much more. For instance, we learn that since the tiger mauled his family, Ron now teaches ballet to children - creepy, especially considering the wigs - and also posits himself as an 'animal behaviorist' and gives tours of the exotic ranch his big cats now live on. That's like calling yourself a criminologist because you invited some wacko drifter to come stay in your house and he murdered your whole family. I don't want animal behavior advice from this guy - HIS TIGER ATE HIS WIFE. YES HE STILL HAS TIGERS.

I could talk about this shit all day. Please do yourself a favor and do whatever you need to do to see this film. You may have bizarre dreams about leopards and leotards for the next few nights, but it is so, so worth it. SO yes - thank you, HBO. You truly are more than just TV.

Oh, Lord. Awkward Confession Time.

I have a dilemma, sort of.

See, there are approximately 20 movies out now/that will be released in the near future that I really really really want to see, and 'Milk' is at the top of the list, because it's supposed to be amazing. However, unfortunately for me, I already know that I will not enjoy 'Milk' - at least not like everyone else will. And you know why? It's the worst reason ever. It's...because ever since Sean Penn starred in 'I Am Sam' I CANNOT TAKE HIM SERIOUSLY. It's so stupid, but I can't get over it. It's not even Sean Penn's fault - I just hate movies that are purposely emotionally manipulative, I hate mannequins and I hate robots*...so OBVIOUSLY I hated 'I Am Sam'...

I am trying to get over this. Generally, I think Sean Penn seems like a pretty whacked out dude, and that's pretty appealing - I like my artists a tad unhinged. I'm aware he's actually a really good actor or whatever. AND THE MAN PLAYED JEFF SPICOLI. I mean really. What is my problem? 'Milk' is going to kick ass. Gus Van Sant! James Franco! I am going to love it. Really. NO I PROMISE MY BRAIN WON'T OVERRIDE THE SYSTEM AND ONLY HEAR SEAN PENN YELLING "IT MATTERS TO ME" DURING EVERY DRAMATIC MOMENT. I promise to try, anyway. Sheesh.

* Dakota Fanning is probably a robot.