The New Normal in the house involves much less dry food, available throughout the day, a bigger water fountain, and a serving of wet food at both 7:30 AM and PM. At the same time as the wet food, I also administer an insulin shot.
Greetings, friend!
I was musing on all the things I’m dealing with at the moment, and realized it’s a lot. Rather than try to fit all this shit into a tweet or a tweet-thread, I decided to indulge myself and fill the vasty white fields of a blog post with swarms of words. I have an awesome mechanical keyboard, let’s bang on this thing.
(CW: Pet health, needles, harsh language)
Feel free to skim the Herzog paragraphs- there is a bullet list at the bottom detailing the other mountains in my range of Recent Anxieties.
(Author’s Note: Once I was done with this emotional barf party, I dithered on whether or not to even post it since it’s a few thousand words of just BLAAAAAAHHHHGGGGHHHHH. But I decided to go ahead and post it – let things that need be said, be said. At another point in the future, I will do a post about all the things I am looking forward to, in order to voice to the positive as well as the negative.)
That’s right! It’s the beginning of HORROR MOVIE MONTH here at Late to the Theater! And we’ve got a whole big RANGE coming up! I’ve been planning and scribbling ideas and having all kinds of fun figuring out the themes for the weeks!
Week 1 – The Suburbs: Hell is Other People – Ride along on your BMX while we deconstruct some of that most 80s of juxtapositions, horror in the suburbs, with well-known films The Burbs,Poltergeist, and the less well-known Lady in White. If you enjoyed Stranger Things, you will find some familiar ground here. I’ve covered The Burbs before, but that was then and this is now and I’ve got lots of new corny jokes.
Week 2 – A Walk Among the Fandoms: My Trip to Spooky Empire – In which I recount my experience at Spooky Empire, Orlando’s horror convention. And I’ll talk about my John Clare costume! Excitement!
Week 3 – Werewolf Week! – Fur, fangs, talons, subtext about sexuality; the gang’s all here with Dog Soldiers,The Howling, and one that’s very near and dear to my heart, The Company of Wolves. Get your beast-fix and bring a doggie bag (hurr) for week 3.
Week 4 – TBA. I like to end with a bang, so the last week should be something really cool, and I haven’t figured out what that is, yet. So who knows? Maybe it’s all Stephen King movies, maybe it’s all old-school, or maybe it’s all new-school, maybe it’s all cannibals. Time will tell!
So stay tuned! Our first entry will be hitting the intarwebz next Monday morning at 8.
I want Eddie Murphy to go the Bill Murray route, and be in a string of brilliant comedies with a profound emotional center that win all the awards and set him up for the legacy he’s worked so hard to create.
I’ve been working on an entry on Eddie Murphy for a few months now, so when I saw that he was going to be in something new I got really excited. “Oh gosh! This is so timely! He must be making a comeback!” Yay!
Then this trailer happened:
As happy as I am to see him in a big film that’s getting a lot of coverage, that is how disappointed I am to see him in a film that is actually about a pretty blonde girl. I cringed as I ticked off the boxes below:
I want Eddie Murphy to make a comeback in a huge way, and be in some amazing film that blows our minds and returns him to the forefront of American cinema. I want Eddie Murphy to go the Bill Murray route, and be in a string of brilliant comedies with a profound emotional center that win all the awards and set him up for the legacy he’s worked so hard to create. He’s smart, savvy, and a great entertainer. I do not want him to be taking shit from a snotty little girl. I do not want him to be the supporting character to a little girl’s journey of self-discovery.
Maybe that’s not what this movie is! Maybe it’s too complicated to be summed up by a trailer, so to get people into the theater and talking about it, the filmmakers went with the ‘Well let’s do the tearjerker Mom Dies Of Cancer angle! That’ll get people to buy tickets!’
I want to believe! I want to!
Anyway, I hope that you’re having a great week, and that you have a great weekend. I went outside to see if I could spot any meteors from the Perseid Meteor Shower last night, but the sky was pretty overcast and I didn’t see anything. Maybe tonight’s the night!
Two years ago, the world lost a great entertainer. On August 11th, 2014, we all found out about Robin Williams’ passing, and the manner of his passing.
I was at the Nine Inch Nails concert in Tampa. It was supposed to be a fun, memory-making occasion – I had loved them since 1995, yet had never seen them live. Somehow I was either always broke, or had some other feeble excuse. in 2014, I bought tickets for me and my then-boyfriend, who wasn’t a fan. In a weird way, I was trying to reach out to him. Our relationship had been on the rocks for most of the year, for lots of reasons, none of which I will go into here.
Sometime between Soundgarden’s set and NIN coming on, the news hit. It went through the crowd like wildfire, I suppose because it hit the newswires about the same time. Still, the show went on, and for many reasons, some mentioned and some not, it was one of the most memorable shows I’ve ever seen.
Mr. Williams’s death still too big a thing for me to address. I don’t have the hours to find the perfect words that would tell you what his career and battle with alcoholism and mental illness meant to me, a stranger who never met him. You probably already know, quite honestly.
Basically my office of about 120 people did a giant potluck. We brought sausages, beer, potato salad, sausages, beer, chips, sausages, beer, salad, sausages, beer, condiments, sausages, and beer. At 3:30, we all knocked off to go hang out. Some people set up grills outside, we all chatted and drank, and it was pretty awesome. Most of my coworkers are people I hang out with outside of work, so it’s nice to be able to do that.
However, for about a week, I have been battling an entirely different kind of sausage party.
Allow me to explain. Some of you will read the first half of the next sentence and go ‘Ah-HA’ because you have experienced this yourself. It was sort of my first time.
I decided to try joining a dating website last week…
… it wasn’t awesome.
I went on a geek-oriented one and created a profile. I was feeling pretty okay for the first 23 hours and 58 minutes, and thought ‘Ah, no hits. Well that’s all right maybe it just takes a while.” At 24 hours, I got a notification that my profile was live.
Which was when the messages started.
This.
I spend most of my time alone, not talking to people, and suddenly people were approaching me most aggressively. I can handle catcalling, and have even faced off with inappropriate touchers at the gym, but this was too much. I had a panic attack and closed the account.
The next day I was telling a friend about my experience, and he basically laughed at me and dared me to try again. So I thought – I can handle this! I have run through fire! I have survived suicidal depression! I’ve walked away from five car accidents, and many other defiances of death. I have faced down angry drunks and fallen out of trees. I can totally do this!
I found a different site (not disclosing names just because other people might try them and actually have luck!) and tried again.
NOPE.
Go little legs, go!
My inbox became infested with dudes. Dudes demanding attention, demanding emotional validation, demanding responses. Being a polite kind of person, I tried to respond to as many as I could, even to say ‘We have nothing in common, but thank you!’ which was apparently seen as an invitation to ramble at length about how I should give someone a chance.
I lasted about 5 days before executing a scorched Earth policy and deleting my account. Waking up today to not find dozens of messages in my inbox was bliss. Especially not dozens of messages from people whose usernames included the suffix ‘-backdoorman’. I am relieved to say that I received no dick pics, had a few interesting conversations, and made a very few new friends, but otherwise am done. Several friends I have reported the same findings, of either no attention or way, waaaay too much. Nay, the dumpster fire of the great Social Media Dating Experiment of 2016 is done. I consider it a valuable learning experience!
Also this.
So now that that distraction is over, I intend to be more disciplined about writing and posting. Also, with Horror Movie Month coming up, I have to start thinking about what I’m going to watch! Plenty of stuff is on Instant Watch, and the Enzian’s got some great selections this year that I’m really looking forward to.
Thanks for sticking around! I really appreciate my readers – without you, I’m just a madwoman chattering to herself in the corner, after all!
EDIT: My friend linked to a very interesting story about a dude who created a female profile on OKCupid, just to see what it was like. His experience basically mirrored mine. Please only read if your faith in humanity is reasonably strong.
Have you ever tried an online dating website? How did it go?
