Shiny Shinies

I went to see Matrix Revolutions with Jeremy and Pat, his friend. I suppose I spent 2 hours and $6.25 staring at shiny lights, glass and rain. Good music, especially the choral stuff. Nice fighting; I'm glad there was more mechanical stuff- I had been getting sick of the hand-to-hand, honestly. It reminded me of Final Fantasy Spirits Within but hell of a lot cooler. The designs of the Machines were very impressive in their insect-ness. Also, I thought the guy who played the man possessed by Agent Smith (from Reloaded, remember?) was a very good actor; he managed to pin down the exact mannerisms of Hugo Weaving without looking the least bit like him. Plot was incomprehensible, as usual. I think the first Matrix was the best because the point of the first one was of course that you didn't know whether the world you lived in was real or no. But now with all that Zion stuff outside the Matrix, it doesn't seem real anymore. It's just another man-against-machine sci-fi movie. I'm not a fan of Zion in general with the knit sweaters and plastic beads. The design of it looks like a bad episode of Stargate. Grungy sci-fi was pioneered visually by Star Wars, IMHO, and has never been portrayed in movies well since. I'm not disappointed by the Matrix; I never was a big fan, so I was satisfied with my shiny shinies.

PS: One of the reasons why I picked Matrix over Master and Commander to watch is because I heard Matrix has a Troy preview. It does. Troy looks great, and my inner ancient studies nerd is happy. There was the Return of the King Teaser trailer, which made me happy to see bits of RotK on the big screen as opposed to downloaded on my computer, but disappointed because it was just the teaser. Saw the trailer for Last Samurai. It looks like a beautiful historical epic, but I hope there's at least one comic relief Asian character there too, because I'm sick of Asians being all solemn with sticks up their asses in movies all the time. (While black actors of course have the opposite problem). Timeline (the new Michael Crichton movie about timetraveling archaeologists) has flaming trebuchets, so even if that sucks, I'll watch it anyways. There are suddenly so many historical epics coming out though that I am a tremendously happy girl.

Since we were at Arundel Mills, I dragged Jeremy to the Sanrio store ("I survived," he said regarding that) and he dragged me to Game Stop where one of the employees taught us how to play the Lord of the Rings game (with Warhammer style miniatures). That must be the best job ever, to be paid to paint miniatures and battlefields and play games with people. We went to a bunch of game stores and just went "ooh" "ahh" at things beyond our budget. We tried to look at Medieval Times but we weren't even allowed in the store without a ticket (which is for the tournament and dinner). That is definitely beyond our budget ($45 or so for the tourney) and I don't even know if it'll be significantly better than what goes on at Rennfest, but I vow to come back sometime.

Still, I had a great time getting out of the house. I should do it more often.

This blows

Windy today isn't it? I was awakened at 4 in the morning by the howling outside of our window and the bang bang thud. Ryan opened the window later on because he said the wind was "sucking the window out" and the wind blew directly into the room and made the Venetian blinds rattle. Me and Jeremy stayed on the bed where it managed to be windy inside the room, and I wrapped myself in his blanket like a hajib, and for a while I thought of nomads and faraway places. Then classes and UMBC beckoned. I wore a jacket today that is knit; I made a bad choice because the wind simply goes through the holes and still makes me cold.

I'm now taking Ancient Studies 201, Introduction to Ancient Greek History. Not officially; it just happens to be a class both Jeremy and Kay are in, so I've been following them to lecture on Tuesdays and Thursdays and taking notes for fun. I went today to take notes for Jeremy because he's holed up in the CAD lab doing a computer programming project.

I am a lab widow. Yesterday I was wondering where Jeremy was, and I went to dinner by myself, and met up with Kay and Niall and Chris quite by accident. We went back to Erickson and played Settlers of Cattan (the running joke is: Settlers of Catonsville: "God, what a hellhole!"). I lost miserably. After that I tried to work on my novel for NaNoWriMo which I am miserably behind on, because I haven't been working on it during the weekends of November.

Jeremy came home in the middle of the night all droopy. I gave him back rubs and he had pizza and ate ice cream out of the carton. Awwww @___@. I wuv when he's such a sad widdle puppy...

I'm perverse, aren't I?

Addendum

Also yesterday, I started fencing epee. It is very hard to be short. I lost to Jeremy, who was gracious enough to allow me four points to his five. I still consider myself a winner after a heavy-handed and strategically placed touch that had Jeremy subsequently curled up into a little ball on the floor, crying for his mommy.

On the bright side, he still has one working testicle remaining.

So yesterday, I was in my room laying on my bed thinking, God let me fall in love with him again.

I heard a knock on the door and opened it and Jeremy was there.

We kissed and made up.

He apologized, I'm not sure what for, which shows that he is an amazing person because I was not aware that I needed an apology. I have no idea in the world how he could have known.

Goin' to New Oxford, Gonna Leave My World Behind

So this weekend I went to New Oxford, a small town in rural Pennsylvania 100 miles due north of Rockville. 10 miles away from Gettysburg. 30 miles from Carlisle, home of Dickenson College and fond memories. 5 miles away from Hanover, snack food capital of the world. It's the main distribution center of Snyder pretzels and Utz chips, and possibly some other stuff. I always thought the Utz girl was creepy, with her goth complexion and that fiendish, slightly glazed look in her eyes as she buries her hand into that giant bag of crack... uh, chips, yes. But anyway, Hanover is the snack food capital of the world, meaning if you live there and there's a nuclear holocaust tomorrow, you'll still never starve.

But in New Oxford proper, there is really nothing at all. It's rural, but not redneck. It's cozy. Approaching it there are rolling hills on either side that let you see far off into the distance, sometimes a low blue smear against the sky. The trees are bare now but I imagine it must look better in the summer or spring. There are wheat fields, and cows, race horses in your backyard, that kind of thing. It's cold up north.

Jeremy went home and I went home with him.

It was strange. I had a New Place Headache, that headache you get when you go to and stay at a completely different place.

At home, Jeremy was greeted by his menagerie of dogs and cat. Jeremy called them a "welcome committee." I call them, "dogs that are clawing at their cages and want to kill me." Jeremy, later, said it was only that the black lab was very territorial, and wanted to keep strangers away from its loved ones.

"Wants to kill me," I said.
"He wants to scare people away," Jeremy said.
".. and kill me," I said.

Jeremy's family is Sporty. We went to York College for a swim meet. I got a chlorine headache. I watched people swim back and forth and back and forth. Through the water. We sat on the ass-numbing benches. People stood at the side of the lanes cheering, mostly for the slowest swimmers to finish up faster. Jeremy told me it would be boring. I didn't believe it coud possibly be as boring as he said. Well, that was my reaction about people's comments on UMBC too during senior year, and look where it got me. I saw a York College swim shirt with someone's arm covering the Y. I imagined orcs in speedos, goggles and swim caps, doing synchronised swimming. "Ock-tar Logar! For the Horde!" This amused me slightly. Jeremy informed me that orc naval units really suck though.

Natalie, Jeremy's younger sister who is a sophomore at York, came out of the pool. She's a female version of him. She has his eyes, forehead, nose and mouth, but not the stubble. She has the oblong head. She's kind of hot (for a girl). It disturbs me. She looks like Jeremy with estrogen injections and boobs and curves. But you might find her sexy. You know what's also disturbing? She's a year older than me, so essentially Jeremy's girlfriend (me) is younger than his little sister. I guess that's not too extraordinary, but it just sounds wrong, you know?

We went "home." Jeremy's mom coaches field hockey. Natalie plays field hockey. Amie (his youngest sister in middle school) plays field hockey. Jeremy's lifelong dream is to play field hockey. They talked about field hockey. I haven't liked field hockey since Lizzie D stole my man in 11th grade. In the living room, we watched football. I tried to understand why they did that whole throwing the ball and running at each other thing. We ate dinner, during which we talked about low-calorie foods and the household made fun of Amie for eating too much.

There were long swathes of free time during which neither me nor Jeremy had anything to do. We played some pixelated games on his fossil of a computer. We went upstairs to his room, which had dinosaurs painted on the wall from when he was five, and a stuffed pterodactyl hung from the ceiling with the words 'I love you' sewn on a little heart on its chest. At a certain position laying on his bed you can't see the strings holding it up and it looks like there is a monstrous yet amorous turkey hovering over you, waiting to gouge out your eyes. He has matching dinosaur curtains, a longsword, and a fish tank bubbling in the corner that needs water changing. We discussed the anatomical impossibilities of the rainbow colored dinosaurs parading around on his walls, and whether the pterodactyl truly did love him. I asked him why he had fish. He said they were for his fish tank. I asked him why he had a fish tank. He said you couldn't have fish without a fish tank now could you? I asked him which one he got first, the fish or the fish tank, but he said you couldn't have one without the other, so he got them at the same time. I asked him why he chose to have fish AND a fish tank instead of NO fish and NO tank. He said because they swim. I asked why swimming helped. He said it'd be pretty dumb to be a fish that couldn't swim. I asked why swimming things enhanced the general atmosphere of the room. He said because they made the room interesting. I asked how swimming things made the room interesting as opposed to hopping or crawling or slithering things. He said, "Because goldfish are five cents a piece." I took a deep breath and sighed, and he said, "See, now didn't the fish just make the conversation a whole lot more interesting?"

We went and watched Finding Nemo on VHS, and watched the lunar eclipse outside the living room window.

I looked at Jeremy's ginormous collection of fantasy, sci-fi and horror novels. However, he has an intense amount of author loyalty, so while he maybe has a hundred books or so, they're by perhaps the same six authors.

We went to sleep. In seperate rooms, to please his parents. I slept in Amie's room. It has deep red hardwood furniture with scrollwork, an old-style kerosine lamp attached to the wall in a curled brass sconce (with an electric bulb), floral curtains, a fluffy pink carpet, a pink feathered net above my head holding all her stuffed animals, and a bed with lacy floral bedcovers and pink blankets. Jeremy tucked me into the warmness with all the teddy bears suspended above my head. I went to sleep watching the white plaster ceiling and for a while it was my room with neither a roommate nor flourescent lights nor cinderblock walls, a real honest to God room, and when I woke up the New Place Headache was gone.

I woke up at around 9, earlier than Jeremy. I didn't know what to do because I didn't particularly feel like dealing with his family without him around. I washed my face and brushed my teeth and loafed around for about an hour with the guinea pig in Amie's room chattering at the cage and yelling at me, then I burst into Jeremy's room and bounced on his bed until he woke up. He snapped his eyes open in shock but then he saw it was me. (He's lived in that house so long he's always subconsciously braced to be awakened at 4 am for swim practice).

We ate breakfast. Amie and Natalie ignored me. They have a habit of not talking to anyone except each other. Amie seems possibly like the kind of girl who'd beat me up in middle school. But Jeremy says that she's just pissed off because her parents made her clean her room (which she usually uses as a crap room, and stays in Natalie's room) so I could sleep in it. I think she's just pissed off because she's 13. Being 13 does that to you. Natalie's pissed off over her swim meet times, so both of them are pissed off. This kind of creeps me out because I keep thinking they are conspiring to kick my ass as the Perpetually Pissed Off Sisters. Over the course of the weekend Jeremy talked to them as sparingly as possible. Maybe it's their dad. He's one of those guys who is maybe sarcastic, if you could tell.

We waited to go to lunch. I played with Jeremy's longsword while he stood in a corner defending the fishtank from sword-related accidents. The sword was so long and heavy I couldn't control it. This is not a sexual euphemism.

We went to lunch at Pizza Hut. It was frigid inside. I was the only person there who wasn't white. Jeremy made fun of Amie eating too much again. After Jeremy's mom kissed him goodbye (on the lips...???!!), Jeremy's dad drove us home... kind of. After a lengthy amount of time trying to figure out parking, we went to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and looked at cool shit while I did my write-up for Archaeology.

Now I'm home, and writing my blog. It seems inevitable that Jeremy will read it. Hidy ho!

Addendum

In addition, "I'm saving myself for marriage" also means, "I'm saving myself for someone special" which also means, "I'm saving myself for someone special who isn't you."