11:15 PM Three Dragon Ante: This generation's only real chance for rock and roll salvation on the highway to eternal damnation.

At the last minute last night, Jimmah, Kenny and I decided against Big Momma's House 2 and opted to see Brokeback Mountain. Turns out it's not a comedy at all, but a heavy relationship film. Just kidding. I guess my expectations had been set pretty high by all the "I loved it" reviews I'd heard/read, but while I didn't think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread I definitely liked and appreciated it, and I'm glad I went to see it on the big screen. Rather than go into it here, I directy you to Jimmah's post about it, where I've left some brief comments about it. (Please note, also, that the musical combo referred to by rock journalists everywhere as "this generation's only real chance for rock and roll salvation on the highway to eternal damnation," Three Dragon Ante, will be playing at Max's place Feb 24th).

Speaking of Rock and/or Music™, Here's my list, in no particular order, of the top ten albums of 2005:

• Gentleman Caller, Mascara Lines
• Winechuggers, Grand Rapids

Okay, so I don't really have a top 10 list, but these are both great albums.

10:21 PM

8:23 PM I've never been one of those bloggers who gives a title to each post. You know the type. That just ain't me, yall. Isn't it funny how quickly things change these days? Using Blogger is old-school now, baby. I don't know anything about anything any more, least-wise podcasting, outline-based blogging or web2.0. But LOST is on tonight...

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I hadn't heard of Structured Blogging before today.

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The sad story of an artificial intelligence guy who committed suicide: [link].

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True story: Last night I was watching the Hoosiers with Jimmy, nodding off at points, but mostly watching the team in "we suck" mode. Even coach got into the game, getting a technical for no apparent reason except he was frustrated that the Hoosiers sucked. Jimmy said: "why doesn't Killingsworth go for the dunk when he's under the basket? He'd be more likely to get the bucket and probably get fouled as well?" Then we joked about ways to play on his name if we were newspaper sports writers: "He's not Worth Killing" &etc. Not the Hoosier's proudest moment, but I still have faith. Go Hoosiers.

-+---

via kottke: the interesting short story of the MS Comic Sans font.

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Okay, so this post is pretty unfocused. But get this:

I'm gonna go see Brokeback Mountain this coming Monday night at 10:30 with Kenny and Jimmah. Anyone else interested?

Oh, and by the way, I'm a rock god. That is all.

11:19 PM Maoist Movie Reviews. I'm not sure what to say about this. I enjoy reading alternate interpretations of movies, and I think it's worthwhile to examine art from differeing perspectives. These reviews made me chuckle, even as I found myself agreeing with some of their comments. I can only conclude that I sincerely hold beliefs which simultaneously crack me up. I'm not sure what to do about that.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon:

The forces of good and evil are trying to win the heart of a young rich girl (played by Zhang Ziyi) who is about to be married off by her parents. She wants to live the free life of a warrior and does not want to marry. The movie never addresses the topic of arranged marriage and the subjugation of wimmin as a societal issue. Instead each woman faces different individual difficulties that are made to be part of her personal situation rather than part of a patriarchal system.

I have to disagree; the movie explicitly addresses the topic of arranged marriage, and our protag, the "invincible sword goddess," explicity chooses the path of the hero, even when it means sacrificing everything to remain true to herself. [update: on a "personal" level - er, yeah, i guess it doesn't address it on a "societal" level per se.]

Spiderman 2:

MIM has said that "Spider-Man: The Motion Picture" (2002) has some redeeming value on the basis of its depiction of asexuality, but it cannot ignore the fact that "Spider-Man's" Amerikan flag-waving fans are cheering for something that in the real world would be called "capitalist police repression."

This is an important point. Communists do not support pig repression, much less the pig-wanna- be, labor-aristocrat vigilantes who think themselves heroes when they are gunning down the Third World proletariat at the Mexico-united $tates border, or the self-styled "community" pigs who "police" Asian, Black and Latino youth street organizations. If the bourgeoisie want to sic their thugs on each other, MIM would not get in the middle of this fight, but it does not support pig repression in the abstract when Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) has his knee-jerk reaction every time he hears a police siren. If Spider-Man had any (spider-) "sense" at all, he would fight the police repression under which gold miners work in Azania and China to produce the gold coins stored in the vault of the bank that is robbed in the movie.

It gets better; I recommend reading the entire reviews if you have any inclination.

- + + + -

Chris put up his list of top 2005 music. I acquired his top-rated album of 2005 and was a bit taken aback. Really? This is your top choice? Okay, I'm giving it a chance. I think I need to give Antony and the Johnsons some time to digest. Initial reaction? Mildly interesting, but nothing I'd give a second listen to without a recommendation. But my tastes have always been fairly pedestrian. Heck, I like Polvo Tortoise, so Maybe I'll develop an appreciation for A&TJ too. I downloaded Sufjan Stevens and decided I must not be in the right mind-set to listen to new music. I think a hyper-critical imp sits on my shoulder tonight.

So I'm not even gonna discuss movies tonight.

You can see the summit but you can’t reach it
It’s the last piece of the puzzle but you just can’t make it fit
Doctor says you’re cured but you still feel the pain
Aspirations in the clouds but your hopes go down the drain
And you want her and she wants you
We want everyone
And you want her and she wants you
No one, no one, no one ever is to blame

That's a Howard Jones song. Booger likes that song. I do too. Have you read Booger's blog lately? You should, and then leave him a comment. Joe and I go way back. We shared a dorm room my sophomore year (and Bill was our unofficial third roommate). It was a crazy time in my life, but I have a lot of great memories from that time nonetheless. Suzanne Vega had a hit. Joe and I lived on the second floor of Reed. Joe wore a shirt that said, "My name is Booger, I live on the second floor."

4:33 AM The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart: "Selling Snapper lawn mowers at Wal-Mart wasn't just incompatible with Snapper's future--Wier thought it was hazardous to Snapper's health."

"As I look at the three years Snapper has been with you," he told the vice president, "every year the price has come down. Every year the content of the product has gone up. We're at a position where, first, it's still priced where it doesn't meet the needs of your clientele. For Wal-Mart, it's still too high-priced. I think you'd agree with that.

"Now, at the price I'm selling to you today, I'm not making any money on it. And if we do what you want next year, I'll lose money. I could do that and not go out of business. But we have this independent-dealer channel. And 80% of our business is over here with them. And I can't put them at a competitive disadvantage. If I do that, I lose everything. So this just isn't a compatible fit."

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Also - recently picked up Charles Burns' collected Black Hole series from the library and enjoyed it. Not for everyone, I suppose, but for all the weird and halucenigenic imagery, ultimately it struck me as just a story about kids trying to make their way through a confusing time in their lives, and in that sense it worked for me.

1:13 PM Some food pix from Christmas in Florida:

10:53 AM Kissing Cowboys make baby Jesus (and John Wayne) cry.

- + -

OBL book review spurs book sales. I've actually held a copy of this book in my hands at Bloomington's local anarchist bookstore, but decided against taking it home with me. Will this change my mind? ...

- + -

Some Ebert readers disagree with his review of Crash, a movie I had mixed feelings about: "The film’s presentation of racism is so superficial, so painfully clichéd, that it threatens to actually close people’s eyes to the ways in which racism most frequently and most dangerously presents itself." [link] . I'm giving this out of order, but the comments on that link are in response to Ebert's defense of his review of the film, which included this:

It is useful to be aware of the ways in which real people see real films. Over the past eight months I've had dozens of conversations about "Crash" with people who were touched by it. They said it might encourage them to look at strangers with a little more curiosity before making a snap judgment.

These real moviegoers are not constantly vigilant against the possibility of being manipulated by a film. They want to be manipulated; that's what they pay for, and that in a fundamental way is why movies exist.

And I guess I think that's true to a certain extent, but I also think of myself as a "real moviegoer" and I also felt manipulated by it. I go to movies because I want them to effect me, sure, but that doesn't mean I won't recognize clumsy or hackneyed techniques to achieve those effects. I'm sure if you watch and review 400 films a year you tend to become cynical about the tools of the trade, and I know that what's trite to one person may be clever to another. And that's all I got to say about that.

Okay, actually, that's not all. I recently read The Kite Runner and liked it. The paperback edition I read has a short section at the end titled "Discussion Questions," something I've seen in some other books as well, a collection of possible questions for books clubs or what have you. Well, reading through these questions/commentaries about the book nearly reduced the novel to a collection of plot devices and writing techniques for me; I mean it nearly killed some of my enthusiasm for the book. An example:

3. Early in Amir and Hassan's friendship, they often visit a pomegranate tree where they spend hours reading and playing. "On summer day, I used one of Ali's kitchen knives to carve our names on it: 'Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul.' Those words made it formal: the tree was ours." In a letter to Amir later in the story, Hassan mentions that "the tree hasn't borne fruit in years." Discuss the significance of this tree.

This element of the narrative, the tree and how it changed compared to their childhood together and later, over time, was a fairly subtle part of the story, at least to me. Having it spelled out like this turned it into a cheap plot device. It's the sort of thing "real readers," to paraphrase Ebert, probably aren't supposed to feel hit over the head with, but which literature critics and english professors see thousands and thousands of times and therefore simply drop into a category in their analytical minds: characters are introduced, certain details are given, for the characters to be interesting they must change and therefore plot devices are provided to chart their change, such as trees that stop producing fruit, gardens or farmland which thrive or wither, businesses with stand the test of time or morph into something else....

I like the scene in The Player when a would-be director is shopping around his script idea by describing the opening scene of his movie: it's dark and raining, people are gathered under umbrellas holding candles, and the candlelight illuminates the umbrellas. The producer says, "that's good, I haven't seen that before" which sums it all up. Everything's been done before, pretty much, but we're still hungry for seeing things told in a slightly different way so that it somehow feels fresh and new. Mind you, they're both still entirely cynical about making movies, but that encapsulated for me what it must be like to work in Hollywood and be surrounded by people who have already seen it all, who can reduce your ideas to a 35-word blurb ("it's a sci-fi battle flick, ala Aliens but not as dark, which also overlaps with 90201 teen sex elements, and it's based on a novel by Heinlein; brief nudity, cartoonish gore, humorous parody of patriotism").

Anyhoo, I guess I know what Ebert means when he says "real moviegoers," but I also think "real moviegoers" can tell when their strings are being pulled; sometimes you recognize it and it doesn't matter cause it still works, other times being aware of the strings kills it.

Might have to return to this later.

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I'd never heard of the Wookiepedia before yesterday. From there I learned that a demo of Star Wars: Empire at War is available for download.

- + -

Gotta go, I'm designing the Tanque corporate headquaters in Legos.

- + -

[...oh, but I meant to add: I finished The Giver last night and I have to admit, it left me scratching my head. I'm not sure how I expected it to end, exactly, but I didn't quite know what to do with the story where it left off. Clint, I may need to see your class notes.]

11:56 PM Tick, tock, tick.

11:44 PM Heidi reminds me that good music makes a nice counterbalance to winter dregs; I'm listening to Uvula right now and imagining rainy muck of Portland after the rain has let up. Here's to the return of the sunlight after a long grey spell.

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Recent (relatively -- since last August or so) list of books read:

• The Price of Loyalty - Suskind, O'Neill.
  Written as if it's target audience is a third grade remedial english class, this was nonetheless an interesting hagiography of O'Neill that covers his time in the Bush Administration. O'Neill presents himself as a reality-based straight talker and Bush as a weak thinker surrounded by ideologues with an agenda. The main point I took from this is that past administrations (and good organizations in general) need to have a system in place that allows opposing views to be balanced and openly discussed. Instead, Bush staff meetings had little or no substantive discussion of policy. Unfortunately, this slender volume is so light as to be nearly entirely without meat. He liked his trip to Africa with Bono, though, and is apparently convinced that the solutions to Africa's clean water problems are within reach, and to his credit he seems to have made that his pet project after the Bushies showed him the door. Maybe if GWB wasn't breaking every record in terms of incompetance and corruption this insider's expose of his poor management abilities would feel more weighty.
• The Persian Puzzle - Kenneth Pollack
  Yes, Pollack was the guy who got tagged as the think tanker who convinced so many lefties that maybe it was time to invade Iraq, but I guess I don't dismiss him very easily. For one thing, I think he's a good writer; less so perhaps when he's suggesting strategy but I found his description of the state of Iraq after the first Gulf War pretty solid, and where he dropped the ball on intelligence matters, I think he did so without an axe to grind. So now his Iran book sits on my bookshelf. It's more broad and comprehensive than All The Shah's Men, which I'd also recommend but which I found to be a little simplistic at the end of the day. (The '53 coup might well have happened without CIA assistance, as far as I can tell, for instance. ) And, for what it's worth, he's pretty up front about the lack of US options in dealing with Iran these days; no recommendations of invasion here.
• No True Glory : A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah - Bing West
  Engaging story of US troops in and around the city of Fallujah (and Ramadi, Najaf) in 2004 told from the perspective of the soldiers tasked with being there. While it didn't change my mind about the war, it does a good job of explaining why different US factions behaved the way they did and how screwed up the command structure was (and still is as far as I can tell). Definitely a pro-grunt book, which emphasised how the insights of the "boots on the ground" were ignored by the upper command.
• See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism - Robert Baer
  This is the book that the movie Syriana is based on. Loosely based on, that is. Bob Baer's apparently written elsewhere about oil interests influencing CIA operations, but this book is mostly about how the CIA under Clinton pretty much shut down and stopped doing human intelligence. Like Price of Loyalty, this book doesn't expect much from it's readers, but it does give a view of the post-cold war era from the perspective of a CIA op who finds his abilities no longer in demand, and makes a reasonable criticism of the decline of real intelligence gathering and cultivation of agents abroad in favor of relatively short-term buisiness deals for the mega-corps. Not sure what else I have to say about this book; I might look for more by this guy, but might not.
• John Adams - David McCullogh
  I loved this book. A librarian at work suggested it and it was my vacation reading over Christmas. I need to come back to this book and go over some of the specific things I like about it, but suffice it to say that it left me hungry to know more about the founding fathers and the American Revolution and the French and Indian War and Franklin's time in Paris and the French Revolution and the Federalists and on and on. Hopefully more on this later.

Of course, after all this non-fiction I totally devoured the first novel I read, Hosseini's The Kite Runner. This year's One Book One Bloomington is Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, so maybe I'll pick that book up again (it's probably been 20 years since I last read it). But I've got a couple things ahead of it on the stack....

Up too late again. lost.tanque.org.

12:33 AM I went to work this morning in a soft rain, the air still comfortably cool after yesterday and the day before's unseasonably mild temperatures. By the drive home, however, snow covered the ground and my car, which, while more appropriate for an Indiana January, is still nothing to relish in my mind. I like cold, snowy weather most when I get to observe it remotely, preferably from the cozy comfort of my home, where I can look out the front window at the accumulation on the front porch and driveway.

Or maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it tonight, as I'd been lulled into a false sense of Spring by the past few days. My buds were showing, as they say.

After watching the Hoosiers succeed (a fun game, if not quite reassuring), I retired to tanque command headquarters to look over the financial reports. Commanding the helm of such a vast enterprise can be a daunting task, but I've begun to look forward to filing my taxes, and not just because our current federal administration has proven itself so very worthy of whatever authority they can acquire on behalf of the U.S. public; these days, unlike most of my tax-paying experience, I can expect a refund. And so, as financial records, forms, documents &etc trickle in from the far corners of my financial empire, I enjoy punching them into my personal super-computer network, eager to see the gears grinding and flywheels spinning, all working to calculate my Uncle Sam "bonus."

I was feeling so flush, in fact, that when I'd reached the evening's stopping point (various official forms yet to be delivered to tanque head offices, hence restricting my tax endevor -- refundus interruptus is the official term, I believe), I looked to the internets to offer up another entertainment option. In these halcyon final days of the Technological Revolution, before instant gratification becomes commodified once and for all, I still enjoy the quant pleasures of ordering things by clacking away at a keyboard, only to have them show up on my doorstep days later, as if cyber elves worked non-stop to satisfy my every whim for a modest fee (plus shipping and handling).

Previous internets impulse-extravegances include Freaks and Geeks and, more recently, Lost. My purchase of The Office on dvd doesn't count because for that impulsive (nay, compulsive) acquisition I actually pulled myself out of the cocoon and went to a "brick and mortar" store (yes, they still have them around town, staffed by professional actors, or perhaps just enthusiastic volunteers ala Conner Prairie, dedicated to re-enacting the long begone days of face to face commerce - they're so cute, and the attention to detail is immensely satisfying -- Look, honey, they're wearing nametags!), but not, of course, without first comparing prices online.

I digress.

This evening I reconsidered for the umpteenth time the acquisition of yet another DVD collection, Undeclared. Written by the writer of Freaks and Geeks and starring tanque crush Monica Keena, this short lived television series might be a total dud for all I know, but I want to see it and doubt I ever will unless I break down and authorize tanque's purchasing department to add it to our library. And I probably will, one of these days. Maybe tomorrow night. Maybe not. As I prepared the purchase order I was accosted by a gaggle of harried-looking tanque accountants who begged me not to withdraw further from the tanque coffers until more funds came in. "What?!" I roared incredulously in response (as only the most charismatically powerful and pathologically removed from reality can), "who dares to imply that everything before me is not subject to my whim?!!"

Alas... scaring underpaid bean-counters is one thing, but actually generating a positive cash flow is quite another wicket altogether.

Not willing to admit total defeat, however, I looked for something else I could do, even if it didn't involve money. First, I took it upon myself to update the Monica Keena page on Wikipedia (see, check the history of her page - assuming it hasn't been editorally over-ruled). I meant to track down some librarian-authored articles on Wikipedia for Pat, by the way, but instead of that I humbly add "me too" to the chorus of fans extolling it's virtues.

And secondly, I came across this email exchange between Freaks&Geeks creator Judd Apatow and they guy who made That Seventies Show: [link]. It cracked me up. And it also is the point of this entire post, which therefore makes it, I think, the recipient of this month's Tanquelogue "Most Long-Winded Introduction to a Hyperlink" award.

-- + --

CODA: I'm listening to Tom Petty's "The Waiting" right now, as suggested by Bill.

"Well yeah, I might have chased a couple women around; all it ever got me was down. Yeah, then there were those that made me feel good, but never as good as I feel right now."

It's almost as if "The Waiting" is the loser from "Even the Losers" but before he realizes that his prefect companion will, indeed, despite how hard it is to believe and how golden and timeless their time together, eventually forget about him.

"Baby, it couldn’t have been that easy to forget about me." Go ahead and tell yourself that, fella, but we both know that if she couldn't forget about you then you wouldn't be writing a song with these lines in it:

I should have known right then it was too good to last
God, it’s such a drag when you’re livin’ in the past

The past is gone and you've had to move on, had to accept that moments in time are tempory and it can't be relived, but deep down inside, in ways you can't describe to others, you cling to your memory of what has come before because you know, despite what's happened afterwards and evidence to the contrary, that you were in the presence of something wonderful.

Yeah I’ve never known nothing quite like this
Don’t it feel like tonight might never be again
Baby we know better than to try and pretend
Honey no one could have ever told me ’bout this

Yeah.

7:20 AM Working on the wording of my letters to my congressmen & reps. So far it goes something like this: "The president has admitted breaking the law - why isn't he impeached yet? Please tell me where you stand on this important breach of our core democratic principles." I want to keep it short and simple, but I'd like to word it a little better than that before I send it out. Suggestions welcome.

- -+- -

Some random pix I've taken but not posted:

- -+- -

Recently viewed: Seoul Train. The nature of the subject makes it hard for the filmmakers to have much footage to use, but moving nonetheless and a good reminder of what's going on in North Korea these days. Refugees from the North are rounded up by Chinese officials and sent back to certain torture and death, since China doesn't recognize their status as refugees ("China, however, has been arresting and periodically sending back North Koreans, categorically labeling them as 'illegal economic migrants' and disregarding the persecution they will face as a result of their illegal exit."). The UNHCR seems powerless to take a meaningful stand against the practice. Having media attention seems to have helped in a few cases, but very few people make it out safely. I have the DVD if anyone wants to borrow it.

--+--

I also, on a lighter note, recently picked up the first season of Lost and devoured it, then had to watch all the episodes of the second season too. I don't want to write anything more about it in case someone hasn't seen all of it, but I liked everything I've seen and it looks like they'll keep doing a good job with the ongoing plot. Sean mentioned it's been favorably compared to Twin Peaks and I think that's fair, though it's not as weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird as TP, nor does it have it's sense of humor (it's still funny in parts, but it takes itself more seriously). I got bored with TP after the first season, and I might with this one after a while too, but so far so good.

8:31 AM Rest in peace, Stella.

7:28 AM Lunch at Shanti. A Pleasure. 'Nuff said.

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Oh, and I think the reason things have been so hinky the past couple days on tanque (and on cornerhost in general) are due in part to problems that happened when Michael Moore linked to a cornerhost-hosted site, onegoodmove.org. Of course, this link might not work right now, as the server which holds tanque is absolutely full at the moment.... [cornerhost's explanation]

11:44 PM I was eating lunch yesterday and didn't feel the urge to take a picture. Same for the day before. I think I may be suffereing from lunch photo overload. Probably only temporary, but I might take a short break from it. Which means I need to post the last few lunches I've snapped but not yet uploaded... Last week while Clint was in town (all too briefly, bro) he and Jimmy and Jennifer and I went to El Norteño for lunch. I had one of the combo lunches -- the picture I took didn't come out too well, but it included a sope, something I experienced for the first time in 2005.

Anyhoo, Jimmy got tacos and they looked delicious, so I went back later in the week and ordered four of my own. Three is probably plenty, but I'm a glutton so I went with four. These are steak and carnitas (two of each) and they were really good.

- -+- -

I just finished finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a novel about Afghanistan which had caught my eye on multiple occassions but which ended up on my reading stack as a present from my cousin Laurel. It's a pretty quick and interesting read. Bad things happen to the characters, so it's a fairly meloncholy story about loyalty and personal integrity, about the loss family, friendships and of the old Afghanistan itself ... but the sadness of it didn't weigh it down to the point that I ever wanted to put it down; just the opposite. If anything it left me wanting more detail about the world before the Soviet Union and then the mujahideen and the Taliban utterly destroyed that country.

9:26 PM My first post of 2006.

Sure seems like I should have something noteworthy to say here. Or rather, I should feel some inspiration to type something in. But I haven't, at least not for the past few days. Which is probably too bad, since I've been lucky over the past couple weeks, first to get to travel to Florida and see my family, and then later to hook up with several buddies I don't get to see too often these days....

You know that feeling when you sit down to type and your hands and mind don't want to cooperate? That's been me lately. And I've been meaning to actually force myself to post more regularly, to make it more of a habit. Hasn't happened. Oh well. But my explanation is this: when important or weighty events happen in rapid succession I find myself a bit overwhelmed to do them justice in print, and therefore find myself inclined to skip writing them down altogether. Where to start when there's a long series of interesting moments to record? How can I do them justice, even in a personal journal? Which is personally frustrating, as I've really liked re-reading journal entries from times of my life when I did take the time to record my thoughts, even clumsily and incompletely.

The other side of the coin, I guess, is the risk that the inferior recording of the event becomes the memory itself. For example, someone at the library once told me about a woman she knew who hadn't watched her wedding video even months after her wedding; she didn't want the recorded images to replace her own memories of the special day. This makes a great deal of sense to me.

So often I feel the need to write something down because otherwise, how can I be sure that it will live on in my memory? Part of it is "the unreflected life" and all that, but even moreso for me it's my fear of losing bits and peices of my life to forgetfullness. Under the best circumstances my memory is hit or miss, and I'm rarely under the best circumstances... How much of my life might be lost to the ether if I don't write it down?

These are, of course, the thoughts of someone who lives an easy, pampered life. What, really, would be lost to the world if my life slipped past unremarked? I feel like I'm gearing up to experience some sort of cliched mid-life-crisis concerning the meaninglessness of life and the fleeting nature of existance, but I also kinda feel like I've been dancing around those concepts my whole life in one form or another. And doesn't it seem arbitrary that one day I might feel consumed with the idea that my life has no meaning while another day such thoughts seem to be obviously ridiculously maudlin and melodramatic?

Whatever. As I said, I've been lucky enough to get to see lots of people who are important to me over the past couple weeks, which has been really nice on several levels and for differing reasons, all of which I feel ill-equipped to further describe tonight. Suffice it to say for now that elements of my soul have been recharged recently.

-- + --

When I was in Florida over Christmas, I went to DisneyWorld. It was a blast. I was sold on the idea of Disney hook, line and sinker -- which in retrospect was a bit of a surprise. Why? The first ride we went on ended by opening a door to the exit, which conveniently led to ... a gift shop. Great, I thought to myself; today is going to be an exercise in consumerism. And I guess that it some ways it was, but mostly, surprisingly to me, it wasn't. Not that I didn't feel the urge to purchase trinkets to remind me of my time in the magic kingdom (I gave into the urge to purchase mugs), but I had some genuine warm-and-fuzzy moments. Granted, I was with my sister and my cousins and my little cousins, so I was predisposed to be having a good day. But all the things about Disney World that might have otherwise seemed creepy to me (the attention to detail, the scale of the place, the consistancy of the message) instead just came off as plain old good fun. Even the food-court experience seemed to be a harmless, silly game to me.

I think to really get Disney World you need to go with kids.

I especially liked going to see the "princesses" -- we met Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Snow White "in person" and it was pretty well done, I must say. Again, I recognize that the experience is crafted to encourage Disney brand loyalty, but my cynical side didn't stand a chance against seeing my little cousins interacting with Cinderella herself. It was just so gosh-darn cute.

- -+- -

This feels like it might be an odd year for me. Which might be good. I don't know what to expect. I want to read more. I'd like to travel a bit. I want to figure out my job at the library a bit better -- I feel a little unsure of what my role is there right now. I'd like to learn a thing or two this year. And I want to write more.