This week on Face Off… » more: face off, “year of the dragon”
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Along with my continued recapping of Face Off (though, LORD, what wretched work are they) I decided to assign myself another project for September. In early August, I sleepily rolled over to Crystal and said, “I need you to find me two really specific copies of books, okay?” and she said, “… O… kay?” and I proceeded to describe, in detail, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. and Deenie but in their late 70s printings. “It’s purple with like, a very blonde windswept girl on the cover… and the other one… She’s standing in front of an oval mirror and there’s like… some dark yellow.” I was sleepy, but the descriptions were accurate and within two days they were winging their way through the mail to us from Oopsee Daisies on Etsy. Along with a bunch of other vintage kid lit because neither Crystal nor I can control ourselves when it comes to books. We ended up with a nice lot of eight Judy Blume books — four for younger readers and four for the young adult crowd — and since I’d only read two of them growing up (my reading tastes were all over the place as a kid but I was VERY anti-girl and thus missed out on a lot of good and important things — internalized misogyny! WHAT A BITCH) I thought I’d spend my September with Ms. Blume.
Back to School with Judy Blume is supposed to be about my ~emotional education~ I think. Or, at the very least, reliving two books that were really important to me in my formative years. I can’t even imagine the number of times I’ve read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. or recount how important a gift Deenie was to me when a friend gave it to me in sixth grade. She had scoliosis! Like Deenie! And I think her mom probably Yahoo-searched books about scoliosis and gave it to her! But her sharing it with me was like an olive branch of friendship I never expected. Now she’s married and has a beautiful little girl! Getting old is really weird! I don’t recommend it!
I’m reading them in chronological order of their publication which worked out pretty well because I get a kid lit and a YA each week. This seems promising? Eight books in four weeks is not a particular challenge for someone who is unemployed and a relatively fast reader, but the writing about them will be my challenge. REMEMBER HOW BEHIND I GOT WITH FESTIVE-ASS FLICKS LAST YEAR?! I CAN’T LIVE LIKE THAT AGAIN. I’m going to write about each book, but what I’m REALLY hoping for is some glorious angels-descending-from-heaven glowing ball of light idea that ties them all together and give me something really interesting to talk about at the end. Something about the how much we grow and how much we stay the same? Or about the power of childhood memory? Or how adulthood is stupid? Here’s hoping! Read along at home, if you got ’em! Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t It’s Not The End of the World Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing Otherwise Known As Sheila the Great Deenie Blubber Tiger Eyes I live in North Dakota now! It’s weird! I’ve been here for about a month and a half and it’s starting to feel like “home” even though I’m having a hard time calling it that?! Like, every time we’re out somewhere I say, “Are we heading back to the house now?” or whatever and if I talk about L.A. I say “home” — so that’s a thing. But regardless of what I call it, the house is very comfortable and we have furniture and stuff put away and we’ve been unpacked for almost a month and just bought the last piece of furniture we needed for our living room, so that’s wonderful. We still need to buy a bed/frame and boxspring, but that’ll happen eventually and until then I guess we’ll continue to survive with a mattress on the floor like some sad college sophomore that lives with eleven other guys. 27 is too old to get up from THE FLOOR every morning! The noises my joints make! YOU WOULD FIND THEM ALARMING. North Dakota is weird and very small (comparatively) and there are SO MANY grasshoppers/katydids/cricket creatures EVERYWHERE which are the kind of bug I am the most afraid of so that’s been great. Also, our neighbors are pretty rude?! So that North Dakota nice thing seems like a lie. Although everyone kind of waves at each other when we pass on dirt roads, so… I don’t even know where to go with it. The lesson, I think, is that there are some nice people and some shitheads everywhere, no matter what. People are terrible! Shocker. Other Things: no one has backyard fences, construction sites are just littered with totally theftable shit at all hours whether people are there or not and there is never security, oil drilling in the Bakken produces a LARGE byproduct of natural gas, but there’s only so much that can be harvested/contained so all the oil sites have these things called flares which are either large holes in the ground or giant potbelly stove looking things that are just ON FIRE all the time, there are dirt roads that you just have to drive on to get to places sometimes, almost no one is from here and the people who are don’t seem all that enthused about the people who aren’t, food is EXPENSIVE, there are almost no chains whatsoever for anything including food and consumer goods, Hardee’s is NOT like Carl’s Jr. no matter what anyone tells you, Pita Palace is the bomb, milk tastes better here just like it did in Kansas City, most stretches of the “freeway” (it’s… not… a… freeway…) are only 2-4 lanes total, we pick up our mail from one of the local radio stations, Frank’s/3 Amigos is also The Bomb, there is only one theater in town and it’s not a chain, Canada is REALLY close, and nobody can drive worth a shit. WHEW let me tell you it’s been a weird month. » more: welcome to nodak
This week on Face Off… » more: face off, “pirate treasure” So, last year my girlfriend tricked me into watching Face Off with her by going, “No, it’s not like a normal reality competition, it’s about MOVIE MAKE-UP” which is trickery because I LOVE stage make-up and learned how to do the at-home, Halloween-y stuff when I was a wee tween and I’m constantly talking about it in movies because I’m a pain in the ass about absolutely everything I love regardless of how little interest the people around me have in it. SORRY. So this year, apparently, I’m going to recap/make fun of Face Off episodes because I need a project to distract me from the fact that I live in North Dakota now. (More on that later. Really. I swear.) Here we go?! Spoilers, duh.
Also, just to clarify, this is not the 1997 action movie starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. This is a television show on the SyFy (Dear God, I miss SciFi) network. Sorry if I got your hopes up inadvertently. I’d never tease you like that on purpose. |
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