Saturday’s (Yes I am still behind, WHAT OF IT?!) festive-ass flick was three Rugrats holiday specials. “A Rugrats Chanukah”, “A Rugrats Kwanzaa”, and “Babies in Toyland”. [CALENDAR.] I had seen Chanukah and Kwanzaa before, but “Babies in Toyland” was all new to me — produced for season nine, after the introduction of Tommy’s little brother Dil and Chuckie’s step-sister Kimi and well after I was regularly comsuming Nickelodean animation. (Chanukah is from season four and I remember it well, but weirdly, Kwanzaa was season eight but I had still seen it. It’s not like I don’t watch cartoons, I’m just usually better at remembering how/when I watched them.)
ANYWAY. Chanukah and Kwanzaa are both good, “Hey, let’s teach babies about a culture they don’t belong to thereby education our viewers simultaneously!” and I’m pretty sure everything I knew about Chanukah as a kid was because of this episode of Rugrats. And this is also probably true for Kwanzaa. I HAVE LEARNED A LOT MORE SINCE THEN. Just to clarify.
I also really wanted to be Jewish as a kid, like, REALLY BADLY and for no real discernible reason. I was raised essentially a-religious. I vaguely believed in god because other kids did, but my parents never told me to and I never got taken to church unless someone died. But JEWISH. That sounded COOL. I think I just wanted to be something/something different. We celebrated Christmas secularly (like we still do) and that got boring, I guess?
At 13 this crystallized into an even more specific desire to be ethnically Jewish and born/raised in Hawaii. As an adult, I realize that I just wanted to be Bette Midler? And that’s cool. (As an adult I also recognize my privilege/innocent idiocy in being able to say I desired Jewishness. But, you know, that’s what learning/growing is all about.)
As a kid I also thought that the houses with blue Christmas lights were the Jewish houses. But like, I also believed that the red blinking lights of the radio towers visible from my backyard were alien spaceships keeping an eye on me and that I could hide under a floral sheet if a natural disaster was coming and it wouldn’t be able to get to me. I wasn’t exactly a normal kid.
The Rugrats are adorable and these are good introductory/sweet/easy cultural lessons for eeeeeeveryone. Hooray for he Rugrats. They also taught me about Passover! So much learning.
“Babies in Toyland” was a different experience because I hadn’t seen it before [I actually wanted to watch the Christmas episode from the first season called “The Santa Experience” but Netflix only has episodes starting from season four. UNACCEPTABLE. But survivable.] and it didn’t have a lesson to teach me other than don’t be horrible and evil and appreciate the time you have with the people you love which are the most common Christmas special lessons. “Babies in Toyland” was real cute/sweet/funny and I would watch it again. THE BEST PART THOUGH BY FAR is when the back of Chuckie’s snowsuit gets torn open and Phil proclaims, “I didn’t know you had Reptar undies, Chuckie.” and Chuckie yells, “QUIT LOOKIN’ AT MY UNDIES, PHIL.” Because, I don’t know, I am twelve and it was CUTE. Watch it. It’s already cued to the right spot and everything.
The lesson in this episode is basically that Angelica is SUCH A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING that she makes Santa QUIT. Ugh, she’s so awful! I think as a kid you recognize that you shouldn’t act like Angelica and then you get a little older and you realize that the babies should NEVER LISTEN TO HER and then you get to be an adult and it’s like, “Damn, if she was my child I would have a hard time not employing spanking as a disciplinary option.” Which is a serious-ass thought to have about a cartoon character.
Chuckie is still my favorite followed SO CLOSELY by Phil and Lil. Chuckie is me and I am okay with that. And if you aren’t on the Phil and Lil boat, you deserve to sink. DEAL WITH IT.
I have all of my best ideas while driving or in the shower and I start all my best projects around two or three in the morning. Granted, “best” is really up for debate here, since most of those ideas are just poop or dick jokes and the projects are just Google image searched images with transparent Helvetica slapped over them in Photoshop. THEY MAKE ME LAUGH ALRIGHT? I am my most important audience, for now and forever.
So, I was in the shower a couple of weeks ago thinking about Jesse Eisenberg, like I do, and I was like, DAMN, that kid’s like… a RAPSCALLION or some shit. Because he is! Google that face and tell me it doesn’t scream old-timey adjectives at you! If you can, you are LYING.
And so it kind of began with this dumb shit:
SCAMP, guys. Jesse Eisenberg is a SCAMP. He is ruined for me forever in the BEST WAY because I cannot look at him without thinking something Old Timey. RASCAL! RAPSCALLION! He’s like the sort of handsy son of a really wealthy southern oil baron guy who is charming and good looking and also RICH who is at least a little hesitant about groping you against your will, so he doesn’t really seem like a bad guy, just like maybe he had a drink or two too many and got REAL FRIENDLY so you just brush it off and giggle and say shit like, “Oh, dear, I had heard those rumors that you were QUITE the rapscallion and I do believe they’re true!” but really it sounds sort of sexy and delightful. And then he gropes you under your petticoats in a hallway. Something like that. OR WHATEVER.
I think this Old Timey Thing applies to Donald Glover too, but I have a harder time looking at pictures of him because they are like lightning directly to my genitals. SO ATTRACTIVE. I can’t deal with it. I just can’t.
But anyway, that dumb shit rapidly escalates into this dumb shit:
Kittens are a point of no return, right? I mean, really. There is no coming back from slapping text over the top of adorable kittens. There just isn’t. And then it just turns into transcribing your dumb tweets on pictures snagged from NASA and it’s over. It’s just all over.
SO: sometimes when I am having those brilliant thoughts late at night, my brain says, “YO BITCH SUBMIT SOME OF YOUR WRITING YO” and because it’s two in the fucking morning, I am like, “YEAH ALRIIIIIGHT.” And whatever, I’m hitting 50/50 acceptance to rejection at this point (because I don’t write almost ever unless it’s for fun, which means I have nothing to submit, which is a great excuse not to put yourself out there. FOOLPROOF.) so I don’t really care about the process. I come across a place that seems like they might take me, I submit, no big.
SO ANYWAY. I was reading a submission to the lit mag I work on at school and she mentioned another lit mag that I was unfamiliar with (This happens a lot. Generally, if someone mentions one, I haven’t heard of it.) so I checked it out, saw they had a nice selection of flash fiction and threw something their way. I logged it in my little submissions file (anal retentive, what what!) and put it in my calendar (redundancy!) and went about watching BBC comedies (Miranda) and forgot about it.
Guys, I am pretty sure I won the speed award for rejection turnaround tonight. Seriously. One hour and four minutes. ONE HOUR AND FOUR MINUTES. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. I submitted the story AFTER MIDNIGHT and had a rejection shortly after one. THAT IS SOME EFFICIENT LIT MAGGING.
Holy shit. I didn’t even have time to worry! I didn’t even have time to obsess and then forget about it entirely, which is my usual submission coping mechanism. And let me tell you, this was a much more awesome way to get rejected. I know the longer someone keeps your work, the closer you are to getting in. And that’s great! But instant gratification is always SO SATISFYING and it turns out it actually kind of applies to rejection!
I know part of my cavalier attitude is because I just didn’t care too much, you know? I have extremely low expectations when it comes to anything having to do with my writing (greeting cards and hilarious poop twitters aside) but there was something about that rapid response — like ripping off a band-aid maybe — that I don’t think I will soon forget.
Aaaaaaanyway, it turns out this is all just a long way to say that if you don’t remember Bonsai Kitties, you have not been on the internet long enough.
PS: For the like… two of you who read this BLAHG, would cutting my insanely long and stupid posts be helpful or irritating? I HATE cut posts because I read everything on GReader and am also incredibly lazy, but I am down to do whatevah whatevah because I live to serve, guys. I live to serve.
I picked this picture because we all look equally terrible.
My parents are awesome. My parents are so awesome that the greatest guilt I have ever felt in my entire life has basically been that I am not a good enough daughter and that I have not been grateful enough for everything they’ve done for me.
Awkward admissions of offspring-guilt aside, my parents are awesome people.
My mom is one of the funniest people I have ever known, sometimes intentionally even. Her verbal filter is… minimal, so she says whatever she is thinking and never refrains from asking even the most honest and awkward questions. She has giant, giant boobs that neither me nor my sister inherited. Tragically. Or gratefully. I’m not really sure. She is really sharp, but really unobservant. She is the Occam’s Razor in the family.
She’s also one of the strongest people in my life and she’s survived, literally and figuratively, more than anyone else I have ever known. She also puts up with me and my sister and my dad and we are huge pains in the ass, so it’s really just another testament to her strength.
She likes to talk about her and my dad having sex or about the sluttier days of her youth because she knows that it HORRIFIES her daughters. We cannot drive east on Route 66 without her going, “I’ve had sex in that motel and THAT one and that one and THAT TEEPEE RIGHT THERE” because she is twisted and cruel. And was also kind of a whore. But a classy-ish one, I imagine/hope.
She loves animals and gets REALLY ABNORMALLY UPSET when people are mean to them. She has the BEST LAUGH EVER and if you get her laughing long and hard enough she will probably pee herself.
Fun facts: Mom doesn’t drive, drink, or think as highly of herself as she should. Because she’s awesome. She loves soap operas. And reality TV. And Elvis. And telling stories about getting stoned and/or drunk with her friends when she was in high school. She was the mascot at her middle school. She loved doing sports. SHE MAKES THE BEST BAKED SPAGHETTI ON EARTH. We are incredibly different, but eerily similar.
My dad is also really funny and smart and weird. He likes outlandish theories and tells everyone that he thinks Jesus was a time-traveler. He’s always been really, really good at his job and it’s something I was always really proud of as a kid. We were never rich, but I was always like, “YEAH, WELL, MY DAD’S CUSTOMERS LOVE HIM AND HE WINS AWARDS AND STUFF.” Because I knew how to throw down. My dad and I have always been really close and I look, sound, talk, and make an ass of myself just like he does. A lot of time when someone sets up a joke unintentionally in conversation, he and I both blurt out the same thing at the same time. And it’s usually stupid. And about poop.
My whole life I’ve been hearing, “OH, WELL HE SURE CAN’T DENY YOU, CAN HE?” every time that people see us together. And it’s still as annoying as ever. HE WOULD NEVER DENY ME BECAUSE I AM FUCKING AWESOME OKAY. Even though I grew up thinking the Japanese gardener that took care of our front lawn was my real dad. NO JOKE.
My dad was a slacker and a stoner and his stories about growing up are the BEST. Like how one time he broke his best friend’s face and how he fell on a stick and the NAIL JUTTING OUT OF IT stuck it to his face and how his mom (my sometimes uptight grandmother) got stoned with him one time. HIS STORIES ARE THE BEST. Or how one time he got an F in art and that same grandmother stormed into the class and was like, “HOW CAN YOU FAIL SOMEONE IN ART?! ART IS SUBJECTIVE!” and the teacher showed her what my dad had done in class and she said, “Oh, okay” and left.
My dad tries to be good at the internet and he has an angry political blog! And he’s pretty passionate about the US Constitution, which is a decent thing to be passionate about if you have to get all passionate and shit.
Fun facts: my dad collects guns (for target shooting) and likes the History and Military channels. He is really good at saying the right things. He played baseball in high school and was a boy scout. His high school principal called him Line Drive. He and his sister (my awesome Aunt Sisi) are a year and ten days apart in age. He is a really good cook and loves to fart. We are eerily similar, but incredibly different.
I was conceived on the Fourth of July 1984 shortly after my mom had her trusty IUD removed. They had sex (UGH GROSS — FOR THE ONLY (my sister and I have different dads) TIME EVER — DENIAL DENIAL I LIKE DENIAL) and my dad said, “Well, that made a baby.” My mom said that if she didn’t get pregnant by her thirtieth birthday, she wasn’t going to have another kid (my sister was already eight). She turned thirty on August 14 and I was already 1/9th of the way to being ripped out of her abdomen with medical instruments. TAKE THAT, AGING.
My parents are awesome enough that at different points over the course of my sister’s and my lives they have let one of her friends, one of her boyfriends, two of my friends, and my girlfriend live in their home. They’re letting me mooch off of them in my lost twenties. They have always encouraged me no matter what stupid thing I wanted to do. They bought me booze when I was underage in college. They used to come to my college apartment, buy us groceries, wash all of our dishes, clean our kitchen, and MAKE US MEALS.
These are good people, seriously.
I don’t know how I got so lucky, but if there’s any balance to the universe, I will probably have the worst children ever to be conceived. Like, the antichrist. JUST ANOTHER REASON TO NEVER HAVE ANY.
Inspired by this nostalgic-seizure inducing post by the oft-hilarious Kevin Babbles, I am compelled to talk about the ridiculous summer playlist I put together this year.
It’s like… 70% flashback 90s/00s music (mostly rap, hip hop, and pop), 10% awful dance music, 10% indie bullshit, and 10% newer but still outdated rap and hip hop.
A sample of the randomized, 467 song playlist:
Some of my favorites:
L’Trimm, “Cars with the Boom” — 1. I love how similar this video is to JJ Fad’s, “Supersonic” and how fucking awful and great they both are. I have way too many memories of hearing this song blasting from my sister’s bedroom growing up and hearing her and her friends laughing and talking about dudes and generally allowing me to grow into a hateful, resentment-filled pain in the ass. Bitches.
Vengaboys, “Boom Boom Boom Boom” — What horrifies me about this song is that I have this really distinct memory of singing and dancing to it at a slumber party at my house and I always though, “LOL SIXTH GRADE” until I looked it up and this didn’t come out until June of 1999. I was FOURTEEN. What the hell? My shame, let me show you it. Second, what the actual fuck is happening in this video, man? Gay cowboy! Blue lipstick! All those horrible outfits! Titties everywhere! Drunk bros! Ejaculatory champagne! Rampant lesbianism!
Come to think of it, that explains a lot about why I would have been into it at fourteen.
Sarai, “Ladies” — This is the EMBODIMENT of my trip to Las Vegas after high school graduation. I still remember rolling down the strip in my BFF’s dad’s Explorer Sport Trac SCREAMING this song at everyone on the street.
Like this.
Oh, to be eighteen. Additionally, watching this, I do not understand how I didn’t figure out I was a lesbot earlier. I MEAN, COME ON. Also, watching Sarai rap is like watching my BFF talk. We call her DJ Xis.
Khia, “K-Wang” — THIS WAS THE DANCE. I remember watching one of my BFFs (Bryce) teaching DJ Xis how to do this shit in front of the big screen TV in my living room. Their dance was closer to this version (although people are CRAZY adamant that this is NOT THE RIGHT DANCE in the comments) but they disabled embedding because the world hates me. Better version of this TERRIBLE SONG here.
Mr. C, “Cha Cha Slide” — I wasn’t going to embed this one because, seriously, line dance hip hop is so god damn terrible, but this is every dance I went to in high school. Gym full of uncoordinated white kids being led by all the black kids. Diversity at work, y’all. And the video is just spectacular.
Edvard Grieg, “In the Hall of the Mountain King (Techno Remix)” — Also a high school dance thing. Just a representative of the terrible, terrible techno remixes that plagues the late 90s/early 00s. See also: Tetris Techno Remix, Super Mario Bros. Theme Techno Remix (not the one of my youth, but close). I listened to a lot of god awful techno in the early days of mp3.com, OKAY. Don’t judge me.
Monifah, “Touch It” — Bringing the troops joy since 1998, girl.
Eminem, “Role Model” — Every white person I am friends with knows every word to this song. I don’t know what that means, but it’s nice to roll down all four windows of my 2010 Honda Insight and blare this motherfucker with a bunch of white girls in the car. Oh wait, awkward, I meant awkward.
So Molly Lewis wrote a blog about the closure/redesign of Star Tours and while I think it’s sweet and engaging and an example of all the things I love about blogs — memories! nostalgia! complainery! — it’s also the kind of thing that makes me sad.
I love Disneyland. I love it beyond the ability to put it into words. And I love Star Tours. I think Star Tours is one of the best rides Disneyland has ever or will ever see. I loved it before I had ever even seen a Star Wars movie. Like Molly Lewis, I know it by heart and I recite it when I ride it and I once had a joyful ride with a strange kid on it. (When Captain Rex said, “I’ve always wanted to do this,” this bright and happy kid yelled, “MEEEEEEEEE TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” My girlfriend and I have stolen his line ever since.)
But I’m not going to complain about the rehab or the changes or the podracing sequence or about George Lucas (even though I could, for days) or how Disney just can’t leave things alone because that’s not what Disneyland is about.
Watch out, I’m throwing down with a Walt Disney quote right here:
“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
Maybe you and I hate the Star Wars prequels and all the too-noisy, hyperactive, CG scenes (and if you do, blame Steven Spielberg and Jurassic Park — no, really), but there is an entire generation of kids who loved them and a whole new generation who will ONLY know Star Wars in chronological order (this blows my mind, but as an entirely separate thing) and it’s their turn for the memories.
I hate that the Country Bear Jamboree is gone and it kills me that they took Mr. Toad’s out in Florida. I miss Circlevision sometimes, or more accurately, I miss getting dizzy staring upward for such long periods. I miss the Mary Blair murals in Tomorrowland and the PeopleMover. I miss the Fantasyland Autopia and how much fun it was to drive before I had to. Until VERY RECENTLY I missed the shit out of Captain EO. I miss Tom Sawyer Island when the settler’s cabin burned and there weren’t any pirates. I miss pre-Captain Jack Pirates of the Caribbean. Hell, I miss the Submarine Voyage and the parking lot. I even miss the Rocket Jets and the Skyway even though they both scared the living shit out of me.
But part of loving Disneyland is loving what used to be there, remembering, knowing for sure and certain and 100% that it was better when you were young, when this was there and that wasn’t, before everything changed.
What we didn’t realize then, as kids, was that things were changing all around us, all the time, at Disneyland, at home, and in the world at large. But we were young and change is often incremental and we were too busy having fun and playing on the teetering rock on Tom Sawyer and listening to our parents talk about A tickets and E tickets and how you used to be able to ride a real live pack mule where Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is now and how it used to be different, simpler, better.
Molly Lewis’s nostalgia is right, her love is perfect, her adoration commendable and so fucking right on the nose for me it isn’t even funny, but she’s still wrong.
“Disney tends to function in the way that Apple and Facebook do by which I mean that they will decide to change things that absolutely did not need changing, and you’re only left to assume that it’s for your own good.”
Star Tours is almost twenty-four years old. It’s had an incredible run, thrilling and delighting and creating memories for thousands and thousands (millions?) of visitors, but up until the last week and one random summer day last year, I never once in my dozens of visits saw the queue for the Endor longer than ten or fifteen minutes, even on peak days and times. And while that’s a great thing for visitors, it’s a death knell for Disney. And while I’d rather believe Disney was revitalizing a ride for the guests, it all comes down to the dollar.
Regardless of their motives, Star Tours 2.0 promises to create brand new memories for the next set of Disney fans. And, god forbid, I someday have a child, I’ll be there with him or her, talking about how when I was a kid there was this pilot droid named Rex and how he’d taken us on his first flight…
