romeo and juliet

hey ! last night i went over to mouse's after work- we initially were going to watch pulp fiction, because christina hasn't seen it and she's like the #1 bruce willis fan of all time, but christina had to work late. we ended up watching the rescue, a doctor who two parter that introduces the second companion, the hilariously named vicki.



the basic story is that a human ship crashed onto the planet dido, and then a mysterious explosion killed all the native... didonians and humans, leaving only a teenage girl, vicki, and a jerk named barrett. barrett and vicki are being imprisoned by a weird space monster named koquillion, and barrett pressures vicki to be nice to koquillion so they can escape. because a rescue ship is coming to perform the titular rescue. the twist was pretty predictable, and sort of nonsensical, but the costume for koquillion was pretty awesome. the other great thing was that there was a scene where vicki is being descended upon by a sandbeast and barbara instinctively zaps him with a laser, and vicki bursts into tears and says, "you killed sandy !!!". cutest.


sandi jo mcsandmonster

mouse is cool. i'm glad i went to his house. he's been pretty accommodating since i've started being a weird hermit, about coming over to my house (i do have the superior movie watching tv, though !!!!) but i'm going to try to go over to his house more because i'm comfortable there and if i were him, i'd want to be able to hang out at home more too.

soooooo big plans for the weekend ! i'm going to like, hang hard and watch muppet things on my xbox ! christina and i set a brodown date for this evening, since she's been so busy with class and work lately and i've been like, hanging out in my room killing zombies. i assume we're going to eat dinner and get something stupid on payperview? and knit? i signed up for a craft swap on an online community i participate in, and of course i got this amazing woman who does amazing shit as my recipient. i have NO CLUE what to make her. i might try the pfeiffer falls hoooded scarf



or this entrelac scarf i found on ravelry if i can find a way to do it without spending $50.



i don't really have plans on saturday. nick and sandi may come down from nyc and hang out with us??? i've already promised to let them watch me play video games and i think they're like, beside themselves with excitement. okay, i'm gonna go do some junk.

p.s. don't forget father's day if you have a cool dad ! since i had a deadbeat dad and he recently croaked, i got my mom some reusable grocery bags with philadelphia scenes on them- they had them at the grocery store and they have beautiful photographs of all of her favorite shit here on both sides, and she loves reusable grocery bags ! haha.
p.p.s. hi

no one said that this life was easy

okay the most important thing. last night my friend ken and i watched bram stoker's dracula on our xboxes. i hadn't seen this movie since the 90s, and i remember it being cool, but it is like... factually one of the worst movies i've ever seen in my life? like, winona ryder and keanu reeves are both horrible, bland, wooden actors who kept forgetting that they were supposed to be speaking in a british accent, and like



this is not a rhetorical question, did this EVER look cool? i was only 10 in 1992 and my 1992 was like, wayne's world and weird al, so i don't know what grown ups were into. aside from the super hasty script that tried to shove too much in to too short a time, awkward rushed pacing, the movie was visually confusing. some scenes were so lush and beautiful and perfect, and some look like if me and mouse decided to make a dracula movie in his yard. like, all the outdoor scenes were filmed in front of a pink wall in a studio. i didn't expect them to actually go to transylvania or anything but it looked so bad. and like... dracula's malevolent shadow moving independently of dracula looked like something from looney tunes.



i'm a pretty vocal opponent of sexy draculas (like, draculas with sunglasses and girlfriends and leather jackets and shit) so that was working against the movie from the start, but it was truly a stinker and i can't believe it got such rave reviews and is considered a good movie. there were some good parts, but i wish someone had given this the old college try sometime other than 1992 so we didn't have to put up with winona ryder, keanu reeves, or gary oldman in a four non blondes costume. p.s. the best part is when dracula is in this form:



everyone is advancing on him and trying to kill him, but then he turns into a pile of rats and everyone screams and is like AHHHHH GET THEM AWAY FROM ME.

so i don't have much to talk about besides bram stoker's dracula, i'm not going to lie. i'm wearing a dress today and it's a pain in my ass. i got it with the gift card kati got me for my birthday.



basically all plus size garments are made for women with huge jugs and as someone without huge jugs i have a lot of exposed chest and extra fabric that i'm gamely trying to manage.

okay, i have a meeting in five minutes so i have to go ! sorry this entry was entirely about bram stoker's dracula and jug problems.

i think i can i think i can i think i can

what's up dogs ! i stayed home yesterday because of double ear aches and general malaise. my ears hurt and i still feel shitty, buttttttttttttttt unfortunately doctors treating fat people like shit has given me pretty bad anxiety about going to see them.

on a lighter note, i spent most of yesterday sleeping and playing video games, with a brief yoga interlude because i realized that not moving around all day was turning me to stone. i gave diana my fat yoga dvd because i thought i'd moved past it and basically memorized it, buttttttt i need to get it back from her and make a copy. i think i have stockholm syndrome with the smug asshole who hosts it. i haaaaaaaated her calling me a sassy diva and strong confident woman and stuff when i was just trying to get my downward dog on, but now i find that it's hard to do it without her stupid encouragement.


namaste, jerk

also, i have no concept of time so i'll be like "i just held that pose for THREE HOURS !!!" and it was actually 15 seconds, so i think having an instructional video helps.

on monday night i played borderlands with perry for a few hours. the game is okayso far, though i have absolutely no clue what is going on or what the objective of the game is. i think one of the problems is that i can't read quest text on my tiny tv (not that i ever read quest text anyway) and that i'm playing with someone who knows what we need to do.



maybe my goal for today will be to make perry tell me what the game is about.

yessssssterday night i played left 4 dead 2 with ken (and were later joined by a couple of other dudes who i kinda know !). THAT was a lot of fun. i guess i don't know what this game is about either, besides killing a lot of zombies and trying to escape from them. i think the factors that led me to believe that it was more fun is that it seems a lot easier. there's tons of stuff to kill at close range and you don't have to even aim your gun (and it manually reloads), whereas in borderlands there's usually a bunch of dudes shooting at you and ducking behind stuff for cover (because they are alive and not dead).



the game itself looks pretty cool, though there's not a lot of variation in the zombies (and one zombie was wearing the exact outfit i was wearing yesterday and i had to kill her over and over D:). the zombies' movements are fast and jerky and scary. we finished two of five possible campaigns, and there doesn't seem to be much variation- waves of zombies, the same 4-5 special zombies showing up occasionally, and then some kind of gimmicky objective. there is a marked difference between each of the skill levels though- we did everything on normal, switching to 'easy' for the tougher parts (the first campaign was just me and ken with two computer players, before two of his friends joined us) so at least there's some variation there. overall it was really fun and seems like an easier beginner game to get used to using the controller. unfortunately i did the worst out of everyone every time !

what else? i took a german placement test (required of all people taking the summer german I class who have previous experience) and i was super worried i'd place out of the class and mess up my schedule. guess what ! i totally didn't need to worry because i forgot like all the german i know. when people are talking to me or i have to read something in german, i can understand like 85% of it, but i don't remember tenses and genders and pronouns at all.



one part of the test was writing a personal essay and mine seriously was like, "my name is roxy, i live in philadelphia, i'm 28 years old, i love fanta and potato salad, my favorite singer is nena hagen" (basically like, all stuff from the laughably outdated neue freunde textbook, which was mostly about the scorpions, falco, and piranha 2).

what else did i want to talk about? oh, i wanted to talk about monster high, mattel's attempt to capitalize on the success of both bratz and twilight. it's basically a line of toys where the characters are descended from monsters but are run of the mill misogynist stereotype airhead bimbo shopaholics !



so like, can anything marketed toward young girls be cool? ever? bratz are fucked up weird dolls that promote materialism, competition between women, sexualization of children (one of their lines was... babies... in diapers... with makeup and heels), and unhealthy body images. twilight is a fucked up book that promotes abusive relationships as romance, a stereotype of female weakness and incompetence, sexual assault and stalking as romance, and uses monsters as a thinly veiled excuse for men to do whatever they want to women because it's their NATURE. why would you then COMBINE these two things to sell to female children? oh, because money is and has always been more important than the health, future, and well-being of women.

the dolls don't come along with books, or comics, or even a tv show. they are just dolls, with a "fun website" that you can log on to, a la those pet toys for babies. the website is full of riveting information like that the werewolf's biggest pet peeve is not being able to wear platform heels in gym and that she spends hours plucking her excess hair to be fabulous. wouldn't a werewolf's biggest pet peeve be that she goes fucking berserk and kills humans during the full moon? the vampire is vegan, which means she's not a vampire. one of the characters isn't even a mummy, she's just egyptian. is "egyptian" a monster now? like, the characters essentially have nothing to do with monsters and their monsterness is only presented as a slight setback in their quest to be hot sexy fashionistas who love boys, gossip, and shopping. plus, to compensate for their monster features, i guess they wear even less clothing than bratz !



get that message, little girls? you're a thing. if you don't look like these dolls, you're ugly. if you're ugly, you're worthless. oh, and instead of having actual interests you should only care about shopping, makeup, gossip, and boys. i just wanted to state that in case the message mattel has been sending us since the 1960s was too subtle.

soooo basically i'm going to blow up the planet.

p.s. i haven't even played red dead redemption yet. word is that it is going to suck on my crappy CRT tv in my bedroom !
p.p.s. i already watched everything good on netflix

i'm the phaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaantom of the operaaaaa (that's me !)

what's up dudesssss. i feel like i had the longest weekend ever because i took off work on friday- i've been feeling really weird and lousy for the past couple of weeks. i've had weird equilibrium problems, sore teeth, and a painful outer ear (all things that point to an ear infection ! but my ear only hurts a little on the outside !) and bad headaches and stuff. i stayed home and basically slept all day.


i don't know what's up with this

when christina got home, we dropped our laundry off and went to cvs, where i got school supplies for my classes (which don't start for like, a month, but i was really excited !) and some pretzel m&ms, which turned out to be not that great. which is a bummer because i um, bought quite a few bags of pretzel m&ms



when we got home, we hunkered down and watched an education, which i've had from netflix for like eleven years at this point. i was psyched because i love peter sarsgaard and i also love carey mulligan (she was in one of the best new doctor who episodes) and i read the article by lynn barber that it was based on right after i heard about the movie.



i did have some problems with it:
- peter sarsgaard's accent was TERRIBLE. terrible. like, unlistenably terrible.
- while i find him very attractive i find it hard to believe that even a bored 16 year old craving sophistication would even have any interest in him.
- i thought her dad was super over the top in an unrealistic way and his immediate 180 in letting her travel internationally with a 40 year old dude and letting her drop out of school to be unrealistic

the problem is, all of that stuff is stuff that really happened according to lynn barber. like, the dude talked in a fake accent to sound sophisticated, he was unattractive, her dad really did act like that. i guess it either makes me think that she was exaggerating or like, maybe it wasn't really a good story?

i played borderlands with perry for awhile, but we didn't get too far because i wasn't feeling well. he also diagnosed me with a traumatic brain injury based on my symptoms. after that, i watched follow that bird with ibrahim on our xboxes, which proved to be much more my speed. i watched it literally hundreds of times as a kid, and the way i remembered the plot is that big bird gets taken away by DHS and he has to go live with a foster family and then he runs away and gets kidnapped by sleazy carnival guys. but that couldn't be right, right? why would that be the plot of a kids' movie?



it turns out i was exactly right, down to the fact that the sleazy carnival guys were named the sleaze brothers. it was still good, though it was full of singing and i didn't remember any singing. but i'm basically into anything where i get to see the muppets' legs so i was psyched.

on saturday i felt pretty crappy and sick so i didn't really do much- i tried to sleep a lot and drink lots of water. i was supposed to go to the girls to the front coverband show in west philly, where lots of cool women... played in cover bands (including carol and zia and the awesome girl who was danzig at the halloween cover band show a few years ago). a show in a warehouse on an 85 degree night is a crappy place to go when your ears hurt and you're overheated though, so i stayed home with mouse and we watched inglourious basterds.


i am feeling a little brocktoon about melanie laurent

i'd already seen it, though mouse hadn't, and i think his fond memories of seeing pulp fiction when he was 16 give him an almost childlike delight when he sees tarantino movies. he really seemed to enjoy hitler getting turned into ground beef by bullets. i also got weirdly fixated on daniel bruhl and added all his available movies to my netflix instant queue, to be watched basically never because they aren't in english and i hate looking at a tv.



everything he's in looks pretty brutally dull, but i'd like to make sure that i actually find him attractive and that i didn't suddenly develop a nazi "thing" or something.

soooo to continue my weekend of not really doing anything but watching movies and playing video games, i played borderlands with perry for a bit and watched episodes of spongebob with ibrahim. mike came down on sunday and we got caught in a horrific rainstorm, got some gelato, and went to see get him to the greek- i wanted to see the a-team because i really want to help liam neeson get a vacation home (and i like anything where a tank is dropped from an airplane), but it wasn't playing at a convenient time. anyway, this may surprise you, but get him to the greek sucked !



like all jud apatow movies, this movie is about a guy who is like, a toooooooootal pussy and is nice to women, and then he meets a masculine guy who teaches him to treat women like crap, and then his life is forever changed except he goes back to being nice to the same woman he used to be nice to? but it's also about how you should follow your dreams, OR about how dreams are not all they're cracked up to be, and also about how you should let people treat you like shit, or not? or something? and the moral of the story is that guys who fuck a lot of women are cool but women who fuck a lot of guys are lying dirty whores. and also that a sexual encounter involving a heavily intoxicated woman is most likely to lead to the man being raped, but his rape is funny because it's funny when men get raped. needless to say, this movie didn't really recover from its rape joke. i laughed a few times but i couldn't tell you what i laughed at, and i'm a pretty smart person but i could not tell you exactly what the overall message of the movie is except like, maybe it's cool, or not, to be a rockstar, and one guy following his dreams sucks but it's good if another guy does, and like... also, puff daddy.

the music was also pretty terrible- like, i feel like if they had spent ten more minutes on the lyrics for each song they could have come up with actual funny lyrics? the songs didn't SOUND bad, they were just so hasty and crappy. i felt the same way about the dracula musical in forgetting sarah marshall- that had everything i liked- dracula, muppets, singing in a dracula voice, a frankenstein (jason segel) but the lyrics were so stupid and lazy that i didn't enjoy it. anyway, rose byrne and puff daddy were the highlights of this movie, and the mad men lady was good too. i also want to encourage the brown haired girl from undeclared to try doing something besides being a "slutty girl" in jud apatow movies because she's very funny and cute.

i got dinner after that (um, a mini quiche and 1/3 of a watermelon?) and then ended up going to bed early because of my bad dinner choices. haha.



i seriously didn't realize how much time i spent sitting in front of a tv this weekend until i wrote that. whatever, i didn't feel well ! my goal for next weekend is to actually do stuff and to hang out with mouse and christina more. i might try to take a day off work when mouse has off so we can bro down.

p.s. hayyyyy

ride it- my pony

wazzaaaaaaaaaaa. i'm so ridiculously caught up at work that i'm digging around for stuff to work on. summer is our slow season at work, and i have a few summer projects lined up, and i may start them early because i'm so bored.

last night was business as usual, at least for the forseeable future. i came home and hung out with christina for a bit (we watched vocal adrenaline's performance on the glee finale) and then played borderlands with perry. my character leveled twice, so now it's level 9 or 10? and we got the ability to ride in a vehicle. i think maybe i'm getting the hang of targeting shit? we dueled each other and i won twice, but only cause i killed him while he was explaining stuff to me and wasn't shooting back. he said that he didn't mind because it shows that i have the killer instinct and he can respect that.



then my friend ken and i watched a movie together. one thing you may NOT know about the xbox 360 is that you can form a party with friends and all watch the same netflix movie together- like, it syncs it up on everyone's tvs ! it's basically the coolest thing ever, though our movie choice of robot vs. aztec mummy was a poor one. while i love mystery science theater 3000, i have to admit that it's pretty hard to talk during them because you're automatically competing with one person and two robots who are funnier than you are.



it actually didn't occur to me until i watched that that mummies can be from places other than egypt. this opens up a whole world of mummies that i've never thought about !

what else? i talked to mouse and made plans to hang out tonight. he's been getting jiu jitsu compliments from his instructors lately. could a purple belt be in the works?!??!! unfortunately, brazilian jiu jitsu isn't like YMCA karate (how many of us knew black belts in like, fifth grade?) and it takes a few years to advance, and he only got his blue belt recently. it's oddly exciting for me to hear about his progress because he loves jiu jitsu so much and i still remember him stopping by after his first class, happier and more psyched than i'd ever seen him, super excited to tell me about... getting his ass kicked?


some jiu jitsu guys doing a thing

oh yeah, i forgot to mention this- my xbox gamertag is scummanifesto (hee hee), so you can add me and maybe we can play one of two games i have together? i should have left 4 dead 2 soon too.

p.s. i'm bored !!!!!!!!
p.p.s. i've been thinking about it and i'm oddly excited to buy school supplies for my classes in july?

a consolation prize will suffice tonight

booo i had meetings all morning and a greek salad just exploded on me ! and i had to like, pick feta out of indoor outdoor carpet which was awesome and i totally smell great now and am happy that i can cross that off my bucket list.



last night i finally hooked up my xbox. there was one minor snag that was um, me putting in commas instead of periods on my email address, but i got set up pretty quickly. i played borderlands with my friend perry for awhile. it's hard to get used to the headset because it's just.. on all the time. in wow, you set a button you press to talk, so you don't have to worry about everyone hearing you farting and singing songs to your cat. also, i'm like 99% sure the jack on my controller is fucked up because my headset sounds like when you'd yank out your walkman headphones too much and they'd get all fuzzy and you'd have to twist it to make it work !!! i'm taking it to the GEEK SQUAD.

borderlands was pretty cool ! we didn't really get very far, but i was surprised that it wasn't as hard to get used to as i anticipated. i didn't really have much trouble controlling my character (though aiming was kind of hard and i didn't really get the hang of it) and figuring out how to navigate, but it's very different from wow and the controller has nine billion buttons.



i'm not really sure what the game is about because i'm the worst at paying attention during cinematics and reading quest text. my friend jason described it as killing desert mosquitos and killing members of slipknot which seems about right. for example:



this screen came up right before we killed this dude. he even has slipknotted *nipples*.

after that, i set up netflix instant viewing and was astounded at how amazing it is and all the stuff i could watch ! unfortunately, i totally choked and ended up watching season 1 of 30 rock. the show started out super funny right out of the gate, but i guess somehow at the time i ignored all the fucked up shit? the rape jokes start in about 6 episodes in. haha.



okay, this is very important. you guys need to recommend netflix instant viewing stuff to me. everyone i know watches such cool things but every time i look at what's available it's like, third rate american pie type straight to video stuff and 29302380293 seasons of the vicar of dibley.

stuff i am interested in
- documentaries about historical stuff, nature, cool things
- historical fiction
- things that are funny and do not have rape jokes
- episodic television that does not involve anyone who was involved with "buffy the vampire slayer"

stuff i am not interested in
- "buffy the vampire slayer"
- jud apatow
- romantic comedies
- um, anything made before 1956
- foreign films that are not in english (this isn't in general, but my tv is too small and i wouldn't be able to read the captions)

thank you in advance ! love, roxy.

p.s. i baked a cake last night for no reason and forgot to eat any D:

out with the ogre

yesterday i totally did what i said i was going to do and cleaned my room. unfortunately, i didn't actually START cleaning until like, 9pm. before that i took a nap, talked to people online, and watched a few episodes of the simpsons. oh, i also complained a lot !

i didn't just want to straighten up, i wanted to CLEAN. which meant dusting all my books and getting rid of clothes and books i don't want to make room for stuff i DO want. none of the clothes were in donatable condition, so i just tossed them. the books i'm going to put on my porch to see if anyone wants them, so uh, if you want every book by yukio mishima, somerset maugham, or emily dickinson stop on by !



i also had a lot of dusting to do, which is a bummer because i'm allergic to dust. i dusted both bookshelves (only one is in the pictures) and the dust rag was like, black, and my sinuses felt like they were glued together by pain and some glue. i felt very sorry for myself !

i regret that i didn't take real pictures, but here's some before-and-after shots:


from the door before


from the door after

my bed before


my bed after


some trolls and dust before


bookshelf sans trolls

so um, those trolls. i have a weird shameful... i don't want to say 'attraction' cause that implies a sex thing but like... a weird shameful attraction to troll dolls? i love them and i can't help it. despite this, i know that is really weird and lame so i never really bought any until a couple of years ago, when i found all those trolls for $1 at the flea market by holmesburg prison.



don't let that picture of historic holmesburg prison distract you though cause i still have some trolls ! i had those trolls shamefully hidden in my closet and when my mom was visiting, she somehow found them (when she was trying not to clean my room cause i wouldn't let her, which led to her picking up everything i own and asking me what it was) and put them on display. she also was like, "LOOK AT ALL YOUR RAT FINK DOLLS" and INSISTED that trolls were called "rat fink dolls" when she was little. please note that my mom is independently and keenly aware that this is rat fink:



and wasn't confusing them or anything. this may be true, but my mom also insisted that the NEWSPAPER printed that rod stewart had to have a gallon of semen pumped out of his stomach (we were talking about who that rumor was about when we were growing up, and my mom was like, 'it was rod stewart... IT WAS IN THE NEWSPAPER !!!!').

WAIT LOOK AT THIS COOL THING JEANNE FOUND !!!!



can someone look at the link and tell me how much those are and if they're for presta or schrader valves??

anyyyyway, i digress. i didn't finish cleaning until 12:30am, and then i took a cold shower and went to bed, so my xbox is not getting set up until today... unless mouse wants to hang out !!!!!

p.s. christina mocked my trolls until she came and looked at them and then we had this weird maniacal troll interlude where we were basically hysterical and at the end of it she got all serious and wouldn't let me throw them out.