Ray is an idiot, and also high

Oh man I love Achewood. I've really been getting into the character blogs lately. Téodor's in particular is fucking awesome:

I was out back watering our new herb garden today (basil, thyme, oregano, mint, chives) when Ray called my cell phone. I almost didn't take it, but you never know what you're going to get with him. Being on Ray's speed-dial is kind of like playing the Lottery: 99.999% of the time he's just calling because he wants to know if Kevin Bacon and Sissy Spacek have ever been in a movie together, but there's always that off chance he just accidentally won a new 63" flat-screen TV he doesn't need and wants to give it to the first person who's home.

TÉODOR: Hello?

RAY: Ray? This is Téodor.

TÉODOR: No it’s not. This is Téodor. Ray?

See, it's probably not that funny unless you're really into Achewood. But I am, so I don't give a shit.

Most of my posts these days seem to be links to other places, or movie reviews. If you concluded from this that my own life is an empty wasteland of despair, well, you would be correct. That's right: I'm EMBRACING the goth teen act. So there. It's only a matter of time before I switch my blog to gray text on black, and start posting overwrought poetry that involves a lot of unnecessary line breaks.

O špatném filmu, or Netflix Fails to Come Through

Ok, I just watched the most depressing movie ever. It's called Zurek, and I seriously do not recommend it, at all. There was not one single redeeming feature to this movie. It wasn't even a tearjerker -- it moved past the point of poignancy, right into the territory of they're beating up a retarded girl, for fuck's sake. Hell, it was past saving in the first five minutes. Also: ugly Polish people having ugly, ugly sex. Ulch.

And it's not like I don't love a nice dark Slavic movie. But damn. This was not a movie. It was just a succession of Bad Things Happening to People You Don't Identify With. Jeez.

Also, the whole thing was filmed in very low light, and the colors were all washed-out. I know, arty, but in this case it just accentuated the despair, like what, have they never heard of a sixty watt bulb in Poland? And dammit, I've lived at that latitude, or thereabouts; it's not that dark in winter. It's...lovely. But that's beside the point.

Also beside the point is the fact that the Polish itself made it more of a downer for me personally. I love Poland, and in fact have had only awesome experiences there, but after a year and some of Czech immersion, Polish sounds to me like a Czech speaker who has been repeatedly punched in the mouth, so that the words are basically running down the speaker's chin. Not pleasant listening. (In fairness, I should add that my obsessively Pole-ophile comrade last year, Depressed Michael, asserted that Czech sounds to Poles like the speech of little children, all high-pitched and squeaky. And I can see that. But I still prefer it.)


So. Not a feel-good movie of any kind, even for me, and I love dark movies. Hell, I thought Requiem for a Dream was good, even though it put me into a three-day funk. This wasn't even dark, though. It was plotless. It was just pain, with no reasoning or justification.

Ok then. Now I need to drink more beer. And watch Tender Mercies, or possibly All the Real Girls. To get the taste out.

Also, during college I owned a movie called Raising Victor Vargas. And now I no longer do. Give it back, dammit.

O dvacet tři a filmu

I turned 23 yesterday. It was very low-key, especially compared to last year...although, since last year’s birthday resulted in the worst stuck-in-a-public-place hangover of my career, which I had to ride out in a corner booth at Bohemia Bagel with the long-suffering Clara, I think it may have been a little too festive.

But anyways. I went home and hung out with the ’rents, and it was just the three of us since my little sister was out of town. So we cooked dinner, drank Löwenbräu, had key lime pie instead of cake.

The cool thing, though, was this Czech movie we watched, Želary. It was...just fucking amazing. I'm not totally sure about the ending, I guess, but in general...so good. And it was respectful and even reverent about religion, which you really don’t expect from a Czech film. Man. I think I need to watch it again.

Oh yeah, and as a side benefit, they speak beautiful clear Czech for most of it, so it’s good for practicing, if that’s what you’re into.

Oh, it's queer all right

During the course of some research I was doing for a post I might finish one of these days, I actually read (or at least scanned) all the way through a long and truly stultifying article on Queer Theory. This thing was just...wow. At one point, boyfriend used the word “recuperate” as a transitive verb, and I thought my eyes were going to roll all the way to the back of my head. I guess “rehabiliate” or even “revive” would just be too damn straight for him.

But it was all worth it for this absolute gem I found: the term homosocial. As in, “Last night was ok, but you know it always turns homosocial when those dudes get together.” And, “Huh, this college we went to sure did emphasize compulsory homosociality. No wonder the boys never came out of their dorms.” It’s like another word for a penis party, which is an excellent mot juste for a fairly common phenomenon, except I was never able to keep a straight face when I said “penis party.” Plus it has the added (or maybe just increased) overtone of seething latent homosexuality, which is always good to have.

More stuff that only Jedno understands

A small side-effect of this whole Czech endeavor is that I'm now constitutionally unable to make the right choice between the 'z' key and the 'y' key.* As demonstrated by the fact that I fucked up not one but both of them while typing the previous sentence.


*because they're reversed** when you have your keyboard on the Czech settings.

**because, whether they like to admit it or not***, the Czechs got everything they have from the Germans, including this keyboard foible.

***and they don't. at all.

I'm not used to this thing where it's a long way to the end of the sentence

I've made several quantum leaps in my Czech ability within the past few months, but I made the somewhat depressing realization today that I can come back to an article on the internet and find the exact place I stopped within a sentence. Think about it...you don't do that in your native tongue, or in any tongue that you're anything approaching fluent in. No, you read to the end of the freaking sentence and then go get another beer or whatever.

But to nevadí. I'll push on. This method* of learning Czech is actually working pretty well for me. I'm pretty sure its efficacy is limited to me, though, because it's based on a genuine overwhelming interest in what they're actually saying in obscure Slavic rock songs, which few Slavs even share, and an endless fixation on text that is written down where I can fix my eyes on it and read it, all day long. In very related news, I read 700 pages of text this weekend in five hours all together. It was in the form of two semi-trash novels**, on the other hand, which mitigates the achievement a bit.




*the method being, find something on the sweet interweb that I want to read, this being mostly lyrics to songs that I love, and then slog through it with the dictionary.

**From a Buick 8, by Stephen King, and Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card. Oh all right: so one of them was all trash and one of them was mostly trash. Well, it was ok, but Ender's Game was way better.