More Randomness

Paul's Post of Randomness is inspiring, but in a bad way, because my randomness is always trite. More random thoughts collected over the last few days:

1. I love children, especially my nine nephews and nieces, but being a Glorified Unpaid Nanny to more than four children at once is enough to make me want to rip my ovaries out with my bare hands and toss them over each shoulder into a gorge. It's not that they're terrors, it's just that it's very tiring. I forgot how very tiring five to six children can be when two are still in diapers. I imagine I'll forget again in time for the next visit.

2. Alvin and the Chipmunks is possibly the worst idea for a live-action remake of a mediocre-at-best anthropomorphic '80s cartoon. Then again, I escaped those two Garfield movies. Damn, Jason Lee. I used to think you were cute and funny. But things like this, unattributable to the writer's strike, make me despair for "family friendly" films. It also makes me really worry about Gen X'er nostalgia for the '80s that they then transmit to their offspring in the form of cinematic reinterpretation. Grosse Pointe Blank? Awesome. Freaky talking CGI animals with irritating voices that make me want to pierce my eardrums with ballpoint pens? Not awesome.

3. Reading crappily written stuff like this that does nothing more than highlight the extreme selfishness and utter lack of self-awareness of the irredeemable, solipsistic author (who writes memoirs!) makes me homicidal. I mean, not since reading the first two pages of Prozac Nation or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (I think I only got past the picture of the stapler) have I felt like stabbing a knife into a book (or in this case, the LED screen of my laptop, though that's inadvisable), hoping that by stabbing the pages I would kill the soul and thus life of the author behind the words. And then I read comments like these, which express more cogently and a little less violently what is wrong with such crap published under the rubric of "Modern Day Tales in Oprah-esque Public Admissions Lacking in Remorse or Actual Self-Awareness But From Which We May All Learn Something, Maybe", and think that maybe if we were left to extra-legal alternatives, public stoning and mob justice could make a real comeback.

4. Re-watching movies on cable like The Big Lebowski can make one powerfully miss a person, knowing at which points the laughter would chime in. It is fortunate that High Fidelity is not on.

5. The only thing worse than working throughout a break is helping your 16 year old nephew prepare for the SAT at the same time. While I write and edit, I will be proctoring 4 hour exams and drilling vocab. He thinks this sucks for him? At least this is his first time through this. No 27 year old should have to re-live the SAT's.

6. I have the reverse problem of the Princess and The Pea: my un-dainty back and apparently tough, wizened flesh cannot really tell the difference between my crappy Sultan Fangebo foam mattress, upon which I sleep in my I Am Totally A Graduate Student Apartment, a Sealy Posturpedic bed, or a $3,000 Tempurpedic bed. I'm currently sleeping on the Sealy Posturepedic in my childhood bedroom, and I sleep just the same as I do on the crappy Ikea bed. And the Tempurpedic bed is too mushy for me, though my siblings swear by it. This makes me wonder whether I can really distinguish between 300 and 600 count sheets; 65 v. 70% cacao, cabernet v. cabernet sauvignon, and other pretentions I've gained since going to law school and becoming a yuppie Ivory Tower intellectual. Then again, we just went to IHOP yesterday. They help keep me real. That explains it.