Ride The White Pony

I couldn't be happier with that. I love the show, and all the characters, but I always identified with CJ. Tall, tough, witty, awkward, romantically frustrated, kinda goofy lookin'.
I mean, sure she has about three inches on me. And sure, she is also a genius who works in the white house for the president. But, apart from all that stuff, we're pretty much the same person.

Watching West Wing I get to pretend that there's a democrat in office, and that the whole party isn't on the ropes, gasping out it's last breath. Bartlet for President!

Posted by kati at 11:56 AM

January 19, 2004

Horizon

There are days when you must tear the world down
Before it gets to you.
A smile simply a foreign and unwelcome adversary.
Impossible and demanding. Vicious, even.

Days when dissatisfaction, inconvenience, details, frustration, or fatigue break through the lines of your defense - turning you into that petulant beast whom you yourself despise, but are at present too weak to keep at bay. The one who spits and snaps, or at very least wants to, at anyone and everyone who dares cross its path. Drawing breath is tiresome, a nuisance strangely reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard. The world is purged of color, and worth no more than a fixed scowl. Your mere presence on the planet feels forced and unenviable. Creation is stifled, tolerance discarded, and all is moving at a frenzied pace. Oh, the energy it requires on these days not to rip heads off! Tear chunks of innocent flesh off the unsuspecting victims, and shake it around violently in your teeth like an animal before casting it angrily down in your wake. Exhausting.

Sometimes the taste in your mouth is a bad one. Bitter, nauseating, safe. who knows.
Can it be avoided, or stopped once begun? Is it a choice?
Have we the strength, the understanding?
Don't we all go through it sometimes? Perhaps these imperfections are the traits that we all share. The ugliness that makes us all the same, all faulted, all human. Maybe that's what really links us to each other. We'd like to think there are better ones, though, don't we?

And in these times of trouble, we can escape to bed, to our dreams and the ramblings of our unconscious mind. A place where nothing is strange, inappropriate, or beyond reproach. A place where we are emboldened to explore what we cannot comprehend in waking life. Strengthen our strongholds on sanity or propriety with a thick down comforter, scented sheets, silence, stillness, maybe even a familiar warmth that is needlessly generous in the soundless dark. If we're lucky, we wake freed of the demon that chased us from life the day before. If not, we usually have a moment or two of blissful ignorance before it all comes crashing back down around our ears.

And some days it is enough to simply be. Strangers evoke smiles, drawing breath seems a treasure, existing feels natural, things have purpose. Days when you're reminded of the color in the world. The scent of holding something closely and just breathing it in. Doing nothing feels like a supreme and long-coveted luxury.

I have both.
I can explain neither.
I enjoy what I can,
and seek to change what I do not enjoy.
I'm a work in progress.

Posted by kati at 05:05 AM

January 14, 2004

Prince Charming

"And what do you do?
Oh you're a plummer! What on earth is that?"

Some people have made the connection that the English royal family likes to well, inbreed. And that this has resulted in the bizarrely frumped-up monarchy that England has enjoyed since the tyrannical hijinks of Henry VIII.

And it's not really just that the royals are moderately brain-damaged, eyes blank like sheep. It's also the ugly thing. The unfortunate horse-face effect of the genetic similarities.

Until now ...

I think that most people would agree with me that Prince William is an attractive man. Even guys feel me on this. He may not turn you on, but if you're looking from an objective standpoint: Tall, toothy, symmetrical, charming smile, rich as all Christendom. what's not to like?

And let's not forget Harry. Sadly, he does look a bit more like Charles, but he's got character, and he's spunky. You gotta admire a spunky royal.

And all it took was a little shake-up in the royal inbreeding pattern. As dopey as poor Charles is, was, and will be forever, he had to good sense to marry a cute and charismatic teacher from Somewheresbourough, England. At least he married her long enough to produce a couple of non-retarded heirs to the royal throne. Granted, Diana was pretty spectacular in her own right. England dug her. So did my New Zealand mother. So did I.

But hooray for the princes, say I! They may well already be spoiled to absolute apathy, but they've got the good looks to get by while they wait to reign.

I mean, Harry will never reign. I don't think he wants to anyway. He's having fun being the black sheep. William actually has responsibilities - and likely the lion's share of the royal Guilt - and has to behave himself. Harry gets to have fun. He may even be gay, who knows. (Prince Harry publicly coming out to all of Britain on the BBC might be the only way there is to actually kill the current queen and get the crown moving again.)

So I propose another shake-up. Make even better, even cuter, even less retarded Super Royals!

I'll volunteer if I have to. I'll do my duty for the sake of England. Looking at the evidence, how could I refuse in good conscience. it's the next logical step.

I mean, it's not rocket surgery.

Posted by kati at 03:40 PM

January 12, 2004

Stop laughin' Tom, you're scaring the kids

I always knew that there was something wrong with Tom Cruise. Maybe not wrong, per se, maybe peculiar. No, maybe just wrong.

His diminutive stature?
His enigmatic sexual preference?
His unwavering box-office success?
His third front tooth?

No.

It's his deranged, psychotic, serial-killer laugh.
It's most unnerving.

In almost everything I have ever seen Tom Cruise do, ever - be it any/all of his movies, appearances on "Oprah," "Rosie," or the like, late-night, comedic spoofs-of-himself, whathaveyou - he finds an appropriate moment to freak me out with this nutter laugh of his.

You know what it is? It's Tom Cruise laughing too hard. Even when nothing particularly funny is said, he lets loose a ridiculous display: mouth wide open, all three front teeth gleaming brightly, rocking back and forth, slapping his knees. And from the seemingly vast depths of his diaphragm, nay, perhaps even his soul, he unleashes a guffaw of sorts that defies understanding. Forced. Loud. Far too long for whatever his being laughed at.

HA ha ha ha ha ha! HA ha ha! HA HA HA! and so on...

Well, it's weird. Weird and unnecessary. And scary.

If I were a little girl, and a man on the street laughed at me - or really, laughed anywhere in my earshot - in such a way, I would have to do my best to be a brave girl and keep back the tears, as I clung terrified to my mother's pant leg. Even now, I would have a hard time not turning and fleeing from whatever certain lunatic could have produced such a sound.

So why's he doing that? What's with the laugh Tom? It can't be real, can it? Is that your pity laugh? If so, I'd say you can tone it down a touch. Do you just like scaring people with it? Or have you perhaps just lost your mind?

... Um, yeah... it's a little funny that your girlfriend could one day be named Penelope Cruz-Cruise ... but you don't have to keep laughing like that. It's really not that funny. Hey man, stop I'm serious ... you're freaking me out. HEY!

Posted by kati at 01:11 AM

January 06, 2004

I am a scientist

"Analysis and freaky sensitivity, we gotta live on science alone."

By happenstance the other day, I caught the first few scenes of the movie "Final Destination." For those of you don't know it, I believe it is a teen-horror flick starring it-boy of the day Devon Sawa (Casper, Now & Then, Something Else That Sucked) and some other randoms, who escape death in a freak accident. As one might expect in this situation, death then proceeds to stalk them, hunt them down, and kill them off one by one. Naturally.
At least I think that is what happens.

Anyway, none of this was particularly interesting to me. However, just before I turned it off, I caught sight of a familiar face. Then another. Then yet a third. By total chance, I had stumbled upon the pasture where old actors from the X-files had been sent to graze. It was a most bizarre phenomenon.

The one who reeled me in was Robert Wisden, who was perhaps my favorite villain on the show. I never knew the actors name, of course, I just knew him as "Pusher," because man, he was fucking scary. It was weird to see him as a generic, someone's-dad type of role.

Cut to about 5 seconds later. The main character's best friend was the actor who played a neurotic, brain-eating monster on an episode called "Sleepless". His name is Tony Todd, as it turns out. Huh. Who knew?

Then there were two more in rapid succession. The woman playing a high-school teacher in this flick had also played some forgettable ethereal nut-case in the really bad episode, "The Field Where I Died," Yet another teacher was an actor who appeared several times as a background member of a number of FBI inquiry committees and heavily-shadowed sinister crime syndicates. In this film, however, he had a goofy French accent, and it was rather bad.

So that was weird. I did end up turning off the movie shortly thereafter. There was a rather unpleasant plane-crash scene that I disliked, so I stopped watching. After an alarmingly turbulent flight from San Diego the other day, I am aware that my irrational fear of flying is growing steadily worse. Every time I fly I hate it more and more. I used to fly to New Zealand no problem, and now I get antsy on an hour-long flight up the coast. What gives? I don't know what to do about that. Take up power-walking?

And the superstition threshold goes way up on planes. I go way past the bounds of what I consider sane or acceptable when I fly now. Why? No good reason at all. I even noticed in this stupid movie that the flight number was 180. 180 to Paris, TWA flight 800 from Paris. Hmmmm. Coincidence? Maybe not. Maybe we should stay off of flights with the number 8 in them, and travel to Paris from England by train.....

I think the more people you know that die (any of us, as we get older) the more you freak out about dying yourself. Sadly, though, people we know are going to continue to die, and the number will inevitably rise as our age does. So, does that make us destined to get increasingly concerned by it? I'd like to make myself less concerned, but at this point I am only feigning my lack of concern, if even that. Hmph.

Posted by kati at 02:39 PM