Couple things regarding the Oscars

Was it just me or was Jon Stewart not very funny last night?  His hosting the show was the only reason I sat and watched the entire thing.  I kept thinking it would get better, but alas…it did not.

Also: I saw the movie Juno, and although yeah it was different from the norm, the dialogue was a bit contrived.  I felt like it was trying a little too hard.

Although, I was glad to see Diablo Cody win for original screenplay.  She did live in Minneapolis for a while, you know.

That being said, I always support all writers, even if screenwriting isn’t my cup of tea.  I want to get people to read, not watch television or movies.

But: how awesome are the Coen brothers, also from Minnesota?  When people get offended by the movie Fargo, they have to realize the guys who wrote it are from this area and know what the accents sound like.  If you’re offended by it, it is probably because you know you have the accent.  And–the main character Marge Gunderson is very strong and any Minnesotan woman should be honored that a woman from the vicinity is portrayed in such a way.  I suppose I need to see No Country For Old Men now.  Or read the book.

It is still too long, the stars still toot their own horns, the songs are still lame, and the movies still try too hard.  Hollywood, here I will NOT come.  What happened to the likes of Bogart, Stewart, Grant, Hepburn and others?  What have you done to yourselves Los Angeles?

Thursday 13

1.  Just when I thought my psych professor was a frat boy type trying to be funny and impress the freshmen, we have a lecture on the effects of drugs and he becomes a real person.  Turns out, he doesn’t really drink.  Talk about mixed messages.

2.  Every time Randy Shaver reports live from Fort Myers for the sports during the news and tells all the Minnesotans that it is 85 degrees down there, he looks a little too happy.  Gloating much?  He’ll be back next week and feel just how cold it is up here again.

3.  It has been so cold up here lately, just the thought of a 25 degree day sounds like springtime.  I would LOVE a day that is in the twenties.

4.  My older brother and I may be driving to Glacier National Park out in Montana this summer during the week of the fourth of July.

5.  I keep finding out things that are in the works for the summer and I am getting very excited for it to begin!

6.  Have I expressed my love for chicken wild rice soup?  Because I do love it, so very much.

7.   There was a tragic crash involving a school bus here in Minnesota a couple days ago and four children died.  That is something that should not happen and it is hard to believe that one woman’s actions while driving caused such a horrific tragedy.  She didn’t even have a driver’s license.  And now KIDS are dead, and many more are heartbroken.

8.  I watched the democratic debate with Hillary and Barack tonight.  When posed the question of the growing Latino/Latina population in the country and the prospect of bilingualism in the United States, Obama stressed the need for our schools to teach foreign languages to ALL children.  That should be a requirement in curriculum from the start!  Starting right away in first grade!  And yes, learning Spanish is incredibly important, but it shouldn’t be the sole language to focus on.  Personally, I am a fan of French.  Americans shouldn’t be afraid of learning a second language.  It should be something to embrace and appreciate.  Sure, math and science and the like are important, but they shouldn’t be the only things to focus on.  Standardized tests clearly haven’t been working.

9.  Clearly I could rant for days on the educational system topic.

10.  I watched the movie Becoming Jane last weekend and fell in love with the actor James McAvoy.  I was wary of the movie at first because I LOVE Jane Austen and her work more than any other right now.  But it turned out to be completely amazing.  I was so incredibly heartbroken at the end, it took a minute or two to recover.  Even though it is very likely to be untrue, I appreciate her works even more now.

11.   I don’t understand why Minnesotans are still opposed to a raise in the gas tax (which is very low currently) when the money will help keep our bridges from falling down.

12.  Why do the New York Mets think they are invincible now that they have Johan Santana?  He can only do so much.

13.  Is it opening day yet?  39 days till baseball returns!

Crazy Professor Quotes: Psychology Division

Here is yet another installment of the “crazy stuff my professors say during class” series.  I am pretty sure they are all insane, but it’s cool.  It makes for an interesting lecture!

First of all: my psychology professor.  I think I like this guy.  He makes the class laugh a lot and really knows his stuff, which is a good combination.  He never needs notes for lectures, he just talks.  But at the same time he has the sort of “frat boy type who feels the need to be funny all the time” vibe.  Like Will Ferrell in all the stupid frat boy comedies he makes.  I think the quotes will speak for themselves.

“Who’s got a jello shot?  That’d be good right now.” (This was when we were discussing the chapter on Bio Psych which was not my favorite in the world because it got pretty scientific and science makes me freeze up a little.  That day he threw a ton of information at us and could tell we were getting perturbed, so he said this to be funny.  Granted, everyone laughed because it is an intro class made up entirely of freshmen, who think it is awesome when an adult makes jokes related to alcohol.  Turning 21 changes your outlook on drinking a bit.)

Here is one from today’s lecture on hypnosis and sleep cycles:

“Maybe you’ll go to a school or a bar or something.  My high school had a bar.  It was called my car.”  (I really don’t remember the context of this.  We were talking about hypnosis and he mixed up school and bar because those were two places people have seen others get hypnotized.  Side note: hypnotism is a real thing, but only if the person is willing to be hypnotized.  Anyway, this is just another example of his need to reference drinking all the time.  And yes, he was in a frat.)

My Sunday.

-I went to a church that wasn’t my own this morning.

-There was a lady preacher for the sermon.

-She said something that I haven’t heard from the male pastors I am used to hearing.

-It went something like this:

-”I realized that all the blessings I have in my life: my job, my home, my possessions, aren’t because I have worked hard for them and therefore deserve them.  It is because of an accident of birth that I am where I am.”

-She was visiting a South American country and helping rebuild a small village when a man told her he wanted to marry an American so his children can go to school in America and get a good education and be able to do something more with their lives.  Because if they stayed in that small village, all they will have in life is the meager living attained in that area.

-Also: at the very end of the service, for the dismissal they not only say “Go in peace,” but, “Go in peace.  Remember the poor.”  Right in the bulletin.

-Sometimes I wish the politics behind the ELCA — LCMS divide didn’t exist.

-After church I took a lovely nap.  Sunday afternoon naps are my favorite.

-I went to see a performance of The Vagina Monologues this afternoon.  This is the third year in a row that I have gone to see this show and it is the same every year, save for the final “spotlight” monologue of the year.  I own the book and feel it is a very important cause that isn’t addressed very often.  That being stopping the violence against women.

-I wrote a short story for my Intermediate Fiction Writing class today.  It is eleven pages long (and could be a lot longer actually) and when the ending came to me, it terrified me!  It is about an overnight journey through the rural area of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and what can go wrong.  I shudder thinking about it.  It is awesome.

-The pitchers and catchers for the Minnesota Twins reported to Spring Training (officially!) today.  This brings baseball coverage everyday and spring and warm weather and dome dogs and every good thing associated with the game.

I’m accounting on ya!

When I got to my boss’s office this morning for work, I noticed that there were TWO monitors at my workstation.  They replaced our computers with new ones last night but I didn’t know I would have two whole monitors!!  The tech showed me how it worked, and I can take a spreadsheet and drag it across so it spreads out on BOTH monitors!  You have no idea how exciting this is!  But then I think about it and it worries me that I am this happy about Excel.  I am NOT an accountant!  But I have been doing this assistant gig for 3 years now…and I am getting a little comfortable.  I need to get some relevant experience for what I intend to do with the rest of my life.  Which is NOT (contrary to popular belief) accounting.  Publishing anyone?

Ouch.

Will the pain of seeing this picture all season (and for the rest of time…) ever go away?  It’s hard to admit that Johan is no longer a Minnesota Twin.  But when pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in a week and a half and they start discussing the dilemma of not having a “real” ace…then it might hit me.

A story. Little truth, much imagination.

This is a story I wrote a few hours ago in an exercise for my fiction writing class.  We were told to think of a story that a family member has told you and take some liberties while still sticking to the original plot.  We wrote it in first person first, then later in third person.  I decided to type the third person version here for you because I like it better and it wouldn’t make sense to put both here.

A young girl of seven years old woke up to the smell of bacon.  She was visiting her grandparent’s farm for an entire week one summer with her younger sister.  As she walked down the stairs the aromas of coffee and eggs and toast and bacon engulfed her.  Her grandmother loved spoiling her visitors.  After breakfast and cleaning up afterward, she decided to play outside and explore the farm with her little sister.  For awhile they took turns on the tire swing, and they even tried a two-way game of hide and seek, but they became bored with those quickly.  They figured they could do those things anywhere, but a week spent on a farm should be special.  The two girls decided to separate and see if the animals were doing anything interesting or their grandfather was around.  The elder sister went exploring the cow barn, the younger to the chicken coop.  The cow barn, to the elder was more fun because cows were bigger than chickens and more is better.  She was disappointed to see that most of the cows were out grazing on a distant field.  As she gazed around the barn, the cow tank where the cows drank from caught her eye.  A narrow wooden walkway surrounded the perimeter of the tall, wide tank.  She climbed up and began walking around when she suddenly fell in!  Having not had swimming lessons she panicked, screamed and could not climb out herself.  Luckily, her aunt was nearby and heard her cries for help.  She helped rescue her, and scolded her younger sister and she for not sticking together.  From that day forward, the elder sister vowed to learn to swim.

So, it is not perfect and probably needs a little work, but this is what I came up with on the spot in about ten minutes.  It was loosely based on a story my mother told me countless times when I was little.  She actually fell in the cow tank on her grandparent’s farm.  But it was when she was 3 she told me when I talked to her on the phone today, not seven like I told.  But I have a bit of an imagination.  And I like to tell stories.  I think this class will be really good for me because I am already getting inspired to write more.  I need to write more short stories, because trying to tackle an entire novel at once is difficult.  Short stories are the exercises needed to take on the big one, the novel.   So that’s my story, for today.

Barack Obama

Yesterday Barack Obama visited Minneapolis and I managed to get one of the 20,000 free tickets to go see him speak.  Well, I actually got two tickets, one for me and one for my roommate.  On Wednesday night the details of where he was going to speak and how people can come see him were announced and since I am on a couple listservs for the Obama campaign I found out where they were handing them out right away.  One of the locations was inside our student union on campus, so that is where I went.  They were going to start opening the doors at 1:30, so we arrived downtown at 1 to get in line, figuring that was plenty of time.  Well, they only had 2 doors open to allow people in for security reasons.  One on the street level and the other on the skyway level.  (Thank God Minneapolis built all those skyways downtown.  It gets cold here.)  The line in the skyways was looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong.  It seemed as though the end would never materialize.  Eventually it did, but after at least a mile.  (Well, maybe I exaggerate.)  We didn’t make it through the line and into the Target Center itself until after 3.  Doug, by this point, had to leave because he had a prior commitment at 4.  It was scheduled to begin at 2, so we figured he would have plenty of time to get back after he spoke.  So I ended up sitting there by myself, which was fine.  He didn’t come out and start speaking until about 4:15 and spoke for an hour.  It was mostly the same sort of speech that has been going around the country, but he catered it a little to Minnesota because he talked about how he discovered that the late Senator Paul Wellstone occupied his desk in the Senate before him.  (They all carve their names in the drawer.)  This of course made all the Minnesotan democrats fondly remember that hero.  Even making it back to the parking ramp and driving out of the downtown area wasn’t too bad afterward.  Even though it took over 4 hours for it to actually happen, I was so glad I went.  It is one of those once in a lifetime opportunities.  Next time it will be even harder to get tickets I am sure, and although I was far up, that didn’t mean I couldn’t hear what he had to say, which was most important.  I have been a fan of his and a big supporter for about a year and a half now, and I truly hope that through the rest of the primary season, others realize that his ideas and policies and values are the way to go.