6.3.98

    I swear I haven't been avoiding my duties here. I have just been really busy. It seems that since I got back from Montana things have just been crazy. Every night I've had a different thing to do.

    First of all, thanks to everybody who wrote in and wished me a Happy Birthday. That was pretty cool. Someone asked what I did to celebrate the big day. Sadly, nothing much. I went out with T. and some of this co-workers to see Godzilla. Actually, I had a pretty nice time. I met up at his work after I got off work (which, I recall, was a pretty bad day) and then we headed out en masse to Pink's. (I tried really hard to find a website about Pink's but had no such luck.) Pink's is a staple of Los Angeles living. It's a hotdog stand on La Brea, a few blocks shy of Sunset, where starving actors and actresses have been known to frequent. As in, 'Before I was rich and famous I used to eat at Pink's between auditions,' says Michael J. Fox (paraphrased), Canadian shorty. It has an interior with a few tables and walls lined with signed glossies. Out back are more tables and a rent-a-cop to help traffic the cramped parking lot. Chili-cheese dogs are their specialty and they are pretty damn filling. I had a chili dog, sans cheese, and fries. The fries are phenomenal and the dog was only $2.50! Can anyone beat that? Of course, there's other fare like hamburgers and burritos which I hear are also tasty. I saw some stupid thing on PBS before I moved down here about kitschy places and they spent some time and Pink's. It was on my list of things to do.

    As for Godzilla...what can I say? I thought it was going to be awful so it turned out not that bad. We saw it at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset and Ivar which is a pretty cool movie theatre. It's huge with a curved screen. The sound was great and because of all the rain in the movie it sounded like it was raining in the theatre. Now, I will copy and paste my rant that I posted somewhere else in cyber space. Laziness? Maybe, but tell me you never rejuvenated an old book report years after the fact.

The only thing that really left a bad taste in my mouth was the romantic storyline that moviemakers have decided they need to weave into every goddamn movie in order to get the girly girls to accompany their boyfriends.

The girl in the movie plays a quirky little blond secretary to a news anchor who won't let her get a promotion unless she has "dinner" with him. So she runs off to her friends who inform her that her problem is that she has no killer instinct and she needs to stand up for herself. So then she goes running around the city and discovers that her former boyfriend is "on the inside" with the whole 'zilla hunter team. How very convenient. So she runs into him and steals some video he has and makes her own video to air including the stolen footage and then *stomp* her mean ol boss steals it from her anyway. And, instead of wanting to be a "real" reporter it turns out she just wants to be a talking head when, after she tapes her report she turns to the cameraman and says, "Did I look okay? Maybe I should have put my hair up."

Then we are subjected to purposeful placement of pathetic damsel in distress with throw away lines like "Take my hand" to help me over this rock, and "boost me up" to get into this ceiling vent and "Screeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaam." And, of course, brave, bold Matthew Broderick gets a moment to clutch her from a near miss in the jaws of the great 'zilla. I like Broderick but wouldn't the word milquetoast be a fitting description?

My favorite worst line of the movie came from M.B.: "Yeah, eight years is a long time."

Anyway, the monster pretty cool and you should see this in a theatre if you're going to see it at all but I'm just not intrigued by these ridiculous "romance" stories. Give me Sigourney Weaver anyday.

    Let me qualify the Weaver statement. Do you remember in Aliens where in the end it turns out it's just Weaver and the hunky, cute guy battling everybody? There was so much chemistry between those two they were giving off sparks. You just knew that when all was said and done that their relationship would be intense and hot. Not so with the so-called love story in Godzilla.

    In other news, T. and I set out on a hunt for wedding invitation supplies with which to make our own wedding invites. We came to a brick wall with the envelopes which were proving hard to find. I slept on it and woke up the brilliant idea that this was going to be a royal pain in the ass. Yesterday, we ordered some from Hallmark® that weren't too expensive and that we liked. I had avoided mentioning anything about the invites because I didn't want the parents to catch wind of our nefarious plan. Oh well, we'll make the 'thank you' cards instead.

    Speaking of the parents. The parents make the wedding more difficult. Or, I should say that for every time they are really helpful they are also really difficult. T. and I made it pretty clear that we wanted the wedding to be as simple as possible. Unfortunately, everybody has specific ideas of "propriety" and are driving T. and I crazy. We think we've got everything worked out and then we get another curveball. AND FURTHERMORE, it seems to me that close family members should be more than happy to help out as needed and should IN FACT be volunteering to help regardless of whether they are in our teeny, tiny "wedding party." I'm going to a friend's wedding two weeks after mine and I'm not in the wedding party and I'm probably not even getting a damn corsage but yet I'm going to do anything that she needs to have done. Geez. T. and I are thisclose to running off to Vegas and getting married by an Elvis.

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