so dark the con of man, indeed.

so, The Da Vinci Code was underwhelming. potentially snooze-worthy, which could have been the effect of a number of things (Tom Hanks' acting, Ron Howard's directing, the fact that i saw it at 12:30pm EST) i'm inclined to go with Ron Howard's directing, but the crack of noon matinee is likely the more accurate culprit. i saw it on Google's dime, though, so who am i to complain.

lovely company, that Google.

the last few weeks have been, easily, the best i've had in my tenure as a New Yorker. Bri, this is all your fault; you don't suck at all!

however.

a few things have encumbered my joy this week.

1) my grandfather is in the ICU for a pulmonary embolism.
2) my cat is in the ICU for cancer.

(as a direct or indirect result, i'm not sure, my parents bought a BMW, which, if you knew my parents, is weird) sports cars are common remedies, i've heard.

3) (however unimportant) i've gotten a number of curiously random comments from prior romantic attachments about occurrences in my life writ below. which is...what it is.

4) and my flat-panel LCD monitor has magically disappeared in transit from Queens to Brooklyn.

also strange; i seem to have surpassed my it-tastes-like-crap/dimetapp opinion of Red Bull this week. surpassed to point of near addiction. Bri, this is also your fault.

lions and tigers and hybrids! oh my!

so, the first documented case of a grizzly-polar hybrid bear in the wild...and what do they do? kill it.

way to go, geniuses.

ode to a room with a door.

i have, for the time being, situated myself in a room of my own. with a door and everything. i have a clever little quasi-bathroom. and a bed that is not a couch.

and, of course, now that i have a bed, i've been sleeping in somebody else's.

i'm sure there's some cardinal rule about dating one's roommate.

two points.

one: it eliminates that whole pesky phone tag how-do-we-coordinate-our-lives thing.
two: you'll never have to borrow a toothbrush.

(it would be cumbersome to speak of the fact that i finally found a pleasant living situation, one with ample cuddling, only weeks before i move across the country. so i won't speak of this. at the moment, i am quite pleased. with the nagging exception that my cat of eleven years is likely dying. which is impending heartbreak. but truly, pleased, i promise)

yes, i know. proponent of the parenthetical.

but i have laundry in my apartment. which is blissful.

viva Mexico!

so, mexico is about legalize personal use of pot, cocaine and heroin.

who the hell would emigrate from a country like that?!

also: this whole "Great May 1st Boycott," or "A Day Without an Immigrant" is some major bullshit. i think there's some rule about naming a historic event before if happens. "A Day Without an Immigrant" just sounds like a bad novel.

why am i always in New York when shit like this happens? oh. i live here.

sigh

the Word: English!

as in, the official language of the United States of America. thank you Stephen Colbert.

unrelated: if you'd like to feel better about your life, stand on the corner of 23rd and Lexington in front of the United Cerebral Palsy center of New York (across the street from where i'm staying this week) and watch a busload of visibly handicapped people in wheelchairs wheel their way at you down the sidewalk. either severly amusing or terribly sad; that fine line.

CSI: Miami on HD is veeeerry pretty. David Caruso, not as much (though i had some wicked strange crush on him in his John Kelly days).

i feel ok. there are some people here that i really will miss, come June. and some, i realized, i won't really miss at all.

it's good to be [not] home

it's, um, raining. again. seriously. what the hell!?

MTV spring break Portland Oregon stylee

...wherein melaina wakes up late, shuffles her pajamaed ass down the hall, out the back door, around the corner to Starbucks for a grande Misto and a scone, returns to apartment, positions self in front of laptop, checks email and...does work.

(which in no way involves MTV save perhaps a guilty rerun of Laguna Beach which will reaffirm the fact that i think Kristin Cavallari is deeply irritating and i will later deny having ever watched said show)

this of course differs from my non-spring break life how? you might ask.

(i am, of course,still in New York, where it happens to be sunny. on a day i had devoted to getting some work done. which will obviously happen)

I would like to point out the 10-day forecasts for both New York, New York and Portland, Oregon this week.

note the fact that it starts raining on friday in New York, gets sunny for a week, then starts raining again at the end of next week, around say, the 21st. also note how in Portland it starts raining this Friday and pretty much rains on through until next Friday, the 21st.

mmmhmm.

death by guinness

So.

It’s been a perturbing month. I’ve lost my train of thought. Scratch that. I’ve lost my train of living.

I am particularly homeless for a while. Which is awesome. This week, it’s a lovely room in the west village. Next week, it’s Portland’s Pearl district. The week after that, I’m not particularly sure. The window I am presently staring out of overlooks the corner of Hudson and Perry, in particular the gold and brown striped awning of Citi Habitats.

Irony for you.

I’m two blocks from Magnolia Bakery. Which is fantastic and overrated. I’m half a block from the White Horse Tavern, where, in 1953, Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. So, at least there’s always that option.

Yet, like everything else in my life, save my tattoos and my parents, this is only temporary. Then, I hear there are lasers. For the tattoos. And not the parents.

I saw The Merchant of Venice last night at The American Globe Theater; my friend Robbie was a particularly good Gratiano. Then followed a lot of Guinness. I’ve had my nose stuck in a book for a while; it was a nice respite. today's headache, almost welcome. almost.

I wrote an eight-page research paper this week on chastity and women’s roles in The Tempest. I forgot to cite the bible.

It goes that way.

mutability

moving sucks ass.

unwritten

i am in no way an optimist but this Natasha Bedingfield song is a good way to start your day.

pop music happens.

unrelated: blind people on the subway amaze me (in that non-facetious way).

what better can we do...

I feel dead.

But it’s not as dramatic as all that.

I reconnected with somebody last week with whom I had not spoken in eight years. She had a severe impact on my life, back then. What matters to you, likely, nobody else remembers.

It goes that way.

I ended up in Westchester with Mike on Sunday, which was a nice respite from my life. Those were the best hours; the last, though, are always clocks ticking. People who see you every day take so much of you for granted. They don’t ever see you walk away. They don’t see you drifting. It’s in the periphery.

I think only strangers really look at you anymore. Like babies, they don’t know any better.

“Oh my god,” said a man on the train in Hartsdale yesterday. “You look like Debbie Harry.”

give Crash a break, yo

Annie Proulx is pissed about the Oscars. bitching about beautiful rich people handing out accolades to other beautiful rich people? it didn't go your way? awww.

it's strange. i've heard nothing but negative comments about the movie Crash since it won Best Picture. it got ripped apart in my women's(read: gender/race) studies class last week. "it promotes racial stereotypes" well, unfortunately, stereotypes happen. "it was written by a white guy" Canadian white guy, mind you.

interestingly, the female producer (who received one of the Best Picture Oscars) never actually got paid for working on the film. gender stereotypes you say...?

i don't know. i saw it twice in the theater (the first time alone, the second, with my then-"boyfriend" Mike) didn't anybody listen to the dialogue?

if you're going to bitch about it, bitch about the snow. that was a bit Hollywood.

also, i can kill you with my brain.

i don't really know what the hell i'm doing with my life. which is fun.

when i was eight, i wanted to paint stripes on my face, don a fur-lined unitard and sing jellicle songs for jellicle cats. that, i thought, was a reasonable thing to do with one's life. but then, that was 1988.

in a lovely turn of events, the temperature hit a sweltering 65 degrees this weekend. i, of course, spent the better part of my day shut up in the stale air of an auditorium taking a three-and-a-half-hour proficiency exam. it's fun being told that you can't go to the bathroom.

also fun: panic attacks in computer science. holding back unexplainable tears in a crowded subway.

normality is relative they say.

related: i'm in the middle of The Tempest.

at least my laptop shipped.

not your queen amidala

i love Natalie Portman.

i'd like to start a religion. that's where the money is.

so, there's a really interesting article in Rolling Stone this month on Scientology.

"The history of Scientology
asserts that 75 million years ago, an evil galactic warlord named Xenu controlled seventy-six planets in this corner of the galaxy, each of which was severely overpopulated. To solve this problem, Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings and then flew them to Earth, where they were dumped into volcanoes around the globe and vaporized with bombs. This scattered their radioactive souls, or thetans, until they were caught in electronic traps set up around the atmosphere and "implanted" with a number of false ideas -- including the concepts of God, Christ and organized religion."

hehe. false ideas...the concept of organized religion...oh the irony.

did you know L Ron used to write old sci-fi pulp fiction back in the day? come on now, i know you're shocked.

(i couldn't make this shit up if i tried. it's just so wonderful.)

not the mama

my father is 60 today. i've known him a while and, well, i still like him. ;)

I'm gonna watch you shine
Gonna watch you grow
Gonna paint a sign
So you'll always know
As long as one and one is two
There will never be a daughter loved her father as much as I love you

prevarications

i'd thought we were on the same page
but you read between the lines, you'll see
it's just fiction
it's nothing real

there's no difference between
what you do
and what you feel

Scientists say that the brain chemistry of infatuation is akin to mental illness

so, this is actually the first Valentine's Day since i was 20 that i have not been with anybody. which is actually quite odd.

my mom pointed me toward this National Geographic article on love (unfortunately, the entire article is not online). i sat down in the self-help aisle at Barnes and Noble yesterday to read it in its entirety. (as an aside here, only in a Barnes and Noble in New York is it difficult to find carpet space to sit and read an article. good god!)

so, if you're single and alone this Valentine's Day, it really only means one thing: that you're not crazy.

(or, for the mopey and depressed single: Fuckvday.com)

the weather is here...

...wish you were beautiful.

stupiderer

John Stossel's 20/20 on education in America. Belgium anyone?