Take On Me

Posted on September 2, 2005 by Meg

So last night I went out to sidekick on Stephanie’s night. We were going to go to 80’s night at Diva’s, and see her crush. He couldn’t actually come to Diva’s, but they did have a Moment, with a longing look and everything. Stephanie didn’t tell me for almost a whole hour afterwards! Which is so totally unfair because I’d tell her when I have a Moment…

Like later that night when they played Ah Ha so I texted Stick “Take on me” and he texted back “Take me on.”

High romance all around.



This is me getting ready to go out last night.

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The Joint List

Posted on September 1, 2005 by Meg

So yesterday I went to the supermarket. Yes, I’m about to post about grocery shopping, but don’t worry, there’s angst AND cock involved. Anyway, I was grocery shoping when I ran into Bethany from knitting club (yes I go to knitting club, and if you dontt stop interrupting, I’ll never get to the cock part of the story). Bethany was with her boyfriend and their shopping cart and their list. You know, their list. A joint list. With the things both people like to eat. It probably hangs on their fridge and they write on it when they run out of lightbulbs or peanut butter.

I was really glad to see her but I got insanely jealous. Not of the boyfriend, who I’m sure is a real nice guy, but jealous of the Joint List and all it stands for. This is no fault of Stick’s — I’m the one who flipped when he wanted to move in together. In fact, I don’t think it really has very much to do with Stick at all. It’s probably some post-college clinginess or mid-twenties hormonal crap.

Anyway, that’s why I was walking around with my basket of single girl food, feeling very sad. Single girl food is six-for-five-dollars yogurt cartons, a frozen diet pizza to replace one of Steph’s I ate the other night and a pint of sorbet. I decided to add some instant soup to my culinary cliches, and I saw…



That’s a picture of a packet of instant chicken soup which was labeled “Cock Flavored” in big, red letters. Of course I had to buy it and bring it home.

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HBO’s Rome

Posted on August 30, 2005 by Meg

Sunday was the first episode of HBO’s Rome series. Stick, being the Greatest Boyfriend Ever actually ordered HBO just so we could watch it. The story begins at a point everyone recognizes, with Caesar in Gaul and Pompey home waiting for him.

So far, Caesar is an unstoppable military genius and Marc Antony is his heir apparrent. Their slightly dull attempt at comradely banter can be explained away as plot exposition. Brutus comes home to extol the virtues of the Gauls, like a college kid who’s just discovered communism, and he announces a bit too readily, that he has no head for politics. Rome differs from six thousand historical novels because it shows the young Octavius as an entitled brat.

One of the scriptwriters did some serious research, and mentions Octavia’s first husband. Stick says that the armor and weapons were quite accurate, personally I was hiding behind a pillow during the battle scenes. The Roman fashions were great, everyone’s wearing yellows, greens, dark reds and browns.The women dye their hair and paint their faces, and get this, only the senators wear purple-bordered togas!

On the negative side, this is really bloody. Really bloody. Just because you’re HBO and you CAN be violent doesn’t mean you have to be. There were two scenes which just turned my stomach.

Also, there was some slight Forrest Gump-ing of the fictional protagonists, but I’ll go with it fort he first episode. As long as they’re not passing by the forum for the assassination of Caesar next week…

Finally, does anyone know why Cato was wearing a black toga on the senate floor? Does it mean something? Or was white just too expensive to maintain?

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A Day At The Races

Posted on August 29, 2005 by Meg

On Saturday, Stick and I were hanging around in that “I don’t know, what do you want to do today?” stage that really is the lamest part of couple-ness. And by hanging around, I mean he was interrupting my manicure to tell me his theories on the Little League World Series and I was interupting his game-watching to ask him what color nail polish I should use for my toes. Punctuated by debates on what would happen if we lived together and could both WarCraft simoultaneously…

“Do you want to go to the dogtrack?” Stick asked. (He really will stop at nothing to avoid watching Firefly with me.)

“Ok,” I said, vowing to reach level 20 tomorrow. I got dolled up, although not as dressed up as I would have gotten for horse races! That could also be because Stick was hanging on the bathroom door saying “Come ON, Meggie, they’re dogs! They don’t care! Yes, of course I think your eyeliner is sexy. Can we go now?”

We went for dinner in Brattleboro, which I swear is right next to Hinsdale even if it sounds like they’re in different states. I knew we were in New Hampshire by the number of firework stores.

Greyhound racing beats Nascar racing for a lot of reasons. First, puppies are cuter than cars. I’ve heard the horror stories about mistreated greyhounds but I saw lots of shiny-coated, strong, happy pups so I don’t suppose that happens anymore.

Second, they only run around the track one and a half times. Unlike Nascar, where I actually heard my hair turn grey and my face develop winkles (it was hard to hear this over my braincells dying)

Third, they chase a bunny. Not a real bunny, of course, or I would have stolen it and taken it home. (I watched this only after assurances that no harm would come to the mechanical bunny). It’s either called the kernel or the colonel, but Stick jsut laughed when I asked him so apparently everyone else in the whole world knows the answer.

So you can bet on a particular dog to win, on two dogs to place first and second in order, on three dogs to place in any order, and on bizarre combinations of winning and placing. You’re actually betting against the other people watching the race, so you’re more betting against the other gamblers than betting on a dog. (For a more detailed explanation of how this works, contact my old roommate Chris, who is once again a math major)

I won my first bet, and my third, but Stick got on my case so much about winning 90 cents total, that I put five dollars on a dog called Absentee. And won. Apparently betting based on a cool name isn’t standard practice, so I won $50. (We also bet on a dog called Pyromaniac because his race notes said “caught on fire” and Stick bet on one called Free Pizza because, well, he’s a gamer.)

Which translates to lot of cocktails, so in conclusion, I think watching greyhounds run in a circle is far superior to watching cars drive in a circle.

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No-Plan-Ahead Boy and No-Sense-of-Direction Girl, Again

Posted on August 16, 2005 by Meg

On the way down to Mystic, we once again proved that the combination Meg and MapQuest is disasterous. I can read a map very well, but MapQuest is like getting directions from the friend who says he knows a shortcut. I used to have a boyfriend who’d go into a sulk everytime I said “I think we should have turned left there,” which meant that when we arrived at our destination twenty minutes late, he was grumpy and not speaking to me. Stick says “That’s ok, maybe if we make this next left it’ll join up with that road,” and then goes back to telling me about eighties music…

Oh yeah, Stick ALSO changed his CDs so instead hearing Best Of Queen, Best of Queen 2, Obscure Queen Songs, and Still More Queen Songs, we listened to Moxy Fruvous, etc. I could go on, but I’m starting to bore myself with the Stick-is-awesome stuff.

On Saturday we went to the beach. Which was really fun and but after you go to the beach, you have to walk back from the beach… and if you are the kind of people who have spent the day either barefoot on burning sand or breaking in brand new flip-flops, this is pretty uncomfortable. Plus, by this time, my sexy demin skirt is covered in an unsexy salt-and-sand layer, and all the places we forgot to sunscreen are red and blotchy.

Sunday we went to Mystic Seaport. There is a ship called the Joseph Conrad, which did actually have enough rivets to sail… (If you got that, you are a huge English geek, and it’s probably the only time Heart Of Darkness will make me laugh)

We’d had a really good chardonnay on Saturday night and we stopped by the vineyard when it was made. It was fun because I tried a bunch of new wines, also because I got to see the pretentious wine-tasters, swirling their glasses and sniffing their shirts between vintages. I wonder if they can really taste all that “hint of leather” and “citrus undertones” stuff or if the pourer is making it up. Because I think that’s wasted on me. I don’t taste oak and leather and cherries… I taste wine. Maybe I’m missing something, so I will make it my mission to drink as much as possible to correct this.

Then we got home and Stick’s mom yelled at me for improperly sunscreening her son!

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I Miss Kristine

Posted on August 2, 2005 by Meg

Today I called my old roommate Kristine to tell her my brilliant Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince theory.

“I know who R.A.B. is,” I began, in lieu of hi or what’s up? or how have your last two months been, torturing lampreys in Michigan?.

“Who?” she says, in lieu of hello or how are you? or how have your last two months been, torturing single people in Massachusetts?.

After I told her all aspects of the theory, and we still couldn’t find any plotholes in it, I asked what she was doing when I called. She told me she was converting her truck into a movable freezer to transport dead turtles from Michigan to Massachusetts.

You see why I went straight to Harry Potter?

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I’ve Got A Theory…

Posted on August 2, 2005 by Meg

I have a theory who R.A.B. is. He’s mentioned at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince… oh yeah, spoiler alert. Anyway, it’s Regulus Black. He’s the younger brother of Sirius who joined the Death Eaters, left the Death Eaters and was offed in some as-yet-unmentioned manner by Voldermort or “on Voldemort’s orders, more likely” (pg 112 in OOTP).

1) The initials. We don’t know his middle name, yet, but two out of three is pretty good.

2) He was murdered by Voldemort just after trying to leave the Death eaters which implies he was high up in the evil-doers’ chain of command. If he was close to Voldemort, he could have known about the Horcruxes and that would have made it easier for him to find the locket.

3) Sirius, and all the rest of the Black family, actually, is dead so they can’t give any info on Regulus. Sidenote to JK Rowling, who I’m sure is an avid reader of my blog: No more Pensieve scenes unless they involve Harry’s parents meeting and falling in love, ok? They’re starting to feel like page-count increasers and plot cop-outs.

4) There is a “heavy locket that none of them could open” (pg 116 in OOTP and I promise I’ll stop footnoting now) in a dresser at 12 Grimmauld Place. Coincidence?

5) Unfortunately, Mundungus Fletcher swiped a bunch of the Black family silver and pawned it in THBP, so the locket could be anywhere. Hence, the seventh book.

6) Rowling is really into the classicist-friendly foreshadowing. Some of it’s a bit much, like Sirius becoming a dog and Remus Lupin becoming a wolf.

And Regulus is the name of a Roman general who was taken prisoner by the Carthaginians in the 2nd Punic War. He was given an opportunity to return to Rome to a peace treaty, which he did, then he told the Roman senate not to accept them (even though those terms made provision for his life + return to Rome) because the terms sucked for the OotP, I mean, for Rome as a whole. He went back to Carthage with the answer, instead of running away which he totally could have gotten away with,, and then Voldemort, I mean, the Carthaginians, killed him.

Your tuition dollars at work, Mom and Dad.

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Spoilers

Posted on July 27, 2005 by Meg

So there’s a bumper sticker just to give away the ending to the new Harry Potter. I’m thinking of making my own spoiler stickers… Something like “The ship sinks” or “It’s a sled.”

Or a whole line of English major/Classics major spoilers:

“Ahab and Moby die”

“Romeo and Juliet die”

“Richard The Third dies”

“Agamemnon dies”

“Achilles dies”

Well, you get the picture.

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Rachel’s Wedding

Posted on July 25, 2005 by Meg

Rachel‘s wedding was this weekend. I considered inventing a tale about all the crazy cool things I’m doing with my life now, because for some reason I thought I should impress people who were important to me ten years ago. I was going to get Stick in on my plans, and we’d drop hints about my nascent superpowers. Instead, we collaborated on not telling any of my most embarrassing stories.

The service was beautiful, and Rachel wins the award for Least Hideous Bridesmaid Dresses. They looked great on everyone, which is impossible but true.

There was a photo collage of Rachel and her new husband Zak, including a picture from the year I had a Halloween party. Rachel dressed up as Princess Leia and brought a cardboard standup of Han Solo as her date.

At the reception, I caught up with a lot of my high-school crowd. It was a little disturbing when I found out that they’ve getting those “real jobs” that I’ve heard so much about, and achieving that whole “financial independance” thing.

Afterwards, we all went up to Eagle Rock Reservation, a spot well-know for drunken teenage antics and parked, but inhabited, cars. (Actually, I never really went up there in high school. I was either on a date or playing computer games on a Friday night. come to think of it, I haven’t really outgrown that) I discovered that the overlook point has been transformed into a September 11th memorial. Because I have no sense of direction, I can’t tell exactly where the towers were, it just looks like there’s something broken about the skyline.

And of course, Stick’s amazing response to Dancing Queen should not be missed.

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Diplomacy

Posted on July 14, 2005 by Meg

My job at Lonely Hearts is a lot like everyone else’s office job, only I’m supposed to be gossiping on the phone all day.

Sometimes two members will go on the same date and have completely different experiences. (Sometimes this happens to Stick and me, too) When this happens, both parties call me and tell me in great detail how awesome/horrible the other person is. Sometimes the woman will say “Can you believe he made me drive?” and the man says “She liked me so much, she picked me up at my house!” Often, one person will say “We had a great conversation last night,” and the other will say “The self-centered jerk didn’t let me get a word in!”

Today a woman called me to tell me about a date she had last weekend. She met up with the man, and he spent the entire meal telling her about some creepy war game he plays. He must have been sharing a bit too much, because from her description of his description, he plays weekly Diplomacy, not Risk or 40K, which were my original guesses.

“Really, he’s a grown man!” she said. “Playing war games with kids! Honestly, would you date someone like that?”

I changed the subject.

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