So I am about to head back to the alteration store to kick up a fuss.  It has to be done today so I can pick it up tomorrow because that is my last opportunity before the wedding.  Did I mention they were supposed to call me when the dress was altered but never did, which is why I am discovering this mess at the final hour?

This is why being in a wedding party sucks.  Back ass, squashed tits, frantic last minute arm waving at hapless sales clerks.  I hereby thumb my nose at all weddings.

PS – If I weren’t doing this stupid shit, I could be at the aquarium with my nieces, which would be so fun!  I love the aquarium but find it hard to persuade other adults to go with me.  Enter a ten and a twelve year old and you magically have social sanction to go coo at fishies.  Except there is no cooing for me, dratted dress!

My machine is, as I say, a front loader.  So it has a lock feature that prevents you from opening the door when the machine is in operation, presumably to prevent heartbreaking gushes of soapy water all over the foyer floor.  This is fine except that the machine was clearly designed for idiots and so you cannot bypass the lock at any point in the cycle.  Started the machine and realized you left out a single sock?  Sorry, Operator, there may be only 30 millilitres of fluid in the drum but you can’t open the door!  Handy lock feature!

God forbid you realize part way through the cycle that something red is in with the whites because you can’t open the door, at all, at any point, once you have hit “start” and before the machine decides to relinquish the goods after the full completion of all cycles.  Handy lock feature!

Most frustrating: at the end of the wash, after the spin dry, my machine has what I call the fluff cycle.  It takes about five minutes and involves the drum rotating slowly clockwise… and then counterclockwise… and back and forth until the clothes within are all peeled off the sides of the drum, where spinning deposited them, and nicely piled at the bottom for the grand unveiling.  I fucking HATE this cycle. I have never been a fan of superfluous cosmetic additions to appliances and cannot stand having my time wasted by a washing machine that is no longer washing or spinning but rather merely fluffing.

Who the fuck came up with that idea, anyway?

I wouldn’t even mind if I could open the door during this entirely water free process – maybe I am in a hurry and want to get the clothes into the dryer.  Maybe I am just an autonomous adult and don’t want my decisions made by an appliance.  The possibilities are endless.  But no: not an option.  I am left hopping from foot to foot in anguished impatience as the machine leisurely rolls back and forth, tormenting me.

And the final insult: after the fluffing is over, there is about a thirty second wait between cessation of movement and the click of the lock releasing.  Why, I ask you?  Why is this necessary?

This is only a clever idea if you bring your bus pass (I didn’t) and if the elevators are working at the stations (they weren’t, both at Burrard and Granville).  So I had to drag all that liquor, plus their glass holding vessels, home from downtown.  By myself.  In the heat.

All I can say is, I really earned this beer I am drinking.

I love sci-fi and I love it gritty, so really, I was totally ready to love this movie.  And when I am ready to love  I pretty much just go ahead and love, so it’s saying something that I will never watch this movie again, despite my great tolerance for repetition and sci -fi that is gritty.

Here is why:

1. Every person in this movie is an asshole.  They are all loathsome, selfish pricks.  Actually, the wife wasn’t a prick, she was an oblivious, whiny cryer.  I revise my opinion: no human in this movie is even remotely likable and so at many points I found myself bored because really, who gives a shit what happens to all these people I can’t stand?

It is not plausible that everyone you run into is a one dimensional shit head, but that is the only type of person represented in this movie (plus one whiny cryer).  I can get behind the occasional stereotyped bad guy or overly pure hero, but if you can’t identify with or understand at least one person, you won’t care about the movie.

3. The aliens are badly written.  Sometimes they are incapable of deception or even the most basic of social nuances (even though they can communicate easily with English speakers), yet at other times they can haggle with the gangsters over resources, use human weapons to commit crimes, and the like.  Even the protagonist alien, who is actually sort of likable, is not consistently portrayed.  He has a Huge Important Crucial Vital secret in his shack and yet defies and provokes the authorities into (predictably) raiding his shack – but he also tells his kid to hide, knows to keep his activities secret, and has an extended sneaking scene early in the movie.  And this alien is clearly put to the viewer as the sympathetic character, who is very human-like in his caring for others and so on.  So which is it – is he socially sophisticated and clever, or is he oblivious and naive?  The writers want it both ways and it doesn’t work.

4. This thing watches like a fourteen year old boy’s fantasy about what adults are like.  The doctors are remorseless torturers… the head army guy is a vicious, unstoppable bully… the head of the Nigerians is a power hungry tyrant.  This isn’t what adults are like, this is a twisted fantasy of unlimited power attached to a sci-fi storyline.  Which probably explains…

5. The human protagonist was psychologically implausible.  The beginning of the movie establishes him as a cruel social climber, and throughout most of the rest of the movie we see him over and over making deeply, catastrophically selfish choices without the slightest consideration for anyone else.  For example he’s known all along that District 10 is a concentration camp that will be even worse than District 9.*  Yet this twat is also supposedly in a loving and gentle marriage… because uncaring, self absorbed social climbers always end up in great relationships!  Also, though transformation and near vivisection don’t bring him any sympathy with the aliens, he somehow morphs into a martyr at the end.  Um, really?

So, the good parts were the effects and the filming, which I thought were excellent.  The storyline was also really cool but the execution was just… ugh.  This is mainly a movie about a selfish and immature man, when it could have been a movie about racism (er, speciesism) and what happens when people (and aliens) are placed in a frightening, uncertain environment.  To the extent that this movie was about those better things, it was great.  To the extent that it focussed on perfectly horrid individuals, it stank.  Alas, the horrids got most of the screen time.

*This also seriously undermines his credibility in the scene where Dad Alien discovers the medical experiments but the human protagonist insists with shock that he had no idea the Big Bad Corporation was doing such nasty things.  Experiments are beyond the pale but concentration camps are okay?  Maybe he didn’t know about the experiments – he’s still a concentration camp-supporting motherfucker.

And, based on the proportion of bras for sale which are padded, I think it is safe to say that something like 90% of the women out there are not so well endowed as they appear.

And finally, if you are of an entrepreneurial spirit, you could probably make a killing selling bras that are comfortable, supportive, pretty, but not padded (or lacy, which makes your shirt lumpy).  It seems this particular combination does not exist in real life.

Friends who live in quiet neighbourhoods: Can I come live with you?

Grrrr!

I translate it like this: Whatever you’re good at, we’ll call that intelligence.

And I call bullshit.  It reeks of po-mo apologism from people with smarts who feel guilty about having something great.  Here is what I think: there is nothing better than being smart.  I’d rather be brilliant than a great dancer, or a great farmer, or a great fireman, or anything else at all.  To name just one reason, it ’s great because it allows you to become good at basically anything else.  It’s the best thing to be and I think people know it.  Consider the very term, multiple intelligences.  Intelligence is right in there.  We don’t refer to the multiple dances, including the dance of the brain.

I’m not saying intelligence is the be all end all.  There are smart assholes and wonderful, necessary people who are not smart at all.  We can agree on this.  But in general, most of us think it is better to have intelligence than any other ability.  If it was so great to be a dancer, we wouldn’t feel the need to stroke dancers’ egos by creating something called kinetic intelligence.  We’d just say “He’s a wicked dancer!” and that would be enough.  But it isn’t.

But wait… upon closer inspection, the raves are all about the community experience at TAM – meeting people, feeling understood, making friends, getting recharged.  No one is raving about the sessions, or at least not very often and usually again in terms of community.

I ask you, would you pay close to $500 for a weekend social?  Oh wait – you wouldn’t have to, you could just show up and hang out with people for free so long as you’d paid your hotel and travel costs.

Which is what I’m almost certain I’ll do next year.  For my half a grand, I expect good session content.  And that’s just what I didn’t get.

Edit: In case that’s not clear, it isn’t my intention to defraud the JREF.  I wouldn’t attend sessions if I didn’t pay – I might just hang out in the hotel and socialize with actual attendees.

This is what I learned in school: if you want A’s then you have to work for them.  And not just once, but every time, so you improve your skills over time.  Trying hard is not in and of itself a guarantee of an A – maybe right now your best work just isn’t that great.

You can almost certainly get better, but you’re going to have to work at it.  Which leads me to…

I don’t understand people who slack at school.  What the hell are you doing there if you’re just going to skip the reading and skip the classes and bang out shitty papers the day they’re due?  Fuck man, go get a job and at least stop sliding into debt with nothing to show for it.  So many people seem to just plain not get the point of school: to learn things.  You’re  not there to see how little you can get away with and not be flunked out.  This isn’t an exercise in defiance.  If you want to learn things, which is the point of school, you have to actually carry out the activities of learning.  Not coincidentally, learning and improving your school skills result in better grades.

I have seen a lot of entitled attitude in people who are lazy students.  Surprise – your natural intelligence isn’t good enough any more.  University is an ocean of intelligent people and a C represents an average achievement.  It’s time to let go of the idea that you deserve an A the first time you try hard.

This is the secret of people who get fantastic grades: they work hard.  I’m in that club and I know others who are in it too.  It looks like we’re super bright when we always have the answer and smash tests out of the park, but guess what?  That all came at a price.  We didn’t pull that answer out of our asses.  We didn’t suddenly learn how to write a devastating paper the first time we put pen to paper.  Sustained hard work needs to be paired with accurate self reflection and insight, and incorporating feedback; it takes practice to make your hard work work hard for you.  And this is what great students do.  We don’t throw up our hands and blame anyone but ourselves when we get bad feedback – we fucking learn from that shit and do better next time.

And, almost anyone can do it.  You just have to drop the entitled attitude and dig in to the work.  There is no magic bullet, no brilliant talent.  Just hours and hours of work, every day.  For every hour I spent in class, I probably put in between three and four hours of work outside of class.  Maybe more.  Reading, researching, writing, getting help, finding extra sources, all of that.  Working and practicing.  I graduated from my master’s with a perfect 4.0 GPA and on more than one course grade sheet I got the feedback that if my school had offered A+’s, I would have gotten one.

So when someone complains that the one time they made an effort, it didn’t pay off so therefore the vague criteria or the markers or fucking space aliens are to blame… well, I just want to destroy stuff.