The neighbor kids come over, insisting that we watch a movie with them. We dig around, knowing that they have all but exhausted the stack of old James Bond movies from my personal collection, or at least they have fast-forwarded to the good parts: the empty space suits that explode for no reason in deep space laser fights, underwater car chases and harpoon battles, boat stunts, alligators fed by a man with a fake hook over his real arm, you know, the awesome basics of action movies since the beginning of time.
But lo! What have we here? The Indiana Jones Trilogy! A great gift, and certainly something to keep a couple of action deprived kids content for an hour and a half.
Ten minutes into "Raiders of the Lost Ark," one of them looks at me and asks, "Just how old is this movie?"
"Why? Does it seem dated?"
I look at the box and nearly choke on my popcorn. 1981. Holy crap. This movie, such a basic tenant of my childhood, is now 25 years old.
Amid clamorings that we are trying to bore them out of our house, Chris lets the room hear his thought; that all must sit still and be quiet or leave the area.
Things are quiet again for a while, and the dreaded storyline develops.
"Are there going to be any more snakes?"
"This isn't like the video game at all."
When, finally, the infamous face-melting scene is imminent, Chris gets everyone to settle down and watch by telling us that it scared the crap out of him when he was their age. I second that, and wait to be disgusted.
It lasts all of 9 seconds, and when it is over, one of the kids says: "That was so fakey."
I have officially become an unhip old person, clinging to the scraps of my quickly rotting youth, unable to impress even the children from next door who like my cookies, the fact that I have purple hair nonwithstanding.
Too much humanity, not enough punching. I need to get on board, is the consensus.
After the kids left for more exciting activities, Chris and I talked about other movies that scared us silly when we were 10. Embarrassingly, Superman 3 would make my list, although I can't remember why, only that when the bad guy gets it in the end, he gets it in such a dramatic way that it gave me nightmares. Also, that movie with Tom Sellack called "Runaway" where robotic spiders would follow you around and inject you with a paralyzing agent and guns shot bullets that could follow you around corners and would explode on impact. I must have entered every dark room like a veteran undercover cop for 3 months after that, not absorbing the absurdity of the notion that futuristic killer spider robots would want to kill a 10 year old girl in a trailer in rural Minnesota.
It was an irrational fear.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Monday, May 01, 2006
We are waiting for bacon to be delivered to our table. I am sipping a too-spicy Virgin Mary that I hope will clear out my pollen-irritated sinus cavity.
Chris is talking about something important, his music perhaps, it escapes me now, but I couldn't concentrate on anything he was saying because he had something stuck to his lower eyelash. I stared at it, thinking it must fall off the next time he blinks. But it didn't. It hung there, suspended above the rim of his glasses, bobbing with the weight of itself as he spoke.
Finally I say something.
"Hey, um, you've got a thing-" I make a swiping gesture at my own face to mirror the problem.
"What? Oh." He takes off his glasses, sets them on the table, where I can't help but think bacon will nest briefly in a few minutes, before being devoured by the two of us.
He rubs at his eye, and puts his glasses back on.
"Better?" he asks, then goes right back into whatever he was saying.
I still can't focus on it though, because now the offending particle has moved up to his top eyelash, where it looks to me like it will drop fiendishly into his eye at any moment, blinding him for life.
"So I just really think that my printing is going to take priority over music for a while, at least until-"
"I'm sorry, I have to tell you: the thing is still really close to your eye."
"Agh! Will you stop? Why can't we just have a conversation without you picking stuff off of me?"
I admit; I am highly distracted by foreign things attached to the faces of those I'm conversing with. I can't think of anything else until the thing/s are removed. It's a major flaw, as there's always something stuck to someone.
A friend just informed me the other night that the night her boyfriend came back to town after being away for a year, that the first thing she did was reach over, as he was speaking, and pick something out of his teeth. He didn't even miss a beat, just kept talking. How do we get to that point?
Chris is talking about something important, his music perhaps, it escapes me now, but I couldn't concentrate on anything he was saying because he had something stuck to his lower eyelash. I stared at it, thinking it must fall off the next time he blinks. But it didn't. It hung there, suspended above the rim of his glasses, bobbing with the weight of itself as he spoke.
Finally I say something.
"Hey, um, you've got a thing-" I make a swiping gesture at my own face to mirror the problem.
"What? Oh." He takes off his glasses, sets them on the table, where I can't help but think bacon will nest briefly in a few minutes, before being devoured by the two of us.
He rubs at his eye, and puts his glasses back on.
"Better?" he asks, then goes right back into whatever he was saying.
I still can't focus on it though, because now the offending particle has moved up to his top eyelash, where it looks to me like it will drop fiendishly into his eye at any moment, blinding him for life.
"So I just really think that my printing is going to take priority over music for a while, at least until-"
"I'm sorry, I have to tell you: the thing is still really close to your eye."
"Agh! Will you stop? Why can't we just have a conversation without you picking stuff off of me?"
I admit; I am highly distracted by foreign things attached to the faces of those I'm conversing with. I can't think of anything else until the thing/s are removed. It's a major flaw, as there's always something stuck to someone.
A friend just informed me the other night that the night her boyfriend came back to town after being away for a year, that the first thing she did was reach over, as he was speaking, and pick something out of his teeth. He didn't even miss a beat, just kept talking. How do we get to that point?
We are waiting for bacon to be delivered to our table. I am sipping a too-spicy Virgin Mary that I hope will clear out my pollen-irritated sinus cavity.
Chris is talking about something important, his music perhaps, it escapes me now, but I couldn't concentrate on anything he was saying because he had something stuck to his lower eyelash. I stared at it, thinking it must fall off the next time he blinks. But it didn't. It hung there, suspended above the rim of his glasses, bobbing with the weight of itself as he spoke.
Finally I say something.
"Hey, um, you've got a thing-" I make a swiping gesture at my own face to mirror the problem.
"What? Oh." He takes off his glasses, sets them on the table, where I can't help but think bacon will nest briefly in a few minutes, before being devoured by the two of us.
He rubs at his eye, and puts his glasses back on.
"Better?" he asks, then goes right back into whatever he was saying.
I still can't focus on it though, because now the offending particle has moved up to his top eyelash, where it looks to me like it will drop fiendishly into his eye at any moment, blinding him for life.
"So I just really think that my printing is going to take priority over music for a while, at least until-"
"I'm sorry, I have to tell you: the thing is still really close to your eye."
"Agh! Will you stop? Why can't we just have a conversation without you picking stuff off of me?"
I admit; I am highly distracted by foreign things attached to the faces of those I'm conversing with. I can't think of anything else until the thing/s are removed. It's a major flaw, as there's always something stuck to someone.
A friend just informed me the other night that the night her boyfriend came back to town after being away for a year, that the first thing she did was reach over, as he was speaking, and pick something out of his teeth. He didn't even miss a beat, just kept talking. How do we get to that point?
Chris is talking about something important, his music perhaps, it escapes me now, but I couldn't concentrate on anything he was saying because he had something stuck to his lower eyelash. I stared at it, thinking it must fall off the next time he blinks. But it didn't. It hung there, suspended above the rim of his glasses, bobbing with the weight of itself as he spoke.
Finally I say something.
"Hey, um, you've got a thing-" I make a swiping gesture at my own face to mirror the problem.
"What? Oh." He takes off his glasses, sets them on the table, where I can't help but think bacon will nest briefly in a few minutes, before being devoured by the two of us.
He rubs at his eye, and puts his glasses back on.
"Better?" he asks, then goes right back into whatever he was saying.
I still can't focus on it though, because now the offending particle has moved up to his top eyelash, where it looks to me like it will drop fiendishly into his eye at any moment, blinding him for life.
"So I just really think that my printing is going to take priority over music for a while, at least until-"
"I'm sorry, I have to tell you: the thing is still really close to your eye."
"Agh! Will you stop? Why can't we just have a conversation without you picking stuff off of me?"
I admit; I am highly distracted by foreign things attached to the faces of those I'm conversing with. I can't think of anything else until the thing/s are removed. It's a major flaw, as there's always something stuck to someone.
A friend just informed me the other night that the night her boyfriend came back to town after being away for a year, that the first thing she did was reach over, as he was speaking, and pick something out of his teeth. He didn't even miss a beat, just kept talking. How do we get to that point?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
