Turn and Face the Strange

Hi! So this blog died. I am reviving it - I used to be a certified lifeguard/wizard, so I have the powers needed to do this.

This is my last week of winter break, and I am currently sitting in a Panera Bread with my mom, while she reads my dad's book and ignores me. There's a fire burning in the elegant hearth to the right of my table...and I just realized that the wood is fake (which is good, because I've developed a new allergy to wood). There is a lovely group of women sitting at the table next to mine, who have been here the entire time I have with notebooks, drawings, and spreadsheets spread out all over. From their conversation, I've garnered that they're either planning a library area, park, or quilt. I finished my sandwich, and the wifi in here sucks so I can't go on tumblr.

Seems like a good time to write.

This break has been a weird one. The majority of it was spent processing last semester, and then sorting through my feelings about Marlboro. By the end of December, I had assessed how Marlboro had affected me as a person, and I was ready to start deciding what changes had been good ones, and what I wanted to do differently next semester.

This is when I chopped off all my hair.

It seems to me there are two of me - Marlboro Molly and Marblehead/Boston Molly. I know this is obviously something that happens when you go away to college. But the problem is...I like Marblehead/Boston Molly a whole lot more. There's nothing wrong with Marlboro me. She's great too. But she doesn't run every day and her hair was all long and she was floating around not really knowing who she was or what she was doing. Typical first semester problems, I think.

Anyway. I cut my hair off because I want to mesh these two people together. I want to bring Marblehead  Molly back with me to school. I've missed her. So I guess this is just going to mean more thinking about myself. As if I don't already do that enough already...

Happy 2012! And welcome back, Booth Blog. 

Tory - A Haiku

Earlier my nose

Bled for ten whole minutes straight

Ew it was awful

Molly - More Quotes From Classes (100% more awesome and/or ridiculous!)

Hey guys! So we've all been neglecting the blog due to busy lives (what?? lives are more important than blogging?!) but I'd like to get it rolling again.

Hope everything is going great for you guys - Halloween preparations, birthday celebrations (Happy 25th Gus!), animal responsibilities and whatnot. My life is homework-laden but pretty darn awesome right now.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way!

Another round of Quotes from Classes, as I am doing homework right now and really only have time to do this kind of a post. But I've been meaning to do it again for a while, as the awesome quotes have been piling up recently...


"I got to page 10 and I threw up...I couldn't do it, not even for money."  (professor, on attempting to write trashy romance novels.)

"Rhett Butler...oh I was in love with him! Oh well, you're only 15 once."

"Do you know anybody who kisses doorknobs? When I was younger there was a rumor kissing doorknobs was the best way to practice."

"Comma abuse - ahhh, poor little things. Think about writing an essay from the point of view of a comma - oh the misuse! This is what happens when you teach grammar for too long."

"That's wrong, but it's wonderful. Leave it be."

"Are you some kind of nut, or are you a brit?"

"Just astonishing vulgarity!"

"The trouble with sentences like this is that you haven't said anything. But that's OK in this class."

"You never know who you're going to have sex with in space!"

"This kind of crazy person that peddles things from the inside of a winnebago."
"Don't we all have one of those inside us?"

(my professor, disdainfully)"Quentin Tarantino is a movie director. He isn't writing fiction."

"Each ass cheek is now clinging to the ass."

"I remember I had a halloween costume that said "inflammable" on the tag. My parents thought it was fireproof, so I set it on fire. It burned."

(dreamily) "Maybe I'm just the boy who laughs."

"We all have basic needs, like food and sex....and water..."

"In some cultures, a poet will go to war and say a poem and the other side will stop fighting and be all 'whoa, that's a good poem."

"And aren't we all in danger of making choices that result in us eating our children?"

"If I could talk about whales..."

Adam: "I wanted to talk about it beforehand, cause I was afraid William would think it was frivolous and we wouldn't get to talk about it."
William (just walking in): "Adam, everything you say is frivolous and I don't want to talk about it."

"But people laugh at hiccups...do they laugh at lovers?"

"This is why your dad needs a young man."

"You one-eyed many-armed ugly thing, I'm going to put you deep down in the earth cause I hate you!"

"Maybe it's like, they're filling holes in each other...oh wait..."

"In your academic opinion, there's a butt on it."

"If I was lying in a field with Socrates and I pointed to a cloud and said 'that cloud looks like a snail' I feel like Socrates would say 'No, that cloud totally sucks.'"

"If you add a 't' to 'manic' it's like RO-mantic."

"Socrates could have any boy he wants."

"He's possessed by extra-terrestrial beings! Oh wait...they're not aliens."

"It reminds me of people who get swept up in the 'save the whales' campaigns..."

"I have all this wisdom, you should give me favors!"
"What a great pick-up line!"

"So, that was a bunch of things I think about."

"Revolution...happens...very...quietly."

"Grouping off makes me feel like we're in pre-school."
professor: "You ARE in preschool."

professor (on courage): "Try that harder rock climb, or try that fancier dance move."



Stay tuned for November's quotes!

Tory - There vs. Their

I attempted to teach Jenny the difference between there and their over skype.

I laughed quite hard at the last bit, and since I am really tired, figured this would be a funny substitute for something thought provoking. Booyah.

Jenny = Nellie B.

Sourkiwis = Guess Who

sourkiwis: Their, not There

sourkiwis: There is like, look over there a dog!

sourkiwis: Their is like, their baby puppy is so cute.

Nellie B.: what?

sourkiwis: When you say THERE you mean a place

Nellie B.: Oh.

sourkiwis: When you say THEIR, it means something someone owns

sourkiwis: So THEIR blog

sourkiwis: THEIR house

sourkiwis: THEIR kid

sourkiwis: THERE is a frog

sourkiwis: THERE is the world

Nellie B.: By the way a sad thing happened to there friend.

Nellie B.: OOPS

Nellie B.: Their.

Nellie - In Which I Have Strong Feelings About Gay Cartoon Characters

So! There's been this sorta scandal/craze all over the interwebs lately, and it has to do with the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time.

What is this crack?

It's an incredibly random, slightly troll-esque show that is supposedly aimed at kids- this is Cartoon Network we're talking about, after all- but ended up having a much larger teen-and-adult fanbase than anticipated. It's deliciously off and funny in an incredibly awkward way.

Moving onward, one of the characters and my personal favorite is Marceline the Vampire Queen.

She is just your typical angsty slightly antisocial teenage vampire. And she's pretty good at writing emotional ballads.



Aaaaand moving on, there's also this other character, Princess Bubblegum. She's not my favorite but she's hilarious in her own right.

Now, if you're paying any attention at all you'll have noticed that both of these supporting characters are girls. The main characters are actually Finn and Jake, but they're not really important to this blog post, aside from the point out that the human character Finn is implied to have a rather large crush on Princess Bubblegum (Who, in case you're wondering, is actually part human, part gum. For real).

To actually show you the point to all of this, I'm going to have to add more videos. But it's worth it, I promise.

Recently, a new episode of Adventure Time aired, entitled "What Was Missing" and featuring another one of Marceline's ballads. Only... this one is kinda, well... you'll see.



If you don't want to watch the entire 11-minute video, you're a lazy ass and too bad for you. No, not really. The important bits are Marceline's song to Bubblegum at 3:00 and a bit at the end between the two of them in which Bubblegum confesses that she wears a shirt of Marcelline's as pajamas. Amid blushing.

Look, if you watched those two clips and come to the same conclusion I did, which was that the two girls' relationship is both Filled With Tension and also Certainly Not Platonic, you would not be alone. The fanbase pretty much flipped over this episode; "Bubbline" shippers are all over everywhere these days. Heck, even one of the creators and artists on Adventure Time draws "fan art" of the two in various romantic poses.

What fueled this fan outburst? Well, other than the blatant lesbian crushing going on in Fig. #1... there's this.



It's an official recap of the episode, and folks, it ain't exactly subtle about the romantic interest between the two very female characters. In fact, it suggests that such a pairing would be "adorbz"- a first, I'm sure, for any reference to lesbian relationships in a kid's show.

So, naturally, the guy in charge of said video was fired, all counts of possible "gayness" in the show have been written off as fans reading too much into it, and the video itself has been taken down- only to be put up again by all the frenzied youtubers who don't want it to disappear because it's inconveniant for Cartoon Network.

In summary, when are gay characters going to be allowed in kid's shows? In this same episode, Jake refers to Finn's "special time with a wad of Princess Bubblegum's hair". Uhm, excuse me? This essentially ruins the "oh-our-show-is-for-kids-no-mature-themes-or-subtext" in one fell swoop.

And also? Gay people doesn't equal mature themes. Bottom line. There are plenty of references to heterosexuality in both Adventure Time and in almost every little kid's show on the planet- would be nice to see a network for once not being a bunch of total wusses and actually sticking with the decisions they obviously made but hoped, what, that nobody would notice? *sigh* I guess that's too much to ask, so have some fan art.


Bubblegum and Marceline by ~vernavulpes on deviantART

Maybe next time.

Molly - Homeward Bound?

Hey guys!

Time is flying by. Every time I turn around I'm ripping off another day of my 30 Rock quote calendar, and sometimes I have to rip off two or three days of quotes at a time.

I've been looking forward to my Hendricks Days break, so the time passing quickly was, for a while, a delightful thing. HOWEVER!

Lately when I've been texting mom about the logistics of my visit, I keep accidentally referring to Marlboro as "home." As in "Great! When do you think you can bring me home, Tuesday night or Wednesday morning?"

When I realized I was doing this, I was all:

O_______o

How can I have two places I identify as "home"? Which is home and which is the imitation? Why does Plato now seamlessly work it's way into how I think about things? *shakes head vigorously in an attempt to rid of RLP references*

But then I stopped freaking out about it. I think it's OK that Marlboro is home now too - just like this summer when Nellie pointed out that Tower Co. is a legitimate second family. The idea that there's room for more than one family or home is a wonderful thing to me. I know that going to Marblehead is going to be great, but I also know I'll actually miss Marlboro and my Marlboro family while I'm away. I guess 2 months is a long time.

Anyway, regardless of my home identity shift, I'll be so happy to see Booths and Boothdom! I've been listening to The Edge of Glory in preparation for singing it with Jenny.

Gus, I enjoy your book-y posts.

Tory, I hope bunny farm is safe from the monster kitty.

Nellie, call me back gosh darn it. Stupidface.

Gus - Once upon a time...zzzzzzzz

Did you ever have a book that you were really looking forward to reading, that you just can't get into for whatever reason? Maybe it's the author's writing style, maybe it's the setting, maybe it's the fact that you keep forgetting to read the book because you got another at the same time. Maybe it's that you tend to start reading too late and keep drooling on the pages. Etc. etc. and so on.

Having the experience with one of David Drake's books. Pretty sure it's a combination of the "reading too late" and coming down off Craig DiLouie's "The Infection," which is one of my favorite zombie apocalypse stories that I've read. I also have no idea what the hell is going on in the scene I just read. That's a bit of an issue too; the changes between scenery feel a bit jarring sometimes, and other times I don't notice that we have a different cast in the room now. And the room is now in space.

But I'm going to keep reading because the book has a very interesting moral ambiguity to it - you want to root for the main characters because they seem likable and, after all, they're the ones you're viewing this world through. At the same time, it's quite apparent that the employers of the mercenary company you're following--this is military science fiction--are less than moral guys. It paints the whole story line, at least in the beginning, in very nice shades of gray. Characters and stories are much more interesting when they're three dimensional, and it always really appeals to me when I read a book that is a good story where there isn't a black-and-white approach to the plot.

*

Watch Land of the Dead. It was great, and I'm normally a very skeptical fan of Romero's later works. Hopper is excellent in it, and it's got a great "this is really screwed up" post-apoc vibe.