littlestar

for my movie marathon i had on friday....
- brasilia, lavendar, mint, chai, honey nugget chocolates....yummm
- riesling, guwertstraminer, menage a trois blanc and menage a trois red
- barbarella, city of lost children, clue, a mighty wind - all pretty crack-smoking, to watch a big "huh??" over your head, especially when you have down-to-earth, sensual chocolate and a wine bottle and a third to yourself

yesterday...
art: gates of paradise, a second cast of the second set of doors you'll find as the eastern set of doors for the baptistery of the Florentine Cathedral (aka. Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore), available and easily accessible (though parking royally sucked) in SF
movie: Dopamine, the third movie in the Sundance Movie Festival, which apparently is playing for two more weeks at 10 different locations, all Loews Theaters, in places like LA, New York, SF, Seattle, etc etc.... it's a pretty cool movie, dealing with the ideas of love as a spontaneous magical thing vs. love as a biochemical thing driven by hormones and pheromones. it was touching and we got to talk to the director/writer after, which was cool. note bien: suspend your scientific belief at the door.
booze (and food): gnocchis~!! gnocchi al funghi with four cheese sauce again... and gnocchi ricotta and spinach with pesto. both really really good. polished off with tiramisu. the booze? apple-tini and italian flag. mike had to drive home. anyone know how long it takes to metabolize alcohol? since those two teeny drinks shouldn't have hit me as hard as they did? parakkum thinks it may also have been because i was dehydrated. mike thinks it's because we hadn't eaten in a while. i think it's being dehydrated, empty stomach and the bottle and third of wine i had the night before with lack of sleep. what do you think?

so there were a lot of stupid people in SF. after all, there are a lot of stupid people everywhere and SF has a lot of people. you encounter a lot of them when you're driving. i have to note on the crazy/insane/irresponsible pedestrians though. the ones that are jaywalking with their family (little children, old grandma) trailing after them. jaywalking with stroller. jaywalking with child when not all cars are visibly stopped. etc etc.

but there was a particularly rude/stupid person at the borders i went to in union square. i was telling mike how the lurlene mcdaniels' books are "slit my throat" books, that they horribly romanticize terminal diseases and health conditions, develop relationships that really aren't appropriate for the social context in which the people are involved, how they had my friends writing wills at the healthy age of 12. and this chick (borders salesperson stacking away books next to us) just butts in with "well, a lot of these books help teens deal with their problems.

1) she butted into my conversation uninvited, but i thought the statement was a fair one. some books do help with dealing with your issues.

so i listed a few that i thought did that, cynthia voight, judy blume, etc... and commented that the lurlene mcdaniels books just oversimplified, overdramatized, and romanticized horrible situations and wouldn't really be a help at all. things like cystic fibrosis, leukemia, organ transplants, etc etc.

she starts talking about how she knew a kid that died of leukemia when she was 9 and she was sad about this. and that with a cop father and a english teacher/librarian/major she experienced losing people she knew every month and her mom would censor what she read and that she grew up at a time where kids thought it was cool to be in gangs.

2) i'm not that much younger than you, i do actually remember when kids thought being in gangs were cool. actually, anyone who saw any amount of tv at the time would know that. not to mention that if your mom was screening your books, she would screen out the lurlene mcdaniels books as being trash, which i readily recognized as an ELEVEN year-old. and given the fact that most people don't read, i really doubt that these books would help people.

so i mentioned that well... it's fine that these books can help people and i recognize that they can do that, but that i'm not going to recognize that all books are well-written since a lot of books aren't.

she says that working in a bookstore for 2 years has taught her that half the books are crap.

3) so why are you bitching at me about these books helping kids when they obviously don't read, the way that she doesn't, and she already thinks that half of the books are crap anyway? what's up with these people that think it's ok to talk about things they know jack-shit about?

mike says that i was obviously antagonized by this rude girl that interrupted our conversation and started to be all stupidly argumentative about things.... but apparently she didn't notice.

in hindsight, i should've just said "i didn't invite you into this conversation, can you not talkt o me." and that would've made me feel like i'm being rude, but i really ought to just cultivate rudeness in myself and tell people off when they deserve it.

end story.