Saw some gooses

 Or maybe it's geese, I don't know, don't make me look it up. They're all starting to show up again in Boston, leaving poop all over any pedestrian path even remotely close to a body of water. My heart goes out to anyone trying to have a picnic on the esplanade, it will be entirely goose poop by mid-April.

  Last night a friend and I watched Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us (dir Justin Baldoni). It was unbelievably bad. I don't really have a lot to say about it other than it was bad and Blake Lively had some all time terrible outfits. I drank a lot of wine and felt very hungover in the morning so I'd say it was an ideal Saturday night. 

 Then this morning I had to drag whatever remained of my body and soul out onto my bike for a long ride. It was miserably cold and rainy the whole ride, with the rain occasionally intensifying from a heavy mist to a full downpour at random intervals. I literally cannot wait for the summer, or just a season that isn't rainy. I did to see those Canada Gooses though, that made it all worth it. Have a nice rest of the weekend :)

The Big 4

 I finished Agatha Christie's The Big 4. It was not good. I was devastated. Hercule Poirot stories are usually cozy little mysteries (can you describe murder as cozy?) in a remote village with a bunch of cooky characters, but this book was a globe trotting adventure where Poirot faced off against an organization of criminals around the world. The titular crime syndicate, The Big 4, features a person from America, China, France, and England. Yes nearly every section even remotely touching on China has aged poorly. 

 Agatha Christie's books usually have a large number of characters with complex motivations or ideas that make it difficult to track who's doing what or why. The resulting story then has a lot of fun texture, with all these clashing personalities and motivations building a nice mysterious atmosphere. In this book the large number of characters ends up feeling both confusing and limiting. Since the book is so short it can't dwell on a setting for a long period of time, meaning there aren't a lot of red-herring characters to create mystery around who might be a member of the Big 4. For instance there are only 2 named French characters in the entire book. It was not difficult to guess the French member of the Big 4. One of the members does not even appear in the book, they just get passing mentions about how evil they are.

 The structure of the book is also weirdly bad? It's divided into several chapters where there's a short mystery that on it's own seems like it has nothing to do with the ongoing Big 4 plot, but some mentions are sprinkled in to make it all fit somehow. It all made me wish I was reading a mystery with a more focused plot. I had no real Idea what the Big 4's plan even was beyond some nebulous idea of 'world domination'. At some point a mountain exploded, I do not know why.

 Can I say also that "The Big 4" is a stupid name for a crime syndicate? It makes me think of digestive supplements for some reason.

 If you want a non-Poirot mystery to read, the Seven Dials is great! It's in the public domain so an ebook is easy to find. I found out that it's actually a mini series on Netflix too! 

 Ok, another long day of turning this blog into a goodreads account. I hope you had a nice April Fools, I got stuck in the rain on my walk home from the train and my landlord gave us two days to decide if we wanted to renew our lease. I'm not sure if those count as April Fools pranks or not. 

 That's it for me, I've been loving the Tomodatchi Life demo, I can't wait for the full game! 

another beautiful day in the bike lanes

 The worst time to ride a bike is right after the rain stops. When it's raining you still get all the mud and crap flung up at you but the rain washes it right off. If it isn't raining? It all sticks to you like it did to me today. 

Luckily road crap has amazing exfoliating properties. My skin is about to look amazing 💁‍♀️. 

I've been trying to sketch a little bit more, I love a portrait so I focus on those a lot. I will eventually learn about the rest of the body, but that's really difficult, so later. The cheap blue bic pens are some of my favorite pens to just scribble something down with. They flow so well and have an amazing range of values for such a cheap roller ball pen. 

I've found I enjoy drawing faces with more unconventional features, wide noses, droopy chins, big eyes, etc. It can be boring to draw people who are perfectly proportioned all the time. 

It forces you to think a lot more about the placement of the facial features, especially if they're not in a location you're used to. 

 

 

 

 

shaved my legs im ready for anything

 I keep getting frozen up on making a new blog entry thinking about if something is "worth posting" as if this isn't literally my blog. I can post whatever I want and it would be worth it because I am the target audience.

how i feel after shaving my legs

 I finished this book Boy Parts by Eliza Clark on a friend's recommendation. I thought it was pretty good. I kept seeing comparisons between it and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation online but the two books have little in common. The main character of Boy Parts, Irina, is straight up a psychopath having a self-destructive episode driven by some kind of dissociative disorder and/or psychotic break with reality. 

 Where Rest and Relaxation felt like it had a lot to say about isolation, grief, depression, and offered an incredible portrait of that pre-9/11 consciousness, Boy Parts felt a little one note. It hinged a lot of it's shock value around the fact that a woman was exploiting men. There's a scene in a gallery where a male artist is upset that Irina has a larger display than his. The male artist has largely the same work thematically as Irina, but has opted for photos exploiting women, thus rendering his work more mundane in the public eye.

 In the end, Boy Parts felt like spectacle, where you gasp and point at what the insane woman is doing in the book. Which isn't necessarily bad, but going in expecting something akin to My Year of Rest and Relaxation did this book no favors. Irina does do some truly fucked up stuff, maybe I'm telling on myself, but none of it disturbed me the way I felt it was meant to. However at no point did I dislike reading the book, so I would settle on pretty good. Read it if you can find it at the library. 

 Beyond Boy Parts, I have been spinning up some spring cleaning. The weather is getting warmer and I feel weighed down by possessions. I'll spread it out between 4-5 weeks just because sorting through everything is exhausting, but donating/selling unused stuff is such a great feeling. I feel lighter, freer. 

 I started reading The Big Four by Agatha Christie on the train, and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger at home. I adore Agatha Christie novels but I haven't read Catcher in the Rye since middle school(?) so we will see how I enjoy that. I am listening to Squish by Gretel (her new album comes out next friday!!!!!). Here's a picture of my cat to close it out. 

 

 

The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions Marathon

 Recently, a local theater held a true marathon watch party for the Lord of the Rings. Three movies, 656 minutes of Middle Earth all in (mostly) one day. A friend and I bought tickets in January of this year. As the day crept closer I began to have some reservations about sitting down for 11 hours of my day, but I was mostly excited. I own the extended editions on dvd but I have never seen them in a theater before. The opportunity to not just see them in a real theater, but to see them with a crowd of enthusiastic fans seemed exciting!

 My day began at 5am when I rolled out of bed for a bike ride. Given how long we were planning to be sitting down I felt like getting a reasonable amount of exercise and stretching into my day would be important to not feeling like garbage when the marathon wrapped up at it's planned time of 12:30am the next day. It was a dismal March morning, cold and overcast. The thick cloud cover stretched the night long into the morning. The sun was only just peeking through the clouds when I returned home from my bike ride.

 I met my friend for a quick breakfast and we went over to the theater together before the scheduled start time. The day had gone from a dismal March morning to a dismal March afternoon. A cold rain that would last the day (and turn into snow the next morning) had just begun as we got to the theater. It could not have been more perfect of a day to be cooped up in a movie theater. 

 The preshow energy was fun! Gaggles of people in various states of costume lingered around the theater talking about plans for the breaks between movies, trivia, or their favorite scenes from the movies. I saw someone wearing an Aragorn varsity jacket that I adored. My friend and I found seats near the middle of the room and settled in for the first movie, fresh and eager to see the full extended editions on the silver screen. 

The Fellowship of the Ring

 Transparently this is my favorite of the three movies. I like that it has a much slower, more methodical focus on the characters and motivations that will come to define the next two movies. I also love Peter Jackson's use of the camera. He's never afraid to pick that thing up and spin it around. There's a specific shot near the end where the camera flies through the woods past legions of Orcs to see Sean Bean's manic fighting that blows my mind every time. 

 That isn't to say everything in this movie works for me, I feel like, especially in the extended version, the time the Fellowship spends with the Wood Elves slows the pace of the movie too much. I earnestly would have liked to trade a little time with them for more time in Bag End with Bilbo and Frodo before the quest begins in earnest. 

 In the real world, we came out of this one still feeling good. The theater offered a 30 minute reprieve between movies and we used that to go to a local Asian supermarket for snacks. I tried onigiri for the first time! It was delicious! Mine was kelp flavored. I especially liked that it was not a greasy snack, in these kinds of marathons it's always better to eat healthy. The rain was still coming down, albeit not heavily at that point. We found a bench in the theater lobby to eat our snacks and got back to our seats with 5 minutes to spare. 

The Two Towers

 To this day I earnestly do not know which towers the title refers to. I assume it's Mordor and Isengard, but Minas Tirith is also a tower, also Helm's Deep has a tower. I don't understand it. 

 I do understand that this movie kicks. I think it's a little more more plot focused than the previous one, which I'm not as big a fan of, but god how can you not love Helm's Deep?  It's one of, if not the most impressive battle scene put to film. The sheer number of extras and costumes needed to make this all go smoothly is staggering to think about, and that it's not just followable, but enjoyable to watch??? I mean holy shit. I think Theoden is kind of boring. He gives a bunch of cool speeches but that's it? He barely even fights in Helms Deep, instead he mostly watches his army of geriatrics and children get slaughtered by Orcs. Sick dude.

 I have to mention the Ents too, love those guys. They show up in this movie, chat for a bit, and then kick in Isengard. Cool as hell. 

 I was actually feeling tired at the end of this one. My legs felt pretty stiff, and my knees were a little sore. Old lady problems I guess. We had an hour this time to find dinner. Since like 150 other people were leaving at the same time as us, we ended up going to a Taco Bell cantina, where I learned that you can get alcohol at a Taco Bell! We had two Truly's and quesadillas and re-entered the theater for the final movie with a little bit of a buzz. It was 8pm at that point. 

 The Return of the King

 It's basically perfect but also my least favorite of the three. I think of the three movies, this does the best with the additions, to the point that I feel like you're actively missing out by not seeing the extended version. However a lot of the scenes in this are a little too early-cgi-goopy, and I really do not like how the ghost army looks. The green is very ugly. Also this is the one with the spider. I cannot do spiders they are like the one thing that paralyzes me with fear. 

 A scene that always gets me is Sam pleading with Frodo to reach up and grab his hand as Frodo hangs onto the edge of Mount Doom and you can just see it in his eyes that he wants so badly to let go, to let everything come to an end and Sam wont let him give up. It's so beautiful and to see it on the big screen was amazing.  

 This is also where I started feeling tired. My early morning was catching up with me. While I think that exercising did help to make me feel fresh for longer, the lack of sleep eventually took over, and when Sam was carrying Frodo to the mouth of Mount Doom I was simply exhausted. "You bow to no one" still got a tear out of me, that scene is so beautiful. 

 The various endings of the movie came and went. Suddenly, Frodo was on the ship to Valinor, and the credits were rolling and I was on my way home. The rain that had been a drizzle earlier had intensified to a downpour and the temperature had continued to decline to an uncomfortably biting thirty three. My friend and I said our goodbyes and I wandered to an overhang at the train station to await the next arrival. After a lonely and thankfully dry wait the next train arrived to deliver me to a lonely and unfortunately wet walk home where I walked in the front door at 1:10am Monday morning, there and back again.