What Would Buffy Do?

Today, I am writing primarily to announce that I will be going to Illinois tomorrow to visit my grandma and will have limited internet access until I get back Wednesday evening.  There was a time in my life when stepping away from the internet meant panic, and a feeling of disconnection, and guilt over any unresolved business that may come my way while gone.  Now, I mainly just announce these things out of habit...and also because I wouldn't want any of you to think I was ignoring you should you make an effort to contact me. :)

This woman means business.

But I'm also writing today to say that in the future, I should write lots of blog entries about the greatest television show ever:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I loved so much that the part of me that was interested in watching serialized television kind of died when it (and its spin-off, Angel) went off the air.  I haven't watched the full series since 2009 or so, but this past week, I've watched a few highlight episodes and just like every other time I've spent some quality time with Buffy and the Scooby Gang, I'm amazed all over again at how well they speak to what's going on in my life.

Much like the seven books of the Harry Potter series, the seven seasons of Buffy are unique entities tied together by series-long story arcs and character development.  Settling on a favorite season of Buffy is kind of like picking a favorite Beatles album.  It's not an easy process, but once you've found your home, it tends to be fairly easy to defend your position.

My favorite season?  Five.  Buffy is as badass as she ever was in season five.  She worked up to it in seasons one through four...and then she fell (the way people do) into a pit of despair and self-loathing in season six, until finally pulling herself back up again in season seven.

But in season five, she is Buffy the motherfucking vampire slayer. 

I don't have an overarching point today.  I just wanted to say that Buffy Summers is (still) pretty awesome.

Twenty-Six Point Two

Saturday - 16.3 mile long run

Sunday - rest

Monday - 6 mile tempo run

Tuesday - 4 mile track workout (2.5 miles of speed work; 1.5 miles of warm up/cool down)

A little over two months to go until the St. Jude marathon, and right now, I am capable of running a marathon over the course of four days!  (I actually feel pretty good about that.)

Friend of the runner.

What does it feel like to train for a marathon?  Well, it depends a lot on who's doing the training.  This is only my second marathon, but much like last year, now that I've reached the 16-mile point in my long-run schedule, I AM HUNGRY ALL THE DAMN TIME.  Put food in front of me and I will eat the hell out of that damn food.  I keep finding peanuts all over my kitchen floor, because they're good for a quick hunger fix, but sometimes in my haste to consume them, I throw them all over the kitchen instead of into my mouth.

I AM ALSO TIRED.  Not like "normal" tired.  Like, going-to-bed-at-9:00-p.m.-and-sleeping-the-sleep-of-the-dead-every-freaking-night tired.  My body is resisting the mileage not by wimping out mid-run, but by trying to make me fall asleep before the run.  (I abhor naps, but I've taken two in the past four days.)

If this year is anything like last year, though, by the time we hit 18 miles, I will have pretty much completely adjusted.  It will be a running miracle.

There's a meme on Facebook that's pretty popular among my running friends:  "Never cross a woman who runs 26.2 miles for fun."  In general, I would agree with that sentiment, but if you were going to cross me, I'd recommend doing it sometime in the next week or two, while I'm still all groggy and weak with hunger.

Dammit, Jake. (Prophecy Girl Reviews End of Watch!)

Two days ago, I put up an entry about Taylor Swift's attempt to outdo me in the arena of artistically expressing irritation toward the common-sense-challenged man-child known as Jake Gyllenhaal.

"HAHA, THAT TAYLOR," wrote I (well, not literally; I'm dramatizing). "She is saying some of the same things I say, except is less pathetic for it because Jake has acknowledged her existence in public."

I was speaking, of course, of Tay-Tay's Jake-bashing breakup hit, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," and its accompanying scarf-filled video.  I thought the song was hilarious, and the video even more so, both because of the Jake-specific details, and because the song itself comically lent itself to the preset narrative about Jake that I, personally, wrote about online from 2006 to 2007 and then 2010 to early this year.

But Jake, you see, occupies a certain role in my life:  to call him a "weakness" does not do justice to the word "weakness."  He is the crystal meth of my pop culture world.  I took one hit, one time, back in late 2005, and it took me years to kick the habit.  And then I was stupid enough to take another hit in 2010, and I'm still dealing with the aftermath.

Upside?  My tolerance has improved greatly with time.

Downside?  That doesn't mean I'm fully resistant.

An hour into End of Watch...goddammit...he had me rooting for him all over again.  Do you hear that, Jake?  Are you happy?  I was rooting for you.  I was rooting for you because you did a really good job with this movie, and you took a risk in making it - not like the risk you took in making a Viagra-themed love story or a sand-filled Disney video-game flop (which I now look at as part of an experimental phase as you attempted to find yourself, and I forgive you for them because I know you learned from them).  But a risk in going back to being Jake Gyllenhaal.  That guy who makes weird indie (or at least indie-esque) films that are maybe hard to watch but that make people think and bring Big Issues to average movie-goers.  The Jake Gyllenhaal who's not in it for the money, but for the art.  The Jake Gyllenhaal who yes, was probably a total effing dick to Taylor Swift but you're a dick to everyone, and you know what, part of growing up is learning that sometimes guys are dicks.  That music video, which I garnered an unhealthy level of voyeuristic pleasure from, I now see as kind of mean.  Taylor Swift isn't exactly a saint, and Jake, maybe I don't give you enough credit for being a real person in a world where you earn your living by being fake. 

End of Watch was a good movie.  Not the type of movie I would ever see under any other circumstances, but that's maybe the entire lesson of my futile exercise in being a Jake Gyllenhaal fan:  he has always pushed me a little outside my comfort zone.  Sometimes that's meant jetting off to a poetry reading, or going to Los Angeles completely on my own, or pushing my way through the press at a film festival to demand I get what I came for; and sometimes it means watching movies that upset me - that push the boundaries of what I want to believe about humanity and that make me think just a little differently about things in my own life that I take for granted.

So FINE.  There you have it.  I will never watch End of Watch again because the camera-work gave me nausea and the storyline full-on dry heaves.  But I have to give it two thumbs up, because after I watched it, a teensy part of me - a part that is small but whiny and persistent nonetheless - wanted to punch Taylor Swift in her smug face for being so bitchy in that video.

Dammit, Jake.  You came back a little bit with this one.  You may annoy the hell out of me at times, but it's only right to give respect where respect is due, and you got some from me with this one.

Taylor Swift Sums Up My Feelings about Jake Gyllenhaal by Summing Up Her Feelings about Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal, the mid-sized, bearded famous person best known for being more interesting six years ago than he is today, has a new movie out this weekend.  End of Watch is a police drama, and one that assuredly will have critics utilizing such phrases as "gritty" and "gripping" and "shot on the cheap."  The movie was filmed back when I was still writing ISJ! (the blog!), and thus it has the honored distinction of being the last Jake movie whose filming I covered.  Having covered the filming of every Jake movie (at least in some capacity) from Zodiac to present, End of Watch - truly - marks an End of Era.

Circa 2007.  I couldn't handle the hipster glasses, so I bailed.

Will I be seeing End of Watch?  Um, does the pope shit in the woods?  Look, Jake and I have kind of a complicated history.  It was great at first (2006), but then we called it off because we both needed space (2007), but then we got back together (mid-2010), and then I remembered how annoying he is (late-mid-2010), and then I swore him off for good after realizing he was never going to change (2012). 

It was exhausting, y'know?  Like, I am never starting a blog about him again.  Like, ever. 

But that doesn't mean I'm not going to see his movies anymore.  It just means I'm not going to see his movies on opening weekend anymore. (Although, if you've read my book, you know that even during the height of our power-couple-dom, I never saw his movies on opening weekend...but that's beside the point.)

In summation, I will be back sometime (I don't know when) with a movie review.  But in the meantime, here, please enjoy Taylor Swift's breakup song about this Jake character, which is literally the best thing she's ever done, although only the second best thing ever written about Jake.  (The first being my book, obvs.)  TaySwift is, lest we forget, famous for her Top 40 Romeo-and-Juliet-you-belong-with-me-back-to-November brand of saccharine love songs, but three months with Jake and she cranked out an I-can't-believe-how-lame-you-are breakup anthem, and of course she did, because HE IS THE JAKE GYLLENHAAL OF MOVIES. 

(TaySwift has NOT, however, ever come up with a Civil War album internet rumor about Jake, and for that reason, this song is best enjoyed if you pretend it's me singing about blogging about him instead of her singing about her "actual relationship" [or whatever] with him.  It's all about me, always.  Never forget.)

THE END.

Dear Mitt Romney,

Literally - literally - the only positive thing I can think to say about your campaign thus far is that you chose a running mate who has not (yet) caused me to projectile vomit.  (More than we can say about John McCain in 2008.)

Regards,
Becky, Registered Democrat

[Normally I have a lot of fun during election season bashing the other team.  This year, I feel like the more humane thing would be if we could somehow put the Republicans out of their misery already...]

Fifty Shades of What the Fuck Am I Reading?

You wanna know why I like Britney Spears?

Because a respectable percentage of her songs are dedicated to challenging other people to man the fuck up.

"Spit it out 'cause I'm dying for company," she says in "Till the World Ends."

"[Time to] be a little inappropriate, 'cause I know that everybody's thinking it," in "I Wanna Go."

"Piece of Me" is the Britney equivalent of Eminem's final battle in 8 Mile (I'm not perfect and so what, asshole).  And "Do Somethin'" (a personal favorite) is exactly the challenge its title suggests; it can be applied to a plethora of scenarios.

In the way that people do, people have done a lot of talking (and writing) recently about what the wild popularity of the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy "means."  Much of what I've read on the subject has reminded me of Britney Spears, who can convincingly sell a line like, "When I crack that whip, everybody gonna trip," who can make a number one hit out of daring someone to join her in a threesome, but who also somewhat pathetically mopes around in her real life like the real and flawed human being she is.

The success of 50 Shades of Grey, which tells the story of the unlikely and (supposedly) kinky BDSM relationship between Anastasia Steele (*cough*Bella Swan*cough*) and Christian Grey (*cough*Edward Cullen*cough*), has - according to much I've read - volumes to say about women like Britney.  Women who are now a major force in nearly all corners of the business world.  Women who are in charge of their own lives, who are self-sufficient and successful, but who, at the end of the day, maybe have a secret yearning to surrender completely to a man bold enough (strong enough) to think he could add something to her life.  Literally, it's "hit me, baby, one more time."

Newsweek sold that idea fairly well in the cover story it ran on the 50 Shades phenomenon a few months back.  I hadn't read the trilogy when I read the article - didn't have any desire to - but the article stuck with me.  I started to think that maybe this was one of those things that I should be familiar with because of its influence on pop culture (Vanity Fair reported last month that it's on track to become the bestselling book series of all time)...and that maybe, just maybe, my own inner Britney would enjoy a story about a guy who loves to take control.

So I started to read.

Five chapters in, I was underwhelmed.

Ten chapters in, I was still waiting for it to get better.

Fifteen chapters in, I was wondering if God was playing a joke on all of us in making this story this popular.

I am currently exactly one-half of the way through this trilogy (Fifty Shades of Grey down, Fifty Shades Darker at the halfway point), and here are my thoughts so far (very minimal spoilers below):

1.  This is a Twilight fanfiction story.  Yes, it has been set in an alternate universe, yes, the names have been changed...but nothing else has.  This is Twilight, right down to the piano-playing and the bad weather, except with more sex.  And since no one in their right mind would call the Twilight saga a celebration of female empowerment, that brings us to...

2.  How the fuck did Newsweek (or anyone else) wring out of this that this was somehow a side effect of a cultural shift toward women in powerful societal roles?  That has absolutely nothing to do with this.  This is nothing more (or less) than a side effect of people liking to read smut.

3.  Which, full disclosure, I've read my fair share of.  So I can say with authority that even by X-rated fiction standards, this is pathetically devoid of plot.

4.  And of editing.  Grammatical and punctuation errors are all over the place.  As are gaping plot holes.  (Which, come on, really shouldn't be an issue considering point #3.)

5.  Word and phrase repetition are being redefined in front of my very eyes.  Oh my, this is some lazy writing.

6.  In terms of specific complaints about criminal-level stalker behavior being treated as acceptable, and about a self-conscious and ambiguously bland heroine being badgered into giving up her entire life for said stalker, whom she endlessly feels she's unworthy of because of his physical perfection, please refer above to the fact that this is a series based on Twilight.

7.  In thinking a little more about that, is that even legal?  I thought all those disclaimers on fanfiction stories made stuff like this not possible...

8.  And you know, I wouldn't even care about any of this if it were a compelling story.  I read shit all the time that is terrible on a logical level but entertaining nonetheless.  But this is so incredibly bad.  I don't understand!  There is so much better fanfiction out there!  And you don't have to pay for it!  (For the record, I did not shell over any money for my reading experience.  I am all about sharing my media these days.)

IN CONCLUSION, even though I still have five billion more pages to read, I can't help but pause at this point to grimace at the utter mediocrity of it all.  The story that may someday outsell all other books is just someone's middle-of-the-road fanfiction story, lifted directly from the internet and stuck in a binding.  It's not a cultural indication of anything.  Except maybe that the free market really does place way too much value on blind luck and word of mouth.

Then again, this far into the story, it hasn't really delivered on its kink aspect either, and that might be part of my problem with it.  Christian Grey, the "fucked up" disciplinarian, proved himself pretty vanilla when he allowed himself to be flummoxed by someone as pliant as Anastasia Steele.

It's fine to sell this story for what it is (bad porn), but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that Christian is some kind of token fantasy guy for all the women out there who regularly challenge the posers on the sidelines to "do somethin'"...