weekend, not as expected.

Tomorrow I will re-enpicture the finished woven scarf. The phonecam shots taken in the evening (even with the big lamps on) suck.

I put the loom back in the box.

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I watched several George Carlin specials this weekend. I also listened to Pay It Forward.

Pay It Forward as a phrase has become part of our culture, but quite clearly no one using that phrase has any fucking clue what it actually means. I didn't agree that the movie was a "gentle drama" which is how Netflix describes it. It's a movie about a boy who lives in Las Vegas with an alcoholic single mother who hits him, who thinks life completely sucks and when challenged to find a way to improve the world he decides to do the hard things that help people and challenge them to help three people themselves in return. It stars Haley Joel Osment and I've only seen him in two movies but he's Kenny-from-Southpark in both of them. Generally I think child abuse, main character death, addiction, suicide attempts, and hopelessness are not "gentle" topics. I'm not sure there are any interpretations where that would be an acceptable adjective for this movie.

Then we watched cartoon movies. We'd apparently missed the Superman Batman Apocalypse movie, and Batman Under the Red Hood (or something like that). It was weird because the animation and story in the Red Hood one were vastly superior but the characterization was vastly superior in the Apocalypse one. And both of these tripped one of my peeves. The idea that the good guys cannot ever kill anyone, no matter how much they deserve it, no matter anything. It's really hard for me to see Batman not killing the Joker as heroic since he knows the Joker will kill hundreds of other people and has already done so. It really bothered me that no one killed Darkseid's Granny even when it would have been trivial to do so. If you're actively damning dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people by your inactions, that's actually evil and consequently you cannot be a hero.

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I'm giving up on The Red Pyramid which was recommended by someone here on DW in one of the book groups. I'm shocked that the Percy Jackson book got made into a movie but the Gregor books did not, because at least Gregor wasn't actively moronic.

That makes my book count for the year -1.

I wanted fries with that.

I saw that jack liked The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I actually disliked it so much that I suggested against reading it to someone who was asking for book recommendations. Conceptually it is not a bad idea to write a fantasy novel for adults, but in my opinion, stripping away all the fantastical elements and leaving only the drudgery and disappointment is a poor way to accomplish that. It is shelved with non-genre fiction at my local library because it is not a fantasy book. If you want to read a non-genre book where the characters are played by actors on loan from Stalinist Russian literature, help yourself. I don't like to read misery. If I did like misery and woe, chances are pretty good I'd love classics and then I still wouldn't be reading Lev Grossman's book because it's not well-written compared to the powerhouses of literature.

In other news, my mouth is healing mostly okay except for the part that had bothered me enough that I complained to the dentist and got this whole mess started. That is in the corner, right where my lower jaw muscles attach; when the gums had gotten detached, every time I moved my mouth, it would ache all the way to the bone. But having them pick at it today didn't feel especially good and I got really stressed. I should have taken something for that, but I figured I'd improve by being out of the office and at lunch. But once I got home and decompressed, I was crushed and slept for a while. I'd turned down the heat before leaving but not up when I returned and managed to get chilled during my nap. So I am cold and sore. I am supposed rinse with warm salt water.

My lunch was interesting. I went out for Japanese food and left hungry because my beef teriyaki was half solid fat. That was so gross that I actually left less of a tip because anyone serving it would have noticed. I went out for fries immediately after. Without having gone for the treat, I would have been completely miserable. That was a good application of $2. But people stare at you if you go into a McDonalds and just order a large fry.

I had to change jeans this morning. The tight jeans from last January fell down when I put my phone in the pocket. The new jeans (3 full sizes smaller than the normal jeans from a year ago) are very tight in the pockets. Going from W-is-for-wide sizes to sold-in-stores sizes netted me a massive decrease in pocket dimensions. But they fit and I don't mushroom over the top and I don't get skin creases from where the fabric digs in. (When I first got these, they left clear indications as to where the zipper and button and seams were, because they fit everywhere except the lower belly.)