‘Loosen Up My “Buttons”‘
Since I know a lot of you like to read this page to learn from my mistakes (since I make so damn MANY of them), please take this advice to heart:
When you go see a three-hour movie like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” please do yourself a BIG FAT FUCKING FAVOR and don’t park in an hourly lot.
See, genius here decided she would catch a matinee at Regal Cinemas, since those bastards at the AMC don’t see fit to discount prices ever.
Besides, I always get free offers at Regal for popcorn, and since my real motivation in going to the movies today was to hide my day off from my roommate nom on real popcorn (OMG, CHOMP), it seemed like the right thing to do.
Hah.
OK, first of all, my movie ticket cost $8. My parking? COST $9.
(Did I mention that the AMC has free parking? *thunk*)
Oh, and the popcorn wasn’t free. I received two coupons — one for a free small popcorn and one for a small popcorn for $1. I breezed past the ticket-taker, who had fallen asleep in her chair at the entrance (classy) and rolled over to the concession stand to meet the other employee of the year.
There, I presented the “free” coupon, but the guy still charged me a buck. Whatever — $18 plus $5 for a trough-sized drink and I could have adopted a child in a foreign country and fed them for a month with this expenditure extravaganza.
Regal must make it their duty to hire neither the best nor the brightest. Failure, they has it!
Also, note to self before attending a three-hour-long flick: Get the small Diet Coke. Really. Somewhere past hour two, your “dear God if I pee this much while not knocked up, I will need a catheter when I AM” bladder will not forgive you.
I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs to try to keep from spraying the people in the next row with piss-flavored Diet Coke. And I was so jittery from the caffeine that my phone — which I’d been using to carry on a couple of text/e-mail conversations with people at work — flew off my damn lap and landed, well, somewhere. I crawled around but couldn’t find it in the dark but eventually it did turn up.
And yeah, being nervous about the whereabouts of your $600 phone also adds to your captivity joy. Really! I was just glad no calamities arose when the phone was under someone else’s seat.
Anyway, the movie was lovely. Seriously, utterly lovely. It dragged in some parts, but it was magnificent how absolutely everything came full circle. Even the most-flippant mentions of the tiniest details in the beginning, came around to be poignant later on.
I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for a love story today, since I’m convinced (today anyway) that boys are stinky and stupid and also have cooties. But yeah, I needed this. Love may be imperfect and people don’t always realize it when it comes around. But sometimes you’ve just got to make your own miracles. But you can only really make them if the magic exists in the first place.
Which explains why I seem to have this harem that comes around, again and again. Always seems like someone had feelings when the other didn’t, then it reverses, then who only knows. You can’t tax your brain with it too much — you just have to focus on what’s in front of you and assume that you’re where you’re supposed to be — and that you’re not where you’re not supposed to be.
And I guess I’m not supposed to be in Times Square tomorrow night. But I’m not quite finding the point of why I’m still in D.C., either.
Anyway, I found a Barnes & Noble tonight that’s going out of business. I was on my way to my de-pudgification meeting but fuck that noise — I always have to buy my own Christmas gift, and I hadn’t found anything yet that I could afford. So, I headed straight to the self-help, metaphysical studies and DVD sections and loaded up on 40%-off delights.
Hey, if I have to ring in another new year with this bullshit excuse of a life, at least I’ll be doing so, armed with all the tools I need to make sure that when 2010 comes my way, everything that CAN be different, WILL be. …