I'm trying to do all my procrastinatory activities before my summer classes start up, pretending I can "get them out of my system" and hit the ground diligent. Make-believe is fun.
Clips from the past two years of my iMovie life, set to "Song for No One" by Miike Snow. (Yeah, I'm sooo trindie.)
For my fellow "deeks" (dumb geeks): This was made on iMovie'09 using clips from my flip video and built-in laptop camera.
Yesterday and today I took afternoon walks ("constitutionals," as the old folks say these days) on the minuteman bike path that reopened my eyes to the beauty that is fall in New England. This isn't to say that I'm just one wood cabin away from writing Walden: The Sequel. Not at all. I still love you, television. But really, Autumn. It's never been my favorite season for reasons I can't justify. Something about this time of year has always put me in a funk. My dad says it might have something to do with a discordance between the lunar and solar calendars. Any explanation past that is over my head. (Actually, that explanation is already over my head.)
Funkiness aside, the beauty of the season is undeniable. Even the name, Autumn. It's like butterscotch. And I love how the stress shifts from the first syllable to the second when the noun becomes an adjective. Autumn to autumnal. Although, I feel like Will Ferrel in his "loovvaaas" character would say, "autumn" to refer to the season.
In case you are not familiar:
Here sit the lovvaas in the hottub
Something about the imminent cold and blusteries outside seems to awaken my inner warm and fuzzies. I want to spend a day in Concord or go reaal crazy and hike out to Salem for a scare or kiss Plymouth Rock (oh, wait. I was thinking of the Blarney Stone. Common Mistake.) Maybe I'll even take a weekend trip to Sturbridge Village. Okay, no I probably won't. But maybe I'll talk about it as a possibility if someone asks me what my weekend plans are.
The advent of Halloween makes me want to go somewhere where I can pretend that the times we're living in aren't nuclear or digital, they're colonial. (So types the girl on her laptop as she microwaves a bag of popcorn.)
Unfortunately, I think this sudden seasonal enthusiasm and desire for simpler times seeped into my baking this evening. I lit a "pumpkin spice" candle and decided I was going to make pumpkin sugar cookies from scratch. "I'll just eye it, like I did in highschool," I said foolishly.
Whoever said that baking is a science might be right. Whoever said that eggs are a necessary ingredient in cookies is definitely correct. Whoops. The cookies were on minute 4 of 15 when I had my epiphany. I was about to warn my sister about eating the raw left over dough because of the salmonella and then I realized, warning not necessary. Whoops. The result was like a crunchy, sugary, butter. (If you must know, I ate three.)
Liz: Being with Dennis is easy. If you give into it, you just start to feel kind of numb, and warm, and then you just get sleepy. It's not that bad.
Jenna: That's exactly what they say it's like when you freeze to death.
I know I watch an unhealthy amount of 30 Rock.
I know: I watch an unhealthy amount of 30 rock.
But instead of focusing on the negative, i.e. my "friends" are mere television characters, I'm choosing to bring positivity to non-fictional people--dare I say, friends? (someday? You can comment later)--i.e. anyone who happens to stumble across this blog.
For fun I've taken on the task of transcribing an episode of one of my favorite shows, Mad Men. This task, which is both a pleasure and a pain, serves several purposes:
-Gives me something "to do" while still watching TV
-Is practice with screenplay formatting
-Helps to tide me over while I await the season 3 premiere (tomorrowow!)
-Illuminates character elements/dialogue details that I missed before
I've chosen S02E02, "Flight 1," and I'm only 15 pages in. (The first 7 minutes took me an hour. I say this is parenthesis because I feel like that should be a "guilty" confession. Going out of parenthesis...now.)
One thing that I love about Mad Men is its natural dialogue and the way the show's writers seamlessly work early-1960s jargon into the script.
"WHEN THE BEES STING"
For example, in the opening party scene in "Flight 1," Paul Kinsey argues on behalf of his New Jersey digs, telling his work buddies that "Montclair is the knees."
The bee's knees.
If that expression were a snack, it'd be ritz crackers and chocolate milk. Almost too hokey, but not quite.
There's something about 1950s/60s slang that I find so attractive. Maybe it's that so many expressions seem fundamentally euphemistic; each individual word in a given idiom is squeaky clean, even if the cumulative connotation isn't.
Then vs. Now..ish
Dreamboat vs.Hunk/Hottie
Beach Blanket Bingo vs.Sex on the beach
Birds and the Bees vs.Sex Ed & Family Planning
Square (var.: L7) vs. Loser
Of course I'm exaggerating. I can't speak from experience; all I have to back up my flimsy claims is my affinity for Beach Boys songs and a handful of movie/TV-derived stereotypes. I do realize that these expressions were not integral parts of the average 1950s/60s teenager's daily lexicon.
I'm sure come mid-1960s, most people's views of these idiomatic expressions were probably pretty similar to my current opinion regarding slanguage like "the/da Bomb," "Phat," and a bunch of those hand signs from Clueless. (To be fair, I tend to shun anything that draws attention to my hammerhead thumbs.)
But what can I say? Regardless of its authenticity, that past parlance still tickles me pink.
Any expressions you wish were more popular/hadn't died out?
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