BLOGGING LOOKING FOR ALASKA, pt. 2: Bring Me The Sun

So I forgot last time to thank MagentaBitch, who actually sent me a BRAND NEW copy of Looking For Alaska when I asked on Tumblr if I could borrow someone's old copy. MB: I have since scribbled all over the book you bought me and will return it to you when we're finished here. Thank you. Also: I like your screen name.

Last time, we met our narrator, who was leaving for boarding school. Today: boarding school. I know it doesn't seem like there's a lot of plot here, but learn to appreciate it. Remember Hunger Games? Oy. (Part 1: Carajo, Un Balazo.)

“One hundred twenty-eight day before”

Miles’s parents bring him to Culver Creek Preparatory School (“preparatory” is a vaguely unsettling adjective, to me) in Alabama, and his first reaction to the place is that it’s fucking hot. In fact, that is more or less his first dozen reactions. The sun burns him in a way that makes him “genuinely fear hellfire” (is that why Alabamans are so nutty Right wing?) and he discovers, to his horror, that his new dorm has no air conditioning.

When I first toured the campus of La Salle University, the college I attended for a year before transferring to Boston, the dorms I saw were wood-paneled, poorly equipped hell-holes. It was mid-July and they literally looked and felt like saunas. But I accepted my fate, as a series of financial aid fuckups and other admissions-related disasters had left me with no other choice. Luckily for me, a few weeks later I was recruited into La Salle’s Honors program (I kind of applied under-the-radar so it took them a while to realize I was a genius) which got me access to their posh, brand-new honors dorms. And that was great until I showed off my new digs to my friend Chris, who was relegated to the sauna-dorms. He brought another friend, who was also named Chris, and for the record they were both black. “So this is how white people live,” Other Chris observed, when I turned on the AC. Anyway.

Miles’s dorm is the regular, barren kind, and his parents help him unpack and then leave and he feels like he should feel more sadness at their departure (I totally get that, but the good news is my parents and his parents understand it, too). And he begins the awkward process of assimilating himself into a new culture. He’s starting at this school junior year, which is a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I made exactly ONE new friend during my junior year of high school, and while he’s been my friend ever since it was a thousand times more awkward than any other friendship cultivation I’d ever experienced. I felt like I had to ask him out on a date or something, you know? Miles takes a chair outside and looks at girls’ butts (probably) and hopes someone will talk to him so he can make a witty joke (about how hot it is. Jeez Miles, punch up your act a little. I bet this guy has five minutes on airline food, you know what I mean?).

Later he meets his roommate. The kid rolls in while Miles is getting out of the shower (another thing they have at this place is a bathroom/shower in every dorm, which is another thing we had, sorry Other Chris), which is less vaguely homoerotic and more intended to evoke the awkward forced-intimacy of dorm living. My old roommate and I didn’t have much of an issue with accidental nudity and the like but it’s definitely an anxiety that you have going into such a situation. And you figure, John Green’s intended audience only knows the anxiety and not the reality. (Caveat: I had a girlfriend with an apartment off-campus, so I spent most of my accidentally and deliberately naked times there, so maybe I can’t speak from experience. Feel free to share stories in the comments!) His name is Chip, which I always thought of as a nickname, but apparently that is his real name because his nickname is "The Colonel." Pretty good nickname.

And we immediately start to build a mental picture of this kid, who is short and stocky and swaggers around the room and breezily blows off the fact that his parents aren’t helping him move in. Huh.

And there’s a bunch of rapid historocultural references peppered in for more or less no reason; atmospherics, I suppose: Before Chip shows up, Miles thinks of John F. Kennedy’s boarding school experiences, and then upon seeing his (Miles's) lousy new shower (picture basically that scene from Lost In Translation) concludes that JFK’s facilities were probably better, and that maybe they had air conditioning. Later, when Chip hears our narrator’s name is “Miles” he asks, “As in, ‘to go before I sleep?’” No Chip, as in Miles the fucking name. But perhaps the Robert Frost/Kennedy semiconnection is deliberate. And even if it isn’t, let’s pretend it is; the former was the latter’s favorite poet, after all, and he spoke at Kennedy’s inauguration.

Funny story: Frost intended to read a new poem he’d written specifically for the occasion, titled “Dedication,” but the glare on the podium was such that he could not read the pages in front of him. So he pulled a poem out of his ass, basically, and “Dedication” only recently came to light.

I don’t know why it took so long, but perhaps everybody forgot about Frost even BEING THERE because of the other thing that happened at the inauguration: Kennedy’s speech. You know the one. It had a lot of killer lines:

• "Let every nation know... that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
• The world is very very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life."
• "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

And then of course, the big one: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. What’s funny is that we generally think of Second Inaugurals as the famous ones. FDR’s “fear itself,” Lincoln’s “With malice toward none.” Kennedy never got a chance, but I’m sure his would have been a doozy. His last words, by the way? “No, you certainly can’t.” It was in response to the Governor of Texas noting that you couldn’t say the people of Dallas didn’t love their President. And then Lee Harvey Oswald begged to differ.

I like Bobby Kennedy’s last words better: “Is everyone else all right?” Wow, huh? Doesn’t that just fill you with, I don’t know, happysadness? There’s probably a word in German for the feeling.

A New Yorker piece* from a few years ago notes how weird it is that Kennedy and Frost were alive at the same time. Kennedy, after all, is symbolic of everything modern about America, and Robert Frost wrote poems about kids accidentally chopping their hands off on farms. Frost is Dick Whitman, and Kennedy is Don Draper. And Kennedy outlived Frost, but just barely. He spoke at Amherst College at a ceremony honoring the recently-dead poet in October 1963, and you can hear or read the transcript of his speech here. If you’ve never heard JFK talk about art, you really ought to.

(*That piece on Kennedy’s inauguration mentions a few pieces of writing on the subject of Presidential Inaugurations in general. There’s apparently a Franzen essay on GWB in from 2001 that I’ll have to check out. But I also dug this quote, from Robert Lowell’s poem about Dwight Eisenhower’s rise to power in 1953:

Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move.
Look, the fixed stars, all just alike
as lack-land atoms, split apart,
and the Republic summons Ike,
the mausoleum in her heart.)

Anyway, The Colonel. He sees a map Miles hung on the wall and then starts rattling off the names of every country, nonchalantly mentioning after a few dozen that he’s memorized them all. And  you gotta figure you rarely have the change to showcase a party trick like that one, so we’ll forgive him for this (kinda douche-y) outburst. And I get it, I mean, when you meet new people it’s hard to resist the urge to forcibly define yourself. LOOK AT ME/ LOOK AT THESE THREE IMPORTANT FACTS ABOUT ME AND FILTER ALL OTHER IMPRESSIONS ABOUT ME THROUGH THEM PLEASE, you want to scream. The first few weeks of college are emphatically like that (don’t think for a second that I didn’t LOVE the fact that, as noted earlier, I had two black friends*) but it goes on forever. I remember at my last job, a guy told me on his third day “I’m the office asshole.” Oh, you are? He clearly wanted that reputation, for whatever reason, and I guess he succeeded because I don’t think he made it to day five. Anyway, The Colonel wants to be a guy who is called The Colonel and who memorizes stuff and who also wants to be all of these things:

1. A guy who wants to read long books
2. A guy whose father used to beat him with books, which forced him to only own like, Goosebumps volumes or something lest padre do more damage
3. A guy who smokes, perhaps understandably
4. A guy who is poor, and who attends “the Creek” on a full scholarship
5. A guy who throws all of his clothes, socks and all, unsorted into his drawers

That last one is less something he is deliberately projecting and more something that Miles obsesses over as he watches him unpack. And then The Colonel asks him what his gimmick is, what his Twitter tagline is, essentially, and Miles tells him about Henrik Ibsen’s last words. Ibsen is a rad guy, and if you don’t know him stop reading this blog and go read “A Doll’s House” and “Ghosts” right now. I’ll wait. That advice should really extend to Miles, who knows nothing of Ibsen except that as he lay dying, he overheard his nurse tell a guest that he was feeling better. “On the contrary,” he said, and then died. That’s fine, but the last lines of “Ghosts” are wayyy better.

(*With whom I lost touch basically less than a week later. I mean, I was in the Honors dorm. Do you really think I’d associate with a non-Honors students? Ha!)

BLOGGING LOOKING FOR ALASKA, pt. 1: Carajo, Un Balazo!

I think we need to calibrate our expectations here. Looking For Alaska is not a high-concept thriller. It does not take place in the future; no one is murdered for sport. Also: there are no werewolves, vampires, or half-human half-vampire hybrids. It is not a "paranormal romance," unless you think Manic Pixie Dream Girls qualify as paranormal creatures.

Looking For Alaska* is a story about like, people. And love, and loss, and grief. And smoking. It’s mostly about smoking.

(*Ways in which this series of blog posts will be different from the others:

1. Before writing a word of this, I read Looking For Alaska from beginning to end (it was one of those thing that started involuntarily but became by design). Truth be told, I can probably write better on this subject if I know it well--Blogging The Hunger Games being a case against doing it the other way. That said, I am going to be mindful of spoilers--just the one, really--and would ask you to do the same in the comments. For now.
2. John Green is a very different sort of author than our old friend Stephenie Meyer. He has an, I would say, extreme Internet presence (as I write this he has literally been streaming himself live on the Internet for something like five hours) and is therefore much more of a knowable entity. We do not know how (or maybe why) Stephenie Meyer’s brain works (sure, there are interviews, but interviews are bullshit), but Green is someone we can hear from (we can like, see him work in real time). And most of you probably know and understand him better than I do; though  I am increasingly a fan of his work, I have literally seen less than a dozen of his videos and have only read one article about him (about his Thoughts From Places series). That will change, though! I am going to periodically watch Vlog Brothers videos (for those who don’t know, John Green’s primary YouTube channel rolls 900 fucking videos deep) and burrow a little deeper into Nerdfighterdom (Nerdfighters being the name for fans of the Vlog Brothers--and being a fan is more of a spiritual thing than you’d think). If there are VlogBrothers videos out there that pertain to specific sections of Looking For Alaska, shoot me an email or give me a heads-up in the comments, yeah? Thanks.
3. Despite my lack of serious knowledge about John Green, he is not very separated from me like, as a human. My long-time friend and current neighbor Jory Caron is friendly with Green. Several other people that I sort of know know him, sort of. And once I made a video gently parodying his particular, peculiar delivery style and either he or his brother Hank watched said video, as evidenced by this comment (I was proud at the time and am now kind of mortified). In other words, as Jory put it, on the Kevin Bacon-like scale I am one or less than one degree from John Green. I don’t know exactly what that disclosure has to do with anything, exactly, but reading this book FEELS different, in an authorial intent sort of way, than does reading any other book. The author is a real, vivid person, which is something I have not really experienced unless you count the experience of reading my grandmother’s self-published memoir, How To Be Hot At Sixty.
4. Also, maybe most importantly: I really, truly liked this book. My enthusiasm for Twilight was heavily, morbidly qualified and my enthusiasm for The Hunger Games was nonexistent, so the tone of these blog posts will probably be different.)

OK. Let’s do this. Clear eyes, full packs of cigarettes, can’t lose!

“136 Days Before”

Here we meet our narrator, Miles Standoffish. Just kidding, his last name is Halter, but anyway he is in the middle of a doomed going-away party for himself, which his parents have thrown, as he is soon to be off to boarding school. He doesn’t have a lot of friends, he explains, unless you count he “ragtag bunch of drama people and English geeks” (...is he talking about us?) he sits with “by social necessity in the cavernous cafeteria” of his school. And he knows they won’t come.

Miles clearly ate his Narration Wheaties this morning, right? Cavernous cafeteria! And this is pretty much the pace at which we proceed from here on out. Miles is a clever kid, and one of the first things I wrote in the margins of this book was "Maybe too clever by half?" because much as I appreciate the lively writing there are times when you just want him to RELAX. I mean, two guests finally arrive, and Miles notes that while he was never one for small talk his mother "could talk small for hours." So far so fun. A line or two later this happens when one of Miles's "guests" is talking about the relative success of a play she was in that summer.

"I guess it was," Marie said. "A lot of people came, I guess." Marie was the sort of person to guess a lot.

SIT DOWN, Miles. No, it's fine, but I worry he is going to strain himself, you know? Marie et al filter out, and Miles sits with his parents on the couch and feels pity for them that he has no friends. "I wasn't disappointed," he says. "My expectations were met."

So we have a sense of what kind of guy Miles is all ready: He's a loser but in kind of a noble way. I mean, clearly he'd like to have friends, but that desire is neither particularly pathetic nor spelled out too clearly by Green (two facts which are related. This book is welcoming me into its loving arms, is it doing the same for you? I've been lost in the desert for so long! Spitting teeth into my hand!).

Anyway, his mother asks if his lack of social success is why he wants to leave (Florida, by the way). Surely that is part of it (we also learn that his father attended the same boarding school Miles is headed to)(also, I mean, Florida! Why wouldn’t you want to leave?) but our narrator gets up and grabs a book from his father's office, a biography of Francois Rabelais, and reads them a quote. Rabelais's dying words were, "I go to seek a Great Perhaps," and while I wonder how he indicated the way those last words should be capitalized, there's no arguing that they’re pretty good last words, and Miles finds them inspiring.

I looked up Rabelais on Wikipedia, as one is wont to do, and learned that he was a humorist whose work is still shocking to many today because of his double-entendres. Being a person very interested in the double-entendre (both the literary term and the sex position) I found a few translations of his work. Here's a quote from "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (available here). It turns out his double-entendres are more like 1.5 entendres (I've emphasized a few things):

This little lecher was always groping his nurses and governesses... handling them very rudely in jumbling and tumbling them to keep them going; for he had already begun to exercise the tools, and put his codpiece in practice. Which codpiece, or braguette, his governesses did every day deck up and adorn with fair nosegays, curious rubies, sweet flowers, and fine silken tufts, and very pleasantly would pass their time in taking you know what between their fingers, and dandling it, till it did revive and creep up to the bulk and stiffness of a suppository...Then did they burst out in laughing, when they saw it lift up its ears, as if the sport had liked them. One of them would call it her little dille, her staff of love...Another, her peen, her jolly kyle, her bableret...another again, her branch of coral, her female adamant...her jewel for ladies. And some of the other women would give it these names,—my bunguetee, my stopple too, my bush-rusher, my gallant wimble, my pretty borer...my little piercer...my pusher...my honey pipe...my lusty andouille...my pretty rogue, and so forth. It belongs to me, said one. It is mine, said the other. What, quoth a third, shall I have no share in it? By my faith, I will cut it then. Ha, to cut it, said the other, would hurt him. Madam, do you cut little children's things?

HOLY SHIT, right? So what I am getting at is when Rabelais said he was going to seek a great perhaps, he was probably referring to shoving something up his butt. But Miles is seeking something a little more noble, and that is fine too.

No Church In The Wild: The Lightning Round

Dear Zac, What do you do when a hardcore vegetarian starts guilt tripping you for eating meat?

Just start salivating and then try to bite them. That's what they think of us anyway!

Hey Zac I'm a 17 year old guy from England, I'm not very popular at school; I'm kind of a clinger on. Not many people like me much and I barely go out at all. I will be going to university next year and I've never had a girlfriend or even kissed a girl. I worried that I'm gonna be socially awkward and have little friends for the rest of my life. Any Advice?

You're from England? COME TO AMERICA. Girls will literally line up and bend over when they hear your accent. And since our nation was founded by people who were unpopular in your country, it will be a nice thematic fit, too.

How do you inform a friend that they're a bitch?

This is one of those times when "a friend" means "you" right?

Hey Zac, I am 18 and I've only had 1 girlfriend and I think she didn't know what to say so she just said yes any advice on how to get a girlfriend?

MOST girls only say yes because they don't know what else to say. No shame in that game! It's what you do AFTER you've guilted them in to dating you that counts. So keep that pathetic act going! It has worked very well for me.

My boyfriend and I have nothing in common. When I told him that the world has come between us he reminded me that one time we watched "Breakfast at Tiffany's" I recall that we both kinda liked it, but Zac do you think that's enough of a reason to stay in relationship with him?

You know, the philosopher MC Skat Kat once said that opposites attract. And while that is true in some cases, usually you need some kind of foothold to sustain a relationship. My wife and I go mountain climbing. GET IT? FOOTHOLD?

But seriously, you just got that song stuck in my head. So fuck you.

SEASON 2 of NO CHURCH IN THE WILD: the video series starts next week. Happy New Year, everybody!

I Enjoyed Breaking Dawn More Than Harry Potter And Other Movie Revelations From 2011

This was sort of a rebuilding year for movies, right? Most of the stuff we got excited about hasn't come out yet (The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit, The Avengers, etc) and some of the stuff that it seemed like we were excited about turned out to be stuff we weren't very excited about after all (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo*). Movies that were hits came seemingly out of nowhere (Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. Mission Impossible). And a lot of movies that looked rad were in limited release, meaning most of us haven't had a chance to see them yet (Take Shelter, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Drive, Beginners, Win Win, Sleeping Beauty, Cedar Rapids**).

(*Or maybe not yet? Give Dragon Tattoo another weekend. America didn't want to see a collection of loosely-strung together rape scenes--basically the 9 Songs of rape, I take it--over Christmas weekend, but maybe New Year's?)

(**I'm starting to realize I might have to rent movies from iTunes from now on? Is that how it's going to be? Christ.) 

The other sign, for me, was that I didn't go to the movies very much this year. And I'm a big "going to the movies" guy, for lack of a better term (cinephile is not the right word for someone who saw Transformers 3). But I saw some movies that I liked, and here is basically my top ten:

10. The Other Guys

This movie came out in 2010, but I only got to it this year because nobody told me how fucking funny it is. Two words: Michael Keaton. That should be all you need to know. But if that doesn't work: Michael Keaton working at Bed, Bath and Beyond. But also: you know when you laugh half because it's funny and half because you were not expecting there to be a joke there? Imagine doing that for two hours. Gosh, when I write it like that it sounds so unpleasant! But it's not. Michael Keaton working at Bed, Bath and Beyond, okay?

9. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

Give Michael Bay a little credit. His learning curve is a long one, but it exists. After complaints about the incomprehensibility of the action in Transformers 2, he clearly made an effort to clean up the camera work and give us a few more wide angles. I could follow what was going on about 75% of the time. And I thoroughly enjoyed about 25% of that 75%. Which doesn't sound like much, but then you remember that it's about nine hours long. But seriously folks, the last 45 minutes of this movie is an action sequence that was totally bonkers-fantastic in the theater. I mean, there's a visual reference to Oldboy in there for fuck's sake! Of course we have to wait for Transformers 4 for Michael Bay to fix his other mistake: Shia LeBeouf. Oy, the Shia. I heard Jason Statham is the choice to topline the franchise from here on out, and I hope he will bring a new (British, charming) sense of humor to the proceedings. Because as we left the theater my friend Josh noted, "That was the douchiest movie ever." And in a way, that is sort of a compliment, but not really. 

By the way, I'm not entirely sure this is worth seeing unless you're watching it on a huge, 3-D screen (in a theater that smells like Axe Body Spray), so don't rush out to the Red Box or whatever you kids do these days. I see a DVD of this movie every day in the checkout line at the grocery store for like twenty-seven fucking dollars. Has anyone ever purchased a movie at a grocery store? The fuck? Anyway.

8. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows pt. 2

This movie was GREAT, So great. I was moved by it, I was thrilled by it. But I've been thinking about watching it again, and I kind of don't want to? Because HP 7 and 8 are fucking ordeals, you know? It's like climbing a mountain. When you get to the top, it's beautiful and you're so happy, but you're also kind of like, OK let's not do this again for a while. This was a feeling I once reserved only for the LOTR movies, which I have seen once and will probably never watch again (I saw them in the theaters, and own the DVDs, but I have never opened them). Apparently the Harry Potter movies have joined their ranks. One doesn't simply walk into the Battle of Hogwarts, Luke.

7. Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol

GHOST PROTOCOLLLLLL! This movie was ridiculous and I loved it so much. The action sequences are gorgeous, and there's a real wit to the proceedings that you don't really think about until later. And yes, Tom Cruise is a crazy person, but it turns out that can be an asset in the movie business (see the Burj Hotel sequence, for which Tom Cruise apparently did some of his own stunts. Being suspended a mile and a half in the air is apparently less scary when you're OT level 8 and could just levitate if you wanted to, I guess). WHO WOULDA THUNK!?!?!?

6. Breaking Dawn pt. 1

How on earth is this movie ahead of Harry Potter, you say? I can feel you angrily warming up your Tumblr dashboards. But hold up! I'm not saying BD is objectively BETTER than HP, I'm just saying the experience of watching it was way more fun. Yes, I hate everything these movies (especially this movie) stand(s) for. Does that mean they're not a fucking blast? No! I can compartmentalize the moral outrage. I'm very good at that. I would make a great sociopath.

The wedding scene was great (especially because it provided detail where the book lazily copped out), the honeymoon was actually sexy (I still want to see the original take that had to be cut because K. Stew was humping too hard, though), the body horror was sufficiently gross, and the birth scene was about as good as it could have been (except for the part where SPOILER ALERT Edward has pulled Renesmee out of Bella and Bella is fucking dying and Edward and Jacob are just kind of calmly strolling around the room for a few beats, what was that). And, again, the closing credits were killer.

I know I kind of broke up with Twilight earlier this year, but I still have some fond feelings for it along with the bitterness. This is our breakup sex. And I'm sure we'll have another drunken hookup in a year's time. It's called closure, okay?

5. Our Idiot Brother

I saw Mission: Impossible at a Regal Theater where they have that RPX sound-system shit. Are you familiar? It's super expensive and you basically pay two dollars extra to have your ears blown out, and I entertained myself while the deafening previews were happening with the thought of seeing like, a quiet indie comedy at a fucking RPX theater.

Anyway, Our Idiot Brother was great! It was assured and unassuming (and moderately funny), and it made no big deal out of the fact that like, EVERYBODY was in the damn thing. (Janet Montgomery was in it, so technically Ashley Greene sort of was too.) It was this year's Please Give (Have you seen Please Give? Please do), which is faint praise but in the very best way. Because not every movie has to be like, a big thing. Some movies can just be about a guy with a dog who has a family, you know? This will turn up on Netflix Instant sooner or later, at which point it will entertain you very thoroughly on a rainy day. And that's an underrated trait in movies! Okay, now back to the movies with explosions.

4. X-Men: First Class

Forget Weekend. The best subtle depiction of a realistic gay relationship was THIS MOVIE. I mean, just kidding, but not really? I wrote at further length about this a while ago, but the X-Men movies have struggled to integrate (ha!) the gay rights symbology with the civil rights symbology in the past, and this movie did, for the most part, a better job than the others (except for one ridiculously clunky, racist moment) symbology-wise. And also, Magneto was so badass! He's the top and Xavier is the bottom for sure, right? I'd let Magneto fuck me. 

3. Bridesmaids

Cut the scene where everybody shits themselves and this would be my favorite movie of the year. Because unlike, say, The Hangover, it was a comedy about recognizable humans. A lot of them. Everybody did a great job, especially Melissa McCarthy (duh) and Rose Byrne and that dude from the IT Crowd. And Kristen Wiig! She contains multitudes, and it turns out it’s not just “multitudes of annoying one-note SNL characters.” The dress-shitting scene kinda throw a wrench into all that (though there are bright spots within it, that sounds gross but it’s not). It was grafted on by Judd Apatow, and he and everyone else involved made sure to mention that fact a lot during interviews because it FELT grafted on, and I think they were sort of heading us off at the pass. But even with all that shit, this was such a good movie. For a bunch of girls. 

2. The Tree Of Life

When the credits rolled after I saw this thing, a few people scoffed and chuckled bitterly on the way out of the theater. Others were openly weeping. So, uh, that’s the range of possible experiences one could take away from this film (which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes this year). Yeah, Tree of Life gets a lot deserved credit for being basically the most beautiful series of images you will ever see on a screen, but I don’t understand the other half of the consensus, which is that there is no story. Guys, this story is so big that you technically have to say “spoiler alert” before you say “The earth forms.” Check it out if you haven’t yet.

1. Friday Night Lights season 1/Parks and Recreation seasons 3/4

One reason I didn't go to the movies much this year is because there was so much good TV at home. I know that Friday Night Lights is oldish but if you have been putting it off because UGH FOOTBALL you need to cut that shit out right now and watch. Season 1 is PERFECT. And Parks and Rec has been killing it at such a velocity that it almost makes me angry? Like, how is every episode somehow better than the last? What the fuck? It's great, please watch both of these shows, I have gained so much enjoyment from them this year, they were literally better than every movie. 

So there. Eight 2011 movies and some other stuff. What were your favorite movies this year? Get at me.

A Very Cullen Christmas

Edward Cullen carefully pulled his red Christmas sweater over his head and breathed a long breath through his nose. It was 8:25am.
“Merry Christmas, baby,” Bella said, leaning against her knees on their bed.
He turned sharply and stared through the cottage wall in the direction of his family's home.
“Relax,” she said. “It's a holiday.”
“Put some clothes on, Bella. This is the Lord's day.” Edward turned the corner to wake Renesmee.
Bella groaned, leaned back, and rolled onto her stomach.
“Are you coming?” Edward asked her impatiently upon returning.
“I'll follow.”
“Why do you always insist on having twenty minutes alone? What are you doing in here?”
“Just collecting my thoughts,” Bella said. “I'm still getting used to this vampire-brain. I need a little alone time."
“Speaking of your thoughts,” Edward said, softly now. “I think you should let me in there again.”
Bella giggled. “That's what your mom said to me in the shower this morning.”
Edward huffed, then stared into her eyes. “Let me hear you,” he implored.
Bella's face tightened in apparent concentration. “I can't do it, honey,” she said after a moment.
“I don't understand. You were so good at it for a few weeks there.”
“Well, you know, I really needed my powers when we were threatened by the Volturi,” she said quickly. “Maybe now the lack of danger...my powers are receding.”
“Hmmm,” Edward said. “Interesting. Perhaps I'll discuss that theory with Carlisle.”
“Yes, do,” Bella said, kissing him on the cheek. “I'll see you in a bit.”
Edward headed for the door and scooped up Renesmee, who was waiting patiently in the doorway.
“Come quickly, mommy,” Renesmee squeaked.
Bella chuckled. “I plan on it,” she said under her breath.
“What was that?” Edward turned.
“I said Merry Christmas,” Bella said.
“Merry Christmas,” he said, and left.

“What are you all doing?” Edward put Renesmee down and glared at his siblings. “I thought we were going to church!”
They were sprawled in various states of undress all over couches and on the floor in the living room.
“Happy holidays, Edward!” Alice said cheerily from the couch, where a Santa hat was the most significant article of clothing on her person.
“Seasons greetings!” Emmett coughed, wearing even less.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS,” Edward corrected. “Would you have the decency to hide your bodies in front of my daughter? Especially on this, the day of our Lord's blessed birth?”
“Would you have the decency to respect others' religious beliefs?” Rosalie, asked. “Especially on this, the December 25th Day Of General Holiday Celebration?”
“Our religion dictates that we lounge around naked,” Emmett said. “In fact, going to church is specifically prohibited.”
“Literally,” Jasper added, half-buried in beer cans on a reclining chair.
“You're trying to upset me,” Edward said. “This is a Christian family.”
“Not me,” Alice said, rising and wrapping a blanket around herself. “I'm Shinto.”
“You are not,” he said, crossing his arms.
“Sure I am,” she said. “See? Shin, toe!” And then she kicked him sharply in the leg.
Renesmee giggled.
“That's very insensitive. Are you coming or not?” Edward said haughtily. “I hope you understand what a sin it would be to do otherwise.”
“Bella's coming right now,” Alice grinned.
“I don't hear her footsteps,” Edward said.
“Well give her a minute to clean up!”
“Clean up what!?”
Emmett, Rosalie and Alice laughed hysterically. The beer cans on top of Jasper shook.
“I'm leaving,” Edward said, turning to the door. “Enjoy hell, losers.”
“Enjoy church, faggot.” Emmett responded.
“Whoa,” Alice said. “Not cool, bro.”

That evening, the Cullens exchanged gifts. Edward sat moodily in the corner, trying not to have any fun.
“Ron Paul's newsletters!” Jasper exclaimed, opening his gift. “This is literally the best present I've ever gotten!”
Rosalie opened her box and stared in curiously. “What is this?” she asked. She produced a blank notebook with the words 'You're Doing It Wrong' written in black.
“It's the title of your book about parenting,” Bella said. “I pulled some strings at Little Brown. You have to turn in a draft by February.”
“Bella, this is so thoughtful!”
Bella opened hers next. It was a remote control. “I don't understand,” she said.
“It controls my vibrating panties,” Alice whispered. “You're welcome.”
Emmett opened a new set of Lincoln Logs and Carlisle a new office chair and Esme opened nothing because everyone forgot she existed, even herself. And then it was Edward's turn.
Alice and Rosalie approached him, heads bowed. Rosalie thrust the package into his arms.
“Edward,” Alice said. “We realize that Christmas is important to you, and though we may be on different sides of the culture war I'd really hate to think I'd ruined this day for you. You are my brother and I love you.”
Edward smiled slightly. “So what's the book?” he asked bemusedly. “The Kama Sutra? Some other filthy piece of entertainment?”
“Just open it,” Rosalie urged.
So he did. It was a fragile thing, a very old Bible from Spain.
“It's gorgeous,” Edward said, turning it over in his hands. “Thank you.”
“Feliz navidad,” Alice said, making a 'jerking off' hand gesture for some reason.
“Whoa,” Jasper said. “I just realized that Christmas is LITERALLY Spanish for 'More Christ.'”
“Holy shit bro,” Emmett said. “You just blew my mind.”
“So, will you read us the story of Jesus's birth?” Alice asked, dancing in place. “Wouldn't that be a fun new tradition to start?”
“That's a wonderful idea, Alice,” Edward said, smiling.
“Is that story even in the Bible, though?” Rosalie asked.
“Um, I'm not sure actually,” Edward said.