Let me start this post out with a request to all women, everywhere, but especially at my school:

PULL YOUR PANTS UP!

I don't let my plumber's crack hang out, so I don't think it unreasonable that you extend me the same courtesy. Especially if you insist on wearing satin thong panties.

...

Last night Marilyn and I stayed in and watched a couple of movies, Love Actually and Big Fish.

If you haven't seen Love Actually , here's the premise: imagine that Hell looks like modern day metropolitan England, where a Satanic parody of Christmas is celebrated, complete with nonsensical nativity plays. The inhabitants of Hell/London engage in what they consider to be love, but since love doesn't really exist in Hell, the best they can manage is lust. They believe that the primary importance of Christmas is to "tell the truth," which means to tell people about their desires without thought to the feelings of the recipient or the consequences of doing so (such as telling a recently-married woman that you love her and want her, or telling your prepubescent stepson - whose mother died a few weeks ago - that you want to have sex with a supermodel in his room). Splice in two storylines from a softcore porn video, a jab at Bush-era America (my own pet peeve, I know), a disturbing performance of Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" sung by a bare-midriffed eleven year old girl, and a promising cast full of well-known British actors and actresses doing their best to make you wonder why you thought they were so great to begin with.

Okay, the acting itself isn't really bad, it's just that the script is so brainless, it made me wonder why they all agreed to appear in it. I'm serious; if I didn't care about what messages I was sending to the world, I could have burped up this script in my sleep.

Fortunately, we saved Big Fish for seconds. Michael had told me that this was a good one, and his tastes have always proven to be spot-on. This was no exception. I really enjoyed it - the father reminded me a bit of my grandfather, who shares his penchant for telling his own life stories (though I think Grandpa's stories could stand to include more giants and witches and fewer technical details surrounding the operation of water storage systems). With my Brothers Grimm class and studies of the oral and literary tradition of fairy tales, I think I found it even more interesting...or maybe I just told myself that I did. Anyway, it was an excellent movie, and washed enough of the bad taste of that other movie out of my mouth that I could go to bed without feeling hollow and empty inside.