Fun times with iTunes

It's Week 3 of the Dark Young Adult Blogfest: pick a soundtrack for a young adult book as if it were being made into a film.

The book: REMEMBER ME by Christopher Pike.

The synopsis:

When Shari Cooper awoke at home after being at her girlfriend's birthday party, her family acted like she wasn't there. They didn't hear a thing she said. They wouldn't even look at her. Then the call came from the hospital. Her father and brother paled. Her mother started to cry. Shari didn't know what was wrong. Not until she followed them to the hospital. There she found herself lying on a cold slab in the morgue. The police said that it was suicide. 

Shari knew she had been murdered. Making a vow to herself to find her killer, Shari embarks on the strangest of all criminal investigations: one in which she spies on her friends, and even enters their dreams -- where she comes face-to-face with a nightmare from beyond the grave. The Shadow -- a thing more horrible than death itself -- is the key to Shari's death, and the only thing that can stop her murderer from murdering again.

This was one of my favorite books in high school  and I strongly recommend reading it (and skipping the sequels).

So here we go.

Playlist:

"Cameo Lover," Kimbra

(Shari is getting ready for Beth's birthday party, on in the background as she gets ready)

"Paper Planes," MIA / "Pumped Up Kicks," Foster the People

(Beth's birthday party, prior to the seance) 

"Lost Cause," Beck

(Shari accompanies her family to the morgue)

"Jar of Hearts," Christina Perri

(Shari's funeral)

"West Coast," Coconut Records /"The One That Got Away," Katy Perry / "Thunderstruck," ACDC

(When Peter finds Shari at her grave site--flashback to Peter, alive in high school and then killed in the motorcycle accident--Peter explaining that his new ghost calling is to help other ghosts to cross over)

"The Underdog," Spoon

(To be used when Peter is trying to teach Shari about all her new ghost skills when she refuses to cross over until the murder is solved)

"Lost," Coldplay

 (When Shari is spying on Det. Garrett as he is investigating her friends and family and finds out that his daughter is a drug addict)

"Haunted," Taylor Swift

(When Shari decides to spy on her friends and family on her own)

"Moon River"

(When Shari spies on her brother Jimmy's black-and-white dream)

"Sexy and I Know It," LMFAO / "I Like the Way You Move" Body Rockers

(When Shari spies on her boyfriend Dan's dream and realizes he's having a sex fantasy about her and Beth)

"Renegade," Styx

(When Shari spies on Jo's dream and sees Jo as an old fortune teller)

"What Do You Want," Jerrod Niemann

(When Peter asks Shari to give up her investigation and cross over to the other side)

"Amen Omen," Ben Harper

(When the Shadow shows Shari a flashback of her entire life, from her birth to her murder.) 

"I Shall Not Walk Alone," Blind Boys of Alabama

(When Shari convinces her brother Jimmy to forgive her murderer so he can pop the air bubble in his heart/When Shari watches Jimmy get loaded into the ambulance/Peter returns to help Shari) 

 

"Bohemian Rhapsody," Queen / "Faithfully," Journey

(When Peter and Shari transform themselves into a devil and angel to scare Det. Garrett's daughter into giving up drugs to thank him for solving Shari's murder and saving Jimmy)

Now, obviously, there should probably be some instrumental sad/scary music in there.  I mean, I'm not really suggesting that Shari get thrown off a balcony to Foster the People, solve her own murder to a country song, or that the Shadow should chase her to Katy Perry.  But you get the basic drift.

And yes, I know there's some cheesy music on the list, but jeez.  It's already a movie about a seventeen-year-old ghost suspecting her friends of murdering her at a birthday party and covering it up--you need some levity or it will be a total downer.


***
I tend to find blog posts that are nothing but a string of embedded songs fairly annoying, but I also know it's kind of lame to just list some songs, knowing that most of us (me, at least) can't remember what a song sounds like just from it's name even if we do know it.

So here's some videos.

Kimbra:


MIA:


Foster the People:


Beck:


Christina Perri:


Coconut Records:


Katy Perry:


ACDC:


Spoon:


Taylor Swift (not the official video, of course, since there were a million teen girl posted ones that I didn't want to sort through):


Coldplay:


Moon River, Louis Armstrong version:


LMFAO:


Body Rockers (with some seriously terrible video quality):


Styx:


Jarrod Niemann:


Ben Harper:


Blind Boys of Alabama (shockingly, they don't seem to have an official music video. Please enjoy this awkward mash-up of images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Tiananmen Square):

Why mean trumps stupid - every time

A professor in law school once told us, "Ideally, you're only going to have cases where the opposing counsel is competent, reasonable, and accommodating, but when you don't, hope for vindictive over crazy and crazy over stupid. Stupid is the worst."

At the time, that seemed a little counter-intuitive. Wouldn't it be better to go up against someone dumb and slam dunk your case against them?

You might think so, until you've spent a little time in the lawyer trenches.  And then the rationale behind the formula

vindictive > crazy > stupid

becomes very clear.

A petty lawyer might at least be smart, and you can argue against smart.  More importantly, vindictiveness implies a measure of self-interestedness.  No matter how mean someone is, if you can show someone where their own best interest lies, you can negotiate with them.

A crazy lawyer will eventually reveal him or herself to be crazy.  More importantly, crazy can eventually be manipulated in turn because everyone wants something. 

But stupid is hard to nail down.

Any lawyer who opens a brief and thinks, "This? What is this? How do I argue against this?  Can I just write, 'Seriously?' in response?" knows what I'm talking about. My old professor was absolutely right.

Take The Walking Dead for example.*  If you've been watching it on AMC, you will probably be familiar with the following faces.

On the top you have Andrea, who is college-educated and depressed about the death of her sister.  On the bottom you have Merle, who is a hot-tempered racist drug addict and probably not completely right in the head.

And yet, anyone who is watching this show knows that as distasteful as he may be, Merle is the lesser of these two evils when it comes to Zombie Apocalypse.  Because Andrea may be moral and gutsy, and Merle a psychopath, but Andrea is dumb as a box of rocks.

Would Merle have insisted on wasting an arrow to mercy kill a zombie? No. Would Merle be alienating all his allies in the camp? No. Would Merle have shot at someone from a distance without knowing whether that someone was a zombie or a human? No.

But Andrea would.  Because you can't argue with fundamentally stupid. 

Five different people warned Andrea not to fire in the most recent episode of The Walking Dead, but she thought she knew better than them and did it anyway.

A smarter person would have thought, "Hey, some of our people are still out in the woods, I should wait and be sure" or, "All the guys are running up to him/it anyway, I shouldn't waste our finite bullet supply," or "Experience in Zombie Apocalypse has taught me that loud noises attract more zombies, perhaps a baseball bat attack would be preferable in this situation," or "Aren't four of my friends currently in the line of fire, and hasn't there already been one near-fatality because someone pulled a trigger without checking to see if the field is clear, and damnit, didn't I just learn to shoot YESTERDAY?"

But Andrea thought none of those things, and nearly killed the most valuable member of the camp. 

I'm not saying that one would want crazy, violent, racist Merle Dixon on your team. But I am saying he'd be easier to deal with than Andrea. Because even Merle would not have pulled that trigger.

Do you have any examples in film, TV or literature of a dumb character ultimately being a worse antagonist than a clever, evil one?




* Uh, yeah I fixate on particular books, movies, and TV shows for weeks at a time, why do you ask?

A Conversation: Blasphemy Edition

I went to breakfast awhile back with Diego and Echo in honor of getting the day off work (hurray!).  For some reason, the crucifixion came up.

Echo: And, you know, the crucifixion was obviously the worst part of His life.

Diego: Really? You think so? 

Ru: What if He had a really bad breakup that's not mentioned in The Bible?

Diego: What if Mary Magdalene gave Him the old, "You're sooo nice. Too nice, really" and hooked up with Judas?

Echo: You guys suck.

Tricky tricky

One of the many problems with home ownership is that a lot of people set out to screw you over, either deliberately or through their own negligence.

When I bought the Casa, my real estate agent recommended that we ask the sellers to include this Magical Insurance in their closing costs -- that way, if any major appliance or utility breaks down in the first year of home ownership, I can get it repaired or replaced for $60.

Well, a little while back my furnace stopped working.  The effort I went to in attempting "self help" shall not be recounted here -- way too long. 

The short story goes like this -- after awhile, I called my sorority sister Chrissy, who has a brother who does HVAC and recently located to New Denver.  Chrissy's bro spent a couple hours cleaning my furnace before letting me know that without the rest of his HVAC guy equipment, there was no more he could do.

But he told me to call my Magical Insurance provider and have them come out and fix it for a $60 fee -- and he told me there were two things that needed to be fixed and/or replaced.  But whatever I did, I wasn't supposed to tell the insurance company I already had an HVAC guy come out to look at it because they might try to invalidate my insurance.

So here's how the conversation went.

Insurance HVAC guy: Yup, looks like there isn't anything wrong.

Me: Oh ... really?  Because it turns on for a little while, and then turns off before it ever gets up to the right temperature.

Insurance HVAC guy: Are you sure?  It looks like it's going pretty well.  (At this point, he had been looking at it for roughly one minute.)

Me: Um, yeah, pretty sure. 

Insurance HVAC guy: Well, everything looks fine.

Me: Really?  There's not something wrong with that blower-motor thingy?

Him: Hmm.  I guess it is a bit dirty.  I could clean it, if you want.

Me: That would be super.  (And for $60, kind of the least you could do.)

Twenty minutes and a giant pile of dirt and cat hair later ...

Him: Wow, that was really dirty.  Well, everything should be in tip-top condition now.

Me: Oh.  So everything else is fine?  It's all clean and ... that temperature gauge isn't broken?  Because ... I googled it.

Him: (getting suspicious)



It's a fun game we played.

Good thing I work well under pressure ...

NaNo Update?

Not doing well.

I'm not giving up, but I am becoming more and more concerned about my lack of forward momentum. 

Luckily for me, I'm still the girl who wrote a 10 page paper on genetic drift theory in an afternoon!  When things get down to the wire, I get geniusy.

(I hope, anyway.)

thoughts on dog surgery

1. When I got Spence home, I thought about taking a picture of his undercarriage so I'd be able to compare levels of swelling and redness from day-to-day. But I have a work phone, and I don't want anyone to ever ask me why I have a picture of cauterized dog balls on it.

2. I kind of thought the Elizabethan collar would be cute.  It's not.  It's kind of mean and pathetic.

3. I suspect that Spence will someday forgive me for this -- in heaven.  I picture us up there on the clouds, him bounding around some giant column, and there will be lots of snuggling time.  And then he'll tell me, "You know that was a dick move, right? I mean, we're in heaven and now I'm over it, but I feel like it needs to be said."

Nice moves there, Clint Eastwood

Last night around 2 AM, I woke up to the sounds of a woman screaming.

I sat up in bed, panicked and confused.  The screams sounded like they had maybe come from the basement ... or possibly outside.  And really, those two are very different places.

For a second, I was frozen, but then I was spurred to action when I heard a creaky floorboard and had an amorphous thought along the lines of, "What would Daryl Dixon do?"  I know that's a nerdy admission, but seriously.  How am I supposed to believe that I could survive zombie apocalypse if I can't even search my own perimeter?

I grabbed my cell phone to light my way as I investigated my house and potentially call 911.  Actually, mostly the 911 thing. I'll be honest, I actually did the pause-with-your-hand-hovering-over-the-doorknob thing while I tried to listen for the sounds of footsteps out in the hall.

(Memo to self: Bring baseball bat in from car trunk.)

I checked to make sure the doors were locked and the windows were secure.  They were.

I peeked outside to the street to make sure an assault wasn't going on in my sleepy little neighborhood.  Nope.

Then I checked my room, to make sure that the murder hadn't slipped past me in the dark to hide in my closet, which is what I would if I were murderously inclined.  But there were only my clothes and shoes.

I started to feel foolish and wonder if I'd dreamed everything up.

And then I remembered what the screams had sounded like -- shockingly realistic -- and wondered if I should grab Spence and lock myself in the bathroom (which, memo to future murderers, is the only room on the first floor of my house that locks).

I thought about waking Diego and Hannah to help me search, and then realized if I did, I would no longer be heroic Zombie Fighter, but the Shrill Stupid Female who mistakes a neighbor's cat for an intruder.

So I decided I must have just had a really vivid dream, given that I couldn't find evidence of any ne'er-do-welling, and got back in bed. After, of course, letting Spence out of his cage to sleep in my bed so his finely tuned canine senses could alert me to any intruders, and briefly picturing the Rubber Man from American Horror Story watching me from a shadowy corner when he refused to lie down and stared at the door all night.

(I officially watch too much TV.)

...

...

...


And then this morning, as I puttered around the kitchen making breakfast for myself and Spence, Hannah came up to start the coffee maker and announced, "I had a night terror last night."

I stopped pouring yogurt over my cereal.  "A what?"

"You know, a night terror.  A nightmare so bad you wake up screaming.  I get them from time-to-time."

My jaw dropped.  "I knew it!  I heard screaming so I searched the house to investigate but I couldn't find anything!"

Hannah laughed, embarrassed.  "Oh yeah, sorry dude.  That was me.  I've done it a few times before.  Awkward that it was loud enough to wake you up, though."

The very best part of this story?

According to Hannah, after she sat up in bed screaming, Charlie looked over at her from his dog crate, huffed a little, and laid back down.

So in the event any of us are really being murdered, our first and last line of defense is apparently me with a bat -- because the pit bull is so over it.