Considering that I’ve never seen Midnight Cowboy or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it was a crap shoot…

Songs from the MoviesScore: 88% (14 out of 16)

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I’m feeling rather low and worthless these last two days due to a combination of running out of my medication and not having the money to renew it until Tuesday (the co-pay just keeps going up and there’s no generic for this one)… and feeling old… loser-like (upon finding out that several people I know are making scads more money than I - and having my brother say, “Didn’t you graduate from NYU? Shouldn’t you be making more than me?”)*

And now I’m the only one in my group of close friends who’s single (or not pursuing the time-consuming law degree that fills the role of a significant other), which in itself doesn’t make me sad, but it does make me feel like more of an outcast than usual… and I feel additionally pathetic knowing that my brother’s girlfriend (four years younger than I) found a new apartment that’s huge and affordable and would be ideal for me in all ways (within easy commuting distance of work, great for one person, allows cats)… if only I didn’t have to use over 50% of my monthly income to pay off debts (and should be paying more, though I just can’t).

It’s my own damn fault; I got myself into this hole and it’s been a long journey out of it… but there are moments/days/weeks like this when I beat myself up over it because I feel like I’ve been doing this FOREVER with no discernible improvement. Then I turn around and go, “Hey - you have a car now… and that’s another reason you don’t have fun money… car payments! At least feel good that you’re able to make those payments in addition to paying off your loans, even if it leaves things a little tight.” Still. Small consolation.

SO…

(1) No medication to provide that mental buffer
+ (1) No money
+ (1) Onslaught of negative and unhealthy thoughts
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= (1) Deeply unhappy and despairing girl, prone to crying, lacking appetite and wanting nothing more than to do some cleaning and sleep the rest of the weekend away, but lacking the energy to do the former and the restfulness to succumb to the latter.

Just sighing the sigh of infinite resignation for the umpteenth time (though I’m not a knight, nor do I compare myself to the characters in the philosophical treatise… I’m just saying that’s the sigh I’m sighing. Love it up. There’s not much else to enjoy.

* No, but it does mean that I can point out that he should’ve said, “Shouldn’t you be making [I would use earning] more than I?”

Also, I pointed out that he’s fairly miserable at his job and that I still LIKE getting up in the morning and going to work and I still love my job. He conceded on that point - “You’ve got me there. I’m not happy.” I’m not happy either, but I like what I do for the M-F 9 to 5.

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So my sister just told me about these commercials for an online dating site called Chemistry.com. I’ve talked to several people who tried the eHarmony.com personality profile thing and then, many many many questions later, got the “We’re sorry, but we are unable to match you with anyone at this time” message and wouldn’t let them join.

There are many theories on why this is so: that they have a bias against anyone who doesn’t specify a religion, that they won’t take you if you’re gay, that if you mark yourself as not being interested in children they shut you out… etc. I mean, after all, the dude who’s their founder (Dr. Neil Clark Warren) is an evangelical Christian and gives credit for their success to regular features on the Focus on the Family radio show. They’re all about the family values over there.

SO… this other dating service — in a stroke of genius, I must say — built their advertising campaign around that. It’s the “Rejected by eHarmony” ad campaign and I found several of them on YouTube. They’re pretty well done, I think, so here they are:

First, the “it’s because you’re gay” theory:

Next, the “if you are anything less than ecstatic all the time, you are a miserable wretch and don’t deserve a relationship theory”:

Last, the frustration of the post-free personality profile rejection:

There are two or three more: the “Dear John Letter”, the “I’m a Good Person” so check them out if you feel like it. I just think this is a terribly good example of leveraging a major shortcoming of a competitor and engendering customer loyalty from the get-go (the eHarmony rejects can rally together!)

This doesn’t mean I will be signing up; but it does mean that they have my respect and if I ever decide to try something like this, I will seriously consider them. But that’s a mighty big “IF”.

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There’s still stuff to be installed on this computer… still… but I’ve got most of them.

In the meantime, here’s one of those absolutely useless things that’s supposed to give you insight into yourself (which is a bit of a contradiction, no?) — Visual DNA.

It ends up being a ploy to get you to subscribe to yet another Web 2.0 social networking (dating?) site of some kind, but I’m just geeky enough to like taking a “test”, no matter how silly.

And here’s a snippet from one of my favorite discoveries of recent (six or so…) months - it’s the first episode of the Brit comedy series, “Black Books.”

Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey and Tamsin Grieg are hilarious. If you’ve seen “Shaun of the Dead”, you’ve seen Dylan and Tamsin. If you’ve seen “Hot Fuzz”, you’ve seen Bill. The three of them together are quite delightful. Oh, and liking British comedies is a big help; if you don’t like them, you probably won’t like this.

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The new computer is up and semi-running. Something’s wonky with the old one (network-related) and I haven’t been able to transfer all the files over… so I’m working at half-capacity.

But the funniest thing was that we decided to boot it up with Vista (which is what came pre-installed) and it crashed the very first time. Seriously - I re-typed my password, clicked “OK” and then got the blue screen of death. Without doing jack-shit.

Yay, Windows Vista. You lost me at that. XP is in place in your stead.

Also, I saw “Hot Fuzz” today. It was hilarious. Not as sparklingly brilliant as “Shaun of the Dead”, but fantastic just the same. I’m going to wander around for the next few days exclaiming, “By the power of Grayskull!” instead of “WOW!” as a result.

Friggin’ 11pm. I need to get to bed. Work tomorrow. This weekend (not surprisingly) flew by. Tonight, Bette Davis & Co. will be keeping me company through “All About Eve” on DVD.

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I’m pet-sitting through the weekend and brought along some DVDs, a book, crossword puzzles and knitting needles and yarn (just to mix it up).

One of the DVDs I brought along is “Babel.” I watched it tonight and ended up fast-forwarding through a fair bit of the movie since the drawn out, dialogue-free shots (with “world music” played over them) got very old very quickly.

Sure, I could convince myself that it’s enjoyable and talk about biblical references, the idea of Babel, the trope of communication/miscommunication/lack of communication and how going without dialogue for long stretches helps further those concepts… much like the deaf-mute girl’s experiences in a world of silence.

Somehow, though, that’s not enough for me to enjoy this movie. I get the point of the stories, the interweaving, etc. and I did feel sympathy for the children’s nanny, the Moroccan family, the American father, and the Japanese girl, as well as the Moroccan tour guide. There was an emotional connection, but this movie was structured to push those emotions onto you. That’s how it goes. There’s a place for it, but I don’t like the manipulation of emotions to be the crux of a movie’s impact; there wasn’t enough here for me to sink my cerebral teeth into.

And yes, I understood the irony and social commentary involved in the “terrorist attack” as well as the issues with the border patrol and embassy, or the wife’s xenophobia (and other phobias). Again, they were there, but not structured enough to make me WANT to sit through every single moment of the film to see what happened next. Instead, it made me want to fast forward through until the next bit of plot development occurred since it wasn’t doing it for me otherwise.

Also, was it me, or did Brad Pitt’s “make me look like a believable middle-aged yuppie husband” makeup just make him look really powdery? He should’ve been a leeeetle bit shinier after all that…. and don’t tell me the Moroccan dust acts as a mineral face powder. Nuh-uh. Meanwhile, they loaded all the grease they could onto Gael Garcia Bernal - for his character, appropriate. But not particulary necessary. Chicken scene? Appropriate and somewhat helpful.

Anyway - I shall stop pontificating. Doggie needs her nighttime walk and I need to set about my evening rituals.

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Or should that be gettin’ ’round to thinkin’ ’bout things?

Eh. So what I’m thinking is that rather than trying to maintain all these pages and craziness, I can scale down the site to what would essentially be three blogs: rants, movies and books.

Those really round out my interests, and I can incorporate stuff from LibraryThing for the books page, Netflix for the movies page (I can hook it up with an RSS feed to my selections/ratings) and the rest would be my regular daily stuff.

I would redesign it all; a clean new philosophy requires a clean new look. I’ve got more friggin’ books than I can read at once about CSS and web design and whatnot… so I should put that info to USE a bit more.

So… that’s what I’m thinking. It might be a nice way to spend a long weekend since I have ample vacation time and not much of a way to spend it. Maybe a nice weekend in May since I want to do this sooner rather than later. Admittedly, I have some freelance web design work to complete first… but I am waiting for CDs full of images without which I cannot proceed.

Oh! My new computer arrived. It’s sitting on my floor with a newly purchased DVI/VGA adapter in a bag on top of it. It’s all slim and sleek and nicely loaded. I have to wait until my brother has some time to help me set it up, though. Why? Well, I’m a little skittish about making sure that I’ve backed up all the necessary files from current computer to the network beforehand (and he can show me how to mirror the hard drive onto the server, I think - yes, I could look it up and teach myself, but if he shows me, I’ll pick it up more quickly), then I need to install XP over Vista (since we ordered after Dell started offering XP as an alternative to Vista - and now they’ll be offering Ubuntu - wah wah??) and get everything back up and running. Again, not hard - but I want to be sure that my *thinking* I know how to do this doesn’t result in effing things up when I learn that I don’t *really* know how about 30 minutes into the process. That would suck. Grandly.

OK. I’m supposed to hang out with my friend tonight and he texted me over an hour ago to say he was leaving work (which is about 25 minutes away); however, I haven’t heard anything from him since then. I’m hoping that he didn’t stop home to eat since I’ve been holding off on eating dinner since yesterday’s email indicated that food acquisition might be part of hanging out tonight.

Well, this is perfect down-time to use for folding laundry.

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