June 2008 Archives

So if you know me, you probably know I'm mildly obsessed with the show "Dallas" and that I'm constantly renting it off Netflix, and then locking myself in my house for 6 hours chunks of time because I can't stop watching it until the DVD is over.  It's awesome because that show was built on the cliffhanger principle, but with DVD technology, I can totally thwart that and watch the next episode seconds later.  (Except the end of season 3 when J.R. got shot.  I made myself wait the whole summer before I rented season 4, just so I would have to wait in intense agony like everyone else did that summer of 1980 or whenever that was.)

One of the problems with watching "Dallas" is that nothing is really ever going to surprise me.  I know most of the big plot points just from being alive when this was on.  And Wikipedia certainly doesn't help when I try to look up a certain actor and my eyes accidentally see a line that says, "And Miss Ellie marries Clayton Farlow in season 7..."

Speaking of season 7, I just finishing the last DVD of that set, which ends like this:



And even though I already totally knew that Bobby gets shot, and I totally knew it was in season 7, and I totally knew that this was the last episode of season 7....as I was sitting here in my house in my quiet neighborhood with all the windows open, and I screamed out "BOBBBBBBBYYYYYYYYY!!!" as if someone had just shot him in my own arms.  Maybe I should take a little hiatus, I might be getting a little too into it.  Again.

This is a second in a series of posts where I document the various stereotypes I observe in weird situations.  Last time I focused on the various characters at adults-only skate night, today I would like to outline the various stereotypes I encountered at last week's tennis camp.  Matt and I signed up for this intense clinic, it was about 2 and a half hours every night for a week.  With a bunch of people who took it waaaaay too seriously:

1. Middle-aged balding guys with something to prove
   Quantity: 1
   Uniform: matching black official tennis™ shirt and shorts, paired with radioactively white shoes
   Specialties: serving as hard as he could against lower level girl players just to be a douche, cussing when missing shots in warmup or other times it really didn't matter
   
   
2. Middle-aged Asian lesbians
   Quantity: 2
   Uniform: baggy shirts and shorts, wrist guards, short hair, glasses
   Specialties: looking androgynous, volleying, grunting
   
   
3. Asian girl who thought she was starring in her own tennis manga
   Quantity: 1
   Uniform: pigtail buns, expensive tennis dress, spandex coverings on shins and upper arms (?)
   Specialties: giggling, nodding at everything the instructors said, giggling, standing behind the instructors to point and help reiterate the points they were making as if she were their own personal Vanna White, taking way too much pride when they used her in example scenarios...and then ruining the example scenarios by putting shots away unnecessarily
   
   
4. Asian girl who was terrified of everything
   Quantity: 1
   Uniform: aeropostale tracksuit
   Specialties: making a very concerned face, making a very confused face, making a very scared face
   
   
5. The guy who had no business being in an intermediate class
   Quantity: 1
   Uniform: head-to-toe lacoste
   Specialties: hitting the ball out of bounds, hitting the ball into the net, hitting himself with his racket
   
   
6. The girl who did not take it all that seriously, joked around too much, and smarted off to the instructors, especially the cute ones (ahem, I mean YOU Federico)
   Quantity: 1
   Uniform: "ridin' dirty" motorcross t-shirt with a tennis skirt from target, these rad shoes
   Specialties: managing to be in the bottom level despite taking tennis lessons for 3 consecutive years, choking on important shots, laughing at everything
   
   

Did you catch that?  Number six is ME!!!

I'm not sure this even needs explanation.  The background of the screencap is the craigslist URL listed in the foreground/IM window of the screencap.



Christina moved to the U.S. when she was 16, so every now and then there is something that throws her for a loop.  And I can see how "banana seat" is confusing out of context.  But I love that she believed for a few minutes that there really was a piece of tiny furniture dedicated to fruit.

Oh, and the best part of this?  When she sent me this IM, she was eating a banana.

This is a followup entry to the time I told you about how I stayed up late to buy pre-sale tickets to see Dethklok.

The show was last night.  A dark, dreary, brutal kind of night.  It had become summery here in Seattle, but yesterday the storm clouds and the cold returned.  A perfect night for a metal show, I suppose.  I took notes on my phone, so rather than trying to craft a story about the whole experience, I think I will just include the out-of-context notes I took during the show here:

• two girls were dressed as rock n' roll clowns (who presumably do c-c-c-cocaine)
  
  
• I did not have to sign a liability waiver (although there was rain water dripping through lighting rigs and it was easy to imagine a mass electrocution)
  
  
• roadies did not wear executioner hoods (in fact one roadie looked like he could be Skwisgar's grandpa)
  
  
• plan of attack: stick close to guy in sleeveless Bathory tshirt

If you're wondering if they performed as cartoons or humans...the answer is both.  The humans came out and played in front of a big white projection screen, which played the appropriate clip from the appropriate episode when the appropriate song came on.  So it was kind of like watching a Monkees episode during a musical montage, where you're sorta watching a live performance, but you're sorta watching a TV show?  At the very beginning they showed a special clip of the council discussing the impending Dethklok tour and their plan to release a virus to all the people attending the shows.

And also if you're wondering, Dethklok fans look less like the uber-hot Toki Wartooth:


And a lot more like this: