When Darin bought his car, 16 or whatever years ago, one of the things the dealer threw in with the package was training at driving school in order to become a better driver. It was a great class, and if I could remember the name of it, I’d include a link. I think we can all use refresher courses on how to be a better driver.

One of the important soundbites I took away from that day was to forget the old mantra, “Look where you’re going.” That’s stupid. That’s how people drive off of cliffs. They see the cliff, they drive off of it. No, the thing they said was “Look where you want to go.” If you want to stay on the road, focus on the road. After you’ve driven for a while, you don’t have to instruct your hands on how to turn the wheel (remember how tiring that part of driving was?) and you’ve got a relationship with your feet on how heavy to ride the pedals. No, your job is to point the car correctly. Your autonomic functioning takes over after that.

Doing those “gratitude journals” and stuff sounded so hokey to me when I first heard of them. Let me rephrase: I absolutely love hokey stuff, but not when it substitutes for, y’know, actual work. So often things like gratitude journals are described as being modern versions of magic spells: do this and this and this, and you get X, Y, and Z in return. Suh-weet deal.

But, when I thought about it, I decided that a gratitude journal wasn’t supposed to take the place of anything else. Focusing on things I was grateful for — whether inside or outside of myself — is always good. I force myself to look at the good things in life, because like so many other people if I don’t work hard at it, I ruminate over the bad things that happen.

You know, the old hokey saying “Energy flows where attention goes.”

Note the similarity there to “Look where you want to go.”

I’ve mentioned in an entry a while back that I like the Happy Tapper’s Gratitude Journal for iPhone app. (There’s an iPad version too.) These apps are good-looking, they’re cute, they’re fun. They make it Not Hard to write down your 5 things every day.

After a while of doing this, your brain gets very good at picking out the good things about the day. You focus not on what makes you upset or angry, but what makes you happy, what gives you energy or peace or joy.

And doing this is especially good during the times you’re angry and you want to knock someone’s block off.

Which happens to be where I am right now. Seriously. I’ve been seriously rethinking my values and what kind of person I want to be, because someone I know seems to have done something bad to me, and I’m wondering how to respond.

While I was thinking about this situation, I saw the following quote (while I’m putting up quotes and epigrams) from Abraham Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

I don’t want to be that person.

I want to be the kind of person who looks forward, who doesn’t let the turkeys get her down, and who doesn’t use her blog to really hurt someone back. Because I know full well that I could. I have a very high Google ranking. I could really do some damage, simply by putting something here, even if no one ever reads it.

It was kind of scary to realize that I was the kind of person who’d ever consider doing that.

I’m not going to focus on bad things. I’m going to go find ten things in my life today that I’m grateful for, that make me happy, that make me feel alive, and reset my brain.

The cool thing is, I can even think of one thing I’m grateful about in regards to this situation (that I’m being deliberately oblique about), and I’m not being snarky at all. You really can retrain your brain.

Some years ago I read a review (maybe in the Guardian, or maybe in some mystery-centered blog I was following) that was gushing/ecstatic/over-the-top glowing about a book called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that had just come out in the UK. I checked on Amazon; no such book had a page. I figured it was a Swedish novel that wasn’t coming to the US. So I ordered it.

In hardback.

From the UK.

When I read it, I thought, “Darin’s going to kill me if he finds out how much I paid for a book that I absolutely loathe.”

I managed to finish it and put it away, out of sight, out of mind.

At which point The Girl came to the US, and there’s been tons of gushing/ecstatic/over-the-top glowing about it and I’ve been baffled. What is wrong with you people?

When I heard there was a US remake of the Swedish movie coming out, I thought, Nope, not seeing that. But then it was David Fincher directing…and Steve Zaillian writing… and there was nothing else to see last night…

And…I still don’t get it. Actually, it’s even worse than that. I think you people are insane.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the story of a disgraced journalist (Daniel Craig) who gets a hail-Mary pass from a wealthy industrialist (Christopher Plummer) who will pay him a huge amount of money to use his amazing deductive skills –

(During the scene where Plummer hires Craig, Darin leaned over to me and said, “This is a total wish fulfillment story.” I said, “Oh yeah.”)

– to investigate the murder of a girl on a remote island 40 years ago. He is aided in this quest by the antisocial, yet amazingly brilliant and super-competent Rooney Mara. Because of the Law of Conservation of Movie Stars (“Today’s movie budgets don’t allow you to fill the whole movie with stars, so if there’s an actor you recognize in a small role, you can bet they’re important”), it’s not hard to figure out who the bad guy is. The Law of Conservation also allows you to figure something else out ahead of time, but I’ll leave that to the viewer.

Let me get the good out of the way: the direction, the art direction, the acting, and the dialogue were great. This feels like a European movie, as opposed to most American movies, which feel like they were filmed on a Universal backlot (even if they were filmed on location). Everyone (except Craig) has a Swedish accent (with various degrees). The score by Trent Reznor is great.

I still hated it. There are so many problems with this movie, most of which come from the source material.

The original title of the book in Swedish was Men Who Hate Women, and that’s a more apt title than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Everything about this story has to do with violence, particularly sexual violence, toward women. Drew McWeeny at HitFix had a good essay recently about when are we, the Viewers, going to start drawing the line at depictions of rape and sexual violence in movies? Is that a good topic for drama or for crime? Of course. But as McWeeny and others have pointed out, often it’s all we get. And we’re offered sexual violence and that’s supposed to be meaningful in and of itself. Even worse, it’s often so explicitly offered that it’s not violence, it’s pornography: it’s meant to titillate.

There’s a whole bit of backstory, just touched on in the movie (I can’t remember whether it’s dealt with more in the novel or not) about Sweden’s history with the Nazis. Huh, that’s interesting…but never pursued. One of the bad guys was involved with the Swedish Nazi party. Is that part of what he did? We don’t know. Is it coincidence that he was a Nazi and a psychopath? Are we simply supposed to equate Naziism with psychopathy? (If so, congratulations: you’ve just cheapened one of the most complex psychological and political situations we’ve ever had to face on this planet.) The whole reason one whole series of girls dies is because they’re “Jewish” or “immigrants” — a factor never explored, just touched on, as though, y’know, we all know about that.

The murder mystery involves several generations of a wealthy Swedish industrialist’s family. There’s a particularly…unusual…psychological dynamic between one of the mid-40s generation and one of the mid-60s generation that’s an important part of the story, and we’re never given any idea how in the hell this happened. Did one teach the other? Does it run in the family? Is it just that they’re Swedish? Or is living on this island making them crazy? We don’t know. We’re just supposed to take it as given that such a thing is possible and apparently no one else in this family, who all live in close quarters, ever noticed. Um, okay.

Much more up close and personal, however, is The Scene, and then The Aftermath Scene. In case you haven’t heard, one of the main characters gets raped, extremely brutally. (She actually gets raped twice, but people pretty much only refer to the second rape when talking about “the horrible rape scene.”) This happens on-screen in the movie; it goes on for pages, with extreme detail, in the book. She then exacts her revenge, in a similarly brutal way, also explicit in book and movie.

The entire point of these scenes in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is that as a result of all of this she gets money. That’s it.

I’ve read a number of places that “Oh, this sets up some stuff in the later books” — I don’t care. In this movie and this book, the end result of two rapes and a revenge assault is that she gets money. She gets access to her own money without any consequences whatsoever. That’s the entire point of this story arc in Dragon Tattoo and it infuriates me.

She isn’t affected emotionally — she not only has other lovers right away, she becomes so emotionally involved with one of them that she undertakes a ridiculous, over-the-top international scheme to right a wrong done to Daniel Craig’s character. She’s not overly clingy or emotionally needy; she isn’t standoffish. No, she’s perfectly well-adjusted sexually and emotionally. Horrifying, painful rape? No problem! Horrible physical and mental assault you perpetrate on someone else? Just do it! You’ll barely remember it happened five minutes later.

She isn’t affected physically. She has no concern about strangers, about her own body, about where she is at any time.

She isn’t affected at all. The same extraordinarily gifted, socially-maladjusted woman we see at the beginning of the movie is exactly the same at the end of the movie.

I haven’t worked in rape counseling…can anybody tell me if this is how it works?

I also got the feeling, from the book and movie and from lots of reactions I’ve read, that we’re supposed to see Salander’s Revenge Assault as “empowering.” That we’re supposed to cheer her on because “he deserved it.” I got a different message from it: if you’re a technical genius who happens to film her own rape and if you happen to have access to lots of computer equipment and if you’re willing to engage in horrible, bloody assault, you are empowered. Otherwise, suck it: you’re a wimp.

The best thing in this movie is that apparently absolutely everyone in Sweden uses Macintosh, so that’s good.

(I totally forgot to mention at least 25% of this movie is people staring at photos or at newspaper clippings or computer screens, and then they react as though they’ve seen something incredibly significant…that’s completely non-obvious to us, the viewer. It’s not deeply interesting dramatically, to say the least.)

The Oscars. Like, who cares, right? Well, clearly we all do, because there are still billions of electrons devoted to talking about them every year. It’s funny how important the Oscars are sometimes and how completely forgotten they are the rest. Like, “OMG Emma Thompson has an Oscar for writing!” or “Jeremy Irons, Oscar-winner.” Of course, Hilary Swank has two Best Actress statues, for all the good they’ve done her. Most people have never heard of her.

Anyhow. This year’s nominations were announced this morning. (By the way, Oscars people: your site completely sucks in look and layout. Look into this, would you?)

Since I haven’t been posting about the movies we’ve seen this year (something I want to change, because after a while I can’t remember what I thought of a movie, and it’s fun to go back and look), I’m going to look at the movies nominated for Best Picture and say a few words about the ones we saw (listed in alphabetical order, since that’s how I got them off of the site).

The Artist

Between The Artist and Midnight In Paris, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m seeing the same cuts of film that everyone else is. People seem to be going batcrap insane over The Artist and I’m like…”Wha’?” Yes, lovely, it’s a silent film made today. It has gorgeous set design and the two main actors, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo are extremely charming. But…but… The Artist the story of a major silent film actor (Dujardin) who loses everything when sound comes into movies and the Great Depression hits. A young woman who’s been a big fan of his for years becomes a big star but still cares deeply about this man when he becomes a washed-up, self-destructive alcoholic.

That’s right, folks: we have yet another movie where the woman exists to make the man feel better about himself. Bérénice Bejo’s character has no existence other than to make life better for Jean Dujardin. True, unlike most movies today, she did get more speaking lines and she didn’t have to have sex with him in order to prove he was heterosexual. But what we have here is not an improvement over that kind of crap.

Rated: Did. Not. Like.

The Descendants

We liked The Descendants a lot — hey, the cinematography convinced us to give Kauai a try, you know? The Descendants tells the story of a man (George Clooney) whose wife enters an irreversible coma after a boating accident, whereupon he has to get to know his kids again and he gets to know his wife more than he did when she was awake. Among other things, she was having an affair, and George decides he needs to track down her lover.

It’s much like Alexander Payne’s other work (Election, Sideways, About Schmidt) — it’s pretty low-key, and pretty realistic in terms of reactions. What do you do when you’re in the situation? Movies would have us believe that people operate at the peak of their emotions all the time. It’s so low-key, though, that it feels minor. What are we supposed to get out of all of this? I don’t know. A subplot involves Clooney’s extended family owning one of the last large parcels of land in Hawaii and planning to sell it for half a billion dollars. I don’t know about you, but when I start hearing numbers like that my understanding of the problems involved goes way down. Oh bummer, to whom do you sell you land for outrageous sums of money? Several of the questions Alyssa Rosenberg of Think Progress raises in this entry occurred to me too while I watched this movie.

And, honestly, I can’t believe George Clooney is up for Best Actor for this. He’s good — hey, he has us believing that George Clooney’s wife would cheat on him — but I’m kind of stunned at the accolades he’s gotten.

Rated: Good. Not stunning.

Hugo

Hugo is the story of a boy who lives in a Parisian train station and changes the lives of everyone around him. He’s completely alone…yet manages to create a family out of the strangers he meets and change many lives. It’s a very charming film, with fabulous cinematography (funny how you don’t think cinematography really matters, until you see a film that uses it to its utmost) and great performances (too many to list, but I liked just about everyone in this movie). It really does transport you (heh) to another time and place.

It’s also a good family film. We all enjoyed it, on different levels. And man, is that really difficult to do these days.

The downside of Hugo is, as Darin put it after we saw it, that a huge part of the emotional payoff comes from the characters’ love of movies. I can’t quite explain that without recapping the entire film, but trust me on this. And…well…we love movies. I love movies so much I moved Darin to LA so I could go to film school! There’s nothing I’d rather discuss all day long than movies!

And I’m not as invested in film as these characters are.

So I’m left a little cold by the ending, which should instead fill me with emotion and sentimentality and the rest.

(My friend Otto, who loves film as much as I do (more, probably), succinctly summarized the problem with the climax of Hugo with “that end had moments approaching ‘this is the part of the awards show where Scorsese’s acceptance speech talks about the importance of film preservation’” and he is dead on correct about that.)

However: the performances are great, the look is awesome (the rare movie that needs to be seen in 3D), and I did feel completely transported to another world and time.

Rated: Excellent

Midnight in Paris

Okay, this is the movie from last year that completely sets me off.

This is the one that makes me wonder if I’ve seen a bad print of the movie.

Because this movie annoyed the hell out of me and I rant about it at every opportunity.

Screenwriter Owen Wilson is in Paris with fiancée Rachel McAdams and her unbelievably annoying parents. He is wondering whether he should pursue financial success as a screenwriter (check out the hotel room they’re in) or follow his first passion, novel writing. Owen discovers a portal back to 1920s Paris, where he meets the amazingly hot Marion Cotillard and hangs out with the social circle of Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald and the whole Lost Generation crowd. And of course Owen Wilson fits right in with them.

Ken Levine is totally right with his Pet Peeves About The Dialogue – the dialogue in this movie is oh-my-god fake. The tensions and conflicts are horrifying fake and 1980s sitcom-level (not a compliment). The intellectual pretensions (mostly in the scenes with Michael Sheen, but all of it, really) made me grit my teeth — it’s not a remarkably intelligent conversation if I can spout all the same nonsense several lines ahead of you. And the direction? Holy crap. There is one scene where Cotillard and Wilson are walking along the street where it looks she’s spending all of her concentration searching for her mark, finds it, stops, turns, and says her line. It was the most amateurish thing I’ve seen in a movie in a while, and believe me, I’m not blaming the actress for that one.

And all of the women in this movie…that’s right, we have a winner! They exist to prove to the man that he’s worthwhile. Because that’s what we do, apparently.

I can’t even tell you about whether the acting was any good or not. I was so overwhelmed with the rest of the crap in this movie. The only thing I remember liking unreservedly was Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali. Hilarious. Also, about two minutes total on-screen.

Rated: UGH. <STAB> HATE.

Moneyball

We saw this whenever it came out (checking with IMDb…September? Really? That’s usually a dumping ground for movies, but…okay). I still remember it positively, perhaps amazed by the dialogue, which was delightful, and the fact that somehow the screenwriters (among them, the ultimately credited/nominated Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, but others got in on the action too) managed to make a business book about baseball a pretty good movie about what little teams face when competing against the big guys. How thinking different can actually pay off…well, until the big guys start thinking that way too, and then you’re screwed.

I don’t know whether Brad Pitt can act or not, but he certainly is a movie star: he is completely comfortable on-screen with what he’s doing, and he’s always interesting. I don’t think that means Best Actor though.

Rated: Very good.

As for the other movies on the list:

• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: I haven’t heard anything about this movie. I’ve never heard of a major motion picture that so completely doesn’t exist on anyone’s radar. Maybe it’s just been overwhelmed by other movies during December, I don’t know.
• The Help: I’ve heard this book is the best thing since sliced bread and the performances in the movie are great. Nevertheless, it really looks like another “story about black people focusing on the white main character” tale and that’s just tiresome now.
• The Tree of Life: All I’ve heard about this is “Terrence Malick,” which is enough to make me not go. I guess that makes me a Philistine. Well, okay.
• War Horse: If we see this, it would be with the kids, I guess. I don’t know enough about it. I don’t know anyone who’s seen it, either.

Here is everything I know on the subject of writing:

“Put black on white.”
– Guy de Maupassant.

Seriously. All of writing comes down to actually doing the writing. And doing it some more.

Oh, need more? Okay.

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
– Ernest Hemingway

Look at a professional’s story. Now look at yours. Now back to the professional’s. Do you know where you went wrong? Do you know why your stuff isn’t as good, as polished, as exciting, as whatever? Work on it. Just because you know the alphabet doesn’t mean you know jackshit about arranging it in the right order.

Sigh. Still not enough? Here goes.

1. Nobody cares whether you write or not. Honestly. We get so many stories bombarding us each and every day (TV, movies, the Internet, blogs, Twitter, Facebook updates) no one’s going to notice whether or not you do yours. So if you want to be a writer for any other reason than you can’t imagine a better way of spending your time, just stop now. There are easier and more pleasurable ways to get money, sex, and fame than typing.
2. Write everything. Fiction, plays, newspaper articles, diary entries, poetry, letters to the newspaper, fan fiction.
3. Write what you know? Fuck that. Write what turns you on, write what excites you, write what you want to read. If you don’t want to sit down and write it, we don’t want to sit down and read it. What book do you want to go buy? Write it.
4. Finish what you start. (This is my personal bête noire.) Everyone has fun with the initial burst of energy when you start a new project. Go through the long slog, because that’s when you really learn how to create.
5. Your writing is never going to be good. Do it anyhow. Imperfect and real stuff >> perfect, nonexistent stuff. No reader in history has ever pointed to the brilliance of a book someone was going write “someday.”
6. Stop waiting for someone to tell you your work is any good or you have promise or whatever. YOU have to know if you’re good. It’s really as simple as that.
7. If no one goes out of their way to tell you you’re good, you’re only just kinda all right. “All right” is my gentle way of saying your work is mediocre. Try harder. Try bigger. Try bolder. Read your stuff with a critical eye — honestly, would you shell out hard-earned money for what you’ve written?
8. When you get criticism, hear what they’re telling you, not what they saying. I’ll let you in a secret: When someone says there’s a problem with your work, they’re right. When they tell you what the problem is, they’re almost guaranteed to be wrong. Most writers wouldn’t know a story if it came up and bit them on the ankle, why on Earth would a non-writer know how to fix a story? Readers always know when something’s wrong though.
9. Creativity is a muscle. You have to use it. You have to work it.
10. I need a tenth thing? Stupid lists of ten.

And, oh yeah, the best writing advice (and possibly life advice) ever:

Nobody knows anything.
– William Goldman

Everyone who gets into the Curly Girl method develops their own routine, depending on the type of hair she has and the time of the year. Yes, what you do during summer is probably different than what you do during winter.

The Naturally Curly site refers to your hair type as 2 (wavy), 3a (lightly curly), 3b (much curliness), 3c (extreme curly), and 4 (kinky). But what your “number” is doesn’t tell you much about what your hair needs and what it will respond well to. Instead, what you need to know is what the three main elements of you hair are:

1. Texture: The diameter of a strand of your hair — Fine, Medium, Coarse. Fine hair needs completely different treatment from coarse hair.
2. Porosity: The ability of the hair to retain moisture. Curly hair tends to be drier than straight hair, so how much moisture it can hold — or be forced to hold — is important.
3. Elasticity: The ability of the hair to stitch and return to its original length without breaking. Often an indication of whether you need more protein or less protein in your hair care regime. You can test this by taking a wet strand of hair and stretching it: it should stretch to at least 50% of its original length without breaking.

My hair is Fine, Normal porosity, and Normal elasticity. I went ahead and got a Curl Genie hair analysis from Curl Wizard anyhow, and it ended up confirming what I thought (and recommending lots of products I already used). Lots of posters on Naturally Curly have been surprised by the response they’ve gotten, so if you’re having trouble figuring out your hair, you may want to check this out.

When I started going crazy doing Curly Girl stuff I bought a LOT of hair products. (Honestly, it’s a good thing Darin doesn’t poke around in my cabinets. Or if he does, he’s kept quiet. Probably from the terror.) There are so many elements to doing one’s hair, and it’s so much fun trying different things together. I started keeping a diary of what I used on what day, the results on that day, and how it turned out the next day.

After a LOT of trial and error, I’ve found products that work really well for me. Almost all of the products have a lot of protein, because I have yet to find an upper-limit for how much protein my hair wants. Other curlies find that using protein products completely kills their hair and makes it dry and brittle. (In fact, I’ve had hairdressers tell me to avoid protein, and they’re just wrong, for my hair type.)

• Shampoo: This is very infrequent for me — maybe once a fortnight or once a month. I like Giovanni Tea Tree and Giovanni Smooth As Silk, both from Whole Foods.
• Conditioner: I use GPB and Nature’s Gate, both available from Whole Foods. I can’t even comb my hair in the shower if I don’t use a protein conditioner; otherwise, it’s too tangled and I pull half of my hair out.
• Leave-in conditioner: This tends to flatten my hair. I’ve put a dime-sized amount into super-wet hair and my hair just hangs there after it dries. You’re supposed to use this especially during winter, but that may be better advice for a colder and drier climate.
• Frizz control: I’ve only found one product for this — CHS Curl Keeper, which smells like burning tires but gives me NO frizz whatsoever.
• Curl enhancers: I know, you have curly hair already, why do you need more of it? Curl enhancers define the curl and keep them tight and springy, whereas they might droop and lose their mojo later in the day. The two I use are AG: Recoil and Pink Boots curl creme (which is a house-brand for Boots chemists and I have to import it via Britstore! But the creme is awesome and Britstore has great service, so I do it). No-Poo Jillipoo tells you how much Pink Boots to use — I use more than this, but not by much.
• Gel: This is a huge category. Light gels, medium gels, firm hold gels, extreme gels. Curlies use gels on top of gels. Some use one gel when the hair is wet and another when it’s halfway dry.
• Protein treatments: an intensive protein treatment, even for curlies who don’t need that much protein, done once a week or every two weeks. You can make your own protein treatment with unflavored gelatin.
• Deep treatments: an intensive moisturizing treatment, done once a week or every two weeks, usually right after the protein treatment.

I’m sure I’ve left a lot of categories off. But look at that! Imagine the shopping opportunities!

These days, in this very chilly and dry winter we’re having here in the Bay Area, my hair care regime is wash with conditioner, comb through, then take about a quarter-sized dollop of Pink Boots, rub it between my hands, and while bent over at the waist scrunch it up into very wet hair. I generally do a count of 6-8 scrunches to make sure the product has worked its way into my hair and is totally off my hands.

Then I follow with the single best product I use BAR NONE: Kinky Curly Curling Custard.

The first time I bought this I didn’t get how to use it. It had a weird texture and smelled kinda like vanilla and kinda…just weird. I hadn’t gone through the process of trying various things and then writing down the results. Once I did that, it was very clear what KCCC did for me: it gave me big clumpy curls that held their shape, with very little frizz.

After I apply Pink Boots (or AG: Recoil; gotta mix it up a little every so often), I take a good-sized dollop of KCCC and scrunch in it, once again doing the 6-8 count of scrunches.

A good-sized dollop

Then, depending on how it feels, I might do a second dollop, really giving the hair a good scrunching to get the product in and simultaneously squeeze the water out.

Then I use a towel to scrunch water out, and then I plop for maybe 30 minutes.

When my hair is about half-dry, I take another dollop of KCCC and scrunch it in/smooth it over the hair. This is called the Smasters method at Naturally Curly, and it doesn’t work for everyone, but it seems to add a nice layer of sheen to my hair. Then I pin everything up again and let it air dry.

Once the hair is dry, I get the fun of “scrunching out the crunch” — bending over at the waist (yes, again: you can do your hair AND practice flexibility!), and gently crushing the gel casts on my hair. The hair has absorbed the gel and will hold its shape, but I don’t have to keep the hard, crunchy gel layer. (That’s why you do all this stuff when the hair is wet.)

The downside of KCCC is that the hair can take forever to dry. I’m fairly patient, but if you’re not, here’s how to blow-dry your hair. You MUST have a diffuser, or you’re going to kill your hair.

The only way to blow-dry hair and not get the frizzies

1. Load up a clump of wet hair in the diffuser.
2. Hold the clump against your head so that it doesn’t move.
3. Only then turn on the hairdryer.
4. Leave the hairdryer against your head. Under no circumstances move the hairdryer while it’s on. If you move the hairdryer while it’s on against your hair, the hot air ruffles up the hair shaft and you have just bought frizzy hair for the day. Don’t do that. The hair must dry in place.
5. When you can’t stand it any more, turn the hairdryer off.
6. Then pull it away from your head.
7. Repeat with a new clump of hair. You may have to redo clumps.
8. When the hair is fully dry, scrunch out the crunch.

Sometimes it’s just easier to let it air dry.

Periodically (like, since 1996) I’ve done these recaps of what Darin and I have been watching, and while it might not be very interesting for you, it’s extremely interesting to me to unearth one of these things. “Oh yeah, Homicide. I remember that show. Kinda. ‘Detective Pembleton will see you in the Box now!’” Or… “Dexter. ZOMG that show got so bad. Is it true they have him hooking up with his sister now (and she, of course, is played by his ex-wife)?”

We still buy all of our TV from iTunes and, with the exception of having (so far) missed out on Homeland, we haven’t felt we’ve been missing anything. I also have no idea what day or network any show airs on any more. If that vision of the future doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of TV execs, I don’t know what will.

In no particular order:

• The Simpsons. Yes, still. It is SO HILARIOUS this year. There was one episode that made me go, “GAH, they have lost their MINDS,” but the rest of them have been so funny all season. “The Book Job”!
• The Good Wife: Darin’s been watching this for a while and I started watching it with him. Basically: Alan Cumming. Also: really good writing. But mostly Alan Cumming being extremely awesome.
• Modern Family: It’s amazing how funny they make such ordinary situations. We watch this with the kids.
• Doctor Who: Well, duh. Matt Smith is The Man. The whole family watches this.
• 30 Rock: Alec Baldwin is probably certifiably insane in real life, but MY GOD he is ridiculously talented. He could read the ingredients of dishwasher detergent and I would laugh so hard I would cry.
• Community: Craziness, banality, hilarity, and wow, am I going to miss this show. The kind of chemistry Danny Pudi and Donald Glover have is unbelievable.
• Futurama: This show misses the mark more often that it hits it, but we’re still fans. I’m not sure what that means.
• Sherlock: Benedict Cumberbatch is also The Man. I’m not sure what it means that The Man keeps showing up in Steven Moffat shows.
• Leverage: This is our “Put something on that requires absolutely no involvement whatsoever” show. If we have nothing else in the queue, or we’re tired but don’t want to go to bed, we watch this.
• Chuck: Or rather, we would watch this, except the current and final season isn’t on iTunes. Why they wouldn’t put a show nerds would love on iTunes, I have no idea. Eventually I’m going to forget to keep checking iTunes. Alas.

Eventually we’re going to watch Game of Thrones, The Wire, and Treme. We’ve bought them, we just haven’t watched them. Whenever Darin says, “You want to watch The Wire?” I feel myself tensing up. This blog post from A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago speaks to me.

(Wow. Looking at that list, I’m quite surprised: I thought we watched more one hour dramas than we do. I can’t think of what I might have missed, however.)

Darin also watches Mad Men (is this still a thing? it was cancelled about 14 years ago, right? ’cause it hasn’t been on in forever*), Justified, Louie, The Killing, Children’s Hospital, and Family Guy (current winner of the “Easiest way to make Diane flee from the room” award previously held by Curb Your Enthusiasm). Yes, he watches more TV than I do: he stays up later, and when he can’t sleep he watches a few shows. When I can’t sleep, I play Civilization IV.

Darin watches Glee with Sophia and Parks and Recreation and Burn Notice with Simon. I used to watch Burn Notice, but the overarching story arc got so drawn out and so complicated I just…lost interest, Bruce Campbell or no Bruce Campbell.

Darin also watches Batman: The Brave and The Bold, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Adventuretime with the kids. They asked me to watch Adventuretime with them once. It was the weirdest and most off-putting thing I’ve seen in a while. “You like this show?” I said. They told me I’d watched an exceptionally weird episode. I was not convinced.

We are also re-watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer with the kids, who enjoy it a lot (except when Buffy and Angel or Xander and Willow start kissing (we’re in the third season, natch)). It’s amazing how many of the episodes and how much of the dialogue has stayed with me after 14-15 years. What a fabulous show this was, and they did it on a budget of some baling wire and gum.

It’s ridiculous how hard it is to find a show all four of us can watch together. Most family shows are either moronic (we watched a few eps of No Ordinary Family until I said, “I can’t take it any more, this is too stupid!”) or have really inappropriate stuff that is completely unnecessary. If anyone has suggestions for family fare with two kids who are smart but are still, y’know, kids, let me know. I would love to come up with an idea for a non-moronic family show: I’d be fabulously wealthy.

(And yes, I know we could get Homeland and the new series of Sherlock By Other Means. If someone happened to drop a DVD with those shows on them at my front door, I would not say No. But Big Media can figure out who’s torrenting what, and it’s not worth the tsuris for me to do it.)

________________

*I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but yes, yes, this was sarcasm. I know it hasn’t been on and why.

John Le Carré caused a big stir with his books about British spies, precisely because his spies didn’t cause a big stir: James Bond was nowhere to be seen. Le Carré’s spies got up in the morning, drank tea, read dispatches, talked, drank some more tea, tried to find assets on the other side who’d give them information, and finished it all off with a honking glass of scotch at the end of the day.

The new movie version of <i>Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</i> is set in the early 70s, when things were really grim: Britain was on the verge of being declared a Third World country (it was too, people, you can look it up), the Cold War was at its height and seemed like it would never end, and office politics at the headquarters for the British spies, called the Circus, seems more centered around who’s sleeping with whom and who’s got the good expense account instead of, you know, fighting the good fight for freedom and liberty and etc etc.

Several assets on the Soviet side have gotten word out that British Intelligence has a highly placed mole (as, in fact, it really did). George Smiley (Gary Oldman, practically unrecognizable) had been let go by the organization as part of a shake-up and is now brought back in, sub rosa, to find the mole, who is one of Smiley’s contemporaries: four middle-aged men who’ve carved out their piece of the pie.

Both Darin and I had heard about this movie that you have to pay careful attention, because the important stuff will go by without anyone calling it out. Perhaps I have the attention span of a gnat, but I didn’t find this to be true. What is true is that the movie doesn’t hold your hand and it’s not drawn in gigantic day-glo colors, the way most movies are these days. In fact, the main color I remember from this movie is gray. Everything is so deeply, morosely gray. The story doesn’t have tiny details you have to follow, anyhow: it’s not like the solution is some horribly shocking thing you should have been able to put together yourself. This is the story of professional men doing their jobs, and it just so happens that it’s as bureaucratic as it is deadly.

While I enjoyed the change of pace from the usual cinema fare with its loud soundtrack and moronic dialogue, I didn’t feel the rapturous experience a lot of reviewers felt watching this. (Although…getting such a change of pace is so refreshing!) The acting is very good. The best part, for me, was the portrayal of early 70s Britain. The hairstyles, the glasses, the cars, the political tensions… does anyone feel nostalgic about anything from that time?