Month: December 2011

American Horror Story, the embarrassment

Sitting down to watch episode eleven of AHS, and the psychic has just explained about the draw of the house.  The words “paramagnetic force” and “physics” were involved.  And…

I don’t think I have ever heard a more mood-breaking description of the dry-cell battery of evil.  And I have heard some really bad ones.  (And read them, but for the sake of the discussion, those are also covered in this complaint.)  It was …embarrassing.  And the description of the Roanoke colony, and the banishment curse, and… gah. Continue reading “American Horror Story, the embarrassment”

Slinking back in.

It’s not much god to say it now, but I’ve been busy. Obviously.

Light of my life got me the new Fright Night on DVD on Saturday. Very pleased.

Way way behind on my TV, partly due to lack of Walking Dead and partly due to Steam and partly due to the holiday crunch. I thought is escaped it, and then wham! But I’m making it through.

Best to any and all of you, and see you, at the latest, on the other side

Goddamn. O.o

Think I can safely say that’s the longest stretch of quiet since I started this thing, and am really glad that it was still only a three-day silence.

Not getting enough sleep.  Work’s coming on, carrying on, I’m getting to start to work on the second stage of the process as  well as the first… or the second-and-fourth as well as the first-and-third.  Got a bunch of holiday cards written and addressed.  Completely failed to get to bed early any of the nights I said I was going to, and did I mention not getting enough sleep?  Sleep debt, FTR, is distinctly unfun.  I’m running on about 5.5 hours last night, right now, and that’s not the first short night this week.

Lord I’m tired.  >.<

Managed to finish a couple of books this weekend; still not at the 83 I wanted to read this year, but getting way closer.

Need to head out soon.  Will try and find time to sketch up a couple of posts at work today, sit down and actually type something once I get home.  The gap in content… I know this isn’t exactly a daily stop for anyone, but it’s still an embarrassing thing to not get it done, especially when I think I could have had the time if I’d planned better.

It’s much blacker than they smear it… (My name!)

Got to see Oliver today at the NAC. 🙂 It’s a preview show, which means they let the audience in, but the director and people are sitting in front taking notes on what needs changing, and the real real show isn’t on until Friday. Dress rehearsal writ large.

Pros: Nancy. Also Fagin and Charley, but Nancy was amazing. She was less starry-eyed than I’ve seen her played before[1], and it made “As Long As He Needs Me” a lot more touching; I hadn’t noticed the line When someone needs you,/You love them so quite so clearly before, or started to unpack it. It was much more a portrayal of a codependant adult than an ingenue.

Also, they had a magician consultant listed in the program (I will check the exact title shortly); I had no idea why, until “You’ve Got To Pick a Pocket or Two”, when there were silk scarves appearing and disappearing all over the stage, plus Dodger flicking a silk scarf up and suddenly holding a cane in “I’d Do Anything”, as if the fabric had unfolded into one. Seriously impressive, especially sitting in the fourth row from the stage. (Charley was doing most of it, I think; I actually went looking at the program expecting to find that he`d been the magician consultant.)

Cons: Casting an adult as Oliver made it a bit harder to swallow some of the lines, particularly the ones that refer to how small he is, and it was weird to see Dodger as smaller and slighter than Oliver, although the actress handled it really well. And I found that the mob scene and Bill’s death were rather quick and flat.

(A note: the last performance of Oliver that I saw involved Bill Sykes running from the maddened mob, a light-and-shadow show, and him eventually falling from a rookery, getting tangled in some lines hanging therefrom, and strangling. Yes, onstage. It’s hard to top that.)

Flipside, the lingering on Charley and Bet picking up Nancy’s body to take it away was well-done. The program included a rather grim photo of group of children (identified only as “from the period”), and the tone of the picture–which I can, at the moment, only describe as being worn and possibly foredoomed–was notably not absent from the play. I mean, it didn’t overwhelm it–I can’t actually imagine a grim and foredoomed rendition of “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two”[2]–but it was there. Clearly not a setting where the greatest complaint children have is that the gruel is bland and a bit sparse, you know?

I was also rather surprised the Bill Sykes didn’t show up until the second act. Apparently that’s not unusual, so I suppose that’s more a reflection of how much the relationship between Bill and Nancy impressed me–has always impressed me about the story–than anything unusual about the staging.

—
[1] …and it’s beginning to occur to me that I’ve seen two performances of Oliver, but never the movie. May look into that, since the person I was with was observing that he thought the choreography was very like the movie.
[2] Okay, now I can. But I couldn’t before, and it’s still jarring.

Still aten’t dead.

If say it was a very busy weekend, but honestly it was just a very sick one. Which naturally cleared up just in time for work Monday. Probably for the best, all told. Paycheques and all that.

Currently hoping to be at work on time despite being stuck in traffic so slow that I could get out and walk faster. Tired. Worrying about the holidays, and not being able to get the people I want to give things the stuff I’d like to get them. It’s a matter of time rather than money, which I guess is good in terms of what it implies overall? That I’m busy, and that I’m not broke.

I just want ten hours of uninterrupted sleep, dammit. It’s not the holidays alone, or work alone, or cleaning, or any one thing. But I just need to stop feeling like I could fall asleep at my desk.

(Going to theatre tomorrow. Horribly horribly afraid I will fall asleep during and incredibly hurt the feelings of person I am going with. Coffee with dinner, I guess…)

AHS again

Alright.  Caught episodes 7 and 8 of American Horror story a couple of days ago, and taken together I’m actually really annoyed with the way the story is going.  Spoilers follow.

First off, I know part of this might be annoyance over Tate being written as such a villain and so heavily coded as a rapist.  I liked him.  Yes, there was the shortcut through my consideration that the trope “mentally ill person wanting to get better” does if it’s done at all well, but justified or not, sourced in misjudgement or not, I liked him.  And he was monstrously cruel, and that it was in such a cowardly way upset me even more.  He’s hanging around Nora, and he takes her shaken comment as a reason to go killing and– the sheer abdication of resposibility, I mean I get it, but–

Agh.  Dammit.

Don’t know what they’re going to do with him now.  Suppose I will be interested to watch; it this a turning point in the presentation of the character?  Meant to be just a speed bump?  What?

*grumble*

John noticed Ben being drawn to the house; I blinked past it, but he’s right.  He got shot and he doesn’t leave the house.  I understand wanting to stay with Violet, but he got shot.  Even if the writers are not up on exactly how weird this reaction to a gunshot is[1], it does not seem like Ben would skip getting checked out.  And he’s always coming by, always stopping over; yes, he works there, but if he tried I’m guessing he could find some other place to see people.

The house does seem to have a fondness for medical professionals.  Even when it was a sorority, it was a sorority whose members all seemed to be nurses.  Leads me to wonder if there’s any intent there, or if there’s simply a groove worn into reality that has things keep slipping back to the same patterns, an echo of the way the house preserves things.

—
[1] Was looking up gunshot wounds at one point.  One accidental shooting where the bullet “went right through” took sixteen months to heal up.  No, sure, get a bandage and go lie down, that’ll fix it…

American Horror Story episode 9

…..aaaaand Ben just became unspeakable.

Given that about five minutes ago Constance turned into one of the more likeable characters on the show, and she hasn’t changed much, this should indicate that the bar is currently set really bloody low.  There was a moment where I really felt for Moira, which I don’t usually when she’s been seen by Ben.

*sigh*

It’s touching on the obsessed-over ideals of fame and love pretty well.  Really well, actually.

We haven’t seen Violet yet, and only seen Tate for thirty seconds.  And I’m feeling sorry for Hayden; I want to smack her,  and I think she’s seeing things with a warped perspective, but I’m feeling sorry for her.

Right.  Working on finishing up the second half of my reaction to the last two episodes.  I think Constance might end up dropping back down to Ben levels of–

Oh holy fucking hell, yay Moira, yay, I am going to keep watching now.

(Even if they are dragging in something in by the heels that makes me hope the writers are screwing around, because in terms of plausibility it’s reminding me of the opening to Deep Blue Sea where the sharks attacked a ship because red wine was spilt into the water.  And you know, it’s red stuff spilling through the water!  That’s what sets them off, right?)

It’s the little things.

The depression came up in a way I would honestly not have expected today.

I’ve got a cold.  A really pretty vicious one–I sound worse than Harold, all wheezy and cracked, and as shall shortly become apparent, I am having trouble focussing.  I made it out to the drugstore and got orange juice and tissues and Powerade and expectorant.  And then I came back, and I discovered that that cough medicine in question advises that I consult a doctor before taking it if I am taking medication for depression.

It turns out that it can have some really fun interactions with my meds; I couldn’t made sense of that, but I managed to find a couple of people who were very kindly willing to explain, and the short version is something like “your meds slow down metabolism of that drug, how do you feel about potentially extreme side-effects including seizures?”

One of them also suggested calling a medical professional to check, which was helpful because that possibility had honestly not occurred to me in my current state. Despite the label on the cough medicine saying “Talk to a doctor before using this product if…”

Yeah, I’m that level of sick-and-out-of-it.

Anyway, I got a callback from the doctor’s office, and it should be okay.

It’s just…

There’s a very good analogy about spoons that explains how you need to manage things, think about things that most people get to take for granted.  And I’m not saying that tripping up on taking cough medicine is the same as having Lupus!  But needing to check, consciously learning that I need to pay attention to labels (even in this state, where I looked at the label before buying the stuff and didn’t even register that bit until I got home), it’s a weird feeling.  A reminder that yes, this is part of my life and it’s going to mean paying attention, and sometimes the same condition that puts me in a state where I need to pay attention to things is going to be the condition that means I’m not able to do it.

It’s tiring, I guess.  I wish I had a better word.

(In the meantime, though, I have made sure that the light of my life has the information on exactly which drugs and at what dosage I’m on, readily to hand.  Between this and the “it should probably be fine”, I am going to stop sending energy on worrying and go drink a lot of orange juice.)