More of the 5 question meme

[mrissa]

akillianna asks:

1) What's the last thing that made you angry (not just ticked off)?
I am really bad at angry. I'm not even very good at ticked off. But the last thing that made me feel a completely unexpected rush of anger was when I was watching Battlestar Galactica S3, first or second episode. A favorite character came home to find that their spouse had been taken by the secret police and their baby was left alone crying. For those very few episodes, they live in tents. So either every single one of the neighbors was taken, or--and this seems by far the most likely--someone was listening to the parent being taken and the baby being left alone and screaming and stayed in their tent and did nothing. And the rush of anger bubbled up and went, "Aw hell no."

Yes, it's more dramatic this way. But if that's the human race they've got, maybe the Cylons deserve the universe.

It's not the world I live in. If our door was open and there were audible screams coming from our house, I can name neighbors from four of the nine houses around us who would be in at a run to see what on earth was wrong. And to be clear, that's because those are the people I can name, Tom and Kathy, John and Sherry, Catherine and Mohammad, Jim who sang on the radio in WWII. I have no doubt whatsoever that the long-haired lady whose mailbox is a pun and the brusque mother of three girls and the other next-door neighbors who like us better now and and the fella who clears every last inch of his driveway with even margins every snowfall unless he's sick would do it, too. I just can't put given names on them. We noticed when the ambulance came for Tom and Kathy's Martin in December. We don't get into each other's social lives and personal choices, but terrified baby-by-itself screams are something different.

We rely on this. This is a basic level of humanity.

I think watching crime shows has spoiled me, because all the FBI agents on Criminal Minds and Numb3rs have this in common: they are disgusted and angry when people don't step up. And so are the regular cast in Numb3rs outside the law enforcement professions. The intonation and the body language of "And you didn't say anything?" will vary depending on whether it's Don Eppes or Derek Morgan saying it, but either way it is clear: there is a basic level of humanity we expect of witnesses to murders and suchlike, and you, sonny jim, have failed to live up to it.

I like characters who have standards.

2) What's the worst movie you've seen?
Hmm. You know, I think I'm trying to block that out. I certainly disliked The Road to Wellville at the time, and have not felt any urge to return to see if the jiggling and fart jokes have improved since. (You know that something is highbrow and intelligent, of course, if it has jiggling and fart jokes in a different century than the one in which it was made.) But other than that--oh, wait! I know! My dad and I watched most of the BeeGee's Sgt. Pepper's movie once. That was really awful. We kept yelling down the hall to my mother, "Hey, Ma!" "Hey, hon!" "You gotta come see this, it's so bad!" "Aaaaagh, so terrible! Come watch!" "Nooooo, I can't believe they--Ma, you're missing it!"

For some reason she did not join us.

3) Looking back, who is one person you would have treated nicer in High School and why?
I was actually pretty nice to most people in high school. A small but still alarming number of people from high school have since claimed that I was the only person there who was nice to them, and in some cases I can't remember doing anything even remotely out of the ordinary. Except that apparently asking them how they were doing was out of the ordinary in that place, gah.

I think there are a few people who would have liked me to behave differently, but I disagreed with them rather than being cruel to them. Also there were some boys I would tell my teenage self to ask out instead of waiting around and seeing who turned up asking, but that's not really the same as not being nice to them.

So, as precious princess as it sounds, I'd have to go with me. There were enough people who were pretty hard on me in high school. I didn't need to join them quite so often as I did.

4) If given the chance would you like to know the day of your death?
I can't think how I would trust that information, is the thing. I am too much a skeptic. I would end up with a plan and a backup plan. So probably not, because I can have fairly sound plans and backup plans anyway, just in less detail.

Also I think it would be very sad to try to guess whether I had time to write just one more book and either risk leaving 80% of a book or not get to try.

5) Do you put water on your toothbrush before or after applying the toothpaste?
After. Heathen before people and their slidey wet toothbrushes and their slightly-too-dry toothpaste! Uff da, what a thing.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know that I've ever seen more than clips of Yellow Submarine, actually. My parents didn't try to keep me from it or anything. It just wasn't something I ever sought out, and I would have had to seek it out to get to it.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Hah!! I had sort of the opposite experience: I was already a hardcore Beatles fan when I saw the Sgt. Pepper movie at age 9 or 10 or so, and I was all, "Wait...this isn't...what...HUH?" I think until I read this post, I'd convinced myself that the whole thing was a hallucination.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I once nearly pummeled some poor goth-ette I didn't know in a Waldenbooks, using a copy of some totally forgettable fantasy novel. The catalyst?

"The Crow? Cool, they made a comic out of that movie!"

Generational/experiential dissonance is fun for the whole family!

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I am a heathen before person, so all my opinions are naturally suspect, but I think that the Sgt. Pepper's movie is one of the best pieces of cinematic cheese ever made, and I watch it every time I encounter it. Oh, mind you, it's a horribly bad movie, no dispute, but it is one of a category that I agree upon far less often than most of my peers: A good bad movie. What I mean is, I don't go in for the MST3K approach, and so I tend to consider something a good bad movie far less often than my wife does. (Fortunately, we agree about The Ten Commandments, which if we had our way would be a cult film.)

I don't know if you have READ The Road To WellvilleM, but as I recall, the bodily function jokes are in the book as well. They would almost have to be, given some of the people in the book who were based on real people who had odd fixations with bowels and so forth. But it works better in the book. The problem, I think, is that T.C. Boyle is very good, and Alan Parker wouldn't know subtlety or delicacy if it hit him in the head with a shillelagh. (This IS, after all, the screenwriter/director who brought us wretched-excess films Angel Heart and Pink Floyd: The Wall, drive-the-point-home-with-a-hammer-films The Life of David Gale and Midnight Express, another don't-understand-the-source-material film, Evita, and what-the-hell-were-they-thinking film Bugsy Malone. Do not EVER see Bugsy Malone. Not even blind drunk.)

What I'm saying, I think, is, if you haven't read the book, don't assume it's as bad as the movie was.

Your BSG comments will probably inspire me to an entry of my own later.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, I watched Road to Wellville when it was new in theaters when I was in high school, and I have never had the slightest desire to go near the book since.

Here's the thing: even knowing that it's not as bad as the movie was, it's still sort of tainted. "This won't be as bad as the first thing to pop into your mind when someone says 'bad movie'!" Oh...um, good?

Oh, another bad movie thing: Congo. Blech. There's the bit where the gorilla with the speech-translation gloves signs, "Bad gorillas! Ugly! Go away!" and the wild gorillas go away. After that, my friends and I imitated the glove voice: "Bad movie! Ugly! Go away!"

Wow, we saw a lot of bad movies when I was a senior in high school. I guess because going Out on weekends was a much bigger deal, so it was more a matter of "which movie should we see?" than "do we actually think any of these will be good?"

[songwind.livejournal.com]

You know a movie is bad when Tim Curry is bad in it, and it's clearly not on purpose.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

1. I wish it were a basic level of humanity, but so many news stories seem to contradict it that I weep for us.

5. I put water on before AND after!

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

2) my grandfather is in The Road to Wellville. I have seen the parts that he is in, and nothing else. (He waltzs, he draws back in horror, and one other thing I can't remember.

5) I get my toothbrush wet before *and after* I put toothpaste on it. best of both worlds!

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Not that it excuses any of the fictional characters entirely, but we are lucky enough to live in a world where the secret police are still secret, and caring about our neighbors is unlikely to get us 'disappeared'. As I recall from watching BSG, getting in their way or even drawing their attention could garner unpleasant consequences.
I expect standard reaction, then, when you hear the distinctive noises of somebody being invited to visit the incarceration facilities would be to do like a bunny, make yourself invisible, and think really hard "I do not exist".
It's not the world we live in. Plus, Ron Moore loves him a dramatic scene.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing: while it isn't the world we live in, other people in our world have lived in it. And while not everybody managed to creep in after the secret police have gone to quiet the baby, some people did. There have always been a few who did.

In the BSG world, where they've had secret police for all of four months tops and so cannot be categorized in the "three generations of trauma" sort of situation, not only does nobody come to soothe the kiddo, but the other parent, upon returning home, does not experience any anger at the neighbors. Whose names and faces she/he must know because he/she has just built a tent city with them. Not even for a moment and then realizing that they were frightened or anything like that. She/he takes it for granted that that's how people are. And that's when I got angry.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Point ceded. Anger at will. (:

[songwind.livejournal.com]

5) Why not both?

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

If I knew the date of my death, I'd fixiate on it and ignore everything else. Total depression. So no, I don't want to know.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I would be okay with knowing the date of my death. It would be great for planning. But I am so contrary by nature, my impulse would be to arrange to die before that date: drink poison while skydiving in a barrel of knives without a parachute from 40,000 feet into an active volcano, that kind of thing. Because, y'know, that's a challenge from the universe I just can't walk away from.