Remember my blog?

It was pretty cool. I want to come back to it. I think I'll work my way slowly.

Where to start? BerryBird tagged me with a meme. It involves posting my desktop. My desktop is not the slightest bit cool. I need to cool it up a little before I participate.

A research study was done that showed that of all segments of the workforce, direct care staff at mental institutions and nursing homes are the most likely to suffer from depression. You know what's hard? Seeing your coworkers being depressed and feeling useless. You know what's harder? Actually taking care of people while you're depressed.

What else we got here? I'm sort of kind of dating someone now. It's my coworker Rachel. She was dating someone else when she started working at the hospital, who is also employed at the hospital, which has made for several uncomfortable moments. Also, the other interested party was perusing my blog for awhile, looking for dirt to dig up on me. Most people, it turns out, publish all their dirty laundry on the internets for the whole world to read. When I told Jeff this, he said, "What was he going to find out? Your new awesome method for ranking your favorite bands?" I told Jeff to shut up. This was another reason I didn't care to recount my life adventures for awhile. I felt it would keep some wounds open a little too long, and I don't particularly enjoy hurting people. In fact, I don't enjoy hurting people at all. Ever, really.

But, Rachel has a daughter, which means when I'm sort of kind of casually seeing her, we have to be at her house, which means we mostly watch movies, and since Rachel has a soft spot for low-budget B movies that went direct to DVD, I get to see quite the eclectic mix. I've watched a few zillion movies over the past couple of months. I could easily turn this into "Andy Comments on Movies, Both Silly and Serious." Here are a few vignettes:

A Beautiful Mind: Dad recommended this. I really enjoyed it, which surprised me, as it stars Russell Crowe. However, it's about a subject near and dear to me, so I got into it.

Cheerleader Ninjas: You know, I don't ask for a lot in movies. They don't need to be smart, or particularly funny, or even good. They just need to entertain me for at least an hour if its your typical 90 minute movie. You'd think a movie called Cheerleader Ninjas could accomplish this meager task. After all, how hard could it be to make Cheerleader Ninjas. You take cheerleaders, give them katanas, send them on a mission, and zany sexy hijinx ensue. None of that happens in this movie. For that matter, nothing happens in this movie. At least, nothing that makes a damn bit of sense. The cheerleaders aren't even frickin' ninjas, for pete's sake. The movie ends up being one long in 'joke' about how bad and stupid the movie is. Gyah. I can't even write how bad this was. All I wanted was some cheerleader ninjas.

Frankenfish: On the other side of the low-budget coin we have this gem. Do we have giant, man-eating mutated fish? Why yes, we do. Do we have a creepy locale for these fish to hunt near helpless humans? But of course. Do we have easily recognizable character archetypes, allowing astute observers to try to predict order of death? We certainly do. Were the deaths gruesome, yet memorable and creative? You know it. Was there at least one decent actor in the cast? Actually, yes there was. Was there at least one absolutely terrible actor? Yes, but she was hot, so we forgave her. See, Cheerleader Ninjas people? This movie making stuff isn't so complex after all. Frankenfish even managed to work gratuitous nudity into the plot more smoothly than Cheerleader Ninjas, and there was nary a cheerleader in sight for the entire course of the plot. All of these pluses let me forgive the fact that the ending was a bit rushed and anti-climactic. Oh well.

Rain Man: When I tell people I saw Rain Man for the first time a couple weeks ago, they look at me like I'm crazy. I think it might be in contention for my favorite ever, up there with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Benny and Joon, which is surprising since it co-stars Tom Cruise. You know what my favorite line is? "Definitely trapped... in some sort of box... with no tv... and 10 minutes 'til Wapner." It's followed up by "They're making legal history in there, Ray, and you're missing it. LEGAL HISTORY!"

In other Dustin Hoffman-related news, I saw The Graduate for the first time ever, and the ending of Wayne's World 2 is suddenly much more entertaining.

Ok, that'll do for now. I'll try to keep up a little better now.

Spider-Man 3

I saw it today. There is one ultra-serious problem with it.

When you see a comic book movie, you walk in knowing that your suspension of disbelief is going to take a beating. Radioactive (or genetically-altered) spiders can give super powers to people when they bite. Sure. Crazy super soldier serum can make people regenerate wounds quickly. No problem. I'm prepared to buy into all of that to enjoy the movie.

But the trade-off is that you can't just randomly abuse suspension of disbelief to compensate for lazy or nonsensical writing. Radioactive spiders cause me no problems, but very, very early on, a villain fleeing from the cops enters an "Experimental Particle Physics Test Site." Except that it's the middle of the night, and the place is still fully staffed and doing their experiments. No attempts to explain what exactly they were working on is made, nor do the writers ever deem to tell us why there is apparently a 24 hour demand for particle physics. Aren't these things usually 9-5 operations? Or done at large research universities? Also, the scientists and lab techs detect the prisoner's presence in their big scary science apparatus, and the response is "Oh, it's probably just a bird and it'll fly away." Right. Not like advanced particle physics experiments of the experimental variety need to be done in controlled environments or anything. I keep forgetting that the first rule of science is "The Show Must Go On." Every bit of the villain was vaporized and reduced to sand, but somehow that cheap locket he was carrying survived the onslaught of particle physics.

That was in the first 15 minutes or so, and I was already done.