Nerdin’ Out and Bein’ Silent

For once (though I’m sure it isn’t truly the first time…just the first in a great while), I come to complain not about lack of sleep or inability to fall asleep, but about getting plenty of sleep.  Yes, I said complain about plenty of sleep.  While the quantity is satisfactory, the quality is awful, it seems.  I fall asleep easily enough and I stay asleep all through the night.  But I’m always tired the entire next day.  I’m obviously restless in my sleep, because for each of the past few mornings (as many as I can remember keeping track of, anyway), I’m either missing some portion of the covers, or I’m missing the pillow out from under my head (how that happens, I couldn’t even begin to say).  My muscles are almost always tense.  I just can’t buy a good night’s rest.  Oh well.  It’ll come soon.  Perhaps when the fucking holidays are over.  I can only hope.

To me, the question is not "Will it be any good?" but "How badly did they screw it up?"  I’m referring, of course, to the new remake of King Kong.  The 1933 version is posilutely a classic in the truest sense of the word.  I fear what the big budget treatment will turn it into.  I know Peter Jackson is a huge fan of the original, so that bodes well for it, and all the rave reviews help, too.  But I’ll be unconvinced until I see it for myself.  I’m also unconvinced it’ll be a huge, huge success.  I don’t think there’s a rabid Peter Jackson fanbase out there like most people believe.  There was a overly rabid Lord of the Rings fanbase out there, sure.  And they made Peter Jackson very famous and tons of money.  But I could’ve filmed those movies on my cell phone camera and people would’ve come to see them.  In other words, he just happened to be the guy given the resources to make the movie properly (I will not speculate on their goodness or badness, as I’ve not seen them).  So I’m not so sure people will go see King Kong just because Peter Jackson made it.  Plenty of people think that’ll happen.  The character of King Kong also doesn’t have a giant fanbase (in contrast to, say, Godzilla), so there’s a limited amount of money to be made there.  In short, I think this movie is going to be exceedingly lucky to break even…which is no small task given its $200 million-plus price tag…plus marketing cost.  But I’ve been wrong many times before.

Now Playing in Dave’s Mental Jukebox:  "We’re All to Blame" by Sum 41 (there’s a perfectly good explanation for this one….it’s in Godzilla:  Final Wars, which came out on DVD today, which means I watched it earlier), "Radio Stars" and "Juggalo’s Paradise" by ICP

I find myself in the grips of a slight panic everytime I mention it, but I’m going to do it anyway:  I’ll be 26 in about two months.  Twenty-freaking-six.  Yikes.  Just…yikes.  Considering all the guys I hang around with at work are 21 and 22, I often forget that I am, indeed, quite a bit older than them.  Especially when they start talking about a lot of the girls at work.  There are many hot girls that work at Sears…but most of them are of the 17-20 year old variety.  I can’t go near that.  I’m way too old for ’em.  Not to mention that it violates my very first rule of who I’d be willing to date:  No girls younger than my little brother (who is currently 20).  Of course, rule 1-A is that I won’t date anyone under 22.  I made that addendum today, because, honestly, I’d rather they be done with school and getting into the next part of life……….though it is extremely debatable whether I’ve made that step or not.

On that front…  I’m getting there.  I’ve had a lot of mental pieces to put back together over the past six months.  I let myself lose an entire two and a half years of my life to what I refer to as The Black Hole.  What is The Black Hole?  Easy.  It’s depression, obviously, but it’s also spending too much time blaming other people for what’s wrong with my life.  I’m sure there are people who’d tell you I was great at that.  I tried to blame Mo, and my stepmom, and others for all the things I’d been failing to do.  It wasn’t anyone but me.  But lately it’s like the fog is lifting.  I look around and start thinking, "Holy shit!  What am I doing?  I need a fucking career, or at least a job that lets me make enough money that I’m not going to be scraping by."  God knows Sears is not a fucking career.  I’d kill myself before age thirty at that rate.

I demonstrated an astounding level of nerdery to C.J. on Sunday night.  We somehow got to talking about all things Star Wars, and I started going into utterly ridiculous amounts of detail about anything he wanted to know about Jedi.  It’s funny, because Star Wars is what made me realize that I was, indeed, a nerd.  I can remember thinking how much of a closet nerd I was when I realized I knew much more than I thought about the original trilogy back when Phantom Menace came out.  A lot of the stuff I know, I’m not even sure where the fuck I picked it up.  Obviously the movies are a large source, but I think more of it came from the two KOTOR games.  Considering I played through the first one twice and the second one four (yes, I said four) times, there has been plenty of opportunity to remember tiny details.  But I remember tiny details about everything.  C.J. was playing random music from Mega Man 2 later on that night, and I was able to guess what stage most of them were, just hearing the music.  Give me an NFL player’s name, and odds are I can tell you where he went to college.  Historical events or figures?  Bring ’em on.  I just know way too many random things.  And none of this is from studying, mind you.  I just remember it.  Though, I guess it is studying in it’s own way (all the replays of the KOTORs, watching tons of college football, playing way too many video games from youth to now, so on, and so forth).  And how many people can have in-depth, serious discussions about Godzilla movies?  I can.  Any of the movies, I can go on and on about ’em.  In summation…I am a ginormous nerd.

I watched Fantastic Four a few nights ago, and I have to say…it wasn’t bad.  I was shocked.  I was expecting a train wreck, and, instead, I got a pretty decent movie.  Story was solid, acting was…passable for the most part, script was good.  But, I have to say, The Thing made the movie.  His depiction in the comics has always been of someone so completely flawed and human, but I didn’t expect them to include that in the movie.  But they did.  And it was that best thing about the movie.  Really, the whole group was explored more as flawed humans than as superheroes.  And that’s always a good thing.  It helps bring a sense of reality to an otherwise wholly unreal thing.

Saw a trailer for Underworld:  Evolution tonight.  I MUST see this movie.  January 20, 2006.  Consider the Official Countdown underway.<

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I’m sure there’s more I could go on about, but the time has caught up with me.  I must be awake in roughly four and a half hours, so I bet get crackin’ at trying to sleep.  Seacrest, out (ah, Robot Chicken, how you crack me up).

Sayonara.