This is an Oscars post.

Alright, the Oscars don't appear to be anywhere on free to air TV in New Zealand, so I've been resorting to various live streams - which, let me tell you, have been of fairly deplorable quality (thank you, New Zealand internet). As such, I only managed to actually witness bits and pieces, although they seem to have been the most important bits and pieces.

On the hosts:



Anyone else have some sneaking suspicions that James Franco was high as a kite? I've got to admit, I miss Ricky Gervais. This was downright boring in comparison.

On Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross taking away the Oscar for Best Original Score:



Nine Inch Nails are amazing, Trent Reznor is amazing even when he looks like a thumb, I haven't seen The Social Network because I am a bad fan, etc etc.

On Christian Bale winning Best Supporting Actor:



I've got to admit, after my initial distaste following that incident (it's fucking distracting...), I settled on a general feeling of affection for good trolling when it comes to Señor Bale. I haven't seen The Fighter but I intend to, and honestly, it was just cute at the end of his speech when he got all choked up about his wife again. /is a romantic at heart

On Colleen Atwood winning for Best Costume Design:

I love her and I could not care less what anyone says about Alice In Wonderland. I thought it was fine. Not amazing, not mind-shatteringly awful, it was fine. People are such drama queens about that shit.

On Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law:

They warm the cockles of my heart, whatever that means. I'm still sold on this Sherlock thing.

On Florence Welch:

Ethereal goddess, musical queen, wasted on this ceremony, etc.

On Tom Hooper winning Best Director:

Laughing at these bitches who seem to think this was unexpected. The King's Speech is a beautifully directed film.

On Natalie Portman winning Best Actress:

Whatever, we all saw it coming, I just don't get it. She was alright, but seriously, best actress? Slim pickings this year, huh?

On Colin Firth winning Best Actor:

King Firth deserves this and every other award we can invent for excellence in a human being, the end.

On The King's Speech winning Best Picture:

Honestly, I wasn't sure the Academy was going to choose the correct candidate for this one, but in the end they got it right. I would've been happy with this or True Grit, so...

All Is Violent, All Is Bright

Sometimes you just have one of those days where everything seems solemn and sort of heavy, even if it's completely irrational. In my case, predictably, this is almost always triggered by some minor love-life-related incident. On the upside, in my 20 years on this planet I have managed to gain the perspective necessary to see minor love-life-related incidents as exactly that - minor - and I find it best to pass the moods with sympathetic music.

In a side note - and this is going to sound spoilt and bitchy but fuck it - it is annoying as hell to be followed around and stared at and complimented and all manner of other usually good things when it's in the context of someone being obviously interested in fucking or dating you, or both, and you would rather grow old and die completely alone than devote one more second of your time to even considering such an unappealing idea.

I don't even care, you bitches know I'm right. It is awkward and uncomfortable and you don't want to be mean about it but if they don't take the hint and quit humping your leg you're going to have to pull out the bitchface and that's a generally unpleasant prospect. If you're disagreeing, that's because you've never had it happen to you, and on that note, you should count your blessings.

Conversely, if you have had the displeasure of experiencing intense unwanted affection, it makes you hyper-aware of any time when you are interested in someone and you're not sure if said interest is returned. At least, that's how it works for me. I am suddenly very aware that there is a pretty good chance that any overt gestures are going to result in quiet but unmitigated irritation.

Or this.

I have yet to come up with a suitably subtle solution to this problem - because sometimes, just busting out with 'So, let's have sex!' doesn't seem to be the best option, and most people I know are too nice to snap out an unequivocal 'Look, I'm not interested.' I'm working on it, but until I find the answer, I think I'm going to have to stick to dear friends with Mogwai DVDs.

Today has been all about music; with a little luck the night will continue in the same theme.

Today I tidied my room and listened to these songs in a sort of endless cycle:

With the occasional bout of this:

and this:

and this:

Basically I am hoping to continue the night in much the same fashion, with plenty of this:

On people with an inherent terror of eating anything they were not raised on.

So, not too long ago I came across a recipe online - I like hunting for recipes online, sue me - for baked lemon pasta.

People of a delicate disposition should probably turn away now.

Apparently, instead of thinking "Sweet, that looks pretty easy to make, I might try something new!", I should have been wondering what kind of person would eat pasta (a disgusting and unpopular ingredient by all accounts) and lemon (which, let's face it, is a horrible and exceedingly rare flavour) in the same dish. This is judging by the reaction to my mentioning it in passing to some people who will remain unnamed. They expressed a range of emotions between shock, trepidation and outright horror at the very idea of pasta and lemon in the same dish.

Now, call me world-weary, impatient, scathing and contemptuous - I am three out of four of those things - but I think that was a pretty stupid bizarre reaction. I'm not sure I properly expressed that sentiment in the moment, because I was too busy being torn between confusion and laughter at the stunned silence, murmured "What?"s and subsequent heartily offended outpouring of "Lemon...pasta bake?" Possibly all I got out was something along the lines of "Yeah. Lemon pasta bake."

Am I missing something here? Is this a normal thing that I wasn't raised to do? Some sort of food-related xenophobia, an utter lack of any sense of culinary adventure? It's not enough that I can't attend bizarre food festivals and actually eat bizarre things, now I have to narrow my meal choices down to Things My Mother Served Me Before I Moved Out Of Home? Because, and I'm sensing a theme here, that also sounds rather boring.

So please, people who are irrationally scared of trying new foods - or clothes, or music, or dances, or sexual positions, or anything for that matter - just give it some thought. I'm just putting it out there. Sarcasm aside, I really do believe that the point of life, insofar as I can tell, is to experience it. I'm not trying to pass judgement on how you live your life, but uhh, it seems like you make the whole 'experience' thing kind of difficult for yourself.

Life in the fast lane comfort zone

So, as it turns out, there are quite a few things I am not opposed to doing/comfortable with doing that a great many people are not.
Among these things are:

• baring my face in public.
• eating 20 chicken nuggets in one sitting.
• dyeing my hair purple.
• sharing my thoughts on a series of seemingly unrelated subjects via the internet.
• participating in a threesome.
• arguing my point.
• falling in love with people of my own gender.
• eating processed foods.
• wandering through crowded places, e.g. concerts.
• shotting horse semen at a bizarre food festival.

I happen to be okay with all of the above, and that doesn't make me superior or inferior to anyone else. They're just facts. There's also a very long list of things I am/would be extremely uncomfortable doing, including stupid things like "ordering my own food at a restaurant" and "walking around naked". That does not mean I automatically feel the need to censor anyone who is fine with ordering their food or wandering their own house in the nude, because that would be pretty goddamn stupid. Of course it would, you say, but I'm not so sure it's such an obvious fact to everyone.

I'm writing this because I don't think it should be anybody's right to make anyone else feel like their list of comfortable and uncomfortable things makes them bad, strange, or unreasonable, unless one of the things listed in the Comfort Zone is "having sex with underage girls/boys", or "hitting people I disagree with", or something similarly damaging and antisocial. The idea of "normalcy" is a fabrication, and that alone makes it a piss-poor standard to judge anyone by. I tend to judge myself and other people based purely on whether or not they are hurting someone with their actions.

So I will shot my horse semen and have sex with multiple people in one go and hold my head high because I am not hurting anyone by doing it. If it makes you uncomfortable enough that you feel the need to throw names at me and tell me I'm doing something wrong, that's completely illogical and the fault lies with you, not me. Thank you for your attempt at policing my choices, but I don't intend to follow your 'rules' until you can back them up with something other than "Well I wouldn't do that, and neither would anyone I know." I appreciate that it makes you feel better if you live your life by irrationally sealing yourself off from anything you don't immediately understand or which is unfamiliar, and that's fine with me; I sincerely hope it isn't as sad and boring as it sounds. I would appreciate it if you restricted it to yourself - you know, the only person you have any right to control?

On compulsive curtain-drawing and the surrounding anxiety.

Sometimes I think about my predilection for closing my curtains the second darkness falls, and how it’s driven entirely by one night in my youth when I realized that even with net curtains, when night falls it’s easy to see straight into a lit room from the outside. Coupled with my horror of ever seeing an unfamiliar face peering back at me when I look out the windows, I am driven to obscure the windows altogether.

It occurred to me that perhaps curtain-habits are indicative – to a certain extent – of personality. I’ve known people who never close their curtains at all, lest they miss something interesting happening at their neighbour’s place. Is nosiness symptomatic of boredom in one’s own life? Conversely, is a secretive habit like my own suggestive of a certain amount of vanity? After all, why would anyone be interested in watching me watch TV after dinner?

On hilariously anti-climactic overhyped pop singles.

Gaga?
Gaga?
What is this shit?
Come on now. I'm not even a hater. In fact I love some Gaga with cocktails and an excess of makeup.
Don't get me wrong; I find plenty of her fans obnoxious, her more vocal haters even more so, and I find that 'monster' stuff generates a fair amount of second-hand embarrassment. I can't sit through interviews with her without concluding that she has absolutely no idea what she's talking about/is trying too damn hard to be a visionary, enlightened leader.

All of that aside, she tends to make good pop music, and pop is one of my all-time favourite genres. It's happy music. Don't give me shit about disliking your 20-minute epics about slaying dragons or worshiping the Beast or whatever the fuck it is, and then turn around like "Oh I can't stand happy music!" Why? Does it make you awkward to be flippant and joyous? Telling.
Anyway.

This song is not good. It's not exactly awful, but for something that's been so hyped...it should have been far, far better than this. I am disappointed, Gaga. I'll just be over here, listening to The Fame Monster and side-eyeing this single. Give me an album on which I can consider this The Track I Always Skip, and things will be cool between us, okay? I still love you.

I basically live my life according to this quote.

"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow up. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood with this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
- C. S. Lewis

And that, my friends, is why I still count 'The Lion King' and 'The Princess and the Cobbler' among my favourite films of all time, why I openly enjoy plenty of young adult fiction, and why I dress up like a five-year-old whenever I feel like it. The fact that I appreciate some childish things does not make me a child. I'm quite secure in the fact that I am a grown woman, and I don't feel the need to overcompensate by pretending disinterest in things purely because they aren't "mature" enough. On that note, I feel like making fairy bread; I'm off to raid the cupboards and see if I can't find a way of making it happen.

On True Grit

I went to see True Grit on a whim, purely because my flatmates were going and happened to ask if I'd like to go along. I figured it's been acknowledged by the Academy this year - I might as well check it out, even if it looked like something I would find deathly boring. Westerns? Not exactly my thing. However, by now I trust the Coens enough to give them the benefit of the doubt despite trepidations about genre.

This turned out to be a good decision on my part; I had a vague feeling that whatever happened, I would probably enjoy the ride, and I was right. For all that Westerns are not my thing, this film certainly was, and for a couple of hours it showed me exactly what fans of the genre see in it.

Visually the film was quite breathtaking. Roger Deakins' cinematography was nothing short of beautiful, and this is one of its main strengths. True Grit boasts a generous helping of the usual black humor and razor-sharp wit I've come to expect from the Coen brothers, but with characters like Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn, it doesn't for a moment feel forced or contrived. The cast delivered brilliant performances, especially Jeff Bridges (and I am not a particular fan of his, but this was truly excellent work), and Hailee Steinfeld, who more than lived up to the stellar cast.

My only issue with this film is the fact that the final sequence felt - well, flat. I don't know what happened. It was charging forward so fearlessly, and suddenly, just as it drew to a close, it stumbled. In a jarring case of mood whiplash, it suddenly lost momentum and...well, I left the cinema feeling slightly confused. What exactly was the point of that epilogue-type deal? I may never understand. However, don't let that put you off seeing it - do see it.
In fact I demand that you see it.
Go on.

On post-rock and days in limbo.

I am in that place between ventures which is simultaneously relaxed and uncomfortable - or maybe uncomfortable because of all the relaxation - there always seems to be something amiss when you're not active. It's a little like being the only person who doesn't have a worried look on their face; it means you've probably missed something, and you're going to feel very silly when the penny drops.

At any rate, I've been passing the unseasonably rain-drenched days tucked away in my room, obsessively building a collection of post-rock, a genre I have basically ignored up until now. On a not-so-special night last week, I realized I had been listening to Explosions In The Sky for three hours straight. I have not looked back and it has been excellent.

On mojo and bow ties.

Every so often, I become convinced that the only reason I am not having loads and loads of rampant, mind-blowing sex is that I choose not to. Entirely at random I will start to believe that I am, in the words of Fat Bastard, dead sexy. Well...maybe not dead sexy, but at least attractive enough that I could reasonably convince one or two people I find dead sexy to climb into bed with me.

As far as I can tell there is no particular trigger for this sudden change in attitude, and in hindsight I almost always find the idea horrifying, but since I'm in the midst of one such mood swing I'm perfectly content to do an erotic dance and flirt outrageously with people I've never met before. Frankly I think all the Doctor Who has had a wayward effect on me; Jack Harkness is a terrible role model unless you really are undeniably attractive.

On an almost entirely unrelated note, bow ties have become fetish fuel for me, and I've decided that the absence of one in my wardrobe is an atrocity that must be corrected.

(Bow ties are cool.)

This is the reason why people don't like Republicans.

Now, I'm the sort of person who likes to be at least a little bit politically aware. I like to have an idea of what's going on in the world around me. Call me crazy, but I even take an interest in things that don't affect me directly.
Like this. I notice it only takes 37 words before 'God' pops up - golly gosh, you'd almost think there was some kind of link between 'God' and 'fuck all women, you don't deserve rights'.

So. Let's start from the top with this embarrassingly misogynistic piece of pro-rape propaganda. First off, it is completely misleading in the sense that it is supposedly just there to prevent 'taxpayer money' funding abortions. That's not all it would do. It would also prevent private health insurance covering the cost of abortion, and if that doesn't seem fucked up enough to you, read on.
Secondly, and most offensively, when the bill was first introduced it included a proposal to change the legal definition of 'rape' in cases of abortion, and by 'change' I mean 'narrow down', and by 'narrow down' I mean 'a 12-year-old girl who is impregnated by a 40-year-old man is not entitled to health coverage for an abortion'.

Of course, there were very few people possessed of basic reading comprehension who were not at least a little perturbed by the sweeping generalization implied there - basically, that all rape victims who are not able to prove that they have been assaulted enough don't count as rape victims. By this definition, in order to be taken seriously enough to qualify for healthcare insurance, you will have to provoke your rapist to beat you into submission. Because that's exactly what you want to do when you're being assaulted by someone - piss them off! Not to mention the fact that you are probably a woman, and your attacker is probably a man, and physically that will normally give him all the edge he needs to step it up and actually murder you. Thankfully there are a great many people who are aware of the fact that the majority of rape is not accompanied by a beatdown, and they promptly created A Big Fuss. So that particular part of the bill has been dropped.

Honestly, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone - even someone cruel enough to want to deny women, children and trans people who happen to have wombs the right to choose what happens to their own bodies - is stupid enough to think that 'raped in your sleep? lol no you weren't!' was actually going to slip by unnoticed.  You know how when you're bartering, you're supposed to name a ridiculously high price that no one would actually accept and work your way down from there to the price you'd actually be perfectly happy to settle for in the first place?
Or when you'd say to your parents, "I want to get a tattoo!" and they were all, "FUCK NO" and you were like, "Okay...well, can I go to a party tonight?" and they were all, "Yeah sure, do what you want, just no tattoos!"
Yeah. Something tells me this is kind of like that. A red herring, I guess you could call it. At any rate, just because that was the worst part of the bill doesn't mean the rest of the bill isn't complete bullshit too. I can only cross my fingers and hope people don't 'settle' for an added economic struggle for rape survivors in a time of worldwide recession.

Liking early Regina Spektor and needing a whole lot more Doctor Who in my life.

I had somehow managed to forget how much I love Regina Spektor's earlier, rougher, freer songs.

Thirty-two is still a goddamn number
Thirty-two still counts

Brilliant. Alright, indie and pretentious, but brilliant nonetheless.

Over the last few days I have, with the mystical powers of Youtube and the internet in general, been giving myself a crash course on the most recent episodes of Doctor Who. For years I had allowed the painfully cheesy low-budget effects and patently ridiculous plots put me off what is actually a very enjoyable show, as it turns out.

Tardy to the party? Well, slightly. But I am making a heartfelt attempt to make up for that! I'm fascinated by its ability to override my rationality and convince me that even though it's blatantly trying to turn "I wear a ____ now. ____s are cool." into a much-loved, oft-quoted catchphrase, I still buy it. I'm sitting there with one half of my brain facepalming and telling me, "That is so fucking lame," and the other half squeeing and shrieking like a deranged fangirl, "Bowties are cool!" Oddly confusing, but I applaud Matt Smith for making it work, because really.

On bewilderingly popular films.

You know, I saw Black Swan, and I didn't care for it.

It was alright. I mean, it wasn't a bad film. I don't regret sitting through it. It held my attention reasonably well. However, I really don't get what all the hype is about. I've got status updates about its peerless brilliance littering my Facebook feed, and I just don't get it. I didn't care about the main character because she was a high-strung yuppie (and the only high-strung yuppie I care about is an insane serial killer), and the plot was so predictable that I spent at least half the film thinking "Hurry up and get to the bit where she dances and it all goes to hell. I get it, I get it, she's the white swan, Mila Kunis is the black swan, her mum is controlling, she's breaking free/going nuts, blah, blah, blah."

Really? People were really blown away by this? By Natalie Portman playing a repressed rich girl with a demanding job? I mean, I'm not saying her performance was bad, because it wasn't. It was quite good - but not great. It wasn't great, because she was basically playing herself. The girl peaked at 13 in Leon: The Professional. Frankly I found Mila Kunis more engaging; I'm struggling to see where the Oscar hype is coming from.

Evidently my opinion is in the minority at the moment, but...