And You Thought There Weren’t Any Great Guys in Utah

I was on the bus last Thursday after class, daydreaming about Bruce Wayne or the Doctor coming along and sweeping me off my feet, when someone out there in the universe thought it necessary to bring me crashing back to reality.

I wear my iPod on the bus specifically to keep lunatics from talking to me, but this guy was not to be dissuaded by ear buds and a little Queen. Mr. Fantastic was in his mid-twenties and banging his head along to whatever he was listening to. He turned to me and said, “I’m wearing two different boots today, cause the laces on the one broke this morning. It makes me look like a hobo.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I nodded and tried to turn back to the rainy green hills outside. No dice.

“I was kicked out of the place I was living, so I have to move into St. Anne’s on Saturday.” (St. Anne’s is a local rescue mission.) “I have a little money left that I’m going to use to buy alcohol and weed.”

This guy clearly has his priorities perfectly aligned, I thought to myself.

He kept going. “I’ve got this dragon incense burner thought that’s worth at least 30 bucks. And another little dragon figurine that’s hand-crafted ceramic and worth about 70 bucks. I’m gonna stash those, along with my TV and DVD player, at my mom’s house while I’m at St. Anne’s, cause, you know, it would suck to lose them.”

I couldn’t think of anything to do other than nod again. Were we there yet?

The inane conversation continued until I, blissfully, got off the bus and he said, “I’d give you my number, but I won’t have one until Saturday.” I expressed some sort of feigned regret at this and skipped off the bus.

He was quite the catch. Infinitely better than that sexy billionaire Bruce Wayne. What was I thinking?

When I'm a Movie Critic...

There may be many movie/theatre critics out there who think they have a good method for determining what makes a "good" show. Well, here are two more.

Jennie and I decide how good something is by how much liquor you need to have ingested to enjoy yourself. For something like the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie you can have fun watching that movie stone cold sober. When I watched Fight Club I wished that I'd had a couple of beers to sip for the first half and a couple pints of everclear for the second half. Woah.

My mom and I know that we like something when we get in the car and say, "Didn't you love the part where..." The more of those moments we find and the longer we're talking about them, then the more we liked the movie.

After we saw the new Star Trek, we were oohing and aahing over it for days. I'm stilling oohing, but it's more internal now.

Note: this works just as well for theatre as it does for films.

Didn't you love that part where Spock turned down his admission into the Vulcan Science Academy and told the Vulcan elders to "Live long and prosper"? Yeah, me too!