smacky and bucky

I watched Cube this weekend, starring a bunch of Canadians. One of them is the mom on the TV version of Dead Zone. The rest I've never seen before. The premise of the movie was very interesting, and most of it played out well. One major shift in character seemed to come out of nowhere and sort of screwed up the plot, but I'll forgive it. Worth a rental, and I didn't give anything away this time. In fact I didn't tell you much of anything about the movie, so I'm sure you're not tempted to see it at all. Let me get in Hollywood ad agency mode here for a second:

Cube is like Saw 2 meets The Matrix and Resident Evil and has a three-way. Now do you want to see it?

I finished the last half of Cell by Stephen King on Saturday. The showers ended in the early afternoon and the clouds actually parted, so I spent three hours in the pool reading. Not a bad book. Definite zombie overtones and moments in the book.

One woman continues to express interest in our house. She's been to see the place five times. The only problem is that she has to sell her condo to have to money to buy the house. She's probably praying we don't sell the house before she sells the condo, and we're praying her condo will sell so she can buy the house. Hopefully those two things don't somehow cancel each other out.

I picked up a used copy of championship poker for PS2 and played it some this weekend. Is it totally immature that I created a female character and named her E. Z. Lay? She's been having a great run so far, winning 6 out of 7 games.

Finally, since I already took the trouble to make the links on Kate's blog, I'll share them here too:


The real Telly Savalas for Player's Club

and

Jim Carrey as Telly Savalas for Player's Club

Both are funny but for different reasons.

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Sometimes I have mini panic attacks about my life. I ask myself questions like: What in the hell am I doing with my life? I rant about how fucked up everything is, but what am I doing about it? How am I attempting to make the world a slightly better place? I feel like I should be doing something beyond the everyday chores and stupid hobbies I have to distract myself. Cheesy horror movies and random pop culture shit that rots the brain like mental candy, completely devoid of intellectual nutrition. I find myself repulsed by pseudo-intellectuals that use big words to sound smart, but I go so far in the other direction in response, reveling in childish activities that don't challenge me at all. Sometimes I feel frozen in place, rationalizing that doing nothing at all is better than doing something and making things worse. People who fuck up, who really fuck up on a grand scale, are doing something.

When I was in middle school, I wasn't particularly motivated in classes, but I clearly recall being depressed knowing that there was no way I would ever have all the answers, or read all the books, that my brain couldn't contain all the knowledge we as living beings had created and thrown out there. At best I'd have a few items of trivia, a good basis for Jeopardy, but no real deep understanding of much of anything. I feel I should be at least alternating one piece of crap Stephen King book with something with more weight. Something that someone poured their soul into to create, with the hopes that someone would read it and their lives would be changed in some small way.

Does anyone else feel this way? That you're running in place and avoiding the "big questions"? The universal truth appears to be we don't really understand much of anything, but that's always been the case. Shining a light on how things are, and how they could be, has always challenged those that enjoy the status quo, who are usually in positions of power or wealth, who have reasons to fear change.