2005-05-21 - 10:12 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Imperial March"

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005

Internal dialogue today:

It's going to SUCK.

I WILL. NOT. get my hopes up.

It's going to SUCK.

(No, I'm not going to see it (tonight or anytime in the theater). Because it's going to SUCK.)

Edit: TheFerrett sums it up rather well for me in this post.

Note to self for posterity: "Revenge of the Sith" premiered today at midnight.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

My young cousin turned four yesterday, and my mother told me he was into "Star Wars" so I wandered into Kaybee to see if I could find him some small Star Wars gift to accompany the cash I had already tucked into his dinosaur card.

Some part of me is an eight-year-old boy, because I walked in and I saw this:

and my breath caught in my throat a little. "I want that," I thought. I wanted it the way I want my own AT-AT (preferably a real one, though I'd be OK with a decent-sized replica). But since I am mostly a 33-year-old woman, I resisted. I got the Spinning Attack Yoda for my cousin.

When I arrived at his house and asked for more details about his interest in Star Wars, I found out that his parents had never seen Episodes I or II. When he saw the ads for Episode III coming out and expressed interest, they rented the original trilogy for him, not the prequels. (A wise choice, actually.) So the impact of "Spinning Attack Yoda" would be lost on him. Well, not necessarily, because when he is older, if he wants to see Episode II, he may be as impressed as I was when Yoda springs into action.

Didn't matter anyhow, 'cause when he opened it up he said matter-of-factly to his mother, "I got this already!" Heh.

Anyway. I am not a hardcore Star Wars geek, but the original trilogy holds a very special place in my heart. I know more trivia about the movies than the average viewer, including my Dad, I think, who took me to see "Star Wars" in 1977 and must have seen it at least five times in the theater. I read the novelizations of the movies, which have a little more background than the movies themselves. My feelings about the original trilogy are summed up beautifully by this snippet from Salon.com:

I understood -- even at 12 -- that Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher were actors in these movies. [...]

But none of that film-business sophistication helped me to understand that "Star Wars," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" were not absolute gospel-truth stories that happened somewhere long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. The universe in which "Star Wars" took place was for me as real as Narnia, as Zuckerman's farm (home of Wilbur, Charlotte and Templeton), as the Hundred Acre Wood. It was one of my personal foundation myths.

I was never a "Star Wars" geek, exactly. Couldn't tell you the names of the drafts of the scripts or how many parsecs to a light-year or whatever. I just knew the story -- like I knew the story of the American Revolution -- backward and forward. In truth, I knew it much better than I ever knew the story of the American Revolution. Maybe it was the authority of that scrolling historical prologue that lent the thing credibility, but in my young mind -- never mind what I rationally knew about filmmaking -- "Star Wars" wasn't something that had been shot and sound-mixed and written and rewritten. It had merely happened and been faithfully recorded by an agile cameraman with a good seat on the Millennium Falcon. Tatooine, Dantooine, the Dagobah system, Alderaan, Hoth, Cloud City, Endor. Mos Eisley, the Death Star trash compactor: They were all real places where the story of three people, two droids and a Wookie played out over and over and over again.

So last night at my cousin's birthday party, I was sitting around a table with my aunts while my cousin was charging around the house in the exact same Vader helmet I'd just hankered after (his grandmother had bought it for him) and one of them says something about James Earl Jones's voice. And my other two aunts expressed surprise. "Oh, I didn't know that was James Earl Jones!"

My feeling at that moment, before rational thought kicked in, was as though they expressed surprise that George W. Bush is currently president of the United States. For a second it just did not compute, that anyone could not know something so basic and obvious. Once my brain kicked in, though, I was amused at myself for taking Star Wars mythology so very much for granted.

--------

After several jeans-and-t-shirt days I'm back to putting "outfits" together. Here's what I wore to my cousin's party yesterday.

The blue of the bag and turquoise of the cardigan are both in the scarf, which makes me giddy, of course. Garanimals!

Cardigan, Old Navy (last year), $13
Tee, Q&A, $7
Bag, MJ knockoff, $40 (splurge!)
Scarf and shoes, Target ($5 and $17)
Jeans Levi's Too Super Low (I forget; bought 'em two years ago. Maybe $35?)
Turquoise necklace was my grandmother's.

I'm finding it kinda interesting to look at all the pictures together. If that kinda thing interests you, here's the link.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

I have some clothes lying around that I don't particularly like, but I've kept in case I get desperate and need something conservative and dowdy to wear (since, as you know, most of my outfits seem to involve belly-peeking and butt-showcasing). Case in point is this pair of green shorts I bought ten years ago. They have a high waist, are pleated, baggy, and hit just above the knee. They are awful, but ten years ago I could wear them to work with a nice short-sleeve sweater.

Then this year I am browsing the runway shows and I see this outfit by Marc by Marc Jacobs:

And I thought of the green shorts. So I just spent a little while upstairs playing with the shorts (rolled twice) and my pathetic collection of belts (black, brown, and white). Here's what I came up with:

This was pointless and stupid since I don't even particularly like the Marc outfit (it's kinda messy, and I can't get happy with the belting), but I had fun playing around with it anyway, sort of like an "exercise for the reader". I actually almost like the white/tan combination, and I definitely like how the shorts make my legs look longer than they are.

MARRIED-PEOPLE TMI AHEAD

When I first put the shorts on, Poindexter wordlessly beckoned me over to his desk with a stern look, then started fondling my bare legs and up the back inside the very loose shorts. He leaned his head against my belly, closed his eyes, smiled and sighed happily, "I love summer."

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