The weeks in culture: May 12 - June 1

This is late, but I'm splitting it up into two posts anyway. Deal with it.

Watched:
Cloverfield
Hoop Dreams
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Sex and the City (plenty of eps, and the movie, too)
Charlie Wilson's War
The Golden Compass
Laurel Canyon
Grindhouse: Planet Terror
Grindhouse: Death Proof
Sorry, Dave, those last two weren't my cup of tea...but I did absolutely love Hoop Dreams. I can't believe it wasn't even nominated for an Oscar. BOOOOO. For best movie of those few weeks, it's a toss-up between that and SatC, which totally ruled, even if it didn't end on quite as great a note as did the series. Darn I love those ladies, though.

Read:
Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer by Moira Allen
Stiff by Mary Roach
Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris
I used to hear all this talk about how great Stiff was. I liked it, but I didn't think it was the absolute bee's knees. It was published a few years ago, and I feel like it was at the beginning of a trend of more accessible, entertaining nonfiction for the masses, so it got a lot of great press. (Actually, it might've just been the beginning of when I started to hear about good nonfiction, since before that I'd always been a fiction fan.) Anyway, while it was a solid read, compared to a kick-ass fiction book like The Devil in the White City, it wasn't anything to write home about.

Heard:
Hideaway by The Weepies

Visited:
Ensenada. What, you didn't spend Memorial Day on a Carnival Cruise to Mexico? 'Cause I totally did. During which time I learned that apparently aviators are a total dude magnet. Or maybe reading is. Either way, I got hit on a lot more than I wanted to. Gracias, pero no gracias, gentlemen.


But I did eat some incredibly delicious shrimp tacos, drink an incredibly delicious mango margarita, and talk to a senior citizen named Bob about how incredibly great a show My So-Called Life was. So...win?

Site of the week:
Scrabulous. I forgot how fun Scrabble is! I've been playing online with a friend from work, and it's a great little break when my brain needs a few minutes to de-stress. My one gripe is that the double/triple word/letter scores aren't clearly defined. But since it calculates the score for you automatically (when I play I'm usually too lazy to take score), I guess I shouldn't be too hard on the poor game. Challenge me to an email game sometime* - you don't even have to join the site.

* If you're not my dad. Or, if you're my dad, and won't be too ashamed that I score about 1/3 of your score, you crazy word-knowing freak.

The weeks in soccer:
Took a bit of a break, and now it's the start of a new season. It looks like we'll have a pretty good team, and I'm looking forward to playing with a few of my teammates instead of against them like the previous two seasons.

Since I don't have too much to say about this season yet, and yet I feel like oversharing, remember those leg bruises I mentioned a few weeks back? I took pictures at the time and wanted to show them off a bit. Check it:


I am sooooo hot. No wonder those drunk 21-year-olds wanted to be all up on me.