I'm going to see The Force Awakens tonight

I know nothing about Star Wars. Well I know someone is Luke's father, and that is important. There are lightsabers, and the red ones are evil. And I think someone shoots electricity from their fingertips? Oh, and there are space Nazis, a truly tragic bikini that fanboys go nuts over (if that episode of Friends is to be believed). And some prequels that everyone is upset about (confession, I can never tell which clips are from the sequel when I see Star Wars clips).

Anyway, RottenTomatoes is pretty excited about this movie, but many of the reviews get a little . . . weird from a non Star Wars fan perspective. Like, it's almost like I'm reading a review of The Passion of the Christ from a devout Christian. I'm left wonder if I'll enjoy this movie considering I'm not entirely sure if Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader or not, though I think that was the point of those much-hated prequels.

There are drug adds on Youtube now? I bet they've been there for a while

So I was watching stand up comedy videos yesterday and I randomly got an add for a drug, which first of all, it's odd that YouTube is trying to sell me an drug for depression. What's my search history telling you, Google? Are you implying something?

Anyway, this standard/boring ad reminded me of another one I saw on TV years ago:

I'm not here to tell people if they should be taking Abilify for depression or not. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm just here to complain about the crap info in this add. I don't even mean that roughly half the add is about the possible horrible side effects since any medication ad has no choice but to do that. But this particular ad doesn't give any specific evidence as to how or why Abilify helps with depression, much less to what degree. My first thought on seeing it years ago was "huh, isn't it weird that they didn't mention that aripiprazole is anti-psychotic? I guess they didn't want to scare their customers." 

It says that "some people had symptom improvement as early as one to two weeks". How many people? From what sample size? As compared to what? How much symptom improvement? How long was the symptom improvement sustained? How many people had any of the scary list of side effects that followed? For how long? Did they have to discontinue the medication? How many people's symptoms worsened? All of this would be important information for someone considering this drug.

Drug ads are a bit of a sore topic in the medical community. I've heard doctors argue that they shouldn't be permitted at all since the overwhelming majority of patients don't have the background to understand most drugs. I'm not sure if I'd go that far. I think patients have every right to know all their options for treatment. However, I do think ads like the one above are manipulative, even if they're not outright lying. 

I mean "some people" could mean "8 out 10" or "8 out of 10,000". Would it really have taken so much more time to say "in our study, X out of Y people experiences symptom improvement in one to two weeks" rather than "some people"? Would it really have been that much harder for the layperson to understand such a figure?

Since tedious drug ads are everywhere, I think there should be some kind of class in high school about how to interpret them. For most healthy people, the ads are easy to tune out, but I bet a sick person might be drawn into asking for a medication that wouldn't be good for them. If their physician doesn't do their due diligence, they might end up with an inappropriate drug. 

My adventures in German continue

So, I've kept up with teaching myself a little German every day. It's hard. Way harder than learning Portuguese, which I made relatively quick progress with. Having Spanish as a native tongue probably helped with that more than I realized even though by now I'm more fluent in English than Spanish.

I got myself a notebook to write tidbits in German. At the moment, it looks like I've returned to first grade, though I hope my handwriting is better. Today, I worked out that "sie" means a lot more than I first realized thanks to this:

At first I was like . . . but Männer is "men" and "sie" is "she"

Then it hit me! The verb decides what "sie" means because . . . why not? That makes sense, I guess. I'm sure Duolingo tried to tell me something like that at some point, but I was like "okay, alright, I'm tired though, next exercise".

ETA on 12/21/15: Apparently there's a different verb for animals eating (fressen) than for humans eating (essen) and it's insulting to use fressen when referring to a human. This feels like something I would forget.

Nostalgia in the land of reboots

I wasn't in the USA at the height of the Star Wars craze. For the sequels, anyway. I suspect I wasn't even alive when the original movies that fans worship so much first came out. So I always get a little mystified when grown people declare, with much dramatic flare, that such-and-such reboot and/or sequel has "ruined their childhood".

Even with the hyperbole removed, imagining that a new property in a franchise I liked as a child would somehow retroactively negate my past enjoyment. . . well, how would that even work? I mean, I "grew up" on Harry Potter, actually taught myself English with the books, had honest-to-God dreams HP5 coming out after Goblet of Fire. . . and I don't care about this new thing about Fantastic Beasts or whatever it's called that's coming out. If it sucks, it won't change how much joy the original HP series brought me.

So I didn't understand all the distress about reboots of "old" classics. Until I saw this:

Is this trailer any good?

I don't know. I don't think I can judge it objectively, insofar as a work of fiction can ever be judged objectively.

See, when I was little (in my early teens), my mom brought home a VCR copy of Disney's Tarzan. For a while, my brother and I watched this movie like once a day. After the Twin Towers, our house went without cable for a while (couldn't have been long, but we were kids so it felt like forever). We watched this movie on loop for that period. Then we watched this cartoon before going to school in the morning. There was a Tarzan level on Kingdom Hearts that my brother and I loved.

When I realized this trailer was for a Tarzan movie, all the great feelings about the Disney thing flooded me. When I noticed that this trailer was going for a different tone, I got. . . disappointed. And vaguely angry that this new thing didn't make me feel exactly as the Tarzan cartoons made me feel when I was a kid.

It's hard to say for sure, but I don't think I like this trailer even when I make a conscious effort to not compare it to a Disney cartoon. The characters are out of focus. There's a little too much rambling about scary Africa for my tastes. We get to see an ape like once (will they talk like the Disney apes? Sorry, I can't stop comparing). Then at the end, there's Samuel L. Jackson, speaking in a tone that doesn't really match with the atmosphere that the trailer was going for.

But am I just grasping at straws to justify unfair feelings towards the movie for not being exactly what I remember as a kid? Maybe. Maybe the movie will be amazing.

I just don't have much hope that it will.

I've started "Veronika decide morrer"

Buy on Amazon.

Since Duolingo's Portuguese exercises have gotten a little to simple to improve my skills, I've decided to spend some hours every week reading Paulo Cuelho's Veronika decide morrer. I have an English copy of the book to check my translations against.

Since every translation is different depending on the translator's skill and viewpoint, it'll be interesting to see how far I get and how much my amateur translations differ from Margaret Jull Costa's, the person who translated my English edition of the book.

I won't tell myself that I'll push through the entire book. That would be daunting even if I didn't have a million other things to do. At some point during the day, I have to squeeze in some German practice, Spanish review, exercise, keeping that Duolingo Portuguese tree gilded, studying, work, personal writing, and perhaps speaking to other human beings. I'd rather focus on what little I can get through every time I can squeeze some time for the project, or I wouldn't start doing any of it at all.

So without further ado, the first two paragraphs of Veronika decide morrer:

 I read:

On November 11th of 1997, Veronika decided that - finally! - the time to kill herself had arrived. Carefully, she cleaned her room near num convento de freiras, disabled her heating, brushed her teeth, and se deitou.

From the make-up table, she got the four sleeping pills. Instead of crushing them and mixing them with water, she resolved to take them one by one, since there exited a great distance between the intention and the act, and she wanted to be free to change her mind. In the meantime, with each pill that she swallowed, she felt more convinced after five minutes, the boxes were empty.

I don't know what num convento de freiras means. For some reason, I want to say "near the train station", but that's not right. This might be an instant when knowing Spanish is detrimental because convento fixates my mind on convents and nuns. But I know that, in this context and in this language, num means "a". Or perhaps "an".

Se deitou means something like "stopped". More specifically, "stopped herself". Here's the thing though, I remember reading this English way bay in sophomore year of undergrad, and the closing words of the opening paragraph are something like "and laid on her bed".

So, am I remembering wrong?

Stuck in a car in lower Manhattan. At 5:30 PM. On Friday.

I visited a hospital in eastern Long Island today. It was beautiful, like what I imagine a hospital in the Capitol might look like. The interviews and tour ended at 3:15 PM, and I stupidly believed the Google maps lady when she told me I'd be home at 5:50 PM. The truth is I was tired, so much so that I ditched my original plan to just hang around the town until late at night, when the worst of NYC traffic would have been . . . less worse.

So I get on the car and, not two minutes into my fifty mile trip, Google lady starts freaking out about delays here and delays there. I see people swerving from lane to lane in desperate attempts to get home before the imminent gridlock, as if every single lane wasn't moving at the same intermittently slow pace. Me? I just drive in the middle lane, resigned to my fate. My car's too old and the accelerator is a little blown. If I tried any of that lane switching desperation, I'd just crash. I know because I did try that when I first got the car, and a truck slammed me out of I-280.

As I neared the city, I kept seeing these traffic notices on the electronic signs about a "gridlock warning" and to "use mass transit". Whatever that means. Highways, I guess? If there's a way to get from Long Island to Jersey without crossing some bridge that takes you around NYC or, God forbid, NYC itself, I'd love to hear of it. Also, I don't think anyone needs to be "warned" about a rush hour gridlock on NYC on Friday. That's just gravity. When people need to go to NYC on Friday, they don't go by car. They use public transportation. People with cars drive them to the station and rent parking nearby. Yay cost of living.

Obviously, I don't have such an arrangement because I avoid going to NYC unless it's absolutely necessary (I might be working there next year, isn't that hilarious? I'm getting rid of the car if that happens). This morning, I had to be on the road at 4:30 AM to avoid the morning rush hour gridlock, and I almost got caught up in it anyway.

I didn't almost get caught up in it this time. At around 4:55 PM, Google lady was happily informing me that I was ten miles from my domicile . . . and also two hours away. At one point, it took my an hour to get the car through half a mile of traffic. For comparison, I can run a full mile in ten minutes.

At times, I wondered if I was just a timid driver or something. Then I realized I wasn't driving; I was just parked in NYC. No one was driving. The driver next two me was on her phone, working or having a serious Facebook fight. Her expression was not happy, though that might have been the traffic jam. The cab a little ahead had a tab $50.82, and the passenger was napping. I unbraided my hair. Then rebraided it.

At the entrance to Holland Tunnel, a billboard told me that "the only thing racing in Holland Tunnel is your heart", which took me a while to interpret as an anti-drag racing PSA because it's not possible to drag race in Holland Tunnel. I've been gridlocked in that strip of hell on Wednesday night at 2:00 AM.

Do people do this, as in the sitting in the car for an hour to trek through half a block, every day? There were extenuating circumstance for me personally, but it's not like NYC traffic is ever any better. Are there millions of New Yorkers who just accept an hours-long commute and offensive parking expenses when they could probably walk the city from end-to-end faster?

Languages and Duolingo

Learning languages is my version of Candy Crush, a tidbit about myself I learned thanks to moving to a Brazilian neighborhood and Duolingo. At first, I started teaching myself Portuguese so I could speak to patients at work, but over the last year I've realized that keeping track of my Duolingo tree helps me relax during my commute. I started refreshing my Spanish, which has grown atrocious over the last decade and change.

And Duolingo works! Today, I facilitated a full conversation between my attending and a Brazilian woman eager to go home. Much to my delight, I clearly understood every single sentence from the woman (a native speaker of Portuguese). One of the first phrases I taught myself is "Se você fala devagar, eu comprendo". I didn't have to use it once today, though I still understand much more than I can say.

To congratulate myself, I decided to start my next Duolingo tree early. I'd planned to wait until my Portuguese tree was gilded, but since it looks like I can hold a conversation already, I went right on ahead and started German.

And it was a bit of a disaster. I didn't realize just how much knowing Spanish helped me with Portuguese until I read this:

From Duolingo's German "Basics" lesson. I didn't even grasp the English.

To be fair to myself, I did complete the lesson with a single error, and that was at the end of a very long day at work and after spending a good hour on Portuguese and Spanish. I'll continue at it and hopefully by next year I'll be able to understand a little bit of German.

Ever played three videogames in one? Persona Q is kinda like that

Buy on Amazon

I started playing Persona games at some point in high school. Though I suspect it was later since I don't recall playing with my brother, meaning he'd already joined the army when I first got my hands on Persona 3.

For the uninitiated, Persona 3 and 4 are about special transfer students at different high schools who must battle "Shadows" while becoming the most popular boys in school. They're part dating simulator, part dungeon RPG crawlers that really love tarot motifs.

As I understand, the first two games in the series are quite different from the last two, which has caused some . . . heated discussions in Atlus fandom. For better or for worse, 3 and 4 (specially 4) have become cash cow franchises for Atlus, as evidenced by this cute little cross over that I thought would be little more than a cheap grab at more of my money.

Don't get me wrong, it worked, but I expected to be an angry little ball of fake geek girl rage twenty minutes into the game. I could not have been more wrong and jaded. This game is really, really, really fun.

Flash Fiction: Teeth in the Fog

1 - The Merchant

Supply and demand. The fog has been great for business because . . . supply and demand. Before, a man trying to make a living at the square had a market bloated with glitter and frivolity.

Food couldn't be just food, it had to be nurtured in the cleanest of farms, the animals serenaded by the sweetest of virgins every morning. A coat couldn't just shield a body from the cold, it had to be the perfect cut and color so the body looked slimmer, younger, richer. And the brands . . . no one of consequence would use anything that didn't bear a proper insignia.

The fog purified the system to its simplest form. Food, never mind its history, helped your hollow ache in your belly. The coat was a barrier between your skin and the teeth in the air. Younger people don't seem much significance in a brand anymore; they sort through piles of hand-me-downs for something that fits them without a thought for letters, prints, or stripes.

2 - The Parent

Not smart to have kids no more, so of course people want more. It gets lonely in the dark--lonely, cold, and dangerous. You have a kid because even if the teeth don't get you, hunger and sickness will hobble your back and squash your lungs. Maybe your kid will go hunt for you then, though the odds for that aren't good.

It's a bad investment either way. Kids die more often than not, their little noses clog with the sooty leftover of oily scales and fragments of insect limbs. A sleek, hunter dog would be a better bet. They don't need more than crumbling concrete, empty pipes, and what little meat you can't scrape off the bones of things they kill for you.

People keep trying for kids anyway. There's some instincts the fog can't kill.

3 - The Technician

They write in a language that once ruled the world. The commands flowed through a contained logic born from the abstract envisionings of a class of people with no skills to fight the fog. Their poems now live in sheets of paper dyed black with soot, the words painted in white wrung from the bellies of vanquished teeth.

Eventually, disciples will string together commands without understanding what they mean. The old technicians can't explain their meaning without their old tools any more than they could teach what 'sunny' means to someone blind from birth.

Or after the fog.

4 - The Hunter

There's a craft to growing old in the fog.

Without the comforts from before, no one can get much mileage out of a human body. Bones don't get as strong as the once did, a person's reach remains stunted, and deep restful sleep is suicidal when no one can predict when the wind will take a nasty turn. There isn't a human left that never huddles under their bed as storms slam teeth against their windows, teeth hitting glass, wood, cloth, or cardboard. Only the mournful rumbling of a hungry belly is worse.

It's easier, for the belly at least, to be alone. It takes hours of patience and focus to kill a single, skinny, rabid deer scurrying from building to building, obscured in the smog. The loneliness that eats at your every thought is an ally every time you don't have to hand over a piece of game, longing for every strip of stringy muscle you'll not rip off the twiggy bones.

5 - The Child

Orphans scurry from tower to tower, eyes glued to the ground for scraps. They fear the fog, but not as much as they trust their ears and noses. They're the ones that stay out longest when the bell signaling incoming storms ring, then come fastest when the wind subsides.

So they're the ones who find the carcasses left behind by the smog, and they're the ones who dig appreciate how the teeth in the fog have stripped away the skin and cooked the meat. They might look feral to those who retain the sensitivities of days past.

But they're not. They've just never seen the sun.  

Jessica Jones, AKA I can't believe I actually binge-watched it

I have some time off, technically, so I guess it's not a surprise that at the end of each episode, I saw no reason to not go on to the next. Full disclosure, I did go to sleep after episode nine, proving that I don't have the attention span to marathon an entire season of television. I don't know how people can watch like twenty-four episodes of anything in "a weekend" without losing their minds. Anyway. My initial, exhausted, dizzy impression is that I like this show very much. I liked it better than Daredevil, and I actually enjoyed Daredevil quite a bit.

Control the Controller: I hope this book wasn't as expensive when I bought it

Buy on Amazon, if you can afford it

For a while, videogame addiction was the hot topic of choice among the twenty-four-hour news cycle talking heads. For all I know, it might still be. As gamer who not-so-secretly feared she might be prone to addiction, the subject always interested me quite a bit.

Now that I know a little more about medicine and health, I can say with certainty that I've never actually been addicted to anything. Saying that I could be because "I can't quit chocolate" makes about as much sense as the people who say they're "so OCD" because they like a neat and clean work space.

Nevertheless, the subject still interests me. Since games as we know them haven't been part of our culture for too long, it was a little difficult to find work focused on the subject of videogame addiction, but a few months back, I purchased a copy of Control the Controller: Understanding and Resolving Video Game Addiction by Dr. Ciaran O'Connor, a psychotherapist working with gaming addicts.

What makes this book a special resource is that Dr. O'Connor is a gamer himself, one with background in videogame design. His background lets him see that, while some people probably cannot touch a game without spiraling into unhealthy playing habits, most gamers can reach a point where they can play without letting it become detrimental to their familial, romantic, platonic, or professional relationships. He understands that videogames are a much more like alcohol than . . . say, cocaine, in the sense that, like alcohol, they are perfectly legal to use, and perfectly safe in moderation.

Essentially, Dr. O'Connor doesn't equate gaming itself with videogame addiction, so he avoids the pitfall of talking like the mere act of playing leads to personal, professional, and financial ruin. He does so while acknowledging that game developers do try to create games with the purpose of hooking vulnerable players, even when it means developing a game that's not particularly fun to play. Such tactics have always been part of the business, but they've grown more prominent with the rise of "casual" gaming on smartphones and the development of downloadable content, where developers can theoretically make a game that would be profitable forever.

Daredevil, episode five

Jessica Jones is starting soon and I wanted to have my commentary for this entire series done before that one started. It's probably not going to happen, but Netflix's big advantage is that I can wait as long as I want before writing anything about Jessica Jones. Or maybe I'll start talking about that series immediately. We'll see.

In the meantime, I remember next to nothing about Daredevil's fifth episode. Onward.

Matt, showing more shock and concern when a mobster is shot by the police than when a blind Chinese man is shot in the middle of one of his vigilante scuffles; #so heroic

• For the record, I think Clare's post-kidnapping injuries would show more swelling than this opening is letting on. I guess the Beauty is Never Tarnished trope is in full effect here, and in a show that I distinctly remember bragging about gritty darkness. Marvel's commitment to "realism" for its Netflix properties must not be so strong that they'd risk showing Rosario Dawson in anything less than her full glory. 
• I missed the FSoG reference the first time I watched this.
• "Taste copper in the air". How has Matt not gone insane from sensory overload? Nevermind. Superhero. 
• While I like the "world on fire" concept, I didn't like the effect they used for it.
• Wait, that was the first time Clare and Matt kissed? I have not been paying as much attention as I thought. Or maybe too much attention because I could've sworn they got together like . . . episodes ago.

And now, my shoes

Going on interviews involves a lot of walking and, as a woman forced to wear "professional" attire (not sweats and sneakers), I need to do the walking while wearing uncomfortable shoes. Heels, even. God help me. The suit I found on sale at Burlington Coat Factory is quite long. I've decided it means the manufacturers just expected that any woman buying the suit soon would wear heels. First, I wondered if the retail world doesn't just think that a woman my height should be quite so big, but I'm like 5'10 so how much taller did they expect me to be?

Although, it's entirely possible that Calvin Klein would find me fat. I hear he finds everyone fat.

Anyway, I had two options: go to the tailor and get the pants shortened, or buy heels. I don't know what came over me, but I decided that if Calvin Klein thought the suit needed them, then I should try to find comfortable heels. My friends and the internet assured me that such things exist. I think they're delusional. They all say I just need to "get used to it", but when is pain a sign that I need to get used to something? Regardless, I recognize I know nothing of fashion, so I listened to those who sounded like they knew what they were talking about.

My rotation shoes, from some store in NYC whose name I don't remember

These are the shoes I wore on my clinical rotations whenever I wasn't allowed to wear sneakers. Once I broke them in, I would even wear them with scrubs.

I love them. One of my friends calls them "hideous" (hi, Stephanie!), but I feel nothing but devotion for them. They're black, which means I can get away with wearing them with "business casual" pants, even if they're "ugly".

But they're not ugly. They're gorgeous. I have wide feet and these things genuinely accommodate that. Sometimes shoes claim to be "wide", but I still feel like I'm being strangled when I put them all. Best of all, it was actually possible to break these in. Yes, I got a little vesicle the first time I wore them, but the third time I could have put them on without socks.

I would've wore them to interviews with my suit, but I broke the soles at some point this year. Hey, they were fifty bucks (cheap, for NYC prices), and I wore them almost every day for a year. So I had to look through my closet or buy interview shoes.

By "look through my closet", I meant consider the other pair of shoes I own:

My old boots, bought by mother when I was a teen

The creases at the front give the impression that I've worn these bastards often. The creases are liars. I can count the number of times I worn these things with one hand.

When I was a teen and mom cajoled me into it. Once while I was in undergrad, shadowing a gastroenterologist. And for five seconds around my house while trying to decide if I could use them for my interviews.

When I show these to girlfriends complaining about what torture they are, they look at me like I've lost my mind. Or like they never before realized what a baby I am. They say these torture devices look "comfortable" because the heel is wide. But they. Are. Not. I put these things on, take twenty steps, and my lower limbs paralyze until I take them off. It's like my feet remember what happened when I wore them to that party as a teen, and now they have PTSD.

And I can't blame them. Here's a diagram of the bones of the foot. Normally, the calcaneus (heel) bone takes most weight when a human being stands. Heels force a person to push much more weight onto the metatarsal bones, which are not supposed to be bearing so much weight, except during dorsiflexion. And the heels actually make them bare even more weight during dorsiflexion. Blah, blah, blah . . . heels force feet into an unnatural position.

The worst part is, these things were expensive. My mother paid around $70 for them, and this is like ten years ago, when $70 was real money. (I realize, after typing that, how it sounds. Of course, $70 is still money today, but it was more ten years ago. So I'm just going to leave the comment as is and embrace how out-of-touch it is).

A Medical Examiner's Job

I'm in the middle of interviewing for residency positions. One of the standard questions I'm asked over and over again is if I have interest in any particular sub-specialties, or to describe any experiences with pathology I've had in the past. It's easy enough to talk about my fascination with gastrointestinal or neurological pathology, my time in the surgical pathology labs, or my excitement about blood banking and molecular genetics.

Talking about forensic pathology is a little harder.

When I started the residency application process, I was warned not to sound like I was married to any particular subs-specialty, but especially not forensics. Many medical students get no exposure to autopsy pathology, and fewer still ever see a forensic autopsy or a criminal case. Needless to say, it's nothing like what goes on television or movies.

Though I am considering forensics as a career, I don't have my heart completely set on it. Still, I am seriously considering it. Morbid as it sounds, I did enjoy my time at the medical examiner's office. I also don't have the option of glossing over the interest due to a quirk in the application process for forensic fellowships. Most pathology residents need to apply early, towards the end of their second year, but many residency programs schedule forensic training in the last year of residency. I have to ask about the possibility of altering the schedule so I can get my residency training in forensics earlier.

So over the last month, I've been asked why I'm interested in forensics. I've found that it's not the easiest question to answer. Saying I like to work with my hands feels shallow, true as it is. The most diplomatic answer would be to say that forensics is often essential for families looking for closure, but that's more about the result of the job rather than the job itself. Saying that death is fascinating is crass, but that's at least part of the appeal. Either way, it can get painfully draining.

(I will talk about my experiences at the ME's office under the cut even though I don't plan to get into gory details. Much. There are issues of confidentiality to consider.)

Crimson Peak and Hollywood's inability to market a movie

By now, it's obvious that my wish for Crimson Peak to cause waves at the box office isn't coming true. It had an abysmal opening weekend, did not bounce back with word-of-mouth, and didn't shake the international box office. According to BoxOfficeMojo, it made back its budget, but you don't need to be a finances maverick to know that a studio doesn't sink fifty-five million into a movie (plus the promo budget) to make back under twenty million in profit.

There are probably many reasons why this movie failed, or close to it, at the box office. Some of them are obvious. The economy is poor and consumers have less money to spend on entertainment. When they do go to the movies, they're much more likely to throw down some cold cash for a franchise that has proven itself to be competent, if not groundbreaking. Del Toro, much as I love him, just isn't a wow-type director that will put asses in seats with his name alone (is there such a director anymore?). Maybe the movie just wasn't as good as I thought it was (I recognize when I enjoy something because of nostalgia and personal taste rather than inherent quality).

But mostly, I think the promo for the movie was just inadequate. I mean, just look at this trailer:

I liked it, but then I liked almost everything about the movie. And as I said in my first post about the subject, I would go see just about anything by del Toro.

Daredevil: episode four

The way I remember from my first viewing, this was the first episode that managed to wake me from the fog of post-IM at the VA service. And I'm pretty sure it had to do with this dude:

• I have no idea what Russian prisons are like. They might exactly like this, for all I know. But it does look a little overly dramatic.
• I'm not entirely sure why I still watch the opening credits.
• The guy Matt threw from Claire's roof would've died from the fire extinguisher that fell on his head.
• So I get it's part of the superhero/comic genre, but I always wonder why professional, grown up women don't run in the opposite direction when they run into these admitedly hot dudes. Like, why isn't Clare going "well, he's dreamy . . . but he does dress up in a black suit and beats people into a coma at night". I mean, she's already out of her apartment, wasting sick days from work to hide from anyone that might associate her with him. Where's her sense of self-preservation? 

Black Snake Moan: I suggest rather than recommend it

Yesterday, while wondering around TVTropes, I ended up on the page for Black Snake Moan. Like the poster, the trailer is . . . well:

Now, in all fairness to the film itself, it is not the exploitative big-scary-black-man-kidnaps-pretty-white-girl-drug-addict-and-turns-her-into-his-sex-slave thing that the trailer and poster make it out to be. Samuel L. Jackson's character (Lazarus Redd) and Christina Ricci's character (Rae) don't have a sexual relationship in the film. Instead, they form an unlikely friendship (almost a father-daughter relationship) that ultimately helps both of them become better people.

I will put the rest under a cut to avoid spoilers.

Daredevil on Netflix: Episode Three

Gif from this recap.

• I know from watching before that this blondish goatee guy is gonna go cray-cray, but I almost want to believe he's a random nice guy again. The actor is good.
• That being said, I never liked this "X amount of hours/days/lifetimes" thing TV shows like to pull. Why can't scene one just be scene one? I'm already watching this thing on Netflix; clearly they don't need to fight hard for my attention.
• Especially a pointless one like that one. Also, people still waving those guns around like they're nothing, aiming them wherever (sometimes at their own body parts).
• The intro is still boring but the music is really nice.
• "Used to be if you killed a man you sent his wife flowers. Now you just send the wife with him." If the point was to get it across that things are getting desperate, than mission accomplished.

Flash fiction: Paralysis

Autumn arrives early at Camp Lakehill. The tree leaves seem sadder, like they shrink in on themselves a little bit every night. It smells differently too, or maybe Lucinda’s nose doesn’t work quite the same way in the cold.

Lucinda has been reading an ecology blog and knows the leaves fall away in the cold because the trunk and roots go to sleep, and the sunlight is not intense enough that it’s worth it for the tree to keep them alive, but she aches for the dying leaves anyway. If she could, she’d gather the trees in her thin arms and share her warmth.

Not that she has much warmth to share. None of the girls at camp do. They’ve been pairing up at night and huddling together in their narrow bunks beds. Lucinda’s bed partner is Maria Gomez, another girl between ten and eleven.

Maria’s bigger than Lucinda. Her mom has said that Maria blossomed earlier than expected. Last school year, she shot up almost a foot and her thighs, arms, hips, and chest filled out nice and soft. Lucinda thinks Maria is getting the short end of the deal in their partnership. She doesn’t think her body is large enough to offer Maria much comfort.

Maria spoons her most nights. Lucinda burrows in, her head just under Maria’s chin, her back pressed to Maria’s chest, the back of her thighs cradled by Maria’s hips, and two thin white blankets covering them both. It’s nice in an odd way. At night, Lucinda’s back is warmer than her front. And the familiar, lilac-soap scent of Maria’s skin chases the stink of a dying forest away from Lucinda’s nostrils.

Lucinda’s not sure if she’s asleep when Maria lays a hand over her mouth. She thinks Maria must have dozed off, otherwise her hand would be nowhere near Lucinda’s face. When Lucinda opens her mouth, her neck tensing to nudge Maria’s hand away, Maria slips two fingers inside. They taste like the twigs in the wet forest floor smell like.

It’s too strange to be scary. Maria somehow spreads her hand inside Lucinda’s mouth, one fat finger inside each of her cheeks and another holding her tongue down so the tip presses against her bottom teeth. It doesn’t hurt but Lucinda thinks it should.

A noise too strangled to be a proper scream gets stuck somewhere in Lucinda’s chest.

Lucinda’s heart starts rustling, a crackle reminiscent of the sound dried leaves make when cold wind passes through thin branches coming out her nose. She would cry, but her eyes are as dry as her throat is silent. She would struggle, or maybe just squirm, but her limbs feel as heavy and dead as granite. Her chest expands with every breath she takes, but she still swears she’s drowning.

It takes Lucinda hours to pull away from Maria. The hand is out of her mouth, but Lucinda struggles with the weight of dead meat on her tongue. She thinks she should scream, shake Maria’s shoulder, maybe hit her like an upset boy might punch a friend who played a bad joke on him.

At least, she should escape the narrow bunk bed.

Maria is back on her before Lucinda can make a decision. Except it can’t be Maria because the leg that falls over her hips is that of a grown woman, and Maria’s still a kid even if she’s grown rounder. The leg morphs into a tree and Maria wants to scratch her thigh as she does when she dozes in the forest ground and wake up with twigs and branches rubbing the skin of her calves.

A keen wail, something a dog might let out before a pack of hyenas, escapes Lucinda’s lips before there’s a big hand back in her mouth. It spreads its fingers again, so wide that Lucinda is disturbed when her jaw doesn’t ache. She’s stuck under the weight, her limbs as hollow and immobile as rusty pipes.

She doesn’t know how she stays under the massive tree-woman, terrified that her chest will stop expanding and letting in air. Maybe she squirms out from under it, but it doesn’t matter because she’s back under the warm boulder in seconds.

“Lucinda, come on!” It’s Maria that shakes her. “We’re gonna be late.”

The light, the words, or the hand on her shoulder; something makes Lucinda’s synapses blink, and her mind and body are awake, struck by a thunderbolt.

Though Lucinda feels like a storm swept through her, it must be a quiet affair. Maria’s warm brown eyes do not focus on her and instead frown at the tangle of sheets by their entwined legs.

“Last day at camp,” Maria mutters to herself. “Better make the best of it.”

Daredevil on Netflix: Episode Two

• I forgot this one started with the flippy timeline thing where the first shot is of the hero all bloodied up . . . in a dumpster in this case.
• Opening credits are still cool, and still boring. The music manages to be both soothing and anxious at the same time.
• You know, technically, hot nurse shouldn't be moving Matt without first checking his neck, but he's unconscious so technically, he'd need at minimum a head/neck/spine CT scan. He needs a C-collar. I'm wondering why hot nurse didn't call 911, and I recall from my first watch that this is never explained to my satisfaction. 
• Yo, those were blown pupils they showed on screen. Her first though wouldn't have been "blind". It would've been brain herniation.
• Now she tries to call 911, after the shittiest trauma survey ever.

Daredevil on Netflix: Episode One

You know how people liveblog and livetweet and livewhatever TV shows? I was gonna try that with Jessica Jones, but that comes out next month. By then I'll be back at the hospital, so instead I'll do this with Daredevil. Full disclosure, I already half-watched this once while on internal medicine service. Which means I remember like 30% of it. And I don't know how this is supposed to work with a show that's on Netflix. But here we go.

• I like the poster. The cane, the bloody knuckles, the smirk/smile thing the actor has going. Kudos to the art people, make up people, and him.
• I thought the scene with the little kid and the toxic spill was going to be the major gist of backstory, but I know from my previous binge-watching episode that, sadly, that will not be the case.
• Matt's monologue with the priest went on like 95% too long. Cut the story, keep the "what I'm about to do" line.
• During that first fight scene, there's a dude sitting in a chair with some junk food the entire time. I don't know what that was about. Like, why didn't he run? Pull out a gun? Called 911? Dropped the sandwich? I feel like I missed something about that dude.
• They were trying some artistic, noire, Game of Thrones deal with the opening, and it's pretty and everything, but just like with the GoT opening credits, I get bored.

Guns and writing gunmen

Is there an action story set in the even vaguely modern world that doesn't in some way feature firearms? Guns, especially fictional guns and the badasses wielding them, are everywhere. After a while, they become white noise and even someone like me, who's never touched one, can be fooled into thinking they know how the things work. Maybe not the specific technical details, but how difficult is it to point at something and shoot?

And then I tried to imagine writing an expert gunman, a typical action hero or heroine. It did not go well. Though I know (vaguely) that revolvers, shotguns, and rifles are different, I do not have the words to describe how they are different. I couldn't even say the difference between the handgun that has that rolling thing in the middle where you slide in bullets one by one, versus the other gun that cops use in all those TV procedurals that has a thing in the handle were you slide a rectangular bullet-holding thing. Which might or might not be called a magazine.

From the paragraph above, you can probably imagine what a disaster it would've been if I'd tried to write a scene from the point of view of any character that knew anything about guns, never mind the point of view of the typical action hero/heroine badass. Clearly, I had work to do.

Enter The Cornered Cat.

On Amazon.

A friend of mine with extensive knowledge of firearms recommended Kathy Jackson's website and book. He said it was an excellent resource for people like me, who've never touched a gun. This weekend, I spent some time reading some of her entries on gun safety, and I thoroughly agree with him.

Usually, I don't recommend any books or websites until I've spent significant time with them. This is the first time I feel compelled to recommend anything before I'm well into the material. I found this website that useful.

I've tried to research guns before and was put off by the use of esoteric terminology, confusing diagrams, and the inevitable political discussions around guns that almost always seem to devolve into fruitless flame wars.

The Cornered Cat is the first site I've found on the subject that organizes information on gun maintenance, use, and safety in a way that's palatable and welcoming to a beginner. From what I can tell, Kathy Jackson is not approaching the subject from a writer's perspective, but from the perspective of a responsible gun owner. Nothing I've seen in the site has anything to do with writing, and everything to do with handling firearms with the respect they deserve.

Just from reading a couple of entries, I've learned to think of weapons in a way that I never have before. I'm now analyzing the way I see them presented in fiction, and I've decided I never want to include them in my story in such a careless way.

Take a moment to read and understand The Four Universal Rules about handling any firearm, as presented by Mrs. Jackson:

1. All guns are always loaded. (Treat them so!)
2. Never point the gun at anything you are not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target (and you have made the decision to shoot).
4. Be sure of your target and what is beyond it. 

I can't recall many books, TV shows, or movies with expert gunman who followed even a single one of these rules. Now that I have a slightly better understanding of gun safety, I can look back at many stories I enjoyed that had their supposedly responsible gun experts treating their weapons like toys.

Reading this website/book has inspired me to do better. If I ever include an expert gunman in my fiction, I'm going to do my damnest to present this expert as someone who respect their weapons' power.

Flash Fiction: Foreclosure

Wreck

The bank will have to claw every last penny out of my bitterness.

I take a sledgehammer to every wall that’s not facing the outside. I wrench out as many pipes as I can. The wall jacks I rip out with my bare hands. I hammer away at the kitchen sink, the one I renovated last year as the mortgage payments seemed to get steeper and steeper. Cement is cheap. I pour it down the bathroom drain, down the toilet, spill it all over the floors.

Putrefy

Meat stinks faster in the summer. I spend the five hundred dollars I have left on chicken, ribs, pork, veal, meat, meat, and more meat. They cut off my electricity a week ago, so it might be just as well to leave it all in the fridge.

But not as effective.

I stuff pieces into every nook and cranny I can find in every room in the house, inside the wall jacks I took out, into the holes I made in the walls. The rest I leave in the fridge, hoping for a fungal universe to flourish.

Decorate

On the one wall I spared, the wall in front of the bed I shared with my husband until a year ago, I use the last of my colors. I don’t have the time to create the kind of image that would end up in a museum, but I’ve got more zest now than I’ve had in years. I paint a dying sun, a flame collapsing in on itself and absorbing an entire world.  

Clean

Appearances are important.

The lawn has not been mowed in months, and that’s no way to greet important people. The flowers have all dried out, but the brown foliage remains. I uproot the weeds, clean the dirt stuck to the wall behind the small patch of flowers. If I had enough money left, I’d have bought a new coat of paint.

Shock

I thought long and hard about how to set this up just right. A gun would’ve been faster, probably painless, but the neighbors might have heard. Can’t have the police here before the bank, so it’s gonna have to be the rope. The living room’s ceiling fan lines up nice with the front door so if I play it right, my corpse will be the first thing the bastards see.

Hope my neck breaks instantly.

Crimson Peak: a romance novel and a ghost story

I watched Crimson Peak with my mother, who speaks very little English and thus missed the . . . uh, nuances of the dialogue. She still loved the movie, because it is awesome. Rotten Tomatoes has it at a passable 68% rating, which just goes to show that professional critics don't know what they're talking about. Because, I repeat, this movie is amazing. 

I expected I would love the hell out of this movie because I've loved Guillermo del Toro's entire cinematography, Pacific Rim included. Especially included. Anyway, at this point, del Toro could take a dump on camera, film it, call it a movie, and I'd be at theaters on opening day. I didn't see Crimson Peak on opening night only because I had to travel all the way to Richmond for an interview.

I'm going to spoil the hell out of this after this great poster:

Sleep deprivation enrages me in ways I can't describe

I'm on an amtrak train halfway back home from my first residency interview,  and there's a dumbass behind me having the most inane phone conversation I've ever been subjected to. It's almost midnight and no one else on the cart is talking, which means that I cannot tune out his insipid commentary on the quality of cutscenes in some Xbox game.

I'm not sure how many hours I've slept in the last forty-eight hours,  but it hasn't been enough to keep me from praying that this imbecile chokes on his own spit so I can get a moment of blessed quiet.

Doesn't this idiot know of text messaging?

I'm am very close to using the kind of language I told myself would be too vulgar and unprofessional for the blog I want.

Oh my God, it's a dumb college student talking about cramming techniques for tests.

Social media the future of literature studies

When I started college almost a decade ago, I planned to major in English or History to become a teacher. That didn't last long, but I do remember my handful of comparative literature classes I took to meet my humanities requirements. The author I remember the most is Kafka.

I loved learning about Kafka and his life, and how it affected the subject matter and tone of his work. And for a while now, I've been wondering who in our generation is going to be a "classic" author two, three hundred years from now. Specifically, will they have kept a blog, a Facebook, or any other kind of social media presence? And if so, how will that affect the way readers interpret their work?

Right now, classic literature students have history, maybe a handful of letters, and speculation about what an author's life was like. A century from now, they might have an author's blog to peruse and speculate about. The sheer volume of entries a dedicated blogger can produce in a lifetime would be staggering, and that's assuming all their social media entries are just about writing.

Most of these entries will be dated, right down to the time of day/night this future classic author posted the entry. For some people, social media has no boundaries. Political and religious views are shared. Funny selfies, drunk selfies, fashionista selfies . . . just selfies in general. (To clarify, I have nothing against social media, though I choose to keep my involvement superficial).

Imagine that a blogger somewhere is writing the next epic tragic romance. Now imagine that at the same time, they're blogging about their feelings are they struggle through a painful divorce from the person they assumed was the love of their life. Assuming that both survive the inevitable Google apocalypse, there will be bright-eyed students interpreting that epic tragic romance as they read the author's heartbroken blog entries.

I'm not sure what this will mean for literature, but I'm a little sad that I won't be around to see it play out.

ETA: Christ help me I think he finally stopped. If he opens his stupid fucking mouth again,  I'm going to lose it.

Flash Fiction: Magic Fever

Suburbian Cheerleaders Attack Magic Fever Patient and Drink His Blood; A Deadly Fad Diet.

Marie had to read the blog’s title twice before she grasped the words, and two more times before she understood it. She glared at her phone, then closed the window and went to check CNN.

There it was. Suburbian Cheerleaders Attack Magic Fever Patient and Drink His Blood; A Deadly Fad Diet.

Marie skimmed the article.

Skinny girls hear that AHDS patients never gain weight. They kidnap a twelve-year-old boy from the projects, starve him because they read that AHDS patients are most infective when they’re stressed out, cut his neck open a few times, and drink him down as best they can. They get sick, convulse, then die, and the kid “recovers” in a psych ward.

“It’s a tragedy,” the article quoted one of the skinny girls teachers, “they were such bright, promising young women. Things like these wouldn’t happen if we didn’t push such unrealistic standards of beauty on our young girls.”

“Come on, you’re next.” Sho’s annoyed voice startled Marie away from her phone screen. “I don’t wanna be late to class again.”  

Marie shuffled to the nurse’s office, swallowing a comment about Sho knowing more math than their teacher anyway. It was hardly an insult. Another girl in their class once asked him if Virus X made him smart. 

“I was smart before I was sick,” Sho had told her, dark eyes not moving from his textbook, silencing the nasty giggles around them.

The school’s pale green hallways seemed narrower than ever as Marie navigated through her day, trying to strike a balance between looking down at her shoes like a mouse and glaring at everyone around her. Her eyes met their head cheerleader’s at the end of the day, and the striking blue gaze forced Marie to remember a picture of the young black boy who’d been tortured for days by cheerleaders worried that they were getting too heavy for the top of the pyramid. His sunken cheeks and hooded eyes had glared from the bottom of the article, right after the cheerleaders' teachers lamented about her bright student’s wasted life. 

Marie looked away from the head cheerleader and stepped out into the hot city summer. Her family had moved to the city a month after Marie was officially diagnosed with AHDS. She hated it. The cement streets absorbed sunlight and then spat it back up, until Marie felt like she was inside a pressure cooker. Trees were few and far in between, trapping the smog in the air that Marie had no choice but to inhale, though not breathing wouldn’t kill her permanently. The first few weeks, she’d cleaned huge, black boogers out of her nostrils every single night. Her sister Sarah, who didn’t have Virus X’s sentinels in her blood, got one of her eyelash follicles infected and clogged up. She needed a month’s worth of eyedrops.  

“Everyone was talking about those cheerleaders at school,” said Sarah that night. They shared a room because their dad couldn’t afford a big house in the city.

“Marie?”

“They’re dead,” she said. “At least they won’t get fat.”

Stupid girls they’d been, no matter what their teacher said. Out of 100,000 people infected with Virus X, 99,000 didn’t survive the first twenty-four hours. Of the remaining ten-thousand, nine-thousand didn’t survive the next twenty-four hours. Of the last thousand, nine hundred cleared the virus and became immune for life. And the last hundred . . . the last hundred never got fat, and maybe those were good enough odds for some people.

If Marie had been given a choice, she’d have risked getting fat.

Next day was the same as always. She got in line for her pills in front of the nurse's office, and she even remembered to stand behind Sho to avoid annoying him. Her classes were a daze, as usual, and the cafeteria food was staler than normal. Marie didn’t technically need food to taste good anymore, but there weren’t that many AHDS kids at her school. Did no one care about the healthy kids shoving grainy pizza down their throats?

Marie liked the small bathroom hidden behind the janitor’s lounge a few feet away from the cafeteria’s back entrance. Though it tended to get dusty, it never got stained by pee droplets from girls who were too afraid to sit on public toilet seats. The water at the sink never got warm, but it wasn’t like the cold could hurt Marie anymore.

A knife could, but only for a moment.

A moment was all the head cheerleader needed.

When Marie turned away from the sink, flapping her hands to help dry them, an arm slashed at her chest. Marie gasped, a scream trapped in her throat, and reached for her chest as she stumbled backwards. Sticky blood touched the pads of her wet fingers before she felt a brief flash of dull pain, then her skin started knitting close. 

Marie wiped her bloody hand on the white sink, gagging as though a little cut could hurt her. The sight of blood had always made her dizzy, and Virus X hadn’t cured her of that.

The cheerleader made a strange noise, forcing Marie to remember where the real danger was. She looked up, then stopped breathing when she caught the cheerleader’s hungry stare. The girl’s blue eyes, perfectly outlined by kohl, widened before she brought the stained knife up to her lip gloss-shiny lips. Marie tasted vile when the cheerleader’s tongue wiped her blood from the knife.

The cheerleader dropped the knife on the floor and whirled around, flying out of the bathroom like there were hyenas on her heel.

Marie stared at the knife, then at the mirror over the sink. A red stripe had bloomed in the center of her chest, highlighting how small her breasts were. The cheerleader’s looked bigger, so she wouldn’t have to worry about looking like a kid forever on the very slim possibility she caught Virus X, survived, and then became a vamp.

Marie zipped up her sweater and went about her day.

~~~

This is another of my very early stories. The theme of a magic disease plays a big part in the novel I'm working on now, though it's completely different than what I imagined here.