Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Provocation

I don't really know what to write, because it seems like what I think will get me in further trouble. So perhaps it would be best just to write a litany of caveats and explanations.

I figure things out by writing about them and by talking them out. My opinions are often subject to change once I hear what other people think and interpret their points of view. What I say at the beginning of a conversation is often a jumping off point, and I frequently don't know my final thoughts on a subject when I begin exploring it.

Two, I won't censor myself on this site. Even if it is ill-timed or thoughtless, what I write here is genuine, and you can read it or not read it. However, I don't write for readers... I write for me, and the writing that I do here is a big chunk of what helps me figure things out. I would like to have the strength of character to say out loud all of the things that I think and write about, but one, that's not always a good idea, and two, they are still raw and unformed. Putting them down and being able to look back at them helps me to challenge their veracity and strength.

So, yes. I don't always say what I mean. But here, I mean what I say, even if I say it in a mean way.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Extremely Frightening Things You Learn About Your Roommates While Watching American Idol

Said in complete seriousness: "Kenny G is not bad! Kenny G is a talented instrumentalist!"

I think this warrants breaking my vow not to judge people I know. And to think I had once believed that I would hold firm until the family reunion in Boston this weekend.

Monday, May 23, 2005

Live Blogging the Tom Cruise Appearance on Oprah

4:01 Tom Cruise makes his entrance. There has never been such whooping in the history of mankind. Oh sweet Moses, the whooping! Ladies, what is wrong with you? The emperor has no heterosexual tendencies!

4:03 TC is apparently incapable of expressing his love for Katie Holmes in anything but grunts, grins, and ill-timed slides off Oprah's yellow leather couch. The man is so desperate to convince us of his Heterosexual Straight Love of a Woman Who Is Most Definetely Not a Man, he is literally sliding off the couch. There's probably some "coming out out of the closet joke" I oculd insert here, but I have another fifty-seven minutes of this to go. Must pace myself.

4:07: TC: "We met."
Studio audience: "AAAAAWWWWWWW!!!!!!"

4:09: It's kind of creepy how he keeps on referring to her as "woman." Yes, she is 26 and all, but she is freaking Joey Potter, testy yet spunky GIRL next door. If it were Tamara Jacobs we were talking about here, I would get this constant "woman"-ness, but he says it as if reminding us that she is in fact legal and that by having Lots of Heterosexual Sex with her he is not doing anything illegal and wrong.

4:13 He just jumped off the couch. STOOD UP ON THE COUCH AND JUMPED OFF OF IT. WHAT THE HELL????

4:17 HAHAHAH. Oprah just rolled her eyes at this exchange:

O: "So Katie once appeared in Seventeen saying...."

audience whoops like they're being poked in the ass with a cattle prod

TC: "I don't want to disappoint her."

O: "Tom, does that mean you're going to ask her to marry you?"

TC: "I'm gonna discuss it with her."

ewwwww.


4:19 Ooooh, he's talking about her "life force." Is this where we talk about how L. Ron Hubbard will be writing a script just for Kate Holmes in which she has a tortured affair with the boy next door but ultimately cannot overlook his dependence on Paxil?

4:21 What say you? Tom Cruise is in a movie coming out this summer? Heavens to Betsy! Paint me blue and call me a Smurf!

4:23 Boooooring movie clips. Talk about motorcycle rides and visits to Italian politicians again! Meanwhile, TC has officially done everything that a human being can do on a couch short of dry-humping a WB starlet on it whilst screaming "I LOVE to put my penis in her vagina!!!!! LOVE IT!!!!!"

4:27 Here's the thing. Tom, you're pretty. You're a decent actor. In fact, staring at your face, intently listening to Steven Spielberg beg you to address War of The Worlds and not just your New Love, I was able to remember the Tom Cruise of yore. The cocktail-flipping, fighter-plane-piloting, wheelchair-bound Tom of the 1980s. You still look a great deal like that Tom, and if it's not natural, then props to your plastic surgeon. Gazing at you then, I was almost able to forget about Scientology and "Nic knows why" and how poor dear Katie got a freaky ass mouth rash after your Italian Tour of Heterosexual Love. If you would JUST GODDAMN STOP forcing your love life and your Scientology on us, you might not be increasingly becoming a national joke.

Just a suggestion.


4:31 Tom on Dakota Fanning "She's lovely, just lovely. I really feel like I want to protect her all the time."

Nice to know he plans ahead. Dakota, honey, the wheels are in motion, and I suggest you start practicing your Italian for the 2011 Press Tour of Love you will doubtlessly be whisked upon.


4:36 On Tom Cruise's biracial son: "What there to talk about? He's my son. I've just never thought about that at all. It's not an issue for me." Hrrrm... might it perchance someday be an issue for your biracial son?

Again, just a suggestion.

4:39 I think I finally figured out why this whole "relationship" is bothering me so much. Katie, honey, you are Joey Potter. I know, I know, you are eager to leave Joey behind and embrace more thought-provoking, adult roles, such as the stock damsel-in-distress in the Batman franchise, or perhaps a mostly naked batshit crazy party girl. But Joey Potter was fantastic. She was a hot girl from the wrong side of the tracks who know what she wanted, went for it, and didn't let the haters get her down. She had excellent hair, the vocabulary of a postdoc in English lit and yet the audience was one hundred percent on her side. The moment where she beat up the two Neaderthals who made fun of her Shinto history project in the first season "Breakfast Club" episode was a defining moment of my adolesence.

So it hurts so much to see this girl (NOT yet a woman) quietly standing by her man, grinning for the cameras, shyly looking down at the ground as he goes on and on to every media outlet on Earth about how in love he is, and how she sparkles and shimmers and glows like the light of a thousand moonbeams dancing on the wings of a unicorn. Joey Potter would not have been a silent partner in this yakfest. Joey Potter would have rolled her eyes, pulled a double shift at the yacht club, kneed a guy wearing Dockers who dared to grab her ass and gotten herself a PhD in smartassness.

Joey, I expected better from you.

4:43 Tom, don't throttle Oprah. She'll eat you. Seriously.

4:47 Oprah just granted the wish of a plebian named Tom Cruise to meet the real Tom Cruise. Here at EJ Takes Life, we don't mock real people, and he actually seems like he has a decent sense of humor about the whole thing (and is sufficiently embarassed that his wife has let the whole world know that meeting Tom Cruise is his biggest wish. The guys at PJ O'Malley's will never let him live that down).

4:51 She's here! Oprah you tease! How could you make us wait this whole time!?!?

4:52 "Katie, come out honey! C'mere! Here girl! Aw, she's shy!"

4:55 She is so cute I almost want to believe this is true. God, you just want to go shopping and get cupcakes and pet puppies with her. Too bad she's the puppy now.

4:58 Tom and Katie should really do more things sitting. I'm a tall girl who has dated short men... trust me on this. Standing is not their ideal position.

5:00 I'm exhausted. Rarely have I experienced such a combination of utter saccharine sweetness and bitter snarkiness. I need nap, but not on the couch. Couches seem somehow tainted now.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Something Good

I just got very excited about the prospect of waking up in ten hours, just so I can make hotdogs on really fluffy potato buns for lunch. It is this potential to cook the anuses and tongues of pigs, and not the four cocktails, late hour or the stress of Meeting The Boyfriend's Family tonight that makes me look forward to sleep.

Someday I will get my priorities in order. Maybe someday I will also actually unpack from a vacation the same week I return from it. In the meanwhile, I shall shove the stacks of shirts and skirts from my big kid bed and hurl myself towards sleep (sadly, alone).

Thursday, May 05, 2005