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Jerksblog!

Date-Based Archive Captain Rick & 826 Valencia

You must all go to this website immediately, and read about why Captain Rick's firewood won't burn, and why his fish won't calm your soul, and how his lard is sub-standard (safe for workplace viewing):

Main page: http://www.826valencia.org/store/signs.html

Firewood: http://www.826valencia.org/store/captricksfirewood.html

Calming Fish: http://www.826valencia.org/store/captricksfish.html

These flyers reminded me so much of my brother!! I laughed and laughed.

Posted by erin at 09:33 PM | Comments (1)

Date-Based Archive Finding a Dentist in New York City

I am having a hell of a time finding a dentist. So far I've only found that:

1-800-DENTIST ate my balls. Their website couldn't handle Manhattan zip codes and when I called, their phone representative was very rude and accused me of wasting her time!

This article from New York magazine seems more concerned with tooth whitening than anything else.

If anyone has a dentist in NYC that's super-nice to patients and does a good job, please let me know!

Posted by erin at 04:42 PM | Comments (4)

Date-Based Archive Paintball

So on Sunday N. and I went with a group of N.'s friends to play paintball at Skirmish USA, located somewhere in Pennsylvania. To tell the truth, I wasn't looking forward to it, seeing as how I'm usually a huge wuss when it comes to guns and such. However, it went really well. Click the link below for more:

N. was looking forward to it, mistakenly thinking that the Paintball crowd would definitely crossover with the Cyberpunk crowd. As we were suiting up with rented coveralls, N. quickly realized his mistake - it turns out that jocks and military fanatics are paintballers, and the only dorks there drove in with us. Later in the day, N. got over his initial foible and managed to peg a professional paintball ninja, and thus, earned congratulations from our group.

Our first few matches were against some teachers from Philadelphia, mostly girls. In the very first game I stuck with a guy on our team who knew what he was doing. We ran in and captured the other team's flag, and I successfully brought the flag back to our side! Hooray! I got to keep the flags.

Then we played a bunch of other scenarios that I won't go into detail here, so that I might yack about them at length in public. I will mention that N. played the President in one game, our group's favorite, and I had to be a bodyguard and take a bullet for him (or, more accurately, N. threw me into the line of fire to save himself). It turns out paintballs don't really hurt to get hit with, they just sting a little.

Posted by erin at 11:50 AM | Comments (14)

Date-Based Archive Best Birthday Party Ever?

My birthday party at N.'s aapartment was a huge success!

I think everyone had a lot of fun, and there was maybe only one awkward moment.

I got super-great gifts, each one better than the last, it seemed! I might post a list of these awesome gifts later.

This morning I watched "Only Yesterday", which is not a Miyazaki film, but is a Ghibli film, etc. It was super good!

However, part of the DVD skipped in the middle and I missed an important scene. I wouldn't have realized it, but then I went to look up the lyrics to an untranslated song. I found that nausicaa.net has the whole script online, with great notes, and I was able to read about the scenes I missed.

So um... in conclusion, Thanks everyone for coming to my party!!!

Posted by erin at 04:20 PM | Comments (21)

Date-Based Archive Parmalat Announces New Slogan: Parmalat! It's similar to milk!

Time for a quick update on my life:

• As you can tell from my new blog background, I've been reading the Nausicaa manga. Sometimes reading said manga causes me to shout at fellow commuters "This is SOOO GOOD!!!"



• Anime Boston was sold out! N. had never been to a sold out convention in all of his long, veteran conventioning career. We still managed to hang out with the CPM folks, and had fun.



• Boston is a nice town! It's very clean and has a pleasant smell. A class act all the way! More on this later?



• Efforts to write Jerksquad! The Movie continue, despite rampant writers block, self-doubt, and OCD.



• I'm considering trying to get fired from my job. I could get a nice severance package and unemployment pay. Hal has offered to help.



• The dieting hasn't been going as well in the past couple of weeks. I'm not too happy about that, but I am re-doubling my efforts.



• I seriously have it bad for Nausicaa. Seriously.

Posted by erin at 10:47 AM | Comments (9)

Date-Based Archive Stoke me a Kipper!

If I know what's good for me, you won't see any blog posts for a little while.

It is imperative that I finish a draft of my new screenplay (Jerksquad! The Movie) by May 5th so I can be ready with a revised version to send to interested parties by mid-June.

I've been super-busy with social obligations lately, and my calendar is pretty full for the coming weeks as well. I barely have time to watch anime and go to the gym, let alone write or watch the movies Rick loaned me.

Posted by erin at 04:11 PM | Comments (7)

Date-Based Archive Eternal Enemy

Recently a coworker (not my boss) who I considered a sort-of work-friend totally got pissed off at me. She's still holding out the not-speaking-to-me act after a week or more, and will only email me if it's also CC'ed to our manager.

On one hand, this saddens me deeply, and the fall-out from the fight had me crying at my desk, twice. (I would cry in the bathroom, like a girl, but too many people go in and out of the bathroom, whereas my desk faces the window.) My job was bad enough already, and I had considered D--- a sort of ally against the madness here. Instead, it turns out she too, is mad (both in the angry and in the crazy way).

On the other hand, I have more time to do my work now, since I don't have to explain it all to D--- every day, and I have less work to do, since she's more hesitant to give stuff to me.

The weird part is that I'm not really sure why she freaked out in the first place. I had a high priority project that tied me up for the better part of the week. It was the sort of project where I really couldn't work on anything else, but D--- kept bugging me to do other things. I couldn't do what she asked, so I didn't, and she got really, really mad and won't talk to me about it civally.

Posted by erin at 04:25 PM | Comments (6)

Date-Based Archive Krapp's Last Tape

Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett is a very good, very short play about a very old man who has been making tape recorded-diary entries of his life for quite some time. As the play starts he records a new entry on his birthday. He recalls himself as a younger man and describes how unwise he was. Then he finds a diary entry from a previous birthday on the tape; in that entry, he is recalling how stupid he had been at some previous birthday.

Although I am not so absurd as the old man, this is often how I feel about my own life. When I recall my high school self I think back on how I lacked confidence, how naïve I was, and the stupid decisions I made. When I was in high school, I often looked back on my junior high self in the same way. I suspect in the future I shall look back on my current self as a young twenty-something and recall the idiotic decisions I made and the jerky things I have done.

This lament is brought on by a dream I had on Saturday where an ex-boyfriend, O., made an appearance. It occurred to me in the dream and in waking that O. hardly knew me at all - or at least, he dated a "me" that was not finished yet. (Does this sound like Eva episodes 22 to 24 or what?) That is to say, we dated my freshman year of college. At that point I had not yet come to terms with being a dork. I hadn't started serious film study yet, I hadn't written anything more than a handful of short stories, and the most anime I had watched was Sailor Moon. Almost everything I define myself by now had not happened before I dated him.

Our break-up affected me deeply. I was so heart-broken it changed me as a person forever. I hurt in ways that I didn't know it was possible to hurt (sort of like now, I'm losing weight in places I didn't know were able to be fat). Dating me before the break-up O. must have known some other person, some person who is no longer me.

Once on "My So-Called Life" Angela remarked that her parents knew her in a way no one else could, because they had seen her change. This is a pretty good measurement of how well you know someone, I have found. I have seen a lot of my friends change over time.

Posted by erin at 05:17 PM | Comments (2)

Date-Based Archive Hooray for Demi!

Congratulations are in order for my friend (and former roommate) Demi, who's short film, "Relative Dysfunction" just won Best Picture and Best Actress at the Palm Beach International Film Fest. I was sorta the crew on this over spring break in 2001. Sorta because it was shot on DV, and I mostly provided moral support.

Here's a picture of the poster:

Posted by erin at 04:47 PM | Comments (6)

Date-Based Archive Lilo and Stitch vs. Spirited Away

To preface this, I should like to point out that no matter what I say, I'm sure Maggie and Adan will still think that Lilo and Stitch was the better movie. And despite empirical evidence or a good bloody argument, I'm sure that they'll point out that I like Spirited Away better because I'm biased towards anime. That may be the case, but I have attempted to let my otaku-dom slide as I evaluate these movies based on my film criticism training.

I should like to begin by pointing out that neither Lilo & Stitch nor Spirited Away is, by any means, a perfect movie. Both of them have deep structural flaws that taint these two otherwise perfectly enjoyable films. Both movies start off with tremendous promise and then start to go awry somewhere in the middle, building to unsatisfactory endings, made even worse by the promise of such great beginnings. A bad film is not disappointing when it is bad through-and-through, but a film that could have been so much better makes one feel so much worse when it ends badly.

To continue reading, click below:

Lilo and Stitch has a great opening. Stitch is fearsome genetic experiment gone wrong. Super-intelligent and built for pure evil, he shows cunning as he escapes his captors and crash-lands on earth. This is possibly the best opening for a Disney movie that I've seen in years. It parallels Belle's song about reading in Beauty and the Beast (as far as great openings go).

The movie keeps up it's promise as it introduces Lilo - she's late for dance class because she always feeds her favorite fish a peanut butter sandwich on Thursdays. Lilo is at once a weirdo and a freaky outcast as she bites another girl - and Lilo bites hard. It's hard not to like Lilo. In Aladdin, Aladdin explains that he steals to survive - that is, he's bad because he's a thief, but you've got to like him because he's doing what he's got to do. Lilo is likeable in the same way. Sure, it's not right to bite other kids, but that other girl had it coming, and if you were Lilo, you'd have done the same.

Early on in the movie, Stitch is a welcome departure from more normal Disney characters. We're used to Disney giving us clean-cut heroes and bad guys. Stitch isn't so clean cut. He could go either way. In fact, he could go off at any minute. He spits, he drools, he swears (although we're gypped as he swears in an alien language), and he's ugly.

Similarly, Chihiro wins the audience's sympathies in Spirited Away without being a perfect hero. Chihiro is whiny brat at the film's opening. Her parents are unsympathetic to her, and so are we - at least until Chihiro's parents stupidly eat unguarded food in an abandoned amusement park. Chihiro shows us that she's got a brain in her head by expressing the correct amount of fear and caution for the situation at hand.

Over the next five minutes Chihiro gets our sympathy as ghosts start appearing everywhere and she finds herself in a crazy bathhouse Wonderland, populated by Japanese mythological and folklore figures who are complaining because Chihiro smells "alive"! She's scared shitless - and in her position, you'd be scared too.

As the complex characters of Lilo, Stitch, and Chihiro continue their respective journeys, we learn the answers to the usual movie structure questions as to what each character wants and needs. Chihiro wants to find her parents and rescue them. In order to do so, she must get a job at the bathhouse. Signing Yubaba's contract is an obstacle - Yubaba steals Chihiro's name but gives her the job she needs to stay alive in this world. As Chihiro forgets her old name and identity, she begins to forget about her parents and her old life.

Lilo wants to continue living with her older sister, Nani. In order for their (small, imperfect) family to continue existing, Nani must find a job and impress Cobra Bubbles, the social worker. Nani agrees to let Lilo adopt Stitch from the dog pound as a gesture of good will, but Stitch presents himself as an obstacle to Nani finding a job, as he causes mischief wherever he goes.

Here's where things start to get ugly, plot-wise: What does Stitch want? We know in the first ten minutes of the film that Stitch want to avoid his captors. That's his goal, and he achieves his goal in about 15 minutes. His captors don't pose any more of a threat until the last 15 minutes or so of the film.

But wait! There's more: By order of his genetic programming, Stitch feels the need to cause chaos in large cities. Fortunately he's trapped on a Hawaiian island (which one?! Apparently not the one with Honolulu, despite the map at the film's opening pointing to the largest island...) by his severe allergy to water. Stitch is never given the chance to stand before a large city and choose not destroy it. This is a major flaw in the overall film. In classical movie structure everything that's set up in the beginning of the film must come out (or come together) in the end. Since Jumba (the mad scientist) says of Stitch early in the film:

"His destructive programming is taking effect. He will be irresistibly drawn to large cities where he will back up sewers, reverse street signs, and steal everyone's left shoe."

We had darn well better see some left-shoe-stealing action by the end of the movie. But we don't! This is the best line in the entire film, and its prediction never comes to pass.

Instead, the film tries to find a new goal for Stitch part-way through. He leaves Lilo in the night, and takes a copy of the book "The Ugly Duckling" with him. Alone and sulking in the woods, his ears down and his eyes sparkling sadly, Stitch opens the book to it's single illustration, a picture of a duck saying "I'm Lost." This scene is where the movie starts getting exponentially worse.

The Ugly Duckling book should be telling us something important about Stitch, and it isn't. Stitch isn't the Ugly Duckling. He'll never grow into a beautiful swan, and he even has one friend - Lilo, so he's not a complete reject like the Duckling. Worse still, Stitch isn't lost! He has a good idea of where he is, as he was able to steer his spaceship there. Lilo hints earlier in the film that maybe Stitch doesn't know who he is because he doesn't have any parents, or a family. This could be considered a diffenent kind of "lost".

For whatever reason, that just doesn't work in the film. I don't buy for a minute that Stitch is "lost". His emotional crisis seems totally out-of-place. I could have stomached some of Stitch feeling bad, but Disney throws in a LOT of Stitch feeling bad. Here is a situation where less is more, and the film is over-doing it.

They also over-did-it with the phrase "ohana." In the brief 85 minute running time the, characters utter the following phrase about 6 times:

"Ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind."

It's a fine moral, and it's very touching. But does it really need to be repeated about once every 14 minutes? Actually, since no one says it for the first 30 minutes, that means a character is giving us the ohana treatment about once every nine minutes by the end of the film. By the third time, I assure you, dear reader, that I began to yell at the television.

I'm not saying I'm a jaded hipster who can't feel anything (despite what Rick thinks), or indeed, that Lilo & Stitch wasn't a touching movie; it's more like Lilo & Stitch was a movie that touched me the wrong way.

Ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. There are only two points at which it was appropriate for characters to say this in Lilo & Stitch: Once, when Nani was storming out of the house, leaving Lilo alone, and Lilo says it, and the second time is when Stitch is drowning, and Lilo says that Stitch is family.

Ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. Possibly the biggest flaw in Lilo & Stitch is there are so few points in the movie when it seems like a real possibility that someone will be left behind. No matter how mad Nani gets at Lilo, we don't really believe she'll give Lilo up to social services without a struggle, and no matter what trouble Stitch is causing, we don't really believe for a minute that Lilo will let him go.

In Spirited Away, however, even though I knew that Chihiro would somehow rescue her parents in the end, there were points at which Chihiro was in real danger, and I was legitimately scared. For example, when Chihiro is being chased by a flock of sharp paper dolls (a traditional Japanese magical item), and must slam the door behind her to avoid being killed, I was really, really worried about her.

Although Lilo & Stitch is a comedy, there is a legitimate space pirate adventure segment at the beginning. The stakes are high and the situation should be more grave than it is. When Stitch almost drowned, I was worried about him. However, I should have been more worried about Stitch at the end of the film, during the climax. I wasn't worried at all, though, because the ending was ridiculous.

In the end of Lilo & Stitch, several characters suddenly switch alignments and goals in unbelievable ways. Stitch starts speaking English at an unbelievable pace, and Nani is far to accepting of the sudden realizations that aliens exist, and that said aliens have kidnapped her sister. At that point, the entire film seems almost like a paranoid fantasy that Nani has made up so she doesn't have to deal with the overwhelming emotional loss of social services taking Lilo away. (In this reading of the film, Stitch is an imaginary friend Lilo invented to make up for the loss of her parents, and when Nani starts to go crazy, she can see him, too. But that's Lilo & Stitch the Schitzo Drama.)

The aliens sent to capture Stitch turn on a dime to save him:

Jumba: WHAT?? after all you put me through, you expect me to help you just like that? JUST LIKE THAT???
Stitch: Ih
Jumba: Fine
Pleakley: Fine?!? You're doing what he says?
Jumba: Uh, he's very persuasive.

MAYBE if Jumba had expressed some interest earlier in seeing his little experiment run wild and free, I'd believe this twist. But he didn't. Suddenly Pleakley and Jumba, two of our main antagonist, are on the side of the good guys. And the aliens who try to keep peace and uphold laws in the galaxy are suddenly powerful bad guys. As N. would say: WHAAA??

Spirited Away is not free of similar flaws: At a key moment in the film, Chihiro suddenly starts telling a story about almost drowning in a river as a small child. Her only friend in Wonderland, Haku, has morphed into a dragon at this point and has long since forgotten his real name. Because of the random anecdote Chihiro has just shared, Haku realizes that he was named after the river she almost drowned in. Now he can be free of Yubaba's work contract on his soul. WHAAAA??

The ending of Spirited Away is not a ridiculous fiasco, but it is weirdly boring. The height of action in the film peaks somewhere in the middle (as I pointed out in my longer Spirited Away analysis). When Chihiro should be rushing into danger, she's riding a train to some nice old lady's house to have some tea. When it comes down to the climactic scene where Chihiro saves her parents, her final task is way, way too easy. In a traditional 3-act film, that's the point at which Chihiro should be almost dead, and have lost everything over seemingly insurmountable odds, and must face her darkest fear alone.

Instead, she's got some friends to help her and Yubaba has actually gotten a lot less threatening over time. This makes the ending seem, well, boring. All of the really exciting stuff, in both movies, is used up in the first 20 minutes.

But Spirited Away is still the better of the two films, for two reasons:

1. It is visually stunning.
2. It has deeper themes and metaphors.

Stitch has a very interesting character design for a Disney movie, somewhere between ugly and cute and fuzzy. He's even more interesting when he has six legs, but he insist on hiding two legs throughout the film, which I find disappointing.

Disney gets credit for doing something interesting with the visuals of Lilo & Stitch. They depart from their usual fare, particularly in the space scenes, and I would give them a lot more credit if they weren't just directly ripping off the Astro Boy style that was used recently in the Japanese Metropolis. I'd also be willing to give them more credit for their watercolor backgrounds and the updated, pudgy look that Nani has to her hips... but Disney's got nothing on Miyazaki.

Miyazaki's backgrounds are the stuff of fine-art-museum-quality-prints. When Kiki flies over her small European city in Kiki's Delivery Service, the background is ridiculously awesome, photo-quality good. When Satsuki runs through the fields looking for her lost sister Mei in My Neighbor Totoro on a summer evening, I recall my own grandparent's fields on summer evenings, and I know that Miyazaki has gotten it exactly right.

Most of Spirited Away takes place at night, and there is considerably less flying than in your average Miyazaki film, so the backgrounds are perhaps not as strong as they could be. That said, the bathhouse Wonderland is a ridiculously rich environment. Around every corner and on every floor of the towering building there is a crowd of intriguing background characters. Each of these characters is from some traditional Japanese myth or folklore or ghost story, or is a demon or god or hero that we as Americans are almost totally clueless to guess at. (Miyazaki did not invent Totoro - he just designed the character.) When Chihiro leaves the spirit plane she doesn't free everyone there because they need to go on about their own stories. The viewer is left with the feeling that the bathhouse-universe was not just there for Chihiro to visit, rather, it was always there, and will always be there.

Disney does a pretty good job of capturing modern Hawaii. I don't think they insulted any ethnic groups this time around (unlike the Pocahontas protests, or how they had to change lyrics in Aladdin). Nani has to work humiliating jobs in the service/tourist industry and Lilo takes pictures of the freakish pasty-white fat tourists, who are more alien to her than Stitch. But that's it. That's a pretty good job, but Disney doesn't begin to compare with Miyazaki's work. (A better case might be made for Mulan, but I'm not the one to write it.)

On the symbolic/theme/metaphoric level, the only thing Lilo & Stitch has to teach us is ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind.

One translation of the Japanese title of "Spirited Away" is "Sen and the Mysterious Disappearance of Chihiro" (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi). When Yubaba makes Chihiro sign her employment contract, she renames Chihiro as "Sen". Chihiro begins her new life as Sen, and becomes a new person. Once a whiny, clingy, scaredy-cat, Sen becomes a hard worker, she grows some courage, and in the end she starts acting like a real hero. The old Chihiro is gone forever. The film is saying something on a very deep level about the nature of identity and how it plays into one's place in the work force. Spirited Away also has a lot to say about the nature of work, which I covered in more detail in my other essay.

And what does Lilo & Stitch teach us? Only that ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. Well, that, and it does have a few other poignant things to reinforce its message:

Lilo: I like you better as a sister than a mom.
Nani: Yeah?
Lilo: And you like me better as a sister than a rabbit, right?

Stitch: This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It's little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good.

This is a pretty complex message for a Disney film (although every Disney film is about an orphan or a single-parent household). But it's not nearly as complex as how Chihiro feels about her parents. Her parents are jerks and morons, but she loves them enough to rescues them anyway (despite N.'s suggestions to her). Because ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. Or forgotten.

In the end, Spirited Away is a visual masterpiece. It's not Miyazaki's best film, but it's not his worst film either. Lilo & Stitch is not as good as other Disney films of the past 15 years, but it's not nearly as bad as the Emperor's New Groove or Tarzan. To break it down for you, Spirited Away is 25 minutes of Movie Greatness, 60 minutes of Quite Good and 40 minutes of Weirdly Boring. Lilo and Stitch is 20 minutes of Quite Good, 40 minutes of OK and 25 minutes of Utter Let-Down.

Spirited Away is the winner on my blog, and in the Academy.

Posted by erin at 05:16 PM | Comments (24)

Date-Based Archive Miyazaki Discussion

This was to be the Lilo & Stitch entry, but then a huge Miyazaki discussion got started...

Top Five Miyazaki movies:

1. Totoro
2. Nausicaa
3. Kiki's
4. (spot reserved for Laputa)
5. Monoke

Posted by erin at 12:36 PM | Comments (26)

Date-Based Archive Requisite Birthday Post

After Sam's blog and A.K.'s blog celebrated birthdays recently, I knew my blog's birthday could not be far off - indeed - a quick glance at my archive and I see that my blog began on my actual birthday; that is to say, my blog and I share the same birthday; April 21st. Or in other words my blog shares a birthday with Iggy Pop, Mike Smith, Tony Danza, and Queen Elizabeth II.

This year my birthday falls on a Monday, the day after Easter and the Monday following the Boston Anime Convention - which I hope to attend for exactly one day (funded by N. as a birthday gift). This muddling of holidays and conventions, combined with a Monday birthday makes a party rather difficult to plan.

It is not as bad as the semester I attended U of M, wherein my birthday fell on "Study Day" - which was the day between classes ending and exams beginning. If I had any friends that semester, they could not hang out that day.

This year I hope to throw two parties - one, a gathering of dorky friends (non-alcoholic) and two - a party of just drinking, for all of my "other" friends (pro-alcoholism) - anyone who falls into the over-lap is welcome to attend both. Dates have not yet been set for these gatherings - I will send emails about them in the week(s) to come.

Although I do not expect gifts from anyone, and although what I am about to say is undoubtedly horribly gauche, I'll say it anyway:

Gift Ideas for Erin**
Heroclix Booster Pack(s) (or individual figures)
Ranma 1/2 Manga (I only own Vol. 8, so not that one)
Amazon Gift Certificate(s)
An Old, Used Digital Camera (if anyone has an old camera that they don't use anymore, even if it takes shitty pictures and puts them on disks or something, I'll gladly take it off your hands - especially if it's Mac compatible).

** As I've said, these are just ideas. If you were going to get me a gift anyway, I know I can be difficult to buy for. By no means do I actually expect to get anything from anyone. Your mere presence at one of my parties would be enough.

Posted by erin at 12:35 PM | Comments (9)

Date-Based Archive Erin Has Girl Disease

Normally I'm not big on pink things and flower patterns, and for years I thought "Weddings? Pshaw! Those are for girls!"

But last night I was looking at the pictures of Kerry's wedding, and they were all super-cute and nice! In May I'm going home for a high school friend's wedding, where I'm a bridesmaid. I will actually have to buy shoes that match a dress! (Heaven forefend!)

I had to go to a lot of boring weddings as a kid, which sucked. In general, people I didn't know were getting married, and my brother and I would be the only little kids there. Then there was an eight-year gap where I didn't go to any weddings, then one of my cousins got married, any then one of my brother's friends.

My brother's friend's wedding sucked-ass, because I didn't know many people there, and only 5 guests were between the ages of 14 and 35 (I'm not kidding, everyone else was a senior or a little kid). My cousin's wedding sucked-ass because it was a pay-bar, I was still underage, and my dad's relatives hassled me for having a glass of wine (even though my birthday was a month away).

I assume that Kerry's wedding and my high school friend's wedding represent a growing avalanche of weddings I might be invited to between now and such a time as a majority of my friends are old and married. Some of these weddings, I assume, will contain "fun."

I guess the formula for fun could be something like:

Number of People I Know + Number of People Close to My Age + Number of Alcoholic Beverages Consumed > Number of Crazy People Related to Me + Number of Relatives Hinting at My Own Marriage + Number of Other Assorted Embarrassing Incidents

So if (Number of People I Know + Number of People Close to My Age + Number of Alcoholic Beverages Consumed) are "Good Incidents"

and (Crazy People Related to Me + Number of Relatives Hinting at My Own Marriage + Number of Other Assorted Embarrassing Incidents) are "Bad Incidents"

Essentially if the number of Good Incidents > Bad Incidents, a wedding could be said to be "Fun".

Posted by erin at 12:21 PM | Comments (7)