The Unofficial Badmovies.org Random Thought Thread!

[indianasmith]

Few things make me angrier than adults who swear at small children.  It shows a complete and utter lack of class. 

[ER]

Life is good, all is happy, things are going well, but I can't remember a year when it felt less like Christmas even this late in December.

[indianasmith]

Our weather has been crazy - up in the seventies and down in the teens within 48 hours . . . gotta love Texas!!! 

[Skull]

Soooo, one time I was waiting in line to see this movie, and this man in front of me had this kid with him, a total brat, maybe seven, and I figured the man was the kid's father, but turned out he was actually his mom's boyfriend. Okay, all good, right? Then I listened harder, and the man was saying to this kid, "Shut the f**k up, you little a***ole. I have to take you here to get your mom to put out, but it doesn't mean I have to entertain your ass. So shut the f**k up."

I was so shocked to hear someone talking like, especially to a child (even if he was being bratty), I didn't exactly know what to do. I could have said, "Watch your language." I guess anyway, told somebody, but the thing is, I was only eleven myself, my mom had dropped me off, and hearing someone say all that shook me up so much I walked out of line and never did get in to see Ghostbusters 2 there at the discount movies, and to this very day I have never seen another Ghostbusters film.

Seriously.

wow I have two thoughts that crossed my mind.

First... the mother's boyfriend is a a***ole and he needs to be punched by Clint Eastwood.

Second... The mother's boyfriend really don't want to see the new Ghostbusters movie. And he's doing it for the kid's mother... And the guy snapped.


The truth is my daughter wants to see the new ghostbuster film and I feel that I need to be drunk so I can watch it. And I had not been drunk since the mid 1990's.

[javakoala]

I miss my mom's homemade fudge.

And now back to your scheduled, non-random thoughts.

[Leah]

It's gonna be 76 on Saturday and 77 on Christmas. It's currently 63 with overcast. It's gonna be the second year in a row with Christmas having fall weather. I guess it makes sense, my fall was Summer extended.

[WingedSerpent]

Idea for a business:

The Opposing Team

A sports bar franchise for people who are rooting against the home team of whatever city they are in.

[ER]

   
In high school and college we used to play this game, Two Truths and a Lie, and a few years ago I tried to re-start the tradition when we'd settle in to watch Pretty Little Liars on what was then ABC Family, and open our libations of choice for the drinking game: a sip if someone said the word "secret," a drink if Aria kissed her teacher or Hanna was referenced as a former fatty, three gulps if it flashed back to Alison crawling out of her shallow backyard grave. (For the record my drink was usually green tea or lemonade. Yes, a violation of the spirit of a drinking game, but I was pregnant half the time back then.)

So most of the nights we played it went well and we'd come up with some whopper statements---my dad cross dresses, I taught my English class commando, I've never owned a dog, I left Darrell padlocked in the sensory deprivation tank---but often the truths were more fun than the lies since eye-opening revelations came to light. (Why, no, Sharon, we never would've guessed you had a piercing there.)

One time though one of the girls told us she'd recently tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists, Cecelia Lisbon style---"How recently?" "Since last time I was over here, El."---but couldn't do it then but was confident she could manage it if she tried again, which she would sooner rather than later because she was tired of being on antidepressants and sick of waking up dreading another day of deep depression, which she hid only too well.

We figured it was her lie among two truths, but she said no, it was one of the truths, and we all stopped cold, sat there a minute and then everybody got involved, why would you want to do that, blahblahblah, anything we can do for you, want someone to stay with you, have I ever told you how much you mean to me, etc., please don't do that, call me if you're upset.

That went on for a bit, and then she started grinning and laughed at us and said, "Gotcha! Don't ever tell me I'm a bad liar again."

She was, to put it nicely, having us on about wanting to die, and she kept it up way too long, we all got mad at her, that night's PLL was buzzkilled worse than if somebody's cat had been run over by a prom queen, and her doing that spoiled TT&AL pretty much for good since nobody could ever play it again without thinking of her doing that to us.

[Alex]

Went christmas shopping with my brother in law today for him to get something for his wife. Well actually, we went out to go record shopping and just happened to pick up some presents for her while we were there. Saw the shop had a DVD section to had a look. Only had about $40 in my pocket and saw two DVD's that I really wanted to get ('Phantasm V' & '31') which would have been slightly over (why did I let Kristi go out with my bank card). On exploring a bit I saw a copy of 'Killer Tomato's Eat France' and decided to go with that and Phantasm V.

About fifteen minutes after I got home 8 of Kristi's cousins (from the one family, there is another child in that family I've not met yet). Their dad has a very impressive military career followed by working for the highway patrol. I was reading his record online one day, got to the end of it and thought "Damn, 9 kids. He should get medals just for that never mind what he has done as a soldier & policeman".

Anyway, I put Killer Tomatos on for them which they loved and then wanted more. I think I might have started a new generation of bad movie lovers on the right path. :)

[ER]

As I've often lamented, even in here, I grew up raised by a mother who seemed to have a puzzling lack of understanding of the most basic concepts of time. She didn't watch much TV, but the shows she liked she'd often miss either all or much of, simply because she seemed to dwell in another dimension, where time was fluid, stood still, or simply did not exist.

When my dad wasn't home, which was probably less often than it seems in memory, I'd face the humiliation of being late to church, school, movies (I wrote off the first twenty minutes of anything I ever hoped to see at the multiplex when Mom drove me there) and it reached the point very early that I started being responsible for setting my own alarms and reminding my mother an hour early that we had to be somewhere important, like my tennis matches: my raison d'etre for several years. (I think I was about five when I started being the family timekeeper, but alas couldn't drive yet so...)

It wasn't that my mother was unintelligent, it wasn't that she had autism or did psychedelic drugs, it was something peculiar to her. I tried to let her off the hook to people who criticized her by telling them it was because she was from a country that ran on inexact schedules compared to the United States, and most people accepted that with a laugh because one thing Americans are paranoid about is challenging some immigrant's idiosyncrasies, but in my heart I knew this fell short as an explanation, since others in her family were always on time. You could set your watch by her father, my maternal grandfather, who was among the most responsible people I ever had the honor to know. (In pace requiescat, seanathair.)

No, this was something within my mother, some....disdaining of the laws of the universe, some flighty, fey laziness, some rebellion she didn't know she was waging against order itself.

I can recall standing waiting for her after school (Kath-uh-lick school, no busses, alas) wishing my paternal grandma could be the one to pick me up. I stood there waiting day after day in the lobby, holding my books, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for much longer, rain, shine, snow, filled with embarrassment and woe, and nobody from the office really said much except one lunch lady opined it was halfway to child abuse, but I of course took up for my mother there with my standard level of eloquent retort:

"No it's not."

Put her in her place, right?

Then in seventh grade I actually started liking her being late because after school while I waited I could hang out and talk to this senior who got parceled to my school half-days because he was so smart he finished all his classes, got accepted into college, and basically had nothing to do. He kept me company and day after day we'd talk til she arrived. Soon he started making up these "Yo' Momma" jokes about my mother not being on time, and it all got funny and amiable, and it stopped bugging me that I had to stand there like a vagrant, and I learned to relax about it and let her unconditionally be herself.

No pressure. :-)

Farther into the future, when I could drive myself, I eventually told her about how I was habitually stopping off at the apartment of that particular senior most days after school, which wouldn't have happened had she been more responsible and not left me standing aimlessly around in, of all things, a Catholic school uniform.

I don't think telling her that is related to her nervous breakdown.

[ER]

Growing up I regularly spent my summers in Ireland, or at least that's one way of putting it, but another would be I got sent to Ireland, sometimes mentally kicking and screaming right up to the runway itself. (For I was far too obedient a kid to kick and scream in actuality. Seriously, the first fifteen years of my life I was sickeningly good. Y'all would've wanted to stone me.)

Perhaps it was ungrateful of me to offer so much resistance to those trips to the ancient and storied island of my maternal heritage, knowing as I did they surely cost my parents a sizable chunk of family income (on my father's side I grew up termed "the poor cousin" as it was, too), but quite honestly I would gladly have traded going there for any of the jaunts to Disney World, the Grand Canyon, or Gatlinburg my neighborhood and school friends were undertaking, often punctuated by the cheerful postcards they'd send me of jackalopes, or Goofy on roller skates in front of the gates to the Magic Kingdom, generally with some "rub your face in it" notation on the back telling me what a stellar time they were having.

Heck I would have even traded it for a summer spent doing nothing but staying home.

You see, the Emerald Isle I visited was not the merry land of the fabled Blarney Stone, and Guinness Brewery, it was a strict realm I took at an early age to dubbing The Holy Land, on account of the fact that my summers there were invested in going to Mass EVERY single morning, led by grandparents convinced the Catholicism of the worldly United States was too lax and ecumenical, therefore my soul was endangered: or was it family honor? Add to that their peculiar insistence I frequently go to confession (sometimes twice in the same week) which bore scant resemblance to any trip to the confessional I encountered back home. In an Irish confessional one is prodded to examine conscience "most keenly" and to help in the endeavor, even as a small child you get asked rather pointed questions of the sort that'd make a Freudian blush. During confession when I was seven a priest there asked me if I'd ever seen what was inside a boy's pants. I kid you not, that's what he asked me.

Yep, Ireland was tailor-made to create holiness all right.

Sure, once I was actually in Ireland I tended to make the best of it, and at times that "best" was fine indeed. Every year there were more cousins, I had an aunt close enough in age to be a contemporary, my grandfather was a well-read man who took on charitable work for the poor and indigent, setting a sterling example, and there were adventures among locals, typically friends of my oldest cousin, therefore always a dozen months my senior.

Sometimes when I'd follow my cousin off to meet these comrades in hooliganism at various locales on the wrong side of the tracks, they'd try to show me they were more badass than American teenagers, and mostly that made them seem silly to me. To them cussing, getting drunk, and pulling pranks like leaving a dog turd on a church pew were the heights of puerile delinquency. Also I noticed their hair was often greasy, they seemed obsessed to the pits of their souls with finding whiskey, and for some odd reason they thought I talked funny, when it was actually true of them. They'd get me to pronounce words, and then fall down laughing when I did. Wut-ever.

Yet for all my grandparents' efforts to ensure my time there was rooted in bettering me, I did find that at least once my going to Ireland ended up putting me in peripheral risk of a terrible fate indeed.

The summer I was nine the cousin who was the only one of our generation older than me, would often lead me down to a house owned by a Scotsman of post-middle years, who was said to "like children" a sinister phrase to my American ears, but in Ireland to say someone "liked children" apparently mean he....shrug, liked children.

So the word got out among young people that this Scotsman was nearly always good for some treat if you'd go talk to him. A few times I went with my cousin and each time he thanked us for coming by, and gave us these plastic-wrapped cupcake-like items that I always let my cousin eat. He'd ask us into his house, and usually we did go in. He lived alone and had a small white dog named Nicky, and would like us to sit at his table and drink milk he poured into these teacups. He seemed to undertake strange efforts to make us laugh, but since everyone seemed to trust him, I figured, okay, whatever, taking candy from strangers must've been all right in The Holy Land, that place God clearly loved best on account of Him having let its people suffer so often. (Suffering being next to holiness, you understand.)

Not so. Turns out when I went back the next year and in time asked after this Scottish man, the room got quiet, and my grandmother told me not to mention him, he was gone. I did not have to wait long for enlightenment, the first time we were together my cousin couldn't wait to burst out the news that the friendly old Scot had apparently lured some young boys into his house for....predictably sordid reasons, and had been sent to prison in Wexford.

In retrospect it seems all too obvious the whole situation was a bad idea, adults thinking it fine and dandy for their children to go knock on the door of a strange old man who was said to "like children" and ask him for something sweet, but it also seems absolutely surreal to me that the situation happened at all. What was everyone thinking? This wasn't the halcyon 1950s, we're talking the late 1980s, well past the age of innocence.

It's just one example of how utterly strange it always felt, hopping from one culture to another summer after summer, existing under rules and situations that could scarcely have been more at odds with one another. And in that one case at least, my conflicted internal compass could very well have resulted in something bad indeed.

[indianasmith]

Yeeks!!  That is pretty creepy!

[ER]

Have you boxed yet for Boxing Day today? I got mine out of the way early down at the park, and got a busted lip. You'd be surprised how many people have never heard of Boxing Day, and some want to argue that I don't know what it means, when it seems self-explanatory enough. (Kind of like the right to "bear arms" the Second Amendment gives us? I for one got my black bears paws proudly displayed!)  So that was how my boxing match came about this morning, someone telling me I was wrong. I admit it seems kind of illogical to even have a holiday where we go out and fight people, but then when have holidays ever made much sense? I put that know it all seven-months pregnant b***h down at the park in her place, though, tell you what...

[AoTFan]

even as a small child you get asked rather pointed questions of the sort that'd make a Freudian blush. During confession when I was seven a priest there asked me if I'd ever seen what was inside a boy's pants. I kid you not, that's what he asked me.

I'm reeeaaallly having a hard time not making a tasteless joke here, esp in light of some of the scandals that plague the Catholic church.  Makes me wonder if that guy ever got "relocated" for some mysterious reason.

[AoTFan]

I don't know how anyone can eat Whoppers.  To me, it's like eating chalk covered in chocolate.