Moments of Clarity. I Mean Stupidity.

A random sampling of our day-to-day. Well, not random, because I chose the stories. And what I thought were the most note-worthy ones. So not random at all. But a sampling nonetheless.

(1) Television

We went 6-7 months without T.V. Don't get me wrong.... We have a T.V. We have a DVD player. We have a cable cord. It's just that we don't pay for cable or whatever it is that gets us the good stuff....aka Comedy Central and the Travel Channel. Well it was a couple days before 9/11, and since we weren't going to be able to watch any of the good specials on the history channel or any of the others that had good specials commemorating that day, I decided to have a netflix movie sent in time so that we would have something. It's called September 11. I'll discuss that movie in the 3rd bullet point of this blog.
After talking to some friends in the ward, we found out that they were planning on watching a 9/11 special and we were invited to watch it with them. So we postponed our movie plan, because this was much better. As things turned out, plans fell through for various reasons, but one of the girls informed us that even without paying for cable, we still would be able to watch it on our own T.V., that we did indeed have a very few, select channels at our disposal. The moment we came home from church, Mary found the cable cord. A cable cord that just so happened to already be connected to the T.V., and all we had to do was take the other end and connect it to the wall, about 1 inch away from the back of the T.V., and directly behind it. Something neither of us thought to even try, since we weren't paying for any sort of cable. Lo and behold, moving pictures appeared on our old television.
We started flipping and realized that we have access to our favorite shows...House, Survivor, Modern Family, So You Think You Can Dance (not applicable now that the season is over...but a couple months ago!!!)...etc. We also love The Daily Show as well as The Colbert Report, but no surprise we don't have Comedy Central. Which we just watch online. As we did our other favs, but now we don't have to wait till whenever the website posts the video for the others anymore!

Point of the story? We went 6-7 months of watching just netflix, redbox, and all my 10 seasons of Friends on loop....because we were too stupid to plug the cable cord into the wall. We were both in such shock the first 30 minutes. Like jaws to the ground in disbelief.

(2) Interactive Cinematic Experiences

Anyone seen Contagion yet?

Not a bad movie. But I didn't love it as much as I thought I would. But I'm still so glad we went, because we had quite the experience as a member of the audience that night. It's important to note that the back row of the theater is apparently not just a place where rebellious teenagers can get into each others pants, but also the place to go for people who want to make themselves at home. So, me and Mary naturally prefer the back row of the theater (if it's stadium seating) because we have found that we can whisper comments to each other, and not feel bad, because apparently nobody up there ever has any sense of manners since we have learned that up there everyone talks. Not loud and obnoxious, but just more so than say...the coveted row with the bar where you can put your feet up. And pretty much every single time, somebody up there says or does something weird (again, not talking about the sexually charged teenagers who are also up there feeling each other up). This show, my friends, was particularly entertaining. The highlights:

You probably all know by now that this movie is about an epidemic. Or pandemic? I don't know. Basically a virus traveling at lightning speeds being transmitted around the globe. Ok so there's a part where I think someone is going through and naming all the major cities that have been affected, and Salt Lake City was one of them. Take a moment to recall that me and Mary live in Salt Lake. Ok actually Holladay....but that's just outside of the city, only like 10-15 minutes, so same diff. Well it was so funny because the second the words "Salt Lake City" slipped out of the actor's mouth, the whole audience started fidgeting and murmuring and gasping and being really weird. Amongst all the fright, a handful of people decided to be silly and force a few crackly, sickly-sounding coughs. People gasped some more. And then, the rowdy bunch of girls sitting on the back row with us yelled (and I really mean yelled) out

"WE'RE ALL DEAD!!!!!!!!!!"

And then the whole theater busted out laughing. And this was as the movie continued to roll, and we were probably missing vital information to the plot, but nobody cared because it was the most ridiculous movie experience I think anyone there had ever had.Story not over.

Not 10 minutes later, I see what I thought was a cloud of smoke coming from a few rows down. I looked at Mary and asked if she saw the smoke too. She looked at me like was going as crazy as the rest of our fellow audience members. Right then, she cocked her head to the side without a confused look on her face, and I turned my head to see what she was staring at, and sure enough, more smoke. And it was coming from a human. And then we saw it. Some guy was totally smoking a joint in the theater! No, not even just a normal cigarette.....but weed!! And he had no shame, didn't even try to hide it! The funniest part was that nobody cared enough to tell on him, and everyone let him get his high on right there in the middle of the theater. Just makes me wonder how often he gets away with that, considering he was brave enough to light up without even trying to hide it. Although I'm not sure how he would have hidden it, so there probably was no sense in even trying.

I'm just so glad that it all happened, and it's kind of hard to convey just how funny it was if you weren't there, but please trust me......It was hysterical.

(3) Our 9/11 Movie

I remember a year ago in my Jewish History class, my teacher showed us parts of the movie called September 11. It's a really cool concept for a 9/11 movie. Stolen directly from it's IMBD site:  the movie is about the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are told from different points of view around the world. Eleven directors from 11 countries each contribute an 11-minute short reflecting on the events of 11 September 2001. It's really neat. Except here's what happened.

In class we only saw the French short and the Israeli short. Our teacher did not activate the subtitles, leading me to believe that there were no subtitles. I thought it was like one of those artsy fartsy things where we had to just soak in the body language and scenery and passion and that the dialogue wasn't important, was really only distraction. Well I should know by now that I am not artsy fartsy and am not so great at interpreting artsy fartsy things. He kind of let us know the gist of what was going on though. So I remembered that movie, and had it come in time for 9/11.
We watched it the day after....without the subtitles (thinking they did not exist). Well we watched a full hour before calling it quits. We watched the French segment (which was also in sign language). We watched the Iranian segment (I've studied Farsi, but I sure as heck didn't study enough yet to be able to understand). We watched the Bosnia-Herzegovina segment. We watched the Burkina-Faso segment. We watched the United Kingdom segment (yay English!....except it was narrated by a Chilean, talking about one of America's fine moments of orchestrating the destruction of political achievements of foreign governments -Allende, also on 9/11 - because heaven forbid we don't choke and strangle and control every single government in the entire world). We watched the Egypt segment (yay Arabic! Too bad it's been over 2 years since I've spoken it and SUCK now, and picked up some of the story, but also missed really important parts).
ANYWAY.....We watched, like I said, an hour of these foreign languages, trying to figure out what was going on. Finally I googled the movie and found an synopsis for each short, which is obviously the only way any of it made sense to us. Go figure. We stoppped at an hour and decided to finish the rest the next day because Mary was tired. On the menu page, I played around and found myself at an option for English subtitles. 

WTF?!?!?! 

     

I was shaking in rage. Anger at our my stupidity. I was so upset, I just went ahead and sent the movie back in the next day, and decided that I would try watching it again next year, when I hopefully will have cooled off enough by then to start the movie over from the beginning, and this time understand what is happening.

And that concludes this segment of The lives of Mary and Michelle.