"In vacant or in pensive mood..." I am: Bekah; 24; Law Student / Favorite Things: Carbs (so there!), Johnny Damon, Smiling at babies, Grilled cheese, Comfortable silence / Favorite Supreme Court Justice: Brennan / Favorite Wilson: Owen by an inch / Today's Special: Song: Elliott Smith, "Bled White"; Quote: "You know, there's like a butt-load of gangs at this school. This one gang kept wanting me to join because I'm pretty good with a bowstaff." Please love me: mmbekah@yahoo.com

 
I am having a crisis. The gravity of this situation cannot be overstated. I cannot decide who I am more in love with, Owen or Luke Wilson.

I feel like I need to make pro and con lists for both of them, but there are just no cons, and each brother has a pro that balances out the other. They are both so endearing, so funny, so subtle, so damn good looking. Let me parse this out a little. First, take Luke. Luke is the more traditionally attractive of the two, with his strong jaw and earnest eyes. His appeal lies in his sweet and sometimes clueless demeanor. Luke is funny, not because he is especially witty, but because he is so unbelievably precious and bumbling in his comic roles. He's what women hope men are, but know they could never really be. I need only point you to Blue Streak, his cameo on the X-Files, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, or the latest venture, Old School, in which he sticks out like a sore thumb among the fraternity assholes. I didn't even think any less of him for waking up next to that high school girl. How can you not forgive that face? Now for Owen. Owen is one of the best and smartest comic actors around. An absolute natural. He has a confidence about him that makes him extremely physically attractive as well. Not to mention that he has a great mouth. Owen takes roles of an entirely different kind--not usually the shy or nervous sweet guy, but instead the cocky ex-boyfriend or a caricature of the tortured artist. Think of Kevin in Meet the Parents or Hansel in Zoolander or Eli Cash in The Royal Tenenbaums. His sense of humor is so fine-tuned, so dead on, I feel like he might actually be a genius. Owen can deliver a line like no one else: he can make anything funny, and he can be a total ass and still have my undying devotion. I saw Shanghai Knights and became more obsessed. No one else can use the phrase "ass soup" and remain irresistible. Luke and Owen both have such great voices...basically the same, wonderfully distinctive voice. Does it have to come down to a blonde/brunette decision? I couldn't possibly insult them that way. Is it better to spread the love between them, or to ditch one of them so that I can spend more time worshipping the other? I am torn. How can I be expected to handle law school with this emotional dilemma weighing on my heart and my conscience? If only I lived in Utah. Then I wouldn't have to choose...
posted by Bekah at 12:07 AM :: |

 
They say that blindness and deafness heighten your other senses. In compensation for whatever sensory deficit you have, the functional senses develop more completely and seem stronger. I think the same thing happens to me when I’m tired. Mental and physical exhaustion make me exceptionally attuned to the sounds going on around me. I am not talking about some sort of cool superpower that allows me to hear butterflies flitting around in a rice field in China or something pleasant like that. The sounds I hear make me very, very angry, and things I wouldn’t usually notice start to drive me slowly insane.

For example, I realize now that the reading room of the library, which I used to believe was one of the few silent havens from law school chatter, is actually the loudest, most exasperating place on earth. The girl next to me is clicking away at her infernal laptop like the raven rapping and tapping at my chamber door. A man in the corner is sniffing every few seconds and coughing like he has consumption. I want to tell him that this is America, and we have people called doctors who fix you when you’re coughing up a lung. No speaka?? The girl with the flipflops is barreling through like a goddamn tank, people are screaming about the reading for Con Law, the guy at the next table is chomping on his fingernails, a million highlighters are squeaking in terrible harmony, and the cell phones are all chiming in with their ghastly electronic Oh Christmas Trees. The dissonance is absolutely deafening and it makes me want to pull my hair out. I need someplace quiet...someplace I can think. Maybe the construction site next door has a study area. Or perhaps a helicopter landing pad. Christ!

posted by Bekah at 11:12 AM :: |

 
I watched Flatliners a few weeks ago, and it really freaked me out. I remember seeing it at a slumber party when I was younger and not really understanding it enough to be scared. But I got something out of it the second time around. Something more than an appreciation of the dramatic transformation Julia Roberts' eyebrows have undergone over the past 10 years. The movie is about these med students who kill themselves and then bring themselves back after 2-5 minutes, to test the limits of medicine or to get famous or something. But when they come back, they are all haunted by people from their pasts. Like Kiefer Sutherland's character is haunted by the ghost of a little boy he accidentally killed by knocking him out of a tree with a rock. So, naturally, I get paranoid about all the things I did when I was little that could end up being my eternal torment. And I remembered something.

When I was in third grade, my teacher sent me down to the parking lot with a friend to get a cake she baked out of her car. I think she actually baked it for her paramedic boyfriend's birthday. So we were carrying the cake back toward the school, and I was holding it like a waiter, trying to be cute, when I started to lose my balance. Moments later, my friend and I watched as the cake landed, slow motion, face down on the pavement. I was too shocked to have any immediate reaction, but this "friend" of mine couldn't stop laughing. Evil, maniacal laughter that burns in my ears to this day. She thought it was just hilarious that I had dropped our teacher's "special friend's" cake. The tragedy happened about 3 feet from the cafeteria door, so we decided to bring the cake to the kitchen ladies and see if they could fix it. They cut off the top, and handed us back a lopsided, gravelly monstrosity, which we then presented sheepishly to our teacher. I think I actually said, "See, they fixed it in the kitchen. They got most of the rocks off of it." Did she laugh it off? Did she deal with it like a normal adult? Oh no. In fact, she burst into tears in front of the entire class. Between sobs she said, "I guess...I'll just...buy a cake instead. I was up all night baking that. Sniff." I just stood there feeling ashamed and confused for making a grownup cry. Obviously the entire ordeal scarred me for life. So after seeing Flatliners I feel like I should make amends, but I have no idea where my teacher is, if she's still dating the paramedic, or if she's still emotionally unstable. All I know is that I will be less than pleased if I'm haunted by my 3rd grade teacher in the netherworld.
posted by Bekah at 11:59 PM :: |

 
Since I've been spending so much time lately making jokes at the expense of others, I've decided to let you in on my very own top 5 all-time dumbest moments. I think the pain that it gives me to reveal my idiocy is proportional to the pleasure my loving readers (all three of you, God bless!) will take in hearing about it. And so, I am willing to sacrifice my dignity for you. And of course, as always, for the children.

1. Flammable vs. Inflammable. This experience will haunt me for the rest of my life. Last year, because I was co-chair of the Philosophy Student Advisory Board, I was invited to go out to dinner with the Philosophy faculty and a guest lecturer. We went to an Indian restaurant, and it was great. The profs were getting pretty sloshed on Kingfisher and heatedly debating such popular dinnertime topics as the mind-body problem and Kantian metaphysics. Somehow the conversation turned to England and the English. So I, totally sober mind you, decide to pipe up about my studies abroad. "Oh, I had such a great time studying Marx and Hegel...Oh yes, I agree, the food is terrible...Oh, can you believe this? Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing there! Those silly English people put 'inflammable' on things that are flammable!" Silence. One of my professors then said, "flammable and inflammable mean the same thing here too." I just had time to say, "Oh, right. Is that a fact?" before someone had the decency to change the subject. I couldn't sleep for a week.
2. Bon Jovi. For a long time, I thought Jon Bon Jovi was a Classical composer.
3. Nintendo Game Cube. I was at the movies with my sister, and a commercial for Nintendo Game Cube came on. It showed a boy sitting inside of a cube, and the inside walls showed different angles of the video game. Like he was inside the game. I thought that was pretty neat: "Hannah! They actually make those!" Um, no. No they don't.
4. The Clash. During my freshman year of college, I wrote a review in the college paper of From Here to Eternity, a live album by The Clash. I had no conception of this band at the time. Like how they're one of the great punk bands, with a huge huge following, and how they influenced pretty much every band who came after them. I think I actually referred to them as that 80's band who sang "Should I Stay or Should I Go" and classified the album as "boring." Rolling Stone, here I come.
5. Nelson Mandela. I don't know if my dad remembers this, but we were watching the news one day when I was little and a picture of Nelson Mandela came up on the screen. My sister said, "Who's that?" I responded, "Just some idiot." Dad was pissed.
posted by Bekah at 10:51 AM :: |

 
Oh dear. I almost forgot how much I hate "the tan ones." Those kids who come back from Spring Break golden brown and about 10 pounds thinner because they've been on some beach in Mexico living on Corona for a week. They're like a little group of demigods walking among the unfortunate pale mortals. But I can't hate them just because they had a great, sunny Spring Break. That would be completely unjustified and mean. Good thing I have a back-up reason to hate them: the way they shamelessly prance around and shove their tanness in my face. Like a girl in my class this morning who wore a neon tank top for the express purpose of accentuating her tan. You may think I'm being overly critical. Perhaps it was just what she happened to put on, right? Wrong. I watched her strategically pull her sweatshirt off of her shoulders and look around the room with that, "Yeah, there is something different about me" look on her face. The nerve of some people.


posted by Bekah at 2:17 PM :: |

 
I saw someone blowing leaves off the sidewalk this morning and realized, as I looked out into the ungainly mass forming in the middle of the street, that leaf blowers are illustrative of American society. Not in our backyard, we say! Get those unsightly leaves out of here! But where, pray tell, do the banished leaves go?
posted by Bekah at 8:10 AM :: |

 
A few days ago at the cd store I got stuck behind someone in my browsing path. It was infuriating. I have a system for these things that requires moving in strict alphabetical order at a pace that is methodical, yet not leisurely. When I walked in, some guy was standing in front of A/B, so I poked around the front of the store waiting for him to move on. When he finally did, I started in, but his tempo was very erratic. He stood in front of the C's for an obscenely long time. I wouldn't swear to it, but I think he was looking at The Captain and Tenille. It's not that I needed a C cd. That's precisely not the issue. The issue is that in my universe I have to look through C to be able to move to D, or everything goes out of alignment. I hovered. I loomed. I did everything I could to make him uncomfortable, but this guy wouldn't move past Phil Collins. Damn you Su-su-ssudio! I skipped ahead and waited by the M's until he was a safe distance away, but by the time I resumed my perusal, it just felt off. Later in the day it started to rain, I got a bad headache, and my sister missed her flight home. Coincidence? Oh, I think not.
posted by Bekah at 8:00 AM :: |