~Tuesday~ Since I was up on the early side this morning, I decided to drive to work, and I got the penultimate free parking spot down by the Raleigh Little Theater. Sweet.
And since I don’t have a buscapde to share, I’ll share a link to this very short article from The Onion sent to me by one of my favorite people on the planet, Sarah Egan Warren:
My boss and I had our weekly staff meeting, to which she brought a piece of that unbelievably delicious “White Texas Sheet Cake,” the recipe of a mutual colleague of ours. The meeting was short and sweet, and the cake was even sweeter.
I walked up to the nearby Subway for lunch, and I thought of the recent “miscommunication incident” that happened there last month, and I wondered if the sandwich artist helping me might be the “Jasmine” in that vignette.
I got a footlong Oven-Roasted Chicken sandwich and I ate half for lunch and saved the other half for a late afternoon snack.
At 3:00, after finally finishing up the EDUCAUSE Core Data Survey and sending it to my director and our CIO, I ran over to the Cameron Village post office, where I finally got my dad’s Father’s Day card in the mail.
Returning, I took a free two-hour parking spot behind our building, as quitting time was within two hours.
I got to the gym at about 5:20, where I did 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches, followed by 30 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine.
After a quick shower at home, I met Jen at Mission Valley Theaters for our free, advanced screening of Friends With Benefits, the new Justin Timberlake / Mila Kunis movie.
There was much drama involved in the time leading up ’til the start of the movie including:
- Being “wanded down” upon entering. I was praying that it wasn’t set off by contraband Twizzlers and Caramel Nips, both of which were in separate crevices about my person.
- A quite long, very serious, and slightly arrogant announcement: All electronic devices of any sort must remain off throughout the screening, because this film has not yet been released to the theaters. If we see any screen lit up, we’re going to come up and ask you to leave. We don’t care if the movie is in the middle or towards the end. You’ll be escorted out. We’re serious about this, we’re going to assume that any device on means you are trying to pirate this movie and use it for your own personal financial gain. We’re so serious about this, he went on to say now holding a prop into the air, that we’re going to be walking up and down the aisles with these night-vision goggles on so that we can easily spot any device that might be on. And if we see one, you’re going to be escorted out, no questions asked, no explanations. These are Sony’s rules not ours.
I thought of yesterday’s bus driver—He’s just the enforcer.
Let’s just say if you’d be at all interested in seeing Justin Timberlake naked from the back, this is your movie. Things (other than that) that I enjoyed about the movie:
- I liked the use of, and references to, technology that was embedded into this movie, from iPads to Google to large-screen, multiple window monitors to texting to flash mobs.
- I liked that there was a gay character in it (played by Woody Harrelson, no less).
- I liked that the leads had chemistry (in spite of being a man and a woman).
- Justin Timberlake is just adorable.
- I liked the exploration of the things people and families don’t talk about, which was particularly relevant after our salon agenda item last night about The Book of Mormons (the play), and in particular the song from it called, “Turn It Off.”
A couple of things I didn’t particularly care for:
- At one point the Justin Timberlake character says about a guy in the scene, “Or he’s retarded.” I will be very surprised if the Spread the Word to End the Word people don’t protest this movie when it is released.
- Although I appreciated that one of the characters in the movie was gay, scenes with him in them pretty much kept me on edge, exactly because of what happened in a photo-shoot scene, when a bunch of very scantily-clad guys were standing in a line and the Woody Harrelson (gay) character says, “Now put your arms around each other,” and a portion of the straight male audience felt compelled to groan, “Ewww.”
Yeah, we get it. You’re straight, masculine, dudes and you’d never put your arms around other men like that.
After the movie, I dropped by The Borough, where I had two cocktails and mused about two people who were wearing sunglasses on their heads:
