Monday, December 13, 2004

Off to the Town Center again, a "Score" to settle, and not putting myself out there

With their never-ending sameness, and with no real break in the monotony of my time off, I’ve been finding it difficult to properly keep track of the days. There were several points today during which I had to really stop and think in order to figure out what day it was.
Today’s monotony did get broken for a little while, though.
Kathleen called to inform me that she was heading to the day spa to get her legs waxed, and that afterwards she was going to the Dulles Town Center and wanted to know if I would like to accompany her (to the Town Center, not to the leg waxing).
I said sure, and took a quick shower.
She was going to the Town Center to have the battery in her watch replaced, which, once she dropped it off, we found was going to take a half an hour, so we wandered around for a bit.
I checked out the calendar place again to see if maybe something had changed and they’d acquired a Janesko calendar. They hadn’t, but I did see an Alex Ross “Mythology” calendar, so I picked that up (www.alexrossart.com).
On the way out through Hecht’s I spotted a fleece that was on sale for $15 (regularly $34), so I decided to pick that up to wear at work (it’s always very cold there). It turned out to be even cheaper than marked, totaling less than $14.
So that was a bargain.
After I got home I got started on dinner, completed it, ate some, froze the rest, and now here I am.
In the mail today I got my copy of “Selina’s Big Score,” a book I ordered about a week and a half ago.
“Selina” in this case is Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman.
It’s a great story which I read a while back, but hadn’t owned. It served as the basis for the most recently launched Catwoman series, introducing the major cast of characters and setting the tone for the monthly book.
If I ruled the world, as I sometimes feel I ought to, though everyone feels that way sometimes, “Selina’s Big Score” would have been the basis for the recent Catwoman movie rather than some lame-ass knock-off of Catwoman that isn’t Catwoman and simply had the name Catwoman tacked onto it in order to try to draw in the existing fan base.
“Selina’s Big Score” would have been so easy to translate to film, and would have been so much more entertaining.
And of course, if I had been in charge and gotten the movie made, I wouldn’t have cast Halle Berry.
Don’t get me wrong: Mmmm…Halle Berry...
However, while Catwoman is many things, such as a thief, a adventurer, a sometimes a crime fighter, there is one thing that she is not: black.
The fact of the matter is that in comics, as in virtually all segments of the entertainment industry, there is a paucity of good, well-realized and defined minority characters, and like most reasonable people I think that something needs to be done to rectify that.
I do not, however, feel that, changing the ethnicities of existing characters, usually arbitrarily, as has been done many times recently, is the right way to go about doing that.
That’s a particular hornet’s nest that I don’t really want to stir up here, but I couldn’t mention the recent Catwoman movie without at least touching on the subject.
Of course, the whole thing is irrelevant in regards to Halle Berry’s portrayal of a character who called herself Catwoman, since she was not intended to be Selina Kyle.
And by the way, in the role of Catwoman, Michelle Pfeiffer, like the entire movie in which she filled the role, sucked ass.
I’ve never thought that she was an especially attractive woman, and whatever the costume in that movie had going for it was ruined by the stupid patchwork stitching (much like Halle’s costume was ruined by the terrible mask, the open-toed boots, and the stupid rips in the pants).
Actually, every live-action portrayal of Catwoman I’ve ever seen has sucked: Eartha Kitt, Julie Newmar, and, ummm…that one chick…dammit.
Lee Merriwether!
I actually remembered her name before I finished pulling up IMDb.
Anyway, every woman who has ever played Catwoman (though Adrienne Barbeau did okay as her voice on Batman: The Animated Series) has carried the whole cat thing way too far.
She calls herself Catwoman, dresses in a cat-themed costume, and has a natural affinity for cats, but she doesn’t take the motif to the extremes that have been presented in movies and TV shows. She doesn’t purr. She doesn’t bathe herself with her tongue. She doesn’t drink cream.
She doesn’t play with balls of yarn, or chase after mice.
Or shit in a litter box.
Batman has a bat motif going on, but that doesn't mean that he eats bugs or sleeps upside down. Just because something is your gimmick it doesn't mean it takes over your whole life.
And honestly, while I realize that the whole vamping it up as a cat thing is intended to be sexy, it really just looks and sounds silly.
In any case, the whole point of this is that the only place I’ve ever seen the character of Catwoman done justice is in “Selina’s Big Score” and in Ed Brubaker’s run on the monthly series. Both are examples of some of the finest mainstream comics work I’ve ever seen, and for anyone out there who reads comics, or is willing to do so, I highly recommend checking them out.
So my vacation is actually over, as I am back on my regular days off. I do regret the fact that I didn’t do more with my extra three days, but as I mentioned many times, there really isn’t much that I could have done with them.
Even if I were inclined to “hit the town,” that would actually be pretty difficult here, as there really is no town. Ashburn is largely a collection of housing subdivisions containing town homes, single family homes, condominiums, and apartment complexes, with a few scattered shopping plazas containing grocery stores, various (mostly useless) specialty shops, and some small cafes and restaurants.
There isn’t any sort of “downtown” that you can go to and walk along the city streets for hours checking out different kinds of shops, cafes, and restaurants, and everything is so scattered that you have to spend so much time in traffic just to get from one place to another, making it too much of a hassle to even bother.
Of course, I do have the option of heading into DC and checking out what our nation’s capital has to offer, but driving there is way too much of a pain, and my desire to do something with my free time isn’t strong enough to make me want to make use of the Metro.
I thought about going out to Delaware to visit my friend Eric, but the most direct route there would involve going through DC, and, as mentioned, that’s a pain (Last time I drove out to visit him I got lost in DC for several hours, which is why I actually have a grudge against DC and am largely unwilling to go there ever again).
Beyond that, though, there arises the question of what I would do once I got there. He’s a married father these days, and I no longer drink, so what would we do? We’re both too old for just “hanging out,” and the one activity that we both used to enjoy so much (drinking) is no longer an option, so why bother?
And it’s not like I don’t care, or don’t want to see him, but the effort of driving out there just doesn’t seem like it would have much of a payoff, and it would ultimately serve only to remind us both that the “good old days,” regardless of how good they may or may not have actually been, are well behind us.
So honestly, even though I do often wish that it were not so, I have to admit that there really isn’t much that I could do with my time that would be worthwhile enough to justify the bother involved in doing it.
Maybe I would be better served trying to do something more constructive with my time, like getting a part-time job, or going back to school to get my master’s, or even more actively engaging in my existing creative pursuits.

On occasion, I do actually work some overtime during the week, and even though it’s fairly rare I’d probably make more money working a few extra hours here and there at my existing job than I would at a part-time job.
Speaking of money, the lack of it is what keeps me from going back to school. (Well, that and laziness, obviously. I should think by now that it's clear that laziness informs pretty much all of my decisions.)
As for my writing and my art…meh. It’s pretty obvious that they’re never really going to pay off, even if only because I don’t have enough interest in pursuing them. They serve to pass the time, but beyond that I have no hopes or particular aspirations for them.
So ultimately it looks like whatever vague, undefined activity I’m looking to fill my time with is going to stay vague and undefined as I continue to simply pass the time at home.
And I guess I’ll just have to content myself to occasionally accompanying my married co-worker when she goes shopping, since that seems to be the extent of my social life.
Hey, I’m not complaining; my social life hasn’t been this active in a long time.
But going out into the world, both on my own over the past few days and with Kathleen, has been sort of revelatory.
To be perfectly honest, the whole reason I feel as though I should go out into the world more is in the hope that maybe somehow I’ll finally meet someone; maybe I'll finally have the sort of chance encounter that seems so unlikely to happen, but which is certainly never going to happen within the confines of my apartment.
But as I venture out into a world filled with suburbanite housewives, it becomes increasingly clear that the odds are just as good in my apartment as out of it. Everywhere I look I see attractive women…walking with their boyfriends and husbands.
Even if I see women on their own, the diamond rings on their fingers are just as apparent as the baby strollers they’re pushing.
And if I see a woman who has no obvious indicators that she’s not single, invariably she speaks little or no English. Okay, so I’m a guy and my primary interest may not always be conversation, but it would be nice to meet someone who will at least understand me when I say, “Okay, now I want you to tighten the restraints just a little more…”
KIDDING!
Honestly, I’m just kidding; I’ve got this whole system set up that lets me control the tightness of the restraints myself.
In any case, I’ve come to realize that what’s really behind this impulse to get out into the world is a desire to finally meet someone, and my dissatisfaction stems from the fact that it’s just not happening no matter how much I “put myself out there,” particularly since my options for doing so are severely limited by geography, language barriers, and my own personality quirks/defects.
So I guess that rather than putting myself out there I’m further ahead to just “keep myself in here.”

1 comment:

Jon Maki said...

Hey, it's not as if my opinion on the whole "Batman Returns" piece of crap is anything new.
I didn't even like Christopher Walken in that movie; that's how much I hated it.
People give Burton way too much credit. Just because he didn't continue the cheesy "Biff! Bam! Holy etc. Batman!" crap doesn't mean that he made good Batman movies.
"Batman: Mask of The Phantasm" is the ONLY good Batman movie ever made. None of the over-hyped, live-action crapfests deserve any consideration whatsoever.
Besides, my opinion CAN'T be wrong. It is mine, after all.