There are very dangerous, scary people in Boston and I am sitting at home with the TV off. I have no news websites open. I look at Twitter, but I find I am mostly getting upset, not learning much about what is happening.

I want to know why someone would do such a terrible thing, but I find these places where I am supposed to look for answers don’t really have them.  They have answers, I suppose.  These nuggets of truth are buried in piles of misinformation, speculation, and people dying to be first, not dying to be right.

You are likely rolling your eyes calling me a luddite, which is fair, I kind of am.  In this instance though, I think the answer to my problem lies less in the past and more in the future.  In fact, AP excluded, I had pretty much given up on most MSM long ago as a regular source of news and information. Like many others, I tend to find interesting articles through Twitter and Facebook.  I find most of my news from new media sources. I admire the ability to quickly turn around information.

Most of the time, this arrangement works fine. You occasionally stumble into some bad information, but it is usually pretty easy to suss out.

Unfortunately, it is in these times of crisis that the Twitter news model seems to fail me so profoundly.

Just a few months ago, I watched in horror as news of the Newtown massacre hit Twitter.  I saw folks posting unverified news updates and pictures of the alleged weapon before police had even finished searching the crime scene.  I remember when someone appeared to figure out who the perpetrator was. Links to the Facebook profile and old pictures hit the Twitterverse minutes later.  It was remarkable to see how quickly information spread.

Problem is, that information was wrong.

The outlet misidentifying Ryan Lanza as the killer could’ve gotten him killed. It didn’t thankfully. Instead, it made an innocent 20 year old kid the subject of international scrutiny as people read his FB posts and Twitter feed and wasted no time labeling him a nutjob and a psychopath.  Turns out he wasn’t. Turns out he was just another emo kid, your typical teenager. And it also turned out that this kid had to deal with this scrutiny on the same day he learned his brother was responsible for the second deadliest school shooting in history.  That person also killed Ryan Lanza’s mother.

Ryan Lanza had to pay the price for others to be first, to prove to the Twitterverse they had something worth saying.  He wasn’t the only one either. There was at least one other young man with the same name who wasn’t even related to the killer whose Twitter feed to this day still has more than 3,000 followers and an author pleading for people to unfollow him because he is not that guy.

As the scene unfolds in Boston tonight, I can’t help but think of Ryan Lanza again. When I think about what I wanted and needed to know about Newtown that day, none of it was so imperative that it merited the massive and deplorable encroachment of privacy that the younger Lanza brother went through.

None of us needed to know the back story of the killer that day because police had already confirmed the threat was dead.  This was not a public safety issue, there was no urgency, and there was no reason the rest of us couldn’t wait until parents had been notified of their children’s passing or that officials couldn’t notify Ryan Lanza before the rest of us.  It would have still been news six hours later. Or even the next day.

There is urgency in Boston.  People in the neighborhood need to know to stay inside, which police are trying to do via automated calls.  Watertown residents need to know to stay away and not stop their car for anyone but an armed police officer.  But do they need to know every transmission on the police scanner?  Is it so important that you are going to compromise the security of police communication while a mass murderer is on the run and could probably stand to benefit from knowing what police are talking about?

Looking at @BostonScanner, it becomes painfully obvious to me that this is a feed with plenty of information, but a fair amount of it is not particularly useful mostly because it isn’t verifiable.  Look at images of the scene.  You tell me if you think the lines of communication there are full of nothing but accurate information.

Yet I see many in my Twitter feed spreading the words of the scanner as if it was gospel.  I also see folks lambasting CNN for not being up to date on information.  I have not watched CNN in several years and have several other reasons to lambaste them besides timeliness, but I will say this:

If I was a journalist (I am not), being a little late to break news would frustrate me.  Breaking news that turned out to be uncorroborated and incorrect in a situation as grave as this would keep me from sleeping at night, probably for the rest of my life.

Folks like @akitz and other eyewitnesses and citizen reporters are great and illustrate what Twitter really excels at–disseminating info in rapid-fire fashion to a wide range of people. As a result, folks like those at Reddit have become very good at putting that information in a central place, creating an, albeit, disjointed narrative.  Sites like Storify allow folks to do similar things, synthesize these bits and pieces into a narrative.  Incredible pieces of journalism and new media have resulted from this. Plenty of erroneous assumptions and dangerous implications have resulted from this process as well though.

I hope that eventually we learn how to fine-tune this process, because it has a tremendous amount of potential.  I hope that the mainstream media figures out how to use Twitter better, and I certainly hope they follow the lead of @AP and institute policies and practices to ensure that they think and evaluate before they tweet.  I am inspired to see that journalists are withholding suspects names until someone officially confirms them, even though they’ve been reported on the scanner.

I am also inspired to see these unifying moments on Twitter, as disheartening as it may be to note that it takes a national tragedy to create a communal experience these days.  We are listening to one another and trying to learn from one another, problem is, none of us have much of anything useful to say about this particular incident. It is like watching cable news, except the talking heads are your friends, who aren’t being held to any sort of journalistic standard.  It has its entertaining moments, but when it boils down to it, it is just a lot of filler until we get the whole story.  Twitter may be where the story unfolds, but we still need folks to put the whole thing together, to fact check, to go back, and to make sure that the official story adds up to more than just 140 characters.

Poker players can be a bit prickly when it comes to discussing cash games, and not just when they lose.  If anything, the poker players I encounter are more secretive about the lucrative cash games they find than their losing sessions. I never quite understood the argument that, if you find a profitably cash game with lots of fish, you shouldn’t tell good people about it. That is, I didn’t understand it until last night.

I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not I should share what happened.  Do I want to protect my little honey pot and make sure no other visiting poker people corrupt my Shangri-La?

In the end, I decided this place deserves a space in this blog.  It is too magical and too special not to, for, my friends, I have found the perfect bar.

I’m not kidding, this place is the Mary Poppins of bars. It is like I carefully hand-wrote a list of characteristics I want my ideal bar to have, sang a ditty in a British accent, then had my militant father crumple it in a ball, throw it in the fire, and tell me never to speak of such ridiculousness ever again only to have this bar float down from the ether via magic umbrella.  Then this bar unloaded a carpet bag full of drunken wonder, all for me.

My friend Tim and I stumbled upon this place earlier in our stay when looking for a place to grab lunch.  Wandering down the river, we stopped to glance at the menu and were immediately won over.  We got inside at ten to 3pm and the waitress regretfully informed us we only had a couple of minutes to order off the lunch menu, otherwise all that would be available was the “Bar Snack” section of the menu.

We were bummed, as the menu looked rather tasty. Then we actually glanced at the bar snacks menu.

“Well Tim,” I said with a sigh. “Looks like we’ll have to settle for your standard bar fare. Think I’ll get the polenta chips and the slow roasted pork belly squares.”

Tim settled for lamb cutlets.  Tough break missing out on the “real” food and having to settle for bar fare.  We enjoyed our meal, but what I enjoyed even more was the Bulmer’s Pear Cider on tap. I’ve been a big cider fan (read: girl) for a long time and Tim was similarly pleased, as his general requirements for  beverages are typically two fold: 1. Fruit 2. Whipped cream.

The place was pretty empty, which got Tim and I wondering what their night scene was like.  

We had a chance to find out last night.  We were fortunate enough to finish up our work at Crown Casino around 10pm, recruited our friend Brett to join us, and headed for what I thought would be a quiet drink.

As we walked down the river, the noise of a raucous Saturday night seemed to be coming from the opposite side of the river.  We neared closer to our destination and I started looking around, fearing our seemingly cool bar was actually lame and unattended at night.

We rounded the final corner and Tim summed it up. “Oh we have come to the right place.”

The place was crowded, but not packed. Half of the bar was being used as a dance floor, but there were still plenty of tables away from DJ and music. As I gently bopped my head to 80s classic Madonna, we ordered a round and grabbed seats in the quieter section of the bar.

If there was one thing about the night I would change, it would be this.  I later realized we wanted to be in the middle of the action, though our seats did allow us to people watch just about everyone in the dance area.  The DJ rotation of 80s tunes continued as we admired an Aussie Rules Football game on a nearby TV.  As I tried to explain the rules, Tim and Brett seemed fairly incredulous that I truly understood this game.

“And if you get the ball through the center posts, that is a goal.  The official, who is dressed in a sassy hat then gives the player the double wink and gun,” I say.

They laughed and refused to believe me. Before I continue with the story of the Disneyworld of bars, let me pause briefly to enter this into the evidence. Exhibit A:

Ahem.

The DJ made his exit around 11 and two young men with acoustic guitars set up on a small stage by the dance floor.  They proceeded to play a series of nostalgic tunes of my youth acoustic-style.  The crowd (and us) were into it and enjoying it, but the grand finale they put on blew the rest of the show out of the water.

I didn’t even realize what was happening, but Tim did.  

“Is that…” He strained to hear harder and was struck by the telling hum. “Yeah. That is ‘No Diggity.’”

No doubt.

Thing is, they weren’t just playing a white and nerdy acoustic cover of “No Diggity.”  Oh no. They were doing the white and nerdy acoustic megamix seamlessly making their way through a good 15 iconic hip hop songs like “California Love”, “Shake That Ass for Me” and “Jump Around.”

As I scanned the crowd, who was singing as loudly and earnestly as I was, I had a very important realization, not to mention a life first:

I was not even in the bottom half of the whitest, nerdiest people at this bar.

These were my people.  This was my home. No diggity, no doubt.  

Even the guys in the bar were exuberantly dancing, white man’s overbite a blazing.  One guy was especially entertaining, often running a large circle around the dance floor before diving back in.  It only got better though.  One of his friends appeared with a new piece of headwear.  I shit you not, it was a scarecrow hat, just like this one:

Oh..pardon the frightening Halloween Glamour Shot, but you get the idea. The scarecrow hat made its rounds around the dance floor as Brett, Tim, and I watched with envy, pondering what kind of Oceans 11-like caper it would take to steal it. It looked like I had an opportunity as the Aussies gathered in a circle to sing some sort of inspirational early 90s Aussie pop song to one another, but as I neared closer, I realized the object on the table was just a pointy purse. Before I could locate the hat, the lights came on. It was time to go. The jubliant dance floor participants seemed as reluctant as us to depart, but the waitress told us this happens eveyr weekend and this week was actually less busy than usual. She thought the good weather might’ve kept people at the beach instead of the bar. As we walked back to our hotel, we were doing that postmodern Millenial thing where we reminisce about stuff that happened just an hour prior, as if we might never remember or experence it again.

I feared it would be a fairy tale or something like Brigadoon, where this magical bar appears but once every 40 years to make every aging pop culture nerd like myself feel special, like I have something to live for.  As I wondered if this was all a dream, the flames in front of the Crown Complex started going off.  

“This is OZ, the great and powerful country,” they called to me.  It was real.  

“It was real,” I screamed out.  "You were there Brett.  You too Tim!“ I turned back to the bar and yelled, "And you too, Scarecrow! You were all there!”

This is the thing about Australia I have noticed so far.  There is a familiarity here for me as an American.  Pieces of it feel like home, but others feel as foreign as the Yellow Brick Road.  It is a mystically real place.  People go about their day to day business as we do, but there is always a spark, be it the literal sparks of the Crown flames or the one that comes from a group of blissfully happy nerds singing along to the familiar chords of Snoop Dogg songs.  

I am on a work trip in Australia (a sentence younger Jess never thought she would type).  We are staying at an amazing property, the Crown Entertainment Complex in Melbourne.  This place is massive and every square foot–er, metre?–of it is gorgeous.  There are so many restaurants here I could eat somewhere different for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of this 16-day trip and never eat at the same place twice.  There is shopping, there are shows, there is gambling, there is a movie theater.  There is everything your heart could desire, save for one:

A mug.

I have been in Melbourne around five days now and I have yet to encounter a drinking receptacle that my java-addicted self would describe as a mug.  I’ve been served coffee in teacups and steins and what we in the States would describe as a juice glass, but no mugs.

The Googled phrase “Where are all the mugs, Australia?” yielded little explanation.  Asking the locals didn’t help much either.

Unlike my work trip to France last fall, the language barrier isn’t really an issue here.  We all speak English, but trying to talk about coffee really is like trying to  communicate with a koala.

My first attempt to order coffee started out easy enough. The waitress offered an option: “Black?”

“Yeah, with milk.”

“Oh, like  a latte?”

After four more conversations that went the exact same way, I ended up with a latte every time.  I have to say, I am not the biggest fan of lattes.  They don’t really taste like coffee to me. The Australian ones seem even less coffee-like. They are like those lattes you order at Burger King when you are 14 and think, “Look how mature I am drinking coffee!” when what you were consuming bears more of a resemblance to a Baskin-Robbins Chocolate Blast than a Starbucks beverage (side note: There doesn’t appear to be Chocolate Blasts on the BR menu anymore. I haven’t had one in a good decade, but still, small sad tear).

These drinks are also served to you in tiny 8 oz glasses without a handle. Newsflash: glass does not hold heat particularly well. So, you are scalding your hand to drink a beverage that is juts barely a drinkably hot temperature.

Last night, my boss and I ordered coffee and decided it was time to investigate.  In this good coffee cop/bad coffee cop routine, I played the role of bad cop.

“Hello sir, we’d like two coffees in your largest mugs,” my boss cheerily requests.

The bartender (yes, we were ordering coffee at a bar. Somehow in our heads, this seemed like the place we stood the best chance of getting a strong cup of coffee) offered us some options and we admitted we were clueless.

“Do you want black coffee?”

Oh no. Not this again.

“Yes,” I say.  "But can we get it not all the way full with a little room for some milk?“

"Oh, so like a latte?”

“Well, no not really.”

“But you want milk?”

“Yeah, but we can just add it after you make it.”

This is where we cracked the case.  I explained the concept of “cream and sugar” and the bartender was taken aback. His face scrunched at the phrase “then you just pour a little cold milk in there”, as if I had suggested the next step in the American process was to grind up babies and sprinkle accordingly.

So I drank another latte.

I’ve tried to take matters into my own hands.  I took precautions and came to Melbourne armed with Starbucks Via and Splenda.  I didn’t bring creamer though.  After scouring three grocery stores and questioning some locals, I determined that, like mugs, there is no such thing as creamer in Australia.

I bought soy milk and crammed it in my minibar fridge and felt prepared.  I found a hot water pot, I was good to go.  Then I looked around the room and realized I was missing something very important:

A freaking mug.

In Season 1 Episode 11 of Justified, Raylan Givens, who lives in Lexington finds Ava in a bar in Corbin, Kentucky. He asks her what she is doing in Harlan and she points out they are actually in Corbin.

If you’re not from Kentucky, this sounds fine. If you are from Kentucky, you know that being from Lexington, being in Harlan, and finding someone in Corbin is about like hailing from Los Angeles, travelling to San Diego, and searching for a friend only to find them in Temecula. Or at Disneyland. An example for my fellow Nevadans-it would be like being from Las Vegas, going to LA, and finding who you are looking for in Victorville.

Corbin is 65 miles from Harlan. The two are nowhere near each other.  This is not some difficult to discover piece of information. It is called Google Maps, Justified, you should check it out.

Also, this is much more minor, but technically Harlan is not a dry county.  Like many counties in Kentucky, it is classified as moist. Yes, moist. What the hell is a moist county, you ask? It is one that doesn’t sell liquor in stores, but does sell it in restaurants with more than 100 seats in it. So, if I had to guess, Ava would probably drive 20 miles to the Applebees in nearby Cumberland to get her drank on, or head across state lines to Virginia or Kingsport, Tennessee, a town just as far away as Corbin, but much larger than the 21,000 people Corbin has to offer.

This part right here? This is just me offering color. I don’t expect Executive Producer Graham Yost to know people in Eastern Kentucky tend to (from my understanding) go to Tennessee and Virginia for things a fair amount of the time.  I don’t expect him to realize people flying to Harlan would fly into Tri-Cities in Tennessee, not Lexington.  I realize at this level I am nitpicking a show that has many, many good things going for it.

But I would expect him to question the geographic possibility that someone would choose to go to a bar 65 miles from the town she is from and 88 miles from the town she currently lives in for no particular reason whatsoever.

/rant

I’ve spoken before about my childhood as a competitive dancer.  I don’t think I really went into detail on my post-competition dance career though.  After leaving my studio, I moved to Lexington’s School of Classical Ballet and actively tried to gain acceptance in the School for the Creative and Performing Arts (SCAPA) as a ballet major. After getting rejected my first year, I got waitlisted in 6th grade and got a call I was in just a couple of weeks before school began.

I started at my new school eager to spend the day splitting my time between academic classes and pursuit of the arts.  As a ballet major, I took a 60-minute class every school day.  On Mon/Wed/Fri I attended Creative Writing classes after ballet.  On Tues/Thurs, I took in another hour of dance in tap classes.  At school alone, I was logging six hours of dance a week, more when we had rehearsals for Dance SCAPA (our annual recital).  

We were also required to take class outside of school.  At our level, that meant two hours of classes three times a week.  Throw in rehearsals for that studios annual recital and we were talking about 20-30 hours of dancing every week.  At the time I also still took gymnastics, taking 90 minutes or so of classes on the one day a week I wasn’t at the studio.

By the time I was ending my second year at SCAPA, I was dancing as often as many hours a week as some people spent at their jobs.  In theory, I was going to continue this pursuit at SCAPA’s high school program, where the daily classes extended to two hours a day and the outside classes and rehearsals only looked to be more time consuming.  Even though I always loved ballet, I became restless. I convinced my mom to let me switch studios to one that was less intense, but even that still necessitated two long days of dancing a week. With our classes at school, sometimes I was dancing 5 hours a day.

As 7th grade drew to a close, I made a decision to retire my pointe shoes and switch my major.  I initially planned to go into creative writing, but impulsively opted to do drama instead, having never been anything but a dancing extra in any of our school shows.  I was accepted into the drama program and gave up ballet cold turkey.  I still tapped twice a week, but I went from 32 hours of dancing a week to two.

In high school my directors knew about my dance background and often cast me in dancing parts in our musicals, but I was never in regular class.  Those four years, I never thought twice about my decision.  As I looked ahead to college though, I started to think I needed some sort of dancing in my life after all.

Knowing a bit about colorguard since our high school’s band was extremely successful, I decided to try out for the USC Marching Band as a flag girl, known as a Silk.  I made the squad (tiny secret: everyone who tried out did).  Since we were a marching guard, this was much less dance-like than I anticipated, so I started looking elsewhere for my fix.  I found the USC Repertory Dance Company.  The Silks put a piece in their annual show my freshman year and I was hooked.  I auditioned and successfully made the company my sophomore and junior years.  In addition to taking part in a number of dance routines that necessitated 3-4 hours of dance a week, I also took advantage of our dance classes for credit and enrolled in ballet again.

By senior year though, I had to start thinking about my career. I had an internship working on the movie “Stealth” and I spent a good chunk of time producing student films for my friends.  I tried to audition for the Company again, but didn’t have much time and didn’t attend the workshop to learn the audition combination (a series of dance moves set to music for those not in the know).  I couldn’t keep up and, while I made callbacks, I didn’t make the cut.  I wasn’t surprised. The company was becoming increasingly competitive and many of the girls (and guys) were on their way to professional dance careers. So I stopped dancing again. Career and school came first.

That was about ten years ago.  Since then, I’ve taken aerobic classes, longing for some means to stay in shape that occupies my mind with choreography.  I took hip hop classes (put your judgy face away, I may be white and nerdy but I have a little rhythm).  It was fine for what it was, but the moves were always a bit basic and I didn’t feel particularly challenged.

About a month ago, I decided to try out dance, hoping it would be the challenge I was looking for.  I went to the Rock Center for Dance, which offered a range of adult-level classes and took a ballet class.  While my flexibility and turnout were a fraction of my peak, the instructor was impressed with my technique and I was surprised at how quickly the terminology and the patterns of barre work came back to me. I immediately bought a pass for ten more classes.

Since then, I have been coming to classes three days a week. I am hooked and I can’t stop.  Even though I am the only one in class who can’t do the splits (working on it), I always leave feeling energized and eager to come back.

The other day, my jazz instructor stopped me on the way out and we chatted a bit.  I told him I used to dance a lot, but I’ve lost a ton of my physical abilities since then. He offered some reassuring words.

“It will come back.  You can tell you love this though. That is the important part.”

He was right, I love it.  I didn’t realize it 15 years ago, but I really loved it.  In college I loved it too, but I thought I needed to love my career more.

At USC, part of my decision to devote less time to dance came because I knew I wasn’t going to be a pro.  I didn’t have the skill or the body type for such a career, plus, while I loved it, I didn’t want it to be my livelihood.  When I think about it, I basically made the choice not to make dance my life back in seventh grade.  

As kids of the 80s and beyond, we are required to make insane commitments  to our extracurriculars.  Unlike our parents, who dabbled in everything, we are taught if you are going to do something, you need to really do it.  I quit gymnastics not because I didn’t like it, but because it became a choice of dance or gymnastics–the time commitment each necessitated meant you couldn’t do both. If I was to keep going to the gym, I needed to commit to compete and get better.  In middle school, it became clear I was going to be too tall to be an elite gymnast, making it the only time in my life I’ve ever been deemed “too tall.” Combine that with a late start, and the consensus was it wasn’t worth pursuing anymore.

When it came to ballet, I think 12 year old me realized I wasn’t the best in the class. I wasn’t going to be a prima ballerina because I was too short, too muscular, and lacked the raw talent.  So at the age of 12, I thought I had to quit.  Loving it wasn’t a good enough reason to keep doing it.

I would like to say that I made the wrong decision in my adolescence.  I would like to say these recreational classes let me pursue something I love just because I love it..  Even these though, there is a certain amount of pressure.  This week, my teacher persuaded me to try the intermediate/advanced class. I did. It was not my finest hour, but I didn’t embarrass myself.  This was a relief, because I would like to someday work my way up to that class.  Taking that class gave me a glimpse of what was next though. The entire hour we heard about building stamina to be in a show, picking up choreography quickly so you can excel at auditions.

Let’s take a moment just to picture what I would look like at a casting call for dancers in Las Vegas. 

Nonetheless, I find myself right back in the mode of wanting to get better, wanting to level up, wanting to be good enough.  It is infuriating on some level, but this is also what I wanted. Aerobics classes don’t cut it and dance, like sports, is one of those things where you truly have to focus on getting better.

Just like middle school, it is still about making it to the next level, moving up that next rung.  My recreational time is basically a version of Candy Crush.  I try to move up levels, I try to outscore my friends, and, no matter how old I get, I can’t just settle for doing something purely out of love.  

I think most people will agree that nostalgia reigns supreme in the current pop culture conversation.  A group of writers and thinkers in their late twenties and early thirties wax poetic on sites like Vulture and Grantland and many topics of conversation center around shows of yore.  We obsess over the reboot of “Boy Meets World” not because this show was good (it was really rather mediocre), but because it meant something to us, so, in turn, we revere it on a level it probably doesn’t deserve.

This glut of reboots and revitalization of long-dead shows like “Veronica Mars” and “Arrested Development” have us worried revisiting our old favorites won’t produce the experience and emotion it did the first time around.  This is a founded concern, really.  I mean, think about the stupid crap we watched in the 1980s.  Much as I lament my 11-year-old nephew liking crap like Catscratch, I used to think this cartoon was amazing:

If you are unfamiliar with the Fluppy Dogs, it was a one-off Saturday afternoon Disney TV movie about dogs from another dimension.  These dogs may look normal (if a dog being blue is normal), but they speak English, they stand upright when they walk, oh, and they have magical powers when you pet them.  In addition to doing things like making furniture fly when scratched, the dogs also have a key that bears a resemblance to a radioactive kazoo made out of amethyst.  The key causes doors to appear out of the ether and lead the dogs to other dimensions.

Yeah. Nostalgia may make me to this day still mimic the villain and ruefully shake my fist whilst yelling, “Get me those Fluppies!”, but in the decade or two since my height of Fluppy love, I have realized that the idealized version in my head is not what this movie actually is.

When MTV decided to do a #retroMTV weekend and re-air the original New York, San Francisco, and original Las Vegas seasons of The Real World, I thought I would have a similar reaction.  While my interest in Real World had waned a bit by the time Las Vegas hit the airwaves in 2002, I remember the New York and San Fran series vividly.  I was around 10-years-old when the San Francisco season aired in 1994.  I remember watching in awe as these grown ups lived their adult lives before the camera, still a decade removed from understanding that being in your early 20s hardly makes you an adult.

When the opportunity arose to watch the show as a person who had more life experience than these cast members, I jumped at it, DVRing every episode.   I thought there would be some personal fulfillment in seeing that, while the seven strangers picked to live in that house weren’t as emotionally immature as the most recent seasons, they were still 20 somethings in search of something, just like I was–and arguably still am.

Unlike the Fluppies or Boy Meets World though, this show was remarkably unchanged by hindsight.  I still admired most of these people with the blind adoration of 10-year-old me.  These people were the 20 something I aspired to be.  Even Cory, the so-called naive cast member seeking to find purpose didn’t seem all that lost.  She was investigating graduate school programs, found a part time job, and made a sincere effort to get to know each of her housemates in a meaningful way.

These housemates had plenty of insight to offer.  I think we are all pretty familiar with one of the poster boys of the AIDS crisis, Pedro Zamora.  It was pretty obvious Pam Ling, who managed to work rotations as a doctor in between stints at the house, had her shit together.  Judd Winick has gone on to be a pretty established cartoonist (and marry Pam btw, cue the collective “awww”), working with numerous noted comic books.  Mohammed Bilal, the spoken word artist and musician, is now a media producer.  Rachel Campos is married to Real World alumnus turned Congressman Sean Duffy and is a mother of six. And then there is Puck, but even that guy with a clear screw loose still managed to have an impact and accomplish enough with his persona on the show that people are still mimicking his outlandish attitude twenty years later.

This batch of overachievers helps to explain why Bunim-Murray Productions eventually decided to make the cast work together on a job–no one was ever home! They were all off at speaking engagements, curing the sick, putting on a show, or meeting with politicians.  While most hour-long Real World episodes center around a single night of drinking and the shenanigans and emotional consequences that result, these half hour episodes are packed with plot.  In one episode, Cory learns about the struggle of African-Americans by attending Mohammed’s poetry performance. She hears Pedro speak and realies his family has struggled as well.  She then goes on a quest to make her middle class White identity less bland.  By episode’s end, Mohammed no joke has the roommates assemble and each read a poem about their identity aloud to the group, followed by a thoughtful discussion.

I thought my college friends and I were introspective and intellectual. Be honest, you did too.  We did not do poetry readings in the living room. I think we went to some poetry slams together, but there was no performance and we definitely different discuss racial politics after it was over.

You could argue this new season of Real World discusses race I guess.  On commercial after this episode wrapped, we saw a sneak peek of the girls discussing what color their nipples are. I mean, at least skin tone is entering the conversation.

In the end, of course I saw the ads for the new Portland Real World and longed for my Real World.  You could argue this is just nostalgia rearing its head once again.  Watching Pedro and crew, I think that, in addition to being the quintessential cultural time capsule of 1994, this is a truly excellent example of what reality TV and documentaries can be though.  While nostalgia prompted the re-watching, 29-year-old me admires this shows for reasons beyond simple nostalgia.  Yes, the midriffs, mentions of pagers, and Pam’s Joe Boxer smiley face bring a smile to my face, but this is an example of a piece of pop culture where my nostalgic fondness for it for once had me not giving it enough credit rather than giving it too much.

Kids. I have a problem.

It is an addiction that eats my time. It even costs me money.  Not a ton of money, but when I finally come out an admit what I am willingly spending dollars on, I am inevitably going to feel a little ashamed.

I’m addicted to a Facebook game. It is called Candy Crush. Yes, like the name of a recurring segment in Tiger Beat. Candy Crush.  As the name indicates, it involves candy.  They come in on a Tetris-like board and you have to move the candies to create lines of three, four, or five of the same type of candy.  Then they disappear.

This sounds simple enough, but King.com, the creator of this game, has somehow managed to create more than 200 levels by adding a variety of obstacles and bonus candies to the mix.  

This is far from the most genius thing King.com has done though.  You only get five lives at a time, then you have to wait 30 minutes for a new life to get added to your queue.  If you don’t want to wait, you have two options: 

1. Pester your Facebook friends to give you lives

2. Buy them at a rate of five lives for $1.20

When I first tried this game, I was keen to wait.  I have never put money towards a social game and the thought of nagging people with requests  offends my Southern sensibilities about politeness.  So, I played on and managed to make progress all on my own and free of charge.

Then I reached the end of the first “episode.  This is where these maniacal geniuses at King got me.  In order to get to Episode 2, you needed to either get three friends to give you a ticket or you could pay 30 cents.  

Okay, I said to myself.  As much as I hate plunking a credit card down for a transaction less than a dollar, I hate pestering people and FB game requests more, so why not?

Since then, I have turned into a degenerate straight out of "Trainspotting.”  I play in the morning before work so I have the work day for lives to repopulate.  If I feel like I am making headway on a tough level, I convince myself momentum actually plays a role in my success and I buy new lives.  I have gotten 30% of my office on this game as well, and will inevitably be reprimanded by our CFO any day now for assassinating our productivity  In the two weeks or so I have been playing this crack-like game, I have beaten 96 levels.  Level 97 though….oh Level 97.

In my head I try to justify this behavior.  "You need a way to unwind, Jess.“  "You would spend way more money mimicking the same sensation at a video poker machine.”

The worst is when I tell myself that I do not need to write a blog post or watch a movie on my resolution list.  "I mean, yeah, you could write about how strange it is that in order to play an adult, dramatic role, the curly-haired Keri Russell has to straighten her hair in order to be taken seriously on “The Americans”, but isn’t it just as intellectually fulfilling and impressive to devise a way to defeat this?

C’mon Jess…you’re not gonna write anything nearly impressive as this. I mean, that one candy has sprinkles on it. Sprinkles!

So I play. And when I do write, the only thing I have to write about is a Facebook game.

This leaves me with one option, really. I clearly can’t quit the thing now that I am this far along. I have no other choice but to beat the whole damn thing. Easy game.

But if anyone does have any tips on how to get past freaking Level 97, I would gladly take them. 

We’re only midway through the third month of the year,but my resolution to watch the 2007 AFI list of 400 movies nominated for the 100 Years…100 Movies honors is already perilously close to my goal.  Thanks to a productive couple of weeks and a slew of movies I needed to see airing as part of TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar, I now only have 69 unseen movies left from my original list of 117.  Considering my goal is to get this list down to 50, I am practically at my goal.

Here is the problem though: I am running out of stuff I have easy access to watch.  TCM will continue to air some of the missing pieces and there are a few left on Amazon’s online store that I can watch, but the pace I’ve established is starting to slow. I’ve taken to watching movies not on the list again, not because I am avoiding my project, but because it is hard to justify spending all that money hunting some of these more obscure titles down.

So, I decided to call an audible and widen my reach for this project.  There is another AFI-produced list of 400 movies.  This is from the original list, issued in 1998.  You’d be surprised how much a decade can change people’s tastes.  Several movies did not make the cut the second time around.  In fact, of the 96 movies on the 1998 list I haven’t seen, 38 of them are not on the 2007 list.

You could argue that because they didn’t make the cut both times AFI undertook this project, but considering I want to keep watching worthwhile movies, it seems sensible enough to add those 38 to my list.  That brings the number of unseen movies to 107.  Let’s see if I can get that down to 50, as opposed to seeing all but 50  out of my previous list.  Here they are:

1. The Americanization of Emily

2. Around the World in 80 Days

3. Bataan

4.The Broadway Melody of 1929

5. Bullitt

6. The Caine Mutiny

7. Cavalcade

8. El Cid

9. Cimarron

10. David Copperfied (1935)

11. Fantastic Voyage

12. From Russia With Love

13. The Great Ziegfeld

14. The Greatest SHow on Earth

15. The Gunfighter

16. Hail the Conquering Hero

17. Hud

18. Intruder in the Dust

19. The Last Temptation of Christ

20. A Letter to Three Wives

21. Little Big Man

22. The Little Colonel

23. The Mark of Zorro

24. Medium Cool

25. Melvin and Howard

26. El Norte

27. On the Beach

28. Only Angels Have Wings

29. Pillow Talk

30. Rambling Rose

31. Run Silent, Run Deep

32. Sands of Iwo Jima

33. Shadows

34. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

35. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

36. The War of the Worlds (1953)

37. Within Our Gates

38. The Yearling

And here are the 69 movies I still need to see from my original list:

1. Ace in the Hole

2. All Quiet on the Western Front*

3. All That Jazz*

4. Badlands*

5. The Band Dick*

6. Beau Geste*

7. Ben-Hur (1926)*

8. The Big Parade*

9. Blue Velvet*

10. Brazil*

11. Bull Durham

12. Cabin in the Sky*

13. Camille*

15. The Cheat*

16. City Lights

17. Coming Home

18. The Defiant Ones

19. Dirty Harry

20. Do the Right Thing

21. Five Easy Pieces

22. Force of Evil

23. The Four Horsement of the Apocalypse

24. Frankenstein

25. The Freshman (1925)

26. Fury

27. Glory

28. Goldfinger

29. Gun Crazy

30. Halloween

31. The Hustler

32. The King of Comedy

33. Last Tango in Paris

34. The Little Foxes

35. The Man Who Would Be King

36. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

37. Modern Times

38. My Darling Clementine

39. Nashville

40. The Night of the Living Dead (1968)

41. Out of the Past

42. The Outlaw Josey Wales

43. The Ox-Bow Incident

44. The Poor Little Rich Girl

45. Porgy and Bess

46. The Pride of the Yankees

47. Queen Christina

48. The Quiet Man

49. Requiem for a Dream

50. Return of the Seacaucus 7

51. Road to Morocco

52. Safety Last

53. Saturday Night Fever

54. The Scarlet Empress

55. Sex, Lies, and Videotape

56. Sleeper

57. Sons of the Desert

58. Sophie’s Choice

59. Sounder

60. Stranger Than Paradise

61. The Sweet Smell of Success

62. The Thin Man

63. The Thing from Another World

64. Trouble in Paradise

65. 2001: A Space Odyssey

66. The Wild Bunch

67. The Wind

68. A Woman Under the Influence

69. Young Mr. Lincoln

As for updates, I have given up blogging about the movies I’ve seen here, because I have discovered a new, nifty social site for movie lovers, Letterboxd.  I’ve developed a profile over there and started reviewing everything on my profile on the site.  You can check it out if you’re curious how things are going.