Farewell

It's not a surprise that you're gone - but it is a shock. Even knowing that you were about to leave us doesn't lessen it.

I wish you hadn't. I wish you were still here. I wish I could have told you all of the things I wanted to when I saw you last. I didn't, because I didn't want my last time with you to be sad. I didn't want to say goodbye. Saying goodbye made it too real.

I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I didn't spend more time with you. I'm sorry I didn't hug you more, listen to you more. I'm sorry I wasn't with you when you left us. And I'm sorry you won't get to meet more of your grandchildren, and I'm even more sorry they won't get a chance to meet you.

But you're not gone, not really. You won't be gone until all of us whose lives you touched, all of us who remember you, are gone.

And I can take comfort from that.

Because when that day comes I will be gone as well. Which means I never have to live without you. You live on in my heart. You live on in my mule-headed stubbornness. You live in my eyes, my nose, my chin - and every time I look in the mirror I see a little of you.

I will miss you more than I can ever put into words. But just because you're no longer here doesn't mean you're gone. And it doesn't mean I love you any less.

Goodbye Pa-paw.

Coping

The short version is that I'm not, not really.

If I let my mind wander for even a minute I find myself overcome with tears. But I'm not crying, haven't cried since I got back to Louisiana.

We laugh and we smile and we try to make grandpa's last days here as painless and full of love as possible.

But it's hard.

When I feel myself begin to unravel, when I feel myself begin to tear up I imagine that I am, actually tearing in two. From just behind my eyes down my chest on through my stomach.

Then I imagine a giant needle and thread and I slowly loop a stitch around the tear. When I finish, usually up to about my throat, I take a deep breath and pull the thread tight.

It buys me a few more minutes to smile and laugh with grandpa.

Pain

My grandfather is dying in the next room.

It's not going to be in the next few minutes, and probably not in the next few hours. But his time left can be measured in days - not weeks.

I've come home to say goodbye.

I've been crying almost nonstop since Monday. It took days before I turned to any of my friends to share what was going on. Even then, it was only short statements to let them know why I've been acting strangely.

This is partially (maybe mostly) my own fault. I really hate to feel as though I am manipulating others and go to great lengths not to sway people. I don't particularly like being the center of attention and I absolutely despise being coddled. I say I've done nothing but cry since Monday but my crying as been done out of sight. Ducking into empty rooms and around corners. I never intended for anyone to see me at all.

Yet when you spend most of your day crying so hard it physically hurts you, it exhausts you, what are you to think when not a soul notices?

I want to grab people by the shirt and shout in their faces. I want to shake them, curse at them, beat against their chests.

Can't they see I'm in pain?

Can't they see everything in me is being ripped apart?

I've been falling to pieces in front of their eyes and they aren't even seeing me. How can anyone be so blind? Who are you to mistake my false smiles for the real thing?

I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to run. I want to take everything I own, head for the hills and never look back. I want to not care because caring hurts too much to bear right now.

I want to wrap my arms around someone and cry until I just don't have anything left in me. I want to hear them say I'll be okay because right now I don't believe it. It doesn't feel like anything will ever be okay again.

...

But I can't do any of that.

Because I'm the strong one.

I'm the rock.

I'm the person you can always turn to when things go wrong.

I'm the one who drops everything and races cross-country so that you won't go through your own pain alone.

I'm not sure I know how to be anything else. I'm not sure I know how to accept people's good will. Sympathy actually makes me extremely uncomfortable. I don't know how to deal with it, I don't know how to be gracious about receiving help when the last thing I want is to talk about it.

I understand this isn't rational, it's pure emotion and makes no sense. Emotions so rarely do.

My pain is my own, guarded jealously from those who might wish to share it. I would never willingly place that burden on another. But is it too much to ask that someone see that I struggle and take on the burden without asking?

And why is it I can sit down and right all this to put on the internet for strangers to see, but I can't openly tell the people closest to me?

Microsoft

I am trying to turn my laptop into a dual-boot. Keeping Ubuntu on one-side and installing Microsoft on the other. For all my love for Ubuntu - I have a laundry list of products that don't support using anything but Windows and thus - here I am.

I am, however, having problems installing Windows 7. I was warned that the 3-pack of installations that my father bought had buggy product keys and that I was going to have to call in order to have it fixed. I was not looking forward to this, but whatever. We use Windows 7 at school and I rather like it, so let's do this.

My phone call to Microsoft - with a VERY SPECIFIC problem - took me an hour and a half to finish. I say 'finish' not 'resolve' because... well, I'll get to that. In the course of this call:

1) I was transferred upwards of eight times. Three of those were not to other departments, but back to the main menu where I would have to start the entire process over.

2) I was accused, vehemently, of having them on speaker phone since they couldn't understand me. One lady even went so far as to circumspectly accuse me of lying to her when I maintained that I wasn't.

3) The man who finally took on the apparently gargantuan task of checking my product key comes back only to tell me that their system is down and can I call back in an hour. He later rescinded this and did some sort of magic - but seriously Microsoft? You don't inspire confidence in your product when I call into your own support center and the system is down. You should look into that.

4) I'm told that the product is out of warranty. Excuse me? A product that has never been activated, and therefore never used is out of warranty? "So what your telling me is that I was sold a product that won't install correctly but you refuse to help me because it's somehow fallen outside of warranty - even though it has never been activated or registered?" "Yes ma'am."

5) I apologized for raising my voice to him, asked to speak to someone else and that man then hung up on me. I kid you not.

There is a reason... there is a reason I happily switched to a Linux-based system two years ago. A system that has never crashed, never failed and never given me one frakkin' problem. I still need to do a Windows install. There are programs I need for my summer teaching fellowship that just don't work on Ubuntu. But I will be damned if I use a legal copy.

Microsoft - you have turned a girl who has legally downloaded every song she owns into a pirate. I hope you're happy.

Pirates non-Spoiler Spoiler

Yeah, that's totally Dame Judi Dench in a cameo. Totally.

Priest

Priest takes place in a world where, due to a war with the extremely superior vampires, humanity has taken refuge in large city-state compounds where they are protected by a dominant and creepy church. A church that seems to have forgotten half of scripture - or maybe in this world the Bible reads "Let humans rule over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. Except vampires. Seriously, those guys will fuck you up." To combat the vampires, priests are created/born/magicked/summoned/trained (it's not really made clear) to fight the vampires and they do a damn good job as by the time the movie begins vampires are all but eradicted.

Enter the plot: A young girl who is related to our main character is kidnapped by vampires, including vampire Karl Urban. She is a lot more upset by this than I would be. Our hero, who doesn't have a name, sets off on an epic quest to rescue her - defying the church and picking up some help along the way. His non-spoilery help is an outland sheriff. His spoiler help is another priest, this one a woman who is desperately in love with him - one can only assume because he is Paul Bettany since he's quite clearly not interested in pursuing her in any way shape or form.

There are crazy beast-vampires, a cave troll (seriously, looked exactly like one), a vampire queen who we barely see or hear about but I was totally rooting for, human-vampires, old-west gunslinging and what-not and lots of other things happening. Despite all of these other things happening, easily 64% of the movie is this:

Someone was really proud of those motorcycles is all I'm saying. And if I can digress for a moment's not-really-spoilers nitpick: At points in the movie we see our characters on these open motorcycles going upwards of 200mph across the desert. I don't know if you've ever stuck your head out a car window (or ridden a motorcycle I suppose), but it becomes extremely difficult to breath once you hit about 60. Watch your dog sometime, he'll pull his head in around 45-50. And yet, our heroes seem to have no problems. Now, there is a scene where the pull up somewhere and take off both goggles and pull off respirators - which would explain how they manage to breath. But it's one scene in what is, dead serious, 64% of the movie. The rest of the time I kept expecting them to blackout and fall over mid-ride.

Anyway, back to the review.

On the plus side the CG was good, nothing to complain about and for the most part blended seamlessly with the movie. I would like to meet whoever did the matte-painting of the cities because they were pretty awesome. The vampires had some issues with actually being in the scene, not just comped in, but all in all the effects were enjoyable and were it not for the plot issues I'd say might be worth the money for 3D (even though it wasn't filmed in 3D and it irks me to pay an extra $6 for an often poorly rendered visual effect).

This movie had one of two major problems - and I find it hard to write about because I'm not sure which exactly it was suffering from. And the two are exact opposites. Either:

A) Priest had too many plotlines. I only cared about maybe two and the rest were boring and felt like filler. I HATED the sheriff character and wanted nothing more than to punch him in the face several times and tell him to STFU - Cam Gigandet did his best to sell the character, but he wasn't given an awful lot to work with. It should have been pared down to just Paul Bettany and Karl Urban - although the 'plot' concerning Urban's character could have been dropped too and just left him in for the pretty value. I enjoyed the character, don't get me wrong, but his motivations were never fleshed out enough to make him interesting. If they had cut everything down to just Bettany and made it into a futuristic vampire version of Taken it might have stood a chance.

B) There wasn't enough plot. I felt like there was this whole world to be explored - mysteries and intrigues and mythology that just never got touched upon. Is this story earth? Apparently not because humans and vampires have supposedly been engaged in a bloody war forever - not just recently. But if it's not earth - why the hell do they have the same bizarre church with the same bizarre mythology? Who made the priests? Why does vampiring work the way it does? How vampires work at all isn't really explained and some of the things that were said seem to contradict each other.

Somehow, defying all odds and logic to how stories work, Priest managed to stay perfectly between these two. The result of which is it had exactly the wrong amount of plot.

[Note: Okay, I know it was a comic book and thus the original source will likely answer some of my questions - but don't ever adapt something that can't stand on its own. It's like, the first rule of making an adaptation. See: Why Lord of the Rings was 10 hours long.]

[Note 2: I'm going to say right here, before I go any further, that I would LOVE to see a director's cut of this. I sincerely hope that they just cut too much out for the movie to stand up on its own. An editing mistake rather than 'this whole movie is awful' mistake.]

All props to Paul Bettany - and lord knows I love that man and I would go see anything he was in because he succeeds splendidly more times than he fails spectacularly - but this movie was just not good. And it was trying too hard to be good to be awesomely bad. Both he and Karl Urban acted their hearts out - and you could tell for sure that Urban was enjoying himself immensely - but you can give an Oscar-worthy performance in a movie and it won't change the fact that it's about Catholic Old West Vampires.

I feel like this movie should have been to vampires what Firefly was to scifi. A different take on an old formula that might have revitalized an entire genre. And maybe as a comic book it was. But as a movie, Priest lacks the charm to be endearing, the polish to be dramatic, and the cajones to be scary. All in all, it failed as a movie at the most basic levels.

With all the love in my heart for Mr Bettany and Mr Urban, I wish I had my $9 back.

Worst Case Scenario

Whenever I am trying to make a decision - usually relatively benign such as 'Should I wear this hat today? - I always ask myself the follow-up question, 'What's the worst that could happen?'

You might think that in this case it would be something like appearing on fugly.com. But no.

No matter what the decision is, my brain immediately turns to some variation on this...

People fleeing in the background, optional.

And that, kids, is why I almost never try anything new.