The Best of 2013 According To Me

Best Albums:

Most of these were on the Rolling Stone list of best albums which reinforces my theory that I have great taste.

HAIM - Days Are Gone
Lorde - Pure Heroine
Arcade Fire - Reflektor
Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
Tegan and Sara - Heartthrob
Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Soundtrack
London Grammar - If You Wait
Portugal.the Man - Evil Friends

M.I.A. - Matangi

Best Movies:

Now this is just a list of the movies that I saw this year that I enjoyed the most.  In order of release date, not quality.  

There are lots of movies that I saw this year that are not on this list.  Like 'Thor: The Dark World' and 'Beautiful Creatures'.  They are not on this list because they were not good. 

And there are lots of movies not on this list that are great and are going to be nominated for Oscars and such.  Like 'Gravity' and '12 Years a Slave'.  They are not listed because, with a few exceptions, I found that I just didn't feel like watching anything that wasn't going to make me laugh or involve explosions and/or supernatural creatures.  

Warm Bodies
Side Effects
The Sapphires
Iron Man 3
Now You See Me
Much Ado About Nothing
This Is The End
The Bling Ring
The Heat
The Way Way Back
The World's End
Ender's Game
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Frozen
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Best TV:

I watch a LOT of television.  And I generally don't watch things I don't enjoy watching.  

So this is just a list of the shows I enjoyed watching the most in 2013.  Ranked in order of how much I looked forward to them each week and how torturous it was for me to wait for them when they were on hiatus.

Breaking Bad
The Walking Dead
American Horror Story
Game of Thrones
The Originals
Scandal
Orphan Black
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
The Mindy Project
The Killing
Veep
Family Tree

Fanfiction: A Beginners Guide

For those of you out there with hobbies that involve going outside and interacting with other human beings, fanfiction is what happens when an obsessive geek discovers the internet.  More specifically, when he or she discovers that they can put anything they want on the internet and other obsessive geeks will read/look at/listen to it.

Some of you out there may already be aware of fanfiction and that either means you are an obsessive geek or you know an obsessive geek who doesn't know when to shut up and stop embarrassing him or herself.

For those of you I mentioned earlier, who don't know, here's the Urban Dictionary definition:

"A piece of fiction within a fandom utilizing characters and situations from a pre-existing work including (but not limited to) books, television programs, films, and comic strips."

As you may have guessed, I am quite familiar with this particular dark corner of the internet because I am, as I have written about many times, incredibly obsessive and incredibly geeky.

Now don't worry, this post is not meant in anyway to advocate or sell non-geeks on the idea of fanfiction.  This is meant to illuminate for you normals just how batshit insane some of us are.  Because it is hilarious.

(At this point I would like to state for the record that I have never written a fanfiction and I try to steer clear of the really fucked up shit.)

The first thing you should know is that there is an entire vocabulary of fanfiction.  There are so many genres and sub-genres of fanfiction that it would be impossible to list them all.  

As it mentions in Urban Dictionary, most fanfiction is based on some kind of romantic pairing of characters.  This Romance genre is then divided into either 'het' or 'slash' fiction, meaning the pairing is either heterosexual or homosexual.  

Now when I say that stories are focused on romantic pairings, that does not mean that they are limited to characters that are actually paired together in the original work.  Oh no.  Let us not limit ourselves.  If some weirdo wants to read a story about Professor McGonagall and Hagrid gettin' it on, I assure you some other weirdo out there wrote that story.

Or maybe Harry/Draco is more your thing.

Hell, let's not even limit ourselves to same species pairings.  If you want to read about Professor McGonagall hooking up with Dobby the House-elf you can bet your ass somebody wrote it.

(Here's another fun fact:  if you have a particular couple that you're fond of, then my people would say that you 'ship' that pairing.  Get it?  Short for 'relationship'?)

But let's say an elderly witch and a house elf isn't off-putting enough for you.  Maybe you want to read something truly twisted.  Never fear, there's always a lower place.  

There's a whole genre of Incest pairings out there, if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat.  Fans of 'Supernatural' have even come up with a specific name for stories about the Winchester brothers getting a little too close - 'Wincest'.

(Again, I would like to remind you, before I go on, that I do not read these stories.  I am just unfortunately aware of them and now so are you.)

Ok, ok, so incest is gross.  But you know what's grosser?  Incest plus pedophilia!  So if you're really demented, you can read a story that pairs Rick from 'The Walking Dead' with his pre-teen son Carl!  

Right now you might be thinking that I'm making this up and that no one would be sick enough to not only think that up and then write about it but then also post it on the internet where other people can witness their shame.  But you would be wrong.   

(I was going to try to post a link as proof but I started getting sucked into a black hole of depravity that I thought I might never be able to escape from.  So you're going to have to just take my word for it.)

I'm going to move on from this train of thought and not go into some of the other sub-genres you might stumble across because I feel dirty even thinking about writing them down here.

Instead let me explain the 'Original Character' fanfiction genre.  Because while it is pathetic, it's not horrifying.

An 'Original Character' story basically means the writer has taken her favorite character and paired that character with a character of her own invention.  

(I'm just going to assume the author is female from this point on because that is usually the case.)

You might assume that this means that this person is more creative than other writers because she has created a new character and integrated this character into the canon.  

(Canon means the actual story created by the people who are paid to do so.)

You would be wrong about this and I'll tell you why.  Because if you see that a story includes a pairing of a character from canon and an 'OC' this just means that the author has written herself into the story.  She has just taken the time to write down the fantasy she had where she is assigned to The Enterprise straight out of Star Fleet Academy and Spock, despite all his logic, falls madly in love with her.

"Oh yeah, this is gonna win an award at www.trekiverse.org this year."

Another fun quirk of fanfiction is the 'AU' or 'Alternate Universe' story.  In these the author has taken characters from the TV show or movie that she apparently loves and decided that the premise of said TV show or movie just doesn't work for her.  So instead of Tate and Violet from 'American Horror Story' meeting in a haunted house in the year 2011, they're star-crossed lovers from Victorian England.  And vampires.  Because, why not?

So now you might be asking yourself, if fanfiction is this lame, why do I read it?

Well part of that answer is because sometimes I am so deeply fixated on a current obsession that even the shittiest story about it sounds more entertaining than watching something new, created by professionals.

The rest of the answer would be that sometimes, sometimes, you find a story that is actually good.  Some of them are really, really good and you wonder why the hell this person is wasting their time on fanfiction when they could be writing novels.

And when I find that story I start to think that maybe this hobby isn't completely ridiculous.  Maybe fanfiction deserves some respect.  It's not all terrible and sad.

And then I see that there are 17,923 stories written about One Direction.

Memories

I was reading Hyperbole and a Half today (which is a blog that is amazingly hilarious: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/ ) and I was marveling at how well Allie Brosh remembers her childhood.  

How she remembers detail and even her own motivations as a 4 or 5 year old.  And the more I thought about it, the more I figured she must make most of it up.  She can't possibly remember this much about her maniacal need to get cake when she was a toddler.  Nobody remembers being a toddler.  She would have to be some kind of freak.

So I asked a couple of my friends and started to realize that maybe I am in fact the one who is a freak.  I did some very basic research (meaning I typed 'what is the average age for a first memory' into Google) and discovered that most people say their first memory is from when they were around 3.  And I remember nothing about being 3 or 4.  If pressed I can maybe scrounge up something from 5 or 6.  Maybe.  

Which apparently is weird.

Anything that I think may have happened from elementary school back has a 50/50 shot of being something that my imagination has created based on a story that my parents told me or a photograph I saw.  I can't even be sure that I existed before 1988.  

My experience most closely matches the way characters in Sci-Fi movies describe the vague, mundane memories that have been implanted to make them think they had a childhood. 

I had a dog named Lacey, she ran away but I don't remember what she looked like.  We used to dig holes in the backyard for fun.  There was a secret passage way in one of the kitchen cabinets that opened up in my closet... I think.

None of the lame recollections that I have can be strung together.  Its like, instead of a video camera, I have a polaroid. 

I don't have any emotional connection to any of these rudimentary images and impressions either, much less any kind of understanding of how my child mind worked.  

This all leads me to the only logical conclusion.  At some point, in my early years, the original Heather died and was replaced by me, a clone.  

Or possibly some kind of really convincing android.  Maybe my parents are in on it or maybe they don't even know.  Maybe their memories of the incident have been replaced with some other, benign memories.

I'm a replicant.  Or maybe a Cylon.  Maybe there was never an original Heather.  Maybe I was just created in a lab out of stem cells as a 7 year old and implanted with the memory of that albino kid I'm pretty sure I was in first grade with...

Or, maybe my medial temporal lobe is just defective and that's why my episodic memory is for shit. 

Google!

But I think I'm a clone.

Things I'm Thankful For

I am thankful that I am about to eat a shit ton of macaroni and cheese and it looks amazing

For Salted Caramel Mochas from Starbucks. 

That Daryl will be in the next episode of The Walking Dead after two weeks without him. Which was awful. 

For my iPhone. Seriously, how did I use the internet without it?

For the internet. 

And Sriracha. 

That Catching Fire was as wonderful as I hoped it would be. 

For the fact that Jennifer Lawrence exists. 

For wine  

And chapstick.

For my new favorite band Haim. Especially the song The Wire. 

For avocados. 

For the fact that I don't have to go to work today...

but I do have a job that pays enough for me to live on. 

And the fact that when people ask me what I want for Christmas, it's hard for me to come up with anything because I already have everything I need. 

And that sometimes, in the middle of winter, I have to get up at night because I cranked the heat up too high and now it's too hot. 

That it's possible for me to get annoyed because I have plenty of food available to me but none of it is what I'm 'in the mood for'. 

For the fact that there are plenty of things that I should be thankful for that don't even occur to me because I take them for granted. 

And finally, I'm thankful that tomorrow we're all free to go back to acting like the spoiled, ungreatful bastards we really are without judgement. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

From time to time I like to completely over-analyze the lyrics to pop songs.  Songs that are meant to just be catchy and not scrutinized.  

I once wrote a diatribe on how the song "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" by Heart is considered a love song when it is actually the story of a woman picking up a hitchhiker for the express purpose of getting herself knocked up because her husband is sterile.

So today I'd like to talk about how the song "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham! is the story of a couple who are fundamentally wrong for each other and really need to break up.  And are probably going to before long.

(At some point I may have to follow this up with my thoughts on the fact that "Father Figure" might be the creepiest song ever written.)

Did she go to bed in this make-up?
The first clue that something was up.

Now the lyrics start off by telling you right off the bat that they are having problems:

But something's bugging you

Something ain't right

My best friend told me what you did last night

Left me sleepin' in my bed

I was dreaming, but I should have been with you instead.

So ok, maybe we're supposed to think they just had a little fight and the significant other in question just wanted to blow off some steam.  

But there are other issues here.

First of all, the fact that he asks that she take him with her when she goes out dancing because he doesn't want to miss it when she 'hits that high' seems to imply that she does this a lot and maybe just wants to get away from this guy.

And that she might also be some kind of drug addict.  I don't know.

Furthermore, when did she leave?  I mean, he says he was sleeping when she left so either he goes to bed early or she goes out dancing late.  Either way they appear to be on very different schedules and live different lifestyles and that has to be difficult.

Also, his best friend told him what she did last night?  Why does his best friend know what his girlfriend is doing at night when he doesn't?  She snuck out of bed with you in the middle of the night and went out with your best friend?  Questionable.

All throughout the song he keeps asking her to wake him up before she go-goes but then towards the end we get this verse:

Cuddle up, baby, move in tight

We'll go dancing tomorrow night

It's cold out there, but it's warm in bed

They can dance, we'll stay home instead.

Maybe this is why she didn't wake you up George Michael.  Because she knew you didn't really want to go dancing and you would try to talk her out of it.  I mean, you go to bed early and then you act like you're all upset that she went without you and then you say you want to stay home anyway.  You're not going to want to go dancing tomorrow night either and you both know it.

It seems obvious to me that this guy is a clingy homebody who is trying to hold on to a party girl who's having an affair with his best friend.

Of course there's also the fact that he's totally gay.  That's going to be a problem at some point too.

Do you know how hard it is to decide
which picture of Wham! is the gayest?

Rebel Rebel

Whenever I trade stories with friends about our high school years, I can't help but feel like I did adolescence wrong.  I didn't drink.  I didn't smoke.  I didn't do any drugs.  I didn't go to wild parties.  I didn't even date.

This is what high school looked like for everyone else, right?

I don't have a single fun anecdote about the horrible, potentially life-threatening bull-shit I pulled as a teenager. 

Whenever I start to think back to those days, it always occurs to me that I never really rebelled against my parents about anything.  And then it occurs to me that I never really had anything to rebel against because they didn't really set any rules to break.

I didn't have a set curfew.  There were no restrictions on who I could hang out with or where I could go.

I didn't even have a pager.

That being said, I never really stayed out late.  My friends were all honor students and we only ever hung out at each others' houses. 

This line of thinking always brings up in my mind a chicken/egg scenario.  Did I not rebel because I had no rules to rebel against or did my parents not institute any rules because I was such a well-behaved angel?

I was grounded once and only once, that I can recall.  This was back when there were such things as video stores (yes, actual VHS tapes) and I worked at one.  It was called Blockbuster if I remember correctly. 

Simpler times.

For whatever reason, my coworkers and I were forced to stay late closing the store and decided to go to IHOP after.  I was out until 5am.  My parents were waiting for me in the living room when I got home.  

At this point, and only at this point, did it occur to me that I should maybe not have done that.  I was so unfamiliar with the concept of acting out that I didn't even realize that I had done it.

So then I was grounded.  It is only the fact that I was grounded that I remember and not what being grounded actually felt like because I'm pretty sure a grounding was a punishment that was wasted on me.

Grounding me only meant that I had a valid excuse to avoid situations that could trigger my intense social anxiety.

"But Mooooom, I need to go sit in a corner, not drinking, scrutinizing everything I've said to everyone all night and hoping no one makes me the center of attention!!  This is so unfair!"

"I can't believe you're making me stay home and watch this episode of The X-Files that I've been looking forward to all week instead of spending time with a bunch of my peers who intimidate and frighten me!!"

So do I Mulder, so do I.

The only times I can remember expressly going against what my parents wanted were times when they wanted me to be active and I wanted to be a pathetic hermit. 

The best example I can think of would be the time we went on vacation to Yellowstone National Park.  In one of my proudest, most surly moments I refused to go hiking with my family so that I could spend the entire day in our hotel, watching a Real World marathon.

In my defense, we did not have cable at home so this could have been my only chance.

My family has always been pretty active and healthy.  (My father hikes over a mountain to get to work in the morning. It's insane.)

Also, I like spending time with my family.  They're cool.  So what the hell is a teenage girl to do?

Be as lazy and anti-social as possible apparently. (By now you may have detected that this is a major theme in my writings...)

So this brings up another interesting question...

Did I actually rebel by being lazy?

Or was I just too lazy to rebel?

Either way I'm going to go ahead and blame my parents.

So I Saw The Conjuring...

Even though I was pretty sure I would regret it, I went to see 'The Conjuring' today and I have to say, it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be or as it was described.  That being said, it is still daylight and I might have to reevaluate later tonight when I can't sleep for fear of an invisible demon grabbing my leg and pulling me out of bed.

Part of the reason I'm not as terrified as I had hoped to be is because almost all the good scares are in the preview.  Another reason is because I spent a lot of the movie thinking "Why the fuck would you do that?"

First of all, why would anyone move in to such an obviously haunted house? 

I think the noose should have been their first clue.

I mean really.  It's a centuries old, run down farm house in the middle of nowhere.  You'd have a hard time convincing me to even walk in to that house much less live there. 

You never see a ghost story where the characters live in a completely nondescript apartment in a big complex.  The kind with white walls, beige carpeting and hollow doors that don't make any noise when you close them.  I'd like to see a ghost try to haunt someplace with carpeting.  I'm not sure it can be done.

It would have been more original if they had gone with a house that looked more like the house the family from this so-called 'true story' actually lived in.

Movie house versus real house.

The characters do a lot of cliche movie character things in this one.  Like investigating strange noises and going into dark, cob-webby basements. I'd like to see a movie where the characters react to creepy shit like a normal person would.  You would think this would be a given since it's such a commonly expressed opinion.  And yet...

(DISCOVERY OF A BOARDED UP ROOM/CRAWL SPACE)

Cliche Movie Behavior

WIFE:

What's in there?

HUSBAND:

I don't know, let's find out.

(grabs flashlight and sticks head in/investigates)

Normal Behavior

WIFE:

What's in there?

HUSBAND:

I don't know.

(nails boards back in place and adds extra nails for good measure)

(UNEXPLAINED THUMPING IN THE BASEMENT)

Cliche Movie Behavior

WIFE:

Honey, will you go check-?

HUSBAND:

Yeah, stay here.

(grabs baseball bat and heads down into the poorly lit basement)

Normal Behavior

WIFE:

Honey, will you go check-?

HUSBAND:

I absolutely will fucking not.

(turns on every light in the house)

(STRANGE VOICES/WHISPERING)

Cliche Movie Behavior

WIFE:

(whispering)

What was that?

HUSBAND:

(yelling)

Hello?  Who's there?

Normal Behavior

WIFE:

(whispering)

What was that?

HUSBAND:

Pack your shit.

(loads car, moves)

And if moving won't help, there must be other options than staying in your horrifying house.  Spend all your time in public places, maybe?  I would go live in a Super Wal-Mart until they kicked me out if I had to.

I'd at least like to see a movie where someone acknowledges the stupidity of the things people do in ghost stories.  

Spoiler Alert:  The first scene of 'The Conjuring' is two nurses telling their story about Annabelle The Doll, which is another of the Warren's 'real' cases.  They explain that they had this (insanely terrifying) doll that liked to move around by itself.  So they called in a medium, who told them that they had a ghost.  The ghost was a little girl named Annabelle and she just wanted to be friends.  So, naturally, they invited her to inhabit the doll and live with them.  Like you do.

The Warrens respond by very calmly telling the girls that they had made 'a mistake'.  

What they should have said was: 

"Are you both fucking retarded?"

I Need A Life Coach

How do people who have their shit together do it?  

How do they not eat every cookie that is put in front of them?  How do they save money instead of buying things? How do they get up early and go running?  

How do they go running ever?

I need a Life Coach.  Or a Drill Sergeant.  

I need someone to make me do the things I don't want to do.  The only reason I ever do anything is if there will be immediate negative results if I don't.

I think the technical term is debilitating, chronic, laziness.

I don't clean until things start to smell.  Or until I can't move around my apartment anymore and I get so disgusted with myself that I binge-clean everything.  

Except the shower.  I pretty much never clean that.  I figure it's basically self-cleaning.  

I don't watch or read the news.  Or seek out knowledge about pretty much anything unless I can find it through a quick Wikipedia search. If something important happens, Twitter will tell me.  And sometimes I watch The Daily Show and that's kind of like news.

But I don't watch it all the time because sometimes it's too much like news.

I do not work-out.  I can usually scrape up an excuse for why I can't work-out right now.   

"I just took a shower so it would be stupid to exercise and get all dirty again."  

"I just went hiking two weeks ago, that's should count for something." 

"My work-out clothes are in the laundry... 

...because I wore them around the house/slept in them for 2 straight weeks."

I need someone to come into my life and force me to be a healthier, happier person.  Whether I like it or not.

It's not as cute when I do it.

They could make me learn to cook things other than pasta and scrambled eggs.

They could make me read something found in the Classics section instead of Teen Fiction.

They could make me go to social gatherings that I'm invited to even if I don't feel like it.  

This would probably be the biggest challenge. I was actually happy that it rained on The 4th of July because that meant I didn't have to feel guilty about the fact that I didn't go outside all day or speak to anyone.  

I would hate this person with a passion.  I would curse their name and wish awful things would happen to them so that they would leave me the hell alone.

I would probably have to sign some kind of 50 Shades of Grey-style contract spelling out exactly what they are allowed to make me do and how I will be punished if I refuse.  

No weird stuff.

Otherwise I would just tell them to fuck off the minute they tell me I can't eat the whole pizza by myself.

My punishment for constantly bitching could be that I have to eat a slice of raw onion every time I whine.  Or they just get to punch me right in the throat.

It would have to be severe, is what I'm saying.  The only thing I might love more than watching TV and being alone is complaining.