Alright, so, I’m not sure what happened to my last few posts, there were definitely some between now and “Of Woe and Agony.” I suppose I’ll have to do a recap of some kind.

So, what’s happened in a month? The Percussion Ensemble returned from Ohio with a silver medal. That was a good time, save for sleeping on the floor of a coach bus during an 18-hour bus ride and having a drum stick fall on your eye. It was sort of a surprise this year: Mansfield High School, from Mansfield, MA, beat us by nearly three points in finals, after edging us out by a little more than two points in preliminaries. They received the second highest score in the whole competition (or at least of the groups present at our awards), a 97.something-or-other, with Ayala, I believe, netting a 98.

The trip itself was pretty fun. There was an unfortunate mishap with a local Taco Bell, which had 6 people working and still took nearly 45 minutes to finish 6 orders. Yes, that’s right. It averaged almost 8 minutes an order. Let’s compare: I went to Taco Bell today with 4 friends, totaling 5 people for the math-impaired or the lazy, and it took them all of 10 minutes to fill those orders. At the time we seriously considered phoning the number on the receipt to complain, but…nah.

So apparently, one of my entries which was deleted was referenced by another blog about my Spiderman 3 review. I’ll write it again, because it deserves to be re-written, not to mention Dr. Hypercube of Diary of a Mad Natural Historian seemed to enjoy something I’d written about Peter Parker’s sudden unwillingness to conform to society, as accentuated by that bit of hair in front of his eyes and all-black clothing.

Ok. So the movie was excellent. This is my personal opinion and I stick by it. It was long, I concede: two hours and 45 minutes, give or take, with some Return of the King-style fade-to-blacks that aren’t actually endings. It’s times like that when I begin to get antsy for the other people I’m seeing the movie with, just because I don’t know whether they’re bored or wondering when it will be over while I’m over in my chair oggling at the greatness of the movie.

That said, it was well-done. Three villains are hard to pull off, especially Harry, because of his complex love-hate relationship with Peter, but I think the movie executed it fairly well. There definitely wasn’t enough Venom, and for anyone who’s read the comics and knows that Venom lives on to later partner up (more or less) with Spiderman, the fate of Venom in the movie becomes kind of a bad thing, but they can’t make as many movies as they can comics, so they did what they had to do. Sandman was pretty cool, too. He’s kind of a difficult character to figure out; his back story makes you sympathetic to his plight, trying to help his children and his wife, although he’s an escaped convict. He’s not a true villain, in a sense, he just is constantly hindered by Spiderman in his attempts to acquire money, and so he kind of develops a grudge against him based on that. You never really truly come to hate him, just as you never truly hate Harry. You hate Venom though. That guy’s a jerk.

Ok, so there were bad things about it too. For one, the bit in the beginning when Peter’s singing along with Mary Jane’s Broadway musical was sort of cheesy. This part made him seem cocky before he was actually cocky from the power the Venom symbiont gave him. That part didn’t bother me as much as his transition to emo-ness, though. It wasn’t even the fact that he was emo; it’s the fact that it happened in one scene. He literally looks at himself in a mirror, and flips a bit of his hair down to cover his eye, as if to say, “I’m unhappy with things right now, let’s limit depth perception while we’re at it.” And there, in that one brief moment, Peter goes from nerd to emo-nerd, in the blink of an eye. I feel like that transition could have been spread out a bit.

Finally, I tried to decide why people disliked the movie, and came to the conclusion that perhaps some people didn’t quite understand the basis for it. Spiderman was created in the 60’s, when cheesy dialogue was the norm. Seeing as how Stan Lee played a large part in the creation of the movie, it comes as no surprise, to me, anyway, that there would be a bit of cheesy dialogue in there, which seems to be a big complaint about the movie. There’s no explaining Peter’s hip-thrusting outside the clothing store, but that aside, I feel like people are forgetting Spiderman’s roots. Of course, some people just genuinely didn’t like the movie, and that’s fine. I just tried to narrow down the reasons.

Finally, an interesting thing happened to me recently. Yesterday I was minding my own business, surfing the internet or something, and my cell phone rang. It was a local number, but one I didn’t know, but I answered it anyway. A man named Derek introduced himself as being a representative of a company called Vector, and proceeded to tell me that my friend Brian Tompkins had recommended me for a job. “Go on,” I said, warily. He proceeded to describe the nature of the job (not the job itself): “It’s not telemarketing,” he said (I was immediately more suspicious), “but rather you setting up appointments with clients who are already interested in our product, and going to their house to pitch it to them. It’s not door to door, it’s not phone calls; it’s personalized.”

I was still wary, but I asked him to continue. He mentioned a “base pay of $16.50,” with “per hour” conspicuously absent. He set me up for an interview for today at 7pm, I thanked him, and hung up. I immediately called Brian to get to the bottom of this. Turns out, Vector is a company that sells kitchen knives. Yes, those things that cut food items that you have lying around, and spread butter and whatnot. The $16.50 refers to the money received for each house you go to, whether you sell the knives or not. I called the guy back, and in a roundabout way said I wasn’t interested, since I already had two jobs lined up (which is true). He graciously mentioned that there were internship opportunities available, as well as various offices around the country, and I thanked him and hung up. I hung out with my friend John later that day, and told him that I honestly could not envision myself selling knives. Maybe it’s just me, but I immediately thought of Kip from Napoleon Dynamite selling Tupperware, a thought which was immediately followed by an image of me walking out of a house waving goodbye and thanking the client for buying the knives, and decided that neither thought could ever happen.

That’s about it. Let’s hope this post actually sticks around. Just noticed the default “post status” radio button was set to Draft, I wonder if that’s where my others went. We’ll see.

I’m out.

Later.