Madison is a twit. And a twitter. A quitter.

I think I am going to start trying out this twitter thing. Check me out at twitter.com. My username there is ~annakarina.

This is the sound of modern cinema sucking.

I haven't been blogging because I have been graduating and birthdaying and Christmasing. Mostly Christmasing. Happy the New Year to you, internet!

Kim threw me a surprise birthday/graduation party. It was fabulous fun. We then went to Texas for ten days of non-work-related bliss. There, I washed my cell phone in a spin cycle and now have a tiny tiny phone that I am afraid of accidentally swallowing.

I saw Juno, I Am Legend and Sweeney Todd in the theaters. Juno is the only one worth your ten bucks. Tim Burton needs to learn that when trying to translate a musical to screen, you need movement, you need something to capture the eye because the vocals aren't live and no one is going to be excited to see Johnny Depp singing to a razor for four minutes. When the music picks up, you need to make your characters MOVE because they are not going to be able to hold your attention for five minutes by lip syncing vocals alone. This is where the RENT movie went wrong too. Putting a musical on screen sucks the energy out of it, so you have to compensate for it somewhere. There were a few good tracking shots that spun through London, maybe if he had employed more of those, that would have been more helpful.

And the gore. Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

Bloggin' about blogs.

Oh hey, internet.

So, my workplace has a blog. You should read it because they're cool, and they know about cool stuff, and you will undoubtedly see pictures of cool stuff on this blog.

Also, this increases my chances of getting dooced. Eek.

Check'em out over on the left. Click the essentials link. Go. Do it.

Today is a day for fangirling.

So. I walked into Newbury Comics today with no intention of buying anything. I had a half an hour to kill before work, I had already eaten in a bee infested place where the guy serving me kept calling me "hey beautiful, hey gorgeous, hey cutie", and I was just all in a tizzy with how disrespectful that was. So, into Newbury Comics I go, where Chris, the manager, knows Brian and I by name. I was perusing the new release DVDs, wandering around when something caught my eye.

Light came streaming through the ceiling. Angels began to sing, a whole chior. I snapped it up, and I bought it. And what I bought, was this:



I think my stomach dropped about four inches and I forgot that I had to pee. I grabbed the last copy marked down to $25.99 from $34.99 (though Criterion lists it as being only $31.95) and bought it and never looked back. Because I love this film. I love this. And watching it will maybe make me write about it for my Fassbinder class.

HELL YES. I am so glad I made that purchase. Even if the year is listed as 1960 instead of 1959. Coutard approved the print, the translation is updated (hopefully degeulasse won't get translated as "scum" anymore) and it's going to be orgasmic to watch.

Bullet Points

It's four in the morning and I am still awake.

281 of you creeps have looked at my profile, and yet nobody comments. Where's the logic and the love?

I'm going to see a film tomorrow and hopefully I will have something worthwhile to say about it, in blog post form.

I also have to write two papers tomorrow, so we'll see how blogging fits into this scheme. You jerks.

Still, no poetry written for Tuesday's meeting. GODDAMN IT.

I wasted my 50th post on this?

It's Kids Week on Jeopardy, which means that instead of my usual trivial knowledge half hour, I have to watch pretentious kids spew irrelevent knowledge about nothing important. I hate kids week! The questions are so easy!

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Today, my dad would have been 51 years old. If you have a beer, or a shot, or a cigarette today, have it for him, because he definitely loved all three things when he was alive. And the Red Sox.

Every year it gets weirder and weirder to get further and further away from him.

This is what the computer says I should do with my life.

1. Director of Photography
2. Set Designer
3. Costume Designer
4. Special Effects Technician
5. Desktop Publisher
6. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
7. Animator
8. Actor
9. Fashion Designer
10. High School Teacher
11. Child and Youth Worker
12. Director
13. Adoption Counselor
14. Professor
15. Casting Director
16. Artist
17. Graphic Designer
18. Comedian
19. Critic
20. Computer Animator
21. Market Research Analyst
22. Musician
23. Print Journalist
24. Website Designer
25. Activist
26. Political Aide
27. Composer
28. Writer
29. Medical Illustrator
30. Translator
31. Craftsperson
32. Potter
33. Public Relations Specialist
34. Criminologist
35. School Counselor
36. Career Counselor
37. Music Teacher / Instructor
38. Clergy
39. Psychologist
40. ESL Teacher

I Wrote a Sestina and It Is Only 70% Terrible!

Downhill
by Madison Charbonneau

I imagined a sprawling bachelorhood. Stuck
to the wall by a pin, perhaps one in the center of my tie,
a dizzying pattern of primary colors.
I was told to just sit there and exist.
So I did. I listened to the White
Album and managed to forget.

You'll find it terribly difficult to forget
the ways that you adhered to your old life. Stuck
to, and disgusted by the disco flicker of adventure, the white
blanket of complacency edges in and manages to tie
you up like a hog and drag you to the ledge. You exist
there for that same blink, and then you topple. No more colors.

My wife makes a living in colors.
No, no, you mustn't forget
that red carpet makes it impossible to comfortably exist
in one's living room. She gets stuck
in the details of design. She thinks the pattern on my favorite tie
is an eyesore. I am to choose the color of the bathroom walls. (Blue? White?)

I imagined a shameful bachelorhood, really. Lines of white
dust on every imaginable surface. Women of all colors,
shapes and sizes. I swore I'd never wear a half-windsor knotted tie
to any goddamned office. I'd play a rousing game of fuck and forget,
which is more fun than kiss and tell. I imagined letting women get stuck
to me like wet paper. This was all fantasy. None of it can exist

past twenty-five. You start realizing that just sitting there? Just to exist?
Is exhausting work. Your old records become dull and passe. Even the White
Album has lost its original charm. My record skips, anyway. The needle gets stuck
between Honey Pie and Savoy Truffle, and all the colors
of John, Paul, George and Ringo's voices screech over and over until you forget
that they recorded professionally. On the Ed Sullivan show, they each wore a tie.

So what's so bad about wearing a goddamned tie
to the office? It allows the rest of us to exist
in the thick gelatin of complacency, suspended and allowed to forget
that our wives are no more than an extended meditation on wedding-dress white.
You forget the disco flicker of adventure and the miserable lack of good bathroom wall colors
for you to choose from. You're knee deep in domestic hell, and for eternity there you are stuck.

Your wife's bedroom whisper doesn't let you forget that you have a space in your closet for a tie.
That once, fast women stuck to you like sheets of wet paper. In order to exist
with your sparse choice of colors, you wake your wife up at four in the morning to tell her: white.

Do I have the heart of a poet? Or: I am a cat. I ate a rat. He wore a hat. And other poetic lines.

I want so desperately to write a sestina. Or a modification thereof. Nicole Steinberg's sestina "I Am Obsessed With My Wife" is my inspiration. Maybe this poetry adventure will result in me only writing sestinas all semester. How pretentious of me. Perhaps a pantoum here and there as well. I don't know why I've suddenly become so obsessed with form when I have never given a piss about form in my life, and sort've pooh-poohed it for awhile.

I need to cut my hair, because the back is getting out of control. Wish I could find the motivation to get some of my work done, ASAP. But all I'm thinking about is getting some poetry writing done, which I think is encouraging as well as a little daunting.

Also, Car Hunt 2007 seems impending and terrifying and I want a car so badly, but every lead I come across falls through and leaves me bumbling and feeling like I will never be able to have nice things. THIS IS WHY WE DON'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

I really, really, hope the friends that said they were coming up this week to see me, still come up, because I rearranged my work schedule and cut down my hours for this, and I really want to see them, and I will be terribly sad if I finagled all this crapola for nothing.

Also, learning how to salsa this semester sounds lovely. Anyone interested in teaching me?