Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Things that give me a thrill

I was walking into Target and some guy asked me if I knew the area. He asked me about the roads, if it was Montgomery or Dobbin, and I immediately knew that he was looking for the Columbia location, not the Ellicott City one we were currently in. Shopping is one of my biggest thrills (even though it’s for basics like toilet paper and groceries). So at that moment I felt like a woman. Then I gave him directions to the Columbia Target, using directional words and names of roads. So I felt like a man.

Another thrill has been rewatching season 3 of the Vampire Diaries. This show has amazing storytelling, with so many interesting characters and their lives and desires interweaving in unforeseen ways. There was one scene, though, that really made it hard for me to suspend disbelief and just distracted me from the heart of the episode. Here there are vampires, werewolves, witches. At the beginning of the season, the werewolf kid reveals to his mom his bizarre curse, and he does this by putting her in this weird dungeon place where he can transform during the full moon and hopefully not hurt anyone else. The mom is forced to stay there through the entire night and witness how her only child transforms into a horrible, savage animal. No doubt she was scared. I’m a very sympathetic person, so I kept thinking: “If I were in a cage all night, I wouldn't care if my son were a werewolf - all I’d be able to think about was needing to pee.”
Tyler's mother went through something no parent should ever have to endure:
She unexpectedly had to spend 12 hours without a toilet.
For that reason, this was the scariest episode of the series.

Then we watched the Avengers, and they put Loki in this super cage prison thing. If he tried to escape from the virtual bubble, he would plummet to a sure death. Natasha asked me where he was going to pee.

Another thrill I used to get was going to church. I used to love thanking God, praying, and in general thinking about all of the blessings he gives us. But now all I do is fight with my three-year-old son. So now that thrill is more like angry shudder.

And I’m working on a young adult novel. That’s pretty cool.