Sunday, February 23, 2003 posted by Jen at 2/23/2003 07:29:00 PM
Is it just me, or do other people get dizzy in those gigantic electronic emporiums?
Adam and I headed out in the rain to get a digital camera, because these days I don't think they let you leave the hospital with a new baby unless you can show that you've got both a car seat and a digital camera, and you know how to use both of them...and even if the hospitals let you leave without the digital camera, you know the grandmothers and great-grandmothers aren't gonna be happy.
The Best Buy was crazy crowded, and also one of the behind-the-ear-hooks of my glasses (what's the name for that, anyhow?) had fallen off, so it was either wear my glasses crooked across my face, hanging on by just one behind-the-ear-hook, or not wear them at all and have everything be blurry. I went for blurry. (Side note: I am wicked nearsighed, and have worn glasses since I was about nine. I am too much of a wimp to get the Lasik surgery, although I've heard good things, and I'm squeamish about putting things in my eyes, so no contacts. I tried to get them for my wedding, and wound up cringing and flinching and eventually almost kicking the very nice opthalmologist who was trying to put them in my eyes so much that we both eventually agreed that contact lenses are just not in my future).
Anyhow, back to Best Buy. We wound up standing there in front of about twenty digital cameras, ranging in price from about two hundred bucks to about six hundred bucks, and of course there's absolutely nobody there to help us understand what the differences are. We figured out the pixel thing (more pixels = bigger, better pictures), and then decided how many pixels we wanted (somewhere between Not Enough and So Many that the Camera Can Be Used Professionally). Adam wandered off to pick up the complete My So-Called Life DVD collection, and I squinted and tried to stave off the feelings of overwhelmed dizziness until I located some twelve-year-old with a ponytail and a Best Buy shirt and said, "Listen, can you just tell me which one of these is the easiest to use?"
Best Buy Boy said it was the Kodak. So we got the Kodak, and the docking port, and some extra memory for the Kodak. Now I just have to figure out how to use the darn thing. It better be easy. Or some twelve-year-old Best Buy employee is going to be in serious trouble. Assuming I get my glasses repaired and can recognize him again.
And then I strapped on my falling-apart glasses and we went to the movies. We bypassed The Hours, turned up our noses at Gangs of New York and went to see...."Old School." Yes, I know, I've got lost whatever intellectual credibility I might have had. What can I say? I'm a sucker for Will Ferrell's butt.
However, the movie was a disappointment. I loved "Animal House" and "Revenge of the Nerds," and I'm happy to overlook the gender issues in both of them, where women are either evil schemers, loyal, voiceless allies or sex objects who exist only to bare their breasts as the plot demands.
But "Old School" had such an underlying bitterness and cynicism toward the female characters that it was hard to overlook. That, and it's funny to watch Anthony Edwards playing a nerdy twenty-one-year-old who just wants to get drunk and laid, but kind of icky to watch Ferrell and Vince Vaughn playing married thirty-year-olds who treat their wives horribly and want pretty much the same thing.
That being said, the movie gets points for featuring Snoop Doggy Dogg. And Will Ferrell singing "Dust in the Wind." But it loses points for casting Craig Kilborn as a callow, scummy, sexist smoothy (yeah, I know, it's the part he was born to play!) and then not using him at all! And for not having the opposition that frat-movie convention demands -- the Evil Jock Frat, with whom our band of rag-tag heroes must compete. It just had the Evil Dean. Come on....even Homer Simpson knows that's a cliche by now!
On the way home Adam said, "We're going to burn in hell for seeing that instead of "The Pianist," aren't we?" And I said yes, but that at least we'd be together.
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Welcome to A Moment of Jen, author Jennifer Weiner's constantly-updated take on books, baby, and news of the world. Email me at jen (a) jenniferweiner.com.
