Well, it's the traditional post-Thanksgiving update. There's not a whole lot to say (just wait, I'll drag this thing out for pages yet), but I am too tired to work on my novel, yet trying to stay the hell awake at least another hour. Going to bed at 8 p.m. on a Friday night is just too pathetic even if you're exhausted.

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Ah, so where were we last? Wednesday. I had planned to come home and work on the novel (I ended up doing it for about 45 minutes at one point), but Hillary (the roommate) decided she was in a social mood. She invited her friend Nick over, made a bunch of enchiladas, we gossiped, they went driving around for two hours in a fit of boredom (I smartly stayed home and (a) watched Amazing Race, (b) wrote for 45 minutes), and then ... we went to see Shallow Hal.

Now, I did NOT NOT NOT want to see this movie. I had never seen a Farrelly Bros. flick before (no, not even There's Something About Mary, which even MY PARENTS have seen. But please, like I don't already know about his dick and "hair gel" by now?), I was very ticked at the fat-person-breaks-chairs crap in the previews, etc. Bleah, I said.

But Hill has been dying to see it for over a month.

Anyway, I gotta give her props for movie selection more often because ... not only did it not suck, it was actually good. (Insert the sound of my jaw dropping here.) I cannot believe I'm saying this, but it really wasn't that evil make-fun-of-fat-ugly (incidentally, I don't think the people in this movie that were supposed to be ugly were at all, even the girl who'd been in a fire) as I'd expected. There's the one godawful best friend Mauricio that DOES do that (Jason Alexander, playing the asshole once again. Sigh.) and insists on ruining Hal's life just so his own eyeballs won't hurt from looking at Rosemary or whatever, but even he has an actual got-a-clue moment (and er, a gross personal problem).

I gotta give props to Jack Black for playing a guy who REALLY doesn't get why everyone's annoyed at him/why what he said would normally be taken as an insult/etc. in a pretty believeable way. It actually makes him quite sweet. And Gwyneth is really good (oh yeah, she won an Oscar, huh) at playing a girl who looks thin to us but isn't really. It's just all so sweet.

Then it got to the part I was dreading: the inevitable "oh, guess what, your girlfriend's fat" moment.... And I LOVED how they did it. Not remotely what I would have expected. He does avoid Rosemary, sure, but that's because Mauricio convinced him she looked so hideous that he could never be with her again after seeing her-- (Wrong.) and he did NOT want to be without her, so he figured he'd wait until he could track down Tony Robbins again so his natural shallowness wouldn't ruin it all. Eventually, he does get up the nerve to go see her. And I also really liked that when he ran into the people he saw while under the Tony Robbins Beer Goggles Spell and sees them as their real selves, while he doesn't recognize them right off, he does greet them all friendly and nicely instead of acting like a dick or something. Woo hoo! That made the movie for me.

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Okay, so that was Wednesday. I didn't end up writing the novel on Thursday because surprise, surprise, MY MOTHER SHOWED UP EARLY. This is a bloody miracle. They had brought along the new van, which I will refer to as the Pimpin' Van, because it is awesome. It's got a VCR and screen in it so I can watch movies/tapes the whole dang time! With headphones! (albeit figuring out how to work it all is difficult) Woo hoo! The door even opens itself without my having to pathetically and futilely tug and yank on it. I love this van. Damn, I wish we'd had it for vacations already.

As for being at my aunt's house, it was surprisingly pretty quiet and decent. She actually had snacks out for us (no need to starve before dinner, methinks) and everything. Mom and I tried to chat with the exchange student a bit, though she is pretty quiet and talks when she wants to, basically. Hard to get her into conversation when she's not prompting it. (We suspect she felt like her days were numbered. Sigh.)

Dinner was actually pretty damn funny. We were all talking about some pretty disgusting topics, most of which I can't recall right now. But after Cassie (youngest cousin) found a bug in her dinner and we started comparing places we'd found bugs, Aunt Susie goes "Didn't we used to have a rule as kids about no gross things at the dinner table? New rule: no more talking about gross things at the dinner table."

She then IMMEDIATELY starts to talk about some famous "fascinating" massacre of Uncle Brad's relatives. I'm like "Excuse me? What happened to nothing gross?"

We ended the meal by doing that wet-finger-on-the-water-glass-rim-makes-noise trick, a la Miss Congeniality. Yup, we're kooks.

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As is traditional on any night before I have to go to work, especially if I have a lot of stuff going on the next day and need some rest, especially if I'm already pretty tired, I didn't sleep much. I think I ended up waking up at 3:30 (though I tried not to look at the clock). I kept trying to doze off, thinking it was 6 a.m. and waking up to find it was 4:30. Or 5. Or 5:20. Or 5:45. Etc., etc. No sleep till weekend, again. This is just so frustrating. I swear, I'm just going to end up not sleeping at all, whatsoever, not even bothering to go to bed for five nights a week at this rate.

Surprisingly, Friday, the day I dreaded for total exhaustion, etc., wasn't. I did have to start hiking out to the police station after 6:30 a.m. because TODAY I remembered there would be no busses. Planning ahead -- only guess what: I got to the station and found the "business office" was locked up for the holiday. I had to call my boss and go "Um, stupid question, how do you get into the police station when they locked it up?" Fortunately, she had had no idea they did that, and had the actual number of the station within her grasp, so she called to have them let me in.

The story I was dreading working on went pretty well, which was nice. The interview I had after that also went well, AND I managed a last-minute picture, thank the gods. (Though sadly the picture for the first story went dreadfully awry thanks to bad developing issues, so I have no idea if they'll even have anything for the picture.) And amazingly enough, I managed to get both my pages done QUICKLY, so I even left on time! Wow! And I wasn't a total tired cranky biyotch like I figured I'd be when I got home!

However, I am still tired, so I think I'll hang it up and go do the novel tomorrow.

Update: Found out more crappy news on the bad thing tonight- something happened that I wasn't told about. I'm nervous once again.

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