Douchettes of the Week

Yes, Douchettes. I think I may have made that up.

Anyway, the Douchettes of the Week are two Girls Gone Wild types named Nisreen and Sarah. Here they are:


Apparently, they're 18, although they look pretty used up for 18. It's Lindsay Lohan Syndrome, I guess.

Anyway, Nisreen and Sarah have somehow have gotten it into their heads, and subsequently onto CNN, that they are too pretty to fly. Truly. According to Nisreen, she never received any water during the flight, and either one or both girls (the details are fuzzy) got in an obscenity-soaked argument with a fellow passenger over who was next in line to use the bathroom. And these travesties occurred not because Nisreen and Sarah are two insufferable brats whose parents told them they were special way too many times, but because they were just so damn hot.

Or, to quote Sarah: "There was no one else on the plane who looked like us, except us."

Okay, the obvious first: no shit, Sarah. I've never boarded a plane and just happened to sit down next to my long-lost twin. And, um, I don't mean to be catty - truly I don't - but neither of you girls are hot. I'm sorry, but it's true. I love the part in the video where Nisreen is going on about how she thinks she was treated poorly because of her looks, and the cameraman does a slow pan of her body from her feet up, lingering on her legging-clad saddlebags as if to say, "I don't know about that."

The fact is, chickies, being a "young and decent-looking girl" will not result in a negative flying experience. Being an arrogant airhead with tacky fake pink nails and a penchant for stating both the obvious and the laughably stupid will. If I was a flight attendant and you were bitching about not having any water, and then getting into catfights over the bathroom, of all things, I'd ignore you too. I mean, what if you drank the water too fast and had to pee again? Best to stop these things before they start.

So, Sarah and Nisreen, congratulations. You may not be hot, but you are on YouTube. You even made it onto an assortment of blogs. You even made it on to mine.

Something tells me this is the most either of you will ever accomplish.

Random Opinions On Inconsequential Matters

So, as usual, I neither 1. watched the Oscars or 2. saw half of the movies that were nominated, since good movies never come out to our shitty little movie theater, and even if they did I turn down 99% of the guys who ask me out, so I never go there anyway.

That said, I do have opinions. I always have opinions.

Opinion 1:

Juno should not have won best screenplay. I don't know what should have won, but I'm positive at least three of the other nominees were better. It was a cute movie, for sure - I loved Ellen Page, and Michael Cera is truly the perfect First Boyfriend (far superior to mine, anyway), but the constant wiscracks and obscure hipster references got really old, really fast. Diablo Cody not only has the absolute dumbest pen name I've ever had the misfortune to hear spoken aloud, but she is so self-conscious and desperate to seem "in" that I actually started to feel sorry for her. "This is one doodle that can't be un-did, home skillet"? Ugh. Diablo, you bitch, don't ever call sweet little Ellen Page a home skillet again, or I will - I don't know - undo your doodle. Whatever that means.

And by the way, your dress was seriously ugly.


Opinion 2:

Sweeney Todd didn't even get a nomination for Achievement In Makeup?

Achievement In Makeup is one of those categories I usually forget about, because, really, who cares? But the makeup in Sweeney Todd was so incredibly perfect in every single scene that even as I watched it I thought, this better win that makeup award thing. Seriously. The makeup is part of what makes the movie.


Look at them. They're grotesque! There's a great scene in the film where Helena Bonham Carter's character is daydreaming about picnicking on the beach with Sweeney, and it shows them relaxing by the ocean with the sun shining down on them, and they look so sick and depraved and out of place - and it's perfect. Absolutely perfect.

I didn't see La Vie en Rose; maybe the makeup was better. Maybe it deserved the Oscar. But how could Sweeney not have been nominated?

Opinion 3:

What in God's name was SHE doing there?

For some reason, I just hate Jessica Alba. I really do. And I'm not exactly sure why, since she's really just your average vapid starlet who can't act her way out of a paper bag, but for some reason she represents, for me, everything that is wrong with Hollywood. She's utterly worthless in every film she's in, and only gets the roles she does because of her body. And I find it hard to like a person who constantly makes rude, tacky comments about her ethnicity. (My personal favorite? "Mexican men love to spread their seed. And the women just pop them out.") Plus she just looks like a bitch. Look at those cold eyes and pursed lips. Bitch bitch bitch. Honey, you should get down on your knees and thank God you were let through the door.

Come to think of it, being on your knees is probably what got you there in the first place. (Oh, snap!)

Opinion 4:

Katherine Heigl, I like you. Really I do. And it's out of concern, not nastiness, that I must inform you...


THAT HAIRSTYLE MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A QVC SALESLADY.

But otherwise you look lovely.

Eh, that's enough for now. I have no other Oscar-related bones to pick...at least not until I see the movies.

If You Have to Self-Publish, Maybe You Shouldn't

I think the most depressing part of working in a bookstore is seeing the complete and utter crap people come out with. I don't mean the mountains of books by Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel, since Roberts and Steel are not people but robots - well-oiled machines churning out exactly one predictable, easily digested mockery of the English language a month. And I don't mean books like The Secret, which, shallow and unsophisticated though they may be, are phenomenally marketable. I mean the self-published books. I mean the books written by poor, deluded souls who have spent countless nights in front of computer screens, coasting on nothing but black coffee and the words of sadly misguided middle-school homeroom teachers encouraging them to Express Themselves.

It's not that I think I'm a brilliant writer; I don't. But were I to write a fantasy, and were I to title it "Sword of Souls," I like to think I could find a better way to describe it than to say, "Sword of Souls launches just after the fall of the Ramadan tribes by the merciless red bearded Tarvas who invade sparing only the women and the young children in their brutal endeavors of destruction."

Seriously, what? Have the merciless red-bearded Tarvas outlawed commas? Were the Ramadan tribes Muslim? Was "endeavors" really the word Douglas Taylor, the self-proclaimed "authoritative and brilliant mastermind of the Chronicles of Caladon series," was looking for? These questions are going to keep me up all night, I just know it.

Look, I don't think all self-published books are crap. But I do think that before you spend $14.95 per book in publishing costs, you should make sure your writing is good enough to warrant it. Otherwise, not only have you wasted an insane amount of money on something nobody is ever going to read, you have also made me sad.

If you enjoy writing, awesome. But enjoying something does not make you a brilliant mastermind. I like playing guitar, and I don't think I suck, but I know I'm not good enough to make a career of it. Accept your limitations. Don't label yourself as something you aren't. I know there are legions of self-help books telling you that You Are Worth It, and maybe you are, but not everything you create is.

I know, I'm mean. I'm not trying to be, I just...am really sick of bad writing. I'm sick of every child being special. I'm sick of this idea that in every person is a creative genius just waiting to be unleashed. I don't think writing poems describing how you feel when you go walking in the rain automatically makes you deep, or that every life deserves a memoir. And I think letting people believe their writing has merit when it doesn't does them a disservice.

Especially if they're paying to self-publish. Seriously, that shit's expensive.

Upgrading...

Now that I'm 21, it seems time to bid LiveJournal farewell. 7 years of reading recommendations to change my password because it's "too obvious" has been more than enough, and I am finally ready to move on.

The problem is writing this entry. I feel like I need to write something witty, since it's my first entry and all, but at present I am wit-free. So instead of attempting to write something even remotely entertaining, I will post a picture of something beautiful:



And that will have to do.