the concept

I saw (and enjoyed!!) Young Adult yesterday. There’s such a thing lately w/r/t ugly-on-the-inside people as leading men/ladies in movies and TV shows, and I’m totally into it. I had all these great examples of this before I started writing this post, but now I can only think of Breaking Bad. And I guess Homeland, which I haven’t even seen. Oh well. Basically Charlize Theron’s character is funny & kind of heartbreaking in her total black abyss of unlikeableness. Love the Diet Coke, love the manicures and voiceovers from Waverly Prep and the strip malls of small-town Minnesota. I don’t want to think too hard about the movie because I’ll realize there are major issues in having such a monster protagonist (like: she’s all monster, only superficially human! And like: the movie totally justifies conservative values!), so I’ll stop writing about it now. Except I totally have that Teenage Fanclub song in my head.

Reminds me of one of my favorite songs, by The Byrds:

Speaking of Minnesota, I just sold a pair of bookcases to a really nice couple from there who recently moved to LA. Why do Midwesterners in LA depress me? Probably because they’re aspiring actors and are moving into studio apartments and have sneakers with holes in them and weird bellbottom jeans. Anyway! I’m always paranoid before I sell furniture on C-list, and end up reading far too much into the email responses. I got one that said “here’s my phone number, but you better not be a spammer or I’ll make sure you die a slow and painful death” — so that one was off the list! And then the ones that are like one-sentence “WHEN CAN I PICK UP THE SLVES” make me pause as well. And even when I settled on the nice Minnesota couple, I dragged the shelves out to the building staircase and closed and locked my apartment door, just in case they ended up being serial killers! I always feel stupid afterward when the nice single moms and nervous couples drive off in their Surburbans, but you never know, now do you? Well, maybe you do know, but can’t help my sheepish paranoia.