Blogging as I watch…forgive the typos and the tense shifts.

Paris Bennett – “Conga”? HUH? AND wearing a dress over jeans? Is it “tired trend” night on AI? Paris can sing and all, but I think this is a horrible song choice. I hope this doesn’t seem nitpicky, but I feel like in her interview segments she’s trying too hard. Those eyebrows are a little too high, the voice a little too animated. David just made a good call: “she’s never sounded as great as she did in the auditions.” I’d rather hear her singing Billie Holliday than Gloria Estefan.
Lisa Tucker – I have no idea what the name of this song is. I will call it “R & B Product.” I do not enjoy “R & B Product.” I think she sang it well. I mean, I guess she did. I was really paying more attention to her asymmetrical hemline and the fact that her hair is straight this week, because, well, I was bored.
Melissa McGhee – NO PLEASE NO NOT A HEART SONG. ANYTHING BUT A HEART SONG. She screamed it pretty effectively, though. If screaming is your thing. It’s not mine. Simon just agreed with me when he said that last note bought her a plane ticket home. Not that Simon is trying to manipulate who goes to the round of 12. Not at all.
Kinnik Sky – See, the thing about singing Alicia Keys is that you have to be good. Not a Miss Florida contestant. And Kinnik is most definitely the latter, not the former. I give her points for the cute skirt, but if that’s the most positive thing I can say, then that’s probably not a good sign for her.
Katharine McPhee – “Freedom” – A fun song for her. She’s so low-key, so talented, so natural, so quietly confident – I like her a whole bunch. She reminds me of Joss Stone, and I think that with the exception of Mandisa, she’s the strongest vocalist in the bunch.
Ayla Brown – She sang the first 16 bars of her song without ever finding a note. I have no idea what the title of her song is, because neither David nor I could understand a single word she said. I think it may have been called “Unwritten,” because that was the last word she mumbled.
Mandisa – “I’m Every Woman” – I’m really, really tired of this song, but I think it’s a good one for Mandisa. She looked great, and I know that Randy is gonna say that she WORKED IT OUT (though there were a few shaky notes). Perfect way to showcase her personality. If she’s on the stage, I can’t help but watch.
Kellie (Dawn) Pickler – Okay, Kellie Dawn. Let’s talk about you singing Melissa Ethridge. It requires EDGE. You have no edge. You are the absence of edge. So in order to convey edge, you screamed. Perhaps you and Melissa McGhee could have some sort of screaming contest. “What’s a minx?” / “I’m a mink!” / “I had a salmon!” Let’s get this girl back to the schoolhouse. She’s giving Jessica Simpson a run for the tuna / chicken money.
Should go: Kinnik Sky and Ayla Brown
Will go: Kinnik Sky and Melissa McGhee
Wednesday night: The guys. Will Kevin Corvais rebound? Will Ace smolder? Stay tuned.

Looks like Sister’s “sources” were right on the money.

They’ll always have Paris, I guess.

I have been emailing this morning with a friend of mine from high school who has actually relocated back to New Orleans after being displaced by Katrina. I’ve taken my own little trip down memory lane for the past hour or so, because this particular friend and I used to find ourselves in all kinds of funny situations. We were so GOOFY in junior high and high school that it makes me laugh to think back on it, and I just remembered one of my more graceful high school moments. I have suppressed this memory for several years, but I think it’s important that I share it because, well, I like to humiliate myself.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I decided that I was going to start walking in the mornings. Now, I am legendary for my head-first plunges into fitness, whereby I go all out for several days and as a result either injure myself, drive myself to the brink of insanity with my obsession, or burn myself out so quickly that I never want to walk / play tennis / lift weights / swim ever again. It’s not necessarily a fitness regime that I can recommend in any sort of good conscience.

So one bright Monday morning, I got out of bed around 6, put on some sweats, and headed out for an early morning powerwalk. Because I had taken dancing for many years, I fancied myself relatively fit.

I fancied wrong.

I walked for two miles, probably, up and down some rather hilly portions of the road where we lived. I remember that as I was walking, my principal, Mr. Harris, drove by and honked the horn at me, and I patted myself on the back for being so dedicated, so committed to Achieving Maximum Fitness. I went back home, showered, and went to school, where my principal did in fact commend me on such a healthy early morning routine.

The next day I repeated the schedule. My muscles were a little tight, but no big deal. I walked two miles again, got home, felt a little charliehorse-ish, but once again patted myself on the back for all the exercise. Remember, there is no such thing as middle ground with me. Either I am full-out, full-on, or thankyouverymuch, I will not be participating. No happy medium. Ever.

By day three I was in agony. My hamstrings felt like somebody had removed them, stretched them out the length of a football field, tied them into a thousand knots, and crammed them back into my legs. I tried to stick with my early morning walk, but by the top of the first hill, I was ready to implement the “stop, drop and roll” procedure because my legs were quite clearly on fire. AGONY. I was in agony.

I made it home, showered, and put on a two-piece sailor dress, because in addition to sailor dresses being all the rage in the late 80’s, we were having club pictures made that day at school. I wanted to look my best, you know – so I hobbled my way into the skirt, got my hair and make-up just like I liked it, and headed off to picture day.

Now there was this boy – an older boy – who I sort of liked. He didn’t like me, of course, except in that sisterly way that all boys seemed to like me because apparently, in bright red ink legible only to the male gender, there was writing across my forehead that said, “TELL ME YOUR PROBLEMS. I WILL LISTEN TO THEM AND MAKE YOU LAUGH. I WILL GIVE YOU ADVICE ABOUT YOUR GIRLFRIENDS AND MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER ABOUT YOURSELF. THAT IS WHAT I DO.” (C’mon, Bubba – ‘fess up. You read that writing, too, didn’t you?) In retrospect, of course, I’m really grateful to have had so many guy friends…I was spared MUCH high school misery as a result. But at the time, I would’ve given anything for this one guy in particular to like me. Well, he did like me, but I wanted him to, you know, like me.

Cut to picture time. I was really sore from all the walking but trying to hide the pain, because really, it’s the height of nerdiness to be walking down your high school hallway and saying, “YEOW! That smarts! OW – that hurts!” I mean, a girl does have her pride.

So there was an announcement for all the Mu Alpha Theta members to report to the auditorium for pictures, and my sassy sailor dress and I made our way down the hall. One of my friends was walking with me, and at the other end of the hall, walking toward us, was The Boy. So I flipped my hair a bit, ignored the stabbing pain in my legs, faked as normal a stride as I could, made some sort of witty remark because oh was I ever the witty and clever one, and when I got within about 5 feet of The Boy, do you know what my legs did to me? They buckled.

And I don’t mean that I delicately lost my balance. I mean to tell you that my entire body GAVE WAY. Collapsed upon itself in a nautically-themed heap. Arms and legs akimbo. With The Boy watching. I tried to laugh it off good-naturedly and all, even though I was humiliated beyond any mortal measure by the degree to which my legs had betrayed me. However, others seemed to appreciate my laughter, because it gave them permission to HOWL and ROLL at my expense. There was much howling. There was much rolling.

The Boy actually came to my aid and helped me back to my feet, though it took some doing, given the degree of leg cramping I was experiencing. Once upright, I dusted off my sailor skirt, straightened my shirt, and headed into the auditorium for pictures.

That’s one good thing about aching muscles and hurt pride – they don’t photograph very well.

Needless to say, I abandoned that particular fitness routine faster than you can say “buckled knees.” The sailor dress made several other appearances at church, but eventually I retired it to the back of the closet. Sadly, it was my last Mu Alpha Theta picture ever, as I was not invited to renew my membership due to some rather unfortunate test scores in Honors Algebra II.

And The Boy? After high school, I never went down that road again.

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

I don’t enjoy going to the movies anymore.

There. I said it.

Most of you remember that when I was in college, I would oftentimes drive to Jackson and literally spend the entire weekend seeing movies. It was not unusual for David and me (in our pre-dating days), along with Todd, to see four or five movies in a weekend. We would plan the whole excursion around what was being shown at Northpark, and I had this movie journal thing-y where I would chronicle everything we saw. Every December, when Entertainment Weekly printed the list of all the movies its critics had reviewed over the previous year, I’d usually seen 80% of them. Movie crazy, that’s what I was.

Todd left State to go to film school in California, but David and I continued the movie-going tradition. Then, when Todd was back in Mississippi for holidays, we would have huge Film Fest weekends and take in as many movies – both at the theatre and on video – as humans could possibly manage within a two day time span.

After David and I got married, we went to the movies almost every Saturday morning for that first year. We’d get together with friends, head to the theatre, and see whatever suited our fancy. We’d usually go around 10 in the morning so that we still had a chunk of Saturday left when the movie was over. It was a pretty good system, because if the movie was bad, we wouldn’t feel like we had wasted our day.

Then we bought a house. And that, my friends, was the beginning of the movie end for me.

I realized after we bought the house that I wanted to clean it. And decorate it. And buy things for it. And work in the yard. With a full-time job, there just weren’t enough hours in the day for me to be able to do all my house stuff and go to the movies, too. So David started going to the movies with his buddies, not me, and oddly enough, I didn’t miss it much. I still tried to be a good sport every now and again because David loves loves loves going to the picture show, so once every couple of months I’d forsake my cleaning / project time and go along for the ride.

Eventually our favorite theatre dropped their 10AM showings, and movie-going had to be done with the masses. I am not a fan of the masses. I cannot tell you how many times, in the last two years we were in Louisiana, that I went to the box office after spending mere minutes in a movie and kindly requested a refund. Either people wouldn’t stop talking, or their cell phones rang, or we were surrounded by merry bands of teenagers, or all the speakers weren’t on, or SOMETHING happened to ruin the experience for me. I’d gotten used to those Tinseltown shows at 10 in the morning, so seeing a movie with a room full of 14 year olds armed with cell phones was hardly a relaxing, enjoyable movie-going adventure. As a general rule, I do not enjoy spending $7.00 to listen to other people predict what’s going to happen next or explain why girlfriend needs to get on up out of that house or announce to the person on the other end of the line that yes, they’re in the movie, but it’s okay, they can still talk. No really. They can!

Once we moved here, I pretty much gave up altogether. At the time we had two theatre options on our end of town: The Summit, which is always always always packed, and Brook Highland, which is very, very small. Neither option appealed to me. So trips to the movies? Few and far between. Don’t believe me?

I give you evidence. Here is what I have seen at the theatre over the last five years. I’m not kidding. Hollow Man, X-Men, Unfaithful, Insomnia, SpiderMan, Vanilla Sky, Anchorman, SpiderMan 2, Spanglish, and Syriana.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

And if you notice a comic book theme, that’s because I usually go to the movies with my husband, who will see anything – ANYTHING – based on a comic book, which means that ten minutes into the movie, I’m fidgeting like a small child in an auto supply store. MISERABLE.

Of the ten movies I’ve seen in the last five years, I have liked approximately two: Anchorman, which is hysterical, and Syriana, which is not, but excellent nonetheless. 2 out of 10. 20%. Are you picking up on my movie issues?

If you factor in the toddler and all that he entails, I think I’m pretty much done with movies in the theatre until at least 2016. And for several years, yes, I did try to stay culturally caught up by watching DVD’s, but after awhile it just got to be too much trouble, and I was too tired, and half of what I would try to watch was so bad that it made me sort of angry. If I’m going to dedicate two to three hours of my weekend to “entertainment,” I would prefer not to be angry when I’m finished. Happy would be good.

But that’s just me and my crazy talk.

All that being said, I give you my list of five movies I cannot live without, and you can add your own list in the comments:

1. Waiting for Guffman
2. Erin Brockovich
3. Terms of Endearment
4. Coal Miner’s Daughter
5. Notting Hill

And by the way, we now have a lovely, large Rave theatre on this end of town, and the three times I’ve been, it’s been a most pleasant experience.

So there’s hope for me yet.

If you love MSU sports, as many of us do, and you’re not reading Ian Rapoport’s blog, you should be.

That is all.

Have a lovely day.