Disneyland part deux

Top 3.5 Favorite Disneyland Rides

1. Peter Pan
2. Space Mountain
3. Haunted Mansion
3.5 Buzz Lightyear

Peter Pan

We tried to get on this ride 3 times on Friday and each time, the line was huge! We finally sucked it up and waited the 25 minutes. (They really should have a FastPass for this ride.) It's hard to understand why so many people want to get on this one because there are no special effects or splashing water or big drops. It's just a sweet journey through the Peter Pan story. My favorite part is when we sail over London among the twinkling stars. I wanted to go a second time at the end of the night after the fireworks but the line was humongous again and Reggie just wanted to go home.

Space Mountain

I know people say this isn't a roller coaster - it's a roller coaster-type ride - but it's way better than the ones where you hang upside down or go backwards. You really FLY on this thing; it's wicked fast. By the end my eyes were watering and my nose was running. Sorry, that was kind of a gross description. I don't think my sister would have liked this one.

Haunted Mansion

This is just the coolest ride ever. I LOVE the details on this and I love that it's the Nightmare Before Christmas which is a great movie by Tim Burton. Decorated for Halloween, it's really amazing. My favorite part is when your car overlooks the big dining room with ghosts dancing and flying around. And the top of the Christmas tree is a giant claw. Love it!

Buzz Lightyear

This ride gets honorable mention for Reggie who thought it was a lot of fun. Runners-up were Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Splash Mountain (which we rode after it was dark and got soaking wet and cold so that was totally not going to be in my top 3). I thought Buzz was kind of a kiddie ride and it wasn't really like anything from the movie Toy Story, which I loved, but Reg liked it because it was kind of like being inside a videogame. Plus I completely lost to her - she was racking up the points and I could barely aim my laser at any of the targets. I think I got maybe 300 points while she got 30,000. I think she liked that.

The whole day was amazing and fun and so much better than going to class. Reg said it was a treat for getting through exams (she took them, I didn't). She and Billy told their parents in advance that they were going and their parents were totally fine with it. Lucie didn't even notice I was gone - she got home way after I did. I was going to get her a pair of mouse ears with her name on them but they were too expensive so I just bought her a Minnie Mouse antenna ball for her car. She liked it, I guess. I think she was a little jealous that we went.

Disneyland #1

Top 3.5 Things You Wouldn't Notice in Disneyland

1. Petrified Wood in New Orleans Square
2. Carriage Prints between New Orleans Square and Adventureland
3. Mickey Mouse Ears everywhere
3.5 The Ducks

Reggie and Billy and I played hooky on Friday so we could see the Halloween decorations at Disneyland. The Heffernans have season passes so they can get me in for free which is pretty sweet. Normal tickets are wicked expensive. The only time Lucie and I went was when she got half-price tickets from Ralphs for saving up Coke labels. And even that was not cheap.

Petrified Wood in New Orleans Square



According to the plaque, this tree was presented to the park by Walt Disney's wife. That's cool, I guess, but I want to know where SHE got it. People say that if you take even the smallest piece of wood from a petrified forest, you will have bad luck forever and this thing is huge! Of course, they also say Walt wanted his head frozen after his death so this was probably nothing.


Carriage Prints Between New Orleans Square and Adventureland

It took me a while to notice these - see the horsehoes and carriage trails in the cement? There are also boot prints, as if the cowboys were walking through the square, wearing down the concrete with their shoes.

Mickey Mouse ears everywhere

This small plaque was on the Aladdin entrance. If you look really closely, you can see Mickey's head. These sorts of details are everywhere. Reggie saw this and said, "I'm glad to see the seven bucks I paid for a hot dog are going somewhere worthwhile." She has no sense of romance or history; these details are what MAKE the park. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of kiddie rides.

The Ducks

These ducks are NOT animatronic.

Stay tuned for the next post where I show you my 3 1/2 favorite Disneyland rides.

Exams? What exams?

Top 3.5 Distractions From Studying for Exams

1. Target
2. Watching the best parts of the movie we rented on Friday night
3. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
3.5 Re-organizing the living room

Let’s be honest: no one – no one – does their homework on Friday nights. Fridays are Blockbuster nights. And no one studies for exams on Saturdays because what you learn is not going to stick in your brain until Monday. Sunday mornings are for sleeping late and getting lattes at Starbucks. So by default, Sunday nights are for studying. But on Sundays, there’s a million things I’d rather do. This is just 3 ½ of them.

Target…Lucie and I usually hit the bullseye around 4 or so and wander the aisles starting with the shoes. We like to try on the flip-flops and sometimes Lucie will wear a pair around the store while we shop to try them out. This sounds tacky but you have to do this, you do. I have owned flip-flops where the plastic thong part never gets soft and I get blisters between my toes every time I wear them so naturally I don’t wear them and what a waste of money that is. You can usually tell this is going to happen if you wear them around for an hour or so. Now, if it’s cold in the store, Luce will grab a jacket and wear that around and never buy it and that IS tacky.

We hit the books and electronics section next and I’ll read some paperbacks for a few minutes while my sister looks at CDs and movies. We never buy anything in this section. Then we swing around and check out the bath area where we pick out vibrant color schemes and fancy appliances for when we win the lottery and finally can redecorate our apartment.

Lucie and I have wanted to buy an espresso maker for like, years. It seems like we would save money if we bought one, that we wouldn’t go out for Starbucks all the time but whenever we sit down to figure it out, the numbers never add up. We’d have to own one for like, seven years before it would start saving us money and who knows where we will be then? I mean, I like Lucie and all but in 4 years, I am out of here. I can’t imagine we’ll still be living together by the time that espresso machine pays off.

Anyway, around 5:30, we pay for whatever we have (sometimes nothing, sometimes shampoo and tampons) and then order a Pizza Hut personal pizza with pepperoni and a large Diet Coke which we split while we read magazines.

Then it’s time to go home where we…

Watch the best parts of the movie we rented on Friday night. Since we rarely agree on what movie to rent (Lucie has THE worst taste in movies), we alternate picking titles. Let’s say it’s Lucie’s night and she’s picked “Bewitched” (which was seriously the WORST movie of all time), I will probably only slightly pay attention when we watch it on Friday. But then two days pass and somehow on Sunday night, the prospect of watching it again before we return it seems very appealing. We skip all the boring crap and suddenly it’s two thumbs up from the Shanley sisters.

This past weekend we rented “Entourage,” Lucie’s choice. It was okay, I guess. I didn’t think it was that realistic and the guys were just mooching off their friend and not really contributing much. I don’t think Luce liked it either but she just wanted to show off how much she knows about Hollywood. Just because her boyfriend lives there, she thinks she’s some expert. She’s all like, that’s the Urth Café on Melrose and that’s Paramount Pictures, which I have to admit is pretty cool. She and her boyfriend Aaron, who’s an unknown singer/songwriter (no offense, Aaron) mostly hang out at his place or go to small clubs to check out his friends who are also unknown singer/songwriters (again, no offense, Aaron) so they’re not at like, red carpet premieres or anything but it’s cool that she knows where these places are.

So we return the video and then come back for…

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I am such a sucker for this show. I can’t watch the first half hour of it because The Simpsons are on opposite but I flip back and forth on the commercials and then watch it when my show is over. What can I say? You’ve got needy families and Ty Pennington and great new furniture and lots of tears and happiness. What more could you want in a show? Sometimes they do the two-hour specials and then, well, I’m pretty much screwed for studying. And Lucie loves it, too, even though she calls it manipulative. I cry at the end, okay, there I said it but sometimes I see Lucie getting teary too, especially if the family only has one parent. I think that’s because our parents died but that was a long time ago.

Inevitably this leads to us…

Re-organizing the living room. Lucie will say, we should get on that show and have people build us a new house and give us all new furniture and clothes because our story is pretty sad, too (it’s also long and not very interesting so I won’t bore you with it) but then I remind her that we don’t OWN our place and you have to or else how can Ty destroy it and rebuild it? And then she’ll say, oh yeah, and pout and I’ll say, to be nice, we can do it ourselves and then we move the furniture around.

But since we don’t have a lot of room or a lot of stuff, we usually move it all back into place at the end.

And that, dear teacher, is why I didn’t study.

Oh and my dog ate my homework.

Meg's got an idea! Finally!

More baseball in the Heffernan homestead last night (Reg, hope you don’t mind I tell people all about your family’s obsession with the sport), although it really is odd that my friend Reggie watches so much of it in the post-season. She’s not into sports beyond this. She doesn’t dig basketball or football or golf or any of the girls’ sports we have at RCHS and she’s always trying to get out of PE. She won’t even walk to the Starbucks near our school which is like, three blocks away. She drives everywhere, which I guess I would too if I had a car and a license. Reg just started driving with her permit which means technically she has to have a licensed driver in the car but her parents don’t really enforce that. Sometimes her older brother Billy will come with us to school (he’s a senior) but most often, it’s just Reg and me. Her parents gave her their old Explorer, the one they use to haul stuff around. When she turns 16 next month, they’re buying her a new car. Pretty sweet.

Anyway, I didn’t get to post last night because the Mets beat the Cardinals to tie the series and there were like, a million home runs and Reggie and her brothers Tivo’ed the game and had to watch the highlights over and over again and it got to be late and I had to get home to finish my French and help Lucie iron her work clothes. Rainout in St. Louis today so I can finally post tonight.

After much research of other people’s blogs, I have finally decided what my blog theme will be. I call it Mega Girl’s Meta Lists. I got the idea from this one woman who posts three beautiful things she sees or experiences every day. It was like one of those “aha” moments for me, like, “Why didn’t I think of that myself?” She writes about things big and small: a child playing with a balloon in a park or a great cup of coffee. But since I can’t steal that idea, much as I would like to, I decided to go my own way.

I am using a Top 3.5 (Top 10 is so Letterman). What’s the half, you ask? Well, there’s first place, second place, third place, and then honorable mention, which is like a half. But they won’t be topics like my favorite albums or my favorite movies which are too easy and don’t mean anything. They’ll be meta lists – lists beyond lists, lists that mean more than just the elements contained within the lists. They will be the way to get to know me and who I am, which I think is what Evelyn wants us to do. I think the individual is at the heart of the media and that is why it matters.

So without further ado, here is my first Meta List:

Top 3.5 Scary Stephen King Novels:

1. The Shining
2. It
3. Pet Sematary
3.5 Cujo

Since it was just Friday the 13th and Halloween is right around the corner, I was thinking about my favorite scary stories and since there really is no scary without Stephen King, I figured let’s not beat around the bush and just go with his books. And for all you people who sniff at Stephen King and call his stuff trash, I have this to say: get over yourselves. I love books but I am certainly no snob about it. I love “Animal Farm” for its political allegory and I love Harry Potter for its magic. I recognize what classic literature is but pop fiction is great too. And just because something is more complex doesn’t make it better. I think it just takes so long for people to get through Tolstoy that when they finish, they feel such a sense of accomplishment. But they don’t necessarily feel joy. “Wow, I finally finished ‘War and Peace,’” they say. Not “Wow, what a great story ‘War and Peace’ is.” No one I know has ever said they loved that book. But pretty much everyone I know loves at least one Stephen King novel.

Now, “The Shining” is not the movie, which also scared me half to death. The book is about the boy, Danny; the movie is about Jack Nicholson. Both are great but the movie is not the book. The isolation of the Overlook Hotel works its evil on the family and the little boy, cursed with a supernatural ability, is the only one who can save them. The movie “overlooks” (ha, ha) the father’s abuse of the boy, which I think is a mistake. It’s important to know that Jack, an alcoholic, hits Danny because later in the hotel, when Jack physically becomes a monster, Danny is the one to save his mother and himself. The little boy stands up to the father and stops the abuse. This book has some scary scenes in it. I love it. I have read it three times so far and it’s a pretty long book.

“It” is very scary. I never saw the TV movie that they made but Lucie said she couldn’t watch the whole thing. This is one of those “older people recount their memories” stories. A group of friends recover their memories of their childhood and yes, there is a clown and if you are already predisposed to a fear of clowns, this book won’t help you get over it.

“Pet Sematary” is creepy because it’s about people coming back to life. It’s kind of sad, too because the father wants so desperately to have his dead son back. Of course it’s never that easy in a Stephen King novel. You can’t just come back from the dead; you have to bring evil with you.

“Cujo” gets honorable mention only because I wasn’t scared that much. Lucie hated it, though, because of the big bad dog. This also was made into a movie and Lucie hated that too. My sister is sort of afraid of dogs in general, which is why she said we can’t ever have a pet, even though I always swear I will take care of it. So I put Cujo on the list for her.

Pretty much every Stephen King book has been made into a movie (some good, most bad) and The Simpsons have parodied just about every movie (love The Simpsons!). It’s hard to capture what King gets right. There is something about the way he writes, not just what he writes, that scares people silly. His characters are normal, everyday people. They are working class or middle class. There are no architects or advertising executives like other stories use (architecture and advertising seem to be the only careers for people in books and movies). And unlike traditional horror movies where kids having sex at camp are eviscerated in their sleep, King’s victims are all ages. Although he has definite morals, no one in his books is all good or all bad. I like that.

New media, Old media, It's all just words

Finally! Reggie wouldn’t let me on the computer until after the Cardinals-Padres game was over (Cards won). She is a huge baseball fan but I’m still not sure who she wants to see in the World Series. She used to like the Anaheim Angels until they became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, which was totally lame, but they’re not in the playoffs.

And why do I, a non-rabid fan, know about the playoffs? Because Reg talks nonstop about it. Mets swept the Dodgers, Tigers swept the Yankees and in case you don’t know, “swept” means the other team didn’t win any games.

So…Evelyn told us last Friday that our blogs are supposed to explore the new media. Not the old media, which is the other course, the one I really wanted to take (have I mentioned that before?), the one about television and movies and books. And she wants us to read each other’s blogs. Augh! Delete, delete! LOL! I have no worries about anyone reading my blog. No one even knows me in this town except Reggie. This is the start of my second year here – we moved to RC (that’s Rancho Cucamonga to the rest of the world) when I was in 8th grade, just in time to finish middle school, so now I’m again with a whole new group of people in the high school. Half the teachers call me Margaret. The others just mumble under their breath (“You, in the back” they say, when they call on me, or “You, wearing the completely wrong jeans”).

Honestly, I don’t care if no one reads this.

So whatever.

I should probably put photos here to liven things up. Plus I need to use up space. I think Evelyn’s grading us on the quantity of material we put in our pages, not the quality.

[Reggie, dude, send me the pictures your brother took when we went to that last home game at the Epicenter! I keep asking you and you keep saying you will. I already saw them and you look fine. I’m gonna ask Billy myself if you don’t.]

Anyway, the reason I say Evelyn is grading on quantity is that she gave major kudos to this guy Benny’s blog and I have no idea why. Here’s what his blog is about: postings about DVDs he owns and DVDs he wants to buy, what’s in his NetFlix queue, photos of his German shepherd, pictures of girls he draws during class (none of them me – so far), and lists of his favorite sandwiches.

Huh?

You mean, like peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread? And bologna with mustard on rye? And roast beef with caramelized onions and Muenster cheese toasted on a Kaiser roll?

Yes, I mean exactly like that. Why is that so great? The dude posts like, every day! WTF? What does he have to say that’s so important he has to write every single day?

Rich kid with nothing to do. (See previous post.)

So, to appease my teacher and make up for that crappy grade she gave me on my last paper, I’ve been checking out other people’s blogs. I use the Random Blogs button at the sign-on screen and I gotta say, most of them are pretty frickin boring.

“And the week is over…”

“And the week is just beginning…”

“This is what I did today…”

Or if you’re Benny:

“This is what I ate today…”

And you can tell no one visits their blogs because there are never any comments posted. Is that sad? Or miserably pathetic? I wonder if these bloggers WANT other people to comment about their scrapbooking posts or if they’re perfectly content to send their words out into the ether with no expectation of a return on their investment.

Some blogs are great and I think that’s because their authors picked a topic they were passionate about, however esoteric it may have been, and then shared their expertise with the world. And the world responded. They were chosen as a Blog of Note or other sites linked to their blog or they got quoted in the traditional media, like on CNN when that British girl talks about what people are saying on the Internet or whatever.

And that’s where I’m stuck. What should my blog be about?

I promise that I will have a topic by the next post. (No, Reg, it won’t be about baseball.)

Better than a C+

It’s October! And that means the first exams of the year are right around the corner. I think I’m doing okay in 5 of my 6 classes. B pluses in Ancient History, Geometry, and Earth Science. A in American Lit and A minus in French. And Media Matters? Not so much. On my first paper I got a C+ and I don’t understand why. The subject was the Immediacy and Intimacy of the Internet (“imMEDIAcy,” get it?). This was the comment on my paper:

“You’re not plumbing the depths of the Internet. You’re only skimming the surface and making superficial comparisons. Go beyond Google and explore what New Media really means.”

Huh?

I argued that the nature of blogs – confessional and tell-all – gives readers a false sense of intimacy. They feel like they really know a person when, in fact, they don’t know her at all. It’s like when you watch “Days of Our Lives” or something every single day. You turn on the television at the same time every afternoon and there are your friends, the people you’ve seen for years and you know all about them. You know who slept with who, who killed whose evil twin, who died and came back a different actor. And it seems like you really know them. But you don’t. Same is true on the Internet. People email like crazy and they read and write blogs and they act like it’s the real world. But it’s not! It’s not real at all. That’s why they call it “virtual.” I concluded that the Internet actually fostered isolation, not intimacy.

So basically, I refuted Evelyn’s point and she didn’t like it.

Was it the soap opera comparison that got me the C+? If I had used Virginia Woolf instead, would I have gotten an A? Probably not. Virginia’s not “new media” enough.

What I’d really like to hear Evelyn Beauchamps discuss is the class discrimination of blogs. Who, after all, can keep up a blog without access to a computer? I don’t have one of my own. Lots of people don’t. Even if blog space is free (like this one) you still have to be able to afford A) a computer and B) a broadband connection. Because my sister has such a crappy job that we can only pay for rent and food and the occasional movie night out with popcorn OR candy and because I’m not old enough to have a job, we don’t have a computer. When I want to use one, I have to go to the library or wait forever at the computer lab after school. I’m lucky to have Reggie as my friend and she lets me use her laptop so I can type up my papers and post my blog.

But what if you don’t have computers at school or a friend like Reggie? That’s right, because you’re…let’s call it, “financially-challenged.” Well, you can’t publish your every thought about the latest Outkast video you downloaded onto your iPod, can you? Then again, you probably don’t have an iPod because you’re…financially-challenged.

Or maybe your family prefers to spend its money on other things, activities everyone can enjoy together like games and DVDs. Maybe they like to go out to the theater or baseball games or on hikes. They’d rather encourage social interaction instead of isolation.

There are a million reasons why people don’t own computers. That means a huge segment of the population doesn’t blog.

So who blogs then?

Think about it.

I would argue (if Evelyn decided to teach this which she probably wouldn’t because she probably doesn’t believe it exists) that rather than the Internet being a landscape of varied and intriguing opinions representing a multitude of cultures and concerns, it is actually quite homogeneous. I’ll bet lots of people (including myself) are not represented on the Internet but they don’t even realize it because they don’t access it regularly.

What do you think, Evelyn? Is that better than a C+?