Why Die Hard is the best action movie of all time

1. Alan Rickman as the sympathetic mastermind villain with a voice that is simultaneously terrifying and sexy

2. John McClane is a flawed hero (afraid of heights, smokes, drinks, leaves his wife)

3. John McClane is a noble hero (sacrifices self for others, cunning, witty, kicks butt without wearing shoes).

4. Holly Gennero is a "tough female lead" who shows strength through her mind and her bravery. And just because McClane goes all action hero, doesn't mean she's going to remarry him. This chick can survive on her own.

5. Argyle is the unaware limo driver offering suitable doses of comic relief and acts as a surrogate for the audience to relate to McClane.

6. Creepy eastern Europeans in a movie that comes out right after the end of the Cold War.

7. Reginald VelJohnson plays a great small time cop with big time loyalty. He is the only one who believes McClane and sticks with our hero, without even meeting face to face until the very end.

8. MacGuyver problem solving skills taken to a new level. McClane and Gennero play brilliant mind games against the terrorists, making many other action films appear formulaic and rather idiotic by comparison.

9. Those quriky stress-induced lines:

911 DISPATCH: This channel is reserved for emergency calls only.
MCCLANE: No F***g Sh** lady! Does it sound like I'm ordering a pizza!?

10. The only good movie from the 80s that John Hughes had nothing to do with.

The Gilmore Girls

are completely awesome. I can't stop watching. Somebody help me please, I have a paper to write.

A New Poet - Bridget Gray

String Theory, Take 1

I have some string.
At some point, I cut up this string into smaller strings,
although my amount of string is infinite.

Some of this string turns into twine, it
weaves with other pieces of string and ties itself,
well, ties itself to whatever I tell it too.

Some string is taught, rigid, strong,
unbreakable, and steady. This forest-green string travels
to the forest, to a house, to rooms, to a home. Most of this
string stays tied to the same place, well it used to.
Now, a piece knots in a hollow, another in a valley, a third to
a spa, and a fourth to Arizona. This is my favorite string.

My second favorite string is all blue. Blue is the color of choice.
These choice strings are conscious, tight, and permanent. There
are four of these strings. The oldest, wow,
the oldest mixes with the dark green, but lurches
to Virginia. The most unbreakable string, and though
muddied, has no cuts, frays, nor has it ever needed mending.
My shortest string is pure blue, and lives 10 blocks away in an attic.
A scary math class, music, and pizza created this one.
My longest string stretches to Asia, it too formed with music.
The newest string is tenuous, but strong. It lives in a hardware store with two dogs.

I don't know what to say about my other string.
I envision it daily, its clear, unclaimed structure, and through it,
peruse for paths across which to stretch my string, and
tie a double knot at a new location.
Sometimes, I find a newness, a novelty, but rarely
does its string survive an expiration date. That's ok,
if string were flying everywhere, I couldn't handle it.

But I still have this wavering string. It has the strong
color, like it's already claimed. Green and blue weaving into each other,
but also, also
a hint of blue-violet that is minimal, but prevalent.
I'm not sure what to do with this string, I'm not sure where to tie it,
if it is to be tied, or if it would even hold in place with super glue.
I'm ok with that. String should be dealt with carefully,
because when it unties, something is lost forever.

Sex Ed.

Today some girls and I were at work discussing dating and sex. To summarize objectively, I'll simply say that I admitted to never having a boyfriend. They went on to tell me the ways to attract a man. I said I didn't want just any man, but someone I found intellectually stimulating, someone I could talk with about theology, literature, etc. Looks weren't that important to me. The girls claimed I needed to date some duds to get some practice in. Hmm...they also said that waiting until marriage to have sex could be a silly thing.

But, there is something important about waiting, not just because God says we should, which is reason enough, but because indulging in sex nonchalantly diminishes its importance. If or when that time comes for me, it will be ground breaking because it signals an important connection and involves a heavy level of commitment. I'm not too brash or conservative or naive admitting that.

What Smo wants in her "love story"

• God's blessing
• Comfort
• Physical purity
  

Now, I'm not impatient for this to happen, if it supposed to then it will, whenever I am ready. My question is now, are these unrealistic desires? I am known to lose perspective sometimes, so perhaps I'm doing that now.

Some poetry practice

I miss writing poems,
not rhyming, a little rhythm,
a little nonsense,
a little bit of me.

But my metaphorical muse is absent,
wherever it may have gone.
I still enjoy words, love them as companions, as friends.

***

A HAIKU

A still, cool lake bed
shifts under strain from overhead
sky trees empty air.


*****

A BAND POEM

I've always liked tile over concrete better
than any frayed carpet, either flat or shaggy.
A little bit of clutter surrounding a round empty space
feels like home. Even better if there's monotonous chatter
that I hear but never listen to.
Yeah, that's my new happy place, or my old happy place renewed.
You can't really emulate that out here can you?
I've tried, but it hasn't worked out the way I thought it would.
But that's okay. In the interim, I'll stick to cherry wood
desks, meters, boxes, and alphabetic shelves.
Williams, you keep your red wheel barrow and silly chickens,
and I'll take surrogate parents, aunts and siblings.

I don't know why...

but I'm very happy and motivated today. I guess those prayers are starting to pay off.

I'm going to use this newfound bliss to be productive and thankful.

Yay!

Some Self Affirmation

Whenever I check facebook or myspace, I get cornered by those side margin ads to go on some sort of diet. I don't need to go on a silly diet to feel better about myself. I may not be the thinnest woman in the world, and gosh darn it, I don't want to be.

I like me, inside and out, and you silly ad men are just going to have to deal with that. Not only are your methods of targeting women for fad diets sexist and ethically flawed, but needlessly ubiquitous on the internet. Sure, I could be healthier, many of us could, but appealing to women's insecurities is in bad taste, no matter how profitable.

Your shady tactics don't fool me, and thanks to your superficial appeals, I'm laughing myself through the evening and not feeling a bit guilty for eating those 5 cookies earlier today. After all, it was Friday, and I needed some chocolate. I owe myself that much for putting up with your rubbish.

Pardon me, Mr Darcy, May I have a moment of your time?

I didn't get around to reading Pride and Prejudice until a few years ago. I looked at the task as a scholarly one, trying to broaden my horizons by studying literary periods I wasn't very familiar with. But, as is typical with most endeavors, I learned much more about myself than I did about liteary studies.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it is about this 20-ish girl, Lizzy Bennett, in late 18th century England. Lizzy has three younger sisters who are respectively a hermit, a boy crazy fashionista, and an impetuous tween. Lizzy's older sister Jane, however is quiet, reserved and endlessly kind. The novel follows Jane and Lizzy's stories of falling in love. Jane falls for the jovial and equally kind Mr Bingley. Bingley too, cares for Jane, but because Jane has made no indication of her affections, Bingley's BFF, the apparently snobbish and self-righteous Mr Darcy, convinces Bingley to stop pursuing Jane. Lizzy, who is calm, logical, and wittingly sarcastic throughout the novel, discovers Darcy's role in the affair shortly before Darcy admits to being in love wtih Lizzy. She is outraged, and rightly so, and sends him packing (not that he was sleeping over or anything, they didn't do that kind of stuff in Edwardian England). I won't ruin the tale by giving away the ending, but I will tell you that against my better judgement, I love this book.

While I admire Lizzy for her wise actions and continuous analysis of social situations, as well as her laugh out loud wit, I sympathize much more with Darcy. On the outside, he appears to be, well a complete snob, but under that facade, he struggles with protecting his best friend's feelings, feining off advances from Bingley's annoying sister, and logically approaching his love life. Throughout the novel (and the films), Darcy's role is an understated one, yet the writing (and acting) convey his underlying tensions and conflicts.

I guess I partly admire the old school gentlemanly-nesss Darcy projects, but I also know that most of the time I project an unanimated facade while much of my life dances by in my head, me as its only witness. In other words, I totally jive with Darcy's interiority. At the very least, I feel comfort in sympathizing with him because knowing that he thinks more than he says makes me feel a little less alone.

Let me more openly self-reflective for a moment. There's a lot that happens in my head that I never express or convey, a lot that I never share. That way of life has been with me for as long as I can remember, but lately, I've been chalking that up to social anxiety, and therefore deeming it a bad thing, thinking I should share my feelings more. But the more I consider it, I'm ok with living in my head, they like me here.

Still, I want to share me, all of me, with someone. I guess in a trite sort of way I'm ready to share my life with someone, but even more than that, I feel like I have a hole in my life somewhere, and my recognition of that gap has created such a longing in my heart that I can't find solace anywhere. This is not to say that the gap is sprititual, actually, God and I are doing fine, and we talk about this gap a lot. That doesn't make it any less painful, though.

To explain things a little differently, I feel whole as a sister, daughter, friend, worker, student, Christian, and other areas of my life. I don't feel like a whole woman, though. That might be a little anti-feminist of me, but that's how it is. I'm not sure I believe in soul mates or even that there is a perfect person in the world for all of us. I do believe that God has a plan for each of us, that He has one for me, and I take comfort in that. But this gap thing is new to me, it's like I miss something, that I'm mourning some sort of loss, but I don't know what it is.

I don't want you to read this as some sort of "I need a man" malady, but take it seriously. I'm struggling here with it, this sourceless pain I can't seem to shake, no matter how much I try.