Still… does it really mean anything to be thirty?  I mean, things certainly won’t be changing that much.  Back to school, back to the same old apartment, back to homework and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all the things I loved as a 20-something. But there’s something about milestones like this - nice, round, divisible-by-five numbers that seem to signal a bend in the road, a big change - whether real or imagined.  30 sounds like a grown up’s age.  Yet here I am - having quit my grown up job and headed off back to school for what is promising to be a pretty long tour.

It’s funny (not funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar, but more like funny I-just-might-cry) to think about how little my current life resembles what I had planned around that last nice, round milestone.

And while I am excited about the fact that I am now Aunt Jenny (the only aunt until my other brother or her brother gets married), the fact that I just plain don’t get babies has not changed at all.  Everyone leaves all these comments: "She’s beautiful!"  "She has her mom’s face!"  "She has her dad’s eyes!"  I never understand that.  In general, I can’t tell one baby from another.  They all pretty much look like babies to me.  I never see the parental attributes that everyone talks about.  And sure she’s cute - babies are cute.  When’s the last time you saw a baby and recoiled in disgust from that hideous creature?  I don’t think so.

I much prefer kids when they start to be able to interact with you on higher intellectual levels.  I want to have a conversation with someone.  That’s why I don’t generally coo and make baby noises - I tend to provide the baby’s sardonic inner monologue.  I view it as a public service for the baby - and for the world.

Anyway, I’m going out to visit said brand new baby in a couple of weeks.  Let the aunt-ly corruption begin!

Big Mistake.

Obviously there would be adjustments going from page to screen, there always are.  And some of them were so bizarrely inconsequential, I couldn’t figure out why they did it - for example - the Great Elector’s name and nationality were changed from Italian to German.  Why?  No reason I could see.  And the camerlengo (who was still said to have been raised in Italy) was played with an Irish/Scotch dialect.  I’m pretty sure Ewan could have tackled the Italian, why change it?  Still - some of the changes were worthwhile.  The most interesting, I thought, was the treatment of the Hassassin in the movie.  As I read it, I thought to myself over and over - how can they portray this character as written in any socially responsible way in this day and age?  The answer: they couldn’t.  I thought it was a wise decision to change his ethnicity - a Middle Eastern zealout terrorizing the center of the Western church just stirs up a lot of things we don’t need to stir right now.  However, I’m not sure why they had to make him a mercenary instead of a believer.  Perhaps it just would have been too difficult to portray his inner satisfaction, and making him cold and disconnected made him simpler.

One thing that bugged me about the movie in a big way is that they all but deleted Vittoria’s character.  In the book she was part of the action, but in the movie, she felt like she was there merely to acknowledge that the screenwriter had, indeed, read the book and knew that the character existed.  They removed her parental attachment and all personal investment in the events.  She was just a chick trying to fix a battery (random unimportant change to the story) - who, *SPOILER - sorta* in the end, couldn’t.  In the book she was tough and interesting and active - heck she even did some serious violence, but in the movie she was purely a prop - not even a plot device, just a prop.

All the backstory was gone from the characters too.  Vittoria’s father, the Camerlengo’s father - gone.  CERN - almost entirely gone.  Max Kohler - gone.  I can respect the Max Kohler deletion - he is so separate from the rest of the action, it was a logical piece to remove, but he was interesting in the book, and I would have liked to see him brought to life.

The biggest omission, in my opinion, was the role of the media.  In the book, the way things were gobbled up and leaked and commodicized and blown out of proportion by the media was essential to the scope of the story - and especially to the Camerlengo’s storyline.  I missed that angle.  But perhaps Hollywood wasn’t willing to portray the media as "the arm of anarchy."

One thing the movie did very well that I think the book did not was communicating the sense of urgency.  There’s an hour between each murder - which is not a lot of time.  In the book you have pages of thinking and arriving at the answer, but the movie did a great job of portraying the how frantic and brief those windows really were.Oh… and I was super pissed about one particular piece of the plot that was entirely changed.  No one reads this blog, but I’ll put a spoler alert here now just in case some hapless google searcher stumbles across and actually reads this far.  So SPOILER ALERT.

ONE OF THE CARDINALS FRIGGIN’ LIVES.  Are you kidding me?  And a bunch of strangers came together to save him.  Isn’t that sweet?  But it’s completely wrong!  The whole point is that all four of the preferiti are destroyed!  I was really bothered by this.

END SPOILER

So, in all - okay movie based OH SO LOOSELY on a much better book.  Tom Hanks is still hopelessly miscast, but I thought he was better in this one than The DaVinci Code (oh - and this book was written first, so I was really annoyed with the need to reference the events from DaVinci.  Unneccesary.)  In general, though, I would say that the rest of the movie was well cast and I thought Ewan McGregor did a good job with the sketch of a character they allowed to survive from the book.  It was worth seeing, but if you have a choice whether or not to reread the book before you see the movie, do yourself a favor: DON’T.

Last night was the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner - an event where Stephen Colbert famously roasted Bush and the whole administration to a rather uncomfortable audience, who apparently don’t watch his show.  And it seems that Obama overshadowed Wanda Sykes’ keynote just a bit, as it’s his jokes that are getting most of the attention:

Dick Cheney was among the Washington elite not in attendance.  The former vice president was busy, President Barack Obama joked, working on his memoir "tentatively titled, How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People.’ "

His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, Obama observed, always has a hard time on Mother’s Day. "He’s not used to saying the word ‘day’ after ‘mother,’" Obama said.

To Michael Steele, chair of the RNC: "Michael for the last time, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout," Obama told Steele. "Rush Limbaugh does not count as a troubled asset, I’m sorry."

He’s the president, people… he can afford good writers!

Of course, the real news was blown open by the likes of Sean Hannity & co., and makes your blood run cold.  Apparently a few days ago, President Obama ordered a cheeseburger with… it’s almost too terrible to say it… dijon mustard instead of ketchup.  So that’s why he was so funny at the Correspondents’ dinner.  He had to try to distracte us from the fact that he hates America.  Seriously, the fact that three separate shows felt the need to criticize the man’s condiment choice is proof positive that we do not need 24 hour news networks.  When you have nothing important to say… just shut the hell up.

Of course, what do I know?  I’m a vegetarian… Gosh… can you imagine what they would say about an openly vegetarian president?  Suddenly Boca Burgers would be equal to the plague of locusts.

I’m in the midst of a project doing a postcolonial read of Henry V, a paper doing a feminist analysis of Big Love, a dramaturgical project for The Women of Lockerbie and a paper about… something neoclassical… that I’m pretty sure is going to be one of those papers that just gets done, but never gets good.  That happens from time to time.

In the midst of all this, I’ve suddenly gotten this odd cough that seems to be coming from somewhere in the region of my soul… so of course I’ll go ahead and assume that I contracted swine flu from the bananas that I purchased today.  What good are pesticides if they don’t keep out swine flu huh?

And hey, while I’m on swine flu…

Is it insensitive that every time I see a headline saying that "WHO is worried about a pandemic," I just assume that it’s some sort of macabre Abbott and Costello routine?

Okay… I really should go back to typing.  I am pretty certain I would be upset to learn how much I spent this past year on printer cartridges.  And next year… oooh… I can just tell it’s gonna get ugly!  My little Epson is going to be earning its keep around Thesis time.  Oh yeah.

Now to figure out what said thesis will be about…

ACK!  Stop!  Go write!  This is not productive!

Earth isn’t looking so good lately.

Ya know, I wonder if the current climate of total worldwide crapitude has led to more or fewer UFO sightings.  You know, as an extra terrestrial, do you look at this and say, "Wow… there’s going to be some real estate opening up there soon!  And you know it’s gonna be cheap!" or do you say, "Dude… they have REALLY screwed that place up.  I’m not touching that with a 4.73 light year glaxnar (that’s the galactic equivalent of a 10 foot pole)."

Me… I’m okay with the end of the world.  I mean, I probably can’t have much personal effect on the bees or the North Koreans or the peanut butter.  All I ask… is please let me finish my degrees first.  If I’m half way done with my dissertation and the world ends… I’m gonna be PISSED!

But yesterday - two days before the beginning of the semester - I received an email telling me they would not be moving any of the classes, and they’d be switching me to a TA assignment for a professor I’ve never met.  This would mean that I would not be able to attend one of the classes required for my program.  Of course, the class "might" be offered next semester, so I could try to take it then, and just take another class now (there are none in which I am remotely interested).  Or, I can take this highly discussion based class as an independent study.  So, I’m stuck with "the fuzzy end of the lollipop," as one of my professors put it.

Me, I think it’s bigger than a lollipop.  It’s more as if I have a metaphysical "Kick Me" sign permanently affixed to my aura, and the universe does its very best to follow directions every chance it gets.

So Monday - when the rest of my classmates are beginning a class on critical theory, I’ll be TAing for a class for which I haven’t even seen a syllabus or met the professor or found the classroom… all I know is that it has 100 students.

So far, 2009 can kiss my ass.

And boy howdy… it worked.