Heh
I'm back from Cuernavaca! The whole thing turned out kind of hilarious, and I did get a few pics, so if any are viable I'll make a separate trip post. But just to go back and count some happinesses from before then, that I don't forget them:
The week before this (the trip) we were actually social, despite exhaustion from schedule upending and painting issues. Saturday we went shopping all day for travel odds and ends with R's sis, ate candy (looks like I have a predilection for licorice and cream together) and splurged on M.Y. China knowing there'd be no Chinese food in Mexico - damn their wild boar noodles were good. Super savory, not gamey at all - and then headed to Death Guild where my friend L was celebrating her bday ^^ Haven't been to Death Guild in 13 years (My first date with R :P) and it was endearing to see the gothies haven't all disappeared from here yet! Her friends seemed cool and it was awesome to see her doing fine. We of an age are all a giant class together, and I like seeing others in that class coming up alongside me! Then we stopped by her place to say hi to her hubs and many critters, and I remembered how awesome a reader her hubs is, and what wonderful feedback on my writing i got from him last year, which got me back to thinking about my writing when I got home, where I pooped out a few new ideas and got all happy about my book projects again ^^
That Sunday, got to hang out with some friends from Shadowrun, pig out on asian wings, play rock band, watch 2 seasons of Yamishibai (fun, creepy little mini-stories, and yes I squealed a bit) and a few episodes of Community, including one of the infamous D&D episodes (honestly a funny show! I'm a bit weirded out by the main narrative overall, but I'll probably watch more. The D&D one was friggin' awesome), and watch M's cute tiny doggie cavort around her home turf. It was a great way to relax after all the stressed out stuff preceding and M and A are both lovely ^^
Let's see...I got kinda pressured into watching The People vs. O.J. Simpson; I didn't think it would be terrible, but since I hadn't been all that affected by the trial when it happened (being like 12 at the time) I wasn't expecting it to be super interesting...and I was kinda pleasantly mindblown by it! They really teased out the drama in great, focused directions - laughing over how ludicrous the manipulation in the court got and just how weird O.J.'s whole deal was, while remembering the undercurrent of racial tension and symbolism. Almost all the lawyer characters were fleshed out into real people (and O.J. himself taking on this weird characterization of half Lenny from Mice and Men, half psychopath). In the beginning I was like myyyyeeehhh about some of the casting but I liked it all by the end - Poor "I make everyone sad for me" David Schwimmer made Robert Kardashian's character extra sympathetic, the fact that Cuba Gooding Jr. was himself a black celebrity around the same time as OJ added an interesting dimension to the character (even though he didn't look for one second like actual OJ to me), Ito and Cochran melted into their roles and Sarah Paulson and Sterling Brown made excellent protagonists - not least because Sarah Paulson has a silver screen sort of charm with her frank face and proper speech that really brought me back to the 90s, and Sterling totally brought me back to the age of earnest young black actors and 90s movies XDDD Even John Travolta was fun, even though he looked nothing like his character and is in general so weird that he sucks in all the attention in a scene like a black hole - the weirdness coupled with his imposing role worked, and made me giggle! The only thing I didn't like was how they kept sticking in Kardashian's daughters like they were relevant to the story. Annoyingly unnecesary. But really, when Cochran decided to redecorate and Coolio blasted on, I laughed my ass off XD
So yeah, good watch! I was totally there when the real thing happend (as I recall I was in my bedroom trying to fix a weird pachinko machine my dad had bought at the flea market while watching the white bronco chase) but since I was so young (and really didn't feel tied to it along racial lines) it didn't really pop that much for me. Back then I had no real feelings either way towards OJ (not being into sports), I had no idea if the dude was guilty (though as things have turned out I'm pretty sure now he was :P) and I just didn't care that much; I thought it was super weird that it was a big thing in the black community. I was like, "well he either did it or he didn't, it's not like he represents the entire black race, and if he's guilty you guys are gonna have a lot of egg on your faces: :P This series kinda brought the whole thing back alive and made me consider its unprecedented nature (will anything like that car chase happen again?) a lot more than I did in '94 :P Also, remembering Dave Chapelle's parody work about high profile black celebrity court cases just reconfirms Chapelle's genius. That shit was RELEVANT and FRESH.
"I'm sorry your honor, my blackness will not allow me to make that statement" XDDDDD