Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Best Year Ever



A few weekends ago I went to the Mississippi Street Fair. I met up with my bestie Rose, her boyfriend, and a couple of their friends there. It's the kind of thing I love to do: walk and talk with friends, drink everyone's leftover lemonade, and look at cool stuff for sale. As you can see it was ridiculously crowded, also hot and sunny (my faves!), but awesome nonetheless.

Apparently all I do is go to markets and street fairs lately? Yes.








I'm really going to miss Portland. The year+ I've spent here has been, arguably, the best time of my life. It's almost impossible to judge those kinds of things, and I acknowledge that, but I feel like I've at last come into my own over the past year -- at least, begun to come into my own. I've never lived in a new city before, and to do that on my own, just Greg and me, to find a new job and fall in love with a new place and learn the city and make new friends, has been probably the most fulfilling and amazing thing I've done so far in my life.

I can't even believe I'm going to be leaving in under two months. I can't believe it. I feel like I just got here, just started to grow little roots, and now I'm up and leaving again. Damn you wanderlust! Yes, the impending UK adventure will be incredible, but I will miss Portland so much. I've had so much fun here it's impossible to express in words. I've grown as a person, met fantastic new people, shown my parents around my new city and new home (which I'd never done before and it was so fun), and generally blossomed into a whole new Meg. I feel like my life has been so rich and vibrant so far, and I can't wait to see what happens in the next year. I can't fucking wait.


Monday, July 25, 2011

Titan A.E.



You know what's a vastly underrated movie? Titan A.E. This is probably because nobody has seen it, because the people I know who have seen it really like it (except Greg, who is silly and only just saw it for the first time today).

Anyway, I was in the mood for some kind of dystopian sci fi movie, and since I couldn't get all the way through Blade Runner (it was just as bad the second time, sorry Dad), I decided I'd watch Titan A.E. for the like, fifth time. Admittedly it's not really a dystopian story, at least that's not how I'd describe it, but it involves humans roaming the vastness of space without a home planet, so that's downer enough for me. Plus, voice actors include Bill Pullman and Matt Damon! Watch this shiz.







This movie rules. The soundtrack is just as amazing. I should be in bed right now but I'm writing this instead. Tomorrow I will be all, "what was I thinking."



Monday, July 18, 2011

Pike Place



So I went to Seattle over the weekend! It was pretty awesome. I went with some girl friends, and we had a triumphant time. We spent most of Saturday at Pike Place Market, and then spent the night dancing and avoiding sweaty creepers. It was brilliant! I'm too tired to write about it right now, so here are some photos. Mostly from Pike Place.






















One of my favorite places to go at Pike Place is the comic book store. It is badass! They had a bunch of Doctor Who stuff, which I wanted to buy, but it must've been imported or something because that shiz was expensive. I'll wait 'til I get to London, thanks!

Speaking of London, I called Brunel University today on the way to work. The woman I spoke to was super helpful and sweet, and her accent made me pee myself. No joke. I kept trying to do impressions of her to my friends but I just couldn't do her justice. I hope everybody in England speaks in such dulcet tones... which they will. Because I am OBSESSED with that place. It's bordering on the creepy.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Beer and Alistair



Rough-arse day at work today, so I promptly settled down to leftover pad thai, Cold Smoke Scotch Ale (om nom Montana beer!), Arrested Development on Netflix streaming, and complete lack of natural light or talking on the phone. Glorious!

Last night I drew a picture of Alistair, my favorite character from Dragon Age: Origins and number one fictional man crush of the moment. He is so fabulous, hilarious, and adorably sensitive; he had to have been written by a woman. Behold:




That's it today, just a tiny update until I feel like vomiting words again. And for those who have mentioned it (like two people), I will continue to update here in regards to my London adventure. Yay! It would be silly not to write about it, I decided, so stay tuned for that in late September. Cheers!

Monday, July 11, 2011

the real world sucks



Lately I've been completely immersed in the unreal. Well, take "unreal" as you will -- for me, worlds of the fantastical and the long past have always been more interesting and worth spending time in than the "real world," and in that sense feel more real to me than any ordinary earth existence could. So, in normal terms, lately I've been hanging around in some completely fake, made-of-pixels, fantasy worlds that are more fun to me than anything reality could offer. And it is glorious.

Most recently I've begun exploring the world of Mass Effect. This exploration immediately follows a full playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins and three playthroughs of Dragon Age 2, both of which take place in an epic fantasy pseudo-medieval world. So the transition from that to Mass Effect, a futuristic space fantasy (yes, I'd call it fantasy over sci fi, but that's debatable), was an abrupt one. That said, I'm finding myself completely at ease in this new world of high-speed transportation, slow elevators, and spaceships-as-cities. It was an immediate attraction, an almost drunken stagger of lust into this new world's arms, spurred primarily by the music on the game's main menu screen. From that moment, I knew this was going to be a beautiful foray into the truly spacey and fabulous.





Anyway, I digress -- kinda. This isn't a review of a game or anything; it's a review of the feelings that arise when I game. I feel wrong just calling it "gaming," because it's always more than that for me (well, sometimes it is just about gaming, when playing Tetris or Peggle for example, but it's actually impossible for those games to be much more than colorful shapes and balls bouncing around)-- it's an immersion into a story, another world, where the life of another person (or persons) becomes my own. Their history becomes my history, their worries are taken on as my own, and their life goals become as important to me as if they were part of my earth-bound existence.

When I was younger, around my early teen years, it seemed like everything I indulged in -- be it books, movies, games, or tv shows -- spoke to me on a deep emotional level, something that can't be described in words, especially not on this blog such as it is. Most of my favorite books of all time were read while I was a young teenager, books that could never impact me now the way they impacted me then. So when I discover something now that can affect me even a fraction as acutely as books and stories used to when I was younger, it means the world to me. That's one of the reasons I love Doctor Who so much, because it reaches me on a fundamental level that very few things reach in me these days. I really miss that feeling, the feeling that everything I took in meant something and would always mean something, and I feel like I've spent my life looking for the thing that will give that feeling to me, again and again, without diminishing returns. The Lord of the Rings is one of the things that makes me cry every time I read it or watch the movies, because I remember what it was like to feel it so deeply in my bones that it hurt. Nothing ever affects me like that story, and I doubt anything ever will.



What I love about Mass Effect, then, from literally like... the hour I've spent playing (I just started!), is that it appeals to the part of me that feels things like younger Meg used to feel. The music, Citadel, the fantastic space opera-ness of it all... it's magic. It makes me feel wonder again, like I'm about to embark on an epic adventure into the unknown. It excites me. And while that adventure may not be "real," by the definition of the term, it feels more real to me than anything I can touch in the physical world. So for me, it's real enough.