What're You Going to Do Today, Napoleon?

so if you'll remember from yesterday's post, i was not a happy camper. fire and brimstone were raining down, i didn't have my umbrella, and the girlscouts were once again selling cookies. those damn samoas are so friggin' addictive... anywhoo, today is a much better day, and indeed yesterday evening helped to in part heal me. what were the ingredients of this miracle cure, i hear you asking?

1. pizza for dinner

2. cake for dessert

3. napoleon dynamite

i love pizza. i don't tend to eat a lot of white flour, etc., or carbs in general, due to that whole "insulin dependent diabetes" thing. hence, it is a treat to indulge every now and then, and pizza is a positively sinful decadence. thin rolled crust topped with sugary tomato sauce, fattening cheese, and all manner of pork products. then it is baked until it reaches that perfect stage of development, where a sheen of grease overlays the bubbling cheese, which has crisped and blistered ever so slightly around the edges. the pepperoni is wonderfully thin and salty, and the crust holds together, but is moist and chewy. read my lips; i love pizza. i would marry it if i could. no no no... that would be too much of a good thing. i would marry eggplant, but pizza would be my lover on the side. a scandalous pleasure.

in fact, i would try and suggest a threesome with me, eggplant, and pizza. a delicious and completely talmudically frowned upon unholy union of allowed and illegal delights, an eggplant parmesan pizza. if i could swing it, i would make sure to take pictures and frame them, so i could always remember it.

if pizza is a rare decadence, cake... cake is like heaven on earth. i salivate when i hear the word cake, like one of pavlov's adorable dogs. i can achieve orgasm by walking through the door of a bakery. something about white flour combined with sugar and yeast, and then baked at four4 hundred degrees... a chemical change takes place that defies all attempts at description. somehow, earthly goods morph into the closest one comes to the kingdom of heaven while still attached to a physical vessel. there is something about cake, that just makes it... mmmaaahlahlahl... like sex with icing. i never, NEVER have cake. even when its available, the fact that it is like insta-death for me makes for difficulty in justifying it. but oh, when i do have it... i need to change my drawers afterwards. moist, rich, sweet cake, full of chunks of pineapple, with fluffy, coconut flavored cool-whip frosting...

i digress. but suffice it to say, last night, food actually did make things better.

then there was napoleon dynamite.

everyone who has seen this movie has said it is the best thing ever. my brother loves it, my sister loves it, my best friends love it, my highschool art teacher is positively obsessed with it. in short, this is a movie that i have needed to see for many months. but i never get around to seeing movies, even though i love them. so last night, rachel bought the damn thing on dvd and we watched it while eating pizza and drinking soda. i think it is without a doubt one of the funniest things i have ever seen. holy fuck, but it made me laugh, and laugh, and laugh, so often, for so long... it was good. it was real good. it was the kind of good where you're sure you must be doing something illegal, its so good. it was sodomy good. and i like me my sodomy...

it is also, without a doubt, the strangest movie i have seen in recent history. and it has such wide appeal, that there is almost a subversive aspect to it. like, all these kids fell in love with this movie, without even being thrown by the fact that it is an amazing piece of film-making. it creates a utah-universe that is bizarre and insular and wholly contained. every time a new character appears, there is a quiet question in you; will they fall into this universe as well? or will they be the ones to break this spell and reassert the reality we all are used to? and they fall in. the universe of the film consumes all reality, so wholly and fully, that you are not even allowed to find your feet until the credits are over and the treat at the end has passed.

and one of the best parts is that this whole universe, this spectacularly successful world, is obviously crafted on a shoestring budget, and revolves around the most bizarre set of people to populate a film in a long, long time. and it all succeeds because it is so, fucking, funny. it is an epic film about tiny tiny people. there are all the highpoints of a classic feelgood movie; the heroes all meet with success, the villains are vanquished, moral rectitude triumphs over shallowness and emptiness, and the main character, in all his goofy, t-shirt tucked into jeans patheticness, is a savior to himself, his friends, and his family. it is a most bizarre realization to come to. and a frightening measure of the utter success that this film is.

in short, if you want to laugh so hard you cry, and at the same time gain a ridiculously honest and effective look into a world where the beautiful people are very far away, and if you want to feel so profoundly uncomfortable that you squirm even as you soil yourself in glee, this movie is for you.

i am utterly in love with it.

being a loser never felt so good.