July 2009 – Page 4 – The only certainty is bad grammar

an ode to “When Harry Met Sally”

Published: July 12, 2009 / Updated: July 12, 2009 Crystal humor, long, movie review

When harry met sally

“I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

– Harry Burns.

Last night i was feeling down about being single because i had just hung out with a crapton of happy families and their happy children, so i decided to watch the best, most honest, most inspiring movie ever made in regards to relationships: “When Harry Met Sally.”

cinema sigh.

the movie chronicles the relationship between harry and umm, sally. and how they randomly meet a couple times before finally getting their crap together and falling in love.

and along the way they address some of the common things men and women run into. right off they bat we have them talking about how men and women can never be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

Sally: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?

Harry: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too.

Then we move into the biological clock thing, which as soon-to-be 26-year-old woman, i have to sally’s perspective on the whole thing makes me feel pretty good about life. She claims it doesn’t really start to tick until you’re 36. phew.

and at one point sally and harry are talking about high maintenance women, and harry invents a category for sally that im pretty sure i fall into:

Sally: Which one am I?

Harry: You’re the worst kind; you’re high maintenance but you think you’re low maintenance.

Sally: I don’t see that.

Sally: You don’t see that? Waiter, I’ll begin with a house salad, but I don’t want the regular dressing. I’ll have the balsamic vinegar and oil, but on the side. And then the salmon with the mustard sauce, but I want the mustard sauce on the side. “On the side” is a very big thing for you.

Sally: Well, I just want it the way I want it.

Harry: I know; high maintenance.

and throughout the whole movie they play these little clips of couples talking about how they met. and some of them are CRAZY! like this one:

Woman: We feel in love in high school.

Man: Ya, we were high school sweet hearts

Woman: But then after our junior year, his parents moved away.

Man: But i never forgot her.

Woman: He never forgot me.

Man: Her face was burned on my brain.

Man: It was 34 years later when i was walking down broadway and i saw her.

Woman: And we both looked at each other and it was just as though not a single day had gone by.

Man: She was just as beautiful.

Woman: He was just the same. He looked exactly the same.

Umm. holy wow! it took them 34 YEARS to find each other again? and then when they did, they made it work! that’s nuts people. NUTS!

But the thing i love most about this movie is that all the different love stories (harry and sally, as well as the other ones woven throughout) give me hope that i don’t have live my life like a text book fairytale. that i can have a happy marriage to somebody i meet in an unconventional way. and that people who have ups and downs can come out on the other side mostly up.

now, of course, the BEST scene in the movie, and maybe the best scene ever made: Harry professing his love for sally:

life is weird

Published: July 11, 2009 / Updated: July 12, 2009 Crystal medium

first of all we need to talk about that one guy.

tis a boy i had completely blocked out of my pretty little head i tell you. but alas, today i was hanging out with some folk from the old Hanover Park neighborhood and they kindly refreshed my memory.

see, what happened was, this boy. and i used to make out and stuff in high school and he always want to do… well, you know.

but i didn’t do that.

(no. really).

and so one day i wrote him letter explaining that it was never going to happen.

except i was weird, so i went about including all sorts of statistics explaining why doing um, you know, as a teenager was a really, really stupid idea.

logic and reason i tell you.

feel free to sum up the high school experience of Crystal Lindell based on that story alone.

moving on, i hung out with a bunch of two year olds today.

it was birthday party for my friend justin’s child. and at first i was like, woah. im a loser. i have no potential of having a kid any time soon, at all. and it’s hard to be the crazy single person at a party full of happy families. and i feel like they’re all thinking “what is wrong with her? why isn’t she dating anyone?”

and i knew that i stuck out like an evergreen tree in the winter because i was able to talk about all the latest movies, something those with two year olds cannot do under any circumstances because taking 90 minutes to see a movie is as hard for them as finding a date is for me.

but then a few hours in, there was this crazy onslaught of poopy diapers. and all the parents were talking about how they have to wake up at 7 a.m. every day. and a couple of the moms were pregnant and one was saying that everything makes her gag while another was explaining labor to me.

and i was like, ya. im good for now.

it was kind of a surreal situation though because most of the fathers were guys i had spent craploads of time with in high school. and now, here they were REPRODUCING and being PARENTS! and when the heck did that happen?!

and really, who the heck am i kidding? i’d totally have a kid right now if i could just meet a non-loser who maybe didn’t cheat on me. i’ve heard men like that are out there, but as far as i can tell, none of them happen to be single at the moment.

in the meantime, i’ll continue to live vicariously through mommy bloggers, like dooce and erin i guess.

Lessons from Six Flags: People do change / being stubborn is lame

Published: July 10, 2009 / Updated: July 10, 2009 Crystal great america, im cool, Six Flags lessons

Instead of one post listing all the life lessons I learned at Six Flags Great America, I’m going to break it into multiple posts, because seriously people, THERE’S JUST SO MANY!

So, one of my lamest moments on this earth happened when i was 13 years old. I was at Great America with my friend Heather and she was begging me to go on the Batman. except i had heard some crazy story about people getting stuck on that ride for like 13 hours UPSIDE DOWN!

that’s crap, i thought in my little eighth-grade brain. and i did NOT want to take any chance whatsoever of that happening to me. so i refused to go on the ride with her.

let me tell you though, that girl begged me for like two hours straight, and i just stood there like an idiot repeating the word no. Despite the fact that i sat in the little seat on display and made sure it was totally safe, and the fact that the chances of me being on the ride when it got stuck upside down were about 4,000,000,000 to .5.and HOLY CRAP THERE WAS NO LINE! AND WE COULD LITERALLY JUST WALK ON! i still said no.

i was a stubborn little twit who refused to listen to reason. who refused to hear the facts and evaluate them and then change my mind.

and two years later, while riding in the front seat of the WAY SCARIER ragging bull, i knew that i had made the wrong decision to say no that night.

lucky for me, people do change.

i changed.

and i started listening to reason.

and when my friend shari had asked me to on the ragging bull, i listened to the facts and went on it. and it was SUPER FUN! and i’ve been totally hooked on roller coasters ever since.

my friend heather wouldn’t recognize me.

which i can only assume is a good thing. i mean, thank God i’m not the same person i was in junior high. that would totally suck.