It’s almost here. I’ve got yummies in the oven, PB on the way with extra champagne and a headache sneaking at the back of my head. It’s all looking good.

I think Al and I are going to have a quiet evening together, with PB passing through, and then we’ll go and greet the new year in city centre. It’s only 5 minutes ride on the bus and we’re there so why not.

But you never really know how quiet an evening you’re going to spend until you wake up the next morning. Last time I thought I was going to have a nice quiet evening I woke up getting flashbacks of me and H staggering home at 4am, eating snow along the way. Not to worry – the thick snow had just fallen, so no yellow nowhere.

So what will the new year bring for me?

I will have my first meaningless and stricken with hopelessness twenty-something birthday.

With any luck I will graduate from university and get my BA degree.

Summer has to be spent working, but with the recession and everything I have no idea whatsoever how that’s going to work out.

And in autumn I will have to decide whether or not to go to school again. I would love to go and study something that I will actually be able to benefit from, something practical that will allow me to work with my hands. But, yet again, the recession has teeth and they might bite hard.

So who knows. But it will be a pretty interesting year, that 2010.

It seems that I’m on a roll with these art entries. I couldn’t help myself, I found this photorealist who painted butts. Women’s butts. And I have one of those! So I had to write about it and share some images.

At the risk of sounding kinky:

nice, eh?

I really like his work. The sketchy and angular less than moral contorted figures. I think this is one of the reasons I like Aeon Flux as much as I do. You know, because the figures are very much like Schiele’s.

It wasn’t as exciting as Twilight, but it was still pretty good. In the sense that it was a pretty good movie about hot people doing hot stuff, catering yet again to the immortal pubescent girlie girl dormant in my otherwise oh-so-grown-up self.

I did laugh though. Which makes me feel kind of good – to be able to laugh at that movie and therefore at myself (I have to say I have mastered that last skill).

I laughed when Edward (could somebody dim the lights and put some Barry on for this one?)…

…entered the scene in slow-mo…

…with his shirt open and left for the naughty wind to play with…

…looking sexy as hell, yet in a casual, effortless way that says: “I know I’m sizzlin’ hot… But I don’t care… Which makes me even hotter… But I don’t care… I’m just Edward…”

…and all the girls fell silent in the movie theatre. The silence was penetrated only by the little gasps given out from time to time from the lips of little girls in heat. I giggled my ass off. Eva shared my sense of humor. Thank God.

But I enjoyed the movie despite its lacking in plot, character development and other such itsy-bitsy details. I am not a fool: I knew exactly what it was I was going to watch when I bought the tickets. I wanted to see hot people doing hot stuff and hot was what I got. I got loads of hot. Truckloads.

So I am totally satisfied and ready for Eclipse.

PS I cannot get over Taylor Lautner’s bod. YUM-E!

I truly was glued to the seat. I had a Pepsi, but I didn’t dare drink it – what if I had to pee? I’d lose three valuable minutes! And the CGI… Oh my! What a world they have created. If I had the chance to go live on Pandora I’d do it in a heartbeat. The Na’vis and the rest of the creatures on Pandora exemplify my idea of perfect harmony, something that should be ours as well, and no doubt, once was (or at least could have been) but is lost now.

It was a wonderful thing to see.

Yes, there were drawbacks. I’m not totally blind. It was black and white, it was naive, it was made simpler than it should have been, but I get why they couldn’t have made it more real. In the sense that in real life the end would not have been as victorious on the good guys’ side as it was in Avatar. If it was real, Pandora would have been nuked without anyone even considering thinking about spending a dime on something less brutal.

Wait. IF it was real? Shut the f*ck up. It IS real. It’s not happening on Planet Fantasy or Makebelief Moon, it’s happening right here on Mother Earth and I don’t see a happy ending waving hello.

So I get why it was made so simple.

Because who would want to see Avatar – a film that is basically shouting at us that we are ignorant money-junkies who only care about the me and nothing else, showing us that the very thing that we are is destroying the potential in us to become something more –

…if it would not have a happy ending?

…if it would not end with the audience giving out a major league sigh of relief?

…if we’d actually see that we are NOT off the hook, but that we ARE responsible for a lot of destruction and that there’s a whole lot of bad karma whooshing out of our every orifice?

Who would want to see the truth?

…

You know what?

Maybe it was meant to be so naive. So that when people see it they would recognize the fact that it is too naive. Maybe they would see that this ‘good conquers all’ mentality is suitable for kindergarten. And maybe, just maybe, people will then realize that it is real. The nuking of Pandora is happening. And one day it will end. But it will not end good. They would see that this movie is a wish, but that it is one that will never come true.

Or maybe I’m just searching for something that is nowhere to be found. I tend to do that a lot so I would not be surprised. But even if my epiphanies are only relevant to me, it’s a win-win situation, because my brain is not a machine gun and no-one must die after I’m done thinking.

Whichever way anyone ever wants to put it, for me it was beautiful. And it was sad.

Exactly what I needed – another totally pointless pastime to get me to station Braindead.

It took me a long time to accept Facebook. I didn’t see much of a point in being there (actually, I still don’t). I watched my sis play Farmville and felt bad for her, seeing her ploughing and planting stuff on a virtual farm like it mattered somehow to do it.

I said to myself: “Maria, you are so smart to stay away from nasty habits such as playing Farmville, because with your nonexistent willpower you would surely be stuck at your computer at all possible times, planting pumpkins and whatnots, earning points and money that have no real value anywhere but in your little head that doesn’t grasp the big picture. Good girl, yay.”

And then I decided to give Facebook a chance. And since I found absolutely nothing to do there, I thought: “what the heck, I’ll just pop into Farmville for a sec and see what all the fuss is about.”

Surely you can see where this is headed.

Yes, I’m a Farmville junky. I cannot resist planting little raspberries and strawberries and cotton and daffodils and wheat and buying cows and sheep and chickens and putting them in the den and getting presents and putting them under the Christmas tree and harvesting apple trees and lemon trees and peach trees and getting money for it all and buying more stuff and sheltering animals and hatching mystery eggs and Jesusiambonkers.

That was fun.

It’s quite odd that when Tom Cruise tries to kill Hitler it’s crap but when Brad Pitt tries it you go: “YAY! Bring that bitch down!” But then again it’s Tarantino. It might just be the default reaction.

Watched Cry Baby again and this song just got stuck in my head. I can’t escape it. I am constantly humming/singing/annoying the hell out of Al.

Helmi-Elfriide Arrak is a friend of mine from high school art classes. I have always admired her flowing, smooth style. Looking at her work (especially in pencil) leaves the impression that it has been done in one long stroke. At least that’s how I have always felt. Now that she has studied art more thoroughly for a few years, her work has evolved anatomy-wise. She is more precise, but still in that cool flowing way. And I love the way she uses colors. Even when she is copying Klimt or whoever, she makes it her own thing.

Helmi will rule the world one day, I have no doubt.

At this point I cannot stand it.

I understand what is funny and I laugh and all that noise, but I hate the characters. The humor is built upon people’s quirks, the subtle (or not so subtle) weirdness of each individual. And I’d love the show if I felt sorry for the lead guy Larry David, if I thought “Oh, poor Larry, look at all those freaks you have to deal with”, but he is just as freaky and annoying! So I don’t sympathize with any of them and that makes this sort of show intolerable for me.

I get embarrassed when watching these shows and I hate that feeling. So in truth, the show itself isn’t bad, but the feeling I get from it makes me hate watching it. Yes, that’s the best way I can put it.

It has happened before that something I really really hate at first kind of grows on me and eventually I start loving it. I won’t say that this show doesn’t have a chance at that scenario, cause weirder things have happened in this world. But I will say that for now I am not touching that with a ten-foot pole. And if my boyfriend, who, by the way, loves the show, makes me watch it again in the near future, I might just smack him right across the face.