Saw the Chronicles of Narnia: Lion, Witch & Wardrobe last night. Fucking ROCKED. It was uber-faithful to the book, with some minor things added for cinematic flair. I suppose the advantage of making a feature-length movie out of a children’s book is that you don’t have to worry about cutting out characters, plot elements, our HUGE chunks of the story (a la Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc.). The CGI was at times obvious, but still very well done. Voice characterization was great too. A lot of the scenery and events were exactly how I remember picturing them in my head when I read it years ago in elementary school. I’m definitely excited about the next six movies in the Chronicles series.
I did make the point to The Gill (he and I joined Hale to watch it) while watching it that New Zealand should change their national motto to: “All your cinematic blockbusters are belong to us.” since it seems that every movie of this type (Lord of the Rings I, II, III, Star Wars I, II, III, etc.) gets shot down there. Must be nice! *AND* they have penguins in New Zealand. I don’t know what I’m doing still living up here in the states.

On an unrelated note, this is the second day of my “sober-weekend,” which seems to be going pretty well. Partially for monetary reasons, but also for health reasons, I am avoiding alcohol and excessive partying for this weekend. I’ve partied pretty hard the past several weekends (and a few times during the week as well) and my brain was starting to feel mushy. The Jaegermeister probably had something to do with that, but I can’t be too sure. Yesterday I saw that movie, rented Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (pretty neat game), and just hung out here at home.

The chance to allow my body to recover a bit is definitely a nice opportunity. I swear after a night of heavy drinking, sometimes it would be difficult to tell the next day if I had completely metabolized all the alcohol or not. My state of mind when I am extremely tired is *very similar* to how I am when I’m inebriated, so that can be a little confusing. I felt I needed to give my body a rest for a few days so I can re-establish “square one” as a reference point.

Additionally, and this is somewhat more important, I wanted to see if I could do it. Like Massive Attack says about inertia: Alcoholism creeps, moving up slowly. Denial can be the worst enemy; While I honestly don’t think I have a problem, a lot of my friends have expressed concern about my drinking — albeit they think I drink a lot more than I do — nevertheless, I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a weekend off to clean up a bit. And I’ve been totally fine. I think I’m doing ok with respect to the task at hand.

I still have to finish this damned paper for my english class. This thing is turning out to be more of a pain than I had initially expected. When I saw it on the syllabus, I thought “hmm.. a paper discussing why you do or don’t like Wal-Mart, that’ll be easy!” — but it’s turned out to be a very elusive and slippery topic to really narrow down and write about. The topics I do want to rant about are generally things that are difficult to correlate explicitly, or are difficult to find sources. I don’t know that more time on this assignment would have really helped all that much — perhaps more FREE time on my part. Hence another good reason for me not to party this weekend. Get this damned thing completed.

There’s a show tonight, and while I know there won’t be any alcohol there, I think I’m going to skip it anyways so I can force myself to work on this school work. Got a chem study group for the next three days as well. My brain is going to be soooooo tired when wednesday evening finally hits, I will be all about partying.