Monkey War 2
Yep, that's the name of the movie we saw last night. I have a feeling that I'm a bad influence on the otherwise intelligent people at BioSoft. Before me, none of them knew about the weekly dose of strange Hong Kong cinema that played right in their backyards, but we were a mini-crowd of our own last night. A party of eleven isn't bad at this thing (it's twice the total crowd of some I've gone to).

(I suppose I should comment on the main character's tendency to take the forms of varioius women he meets, but I won't beyond noting that he does. Enjoy any irony you find in it)

There was me, of course, and Jen & Carlos, and Carter. Lizzie and her husband showed up, but I don't seem them coming back. Mark and his girlfriend, maybe, especially after I told them it looks like this was another kids' movie, but the good stuff with well-choreographed punching and kicking would be on tonight. Dimitri and Sam looked like they weren't having a good time at all. Maureen, I don't know. I think she was just trying to suck up... Well, maybe that's harsh, but ingratiate herself with the other folks at work. We wound up in the restroom together after the movie, and she asked if I was into the whole kung fu and sci-fi thing before I started to work there. I said I was, big time, and she looked kind of relieved. "I've never really spent much time with these science and computer types, so I'm just absolutely lost half the time. Even when they're not talking about work, it's like a foreign language to me."

I sort of just grunted because, truth be told, I hadn't gone in there to chat, but to empty my bladder. She picked up right where she left off after nature's call had been answered, though, even when we joined the group, and she said hanging out with the geeks wasn't so bad. That sort of quieted everyone down, leaving her like "what, weren't you calling yourself geeks and dorks and nerds earlier?"

Mark's girlfriend put it succinctly, that it was kind of like the n-word - then, realizing Carter was in the group, quickly adding that obviously it wasn't as severe, not even close, and really she feels like such an ass for even making the comparison. Carter stopped her before she died of embarassment, saying that it wasn't a bad analogy - sometimes okay from inside the circle, seldom from outside, and even inside there were folks who didn't like it. "But, yeah, not as big a lightning rod."

That wasn't the biggest scene, though - we were just getting to the cars when Sam tripped after her heel got caught in a sewer grate, and she just threw a fit about how she hated being short, and wished she had somewhere else to go other than Dimitri's place, and when he held her hand and told her it would be all right, she whimpered something about wanting to go home. Threw in some Russian swearwords she must have picked up from Dimitri, too, before they got in his car and drove off.

Carter and I got rides home from Jen & Carlos; it would have been awkward sitting in the back seat with him if I lived more than five minutes away and Jen didn't have the Sam-and-Dimitri show to gossip about. Said it must really suck to date Dimitri, because even as much as she'd freaked at flying and been kind of uncomfortable back when they took that trip in November, she'd been tough about it. I had to agree; I'd only met her a few times, but she didn't seem the crying type. Carter pointed out that she was just a kid, and that could change from day to day. Carlos remembered that we had theorized on her being a runaway at some point, and wondered if maybe she wasn't just looking for a reason to go home.

I worried about her as I tried to fall asleep last night. I'm surviving being cut off from my life, even doing a little better than getting by. I try to compare Sam and the guy in my original body, assuming we're right about Sam having been a runaway. The idea that both of them were apparently so dissatisfied with their lives that they chose to leave them behind... I can't really imagine that. My life's never been perfect, but there's been no appeal to the clean break with it at all.

-Marti
- posted 4:48 PM - - (archive use only)