my heart is a glorious machine;

Today I was attacked by my own bedroom.

Sometimes I have these really stupid impulsive ideas. At about eleven thirty tonight, the stupid idea was: My glasses have been missing for a couple of weeks. I am sure they slipped into the terrible jungle that is under-the-bed and I will find them in two minutes if I actually look instead of shoving my hand down there and waggling it back and forth for a few seconds.

Learned Thing I: Under The Bed is a very, very terrifying place, far more terrifying than I had previously imagined. It is a place of death and I am never going down there again if I can help it. I am afraid to clean under there now because I think it might eat me. 

Learned Thing II: When I was eleven, I fit rather comfortably under the bed. I am nineteen now, have a slightly different bedframe setup, and, more importantly, have acquired copious amounts of bosom. I can no longer get more than my head and shoulders under the bed. At all.

Learned Thing III: Mattresses are really heavy. Boxsprings are even heavier and they hurt when they fall on you. You should not attempt to move them off the bedframe on a whim in the middle of the night, especially when you wear contacts and have done just fine without your glasses for weeks now. (I mostly wear my glasses when I am very headachey, when I am very lazy, when I am in between sets of contacts because I never remember to order them on time, or at night when I am reading in bed, because slipping off glasses is easy and slipping off contacts is not when you are sleepy.)

Learned Thing IV: I have more muscles in more places than I even knew. I do not feel so bad now about not having exercised today.

Learned Thing V: I should listen to my mother sometimes. Here is a conversation that probably happened more than once.

ME: "All of the plastic cups have mysteriously vanished! This is very irritating. Where could they have gone?"
MY MOTHER: "...Are they in your bedroom again?"
ME: "I HAVE NOT DONE THAT IN MONTHS WHY DO YOU DOUBT ME also I can't find any cereal bowls."
MY MOTHER: "Didn't I see one on your desk?"
ME: "YOU ARE SO SUSPICIOUS AND ACCUSING"

Under my bed, nested amongst the mangled remains of many newspapers, magazines, guitar chord printouts, candy wrappers, and scribbled-on pages, were approximately two hundred plastic cups. Fortunately none of them had rotting milk in them. There were also some cereal bowls. I am duly ashamed. But I also blame my bed. It was probably hungry.

Learned Thing VI: It is very hot under the bed. Also, it is far easier to get under than it is to extract oneself. I don't even know how that works. At one point, when I was mostly stuck, the radio went on (whenever it gets unplugged, the alarm resets itself to go off at midnight) and Ominious Monk-like Chanting followed me beneath the mattresses. It was a little disturbing. (It was actually a sort of New Age music programme public radio has on late at night -- and it happened to be mostly the very, very nice, relaxing, and musically interesting sort, not the really lame elevator music sort. And then BBC News came on. Yay!)

Learned Thing VII: Somehow, lifting up the mattress and the boxspring makes the entire room explode. My bedroom was reasonably neat. I spent half an hour or longer trying to make it look mostly the way it had before I pulled up the mattress.

Learned Thing VIII: My glasses were behind the dresser.

I am going to get an ice cream bar out of the freezer downstairs. It is nearly two in the morning. I do not care. I need it.

i. So, Dad came upstairs a few minutes ago to tell me that, "oh, there's going to be a Beowulf movie...with Angeline Jolie." We sort of stared at each other in an "o-kay" sort of way, and he said something about Robert Zemeckis directing, "so it might be good, because he's really brilliant," (not that I would know; I am not so well-versed in directors and I had to ask, and apparently he directed Forest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and some other stuff, which all seems about as far from Beowulf as, well...Angelina Jolie) and I'm still thinking Angeline Jolie? In Beowulf? Angeline Jolie?, because, seriously, who is there for Angelina Jolie to play? And then I thought, oh, oh, sweet Arda, is this the same Beowulf movie that Neil Gaiman did the script for? (Because there could be two totally different Beowulf films coming out in one year. Really!) So, after Dad wanders back downstairs, I had to look it up to see for myself, or I'd sit up all night trying to reconcile the two vastly different worlds of Angelina Jolie and Beowulf. 

I looked it up, and it is. (Right. Like I said, two Beowulf films in one year?) Robert Zemeckis, Neil Gaiman, and Angeline Jolie. As Grendel's mother. Angeline Jolie is going to play an underwater hag. I am thunderstruck, I tell you. Also, the movie is reportedly going to be done with motion-capture technology: i.e., it's all going to be animated. ("Like The Polar Express," the article said, and all I'm saying is that the animation had better be better than The Polar Express, which may have been a technical wonder, but the animation was dead boring.) 

My conclusion? This film is either going to be completely brilliant or fantastically awful.

ii. I am updating Ink & Chocolate, my Vox, every single day now. Or every weekday, anyway. It is for Scholastic Purposes. It is also rather rambly and probably sort of dull, but pop in to read once in a while, won't you? There are Bookish Thoughts. And right now there is costume-squee.