Christmas, Cake, and Castigating Counterfeit Constantines

The weather has been having a strange effect on me lately. The combination of an unseasonably mild early winter, followed by lots o'Arcticness starting this week, has fooled me into disbelieving the calendar date. Now that Pgh is covered with a nice thickening blanket of snow, I've caught myself hearkening back to the 40-70 degree days of a few weeks ago, and thinking, Ah, how nice...this kind of weather really puts me in the Christmas spirit. Then I remember that Christmas was three weeks ago. These past few years, in which I've consistently forgotten to get good snow-walking shoes, had worse-than-usual ankle and knee problems, lacked the time and green acreage to go out and play, and had to drive in the accursed stuff, the association with Christmas has really been one of the only things that gives snow a positive connotation in my mind. Getting it now, after the holidays are over, is like going to work and being told that your mandatory overtime is going to be unpaid after all. It would have been worth it with the extra money, but that won't be happening. You're already there, and you can't very well just leave; you just have to slog through until it's done. I don't want to wish the rest of the winter away. I have too many school projects due in mid-February to do that, and Adam and I have a lot of wedding plans to consider making. But I fear it's going to be a long season if this weather continues.

One thing I'm most definitely including in the wedding plans: a cake from some sort of baker who is not me. I realize that Adam and I could be perfectly happy with a homegrown cake; it seems that our nuptials are shaping up to be a low-budget, low-pressure affair, and I'm cool with that. I'm fairly certain we're going to be making our own invitations, head table place cards, etc. (Adam's had to drag me forcibly away from the "Make your own Veil/Cake Topper/Bouquet/Unity Candle!" section of the craft store several times already.) I also hope to mobilize the oven-friendly members of my family to make a million and a half homemade Italian cookies for the reception. But we won't be making our own cake. I can't frost them. I'm utterly incapable. No matter how cool the cake is and how warm the icing is, no matter how cleverly I ply the little rubber spatula, I always, always end up tearing up the top layer of the cake, getting it mixed up with the frosting, and leaving behind a wasteland of craters, bald spots, and jagged hills of frosting that will not be smoothed. The gaming group last night assured me that it tasted okay, but I'm certain they were secretly horrified by the blasted appearance the cake presented. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I have the same problem when I try to work with spackle (which does not bode well for my hopes to perform feats of Interior Decorating in the future). But, yes...this is why I am perfectly willing to spring for a professionally made cake. Even if Adam has his way and we do end up using Star Wars figurines as a cake topper.

(Warning: comic book geek content below!)

One more random thing that I hope will horrify my friends as much as it did me: last time we were at Barnes and Noble, we came upon something that Should Not Be. What we found was a graphic novelization of a movie. The movie in question was Constantine, that ridiculous, misbegotten mess of a film that stars Keanu (insert profanity here) Reeves as John Constantine THE DARK-HAIRED AMERICAN WITH A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES.

*twitch*

Yes, I know I've only read Original Sins and can't call myself a Hellblazer fan by a long shot. But still. Keanu Reeves. Los Angeles. No. Even in my relative ignorance regarding the series, I already know that the city of London is just as much a main character as the man himself is. It's like taking Lestat out of New Orleans and putting him in Miami. Oh, wait, that eventually happened too. Well, it's like...it just doesn't work, and I predict that the movie is going to bomb. I may ultimately be wrong about that, but I won't know, because I'm not planning to see it. But back to my previous rant: yes, this was a comic book novelization of the movie. Which was, of course, adapted from a comic book so it didn't NEED a comic book adaptation. It's one thing to see Keanu Reeves pretending to be John Constantine onscreen. It's quite another to see him in the pages of the story's formative medium, usurping the word-bubbles and the mood lighting, and just...pretending. On the plus side, the editors of the book decided to give us a helpful object lesson on how much their movie and tie-in product sucks; they also included the first three volumes from Original Sins, just for comparison.

If I ever publish anything, I'm going to do it on a hand-cranked printing press that I hide under my bed. I am never, never going to sell any kind of rights to someone who will hurt my work in this way.

That's probably a lie, but since I'm not even published at all yet, I can still afford to be idealistic.