For a tiny day trip, much more successful than last weekend’s, my sister, my mother, and I went to Corning, a small town in New York. My mother had been there before and thought it would be a nice relaxing place to visit. It was gorgeous. You know those small towns that you read about in stories or see in movies? The ones where kids ride their bikes down the main brick sidewalked street, going to sweet shops (there were tons of those there) and solving summertime mysteries. Everything about this place was amazing. It was so adorable, with its little stores, it’s wonderful architecture, not to mention it’s glass museum (Corning is famous for its glass). Who knew there was so much to know about glass? I was having a total design orgasm over all of it, taking pictures like every five seconds. I would totally drop everything and move there tomorrow if I could.
August 2004
Well, this isn’t a good sign….

Maybe I’ve just been paranoid since I saw Day After Tomorrow, but it seems that the weather has been really cold, even though it’s august! Some trees are already turning orange! Watch out or New York will be flooded!
Road trip
rolling down the black black road
in the hot bright car
droning music hums echoing
out of the radio
the road stretches on into forever
walls of steam hang ahead
no stop lights, no speed limits
just go.
the sweet smell of cows and hay
that is mixed into the air
slides through the crack in the window
and the breeze against your closed eyes
hot sun shoots through the window
like an arrow from a bow
seems to be directed right at you
don’t stop. just go.
grass and farms and fields swoosh by
at a million miles a second
waves of dizziness and hot spread
from head to toe.
eye lids slowly touch the ground
breathing slows on down
feeling the rocking of the car
never stop. just go.
It was not that predictable!

Both times I went to see The Village, I was with people who are either incredibly smart or just plain skeptical. The first time, right about when the huge *twist ending* was about to be revealed, the person I was with was like, “ooooooh, I bet it’s [blank].” Then, when the even bigger twist ending was revealed, he was like, “I KNEW it!” I supposed that maybe he was just better at guessing things than me.
The second time I saw it, today, I saw it with my father. Even sooner than my friend had guessed the ending, my father was outlining basically the entire movie’s plot to me even before it was about half way over. I sat there next to him a little stunned and annoyed. Am I just stupid? Am I just too imaginative? Do I just take what people say to be true? How is it that all of these people knew what was going to happen before I did? The movie was not that predictable!
Okay. That over, I thought the movie was pretty good. I think I liked the movie much better the second time. It was interesting watching things for the second time knowing how it was all going to unfold. I guess that’s a common trait in M. Night Shyamalan movies, he makes them so they make sense even if you’re watching them over and over again.
I say the movie was pretty good because besides the somewhat disappointing plot and the silly dialogue, the movie is both emotionally and visually gorgeous. Shyamalan has a real gift for conveying feelings visually. The beautiful music added even more to the movie. I left the movie feeling very uplifted and ….um….. nature-y. I want to take photos of trees, go out into the woods, and, oh, why not even become Amish? …..At least for a day. Even though I’m sure that’s not the point of the story, the movie really did make the world the characters lived in seem very beautiful.
I think one of the main reasons the movie has been getting so much negative feedback is because they decided to advertise it as more of a horror movie, and also probably because up to this point, M. Night Shyalaman has made mostly scary movies. This movie was hardly scary and perhaps shouldn’t be even defined as a horror movie. I can understand why some people might not have liked it, but for me, it was excellent….. the beauty of the film overcame the bad dialogue and plot.
{Image from imdb.com.}
Worst. Weekend. Ever.
Friday night, or I guess Saturday morning, I went to sleep at about 5:00 in the morning. Not because I was up doing anything really, I just couldn’t sleep. When I was waken up at about 10 in the morning, my parents informed me that we were leaving immediately for the Thousand Islands. I had thought we were going on Sunday, not Saturday. After only about five hours of sleep, I was not ready at all for a five hour car ride.
It took me about three hours or so to get ready, being incredibly tired and still hopeful that my parents might realize that they made a mistake and reschedule. Even though our family has been known to change schedules without notice, this level of spontaneity was a bit too much. We finally left the house at around 1:00 in the afternoon after much yelling about how I can never get out of the house on time. We then picked up my sister from a friends house and were on the road.
When we got to the Thousand Islands, oh, at about 5 or 6:30, we took a ferry to Wolfe Island in Canada, and then another into the city of Kingston. This is where we were planning to spend the night.
My father started to look for an internet cafe. Why? Because, we were incredibly unprepared and he had not reserved a hotel room online. We ended up calling one of hour friends in our hometown and asking them to go onto Priceline and get us hotel reservations. Just our luck, some sort of motercycle convention was going on and almost every single hotel was full, except for some crappy looking in a less commercial part of the city. If only we had just taken a hotel room there….. (Can you feel the dramatic build up?)
We searched at about every hotel, motel, and resort in the Thousand Islands region. Basically every single one was either full or just closed because it was so late at night (by then around 11pm). The uncomfortableness of the whole searching thing was greatly intensified by need to pee. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom since we came to our supposed destination. By the time we had visited just about every place to stay in the area, my legs were burning and I felt like I was about to pee in my pants.
I got to finally relieve myself at a Best Western a few miles away from The Thousand Islands region. Unfortunately, they had no room. It was like a travel nightmare! The kind of stuff you only see in movies and books!
We finally found a hotel after driving about two hours back from our original destination. It was then about 1:30 in the morning. I don’t think it ever felt so good to get into a hotel room before.

