December 27, 2003
Definitely not smarter than your average movie-going crowd . . .
I propose that the weight of a people's intelligence be measured by how they behave in a movie theater (while the measure of your own intelligence, obviously, is what movie you're sitting there watching with them). I cannot say, by this system, that Guatemalans are the biggest morons on the planet, because I have only visited movie theaters in five countries. But surely they must be among the most egregious of idiots. I swear that during the last three days of watching Return of the King I have encountered more stupid people than in the past three semesters in Longview. Some of you can confirm that this is truly saying something . . .
Total crackhead Guatemalan quote of the day (delivered in all seriousness in reference to Shelob): "Look, it's that big cockroach again!"
I know I need to supply an account of the past few days, but I feel mentally drained from having spent 10 hours sitting in darkened theaters with dozens of people who are probably medically brain-dead but are somehow still able to make lots of noise.
And tomorrow is not looking up, for the moment. I was hoping I'd get to go to the place where I can see it in English tomorrow . . . I had a pretty good plan worked out that would get the timing right nicely (there's a lot going on tomorrow) but a certain someone quashed all of my carefully laid plans with one simple phrase: "I don't want to do that." And it doesn't matter that everyone else does, because the person who said that was my dad. So that sucks. I can't make it work now . . . and there will be a lot going tomorrow morning that I really don't want to be involved in, but I'll have to be, and so on and so forth . . .
How depressing. I'm going to bed.