predictable? yes.

corny? sure.

unoriginal? yup.

but still, i can’t help it. jessica alba has won me over and just when i thought i couldn’t love her more, i see her in honey. now, sure, the plot is weak, the storytelling is unoriginal, the one dimensional characters are distracting, and some bad casting calls could ruin the movie, but man…i still liked the movie.

[url=http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/Honey-1127773/]rotten tomatoes[/url] gave it a 16%! sure, the movie doesn’t offer anything interesting. sure, you know how the movie is going to end halfway through the movie. sure, there is no depth. and sure, i’ll even admit that some of the subplots seem a little contrived, but i can only offer one explanation as to why i liked the movie and why it’s very likely that i’ll watch it again: jessica alba is hot.

it’s so sad, but the dance sequences were fun, the celebrity cameos were nice, and i just enjoyed the movie. and did i mention that jessica alba is hot? surely i must have.

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i made some spam musubi last night. i wasn’t sure what to expect, but it actually turned out pretty good, i thought. i must admit that when i first heard about spam musubi i had my doubts.

spam? sushi? eh?

but it was actually pretty good. i was trying to pawn off some of the spam musubi to some of the poker gang, but no one seemed to want to eat it. i can understand the reluctance. jen and leeya were open-minded enough to try some and the both liked it. i ate a plate of it, myself. mmmm. i’m going to make another batch tonight for the volleyball tournament and i’ll take pictures and describe the process. the directions i found on the net were helpful, but i think i’m a visual person so i need more pictures.

i bought a 50 pound bag of rice yesterday and it was considerably harder to carry than the 20 pound bag…go figure. i went through 3 cups of rice as if it were nothing yesterday, though. i think i’m going to make 8 cups tonight so i can make really fat spam musubi, yo. errr phat musubi….err, whatever.

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at this moment there are 5 replaytvs in my apartment. two are in my room, two are out in the living room, and one is still neatly packaged in a box. of these five, one of them’s mine, two are paul’s and two are jen’s. paul’s taking back one of his replays so he can use it when he moves later this month, so jen bought one to replace the one she had been using.

man…we record too much tv. we don’t watch enough of it, but we sure do record a lot.

i knew it what to expect, but my heart still sank when the possibility of ross and rachel not getting back together seemed more possible last night in the friends finale. it’s been a ten year love affair i’ve had with the show and i’m sad to see it go. i’m not sure what my thursday nights are going to be like anymore. a little part of me will forever be changed.

and she got off the plane.

i can’t help it, i’m just a sucker for the love stories that end up working out. regardless of how contrived it may seem, i still can’t help but loving it. serendipity was a movie i liked quite a bit for that very reason. sappy love stories are my weakness.

i was surprised that they didn’t set up joey’s show in the episode, but the preview of the show looked pretty good. i think it definitely has potential.

ahhh, friends. i will miss you. it’s an end of an era.

i’m thinking about getting a bike computer. i wasn’t sure at first what they were called, but indeed, they are called bike computers. all i really wanted was something that would keep track of how fast i was going and how far i went. pretty simple, right? so the speedometer and odometer functions are pretty standard. what i also wanted was a thermometer. apparently this makes the computer ridiculously expensive jumping from $15 computers to $150 computers. oh well, i guess i can live without it.

i’m a little concerned now. i wonder if i will get into the whole fixing up my bike phase that i was in a long, long time ago as a child. i used to work on my bike, get new parts and do all sorts of things just for fun.

which reminds me, i still need to figure out how to store the bike.

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i decided to go biking again. i didn’t really have a destination in mind, but i thought that i’d figure it out as i go. it was roughly 10 miles in about 40 minutes. not bad, i guess, but i definitely decided to try and push myself this time. whenever i felt tired, i tried to keep up the pace and push forward. it was a lot more road biking than i wanted, but i had to get back to the apartment before people came for poker night.

biking is pretty relaxing. it’s kind of nice to be able to just pick up and go wherever you want, not bound by the restrictions of the road.

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volleyball tournament’s coming up this weekend. i think it’s the first shindig summer tournament. i’m pretty excited about it. i haven’t really had much of a chance to play volleyball outside of the one night a week that i’m playing now, so it’s good to be able to get out in the open air and play some volleyball.

i think i’m going to try and make some spam musubi. it seems to be a staple in tournament food. it was pretty good too. i wonder if there is some kind of special sauce that they use for it.

***

ok, so apparently there is a special sauce for the spam musubi. i think i may make a trial run tonight and feed it to the poker night folk. mmmm. spam musubi!

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i’m not totally sure, but i think the major redesigns of the journal have corresponded with major changes in my life. just a random thought.

today was quite a day. i decided to go to the off ramp again to get my front break adjusted. after some advice from jimmy and paul and some debating, i decided that i might as well just go ahead and take advantage of the free adjustments while i can. so they adjusted my front break which was butted up against the wheel. pretty minor change and they did it nice and quick.

after that i headed over to paul’s where we decided to go venture off on a biking trip. we didn’t have a particular destination in mind, and in fact, i don’t think we really had much of a route planned either. we sort of winged it. the map below approximates our route.

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What do you get when you fall in love?
A diamond pin to burst your bubble
That’s what you get for all your trouble
I’ll never fall in love again
I’ll never fall in love again

there have been times in my past where i was so jaded, i actually started to scare away some of my friends because talking to me was depressing them. kind of funny now, when i think back to how jaded i was when it came to relationships. i think that i had gone through a pretty bad breakup and i was pretty devastated at the time. i remember on more than one occasion i told a friend of mine that i was going to swear off women because they were all evil.

there was a time in my life when i thought that all women were evil. i really believed that they were here on this planet to make my life miserable. to tempt me, to dangle that promise of happiness in front of me only to snatch it away. it was just more than i could bear.

What do you get when you kiss a girl
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia
After you do, she’ll never phone you
I’ll never fall in love again
I’ll never fall in love again

sometimes it feels like no matter what i do it just isn’t enough. in the past i’ve felt that i was just bending over backwards to accomodate my significant other and then i started to be taken for granted. no one really enjoys being taken for granted and that can only lead to bad things.

and i felt like i kept getting into relationships that just didn’t work out for one reason or another. maybe i didn’t feel as connected to the person, maybe the other person didn’t feel it for me. maybe we just weren’t meant to work out. maybe there were just too many issues and not enough good problem resolution on our parts. at times it seemed like dealing with women and relationships was just more work than it was worth and i started to just give up.

Don’t tell me what it’s all about
‘Cause I’ve been there and I’m glad I’m out
Out of those chains those chains that bind you
That is why I’m here to remind you

other people tried to reassure me. they said that not all women are evil and there are good women out there. i think that i wanted to believe them, but after having gotten out of so many relationships where i eventually felt it was better to be out than in, i wasn’t sure i wanted to jump back into the dating game.

What do you get when you give your heart
You get it all broken up and battered
That’s what you get, a heart that’s shattered
I’ll never fall in love again
I’ll never fall in love again

Out of those chains those chains that bind you
That is why I’m here to remind you

it seemed like an endless cycle. get into a relationship. really dig the girl, start to love the girl, and then something happened. i don’t know what happened to change things, but it seemed that something always came up. when things got more serious, something came up that made things not work as well. things that bothered my girl about me started to resurface or vice versa. things that we thought we could work through weren’t being worked through. there came a point in the relationship where you had to decide what was the best course of action.

and that’s how i got jaded.

What do you get when you fall in love?
You only get lies and pain and sorrow
So for at least until tomorrow
I’ll never fall in love again
I’ll never fall in love again

but regardless of how jaded i was, let’s face it, i can never really be so jaded, so disenchanted from all of my experiences to think that true love isn’t possible. i mean, come on, i love women. i can’t help it. no matter how burned i’ve been in the past, no matter how unlikely it seems that i will ever find that other person who can complement me, who i would want to share the rest of my life with, i still believe that that person is out there. it’s just a matter of time before i find them or they find me. i mean, sure, i could be a little cynical about love from time to time, but deep down i can’t help it, i’m a romantic at heart and i still believe in the notion of true love.

my favorite type of movies are romantic comedies. i think my favorite movie is when harry met sally. the idea that you can find true love despite all the failed attempts, despite all the fruitless searching, despite overwhelming odds…i just know that it’s out there. kissing jessica stein is another one of my favorite movies. sure jessica wasn’t sure what she was looking for and went to great lengths trying to figure it out. but in the end, she did find who she was looking for.

i know that life isn’t a romantic comedy and i know that you can’t expect to have a fairytale love story, but it isn’t so much that i want to have all those things as much as it is that i believe that that kind of love does exist. i believe that movies may idealize love, but it is based on life. and it is those kinds of movies that give me the hope that something greater is to come.

i haven’t really talked about this much in public, but i guess it’s safe enough to say that most people close to me probably already know by now. i’m a single man again. it was rough for a bit, but things are better now. i’m not shaking my fist up in the sky and damning the world. i’m just kind of seeing where my life will take me nowadays. i think that my belief in one true love hasn’t been shaken. sure, i’ve been wildly unsucessful when it comes to the whole dating thing, but you know, the thing with relationships is that you only have to get it right once in your life and as soon as you do get it right, you’re set for life. the odds may be stacked against you, but if you only need to get it right once, surely it can’t be that bad.

i was talking to a friend over the weekend and we were relating some of our dating experiences to each other and she asked me about how a guy would hint disinterest in a girl if they had gone out on a date.

it’s funny because i’ve seen situations where the guy was crazy about the girl but the girl couldn’t stand the guy. the guy thought the date went fabulously, but the girl thought it was a disaster. how does the girl convey to the guy that she’s not interested? what if the situation was reversed? what if the guy wasn’t interested in the girl, but the girl was interested in the guy?

apparently, it’s pretty common practice for the guy to just not call the girl up anymore. or rather, to say that he’d call her back, but not. to just ignore their calls and not answer the phone or to delete messages left with them. chandler in friends was employing this technique so that he wouldn’t have to call rachel’s boss back after a boring date.

i don’t know. even if i was not interested, i wouldn’t just delete voicemails and let them go off into oblivion. i think that i’d just feel too bad. i don’t think that i’d be able to just ignore them. it just seems so callous. i’d probably rather try to hint that i’m not interested, but if push came to shove, i’d probably tell them politely and nicely that i just don’t see it working. i think the direct, honest way is the better way to go. it’s probably the best way that i could deal with it without feeling bad about it afterwards.

not that this really matters to me, anyway. i’m usually the one who needs to convince/bribe/kidnap the girl to get her to go out on a date with me, anyway. ahhh, what a luxury it must be to be pursued by a girl.

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