Welp, that was Thanksgiving

Flew over to Chicago and got to hang out with the fam (mostly Jono's side, but also my bro!) Had some nice discussions with mom, bro, and Atul. Had hijinks of traveling to the northside on the Red Line to find a diner that was closed.... so typical Chicagoland adventure.

Jono watched some Adventure Time after visiting Stephen at his Homestuck House, and now can't stop talking like Lumpy Space Princess.

There's an aspect of Thanksgiving that's really weird, which is that we've got a bunch of shy introverted people who get stressed with large social situations, and then we put everyone into a social situation.... I guess what usually helps for me is being able to have some sort of mediating task -- cooking, playing games, watching Youtube videos, etc. I decided to learn how to fold an origami rose (inspired by Nendil's wedding awesomeness), so I made like, 10 of them.

Yesterday on the plane I sat at the window seat, and the right side of my body was super-cold compared to the left side, so I started getting sick. This morning after breakfast I ended up sleeping until 1pm!! Jono knew it was Serious Business because I put on my Sick Hat and transformed into a Burrito. So he went to to store and got himself a burrito and made me a sammich. :)

I'm making banana-not-banana for my Advo tomorrow.

(no subject)

To continue my recent film-watching streak (Wreck-it-Ralph=cool, Skyfall=meh), I watched Argo over Thanksgiving.

Parts of it were pretty cool -- I appreciated the attempt to genuinely make it look like 1980. I also liked the beginning narration, which pretty much admitted that the Shah was horrible and totally America's fault. The general "heist" style movie was pretty cool, though.

But, a few things that got on my nerves:
1) White-washing of Tony Mendez. Seriously, is it that hard to find a latino actor for this? It's especially telling because in the end credits they show photo comparisons of the real people with the actors, and all of them look very similar, EXCEPT Ben Affleck/Tony Mendez. If you care so much about historical accuracy, why is one of the big parts that you decide to re-write is to make a generic white guy the hero of the film?

2) Lack of character development for secondary characters. For example, the housekeeper at the Canadian Embassy was Iranian and played a key role in the movie to protect the Americans -- there was a really cool scene which shows the increasing conservatism of the country... but does she have family? What are her motivations? All the Americans get out safely, but she becomes a refugee in Iraq?? Or Tony Mendez -- it's shown that he has wife and kid, but that they're doing a trial separation thing, but ... why? He doesn't seem like a bad father. He doesn't have weird violent streaks, etc. And then it's magically okay at the end of the movie. Um... that's good?

3) The main tension of the movie is: "can they successfully lie to the Iranian authorities?" And "if they catch us it will be certain death!!" -- completely disregarding the certain deaths of others who may have sided with the Americans. There's a part in the movie where they decide that they don't want to do this because it's too risky, and I was like: "Do you not see how many people are risking their lives so that you can sit and play chess with the Canadian ambassador? Do you not see how it was American selfishness that lead to this situation in the first place?" It eventually gets resolved, but it was still frustrating.

I guess I really wanted to see a movie about the Iranian Revolution from an Iranian perspective.