Team Zissou

Last night was a good night.

We watched Life Aquatic, which I adored. I love Wes Anderson movies because of how unlike all other movies they are. You simply cannot watch them passively and enjoy them. There’s no trying to predict the story arc. It’s pure whimsical, yet thought provoking fun. I just added two of his earlier movies to my must watch soon list. Here it is:

Bottle Rocket
A Scanner Darkly

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (edit: Andy says it’s AWFUL)
Rushmore
The Squid and The Whale
Annie Hall
Slumdog Millionaire
Kill Bill 1 & 2
He Died with a Felafel In His Hand
Afro Samurai: Resurrection

Later we played Euchre and Hearts with Kileean and watched the first 2 episodes of Afro Samurai(very cool).

At some point, while making brownies(which Theo ruined) I was trying to take pictures. However, when I turn my flash off, my camera starts taking blurry pictures. I found that whenever I told Andrew to hold still he would just start dancing. So this happened:

Notice the very end:

Theo: “This isn’t a 8x8 or 9x9”

Andrew: “I know, they’re fucking stupid. Just put it in a pan.”

Thinly spread brownies=burnt gross brownies.

Today has been slightly less eventful. Yvonne made some tasty Mexican food. Karsten and I studied a bit for our green industrial organic chemistry midterm on Monday. Andrew and I played tennis. Oh…this happened too:

Sidenote: Elissa, in the incredibly unlikely event that you see this, I apologize.

….but srsly, it’s all Theo’s fault.

Hopaan ip Boff!

Twas quite a wonderful Christmas in the Hull house yesterday. Spend the morning with my parents/sister/brother-in-law. Presents were given and presents were recieved, it was all rather fun.

I actually enjoyed hanging out with my grandparents in the afternoon, which is unusual. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that my grandpa usually bores me to death by telling the same uninteresting stories over…and over…and over again. Plus I’m always distracted by his off-center hitlerstache. Come on grandpa! Just get that thing in the middle, JUST ONCE!

During lunch we somehow got talking about my speech impediment that I had when I was young. It truly is a miracle that my parents could understand a word I said, I would just ramble endlessly without making sounds resembling any part of the english language (I may still ramble, but at least people know what I’m saying). My preschool/kindergarden teachers would always tell my parents that I was the best little student, I always participated and was always happy, BUT…they couldn’t understand a single word I said. There are a few particularly golden moments hidden away on our videos from years past.

My personal favorite is on Dec. 25, 1991. The adorable two-year-old version of Alex Hull is sitting on the carpet in our living room next to my sister, Beth. I unwrapped one of my gifts to find a toy truck, which clearly excited me, however I couldn’t open the box. So my big sister took the box as was opening it. The young Alex decided to help motivate her by repeating, “Hopaan ip Boff! Hopaan ip!” Easter of ‘94 or ‘95 had a couple more gems. My (evil) parents would make me stand on a little wooden stool and sing a bunch of songs I learned in church/school. So if you can, imagine a pale little stick of a child with a hilarious speech impediment teetering in front of a camera, flailing his gangly arms in the motions of ‘I’ve got roots going down to ocean’ and singing ‘I’ve gow wut goweeng doawn to da oshaan!’

And it gets better!

Next up was my sister’s display of her similarly underdeveloped talents. The camera switches to my sister standing in front of our piano, complaining that she hasn’t practiced enough, it’ll sound horrible, whine whine whine. So she sat down and stumbled through ‘The Entertainer’ and ‘Black Forest Boogie’ well enough, but next came one of my favorites at the time, ‘The Hokey-Pokey!’ My sister, already annoyed by the noises I was making which were ‘distracting her’, was no more than 5 bars into the skating rink classic before I danced my way in front of the camera, thrashing my bony appendages thru the air like a adolescent monkey on cocaine. Beth gets off the piano bench and yells at me for ‘making her mess up’ and storms off.  Good times…

Thinking about all of this has made me realize what the best Christmas gift EVAR would be, the chance to go back to the house that I grew up in back in Jenison. Nothing changed from when I was 9 and moved away from that house. It would be the greatest thing to be able to walk thru my old bedroom, the freezing cold, brick-floored living room, my sister’s pink room, all full of Johnathan Taylor Thomas posters, the awesomely 80’s orange kitchen and family room, the awesome in-ground swimming pool, the wood paneled musty smelling basement…man, I’m getting all sentimental now.  Part of me would really like to go to that house now and ask the people living there now if I could just walk thru the place (that’d be a crazy awkward question to ask!), but I think I’d be disspointed with all of the changes. What if they turned my bedroom into a storage room!?!? oh noes.

Listening to: The Jessica Numbers - The New Pornographers