Ooooh, Scary

Sunday, as we recall, I was hungover. (Yeah, I'm now the Queen of the Blogosphere &etc. Yesterday I had a big old neurotic freak out guilt meltdown I-am-not-worthy fit about it but my friend J patiently talked me down from the virtual ledge and I'm okay now. Also, my kids laughed at me and my nerdy pretensions. "Why did you win so many prizes?" asked He Who Shall Not Be Blogged About, "Is it because you have no life?" and my daughter said, "Oh, nerd party. Uh huh. That's nice, Mom.")

Anyway. Sunday night the kids and I settled down in front of what passes for the familial hearth these days: the Sci Fi channel. Which was playing, first, the end of a movie called Avalanche! which was satisfyingly awful (so bad, in fact, that I can't even find it on IMDB, unless I managed not to recognize Mia Farrow in it, which is possible. Hmm.) and then something called Stephen King's Storm of the Century. We thought, in our innocence, that this would be a 2 hour movie, just barely possibly including a monster terrorizing the inhabitants of a small Maine town. We were right about the monster and the small Maine town - big stretch there for Stephen King! Not like he ever writes about that! - but hideously wrong about the length of this movie. It went on for six hours and by the time we had figured that out it was too late and we were hooked. So we watched it. And watched it and watched it and watched a billion commercials and got all Buffy-ized, which is our family shorthand for what happens when you watch too much TV and become punchy and giddy and weird and lurch around when you try to stand up.

The brief plot synopsis of this movie, in case you care, is that there's a big scary snowstorm which cuts a small Maine island, populated by stalwart white (very white) Maine types with a bewildering assortment of accents, off from the mainland. This naturally brings down a scary demon who goes around killing people and controlling their brains and so on. He is pretty spooky. Whatever. Then he demands a kid and they give him one. Stephen King always sort of falls apart at the end. Then A left, I managed not to buy a Chevy, although I felt deeply driven to do so, and went to bed. The next morning I got up and walked the dogs as is my habit and wont.

Well. There was a car in the parking lot at the park. Oooooh! Yikes! I got all paranoid and started jumping at shadows and freaking out. So bad, in fact, that I very nearly continued instead of turning around and went to Amboy Road and called C to come pick me up, since he is a gentleman and probably (not definitely, but probably) would help out a damsel in distress even if it was me. Then I thought I was being dumb and I came up with all these tactics that I would use if accosted, from magically melting away into the mist to running up onto the highway to siccing the dogs on him to using my amazing martial arts skillz, which I mystically acquired via years of Buffy watching and the 3 months of Tae Kwon Doh I took 10 years ago. All this was very good and empowering and I felt tough and competent and then a jogger came up silently behind me and said politely, "Excuse me!" and I shrieked like a little girl and jumped 6 feet up in the air.

No more Stephen King miniseries for me. Too scary. I better not watch anything stronger than My Little Pony ever again.