Kanlaon

You did not give in to temptation and slink off to see “Oblivion”!  No, you stayed home, and saved $7.  Not only that, you saved two hours of your life which were instead spent on:

• Catching up with old friends.  You found an e-mail from Beth Alvarado.  Which was just so, so –  zen, because you had just been in the Stanford Creative Writing Program yesterday, attending a colloquium with T. C. Boyle (T.C., why are you so hip?  What gives you the right to be so hip?  How can you be a famous author and not be an ass?  How?  How?  How?  Is it your red converse sneakers and the black suit and the hair that probably at one time used to be a mullet?) and it would have been a terrible waste of the energy flow from that event to see a movie like “Oblivion.”
• You got to try to get son off from jury duty.  That is, you called the San Mateo County Courthouse on his behalf and explained that on the date in question, son would be in Claremont, receiving his Masters diploma.  And the lady said, “Fine.  I’ll move his date to the following week.”  To which self really had no rejoinder.  Well, actually, she did attempt a rejoinder but the lady cut her off and said, “Ma’am, this is the second postponement.  By now he should know what his summer plans are!” Self meekly subsided.
• You got to hear the mail landing in the mailbox.  And you were then able to see that you had a form rejection (from Colere) and an announcement of winners of the Sarabande Book Prize and were informed that IF you were a finalist, the entry fee for next year’s contest would be waived, so you thought that you were a finalist, until you read the names of the finalists.  What is the point of sending a letter saying IF you are this, then you won’t have to pay a fee to join the contest next year, when there are only three finalists and the letter was probably sent to EVERYBODY?
• You got to do more web research on your favorite characters from “Game of Thrones” :  Jaime Lannister (You finally realized you’d been mis-spelling his name forever), and Brienne of Tarth.  And you found this fascinating interview between Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Self can’t believe she actually spelled that correctly), and Rolling Stone.  NC-W says quote unquote:  I’m sorry, I’m going in circles.  You were asking about Brienne and I’m talking about Jaime!  To which interviewer responds quote unquote:  It’s very Jaime of you.  To which NC-W responds quote unquote:  We should have Gwen on the phone.  It’d be more fun.

See, this is the reason why watching Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth on “Game of Thrones” is so much fun:  there’s this on-going banter between two people who respect each other, one of whom just happens to be a man.  And maybe Brienne, the woman, really wishes she were a man as well.  The man’s good looks are completely incidental to the relationship, and the woman’s plain-ness is incidental as well.  Holy Cow!  Did you catch that smokin’ hot tub scene in Episode 5?  When Brienne stood up from the water where she’d been just moments earlier simpering like a blushing bride and displayed herself to Jaime in all her earthly glory (from the back, but her curves were evident), and the guy was just — mesmerized?  As were we, the viewers?

Until the fight on the bridge episode (Episode 2?), which was the last one self saw before leaving for Venice, self’s favorite character on “Game of Thrones” was Daenerys.  But –  no more!  Give her Brienne’s awkward ungainliness any time!

So, given that self had skipped watching approximately three weeks’ worth of “Game of Thrones,” she could be forgiven for wondering why Jaime Lannister was wearing that hand on a rope around his neck.  She didn’t realize it was his own hand until some bandit began ridiculing him about it.  Then it was — GASP! –  Holy Major Plot Development!  As some other person on the web said (You see?  Self really HAS been all over the web this afternoon!):  Jaime.  Oh, Jaime.  I really hope you’re ambidexterous.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.