Tag Archives: netflix

How to Have a Proper Family Movie Night

Posted on December 8, 2020 | Leave a comment

Excitedly announce you are having A Family Movie Night! 

Wait for the cheers and applause that never come.  

Watch as everyone immediately starts to argue about what to watch. 

Browse Netflix. 

Calmly make a suggestion. 

Get greeted by groans and dramatic tears. 

Gently remind everyone this is supposed to be fun. 

Browse Disney+. 

Argue some more. 

Break up fist fight. 

Argue some more. 

Take weapon away from preschooler. 

Let out primal maternal scream. 

Make executive decision to watch a movie everyone has seen 576 times already.

Bring out snacks during opening credits. 

Listen to complaints that it’s the wrong brand of root beer, no one likes popcorn anymore and can we order a pizza?

It’s all we have, when did that happen, no.

Listen to more groans and dramatic, loud protestations. 

Get angry.

Start yelling back. 

Now everyone is yelling. 

Dog is barking. 

Everyone is yelling at dog to stop barking. 

Order stupid, dumb pizza.

Pause within first five minutes for Potty Break No. 1.

Answer first question about the basic plot of the movie they’ve seen 576 times already. 

Politely ask kid who keeps repeating every line to stop repeating every line. 

Start absentmindedly discussing the grocery list with partner. 

Get shushed by kids. 

Exchange look with partner and secretly do lewd gesture behind the children’s back. 

Answer 12th question about the basic plot of the movie they’ve seen 576 times already. 

Pause for Potty Break No. 3. 

Shoot down request for more candy. 

And more root beer. 

And the popcorn no one likes anymore but is somehow all gone. 

Remind kid who keeps repeating lines to stop, please. 

Tell shusher kid to stop shushing repeater kid.

Break up “I can’t hear, shut up” wrestling match on floor. 

Answer 33rd question about the basic plot of the movie they’ve seen 576 times already. 

Pause for Potty Break No. 7. 

Throw a pillow at the kid who won’t stop repeating every line and scream “knock it off!”

Pause movie so you can have family discussion on why that wasn’t actually child abuse. 

Pause for Potty Break No. 12. 

Sigh in relief that it’s finally over and you can stop stress eating pizza. 

Watch end credits until the very, very end to prevent preschooler meltdown. 

Practically hurl kids into their beds. 

Begin the unnecessarily violent movie the adults have been wanting to watch forever. 

Sigh contentedly. 

Immediately pause and escort an escaped child back to their bed. 

Resume movie. 

Jointly fall asleep 12 minutes in. 

Wake up on couch unable to turn neck for the next three days.

Forget whole horrifying ordeal by day four because you do not brain good anymore ever since the children systematically killed off all decent remaining brain cells. 

Repeat next week. 

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Posted in Family, funny, Humor, Marriage, Parenting

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The Life-Changing Magic of Giving Up

Posted on March 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

Oh, early spring. Isn’t it lovely? That magical time of year where you can kick the melting, dirty, gray snow out of your path with your new flip-flops while walking in an unrelenting downpour of freezing rain. Mmm…so life affirming.

Ugh. Oh, how I hate this time of year. So much. It’s dumb and the weather sucks and there are no good holidays unless you count St. Patrick’s Day, which I don’t anymore because I have small children who don’t understand the importance of day-drinking OR green beer OR making an idiot out of yourself.

For all these reasons, I should be hunkered down in a blanket fort binge-watching the world’s most depressing show, “The Killing,” on Netflix. Just biding my time during this bleak and desolate season until May when I can once again blind innocent bystanders with the glare coming off my pale calves.

But what am I doing instead? Making yet another half-hearted attempt at spring cleaning. Because I hate myself.

It never fails. Every year at this time I feel an overwhelming urge to get my house in order. To organize. To scale down. To have one of those minimalist living spaces where you don’t feel like if you fall you’ll be buried under a stack of Bust magazines from the early aughts and no one will ever find you and the last image you ever see is Margaret Cho smirking at you.

Or, barring all that, even just finally wiping off the blades of the ceiling fan that have literally started to bend under the weight of dust and dog hair and dead bug carcasses.

And yet, every year it ends the same way: My husband wrestling the matches out of my hand as I repeatedly scream “BURN IT! BURN IT ALL!”

CLEANING1

It always starts out great. I’m motivated. So motivated. Manic, almost. Because I will get everything done and I will do it all RIGHT NOW. So, I run around the house and [play the “Flight of the Bumblebee” in your head as you read this next part]…

Shove any and all clothes that no longer fit into trash bags for donation, regardless of whether anyone is still wearing them at the moment. That is until I get distracted and realize I need to…

Go through all the kitchen cabinets and finally throw out the canned goods lurking in the back that have been there since the Clinton administration, which I do until I remember I still need to…

Break down all the Amazon Prime boxes piled up in the attic that are leftover from Christmas, which I do until I realize I hate breaking down boxes so I move onto…

Finally cleaning out my gigantic make-up bag, where I will throw out exactly one red lipstick, which looks like the 27 other red lipsticks I own, before getting frustrated and…

Decide to organize my massive book collection, but actually I just sit on the floor and start reading each book I pull down but it doesn’t matter because…

The kids have by now woken up from their naps and so I go and retrieve the red lipstick I threw away from the trash can and put it back in my makeup bag because you never know when you need a 28th perfect red lipstick and…

I get the kids up and curse my messy, chaotic house.

Maybe I need a plan of attack. A tried-and-true cleaning and organizing method. I mean, I tried that crap where I held stuff to see if it brought me joy. Unfortunately I started in the kitchen by the wine rack. The good news is that every single bottle did indeed bring me joy. The bad news is that nothing else got done except an angry, error-and-typo-filled email sent to Amazon customer service about the canceling of the show “Good Girls Revolt.”

I’ve also thought about how I should probably start addressing this problem from a different front, stopping it before it gets to this point, maybe. Do one of those “don’t buy anything new for a year” crap that people always blog about.

Except there is the issue of my book hoarding. I have more books than I know what to do with and I can’t stop buying them and my husband is the worst kind of literary enabler.

Get a Kindle, you say? Well, I hope you die and burn in hell for all eternity, is my response to that.

Sorry. That was a bit harsh. I apologize. E-readers are a great invention. And who knows? Maybe I’ll break down and get a Kindle one day. The day they invent one that gives off that old book smell. And has actual turn-able pages. And is heavy. And is made of trees.

It’s not just me though. My husband loves collecting comic books and graphic novels. My toddler son has a fierce and unbreakable bond to every single toy he has ever gotten. Even that broken yellow crayon stub. DON’T YOU TOUCH THAT BROKEN YELLOW CRAYON STUB! Ever. It’s his most treasured possession. Well, that and the gigantic kitchen set he has never, ever used and takes up 35 percent of the real estate in his room.

Even the baby is a budding hoarder. No one, regardless of age, needs that many empty water bottles to chew on.

And it’s for all these reasons that I always give up pretty much before I even get started.

Which is why I’m just going to go out and buy one of those stupid decorative signs that says “Please excuse the mess, the children are making memories” and hang it prominently somewhere and call it a day.

Season three of “The Killing” ain’t gonna to watch itself.

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Posted in Family, funny, Humor, Pop Culture

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Death is the ultimate guilt trip

Posted on September 29, 2016 | 3 comments

Aprill “Danger” Brandon, age 35, a lifelong resident of stunted adolescence, died Thursday in her Boston home (technically Somerville but whatever, close enough). The cause of death was a brain aneurysm brought on by being forced to watch what authorities suspect was too many “Little Einsteins” episodes.

The first documented case of “brain suicide,” as the doctors are referring to it, it appears Aprill’s brain cells all rammed themselves against her skull at the same time so as to escape hearing that god-awful theme song ONE MORE TIME. Her condition was exacerbated by the fact that she did, indeed, have a very hard head to start with, according to multiple sources.

She was the mostly beloved wife of her husband, Ryan, who was, as you can imagine, devastated by the news even though their last fight was about how he uses too many paper towels. He is likely to remarry quickly but he is under strict orders that she be dumb and ugly. Or, at the very least, dumber and uglier than the deceased.

She is also survived by her two children, her baby Mae (yes, Aprill named her daughter Mae…sigh…yeah, we KNOW) and her toddler son, Riker (who, let’s be honest, essentially murdered her with his TV viewing habits).

Other survivors include her parents and a brother she nicknamed “Turd,” as well as a male dog named Buffy (ugh…again with the cutesy names).

Aprill spent her childhood in Ohio, where she was lucky enough to be shielded from the evil that is the “Little Einsteins” TV show, mainly because the sadistic bastards behind it hadn’t invented it yet. Instead she spent her time climbing trees and poking at dead things with sticks and slathering her face with her mother’s expensive Mary Kay makeup even though this was expressly forbidden and made her look like a Vegas showgirl who was down on her luck.

She attended Miami University where she majored in journalism and poor quality beer. Upon graduation, she worked at a series of newspapers and magazines around the country, making her living by writing boob jokes and sentences containing too many misplaced modifiers.

In 2010, she married her husband in Austin, Texas during the month of February because February in Texas is essentially June in the rest of the country. It was a wonderful ceremony that no one remembers, least of all the bride and groom, because there was an open bar with a giant kickass margarita machine.

In 2011, the happy couple moved to Boston, where they discussed having kids every time they got day drunk on the weekends.

In 2012, they discussed having kids even more while sleeping in on Sundays until noon.

And then in 2013, she got knocked up and basically turned into a swamp demon for nine months.

Her beautiful son was born in 2014, followed by his equally beautiful sister a mere 11 weeks ago. And she was super happy with her life up until the moment she collapsed face first into a giant pile of tiny, tiny cars by the aforementioned brain suicide.

In addition to her love/hate relationship with writing, Aprill was known for her love of books, photography, fancy-ish cheese, Pacey from “Dawson’s Creek” and cooking while drinking copious amounts of wine; all passions she wished to passed down to her children if they hadn’t up and murdered her with their cruel addiction to badly animated drivel.

Aprill lived as she died, with a cocktail in her hand and a snarky Tweet in her heart.

In lieu of flowers, please send some thugs over to the house of the creator of “Little Einsteins” to break his/her kneecaps. Feel free to also beat up the creators of Netflix, who are keeping this animation abomination alive and well with their stupid invention.

There will be no viewing as Aprill’s last wishes included not being laid down in a position that would make her look like she had a double chin.

Per her will, she will be cremated and her ashes placed above her son’s bed so he is reminded daily of how he killed her.

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Posted in Family, funny, Humor, Parenting

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Everything I’ve learned, I learned from ‘Dawson’s Creek’

Posted on May 30, 2012 | 2 comments

So, “Dawson’s Creek” is now available on Netflix.

To normal people, that statement probably seems pretty benign. But to anyone (re: girls) who grew up in the ’90’s, that statement means that life outside of our couch has now become non-existent. It means we now have 128 episodes, which roughly equals out to about 5,504 minutes, (oh yeah, I did the math) of ridiculous, overly articulate, teenage angst right at our fingertips. Which means working, sleeping, eating and even breathing if it wasn’t involuntary has now taken a backseat to catching up on the lives of all those wacky Capeside kids.

I’m not proud of this. I wish I was stronger. I wish I could disentangle the show from my nostalgia and make fun of it like the rest of the world.

And I really wish I still didn’t think a 16-year-old Pacey Witter was hot.

But I’m not. And I can’t. And he still is.

The good news, however, is that even if loving this melodramatic 90’s teen soap is lame, the fact can’t be denied that pretty much everything you need to know about life is hidden somewhere within those 128 episodes.

Which is why I’d like to present the following, which I like to call the Tao of Dawson:

Oldest friendships are the best friendships. They’re also the friendships that will royally eff up every future romantic relationship you ever have should they involve someone of the opposite sex.

Aspiring filmmakers are SUPER whiny.

Everything that happens at age 15 is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED AND/OR WILL EVER HAPPEN!!!

Sex is not something to be enjoyed. It is something to be over-analyzed, dissected, elevated to impossible heights and be a never-ending source of despair (both when you have it and when you don’t and even when you kind of have it but not really because something interrupted it).

Most mainstream ’90’s music was SUPER whiny.

Katie Holmes used to be much more humanoid.

Free-spirited blonde chicks do not fair well in life. They end up in rehab, in the looney bin or dead.

Getting drunk, especially when you’re underage, is bad but sometimes you have to do it in order to move the plot along.

It is apparently possible for a teenage boy and a teenage girl, both chockful of raging hormones, to sail around the world for three months alone and not have sex. Also, parents are totally cool with the fact their teenage son has a ladder outside his window that his female teenage best friend uses at all hours for sleepovers.

Everything that happens at age 17 is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED AND/OR WILL EVER HAPPEN!!!!!!!

Even overzealous religious and borderline racist grandmothers can change their stripes.

If your spouse cheats on you, then you divorce them, then decide to get back together, remarry and have another kid after almost two decades after your first kid, you will die a horrible death shortly thereafter.

Being gay in a small town SUCKS.

Being clinically pyscho can be fixed in just a few weeks.

Everything that happens at age 20 is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED AND/OR WILL EVER HAPPEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the end, always choose the guy who ends up with his own show on network TV and not the guy who ends up as an Internet meme.

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On the 14th & 15th of December, Christmas gave to me…

Posted on December 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Two straights nights of watching the cheesy “Holiday Favorites” queue on Netflix while wrapping the aforementioned dog-fur covered gifts.

INCLUDING my all-time childhood favorite “The Christmas Toy.”

When I was five, this Jim Henson made-for-TV movie was the shiz. And it made me believe for way longer than I’m willing to admit that my toys came to life when I wasn’t looking. It also made me cry when the slightly creepy-looking clown toy (SPOILER ALERT!) goes lifeless after getting caught being all non-inanimate.

(And 25 years later, it still brought a small (I said SMALL!) tear to my eye…stupid slightly creepy-looking clown toy).

And then I moved onto the Christmas Classics, which are collections of old (and I mean wicked old…not like you’re-a-teenager-and-30-is-old) Christmas cartoons and shorts. INCLUDING some delightfully (and by “delightfully” I mean “horrifically”) racist ones such as this one:

And one where it proves that whole “they don’t make things like they used to” is complete bunk (pay close attention to how the plot is centered on the quality of the craftsmanship of the toys…Santa was one lazy mofo back in the 30’s). 

And some that just creeped me out (especially because I was sober):

Although I’m thinking tomorrow I may just make an eggnog drinking game (have I mentioned how much I love eggnog?) out of how many things I spot while re-watching these that would make today’s organic-only baby food, Einstein Baby-loving parents of today crap their pants.

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Two guys, a girl and not a DVD to be found

Posted on August 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

The life of a writer is tough. I mean, after so many months, you run out of movies and TV series on Netflix to distract you from the fact that you should actually be spending your time writing.

Which means you now actually have to write.

And no self-respecting writer actually wants to write.

Hell, most of us just do it because it’s easier than data-entry or flipping burgers.

So, we writers are endlessly looking for other ways to distract ourselves from creating the next Mediocre American Novel. And thanks to the whole 90’s nostalgia wave sweeping the country currently and my “never say die” attitude when it comes to procrastination, I have found a new way.

Why the hell can’t you find “Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place” on DVD? Or Netflix, for that matter? Or, well, pretty much anywhere?

For those of you that don’t remember the show (or are too young to remember…which, if you are, get the hell off my blog, you make me feel old), “Two Guys, A Girl and A Pizza Place” (which was later changed to “Two Guys and a Girl”…because the TV execs apparently finally realized a TV show title should not resemble a haiku…in length or form) was a show that ran from 1998 to 2001 on ABC. From what my old ass remembers about it, it was a good show, not great, but highly entertaining.

But more IMPORTANTLY, it is the show where not one, but TWO of my imaginary husbands got their start. The sitcom featured both Ryan Reynolds and Nathan Fillion as main characters.

I mean, I looked everywhere for this show. To no avail. Even Amazon, which has a page for the “complete DVD set,” has the disclaimer, “when becomes available.” Apparently, whichever company owns the rights to it now doesn’t think it would sell well.

Even the Internet pirates let me down. The only place I could find episodes, besides a few 15 minute, low quality videos on YouTube, was some scary eastern European-ish (or possibly Martian, judging by the language) website, which had the first season, but no dice on the other three (which I’m not linking here for fear the TV gods will go on the war path and take it down).

Now, granted, a lot of my frustration stems from the fact I am of the Internet generation, where we literally can have everything at our fingertips. Any information, any image, any video. So the fact that I can’t have something makes me want to throw a Generation Y-sized tantrum.

And so, I say we Gen Yers and Xers no longer stand for this. We want the crappy, laugh-track sitcoms from our youth and we want them NOW. So let’s flood the Internet with our demand for more Berg! And Sharon! And that guy on the left that no one can ever remember the name of!

It is our instant-gratification, self-entitled RIGHT!

Plus, I think we can all agree the world needs even more scenes of a shirtless Ryan Reynolds.

P.S. Between obsessively trying to track down episodes, I did do SOME actual writing. So for you suckers hard-working people with actual jobs that want to waste even more time, you can check out my latest two posts for the Weekly Dig, where I bastardize the Bard’s work after seeing Shakespeare in the Park and get all gangster on a trolley. And, of course, my latest Advocate humor column, where I reveal my brilliant new plan to make new friends based solely on their pop culture preferences (you Next Gen Trekkers are in…Original Series? Hit the road, loser).

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