blessed be

So, my headaches are better, but now Simon is bad again.

The temporary verdict on the headaches is that it's a sinus infection from January, which I never treated, and which never actually went away. The young, "chill" doctor at the U of M reluctantly prescribed an antibiotic and the strongest dosage of Motrin a human being is capable of consuming (as he said), and the combination has been delightfully, amazingly effective.

Laura and Keith are visiting this weekend (and for some reason, having that extra parking space behind my house for overnight guests -- since the neighbors across the hall don't have a car -- makes me feel like a real grown-up), and we were settling in last night on stomachs burgeoning with good Mexican food to watch some Star Wars when Simon's ear-splitting shrieks cut through the Mos Eisley Cantina music. I called the Animal ER (a number I never really wanted to have saved into my phone) and we packed him up and took him over. Three endless, hot hours later (that place, so freaking cold the last time I visited, was a furnace last night) we left with nothing very conclusive but a few suggestions.

The vet thinks he may have a UTI. The ultrasound revealed no stones in his bladder or kidneys, but his bladder was completely empty, so they couldn't do a urinalysis. So she prescribed an antibiotic anyway. She thinks he may have torn something in his leg or hips (the injury from last time) and it resurfaced because I hung a new cabinet in the kitchen which he figured out how to jump on top of (it's much higher than the top of my head), and he possibly has some early onset arthritis. So she also prescribed an anti-inflammatory. She also wrote a prescription, based upon my reports of his difficulty with urination (because all of his problems, even the pain in his hips, arise when he attempts to use the litterbox), for a medication for urethra spasms (a human medication which I would have to fill at a people pharmacy).

I like this vet because she basically said, This will get you through the weekend until you can see your regular doctor on Monday, which will be Much Cheaper. (It's eighty bucks just for walking through the ER door, plus whatever they do for him.) So I took him home and dosed him up and fell in bed...and woke up to him crying in the litterbox at 8:30 this morning. So I threw on shoes and a jacket and drove to the (completely empty) 24-hour CVS to get the people pills, only to be told by the lazy-ass pharmacist on duty that they wouldn't have it ready until tomorrow, at which point I took the prescription across the street to the 24-hour Walgreens and told THAT pharmacist I was having some trouble getting it filled and needed it today, and he said he could do that, but it would take at least an hour to mix up the dosage, which is totally fine.

So I'm waiting till I can go pick it up, and loving up my little guy, and trying not to plan for the worst (which Laura says is ineffective thinking anyway, because you can never actually prepare for the worst, so it's not worth getting all worked up about), but really it's horrendously stressful to spend all my time at home listening for him to use the litterbox and waiting for him to start crying and growling and licking himself and not being able to do a damn thing to make it better. And he's such a sweetheart too. He never bites, he never holds a grudge, and when it's bad, he comes dragging himself looking for me.

Sigh.

Now, onto something completely unrelated, and that's Star Wars. I was deceived by misleading packaging into buying the version of the originals that I didn't want. I wanted the Originals. The old, campy, filmed-in-somebody's-half-dug-swimming-pool originals. The ones I watched through my childhood, the ones that spawned hundreds of thousands of bad fan fic, the ones my parents went to on dates ("in my beginning is my end"), those ones. So I bought the boxed set that said "the classic movies." I thought "digitally restored and remastered" meant, you know, touched up a little bit.

No, no. It meant full of all the technocrap that George Lucas can't seem to help putting into his stuff. Mr. Worship the Force of Technology. High Priest Sacrifice the Story on the Altar of Special Effects. Captain Forget the Plot, Lookee What I Can Do!

I was all caught up in the hype when the Special Edition Episodes IV-VI came out, like almost everyone else; but it wore off quickly, and in the wake of sharp disappointment in Episodes I-III I haven't been in the mood to watch anything Star Wars until now...and then I wanted to go back to the beginning. To the before. The genesis.

And I couldn't. No, the Tattooine canyon R2-D2 first travels through just had to be changed to look more "alien." The Mos Eisley streets had to be crawling with digital alien rats. The people walking around had to be edited out and replaced by dinosaur-type critters.

Meanwhile there are droids walking around made of garbage cans. And Shop Vacs. And cameras. And clowns. Did we edit those out to make them look cooler? No.

See, and there's where the problem lies. Lucas was so excited to dispense his "original vision" to everyone that he forgot his original effect -- that the true glory of the first Episodes IV-VI lay in their campiness, in their home-done touches, in their "let's use what we have to hand" methodology. Maybe in his head it was all perfect. But if the technology had been able to support his orginal vision, I'm thinking they all would have been as bad as the most recent three, and we'd only be watching them now through the sarcastic lens of Mystery Science Theater. Because the originals had heart. They were campy. Some of the effects were bad. And when you take away that obvious humor -- haha, look, that droid is a garbage can! -- you take away what made the story fun as well as poignant. You take away most of the audience connectivity. And you completely erase the nostalgia.

Which, since he didn't do that entirely -- didn't make over every cheesy effect, every silly puppet -- but only added a few things like rats and dinosaurs and ambulatory Jabbas, he created, instead of something even more glorious and cohesive, something choppy and dissonant. You jump from trash cans and hovercraft races against a blue screen to way too sharp and clear backdrops replete with state-of-the-art, soulless digital aliens about whom you care nothing. And then back again. He made his epic schizophrenic. There's a subjective breakdown in the delivery of the narrative. And it sucks.

So I had to take back the deceptive "classic" version and buy instead the "Limited Edition" version that includes, as a bonus, the original theatrical releases.

So not only is George Lucas a big sellout prostitute to his own imagination, and a big liar on his packaging, he's trying to pretend that the originals never even existed, and hoping to wipe them from the memory of the earth.

Yeah, right.