This weekend my little cousins stayed over our house, and this morning I was sitting on the couch with my 18 month old baby cousin watching Barney. I sat her on my lap to keep her from climbing over the back of the couch (she would try), and a short while later, she held my hand and cuddled into me all sweet and calm. Every once in a while, she would look back up at me, smile, and look back at the TV. I would sing along to the Barney songs, and she would look at me and giggle.

Still, every once in a while, she would check to make sure my mom was still around. If she couldn't see my mom, she would yell at me to put her down, run down the hall, and call my mom's name. When my mom came back in sight, she would jump back up on my lap and be content to watch the show.

After spending the weekend with her, I know how hard it is to balance your attention between a toddler and everything else you have to do. I also know that one day I want to hear tiny little feet running down the hall, a squeaky little voice calling for mommy, and the call to be for me.

Love,
Juliana

Juliana Tests Positive for Unstable Loner

I "stumbled upon" this personality test. Here were my results.

Global Personality Test Results

Stability (13%) very low which suggests you are extremely worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious. Orderliness (73%) high which suggests you are overly organized, reliable, neat, and hard working at the expense too often of flexibility, efficiency, spontaneity, and fun. Extraversion (36%) moderately low which suggests you are reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and secretive.

Take Free Global Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

I'm boring, unstable, and I have a stick up my butt. Cool. Then here was the "trait snapshot" they gave me.

"Introverted, neat, needs things to be extremely clean, observer, perfectionist, not self revealing, does not make friends easily, suspicious, irritable, hates large parties, follows the rules, worrying, does not like to stand out, fragile, phobic, submissive, dislikes leadership, cautious, takes precautions, focuses on hidden motives, good at saving money, solitary, hard working, emotionally sensitive, prudent, altruistic, heart over mind, unadventurous."

It's sad because it's true. I think I'm a little more fun than it thinks I am, but maybe not. Please help the cause by checking this box.

Yes! Send love to Juliana!

Love,
Juliana

Cruel Intentions

Cruel Intentions is a 1999 remake of Dangerous Liasons, except with teenagers in Upper East Side Manhattan. An evil, soulless team of stepbrother and sister, Sebastian and Kathryn (Ryan Phillipe and Sarah Michelle Gellar), plan to destroy the innocence of two girls new to their school (Selma Blair and Reese Witherspoon). Witherspoon's character wrote to Seventeen proclaiming her decision to remain chaste, and Sebastian believes her to be the perfect challenge. Sebastian and Kathryn make a bet. He has to have sex with the self-proclaimed proud virgin. If he loses, Kathryn gets his car. If he succeeds, he gets to sleep with Kathryn.

Manipulation, vindication, pseudo-incest...in short, Gossip Girl: The Movie. They directly based the plot of an episode off this movie. Blair and Chuck in season two were Kathryn and Sebastian, just not related.

Let's meet our main characters.

Such a close family

Now we meet Cecile, a new student played by Selma Blair. I would tell you how innocent she's supposed to be, but her koala shirt speaks for itself.

Another thing that speaks for itself in this picture is Cristine Baranski's face

The plan comes out after this meeting, and we get a little introduction to Annette Hargrove.

And she's from Kansas.

And then a formal introduction.

The outfit screams "I'm a virgin and proud of it."

After a dose of Annette's chastity khakis, it's about time for some girl to girl tongue action.

This won for the "Best Kiss" category at the MTV Movie Awards in 2000.

Kathryn tells Cecile that girls learn how to kiss by practicing on each other. Cecile believes her. Later, Kathryn tells her that girls learn how to be good in bed by sleeping with everyone they can. Cecile believes her.

Kathryn keeps cocaine in her cross necklace. I wouldn't listen to anything she says.

A little more inappropriate relations.

Complete with dirty talk. Too bad you didn't get to hear that.

A negative review on rottentomatoes.com says: "Despite its highly descriptive dialogue, Cruel Intentions features no nudity ... I doubt teenage boys will be satisfied just to hear Buffy talk dirty."

I'm going to stop here and leave the fates of these characters a mystery, although the entire tone of the movie shifts at the end. I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. I didn't quite expect it, I've heard critics call it a cop-out, but I think it was definitely effective.

Now I think is a good time to mention just how gorgeous Ryan Phillipe is.

Dude.

Even lame episodes of Gossip Girl can be sugar-coated with hot guys and sex scenes. Same goes for this movie. It was nominated for a Teen Choice Award for Sexiest Love Scene.

Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillipe got married the year this movie came out. If you don't envy Reese Witherspoon for being pretty, talented, and successful, envy her for this.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it received a 47% from critics and a 79% from viewers. Other sites have it rated much higher, but most of the negative reviews criticize it for being an excuse to look at pretty people doing bad things. Sarah Michelle Gellar won an MTV Movie Award in 2000 for Best Female Performance and was nominated for Best Villian. It also won the Teen Choice Award for Best Drama. Critic Charles Taylor on salon.com calls it "The Dirtiest-minded American movie in recent memory - and an honestly corrupt entertaining picture is never anything to sneeze at." I agree with that. Fluffy but definitely entertaining.

Love,
Juliana

Breastfeeding an 8 year old...

This mother from England still breast-feeds her almost 8-year-old daughter. Allow me to illustrate my sequence of reactions when I watched this video.

?_?
:o
@_@
O.o
=/
=|

Now allow me to share it with you, and let me tell you it gets progressively weirder as it goes on.



Every comment I can think to make just seems to completely inadequate. This speaks for itself.

This is probably a weird thing to say, but if these girls are so fascinated with breasts now, I wonder what they're going to do when they get their own...I mean 8 and 9? They're only a few years away.

I never even thought about anyone doing this. I always thought the general cut-off was whenever the baby started getting teeth, sometime before a year, not when they were getting their second set of teeth. Turns out pediatricians recommend doing it for at least a year in order to build up the kid's immune system and prevent diseases later in life.

I watched a few other related videos after this one (American women whose children are five or six), and supposedly the international average age to stop breast-feeding a child is four. I also read that this is an insignificant statistic because it doesn't account for cultural factors. It did say though that in societies where the children self-wean, most stop around three or four, which is supposedly the natural age.



They all made an interesting point that the United States and I guess Western culture in general made breasts a sex symbol, and that whole belief is a learned social construct that makes people uncomfortable with breastfeeding. Nevertheless, society dictates what is appropriate and inappropriate, so it might be difficult for these children to adapt to what is considered normal if they were raised that way. I would be beyond mortified if I was one of those children.

I spent seven hours at school today and the most useful thing I learned was from watching Cracked TV on YouTube.

Love,
Juliana

Hot in Cleveland and Golden Girls

I was sick today, and sick days always lead to a discovery of some new show that I will watch half the day. Last night I discovered "Hot in Cleveland," a sitcom on TV Land, and I've watched six episodes since last night.

The show is about three single middle aged women who moved to Cleveland from LA and still try to act like they're 30. (Sex and the City anyone?) The three of them are funny, but it's the 80 something-year-old quick-witted caretaker of the house played by Betty White. She was cast in the pilot of the show as a guest star and was not meant to be a regular, but her appearance received such enthusiastic reception that she was written in as a main character.

Betty White is adorable. She is 89 years old and still kicking. In the last couple years she's been on Saturday Night Live, the movie The Proposal, You Again ("I'm also on Facebook. And the Twitter!"), an episode of 30 Rock, and several other things including a major role on the show "Hot in Cleveland." She won a SAG Award last night for her role on the show.



She has been acting since 1945 and used to host the show Password in the 60s, but I know her from the show that kept her name alive in the last part of the 20th century, "The Golden Girls."

This show is about three old women who live together in Miami, and one's mother who hangs around their house and gets in the best sarcastic one-liners. Estelle Getty was to Golden Girls what Betty White is to Hot in Cleveland. They're all basically a family and have problems you would expect among a group of young women, made funny by the fact that they're in their 60s.

Betty is the last living Golden Girl, as of June last year. She played Rose, the dim-witted, clueless one of the group who would tell crazy stories like Kenneth from 30 Rock about living on a farm. Golden Girls is one of those shows that can put you in a better mood instantly. I love the theme song.



Love to these shows, Betty White, and you,
Juliana

The Parent Trap

There's a kind of magic to these movies. If you don't know what they're about, two estranged twin sisters meet for the first time at a summer camp and realize they were separated at birth by their parents who divorced and each took one child. The one who lives with her father in Napa, CA is more of a tomboy and the one who lives with her mother, a famous wedding dress designer, in England is more refined and feminine. Each girl wants to meet their missing parent, so they decide to switch places and get their parents back together so they can finally be the family they were meant to be.

Like any little kid, I went through phases of being totally obsessed with certain movies. In Kindergarten, these were my favorite. I remember watching both versions so many times at my grandma's house that to this day she still can't stand them. Sometimes I used to watch the Lindsay Lohan version twice in one day.

The original version came out in 1961 and starred Hayley Mills, my favorite actress when I was little. I loved old Hayley Mills movies like That Darn Cat, Pollyanna, and The Parent Trap. The mother here is played by Maureen O'Hara, the mother in Miracle of 34th street, which I'm sure means nothing to anyone but me.



I used to walk around singing this song. They nod to it in the 1998 remake where they have Lindsay Lohan sing it while waiting for an elevator.


This was Lindsay Lohan's break into acting, and it makes me sad to think of the drastic downward spiral her life has taken since then. Between the soundtrack and the charm of the awesome cast Dennis Quaid, Natasha Richardson, and young Lindsay Lohan, this movie is an adorable remake of an adorable classic.



Love,
Juliana

Desperately Seeking Susan

I saw this movie for the first time tonight, and when I pressed play I actually squealed. My sister said "What was that?" I said "I'm so excited!" She called me a nerd, and I deserve it, but it's Madonna in a movie!

The tagline for this movie is "Roberta is desperate to be Susan. Susan is wanted by the mob. The mob finds Roberta instead."

This movie is about a bored woman named Roberta, married to a nerdy hot tub salesman, who lives vicariously through some woman named Susan she has never met. She knows of Susan through the personal ads where her boyfriend leaves messages for her titled "Desperately Seeking Susan."

Susan is a drifter, so when her boyfriend can't find her, he leaves her a message in the personal ads detailing a time and place for them to meet. Roberta wants to know more about the elusive Susan with the kind of exciting life she will never have, so she stalks their meeting. When Susan sells her signature jacket, Roberta buys it to emulate her idol. She ends up hitting her head and gets amnesia, and everyone including herself believes that she really is Susan. Unknown to Susan, the mob is after her for her earrings, stolen artifacts, and they come after Roberta instead.

This movie is everything I love about the 80s. If I could be made into any character from any movie ever, I would want to be Madonna's character in this movie. This review calls it "a must see for anybody interested in 80's culture."



Love,
Juliana