Poshdeluxe

i can’t believe this is true, but until last weekend, i hadn’t ridden a roller coaster since 1998.

how did i let this happen?! more importantly, why didn’t my friends step in and intervene?!! hello?!! i thought you guys really cared about me?!

ok, well, what’s done is done, water under the bridge, etc. etc. cos this weekend, i went to six flags in arlington! and i rode lots of roller coasters! sometimes even twice!

friday night, henri and i drove up to dallas cos he had two midnight buffy shows scheduled at the inwood theater:

isn’t it pretty?

guess who lives right down the street? my high school friend, jessica, and her husband, jim! so we had dinner (i ate this amazing mac & cheese! yes!) then headed over to the bar inside the theater. i love it when movie theaters have a bar– it always feels so classy and retro and greta garbo-ish.

of course, i had to get a martini. because i think that’s what greta garbo would do.

i call this our “sex in the city” pose, even though i have never seen that show. i’m just guessing.

later, jessica made friends with a bunny!

when a friend likes yr boyfriend, even after he dons a bunny head, you know you’ve got a good friend. stay gold, jessica!

the next day, we met up with erica and drove to arlington for our SIX FLAGS ADVENTURE!

and guess what? NO ONE WAS THERE! i mean, yeah, there were people, but not an overwhelming, sweaty mass of them. check out the back parking lot!!

yeah, that’s our sweet ride in the middle (thomas who?).

this weekend was the *perfect* time to go, given the lack of crowds and the weather (which was sunny but not super hot). of course, now that i’ve written this, all 15 of you that read this blog will decided to go at this time next year and RUIN IT with yr CROWDEDNESS. sigh.

there’s a lot i’d forgotten about amusement parks. when i was in junior high and high school, i got a season pass to astroworld every year, so my friends and i could jet around on the viper or XLR8 while my dear, sweet mother sat in the shade with her latest fantasy novel (i think we were eventualy allowed to go without a chaperone by the time i turned 18). i knew that park like the back of my hand, and i almost cried when they tore it down (even now, if i’m driving down 610, i must avert my eyes).

one thing i completely forgot about was the fact that amusement parks have “shows.” you know, little song & dance revues with teenagers in heavy make-up and cheap costumes.

since this was “fright fest,” all of the shows had a halloween/death/scary theme. you know, family entertainment. even BETTER, lest you forget that you’re experiencing “fright fest,” there’s halloween music blaring throughout the park, non-stop, for the entire day. you might ask, “how much halloween music can there be?” the answer would be: v. v. little. so, while you’re standing in line or eating yr funnel cake or horsing around the park, yr ears are ACCOSTED by either: 1) an evil cackling laughter sound 2) an instrumental “do-do-do” type horror house soundtrack 3) “the time warp” from rocky horror.

i can’t stress how weird it is to enjoy a piece of funnel cake while feeling like you should be worried about an axe murderer nearby.

eventually, we got used to it, which worried me. i mean, what IF a chainsaw psycho was right behind me, and the music was WARNING me, but i just ignored it?!!!

so imagine all of these pictures with a cheesy scary movie soundtrack.

weird, right?

this, btw, is the big starburst advertising campaign around the park. there are different poses people can do while enjoying a starburst. of course, only Major Dorks would actually try to do them.

our first ride of the day was the Titan, which is described like this on the website:

“towering 255 feet above the earth, the muscular steel superstructure features one of the world’s mightiest drops at hyper-speeds of 85 miles an hour.”

whoah!

honestly, it had been so long since henri and i had experienced “one of the world’s mightiest drops,” we were actually kinda nervous. it felt silly, but all of a sudden i was asking myself, “why was this fun, again?”

of course, we didn’t have much time to freak ourselves out, cos there was almost NO LINE!

i know, isn’t that cray?!!! of course, this was around 1 PM… a little bit later, things got slightly more crowded. but i think the longest we waited, all day, was maaaaybe 45 minutes? maybe 30 minutes? pocket change!

anyway, the titan turned out to be AWESOME, of course. halfway through the first fall (which was pretty major), i remembered: I LOVE THIS FEELING!

when we got off, i wanted to run around and get right back in line! but we had a lot more coasters to tackle, so we moved on to the texas giant, described as thus:

“you can’t leave till you’ve ridden this monster—named the top wooden coaster on earth—14 stories in the Texas sky, this beast howls at 62 mph.”

well GOSH DANGITY DARN IT!

since this coaster wasn’t as intense as some of the others, we decided to take pictures. which is really, really fun. and also, kind of ridiculous, cos most of them turn out to be photos of yr knee or the sky.

here’s a good one of erica, as we approach the first (and biggest) drop:

joy or terror? you decide.

henri and i rode in the first car, which makes this photo preeeetty amazing:

i know, i’m getting a little vertigo just looking at it. eeeee.

you know what’s even better than that picture? this video that henri took! during the ride!!

for some reason, there’s no sound when i play it… which is good. cos then you would just get to hear my high-pitched shrieking.

this picture pretty much sums up the exhilaration of roller coastering:

awww! i wanna go again!

next up, batman: the ride.

“soar like a bat out of Hades, through, above—and even underneath—Gotham City, suspended from the rails of one of the most innovative coasters of all time.”

like a bat out of *hades*, huh? i guess they couldn’t use H-E-double hockey sticks, cos this is family establishment.

astroworld actually had a similar batman ride (although that one, as i recall, was standing, while this one makes yr feet hang freely in the air), and i remember when it opened, i was sooo impressed with the “art direction” of the ride. i am not kidding. i remember running through “bruce wayne’s factory” and seeing the smoking police car (it just crashed!) and hearing the sirens go off cos there’s TROUBLE IN SECTOR 7! honestly, i took a secret pleasure out of standing in that line.

which i had completely forgotten (what? me, a nerd? i don’t remember that), until we arrived at the batman ride. cos look! it’s the batmobile!!! that means batman’s HERE!

and DUDES! it’s the PO PO! they’re on the scene!

erica and henri derived a *great* amount of amusement saying things like, “you GUYS! this is just like the MOVIE! it feels so real!” etc. etc. har har har.

the entrance to the mr. freeze ride was my FAVORITE. guess why.

ok, but hello false advertising. did we actually get to eat ice cream in line? was there any TRACE of frozen treats inside that building? NO. if the batman ride has a crashed police car and a sign that says, “this park dedicated to the people of gotham city by bruce wayne,” which makes it feel super real, then the mr. freeze ride is OBLIGATED to serve ice cream. it only makes sense.

speaking of clever art decor, i’ve missed all of the charming landscapes found in amusement parks. you know, like astroworld had nottingham village and disney has main street, USA. and you walk down the street past all of the storefronts and feel like you’ve Entered a Different World, a Different Time, a Magical Place. like “boomtown,” which featured this lovely “note” on the window of the “schoolhouse”:

oh, those silly whipper snappers! they can’t spell worth a cotton-pickin’ durn!

since it was fright fest, everything had to be SCARIER. that means that everything is smothered in faux cobwebs.

oh yeah, and there’s a few gravestones splashed here and there with HIlarious inscriptions like, “doug. who was he?”

moving on

the scariest ride we went on all day was probably the superman “tower of power,” which, speaking of decor, actually had some cool design:

while waiting in line, you could read about lois lane and brainiac and all kinds of people. fortunately, we had something *even better* to hold our attention: teenagers! making out like crazy!

the mists of time had clearly robbed me of the many, many memories of PDA i witnessed at astroworld. amusement parks, after all, are one of the few places you can go with little adult supervision (c-ya, youth group leader!) where you are forced to kill time in the only way you know how: sucking face.

in the line for superman, there was a set of three couples who probably would have died if they hadn’t been able to constantly keep at least 95.3% of their bodies touching each other. one of the guys, by the way, appeared to have just discovered the boobs of his girlfriend. another couple was SO stuck together that i only realized they were two separate people when they had to get on the ride.

speaking of the ride, yowza!!!!!

the tower of power is scary for several reasons:

1) when the ride begins, you shoot up to the v. top at an INSANELY FAST speed, and you’re never really sure when the ride is about to start

2) once you get to the top, you drop back down again, halfway, then up, then down, and you’re kind of wondering if the safety harness was actually engineered for a person 10 pounds bigger than you and therefore OMG I’M ABOUT TO FLY OUT OF THIS THING

3) you go all the way back up to the top and sit there. you just sit there. staring at the city far, far below. soooo far below. and you know you’re about to drop ALL the way to the bottom, which is so far away, but you don’t know when until AAAAIEEEEE!

in summary, it totally rocked my pants off.

having conquered the ride, superman personally invited us to join him in fighting crime and saving the planet.

we decided to eat waffle fries instead.

by the end of the day, we’d ridden ALL of the rides that received a “MAX” thrill rating (in red, no less) on the website, and our top three (titan, batman and superman) twice!

unfortunately, none of us won any of those amazingly massive plush animals that i’m sure cost at least $200 and you can really only get by playing the ring toss about 25 times until you’ve finally “learned the secret” and the joke’s on six flags cos they just lost themselves a BIGASS RED DRAGON! BURN!

(thanks to erica for the photo)

still, i think it’s safe to say that we’re six flags pros now, since we totally managed to hack it with the big guns.

you know, like daffy.

LINKS

god bless david letterman for doing what all of us have been dying to do: really embarrass paris hilton.

it’s no dick in a box, but my secret boyfriend andy samberg’s “iran” song is pretty awesome. plus, he’s wearing a vest. which i picked out for him. obvs.

props to mark for sending me this article about how blog commenters are “famous.” and by famous, i mean other blog commenters know them.
a real life “harold & maude” just goes to show that it’s entirely possible for a 24 year old man to fall in love with an 82 year old woman. it’s also entirely possible to give the entire world the heebie jeebies.

serious note: a high school girl got her wrist broken by a security guard after dropping a piece of cake on the ground. the most unbelievable thing about this story is that there’s someone out there who feels more strongly about cake than i do.

here’s an idea! let’s remake “karate kid”! with will smith’s son, who’s only, like, seven years old! yeah, and let’s make the audience eat poop! cos they’ll be doing it anyway!

on october 10, you can download the new radiohead album for… however much you want. because radiohead is already super rich and they don’t have a record label anymore and really, they just like effing with big companies. THOM YORKE PLEASE HAVE MY BABIES! even if they get yr wonky eye, i won’t care.

the new regina spektor video is basically lots of girls getting to pretend to be regina spektor. which is, like, my dream.