05/01/2004 - 1:26 p.m.

And there are many paths to tread

Further along in here is my opinion and review of ROTK and the trilogy. You have to read about my life first to get to it. Thousand pardons for those who don't give a damn.

I have decided that I am going to get back into this diary. I am actually going to write regularly again, and nothing and no one is going to stop me. So there.

The hols were nice, very nice, but it would take forever to write about them, and now they were so long ago no one would really be interested anyway. I go back to school on Saturday and I will have myself a new roommate. She is my fourth, and apparently hails from Virginia. With all my luck, she'll be a non English Cuban immigrant living in Virginia since last year... Which is unfair to say, but I've given up on roommates. I hope she only stays two weeks and then gets out so I can have the room to myself again.

Where I have to live next year as well, incidently. My parents are against an apartment entirely, and the ideal situation, moving in with Nathan, cannot be a reality due to reservations on his part and a strong dislike from his parents. Nathan, I think, is hesitant from the Teri Ann experience.

Tomorrow Nathan is supposed to be coming to save me from the hellish doldroms in which I live. I don't know now if it's going to happen. The original plan was to watch a movie at one o clock in Ames with Dancing Jennie, but the movie times are all changed now that the schools are starting again. No one realised that until today. Unfortunately, no movies start until 4:20, and Jennie has to work from five to nine, so we'd have to go to a late movie.

The problem with this is that I doubt that my mother will be too impressed with us driving all the way to Ames at nine o clock to watch a two hour movie and then drive all the way back to Ames. The weather has turned wintery at last and she is convinced that we're going to end up dead by the side of the highway anyway.

I picked a bad day to tell Nathan all this, though it's not as though I could help it. I expect I should've realised when he called me at one in the morning that not all was happy with him. I wasn't thinking about that when I talked to him, and he went back to bed in a mood, convinced (I'm pretty certain) that it was his fault and that he won't get to see me. I wish I knew how to convince him otherwise, but I think I'll just wait until he wakes up and then we'll try to come up with something to do instead.

If anybody happens to be in DM tomorrow, and isn't working, give me a call, would you? Maybe we can fit you in someplace. I've been a victim of foreced anti-socialism in the name of family time.

That time involved my father arguing with my brother about how to hook up the DVD player he and I went halves on- his share of the money he promised to pay me as soon as he could and I doubt I will be repaid. So now that they have it, my brother refuses to read the instructions, and my father refuses to do anything unless my brother reads the instructions. It's more than slightly enraging, and I do regret buying the thing for them.

I should've bought the Extended Two Towers and been selfish. I still need to get it, actually, but I've been trying to decide if the "Gollum" version is just the movie with a figurine, or if there's actually anything more in that version or not.

I saw ROTK a few days ago, finally. I hope that everything that ought to be in the extended version will be, because otherwise I will be quite put out. I want to see the Faramir and Eowyn story, and I need to see what they do with Sauruman. As for things that actually went into the movie, the Paths of the Dead were cool, but not what I expected- I've always thought it rather vauge in the book, so I probably need to read it again. I still want to know which finger Tolkien didn't have: Frodo uses his ring finger in the books and his first finger in the movies, and I can't find a reason why except that it probably looks less like he's flipping the camera off, or if it's in tribute to the author. I'm certain people know, it's not like Byron's club foot, I just can't find it.

I thought Shelob was much creepier than the Harry Potter spiders, which was good. I disliked the whole "Betrayal of Sam", and the "Arwen is Dying" stuff that got added in. I suppose it's supposed to be character development and inclusion, but I don't much care for it.

My brother says he could write a better script, and I suppose that I could too, but the thing is that then it would be our version of the book. Everyone in the world has their own version: what we have to do when looking at LOTR is decide if Peter Jackson's version had goals and if it suceeded in those goals. If the goal was to give me my version of the books on the screen, well, in some places they did it, in others, not really. However, I highly doubt that was the goal. If it was to try to fulfill most people's visions and to introduce non-Tolkien fans to the books, well, it seems to have done that. If it was to put together a movie about hope, I would say that that definately happened. It's the one movie I would say portrays its theme absolutely and often.

They are going to stay among my favourite movies forever. The scope and sucess of the project, as well as my love for the books and their portrayal on screen, give them a place in my heart forever. It's been a good three years, and I'm always going to be able to include the films as posts in my life, spaces in my timeline.