I just saw "8 Mile" with Eminem. The reviews were right. It's a standard Hollywood plot, updated for the Detroit 313. What makes this otherwise boring movie a standout is Eminem. He has the same kind of intensity I've seen in Sean Penn's film, and which I saw up close when Penn was in a Sam Shephard play with Nick Nolte at the Magic Theater a few years ago.

Eminem is very watchable. You see all these emotions wash across his face, which is great for a movie audience. I loved the guys arguing in the car about the difference between west coast and east coast rap styles, and how Tupac Shakur influenced rap style. I'm sure half the people in the audience with me, had no clue what these guys were talking about.

And Kim Basinger. She looked almost too natural, too familiar playing Eminem's trailer trash mom role. The music was great, but I wished it had more of Eminem's own music. I'm not sure Eminem would do well in another kind of movie role, but he was great in this semi biopic of himself.

"Contact" the movie was on TV last night, and every time it's on TV, which seem like once a month, I have to watch it. I love the Ellie Arroway character. I so relate to her focus, her single mindedness, her intensity and how her driven qualities lead to her inevitable incredible loneliness. But in the movie, she's at least got her JC man, Palmer Joss, the ruggedly beautiful Matthew McConaughey. I'm like so jealous! Like where's my spiritual, beautiful JC man?

WOOHOO!!! I finished National Novel Writing Month a day early, and wrote 50,184 words. I'm not even done with my story, but I do intend to finish it soon.

I even figured out how to post a graphic to my bloggie. I'll have to post more pics soon.

I'm exhausted from writing like a fiend this whole month, but now I have to get back to writing my screenplay. I'm taking a class from Richard Schultz, who I believe is the head of the screenwriting department at UCLA and has taught most of the current screenwriters who have Hollywood films out. The class is in two weeks, and last year in a radio interview, Schultz said he would read screenplays if people brought them to class. I would so love to get feedback from him on my screenplay.

I can't believe I completed another year of Nanowrimo. It's so hard, so maddening, yet in the end I always feel good that I've pushed myself and accomplished something really cool like write 50K plus words in 30 days. Now that's great writing production.

I've got the day off, and I can't decide if I want to venture outside and brave the shopping hordes. I need a new watchband for my Timex Ironman triathlon watch, and would love to pick it up today but I'm not in the mood to deal with crowds.

Today is the supposed to be the best day to shop for deals at the stores, but it's you and everybody else in your neighborhood doing the same thing.

I feel like such a slug though. I finally made myself take a shower, after lounging around in my jammies for most of the day and picking at my leftover Thanksgiving food. I feel like I should at least get out, and do something like maybe go see a movie or something or run some errands. But I've got two more days of my weekend to do it, and part of me just wants to kick back and relax like a stuffed whale at the beach. Too bad there's no blazinlgy hot sun for me lie around in, to make the image complete.

There are three movies I want to see; Die Another Day, 8 Mile, and the new Harry Potter. But even these aren't temptation enough for me to want to leave the comfort of my own home.

There's a Mervyn's up the hill from where I live, and I'm pretty sure they sell watchbands, so I might just take the bus up there. If I go to Union Square, it will be a crazy zoo and crawling with way too many people. I feel to do just one productive thing today.

God, and I really have errands to do. My company Christmas party is next Friday, and I want to see if there's anything out there that I absolutely need to wear for Christmas this year. I want to see what's in style, what's hot and trendy, and then decide if what I have in my closet is still okay for another wearing. Now that I've lost some pounds, I can wear some holiday clothes that I haven't worn in a few years. Maybe they'll look kind of new because no one has seen me wearing them for quite some time.

I also want to look at Christmas decorations. I always buy at least 4-7 ornaments every year, just to have new things on the tree. But those darn crowds!

And then there's christmas shopping. I haven't even started that yet, although I did buy some stocking stuffer type things a few months ago.

Maybe if I just go for an hour, it won't be so bad. I just hate shopping when it's crowded.

Wow, Stars Wars Phantom Menace is on TV. God, I love Ewan MacGregor as Obiwon Kanobi! He is so darn cute!!! And I so don't care what the politically correct people say, I love Jar Jar Binks! Bring back Jar Jar!

I just got back from my aunt and uncle's house in San Jose. It's nice to see the relatives, since we don't get together very often. I brought a green bean and onion dish that I found at Epicurious that I debuted last Christmas. It's simple, easy to make and very tasty.

I arrived at my aunt's house at around 1:00 pm, and helped her with some last minute preparations. We ate at 3 pm, watched the football game on TV, and gossiped about the family. My other aunt and uncle from Oakland also were there, and it was nice to see them as well.

Then armed with leftovers, I drove home. I would have stayed longer, but my aunt wasn't feeling well so I decided to leave. I think she has the flu that everyone is getting. I hope she didn't cough on the food. She made a ton of food, and there was so much desserts to eat, I kissed my eating plan goodbye for the day.

I was so sleepy on the drive home, probably from the turkey. I was glad I only had a glass of wine with appetizers and a glass of wine at dinner, and no beer during the football game, even though I really wanted one. We were done eating by 4 pm, so I had a couple of hours to sober up before the drive home.

Maybe I got sleepy from the pumpkin pie, apple pie, chocolate cake, pumpkin cream cheese cake and ice cream that I had for dessert. Yes, I really did eat all those desserts and they were so heavenly and yummy. I thought I was going to burst at the end, and felt like a distended fat cow couch potato watching the football game .

Thank god I wore stretchy waist pants. I had better exercise double tomorrow, so I can work all that dessert off. I don't know how I fit a plate full of thanksgiving food and all that dessert into my tummy, but I did.

Speaking of football? What is up with Steve Spurrier and the Washington Redskins? Wasn't he that great college football coach who was supposed to make a splash in the NFL? At least, that's what all the sports talking heads were predicting about him. My uncles were bitching about their fantasy football league teams, and how they thought for sure Spurrier was going to be a winning coach in his first season. One of my uncles was pissed because he picked a couple of players from the Redskins teams for his fantasy football team.

Fantasy football sounds like such a trip. One of the companies I worked for had their own Fantasy Football League. It was run out of the Finance department that I was a part of. The draft was like such a big deal, and was very serious business. All the VPs played, and the directors, and what other football nuts they could find. Everyone took it so seriously.

I asked if I could join, and the director that I worked for said I could join up with him and this other guy. But then he started telling me about all the work involved and I was like "NO WAY". You have to watch the games, and keep track of the stats. Then when your players are doing badly, you have to research trades. Everyone did their research at work of course, but then you have to watch a ton of football games. So much work, and for what? A little money and prestige. It's such a guy thing.

Pet peeves of mine this morning. God, I hate that SF Chronicle radio ad for classified ads, only because it bugs me that the woman answering the phone says “chello”? I mean who the hell says “chello” Isn’t it Hello? Is this some new way of saying Hello that I’m blissfully unaware of?

I hate when people say “often” and they hard pronounce the “T”. This is a relatively new phenomenon. No one in England says often with an over annunciated “T”, and no one said the word this way ten years ago. Why are people saying it now? I asked my acting speech teacher, who was a stickler for speaking correct English, and he said it was so totally wrong and people are over annunciating the “T” to sound intelligent. Whenever I hear someone saying it, and everyone seems to be saying it lately, I think of that person as snooty and snobby, and trying to prove to other people that they’re intelligent. And if they’re trying to prove they’re intelligent, it must mean they think they’re stupid. And you know what, they’re right.

I'm at 41,881 words for Nanowrimo and back on schedule. Unlike last year when I only was behind a couple of times in my word count, I've spent most of this year's Nanowrimo always being behind and having to play catch up. The loss of a fully functioning computer for three weeks didn't help me either.

So many participants have already passed the 50K mark. I have half a mind to write more every day, just so I can finish early. My writing limit seems to be 5,000 words. I think Stephen King said in his book "On Writing", that he wrote 10K words a day. I don't know how he does it, and the only explanation I can come up with is 1) his only job is to write and 2) he's been doing it so much longer than I have.

Working a full time job really does take up alot of my energy, energy that I could be devoting to writing. Still, 5,000 words a day isn't that bad for a day's worth of writing, but those 5,000 words don't come easy. The first 3,000 words pretty much flow out, and the last 2,000 I have to really figh to get out. 1,667 words a day is by comparison relatively easy compared to the 5,000 word days I've been forced to do.

And on November 30, I still won't be done with my novel. I think the Nanowrimo folks wanted a fully completed novel, and my novel will be completed, but the story just isn't finished yet. By November 30, I will have finished the the first part of the story, but I still have parts 2 and 3 to go. Part one of this story could stand on its own as a mini novel or be part of serial novel. Dickens wrote this way I believe.

I definitely intend to finish parts two and three though, only because I'm curious to see how it all works out. I mean I know how the story ends, I just don't know the details and it's the details that I'm most interested in knowing.

Interesting article from the National Revie Online about The Possible Collapse of the Government in Iran. There are many whispers around the net, that the true source and supporter of the all the muslim terrorists and Bin Laden, is Iran.

The following was taken from a DOD transcript of Secretary Rumsfeld En Route to Prague, Czech Republic. It's interesting to hear Rumsy speak about what other countries are offering to do, in the event we go to war with Iraq.

I love reading the DOD transcripts whenever Rumsy speaks. You learn so much more about the Iraq situation by reading these transcripts, than you do reading or listening to the news. My college profs were right when they said, always use original source materials and never trust secondary sources.

<[Q: Mr. Secretary you said you'd been getting offers every day from other countries to help disarm Iraq by force could you talk at all about the details of those offers? Do you expect further such offers at the NATO summit]?

Rumsfeld: I don't know that I've said we're getting offers everyday. I may have, if I did, I think we're getting more accurately to say we're getting responses every day. And they fit into a variety of categories, one category is That we would like to be helpful and start planning now in the event that force is used with or without the UN resolution. Another category is we would like to be helpful and begin planning now but only if there is a UN resolution indicating that it's appropriate for member states to use appropriate force. Still others are saying we are not in a position to cooperate with Iraq but on the other hand we would be willing to provide assistance in other ways. That might be force protection in a host country. It might be back-fill and support for some of the things we're doing elsewhere in the world where as they don't feel they'd like to be involved in the event force is used in Iraq but they could be helpful to us and free up some of our capabilities.

A forth category would be we don't want to help. A fifth category would be in the event force is used and the regime is changed we would like to cooperate with a coalition of the willing after the fact to assist Iraq from a humanitarian standpoint, and that type of thing, like so many countries are doing in Afghanistan. So they're these various baskets and a large number of countries have responded to those and a recently some additional inquiries have gone out and there are a number of countries that are in the planning process.

I think one of the reason so many countries are currently involved with planning that they recognize that there would not have been a UN resolution absent the potential of the use of force. That the build up that's taken place and the cooperative arrangements that are being fashioned among a coalition or the willing reinforces the diplomacy and creates a much better environment for the united nations because it ought to persuade the Iraqi's that the united nations and the coalition countries are serious. >

I'm dying to know which country is in what basket. Like who would volunteer to rebuild Iraq in the case of a regime change, but wouldn't to get involved in the war? To the victor goes the spoils? Who is the victor in Iraq's case, and who would have the most to gain by being involved in Iraq's rebuilding. My guess is Iran, Saudi Arabia maybe.

I just got through reading a post over at Dietchick's Blog about losing weight. It made me think about why I'm losing weight.

I decided to lose weight, primarily because of health reasons. I used to have very low blood pressure, 110/70 and a very low resting heart rate, 60. About two years, my doctor noticed that my blood pressure was slightly elevated (130/90). He was very concerned for my health, because it had been below normal for so long. He basically told me to lose weight and exercise, or he was going to put me on high blood pressure medication. He told me normally he wouldn't be concerned because it wasn't like I had really high blood pressure, but because my old pressure was so low the increase was too much to ignore. A normal blood pressure is 120/80.

I got so freaked out. I also started to notice that I was having pains in the bottom of both heels, when I walked. My left hip, which is a little high because of my scoliosis, started to really hurt. I told my doctor about these various pains, and he said my increased weight was causing all these problems.

I've never believed in losing weight just for the sake of appearances, and I'm a big believer in accepting yourself for who you are, but I also noticed that I wasn't as self confident as I had been when I was thinner. In fact, my self confidence around men was practically zero, and I would freak myself out whenever I went out on first dates or met really cute guys. I couldn't help but think, why would anyone be interested in me at this heavy weight person, especially now that I was unhealthy and having pains all the time. Talk about feeling geriactric in a serious hurry.

So I went about trying to lose weight last year, and I took off 20 pounds, and my blood pressure came back down to normal, not my normal low pressure, but normal enough, and the pains in my heels for the most part disappeared. And my self confidence improved a wee bit, but not enough where I felt that good about myself. Still, I felt a whole lot better than did the year before.

It wasn't until I met the really cute guy in my screenwriting class in the spring, that I realized my self confidence was still too low, I still felt totally unnattractive, and sadly, very unworthy around a man I was wildly attracted to. I didn't put it all together until around July or August, but once I did, weight loss became essential not only to continue my journey towards better health, but also towards feeling better about myself. I don't think I would have even contemplated losing weight, unless my health and my general well being about myself weren't being threatened somehow.

Losing weight is so not easy. It's much easier for me to eat all the food I want and not worry about my body. I envy people whose bodies can take all that extra weight, and not feel physical pain or have their health or their self esteeem compromised. I'm not one of those people. My extra weight put my health in jeopardy, and put me on a totally bad trip about who I was, what I was, and what I looked like. I can't believe I let "my weight, my fat" take control of my life like that, and threaten the very things I had always taken for granted; good health and well being.

That's my weight loss story for now. Maybe it will change in a few months when I finally reach my goal weight, maybe it won't. But I already feel better with the weight that I have lost, and although my left hip still hurts (will probably always hurt a little), all the little physical pains that I thought were part and parcel of life are gone. And that's been the biggest and best benefit of my weight loss plan so far. Everything else after that for me right now, is gravy, extra. And what's great is how much happier I am, knowing that my body works again without pain and that I'm doing something to make my life better.

My company just hired four temps last week. They've all come from well paying jobs, and things must really be hard out there if they're taking temp jobs in a call center. I don't blame them. If I was in their position, I think I'd take any kind of temp job I could get just to make rent or have extra.

I have a friend who's been out of work since January, and now she's working in a retail store for the holidays since her unemployment checks stopped. She can reapply unemployment next year, but she has to make a certain amount of money this year or she won't qualify. She seems to be taking it all in stride, but I wonder.

God, I hate downloading software from the Internet. I was trying to install this book/cd I bought a few years ago called "Wingmakers", and I kept getting a failure message. From the research I've been able to do, I have to make sure all the drivers on my pc are updated.

I have an Nvidia GeForce sound and graphics card, that have pages and pages devoted to they mess up other games. Nvidia just put out a driver fix on 11/20, and I've been trying to download it all day. Me and everyone else who owns the Nvidia graphics/sound card. What a pain.

I found the ebook/cd on my old hard drive, and I can actually run it from there, but I'd like to install it on my new hard drive. I'd like reformat my old drive just to clean it out, but I may just leave it just in case there's something else I can't install.

While doing my research on my pc problem, I found a website called www.annoyances.org. It's a website for people who use Microsoft products. People post rants and tips on how to solve various Microsoft annoyances. Very funny but frightening due to the large volume of messages. Spooky!

Wow. I'm under the 150 pounds mark. I'm showing big weight losses because of all the cleanses I'm doing. Cleanses will clean your insides out, and if you have a tendency to retain water like me, it gets rid of the water as well.

After last week's cleanse, I was afraid I would gain all the weight back but I didn't. YEAH!!! I'm also going strictly vegetarian for awhile, except for the Thanksgiving weekend and possibly Christmas, and my company Christmas party. When I go strictly vegetarian, it's easier to stick to my eating plan,

One thing about this weight loss that I totally love is I now can wear some of the tighter fitting clothes in my closet. The necks on my turtlenecks, even the really tight ones, are loose, and it's so cool.

I'm dying to buy some clothes, especially now with all the christmas catalogs flooding my mailbox, but I feel like I should wait until I'm done. Everything looks baggy on me, except for waistlines which are loose but not that loose.

My extra large sweaters are definitely going to have to be thrown out or just used to wear around the house, because those sweaters are just hanging on me now. The loose necks on my turtlenecks is definitely the coolest thing though.

I did another cleanse yesterday. This cleanse is from the"The Cure for All Diseases" By Dr. Hulda Clark. This juice cleanse is designed to cleanse your liver of gallstones and cholesterol.

Who knows if cleanses really work, but it's amazing what I've been passing out of my body, and I say it's got to be much healthier to have the stuff outside of my body and in the toilet bowl, than inside of my body and cause who knows what kind of cellular damage.

The ingredients for this cleanse are 3 cups of fresh squeezed apple and grapefruit juice, 4 tablespoons of epsom salts, 1 big grapefruit and 1/2 cup of olive oil.

You start Friday and by Saturday afternoon you're done, so it's relatively painless except for the taste of some of the ingredients. The cleanse instructions tell you what to expect to pass, and sure enough I passed exactly what it said; tan and green tiny stones and tan colored chaff which is supposed to be cholesterol crystals. It's scary to think my body is storing this stuff, but it's coming out.

You can repeat the cleanse, which I'll probably do it once a month until I don't see that stuff coming out anymore. Your allergies are supposed to decrease as a result of this cleanse, so I'm hoping this will be my personal result.

The other cleanse that looks promising and not to difficult is a kidney stone cleanse, which is supposed to dissolve your kidney stones. That cleanse will have to wait until December.

This is old news from 9/19/2002, but a friend of mine told me to buy Apple Computer stock. He said that Apple is coming out with a 64-bit chip. This friend said it's the same chip that Silicon Graphics uses to do all the movie effects, and it will be the equivalent of having a cray supercomputer on your desktop. He said it will blow Intel and all the other chipmakers out of the water, and should boost Apple stock big time if they release it in 2003. But then he laughed and said, that Apple is notoriously late about delivering products to the market. But then he said, buy the stock now so when they do release the chip, I can make money when the stock shoots up.

This news make me cringe, since I just bought a 1.6 gig chip and a pc last week. I hate techhnology sometimes, don't you?

All the layoffs are starting to scare me. Do they frighten you as well? So many people being laid off, and I don't think they're done yet. Look to first quarter 2003 to see some real bloodletting if the economy doesn't pick up.

I'm very blue today. Maybe it's the blue meanies? I'm listening to Chant by The Benedictine Monks of Santa Domingo de Silos. I'm hoping the monks' Gregorian chants will soothe my nerves. I used to love to listen to Gregorian chants in college, and this music brings that part of my life all back. I probably need to rebuild my Gregorian chant collection again, since what I have is all on vinyl and I haven't had a record player in years.

I've got new upstairs neighbors, and they're totally noisy. My apartment building has hardwood floor and ceilings and floors are very thin. The couple walk around in their shoes when they're in their apartment at night and in the morning, and these past two nights I awoke in the middle of the night to crashing noises. Either someone fell out of bed, or they're doing it at 3 am in the morning and their bed is bouncing up and down. I can hear every step they take, and it's so horrendously annoying!

The whole thing makes me depressed about my living situation, and I haven't been willing to admit it to myself, but my apartment is just not a fun place to live anymore. I was having trouble writing in my apartment, and I attributed my malaise to me needing to sometimes change my writing environment.

It's now beginning to dawn on me, that my apartment is to blame. It's just too small, and it's noisy and I need more space. Now comes the part where I sometimes wish I didn't live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. If lived anywhere else, I could afford to by my own place.

I have a friend who lives in Portland, Oregon. She and her husband own their own home, and have two sons. She's a stay at home soccer mom, and her husband supports all of them on his salary, and I make 25% more than he does. I make more money than he does, and I can barely afford to support myself living here.

The city and county of San Francisco is just such an expensive place to live. I know if I lived outside of the city, my paycheck would stretch much further, but I hate living outside of the city.

The only reason I stay in my place is it's very cheap, and everyone says I should stay here until I can afford to buy my own place. But I don't know. Is it worth it to stay in a place and be miserable? If I move to a bigger place, I wouldn't be able to save as much money as I would want, but I'd still be able to save. It would just mean my plan to purchase a place would be delayed a year or two. And what's a year or two?

I was thinking about my housing situation at work today, and I got the feeling deep in my heart that it's time to move on. I've never gotten this feeling about my apartment before, and the feeling was very sure and strong.

This is partly why I'm so down. I think moving places is traumatic. I used to move every two years, and this is the first place I've been in for longer than two years. I love the location, I love the neighbourhood, I love my view, and I like all of my neighbors, except for the noisy freaks of nature upstairs. I have an odd feeling of comfort about where I live, which probably stems from the length of my stay here.

But it's time to move on. I'm definitely staying in this neighborhood though. I just have to find a bigger place that has lots of windows and light, a view, and is on the top floor so I don't have to hear lead foot smegheads shagging above me in the middle of the bloody night.

I just finished reading one of my favorite astrology websites, and it said that Sagitarius is a hidden epicure. The oh so beautiful screenwriting marina hottie boy whom I had a seriously secret major crush, was somewhat of a sommelier. The boy seriously knew his wine, and I think his food as well, although he said he was lactose intolerant.

I wonder what my favorite crush is doing these days. I wonder if he ever finished his screenplay. He didn't seem to be very good at finishing projects. I wished we could have stayed friends and kept in touch, but it was destined to be.

I'm caught up with my nanowrimo novel through Tuesday. It's getting harder and harder to write, because now I'm on the part where the women are going through four trials that they need to pass to become the Head Priestess.

The first trial was to build an a makeshift village, in case of a tribal disaster. This trial came out of the history of the tribe, when the tribe was attacked and their homes were destroyed. The Head Priestess at the time, put together a makeshift village in another location that the tribe moved to until they could rebuild a permanent village. The village had to be put together in 8 hours, which is how long it look that ancient Head Priestess to complete the makeshift village.

The details of the first trial actually came pretty easily to me. I saw it as kind of emerency camping. You put together tents, fire pits, a cooking space, and you gather food and herbs.

The second trial is much more complicated. Keep in mind, that I'm making all of this stuff up as I go along. The second trial consists of two parts. The first part is Magical Potions. Each candidate will make up several random potions. The second part is to prepare a feast fit for a Head Tribal Chief. The second part of the trial stems again from the function of the Head Priestess and their history. If the Head Tribal Chief is without a spouse, the Head Priestess becomes the Queen, the consort sometimes, until the Head Tribal Chief takes a wife. The Head Priestess must be able to demonstrate that she can prepare a feast for a Head Tribal Chief and any visiting Head Tribal Chiefs. In the tribal history, several Head Priestess had to fulfill the function of the Queen, and the trial is insure the candidate will make a good Queen.

Don't ask my why I put this part in, but it made sense at the time I was writing it. But the hard part now is trying to come up with the random magical potions for the test and the food for the feast. I don't think I can just sit down and write this part, without giving it some serious thought.

I have all weekend to get caught up, so I'm actually not that worried. And then I have two days off for Thanksgiving, so if I really get behind, I have that last weekend to write like crazy to get to the 50K mark. I'm at 32,000 words, so I'm not that doing that badly yet. I just hate falling behind like this, because then if I keep doing it, it gets harder and harder to get caught up again.

I finally got around to watching the movie "Clerks" the other day. God, the acting was very, very bad. I think I could have even out acted these people, and I'm not a very good actress myself. I think if the acting wasn't so bad, I would have really liked this movie more. Some of it was very funny that it made me laugh out loud, but in between the laughs was horrible, horrible acting. The Dante character was good, and at least he could deliver his lines. Veronica and the odd assortment of store customers were also quite good. It was the Randall character and the Caitlin character that made me feel like turning the movie off. Too bad too, because the Randall character had some great lines; he just delivered them in the worse way possible.

God, talk about unattractive people in a movie as well!

The other thing I noticed was how chatty some of the scenes were, and how utterly boring they were. Now I know what my screenwritng teacher meant when she said to not have pages and pages of dialogue. Oh my god, it's so boring to watch people talk and not do anything. And even if they are doing something, don't have them talk for very long because it just doesn't play well on a big screen.

I also decided to watch "The Fast and the Furious". I wished I'd seen this movie in a big theatre. Some of the car racing scenes were very thrilling, and would have looked great on a big movie theatre instead of my TV screen. The movie also had a great soundtrack, which again would have sounded great in a movie theatre.

I was supposed to see this movie with a guy friend of mine. We kept trying to come up with a date to see it, but something always came up, and he ended up seeing it by himself. Now I'm bummed, because he was right. It's a darn good movie.

Vin Diesel was of course fascinating, although not as sexy without those great tatoos from Triple X. Still, there's some very intriguing about him as an actor that make you want to watch him.

I loved how all those Nissan Sentras, Hondas, and Jettas were turned into very fast cars. My boyfriend in highschool was a car nut, and I learned to love fast cars and powerful engines from being with him.

There was a whole thing in The Fast and the Furious about driving at 140 mph. I can say honestly that I was in a car that was going 140 mph, with my car crazy highschool boyfriend driving.

There's one straightaway on the island of Kauai that is great for racing. The road is completely straight and flat, and people would often race down this little strip, or at least they did when I was in highschool.

My highschool boyfriend and I were taking a member of this singing group visiting my highschool from Spain to some event. I was in Spanish class so I was a hostess for one of the spanish singers, which is how my boyfriend got roped into being our chauffer. We were running late, and my boyfriend drove like crazy to get us to the event on time.

We were speeding down the straightaway, when I noticed that the scenery outside the car was whizzing by more quickly than what I was used to. I glanced at the speedometer, and it read 140 mph. I registered the speed in my mind, but my boyfreind was such an excellent driver that it didn't really bother me that we were going that fast.

It wasn't until we were getting out of the car at our destination, that the spanish musician asked about the speed of the car since he noticed the speed of the car as well. He just thought we were going 140 kilometers, and not 140 mph. When my boyfriend told him we were driving 140 mph, the guy kind of freaked out and had a hissy fit about the danger of driving so fast.

I remember my boyfriend looking at me like, I was trying to help, you got me into this mess now get me the hell out. I smiled, interrupted the spanish musician and told him we were late so we had better get inside.

When I saw the 140 mph come up in the movie, it brought an amusing incident from my past back that I hadn't thought about in years.