A Tomorrow To Remember
I’ve been warned that my excitement might be misconstrued as gloating, so I’ll try to keep this brief, but tomorrow BJ, Eric and I will be attending a 12 hour marathon viewing of all three LOTR movies (The special edition DVD versions of the first two and the newly released final film). Our understanding of how it will work is this: the marathon begins at 1 p.m. with the first movie, then about a one hour break, then the next movie, another break, and the third movie will supposedly start around 10 p.m. I haven’t done the math, so you may find that it doesn’t work out, but that’s just the culmination of various things we heard while standing in line for tickets and from what we read on the website.
For our part, Eric and I mapped out our proposed sleep-training regimens this weekend. Unfortunately, I have been unable to follow mine due to my body’s current sleep-schedule and various other distractions. All three of us, for different reasons, are obliged to waking up long before the scheduled start time – BJ for work, Eric for an exam, and me for waiting in line to hopefully ensure decent enough seats. Therefore, sleeping until start time is completely ruled out. So, here we have a delicate balancing of total sleep time with getting our bodies situated with an approrpriate schedule that has us up at the latest (for me) at 8:30 a.m. and then able to sustain cognitive coherence for approximately 18 hours. I’ll be taking duct tape with me just in case.
The other problem we face is food. Without disclosing too much information about each of our personal financial situations, I will tell you that the $30 ticket price was quite a hit. This makes each of us even less inclined than normal to spend our hard earned dough (well not in the case of BJ who has a cushy government job) on $10 nachos and 3 day old popcorn. The “organizers” told us they were going to try to get people to stay in the theatres during the breaks, but if they’re gonna do that, they better be shipping in a pizza per head or something crazy like that. Eric mentioned making sandwiches and buyin sodas to put in the car. I might just have to starve.
Well I’ve taken up a lot more space than I intended to, so let me offer you this as a reparation of sorts. Our task of obtaining tickets was very challenging, and the fact that we actually got tickets was complete luck. We were in line for probably just under 2 hours but were actually unsuccessful at getting tickets by this avenue. While we were in line, we heard they were selling tickets simultaneously online. Eric proceeded to call everyone he knew and ended up with his dad. His dad got through almost immediately, but tried buying 5 tickets. This quantity of tickets exceeded the spending limit at the online retailer (because of the $30 price) and so he had to go back through the system, which was a bit slower by this point. In the end, it turned out you could only buy 3 at a time online, and those 3 (tickets sold out before we could get through another round) were doled out according to a list of people based on a) the person who was actually responsible for us getting the tickets, b) the person(s) who actually waited in line for 2 hours, c) the person(s) who we absolutely knew for sure could make it. In this order, this gave us Eric, myself, and BJ.
So that’s it. It’s a little past 9 now, so I need to be getting myself prepared for a full night of slumber. “May the force be with you!”
Just kidding.