Bloggers in Sin City

Immediately after Vegas…I got Lost.

May 26th

Since I know that most everyone has a love or hate relationship with Lost, I promise this won’t be a recap. But, as it lasted for four years (we started watching in season three, and so had to play catch up with seasons one and two), my relationship with Lost was one of the longest ones of my life. So I’m going to talk about it. GET OVER IT.

Sunday night, @matrixmechanic and I went to watch the series finale of Lost. With about 800 people. Yeah, eight HUNDRED.

Red Carpet Crash (who hosted the Oscar watching party I attended earlier this year with Natalie, Carissa, and Sketch) hosted the country’s largest Lost watching party at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas. The best part? I won reserved seats because I’m so special! I never win anything!

Reserved seats, what?!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Four and a half hours of Lost in a theater with 798 strangers? And on the heels of Bloggers in Sin City, no less? Shine, what were you thinking?

But much for the same reason that seeing movies at the movie theater is awesome (think Star Wars, the original trilogy, not that I was old enough), this was an incredible experience. When I laughed, so did the other 275 people in the theater (we had three theaters). When I cried, I could hear sniffles all around me (yes, I cried, and I’ll thank you to shut up about it). To sum up, I couldn’t think of a better way to watch the end of a show that I’d been watching for so long. Well, it would have been more awesome to fast-forward through the commercials.

Top Five Things I Will Miss Most About LOST:

1. Josh Holloway without a shirt. Times infinity. I wish he would come over and tell me dirty bedtime stories.
2. Rushing home to find Lost recording on my DVR.
3. Discussing the week’s episode with Joanna and @matrixmechanic
4. Benjamin Linus. Well, Benjamin Linus pre-season four.
5. Giving myself a headache trying to unravel all the mysteries.

And now, the Top Five Things I Won’t Miss About LOST:

1. People bitching, whining, and otherwise moaning about people talking about Lost. It was a good show, but no one is requiring you to watch. Shut the hell up. I have to listen to you talk about fucking Twilight all the time.
2. Giving myself a headache trying to unravel all the mysteries.
3. My Twitter feed filling up with a collection of people tweeting about Lost (which is annoying) and people tweeting about people tweeting about Lost. (Which is more annoying, because these are usually the same people who tweet about Gossip Girl and The Bachelor. Trust me, your tweets are no more interesting or informative.)
4. The several hours I wasted each week reading random theories about what the fuck is happening on Lost.
5. I can now watch OTHER THINGS ON TUESDAY NIGHTS. Like Glee. Is it any good this season? Was NPH as awesome as I wanted him to be? I’VE MISSED EVERYTHING!

So there you have it, folks. The End.

Red Carpet Crash

What happens in Vegas…

May 24th

Posted by shine in Bloggers in Sin City

57 comments

Yeah, it pretty much stays there. Except herpes, I imagine.

I managed to lose my voice about two days before I left for #BiSC, and it’s still not really back. This means I spent the majority of the trip answering the question, “Who are you, again?”

“Shine.”

“Jen? Shannon? Sharon? Chai? Susan?” (Imagine me repeating “shine” in between each of the guesses.)

“S-H-I-N-E.”

“Oooohhh, Shine. That’s a pretty name.”

“Um, right. It’s not my name, but there are three other people here with my name, so…yeah, it’s my blog name.” (My mom doesn’t have nearly enough (read: none) hippie in her to have named me “Shine.”)

Luckily, the smarty mcsmarty who is @stratejoy had the brilliant idea to write twitter handles on everyone’s forearm. Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous. But really. It HELPED. For a list of all the fabulous ladies and gentlemen (I’m using both those terms loosely), please click here.

Of course, one of my favorite parts of the trip was getting to meet @lbluca77 and @rsub27 (Mr. Beautiful 2.0, now with more brown!). I’m going to go kidnap them both and move them to Texas. They’re going to be PISSED.

Some ridiculousness, bullet-point style:

I forgot to pack my toothpaste and then only travel-size I could find on my way to the airport was this Arm & Hammer baking soda shiz. Basically, it looked like jizz and tasted like ass, so I spent most mornings talking about “jizzing my mouth.”
There was apparently a sex toy giveaway (sex toys provided by Toy with Me, go check out the site!), but I saw no evidence of sex toys or giveaways, despite having what I suspect was the most interactive costume for our Theme Party Pub Crawl (which was less of a crawl and more of a “stay at Planet Hollywood where they gave us free booze,” because hey, we ain’t stupid. (Thanks, Planet Hollywood, my vodka was delicious!)
I played ONE penny slot machine (with ONE dollar) and won (then lost, of course) $5.40. I don’t gamble, dudes. It’s not my style.
I am not now, nor will I ever be, in the “cool kids” group. I just don’t care enough about having my voice heard to try that hard (dear friends who are reading this, shutupkthx). Plus this weekend, I didn’t have a voice to be heard.
I think I’ve officially seen the whitest of all white dancing. Sorry, @nataliecottrell , you’ve been bumped by @livitluvit and @rusb27 . For serious.
For reasons I don’t care to explain, I was wearing two pairs of underwear on my flight home.
At some point, I turned into the Incredible (Shine)Hulk, and refused to say much more than “SHINE SMASH!” (I wasn’t drunk.) I’m making some giant orange fists to smash together, don’t worry.
Our hotel room was littered with French fries for most of the weekend.
You will be hard-pressed to get me to give enough of a shit to RUN up and down the Vegas strip in the middle of the afternoon to win any kind of scavenger hunt. Unless the prize is Jason Statham or something. Then you better get out of my way.
Three girls walking down the Vegas strip dressed as a school girl (from Gossip Girl), an ’80s aerobics instructor, and an autograph book (that was me, and by this point, people had signed all over my clothes) will attract a LOT of male attention. But no one will find the outfits bizarre.
Vegas is one of the least awesome places to be if you’ve just had to give your electric company the last pennies in your checking account.
@nicoleisbetter talks about 37 miles per minute. About her vagina. So you can all rest easy in the fact that what you see is what you get, when you read her blog. (If I’m to be perfectly honest, I was a little about meeting her, but she was really nice to me the whole weekend. Plus, it was pretty awesome of her to plan the whole thing.)
One of the washcloths in our room was used as an ice pack for more than one person. We had a rash of bloody head wounds and unfortunate curling iron burns in our hotel room.