Is it mean I find Sarah Silverman’s joke about Paris Hilton going to jail hilarious? Am I mean? Because I don’t want to be mean. So if that’s mean, just pretend I didn’t laugh.

Last night, I dreamt about vampires. I was in a big quasi-Victorian room like an old-fashioned laboratory with card cabinets and nooks and doorways. Most of the dream consisted of me locking windows because it was going to be night soon, and we had to make sure that the vampires couldn’t get in.

But in true horror movie fashion, I forgot one section of the windows, and at nightfall the vampires came in anyway. They were a bunch of quaffed cool-looking people, the kind of 20-somethings who go to LA clubs to snort coke. A couple of celebrities were with them, and I remember thinking, “Wow, I didn’t know Cameron Diaz was a vampire.”

The vampires were clearly going to eat me, but at the moment they were too busy deciding who was going to hook up with whom to bother, giving me an opportunity to go into the kitchen and grab a knife. Brandishing it high, I ran out and stabbed my knife in one of the vampires, and … nothing happened. The knife handle just stuck out of its chest.

“I thought knives were supposed to kill you,” I said.

“Only stainless steel knives,” said the vampire.

“That knife is stainless steel,” I said.

The vampire rolled its eyes. “Obviously not,” it said.

I took the knife out of its chest and realized that the problem was that it was coated stainless steel, which blocked the stainless steel properties from affecting the vampire’s heart. So I ran into the kitchen to get a metal scrubber to rub the coating off the knife, but one of them followed me in there to kill me. Luckily, my favorite tomato knife was in the kitchen, and so I stuck that in the vampire instead. It worked, but instead of poofing like they do in Buffy, the vampire bled all over me like Tom Cruise does in Interview with a Vampire when Kirsten Dunst stabs him. As the blood and vomit went everywhere, all I could think about was how my pants were dry-clean only and this was going to be annoying to get out.

Then this delivery driver unlocked the front door with a key to give me something I had ordered–thus letting in more vampires–so I told him to LOCK THE DAMN DOOR. And that’s when I remembered that I could levitate things with my mind. What a relief. Instead of stabbing the vampires, I could just levitate the knives and shoot them at them, stabbing them in the heart and avoiding blood and also danger.

Just as the dream was getting good with me getting to save the day with my levitating powers, I woke up. I discovered I was squeezing my hands into fists, probably because I believed they had knives in them. I don’t know how long I had been doing this, but I’m guessing a long time. They are kind of sore now.

This is the second time this week I have caught myself making fists during sleep. So maybe it isn’t the writing that’s causing the sore hand problem after all.

I loved Calvin and Hobbes as a child. I cut all the comics out of the paper and saved them in a tinbox, and somewhere I still have all the collections. I think Bill Waterson was brilliant and even today, I sometimes wonder what he is doing with himself.
Still, I cracked up when I saw Robot Chicken’s hilariously dark clip of this beloved childhood icon:

I love movies about writers. I’m a sucker for them. I see all of them, the very good ones and the very bad ones. So naturally, I had to watch Miss Potter, about Beatrix Potter, who wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other books. I read all her books when I was little–in fact, the first book I ever read was about Peter Rabbit. The Tale of Two Bad Mice is my favorite.

Potter was a fascinating person. On top of her children’s books, she was an avid scientist. She even attempted to enter the Royal Botanical Gardens but was rejected because she was a woman. Later, she was the first to observe that lichens are a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae and became a respected mycologist throughout England. Her books were best sellers, and in later life, she became a conservationist, saving thousands of acres in the Lake District.

When I was a kid, my Mom told me how Potter would draw the wildlife around her, and I imagined a young girl-scientist drawing her pets (Peter Rabbit was based on her pet bunny) with a scientific eye, and sitting in nature watching the smallest insect with intelligent curiosity. I imitated this, drawing my cockatiel Jiggsy and dog Macs and sitting outside to “observe” nature, which really meant reading books and singing to myself. Potter probably started my fantasy about being a biologist in the late 19th century.

And then Hollywood gets a hold of the story.

First off, the movie makes no mention of her scientific efforts–no microscopes, no slides, no shots of Renee Zellweger staring at something in a scientific way, nothing. Instead, Beatrix Potter is a silly woman, even a little deranged. Not only does she call her drawings of rabbits and hedgehogs her friends–which is a little precious but acceptable given what she does for a living–she also talks to her drawings. Aloud. In front of people. “You stop that and behave!” she says to a drawing of a duck hanging on the wall… in front of her business acquaintance. She seems kind of crazy, frankly.

According to the movie, Potter’s biggest problem as a Victorian woman isn’t her thwarted desire to be a scientist, or her attempt to publish books–the movie makes that look pretty easy–but her desire to marry a tradesman when she comes from upper-class people. To be fair, this was an issue in the real Beatrix Potter’s life, and it makes sense to draw from it for the script, but not at the detriment of all those other, bigger issues. The movie does nod to Potter’s conservationist efforts in the end, but without the background in science, her attempts to save land comes off like self-righteousness or worse, modern-day environmentalism.

It’s not that I want Hollywood to make a feminist movie about Beatrix Potter. That wouldn’t be anymore appropriate than making her into an environmentalist. I just thought the movie made her look like a silly nitwit who likes to draw pretty pictures, not the clever exacting thinker that she apparently was. On top of that, the movie tries too hard to be witty, so all the jokes felt cutesy and off to me.

And while we’re at it, what is the deal with Renée Zellweger? I like her well enough, but I’ve never seen her do anything as an actress to warrant the A-List status she has. What’s up Hollywood? Are her English accents really that great?

Please stop nagging me. Every time I turn on the TV, some celebrity is making me aware of a cause that desperately needs my help. For example, in the two hours of TV I watched yesterday, Mia Farrow told me about orphaned children in Africa, some TV actor reminded me about breast cancer, and Leonardo DiCaprio told me how he’s worried about the environment.

Helping is nice. And I know you would all like Angelina Jolie’s career–after all, without her concern for ailing third-world nations, she would be known for being a crazy husband-stealer who, while undeniably gorgeous, is, let’s face it, a pretty bad actress. But come on. I have to listen to Dustin Diamond, Screech from Saved By the Bell, warn me about foreclosures because he might lose his house now? It offends my sensibilities to see people use the sick, the poor, the orphaned, and the financially clueless to get themselves some publicity. I can handle it sometimes, sure, but all the time? Celebrities, you have overstepped your place in society. Please go back to having affairs and going in and out of rehab, and I will go back to feeling quietly superior.

Thank you.