The Teenage Girls Guide to Her Ever Changing Body

Author notes

In Media Res (Book 1), Canto II, "Air's Siren Song," Page 3

Bubbles

on Oct. 24, 2006

I think the best review of "Man on Fire" (the Denzel Washington movie referred to, if you aren't big on American pop-culture references or are as old as the characters and therefore forbidden from watching R-rated movies where Denzel Washington kills the entirety of Mexico City to avenge the abduction of Dakota Fanning, current World's Cutest Child Actress) is that it was "emotionally manipulative." With the music and the kind of overdone plot, it made you want to cheer along with Denzel's "painting with death" (to paraphrase a line spoken by Christopher Walken later in the film - if you do like action movies and haven't seen this film, you really should, it's right up there with DeNiro in "Ronin," which my mom thinks has the best European car chase scene in a movie, even better than "The Transporter") even though, honestly, he goes a bit over the top. So over the top in fact, that I can't describe what he does without changing the rating of this comic from "okay for young teenagers" to "okay only for psychologists who study the victims of ethnic wars."

So, the upshot is, Dakota Fanning gets kidnapped in Mexico City despite having Denzel Washington there, because the Mexico City police are totally corrupt and working for the kidnappers. This is not exactly how it works in real life, but Van not only doesn't live in real life, she doesn't like to live in the reality I created for her.

To totally change the subject on you, notice that Helena decided to read "Godel, Escher, Bach" on this long car ride. Like the book "Simulacra and Simulation," best known as the book Keanu Reeves stored magnetic optical disks inside in the opening twenty minutes of "The Matrix," this is a book that you have to be a really, really high-level nerd to read. I say that while looking over at my shelf at the collected works of George Bernard Shaw and Chekhov, the Penguin Nietzche Reader (featured in the first episode of the first season of Smallville! Lana Lang's kryptonite pendant forces Clark Kent to drop it), every script from Blackadder ever, a Japanese kanji dictionary, and a tiny book entitled Twentieth Century Small Arms. I am a total nerd. But even I couldn't get through Godel, Escher, Bach. You have to have consumed so much high level philosophy and calculus to get there it makes my head spin.

Helena loves this stuff. We may see her with "Simulacra and Simulation," or something untranslatably German by Hegel, at some later time. As you'll soon learn, Van's taste in literature is quite different.

Also, kids, Helena is totally helping Van jump bail here. This is not something you can do yourself. Not even Dog the Bounty Hunter got away with jumping bail in Mexico. Van can jump bail in Mexico because she has powerful friends - you'll learn about them later, too.