I have to start this post by saying that Coldplay - including my boyfriend, Chris Martin, who isn't really my boyfriend but should be - put on an incredible show Monday night. This is why they're my favourite band in the world. Also, they like vegetarian food and yoga, which means we can be friends.

When I was watching them on stage, I caught myself in creepy stalker mode. I said to myself "Gee, they'd really like me if they got to know me. We're so much alike!" and then I vowed to never, ever think that way again, lest I go just a little further down Crazy Blvd. and start stealing underwear from their homes.

This is just further proof that I need to get out more. And I shall, this weekend! Pixie is coming over to watch the boys on Saturday night while Geekster and I stay at a hotel downtown. We'll be taking in a movie, a museum and possibly a morning at the gallery. How cultured of us.

Or maybe not. See, I have a confession to make. As shocking as this may seem, I'm not very cultured. I'm sure it has nothing to do with my being at home for nearly 12 years raising children. Not in the slightest.

Last night I watched an art film called Stalker. It's supposedly a cult classic from 1979 - a Russian film with some heavy sci-fi undertones. Geekster thought it sounded interesting when he ordered it from the online movie store. We only get one movie at a time because we have the cheap-ass plan, so, despite the incoming sinus cold building up behind my eyes and the strong desire for a steamy, hot bath, we ate some chocolate (vegetarian, you know) and opened a bag of chips (those are vegan, even) and sat on the couch to become... enlighted.

I was not enlightened. I was bored.

The movie was two hours and fourty-five minutes long, and it didn't go anywhere. There were twenty minute long philosophical discussions in grassy fields and five minute segments where a camera is following the back of someone's head through a dark tunnel. The story revolved around three scruffy, weird men with not even a hint of attractiveness. So, I ate a lot of chips, tried not to fall asleep, and daydreamed of the hot bath I wasn't having.

I know I'm supposed to say that I really enjoyed the movie, because it's one of those smart people films that gets you thinking. But I am apparently not very smart. All I could think of was that I had just wasted nearly three hours of my life watching a potentially good plot fall apart before my eyes. And the end scene? It was supposed to be meaningful and intense, but I have yet to figure out how it fit with the rest of the movie.

These are hours of my life I simply won't get back.

I could bring up a wiki page on the movie and become enlightened through other people's interpretations of the film, but that's just more work and probably more confusion. I have mommy brain, not director brain.

I'm ok with this; gone are the days when I needed to prove my worth through what I watch or listen to. Now I just blog, because blogging is easy and makes people like me. Isn't popularity what life is all about anyway? Nobody likes smart people. They just make the rest of us feel bad. And those cultured folks are giant jerkfaces. Thanks to them millions of tax dollars have gone into purchasing "abstract art". No matter how you slice it, three stripes painted on a canvas is not art. The art is in how smoothly the National Art Gallery was conned into paying $1.76 million dollars for it.

I can paint better stuff than that. At least four stripes, and I would use different colours.

So who decides what's art and what isn't? What's good and what's not? I almost feel like bringing some Post-It Notes along to the art gallery so I can rate the artwork:

Yay! I can actually tell what this one is!: 6.2

Why did you draw a dead cat? Did you keep the corpse around long enough to get the shadowing just right? Sick: 3.4

Wow. A bowl of fruit. How original. I could have stayed in my kitchen to see that: 2.1

This one has a penis and that makes me giggle: 8.5

This late artist sure liked to paint bottles. Did anyone autopsy the liver?: 5.0

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't get to be an art critic.