I want you to have a point of reference, so the following pictures are of Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey:

Okay?

So, here’s the thing. I’m not particularly nuts about either of these guys. I have nothing against them, but I don’t count them amongst my secret boyfriends of the world. I do have some love for them each for two reasons. One of JL’s is that he was in American Psycho and, although his part wasn’t huge, he WAS the guy who accused Paul Allen of being Jewish because he saw him “spinning a menorah” on his desk and bringing a Hanukkah bush to work. And one of PD’s (the big one) is that he was in one of my inexplicably favorite movies of all time: Can’t Buy Me Love. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of bad movies (this post, in fact, being about one), but Can’t Buy Me Love is seriously an awful movie. But, I really don’t care, because I could watch Ronnie Miller do the anteater dance, and flip around his gigantic hair, and cry in the cafeteria, and listen to him PRONOUNCE the word “cafeteria” (“cahhhhfeteria”) 500,000 times in a row and never get sick of it.

But, anyway. Those two stills are from the movie Sweet Home Alabama, which is also a bad movie which I love. See, Sally and I watch a movie or tv together almost every night, but there was a time when she had to get up a lot earlier to get to her old job and she would go upstairs at around 11:00. So, since I usually don’t get to bed until around 4:00 (not an exaggeration), I had to find ways to occupy myself. So, normally I’d go on the computer for a while, empty the dishwasher, make a snack, and then watch a movie (or two). And for a while there, Starz was playing Sweet Home Alabama non-stop. Since there was nothing else of interest most nights, I ended up watching this movie probably two to three times a week for about a month. It was background noise while I’d be knitting or doing a puzzle or something (straight up old lady), and this was at the point where we had maybe five movies on dvd, so I didn’t exactly have a library to choose from. So, SHA it was for a while, then for about a month there it was Grosse Point Blank nonstop (which was very exciting because that’s ACTUALLY a good movie), and then SHA came back on again! Eventually, it became second nature for me to watch this movie, and I actually found myself unable to watch something else if I saw it was on. I like repetition, and I like watching things over and over until they become part of my brain and I can remember every detail. SHA is NOT a good movie, and parts of it don’t make any sense, but I watched it to death and then brought it back to life and then turned it into, like, this movie zombie that latched onto my brain and wouldn’t let me go.

Eventually, Sally stopped working at that job and started staying up later with me (not till 4:00, but long enough to watch a movie) and my SHA obsession had to be kept under wraps. Then Blockbuster started selling off their dvds if you kept them over the two week limit, and, when I convinced her to watch SHA with me one night and we had to rent the dvd from Blockbuster, I insisted that we be charged the extra $5.00, because I would be physically unable to take this movie back to the store. It’s a sickness.

One movie, its actual good or bad qualities notwithstanding, can make me grab a guy and put him in my arsenal of secret boyfriends so easily (Hackers, for example) and you would think that, after probably somewhere around 100 viewings of this movie, I would be totally in love with both Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey. I’m not. And even if I was, I’m not one of those girls who gets upset when someone doesn’t have the same taste in guys as me (you know, “What do you MEAN you don’t think Marky Mark is cute?? He’s so totally cute!! What’s WRONG with you??? Don’t SAY that! He’s NOT ugly!! Oh, my GOD!” etc.) or when a guy seems really cute and then you see him again and you’re, like, wtf, and then your friends are like, “You like THAT GUY??? Ew!” (Richard Armitage? I’m looking at you.)

So, the dvd menu for Sweet Home Alabama, while not upsetting to me, was really bewildering. Since I had only ever watched the movie on tv, this dvd menu was so bizarre when I first saw it, that I just didn’t understand what the people who made it were trying to do. Because, seriously: why didn’t they use pictures of Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey…

…instead of Joe Simpson and Dustin Diamond?