The state of me: wasting my time away; thought on and criticisms of Burton's Alice in Wonderland

'I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'
—Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

I've always slept in three hour intervals: three, six, nine, twelve hours a night, although eighteen is not unheard of either and I once managed 36 over a 48 hour period. Right now my three hour intervals are even more literal: I sleep for three, wake for three, and then try to repeat the process again. Normally I would hate this strange version of insomnia, but it's doing too good a job of breaking my day into consumable, wastable hours. I pack my time spent awake with Law & Order reruns multitasked with PopCap word games and more or less just wait for Devon to get home, and then we watch sometimes together or I watch him game. Days are slow and stagnant but relatively painless. My thoughts are a fog thick enough to stir with a spoon but I don't bother—I would rather doze through, wait through, this.

I'm wasting my time but that's precisely the point. Nonetheless I hope to break from it soon, because I have a draft to type up and letters to respond to and a number of other things to get to which are ultimately useless but are certainly more productive than never leaving my bed. Still there's a comfort in totally vacating my own skull. I've done this before (I spent a month once, about the time that I was dropping out of school, doing nothing but leveling in Final Fantasy XII, an endless repetitious thoughtless grind that all but silenced my thought, allowing me to escape to an empty place where there was nothing more than a hundred-chain of kills). It's comfortable. It's pleasant. It's the clearest proof that I am content with my own misery.

Perhaps Alice can explain herself.

I'll be better soon.

Merely tangentially related: Can someone other than my lovely boyfriend reassure me that the new Alice in Wonderland was somewhat ... disappointing? We saw it on the day it was released and while we loved the aesthetic, the casting (except the White Queen, on my part—Hathaway, though I love her in other roles, exaggerates her caricature to the point of awkwardness), and the CG, neither of us enjoyed it as a reinterpretation of the source material—for a number of reasons: Turning Wonderland/Underland into a strictly "real" place with strange, ill-suiting rules strips away its wonder and destroys its connections to dream, subconscious, and imagination; the empowering themes start so well, but crumble horribly when Alice "choses" the predestined role which she must chose or else condemn Wonderland to complete ruin; the aspects directly harvested from the source material mangle and misrepresent said source material, from parts which are exaggerated from incidental to instrumental (e.g. the Jabberwocky) to characters which are confused (the Queen of Hearts is not indeed the Red Queen, despite popular belief) and wholly misinterpreted (what the fuck was with the feisty, alert, female dormouse?).

Yet it seems like almost everyone but us loved it. Don't get me wrong: fascinating visuals and aesthetic, clever casting, these are wonderful things and they made for an engaging film, especially in the first half. (I'm a huge fan of Burton, Depp, and Bonham Carter, which doesn't hurt.) But I keep hearing—sometimes from people that I respect!—that the film was just awesome, or at least, outright enjoyable. I did enjoy many parts of the new Alice in Wonderland, but it left me with a sour taste which feels more potent than my usual critical approach to most media. I feel like I'm reliving The Looking Glass Wars, despite the vast differences between the retellings. This is another Wonderland retelling that shares enough of my infatuation with the world of the books to draw me in, but never quite seems to capture the books's wonder, whimsy, and iconographic characters in its retelling. I'm not looking for all-out literal faithfulness to the source material (if I were, I'd just reread the books—and I have!) but I love the books for a reason. They have a magic, an imagination, a spirit which intrigues and inspires me. If retellings and reimaginings don't have that at their heart, then they will leave me cold—because they do brilliant source material a simple disservice.

Devon and I have been asked a few times if we recommend Alice in Wonderland, and our answer is: Have you read the books? If not: sure, you'll love it. If you have: the film is a disappointment. But I've read from others that know, love, and even quote the books that the film is awesome, so I say: what the hell am I missing?