#i made her watch pretty much every movie Gael Garcia Bernal had ever made

[someinstant]

Suddenly overcome with deep nostalgia and longing for video rental places. Not Blockbusters or anything-- my favorite was an independent joint in the town where I went to college. Vision Video. It was in a building that had formerly been a laundromat and a dry cleaners, so there were multiple rooms with mismatched tile, and they almost assuredly didn't have whatever the big teen movie was-- but if you were into, like, South Korean horror or the entire back catalog of Nic Cage or German expressionist silent films or Ernest Goes to Camp or carefully labeled erotica (porn. it was just porn, but this was the American South many decades ago)-- if you were the sort of person who fell hard for a particular genre or director or actor, it was heaven.

Just wandering the store at eleven at night on a Thursday with your roommate, stacks of movies in your arms, Of Montreal's latest EP coming over the speakers, the big weird quiet guy at the counter watching a very violent anime on the TV, occasionally suggesting you watch a Danish action flick, and handing you a flyer for the local student film festival when you checked out an hour or two later.

And then you'd go home to your crappy off-campus apartment after stopping at a convenience store for snacks, flop down on the futon, and start marathoning whatever your current obsession was (my roomie: anything Edward Norton had ever done. me: basically all of Mexican Nuevo Cine), and wake up when the afternoon sun slapped you in the face, the DVD menu in playing in an endless loop in the background.