Subject No. 24

I have fifteen dollars in my pocket (okay, now it's ten, because I bought some chips and a bag of M&Ms today - I'm starting to get a cold and feel crappy) because I took part in a Science-Fiction psychology test.
It was quite entertaining - I was given a list of names and asked to check off the names I recognized as fantasy authors, and then I was given a pile of book covers with the author's name blotted off and asked to sort the covers into piles I thought shared the same narrative content. I was subject number 24 in the test.
Before that, I had to do the same with mystery novels/writers, as a "controlled" variable - because while I read almost entirely Fantasy fiction, I don't read very many mysteries. So now I have $10, and I'm planning on using it to rent a Patrick Dempsey movie or too. It's a little difficult, because most of his movies were made in the 80s, and were never really significant enough to merit a conversion to DVD (with the exception of his more popular movies Can't Buy Me Love and Loverboy) I have to go to specialty independent video rental places to find his movies. Mind you, I'm just going to watch his movies, and only when I have the time and don't have to work on projects or study. I am not - as my mother would have you believe - "stalking Dr. McDreamy".
Also, I've started reading George R R Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" trilogy for Green Man, and I'm already being sucked back into that world again. I love those books. I find I read them differently now. For the longest time, I relied very strongly on mental visuals when I read. First, I pictured them in my head as anime characters (this helped for Robert Jordan's books, because they became very episodic like anime), then I took to playing "movies" of the books events in my head, casting famous celebrities as the characters.
In Robin Hobb's "Tawny Man" trilogy, for instance, I pictured Hugh Jackman as Fitz, Anthony Hopkins as Chade, Gwyneth Paltrow as the Queen, Jennifer Aniston as Starling, and (I hope Robin Hobb forgives me), David Spade as the Fool. Of course, all the actors, when they're in my head, are good actors, so it works out fine for me.
Unfortunately, this allows me to read slower than I could - it took me a while to go through "A Song of Ice and Fire" the first time, even with Mel Gibson as Ned Stark, Nicole Kidman as Catelyn, a young Elijah Wood as Bran, Tom Cruise (!) as Littlefinger, and the fantastic Peter Dinklage as Tyrion. So now I'm not trying overhard to visualize it now, or play movie scenes in my head as I read it, because I actually have a deadline now to bring in the reviews, and it's in less than a month. So I'll have no time to watch Happy Together, For Better And For Worse, or Some Girls until the Christmas holidays, at least.