Because there's air conditioning in here?

Why is my girlfriend cool?

Hint: It's not because there's air conditioning in here.

So, today I did something I had been meaning to do for a long time: watched all the Lord of the Rings movies back to back. Unfortunately, there were only the theatric versions and I was only watching them on my laptop, but it was still a pretty worthwhile experience. And, since watching Lord of the Rings all day by myself seemed like a pretty sorry occupation for a saturday, I decided to make my girlfriend watch them with me.

She has never read the books and knows nothing really about the story, so she was basically a LoTR virgin. So the scene approaches in the first movie where Gandalf is facing down the Balrog in the Mines of Moria, and I start to think: she doesn't know (a) that Gandalf is gonna get pulled down into the abyss with the Balrog and (b) that Gandalf comes back in the second book/movie. So I was kind of interested into seeing how she was going to react, and I wasn't disappointed.

When Gandalf takes the fall, and Frodo lets out his pre-adolescent howl of agony, she just begins to weep. She continues to weep, blubbering "iya-da" ("no!" or "i hate it" -- hard to translate) and "Gan-do-ru-fu" ("Gandalf") between sobs. I tried to restrain laughter, but was incapable of doing so. But at the same time that the situation was hilarious, I also held deep respect for her: she had appreciated and connected with Gandalf as a character in a way I hadn't (I didn't cry during the first movie to my memory). I told her later that I don't think I'd ever want to date someone who wouldn't weep over Gandalf's death, or at least get misty-eyed. So, the answer to the above riddle is that my girlfriend is cool because she wept for Gandalf.

The next test is to see if she'll get drunk with me and watch the last episodes of Cowboy Bebop and yell at the screen during the most moving scenes.

In any case, I must go attend to my pain-deer (for even as I now type this post, they are penciling rancid agendas into their date books).

How do we know we exist? Maybe we do not exist. (E: is this quote accurate?)