Even down to the fucking poodle

I watched Rachel Getting Married tonight, and I'm going to have to say, a little too close for comfort.
The best place to begin would be the trying to get the Dad to take sides stuff, and then there's the both literally and figuratively absent mom, in this case Debra Winger, named Abby in the movie. See, it's all about me, as usual.
There's the requisite melodrama, only to be broken up by Gus coming into our room and demanding to know where the drumsticks were, and me, not having hidden them, but knowing what it's like when someone has.
Families are fucked up, some more than others, and it's not necessarily cathartic to see it up on screen, it's more like, why was mine such a mess, and why couldn't we have looked so good all the while.

Eamon'n'Gus

Do'mance

Eternal fate has turned it's back on him

Here she goes again. Nothing can be left unsaid, especially when it has to do with what is real and what is not.
Twilight is the ultimate warped middle aged woman' fantasy of what love should be. Someone is always watching over you, especially while you sleep, he is satisfied to stare into your eyes for eternity, he's there when you're in danger. prolongs the longing and courting and that's enough.
I know that if I was caught up in the mess when it came out, I would have secretly thought Edward was foxy, but, I can look at it from the distance, and from having ordered the books for ten year olds to septuagenarians; with the addition of the DVD release amnesty period and because I've seen it all before, it was called The Blue Lagoon.
The ultimate in undead heartthrob still remains in the capable hands of Gary Oldman, who is now, sadly, aptly named.

I'm worse at what I do best

My Sirius radio signal went out last night. I had been thinking that satellite radio really wasn't that exceptional and I was going to cancel it due to all of the belt tightening. Nope, not gonna do it. in fact, I'm going to have something implanted in my head in order to receive the signal all of the time. That's how much I have come to like it.
So, as I was listening to college radio this morning, I heard Smells like Teen Spirit and thought about how non essential that song was, apparently millions of people would disagree. I'm not saying that I didn't appreciate Nirvana or like that song; I did but not so much as to think of it as a favorite or classic.
It wasn't one of those songs that made me want to hear it all of the time, it didn't give me that twinge of magic or connectedness that comes with something that at first grows on you and then becomes something you have to pursue, research and either buy or borrow so you can hear it until you don't need it anymore.

I can smell the chemicals

An evening of two bad movies has me thinking about how like everything else, film had to become formulaic and common.
One of my tasks at work is to check DVDs that come back where the borrower has said they didn't work or were scratched. Often, there seems to be nothing wrong with them, conversely at times they are totally messed up.
In order for me to check them, I watch them on a PC and just view each chapter's beginning. With that, I've seen the start of hundreds of scenes and they all, or at least most, follow a traditional thread, there is an establishing shot of; action, people walking around, driving, arriving, or a still shot of the environment. When you're watching a movie normally, none of this stands out or seems so very everyday, but the technique becomes as standard as the requisite bowchickabowow in a porno.
It's annoying, or cloying might be a better description. Though it's become so the norm, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a relevant way to set up every moment where the viewer is walked through, shown where everything is, and then left with the comfort and security of the known. It sets up a false sense of reliability that rarely is the case in any other domain.

You don't know what you're missing now

After all of these years of thinking it was Jake that needed the most in terms of judgement and watchfulness; oh how wrong I've been. Gus seems to have become derailed and with that comes a bounty of new problems and potentially difficult and awkward situations. What is good about this situation is that it caught me totally off guard and shows me just how clueless I've been even when I thought I had a handle on who was whom and what was what.
When Hitchcock devised his movies, he always had a McGuffin, a plot devise that makes us think something is relevant to the plot and it's mystery, when in fact it's not, it's just a distraction to keep viewers guessing. So, how I see it is, now my world is full of decoys, and I just have to determine the difference between what appears to be important and what actually is.

Casting a golden light

For all I knew, Jack could have just been a normal thrower upper, but no, he has extraordinary range, distance and vocalization; and complete lack of coordination. In addition, he has the acute ability to wait until you are in your deepest possible sleep state to start jumping up and down on his bed, screaming and spraying the surfaces of his room, with the requisite brightly colored, cran-grape juice and what ever else was making him sick. It was a long night, after a miserable day of really feeling the role that I live, which is basically a unpaid domestic. Each of my sons managed to let me know how little regard they really have for me, or anything I might attempt to have in place to keep people functioning and participating in life's glorious grind.
The extravaganza that led up til dawn had only one positive outcome; Jack told me he was seeing strange and terrible things, and he wasn't dreaming, and I said, from my bed, "then stop looking in the mirror."

We're not the fortunate ones

It's been a long week of no sleep and lots of activity. Last night going out with friends for dinner, I was struck, as I am so often at the volume of people, and how the level of forced gaiety was exactly that.
I don't know how to just have fun, granted; but who is the show for and what channel are they really watching.
Earlier in the day I went to the Westside Market so it was a Friday full of social events which when you are not feeling it so much, doesn't exactly make for an easy time. And again, I ask why is that; what's with the sub level of worry and distraction over the things not getting done, or the car getting a ticket. The underlying anxiety that I know I am not the exclusive feeler of, is really tiresome.
As I was getting up for work this morning at around six, I notice that the light was on in Jake's room so I knocked and he was awake and kind of staring off into space. I asked him if he had just gotten in, and he said no, that he had been up all night. I looked at his face and thought about all of the generations before us, whose fear we carry in our genetic structure and how we struggle to find out why we feel the way we do, when in fact, it all happened long before we got here.

Nothing but a good time

I am the first to tell anyone, that my choices in menu design are limited, yet I find it successful for the way I have to manage. But as I was buying my requisite power bagels, I had yet another ridiculous conversation that brings me to my major point of how having been "at war" for the last six years has ground the economy to a halt, rather then say, ANYTHING ELSE.
So the gal at Einstein's was asking me a question, and as I talk with my hands, my ring flew off, and she then wanted to know if I'd lost weight. So I told her I had, and she asked how, and I said with hard work and treating it like an addiction and she asked what I ate and I said usually the same, or similar things every day, lots of fiber and lots of protein,and she said that sounded boring and I said so is self loathing, and then she said have a nice day.
Because, people don't want to hear the truth, they don't when it comes to how they live their lives or regarding the state of the union. They cannot wrap it up into their Americanidoldancingwiththestars package that a country was destroyed and rebuilt with their hard earned dollars going to greedy, duplicitous, murdering assholes, or, they won't; either way, nobody wants me to tell them that boring is what it is no matter what your poison.

All we ask

My husband is trying to make a movie, and he is very determined. For the last few years, he has been accumulating the necessary goods in order to make his own independent film. There are days when I have absolute faith that this project is actually going to come to fruition and then on others, not so much.
He has gotten a second job in order to finance the endeavour, as we have already maxed out our credit cards, and, the job is in food service, so he had to shave his beard which he has had since before our progeny were regrettable accidents; (I kid).
Thusly, I am married to a new fella, his face is totally new to me, and not just me, our kids are a little freaked out, we all kind of just stare when he thinks we're listening to what he's saying when in fact, we are just watching his mustache and mouth move freely about the cabin.

Many years from now

As we have had a lot of changes at our library, some of us have had to step out of our little zones of comfort and do things we wouldn't normally have to; I actually volunteered to lead a book discussion at the Senior Center because I'm a little off.
I went from saying that I was going to be a complete failure to, they'll never remember anyway so why worry about it. But worry I did, until I sat down amongst the crepey skin, baby powder smelling lots of elastic wearing members of the group. They were just so happy to be there talking about something. Of course there were a few awkward silences broken up by snoring, but at least they tell you how they really feel about what they've read, there is no messing around when it comes to being a certain age, and that is something I have truly come to appreciate.

Promises of someday

I'm feeling a bit disillusioned at the moment. Is it an understatement of sorts, sure I have felt that the facade of society has always been a real downer, but of late, I think my individual experience has a more common thread.
Work hard, get a house, sell it eventually and buy a better one, move to a more moderate climate and enjoy the twilight years with a modicum of security and knowledge that you can live prudently but with comfort; or not.
My parents are eighty and they have a house to sell, in one of the most highly desirable counties in California. It's been on the market for almost two years, and they have lowered the price considerably. A few years ago, when it wasn't for sale, someone asked them to sell it, they declined as they were not ready. Now, as age and health have become much more serious issues, they are stuck, albeit in paradise, but without many options.
My dad was never sick, didn't miss work, and if for some emergency he had to, my mom would teach his class for him. He really hasn't retired and they still submit papers to conferences. Yet, with all of that work ethic and commitment, the rewards are scarce and far less satisfying with the knowledge that what they thought the end result would be, actually is not.

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