so while we’ve been preoccupied over here with u.s. election primaries and outrageous weather and recession and whatnot, across the water a supermodel/singer-songwriter has married the french president. this is already old news to a lot of people, but I’m just coming to it this morning. I’ve had bruni’s album quelqu’un m’a dit on shuffle for a couple of years since jen and her france-visiting manfriend adi burned it for me. pretty music. check out her wikipedia writeup–quite the femme fatale.
terror and joy
is it possible that we make our lives small because all the opportunities and richness and potentiality are just… overwhelming? terrifying? maybe we are afraid that our own lives will drown us if we enter them fully.
sometimes I see these little glimpses, this verge, right there… and I– step back. it so stops my heart– or starts it pounding in the most disturbing way. of course, I must collect myself. I must have myself well in hand. I turn away. hesitate and then the moment passes away.
this horace quotation that came to me in a.word.a.day recently is just kicking my ass all over the place lately–
He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”
-Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE)
I feel like I’m standing on that river bank, just waiting, so afraid to get wet– and the river keeps running by, just laughing and crying at me hanging there as if there were such a thing as the opportune moment. there is grace in diving.
revelation
sometimes it visits us at odd hours, in surprising guises, sneaking up and tapping us on the shoulder with its groucho marx glasses in place and whispering all sneaky-like into our ears while we’re in the midst of doing something totally silly and slapdash… but whenever wisdom deigns to sneak on through, I feel we should make space to acknowledge the grace of its passing. and so. on the tail end of my gazillionth round with insomnia and the latest cl experiment, I suddenly know this: there is no reason on earth that I should waste my good energy, angst or time on people who themselves make little or no effort. whew. the smartest things are damn obvious. and now, I’m going to make friends with my pillow for a few last minutes of darkness. ta ta for now.
facebook can bite me
okay, yeah, I’ve been awake for a few of the wrong hours, so maybe my patience and tact are a mite slim. and I like having a sheep thrown at me as much as the next person. but seriously. facebook’s annoyance quotient has gone seriously through the roof with all the quizzes (half of which won’t even let you see your results until you’ve spammed 10 other people, the fckers) and FUNWALL and hooha and crap. so that’s it. I’m done. if I don’t respond to your movie challenges or guess the latest celebrity couple critical contests, please don’t take it personally. I’ve just decided that facebook is the antichrist.
turkey cam!
golden deeelicious, succulent, and fallin’ of ze bone.
jeeeeeeeezus
people. I seriously don’t get how they think sometimes. it just amazes me. like this most recent nugget:
so, in a fit of annoyance over not knowing how to expand my social network to include male friends and also friends who like to get out and do things like go on photo excursions in abandoned buildings (where, to be frank, it is somewhat comforting to have a male presence), I posted an ad in the the “strictly platonic” section of craigslist last night describing said desire, plain and simple. and, simply because craigslist provides a space for you to include your age, I figured, fair enough, and included my age. no big deal.
now, I can see from scanning other ads that some people do in fact use this “strictly platonic” area to make inquiries that are, if you read not too terribly deeply between the lines, little more than hedged searches for romantic partners. so, okay. that’s out there, even though I wasn’t doing it. seriously.
so anyway, this one guy writes back to me, nothing else first, just launches in with the following: “41… Thats old as hell, but yea. Im always on foto excursions. Lets get on it!”
[channeling arlo guthrie a la alice’s restaurant massacree– take that for old, ya pip]
I mean. I mean. I meeeeeaaaannnn, come ON, buddy– how can that seem at all okay?
just, jesus.
sometimes I think to myself, man, sarah, you’re so silly to get bent out of shape about age– you know how relative and meaningless it is. but then something like this comes along and sucker-punches the wind right out of me– and I have to wonder just what the hell is wrong with people? I mean (I meeeean), why even bother replying? why, um, hel-lo, say yes??
totally weird.
ahem.
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(oh, and just so you don’t think I’m all bile and hate, some of the responses have been very pleasant indeed, some of the correspondence even downright delightful– so, yeah, it’s a mixed bag and all. I just had to put my sense of righteous outrage at people’s stupidity and rudeness someplace. thankyouandgoodnight. no turkey for someone, that‘s for sure.)
melinda me
tomorrow (well, today, officially) I will cook the turkey I received from work for last thanksgiving. it’s been sitting in my freezer, taking up a whole bunch of space, and earlier today (well, yesterday— dang, insomnia makes things confusing) I decided the time had come to put old tom in the oven, so now he’s thawing. I’m only one rather small person, so I’m feeling a bit like shel silverstein’s melinda mae… actually, that goes for a lot of things right now.
fyi– challenges!
the things I cannot state publicly– we’re also cheap, hypercritical, idiosyncratic, prone to severe attention deficit, overreactive, narcissistic, and… oh, what else? cheap. did I mention cheap? and also occasionally crazily extravagant.
the eeeeeeeevil time of day
for a navelgazer at least. in winter’s dark and cold. and then the bad fm radio deejays out to keell me with neil young’s “out of the blue and into the black” and pink floyd’s “time”. bastages.
bring on many glasses of wine, I say!
sarah recommends…
partly in response to electric firefly’s recommendations in honor of Upcoming Unnamed Romantic Holiday and partly because I’ve been in a movie renting phase again, I’d like to offer up a recommendation of my own.
In the Land of Women. I sort of dislike posting trailers because too often they spoil the surprises and good stuff– I love it when I go in to a movie knowing and expecting virtually nothing and am swept up into the reality it creates– I also think that trailers are a very specific medium separate from and wholly different from the feature-length films they supposedly represent, such is the power of editing and pacing. this movie is not what the trailers would seem to sell it as, a romantic comedy– it’s a lot more thoughtful and quirky and therefore, I think, lovable than that. the strengths are really good writing, superb pacing, and beautiful performances, even if you may or may not have preconceptions about meg ryan from her previous roles. and, really, what’s not to love about adam brody?
I wish I could recommend more than this, but really a lot of what I’ve watched recently has just sort of slid right off the plate of my consciousness. I liked Fracture, even though it’s pretty formulaic, because how could a movie with ryan gosling and anthony hopkins be anything but watchable? but frankly it’s thin. the rube goldberg devices are nifty, though. I tried to watch 300 and had to shut it off about ten minutes in, which I virtually never do– somehow the same types of artifices and over-the-top-ness that I adore in Sin City, here just felt way off the mark and immensely irritating to me. Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix was… I won’t even say enjoyable because poor Harry is just being set up to grapple with one impossible situation and set of condemnation and misunderstandings after another, and it just kind of feels like a gulag to me. if you want fantasy The Golden Compass is far more multifaceted and compelling, for my money.