Hey all. I’m so excited to be volunteering for the Fringe this year! I do feel like a lightweight, though, I’m only working 9 shows. There are 800 over 11 days!! I’m just not too sure of my overall schedule, and I didn’t want to commit to things I will have to get out of later.
I went to the training on Saturday, and it was really well done. I feel pretty well prepared to do my part. I am thinking that maybe Jay and I should try to do a show next year – it’s a great deal. You pay $400, and they give you the venue, some advertising, and a tech. That’s amazing. Not everyone who applies gets in, though. It’s not juried, it’s based on a lottery system. I think that’s so cool.
I can’t wait to see what people have prepared for their shows! And if you want to get in to some shows for free, you should volunteer. You get a ticket to another show free for every show you work.
Check it out! www.fringefestival.org
Hi. It seems like more than four days since I’ve written. I am trying like hell to start a new novel. I did start one in January, and I might continue it. I’m not sure. The fact that my father in law is in critical condition in the icu seems to be taking a front seat in my thoughts.
I don’t know how it’s possible that I am so sore, so tired, and so disoriented. I always think that summer break is going to be relaxing. Ha. Ha ha. This year is different than last year, in that we had an odd vacation – up north with my Mom rather than going somewhere touristy, and we cut the vacation short to come home. We have been at the hospital every day, hoping that my fatherinlaw pulls through his illness.
All of this takes my focus from writing, and in fact, gives me a darn good excuse not to write. I would use that excuse, too, if it weren’t for the fact that writing is calling to me. It’s pulling me. Even as I know I am writing with half a heart, I must write. It’s summer. I have a month. I need to get a good chunk of American Girl – Lyrics to Living Life as a Modern Mythical Creature under my belt. I need to get these characters walking around, living, breathing, talking…mostly talking, considering my other writings…
So, guess I’ll go do that. And if you have time, please send good thoughts and wishes to my father in law. Thanks. Sheila
Jay and I were supposed to be gone already for vacation, but I guess I mixed up the dates and everyone thought we were going tomorrow. It’s nice, because it gave me a little time to get some things tidied up here at home, and it gave me some time to do some research (aka dink around on the internet) about what to do up there by my parent’s place.
I might actually end up posting some pictures for a change, but I’m really not ready to make a committment to that. Our plan so far is to leave tonight, (for all of you worried about our pets – no worries! Allie (she of the canine persuasion) is coming with us, and Jay’s sister is staying at our house for the week to watch over the cats. (Athena, Trot, Luci, Arun, and Phyll.) Oh, and the fish (Quincy) should be fine, too. 
Bill is happily off at Camp Courage for the umpteenth time. He started going when he was 21, missed only one year, so this is his 45th year, I guess. Dang. That’s a long time. And he absolutely loves it. His only complaint is that it used to be 2 weeks, and now it’s 5 days. And since he has 5 days, we have 5 days.
Sawyer MN, where my parents live, is near Cloquet, which is near Duluth. Our plan so far consists of going to Jay Cooke State Park tomorrow for a program about what to do if you are lost in the woods. We are bringing my mom and the dogs. It should be fun. We might also go up to Duluth to explore the Enger tower and the gardens.
On Saturday, we are going to buy these Explore Duluth passes from the Vista Cruise company. It’s only $24, and we get to go on a 1 1/2 hour cruise, a 2 hour train ride, and we get to go to the aquarium. We will also be having dinner (not included) at Pizza Luce, the official favorite pizza of our branch of the McMahon family.
Sunday, I guess we are pontooning and swimming at Mom and Dad’s. Hopefully we will also get to see some of my relatives. Other than that, we are pretty open. Jay wants to rent bikes, which you can do at Canal Park, I like to go to Park Point, and we will explore Duluth on foot, too.
One other thing I’d like to try is this Superior White Water rafting on the St. Louis River, part of Jay Cooke State park – or just north of it? – they have white water rafting for $40 each, or we can rent a 2 person kayak for $10 an hour and explore the calm lake… I have to see what Jay wants to do.
I’ll be reporting back on whatever we find interesting. My only fear is finding enough vegan food on vacation, but we are bringing a cooler with fake hotdogs and sausages, lots of spinach, some pasta stuff, soy milk and so on, so I’m sure we won’t starve.
I want to say something nice about the new Harry Potter movie, but I just can’t. All I can think is, you call that a movie? Doesn’t something have to move to qualify as a movie? And is there some sort of shame in having color in your movie? Does it all have to be silver and black? Is this a 2 hour homage to the Oakland Raiders? I would rather be watching football than watch this movie. Maybe that doesn’t sound extreme to you, but trust me, it is one of the strongest statements I can make.
Jay had the right idea – he fell asleep about 20 minutes in, and snored the whole time. I foolishly stayed awake, thinking that something might happen. I mean, there was a plot in the book, as I recall. I read it – maybe it was a bit tedious, but I did. All this seemed to be was an extended series of near-poisonings where everyone turned out to be alright. By the time that something I dreaded happened – which I won’t divulge, in case you are one of the dozen or so people who haven’t read the book – I was just plain burned out. The only reason I didn’t walk out on this movie is that I literally didn’t know where the exit was, and I didn’t want to turn on my headlights on the off chance that I might ruin someone’s enjoyment of the movie.
At least I got to see it at the drive in. I haven’t been to a drive in since about the 6th grade, when I believe they had Star Wars followed by Porky’s, and the only things I remember are my dad snoring through both of them and some kid at school saying that if my family saw Porky’s at the drive in, my mom must have thrown a blanket over the whole car.
My mom did not. But in retrospect, I’m surprised. I wish I had had a blanket to throw over my car tonight – that or I wish I could pull the memory of that movie out of my brain with a magic wand and store it in a test tube on the shelf…no, even then I wouldn’t get my 2 hours back.
Hi All.
First, let me say that I don’t know if I’m going to do very well with the National Blog Posting Month in the next several days – I will be up North, and the internet connection is questionable. So we’ll see. Try not to cry if I don’t post for a few days.
But I wanted to write because I was just looking around at the wonders of wordpress. I followed a link back to ‘humor’ because that is how one reader got to my page today, and while I was just looking around there, I noticed that some of the tags people put on their writing are quite odd.
In one blog, it was tagged with the following: “Just Plain Strange, humour, 80s frat party movies, batchin’ it, anal bleaching, male brazilians, lively dinner conversation, yo-yo management and small children, anal botox“. I don’t want to put these things in my blog, but it’s an illustration. Are there people out there entering in things like ‘lively dinner conversation’ as a search? This is not to make fun. THis is an honest question.
Are tags meant to be something that people can and conceivably would search for? Or, in the case of this blog, which I didn’t read, are tags more of a warning not to bother? I know that wouldn’t be the intention of this blogger, but that’s the function that tags served in this instance, and that I’m sure they will serve again, at least for me. What do other bloggers think? Do you tag with phrases that won’t be searched for? Am I missing the point somehow? Please comment if you have thoughts on this – I promise to read at least 5 of your posts if you comment. (That’s my standard practice, anyway… )
Another question I have is whether people put in unrelated tags just to get the hits – like, if you are a blogger, do you put in something provocative and popular and then hope people read anyway, despite their disappointment? I’m sure that tagging up this blog with Michael Jackson and slang names of body parts would do wonders for my stats, but I would rather believe that people are actually reading… Or I suppose I could try my hand at writing about the things that are more popular in this world rather than my own random thoughts. But no, I wouldn’t want to disappoint my loyal readers, whoever you are.
When you hear phrases like “Time marches on” or ‘Time waits for no man,” you might begin to think that time flows on irregardless of your needs or wants in life.
Time, though, has a mind of its own. I can’t wait for the day that a Nobel-level physicist discovers and proves scientifically that which I know intuitively – Time is a bitchy seventh grade girl who runs the universe like Stacy F. used to run the junior high. The question is, now that I’ve been out of 7th grade for 25 years, and have escaped the influence of that sphere, (Well, can we ever truly escape? That’s another blog…) is it possible to escape the random and cruel influence of time on our lives? Time doesn’t work irregardless of your needs – time figures out your individual needs and runs at a different rate just for you to mess you up. The it sits in the back of the social studies class with the other cool kids laughs while you try to pick up the shards of your shattered aspirations.
These thoughts flow from a simple fact – I was granted an extra day today. Time must have been looking the other way or torturing someone else for a change, because I thought today was going to be tomorrow, and boy was I surprised to find that it isn’t. It’s Wednesday today. If it had been Thrusday, like it will be tomorrow, I would be finishing packing for the beautiful Sawyer MN, Bill would be heading off to Camp Courage, and I would be wondering how time can go so fast.
I know I should make use of this found time, but I will probably whittle it away wondering what to do…and this is where Not Bothering To Set People Up comes in. It takes forever to orchestrate two people meeting each other, and it never seems to be worth the effort. I have had one, count it, one, time that I introduced a couple and it worked. So I know I can put that on my list of things not to do today.
I guess I had beginners luck that time. Usually what happens when you set someone up is that suddenly your eyes are opened to the unattractive aspects of your friends. And who wants to have that realization? I don’t care if my friends are attractive or not. I just want them to be fun to hang out with and laugh with. Even with my found day today, there isn’t enough time to sit and pick everyone apart.
Well, that’s all I’ve got. I hope you have a nice day and that Time doesn’t steal your lunch money.
See it. It works.
Howdy. So I have been asked by a Brazilian educator to write about what it’s like to teach high school in the United States.
I’ll try. I don’t think my experience is typical – I have taught Drama in Florida, Drama and Reading in Chicago, Illinois, and Drama, Reading and English in Minnesota. I worked in large schools (2,000 kids or so) for the first 6 years; one year as a substitute. The past 4 years I have worked as the only English teacher in a very small school – with an average of 75 students.
I think that if a student here knows about the different options, he would be able to find a school that suits him. Of course, that depends on where he lives, too. We have something called ’school choice’ here, which means that if a student doesn’t want to go to their neighborhood school, he can go to another school. Usually there is transportation for those students. A lot of people have widely differing opinions about school choice – some argue that it’s great because it helps students integrate racially and stay away from situations where a poor neighborhood has a correspondingly poor neighborhood school. Others claim it is a way for white parents to send their kids to less integrated schools. This is a very complicated and controversial topic that perhaps I will research and try to go into in more depth at a later date.
Personally, I think school choice is good if it helps students voice their opinion about their neighborhood school. If the kids get a say (with their parents) about which school they will attend, it’s almost like a vote. Competition to be a better school and attract students seems to help ensure better schools for the kids. And that’s what it should all be about.
There are some people who also think that we should be working to make sure that all high schools are offering the ’same’ education across the country. This is not happening. Each state has standards that their Board of Education writes up and publishes, but the standards are left to local interpretation. I think this is a double edged sword. I believe strongly in ‘teacher autonomy’ – that a teacher should have the power to make decisions in the classroom for his or her students. But I wish there was some sort of a consensus, too, officially, about what might be ideal.
Now maybe I’m just belying my ignorance here, but I have never seen a national resource for curriculum that could be used at the high school level – at least not for Engish/Language Arts. Instead, it seems that I have worked to interpret the Minnesota standards on my own and implement them into a curriculum. This also leads to me repeating bits and pieces of what I was taught in high school and making up new curriculum myself. I’m fine with doing that, but I would love to be able to check myself against a true standard.
I think a lot of the problem with that is there are a lot of companies that want to write and sell curriculum. If the government put together a really good resource, I suppose they would be limiting free enterprise’s chances to make money. Again, I think that the needs of the students should be the most important.
Well, I think I introduced some rough ideas about a lot of interrelated topics in this post. I will try to refine my thinking and continue to write on the topic. As always, I would love to see this turn into a discussion so if you have any comments or questions, please be sure to post them. Sheila
I have been a do-gooder all my life. Always wanting the best, the ideal. Not materially, but spiritually. I revel in good deeds, in participating in a successful endeavor that will do no less than change the world. The next right thing is my mantra. Joy is being useful, helping people. I want to do good and seek out the good in others. I want to be the first to catch a glimpse see it, coerce it out if it’s latent. Maybe this is why I am a teacher.
Lately, I have been experiencing something strange – a confusion, a dizzying mental drag causing me to sway in my belief in humankind. It’s as debilitating as the vertigo I used to occasionally suffer, but again, it’s spiritual and emotional. A doctor once explained vertigo to me as a brain’s confusion between reality and its perception of reality. If the muscles in my neck are too tense and a breeze caresses them in just the right way, my brain will believe that I am falling although I am simply standing or sitting.
Emotional vertigo, I posit, is the confusion in my brain that arises when my ideals are brushed by even the lightest hushed wind of a disappointing human reality. When my expectations of something or someone I’ve idealized are met with non-ideal reality, my emotions swoon inside. My elbows tingle, I mix up words as I try to speak, I weep without direct cause.
The cure for physical vertigo that has worked for me is to stretch my neck and to ice those muscles. I am still seeking the cure for ‘emotigo’ – I know that the disillusionment will not last. Reality may not be ideal, but it’s not bad either – somehow to stretch my mental muscles and reset back to reality. Perhaps vacation will do the trick.
Well, I missed another day. This time I had a blog written, but it was off-line. When I went back online, something bad happened and the computer ate my words. At least I didn’t have to eat them.
Actually, I wasn’t too excited about what I had written anyway. It was about reading Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, which I finished last night after blogging (or trying to blog, anyway.)
I do love reading The Natural, which is a little unnatural for me because I am the antithesis of a sports fan. I don’t exactly hate sports, but I do find myself unable to resist rudely changing the subject when someone talks about sports for too long, which in my estimation is about 30 seconds.
I don’t know why I love that book so much – there is a lot of description of different aspects of games and playoffs, etc, but I don’t think the book is truly about baseball. I think it’s about love and ideals and the loss of youth.
The hero is the a lunk of a bumbling idiot, yet he fairly graces the pages of the novel, and this is because he is a hero. He is a natural at the game of baseball. Even with all of his setbacks, his Greek mythic characteristics carry him through against the odds. Then, well, then we learn that he is truly only human, and I find it one of the saddest endings of a novel.
You might be tempted to see the movie, and if you do, that’s fine, but don’t kid yourself. It’s not the same as the book. Not nearly. Talk about your Hollywood endings. It’s a good story, but it’s not the story that Malamud wrote.
I also had written some things down about the women in the book, how they are like strikes in the game of life – you only get three. And I will have to ask around to see if the image of a bird is somehow significant to the game – birds come up again and again. That’s still a mystery to me.
Ok, I’m running away now. Keep writing!!
Everything is an advertisement lately. I was reading some advice about blogging, and the article mentioned advertising on blogs. I have never even thought about trying to advertise anything. Sometimes I talk about my novel, *still seeking representation* but I don’t consider that to be advertisement.
The author was saying that if you had enough viewers every day, say 1000, that you could get a company to place a banner on your page and they would pay you $200 a month. Weird. Perhaps I can be accused of not knowing what I’m talking about, since I have a daily average of about 5 readers – and that is a vast improvement over a couple of months ago… (thanks, you 5) but even if I had a large readership, or perhaps especially if I did, I would think that letting some corporation try to influence you to buy some crap you don’t need – or even crap that you do need – would be a let down. I would be disappointed in myself.
I hope that if you are another blogger, you will agree with me that advertising on your blog is not the way to go. I actively seek out pages that are by people who are writing for the joy of writing or because they are committed to the topic – not because they are mildly clever at embedding a bunch of key words that advertisers want you to click on.
Not everything needs to be a goddamned advertisement. That said, someday Jay will get his t-shirt printing endeavor together, and maybe I will offer his atheist themed shirts. But then it would be a cottage industry, not a corporate interest. And I would be sure to only offer shirts which would be entertaining to read in an ad… then it’s an even trade, right?
Hi. I have noticed that a few of my readers have gotten to my page by searching for vegan information. I don’t remember how much I have talked about being vegan, but it’s been a long road to get here.
Both my husband and I are practicing vegans. I say practicing, because we are not perfect at it. He’s better at it than I am. I don’t try to cheat on being vegan, but sometimes it happens. In September we will have been vegan for two years. We were lacto-ovo vegetarians for about 5 years before that. During the first few months of being vegetarian, we were vegan for a couple of months, but it was too hard at the time – we didn’t know anything about vegetarian cooking, muchless vegan cooking, and so often we felt like we just didn’t know what to eat, and that led us to eating whatever we could find and feeling guilty, so we gave it up until we were called to it again.
Usually when people ask us about being vegan, the first question we get is why. I don’t really like to answer this question if I’m talking to someone who still eats meat. Most of my reasons involve words like ‘gross’ and ‘disgusting,’ ‘unsanitary’ and ‘murder,’ and I don’t think people like to hear that about things they eating…
What pushed me over the edge into complete veganism was reading about what happens to the little male ‘layer’ chicks that are born with no usefulness – they are destroyed. Some places destroy them by tossing them into a wood chipper. Alive.
I also don’t like the thought that cheese is coagulated by an enzyme that is only found in the 4th stomach of a calf. I mean really. I don’t even want to know how they know it’s only in the 4th stomach.
I could go on and on, yet I do sometimes crave cheese or meat. I also have a hard time saying ‘no thank you’ if someone has been nice enough to make me food.
Well, I am running out of time, so I guess that’s all I’ll be talking about veganism today. If you want to get a discussion going or have questions, please feel free to leave a comment!
Sheila
Writing about my thoughts today might prove to be difficult. Recent family events have turned my mind to the process of aging as I experience the beginnings of middle age and as I watch family members. I’d say the worst part is the pain of prolonged illness. There is one member of my family in particular who seems to be displaying some symptoms of dementia. A few weeks ago, I didn’t really know what dementia was. Frankly, I still have a whole lot to learn.
Hopefully it isn’t dementia, but bouts of depression that he is suffering with. The doctors are still figuring it out. What I know is limited to what I have seen, but there are different moods and personality changes that concern me. This is a person who I have gotten to know pretty well over the past decade, and we have gotten along well. There was one time when we got into an argument over something that they said, something racist and irrational, but for the most part things have gone well.
That said, the time that we got into the argument reminds me of what we are seeing now when he is irrational and angry. I don’t know, looking back, if that was a warning sign or if it was just how he acts when he is angry. I don’t know about a lot of things…his wife would sometimes call and tell us to not come over because he was in a mood – she would describe him as unbearable. I took it at face value, and none of us even began to wonder if there was something wrong.
Not all of the examples of aging that I see in my family are on such shaky ground. My parents are doing well – they are still pretty young though. Just thinking about what it would be like if my parents had dementia… well, it makes me automatically think of how the elderly in my family have not tended to have those kind of diseases. Rather, we have died young of anuerisms and bronchitiosis (sp?) and other quick deaths. Maybe that’s enough thinking about that for today. Hope you’re well, thanks for reading. Sheila
Sadly, I missed blogging yesterday. I meant to do it, but technology (or lack thereof on my part) got in the way. :( So I guess I’ll keep going until I get thirty consecutive days – which, a few days ago, sounded so easy. I have a new found respect for those that do a “30 in 30″ which is an AA/NA term for those people who attend thirty meetings in thirty days – I mean, if I can’t even sit down in my own home for 15 minutes and blog in a day, they are really making an effort.
I’m not going to count this blog as today’s entry. I’ll be writing later, once I decide on a topic. I think I might be done with the complete ramble – we shall see. :) See ya later, thanks for reading. Sheila
What is it about writing that is so gratifying and so frightening at the same time? I have been keeping a journal – off and on – since I was about 20. Alot of my early independent writing was done when I was in high school, in the form of notes that I never passed on to my friends. I still have a pile of them, and they clearly reveal that I was a teenager in the 1980’s. ‘Like, gag me with a spoon.’ (shudder.)
When I was 20, maybe it was on my birthday, I went to CityCenter with a guy friend who later was my boyfriend for two days before we realized that we were not really interested in each other. We are still friends, though, through chance meet ups around town and the occasional facebook note. Cyber friends, I guess. The journal I bought was bright yellow and blue with repeating prints of an Andy Warhol rendition of cows. I especially loved that it was unlined. I filled that journal up completely.
Since then, I have probably started 10 or 12 other journals, and brought them to varying degrees of completion. I find it interesting how much I have changed in the time since the first journal. Of course it has been 18 years, but it’s a lot of change, to my way of thinking.
I used to be mortified if anyone read any of my work. Now I’ve written a (n unpublished…) novel, I have a little website, I make comments on Facebook, and I blog for all the world to see, should they care to take a gander.
I’m not sure that Mortified has the capacity to convey just how shy, trembly, sick I felt if I knew someone’s eyes were scanning my very own words. I hated it, but of course like any good passion, there was an equally strong flip side. I desired intensely for people to have read what I had written and to receive the praise I would demurely say that I didn’t deserve.
Hence, despite wanting to crawl into the nearest hole while ‘being read’, I have shared my writing. I wrote a few little poems for an improv show I was in during high school – I am forever thankful to my improv troupe for their reactions. Let me set the scene for you: We knew that we wanted to do a sketch about people in authority taking advantage of their positions – even the smallest amount of authority seems to go to some people’s heads. I was up late one night writing, and I decided to try writing something for that sketch. I wrote a series of short poems from different points of view – a judge, a crossing guard, scout leader….I don’t remember the details, really.
What I do remember is bringing in my poems and telling the other cast members that I had written something, but I didn’t want to read it. They said I must. Since I didn’t want everyone to hear, we went into the girls dressing room, they kicked out some non cast member who was in there, and they all encouraged me to read the poems aloud. I did. I remember that I felt my voice was not even audible, but they heard me, and then they used the poems in the show.
I think that’s when I started to realize that not only did I like writing, but that writing has a power. There is something about the written word. There are other forms of communication – speaking, music, video, plays and so on, but the written word, besides being essential to many other forms of communication, stands alone.
Even while everyone decries the internet and advancements in technology, it seems to me that what a lot of the internet consists of is people reading and writing. Different forms – not a printed book, but reading and writing none the less. I mean, here I am blogging my little heart out, and here you are reading it, so what does that tell you?
I think the fear of writing comes from an essential fear of being oneself and being rejected. And once words are down on a page and released into the world, you really can’t take them back. You can apoligize, you can claim that something was a typo, but it’s still out there. And in writing. A solid piece of evidence about how you felt or thought at a particular moment in time.
For most situations, there should really be no fear – how you felt about this or that is probably inconsequential. But once in a while it’s important, and you have to have the sense to know when that is. There is only one sentence I have ever written and sent out to someone that I truly regret.
It was when I was in Mexico, thoretically studying Spanish. I received a call from a friend of mine, and she was insensed because of something my ex-boyfriend had said. I do not have any memory of what made her upset, but at the time it made me upset, too. I was so angry about whatever his offense had been, that I wrote him a post card. All I said on it was, “You are such a f****** pessimist.” And I sent it.
I’m blushing right now at the memory of that. How very wrong. What a rotten thing to get in the mail. And he really was a nice person – he didn’t deserve that. But it also illustrates the power of words. I think it’s just that power that makes writing both gratifying and frightening. I, for one, am going to keep on writing, even if it scares the hell out of me.
Thanks for reading. Peace out. Sheila
NaBloPoMo is exactly what I need right now! So I’m going to do it- 30 blogs in 30 days.
To start off, I have seen three recent movies without talking about any of them. They don’t flow naturally together at all, none the less, I shall discuss each of them in this blog as if they do. Hope that works for you.
I think I will start with my favorite, which was Away We Go. I laughed a lot. At one point, I laughed so hard I thought I might have an asthma attack. I cried a little too. Lots of events happen in this movie, but what I liked the best was that they addressed a lot of different women’s experiences with fertility/infertility. Some of it was just funny, like over the top touchy-feely parenting, but I felt that they balanced that well with more serious situations.
It’s been very difficult for me to articulate why, not being able to have children* myself, I don’t go out and adopt. I can’t exactly say why, but it doesn’t feel right to me yet. Maybe I’m still in mourning – but I know I’m not ready to adopt right now. In the movie, I feel like the couple from Montreal (don’t worry, I’m not ruining the movie for you here) showed exactly why I am hesitant – I am afraid I would feel how they feel. Ok, spoiler alert, I guess, because I’d like to talk about it in more detail.
I have been in her shoes – the woman who does the sexy/melancholy dance – because I have often wanted to ask pregnant women how it feels to get pregnant and have no problems – but I’m sure they couldn’t tell me anyway, and I would probably start to feel envious, which is a complete waste of time.
Anyway, I liked that part of the movie because it’s not a feeling that is talked about – the feeling that no matter how much you try to fill the hole that is left by not having children, nothing will. You have to live with the hole. And if you adopt, that’s great, and they are your children fully and completely, but the reality is that if you had wanted a biological child, an adoption is not a replacement of that lost possibility. It’s probably not fair to the adoptive child to have a parent who is still longing so deeply for a biological child, and that’s why I’m not ready to adopt yet. I am still in mourning. I don’t know how long it will take. It’s definitely better than it used to be – I no longer weep about it on a monthly basis, but the pain and loss is still there. Seeing someone portrayed in a movie who went ahead and adopted several to ‘make a family out of whatever we can,’ and seeing the possible cracks in that goes a little way toward helping me understand myself, which I appreciate in a movie.
I also liked that the main couple reminded me of myself and my husband in that they are so in love. And like that couple, we laugh a lot. And when someone’s grumpy, it’s usually me. They have little jokes, they are disappointed by the same things, and so on. I loved them as a couple, and I love us as a couple.
The second movie that we saw recently was The Proposal. I don’t have that much to say – it was entertaining and cute, but it’s obvious that compared to Away We Go, the director didn’t seem as confident in the audience being able to grasp the events and interpret them – this is especially evident in the last scene where what’s his name says some mushy-gushy stuff, and the director cuts to shots of random office workers making doe eyes or covering their mouths in surprise. It was so effin’ silly. But other than that, the movie was fine, and was enjoyable two times, so far.
The final movie we have seen recently is Transformers II, or whatever the hell it’s called, which was pathetic. I was the one who wanted to see it – and I was sorry about 10 minutes in. The cars transforming was neat, but there was no plot to speak of. Well, there was a plot. It was a very young and oddly mismatched couple competing to be the last one to say ‘I love you’ to the other. Meanwhile, aliens attack the world, yadda yadda, the girl says it first because she thinks the boy has died, and only then he can say it back. Plus shitloads of chase scenes, and some very racially stereotyped robot characters, and a couple of near crotch shots of a couple pretty girls. I think that sums up the movie, actually. So so very bad. And they’ll make a million bucks each. Oh well. Hollywood, right?
If you only have the chance to see one of these movies, it had better be Away We Go, or you are a fool. We’ll try not to judge, but why don’t you make it easier by just seeing it. It’s worth your time.
*without going medically further than I want to, that is, Please don’t email me and tell me “there’s always something they can do” – it’s not them, it’s me. Plaintive smile. – thanks, Sheila
