After several days of warm rain last week, Boston’s snow pack had diminished significantly, from towering monoliths to untidy piles of soot-caked snow. “Spring is coming! Spring is in the air!” I heard more than a few people comment. I politely assent similar sentiments, but inwardly I think “Spring? Are you insane, it’s only February! Spring is at least two windy, wintry-mixed months away!”
But for all my realism about the weather, I was still surprised (yet stoked) to wake up today to find five powdery inches clinging to the ground. Five inches is the perfect amount of snow: not enough to cause any significant transportation problems, and just enough to allow for an afternoon of free XC skiing at Middlesex Fells.
As we skiied classic-style on the perfect cover of powder (atop of a literal foot of ice), Mr. P tested out his new camera lens, which he specifically bought for taking portraits. I happen to think the new lens is magical, for it yielded the best picture he has taken of me since I turned 30 (see below). All this time, I’ve been thinking it’s me who looks old, sallow, and disgruntled, but the whole time it was the len’s fault!
Here I am, getting simultaneously ambushed by my camera-happy hubby and a cloud of snowdust falling from the trees. (For the record, the word “hubby” was employed strictly for alliterative purposes, and I’m surpressing the urge to say something snarky to detract from the word’s corniness.)
Mr. P was realllly hoping I would fall off the bridge, for that would make an infinitely better picture, but I just don’t fall this late in the season.
My activity of choice these days is physical decluttering, which often leads to mental cluttering. I parse through boxes with an unsentimental glint, tossing 70% of what I come across. Lots of papers covered in scribbles of writing from back when longhand was my preferred method of communication: Unfinished stories, two unfinished chick lit novels, drafts of essays and letters, errant journal entries, to-do lists, quotes from books and songs, and a veritable slew of bad poetry.
Poetry that is so bad that it deserves to be blogged before it heads to the recycling bin. The irony is, if I were trying to write bad poetry, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the following three poems that I penned nearly 10 years ago, because that cringing sincerity endemic to bad poetry would be missing. Today, I have no shame!
“Beth”
Matured intensity of a city dweller.
Urban foraging, empty aspiration.
Indulge her and taste the city:
Concrete and butts, tucked
under your tongue like a pill.
“The Pleasure of Bread”
Suppose I talk about the pleasure of bread:
The mutual love when mouth and food are wed,
The smell and taste of giving life,
the grainy flesh yields to a knife.
Have you had the pleasure of my bread?
“(Un)titled”
In the morning it’s instant coffee and hard-boiled eggs.
His index finger rubs salt over the yielding whites,
and he watches me eat and sip. He looks here and there
For things that may not be there.
We know to go East, to ignore the ripe fruits, and
To hide our faces when the birds call.
Walking through the hallowed corridors:
We’re looking for the kind of comfort
that only comes after extreme discomfort.
Our sanity long since plucked, our
eyes blink away dirt and tears, searching
for a place to repose.
Most movies are too damn long. Inception, for example, which is currently in the running for the Academy Award for Best Picture, was an agonizing 142 minutes — for me, such prolonged anguish, because my mind was not blown for a second of it. I was too busy musing upon all the other productive things I could be doing rather than puzzling through elaborate, idiosyncratic science fiction gibber-gabber buoyed by dazzling special f-x and Leonardo DiCaprio, who is just blah to me.
Yes, movies are a commitment — I resent acquiescing time, money, and attention on movies that simply regurgitate the same Hollywood crap, formulated to maximize box office. Even independent films can be tedious: stretching story arcs, dwelling on details, allowing the pacing to sag as they seek to fill out the requisite 100-120 minutes of running time on a limited budget. For example, The Kids Are Alright — also in the running for a Best Picture Oscar — veers into near-farce in an attempt to pad a good premise (children of inseminated lesbians contact donor dad) with faux dramatic tension (donor dad and lesbian have passionate, desperate, inexplicable love affair).
For these reasons, I like the idea of short films, which run 40 minutes or less, though most barely crest 20 minutes. Sine it’s impractical to shlep to the movie theatre for a 20-minute shot of cinema, it’s nice when they’re packaged together, like the 5 Oscar Nominated Short Live Action Films for 2011, which we saw at the Kendall Square Cinema amid a crowd of film-buff types who looked like they were mentally filling out their Oscar predictions.
The Confession (UK, 26 minutes) centered around a sweet young boy, nervous about his first confession because he has nothing to confess and therefore cannot be absolved. His friend decides to help him by roping him into an innocent prank that quickly turns disastrous. Heavy with religious symbolism and foreboding camera pans, the film packs a lot of tragedy and anguish into 26 minutes. “I thought short films were supposed to be funny,” I whispered to Mr. P as the credits rolled. “No, it gets worse from here,” he laughed.
Wish 143 (UK, 24 minutes) starts with a cautiously humorous premise — a teenaged boy with terminal cancer is granted a wish from a charity and he makes no secret about wanting to lose his virginity. He tells everyone and enlists the help of a priest to help make this wish come true. Though this leads to some funny dialogue, cancer is inherently not funny, and my eyes teared up when the film came to a quick and poignant end.
Na Wewe (Belgium, 19 minutes) takes place in Burundi in 1994, when the genocide in neighboring Rwanda was at a height. A mini-bus full of civilians is stopped by Hutu militia and aggressively interrogated about their nationalities in a search for any people of Tutsi heritage. It is a scary, tense confrontation that occasionally lapses into humor, and ends on a semi-happy note… muted, of course, by the reality most confrontations involving Hutu militia did not end as well.
The Crush (Ireland, 15 minutes) was short and cute. A young schoolboy is in love with his teacher and believes they will marry in the future. He feels betrayed when she becomes engaged and challenges her leather-jacket-clad boyfriend to a duel. After the despondency of the previous three films, I really savored a touch of silliness.
The God of Love (USA, 18 minutes) is the slickest and coolest of the bunch, featuring a lounge singer/hipster who prays to God for the love of his drummer Kelly, who in turn is in love with his best friend. He is given love-inducing darts and tries to use them to woo Kelly, but winds up taking a different path entirely. (Suspension of disbelief is mandatory).
So after taking in all 5, which will win the Oscar? Honestly, The God of Love was my favorite, but I’m not sure it will be Oscar’s favorite because it smacks of “film student.” My second favorite was Na Wewe, which boasts social commentary and a promise of diversity, but the topic is a bit dated (movies about the Rwandan genocide are soooo 5 years ago.) The Crush was too light, Wish 143 was too sad, leaving The Confession, truly a full-length film squashed into 26 minutes — compact, concise, and spell-binding, with a story that sticks to you. The Oscar will go to The Confession… (or The God of Love, or Na Wewe…)
It’s too late to qualify as a January thaw, a statistically-proven warming trend that usually occurs during the third week of January — this year, right around the time we were burrowing out of progressive snow events. But that’s precisely what made today’s 60 degree balminess so inviting. This was a hard-earned thaw.
The lumps of dirty, icy snow shrunk a little; the roads, driveways, and sidewalks got a bit bigger. I left work a little bit early to get in a brisk jog before sundown. It’s been months since I’ve seen the local bicycle path. I relished in the earthy, warm smell tinged with a chill from the remaining snow banks that cling to life — like ice cubes in a glass of warm water.
With the thaw, come the flood. One stretch of the path was completely submerged in dank meltage; since it’s too early in the season to ruin my sneakers, I followed the well-worn trail in the snow along the side. I love sliding in snow with shorts on.
I headed back home through the town center, passing the funeral parlor near the large Catholic church. A handful of dark-clad elderly people were shuffling to the entrance. What a day to be buried, on the day of the thaw, the earth relenting from the freeze to swallow you up.
Last week in yoga class at the local hot yoga studio, I finally achieved it: Tripod Headstead. Tripod fucking headstand.
It was glorious. There I was, sweating bullets amid 10 other mostly women, emerging from triangle pose and going into wide-leg forward fold. “You can stay here if you like,” my favorite teacher said. “Or, if you’re playing around with tripod headstand, you can come into it.”
This is standard yoga teacher patter, but I knew she was directing this last bit at me. For the past 3 classes, she had assisted me into tripod headstand, standing behind me and acting as a good-natured wall as my legs rise into the air and lightly batter her torso. Only, this time she didn’t come to assist me. I knew she was cutting me loose — it was time to sink or swim or crash onto the floor.
I placed my palms on the floor in front of my shoulders and scooted my knees onto my elbows. Just getting into this basic tripod balance took me weeks, and now it was effortless. Slowly I straightened my legs. My whole body was suddenly afflicted by random shakes — first my legs shook, then my hips, then my arms, then my core. It travelled to the weak spots, threatening to upend me at any second.
“If you’re going for tripod, make sure you keep your hips stacked!” the teacher’s voice cut through my physical reverie. I heaved my hips straight — my pear-shaped, un-yogic hips — and the shakes consolidated into full-body oscillation.
“Send your strength through your legs!” Another instructional missive seeped into my consciousness, and I girded my legs taunt, which momentarily stopped the shakes. My body was totally inverted, with the crown of my head and my sweaty palms the only things touching the ground.
Stability achieved, suddenly I felt totally at ease. I did not fear falling, nor failing. I felt as relaxed and nature as if I were standing upright. My legs swayed gently above me, mere physical appendages to an inner strength. I perceived the rest of the class was coming out of their forward folds and continuing with the sequence, so I toppled my hips and allowed my feet to drop to the ground. I fell into Child’s Pose, relishing the energy pulsing through my body, when I felt a hand on my lower back, gently massaging the sweat-clad flesh.
“Awesome!” my teacher’s voice quietly said. The first time ever that a child’s pose is followed by a high-5.
Tonight I watched a computer trump its human rivals in Jeopardy. “We’re fucking doomed,” I thought as I watched the IBM computer system, dubbed ‘Watson,’ repeatedly ring in with the correct response as the most accomplished Jeopardy players of all time looked on clutching their buzzers, impotent, helpless. The computers are getting smarter. That Matrix shit is coming true.
Then I remembered… a computer program is only as good as its programmer. And while there may be IBM programmers who can fashion software that can wow Alex Trebek, we are not yet clever enough to devise artificial intelligence that won’t answer “What is Toronto?” in response to a Final Jeopardy category entitled “US Cities” (here). Humanity is safe, for now.
A cursory scan at the search engine phrases that have landed people here in the past 4 months reveals…. nothing. Hey you, Googler. Go away. There is nothing here for you.
A sampling:
can i tell the uk border control i am visiting my husband
how old is the term thundersnow
i hate the term thundersnow
why does colonel have an r sound
neighbor yelling cuz i got snow on his fence
tee shirt snow sex and tartiflette
you are a peon
how do you say holy shit in french
vampire attacks in birmingham
how do i store killed rabbits
great new albums to show my dad
meredith i miss you when you go anywhere
how many times is monkey face said in suspicion
monkey faces socialization
poems with many adverbials
wife buys me panties
how does italian wine taste?
facts about kit kats
make one gift now and we’ll never ask for another donation again
why is the rabbit hanging in a jesuit church?
football players in pink irony
eat carrots carrot warfare
pretentious is a pretentious word
braveheart squirrels
a feather gives to a hat a touch of lightness the chimney smokes.
this is cvs pharmacy giving you a courtesy call to remind
billie joe armstrongs nipples
is coca cola usda approved
how do i get my phone out of cvs robot
i love christmas so much.....
i hate my body
I hate my breast
I hate my bra
when i turn my neck i pass out
After more than a year of commuting by car rather than subway/bike/my own two sturdy legs, I have a pronouncement to make: The rudest drivers on the road are usually ensconced in a Jeep.
If I’m merging and take a gander at my blind spot, there’s a Jeep, revving to overtake me lest I converge in the left lane without slamming on my brakes and veering into the shoulder. Walk into any parking lot, and you’ll see a Jeep spilling over the yellow line, its bulk blocking the full natural swing of a driver’s side door. A vehicle crosses two lanes of traffic with nary a blink-blink to throttle past a school bus on the right, and oh yeah, it’s a Jeep.
Whether its a boxy Wrangler or an elephantine Cherokee, I always elude the beasts when they come barreling into my rearview mirror. Jeeps invariably ride your ass, to the point where I suspect it’s something innate to the vehicular engineering of a Jeep, or perhaps the type of human who would purchase a Jeep. I understand but don’t condone nor practice tailgating as a tactic to hint to the driver in front of you that they should either up their speed or get out of the way, but when you’re in stop-and-go traffic in a line of 1000 cars, tailgating becomes less a means of prodding traffic forward and more a sociopathic way to vent your own frustrations and inadequacies.
I’m not a particularly slow driver. Being very attentive, I feel safe staying between 5-15mph above the posted speed limit, depending on the area or conditions, which seems pretty normal. So it pisses me off when I’m cruising 45 in a 35 mph zone and some guy starts to tailgate me. Sometimes, I’ll intentionally toy with tailgaters by slowing to the speed limit, as if to say “Hey, it could be worse. I’m already breaking the law… live with it!” But I must admit, I never do this to a Jeep. I don’t fuck with Jeeps.
As I get older, I’m beginning to see rudeness as a sort of feckless fearlessness as opposed to an inevitable reaction to the societal friction against which we all must brush. To contain rudeness in the face of incompetence, ignorance, or inability is an admirable treat, not shirking meekness or apathy. I want to be one of those happy-go-lucky types, who whether following an old lady going 20 mpg in a 45 zone or dealing with an aggressive Jeep Wagoner stuck on her bumper, just lets it slid out of her mind, down her back, a vanished realization in the quest to commute safely to and fro.
Errand night. The roads were relatively clear, although with towering snow piles delineating every street corner it’s always risky to venture out into the neighborhood street, and I had many missions.
To get fuel. When I bought a diesel car, the saleswoman at Volkswagen assured me that diesel fueling stations were plentiful, but the only self-service gas station that is convenient to my commute just closed for renovations, leaving me reliant on a small local-owned repair shop with four full-service pumps. Its hours are erratic, although I like the people who work there, including an old man who sees me checking to make sure he uses diesel and invariably regales me with the only time he put gas in a diesel car. “We noticed! Don’t worry, we noticed, and we siphoned it out of there!” he says. Tonight he accidentally ran me up for $15 instead of $45 and asked me if he could run my credit card through again for $30. “I’m going to catch hell from the boss,” he said. “Because we pay a 5% fee for credit card transaction, so this will be double.” I didn’t catch his logic, if there was any, smiled and drove away.
To do laundry. Oh, why do we wear so many clothes! The laundromat was empty except for a clean-cut business man in a suit folding endless piles of baby clothes. He offered to help me lug my two bulging hampers of clothes into the laundromat, and I politely declined, though his kindness made me momentarily love the laundromat. We distant launderers, we’re all in this together.
To get cash. As my clothes were washing, I tip-toed to the ATM through the town center on sometimes icy pavement as rush hour wound down on the busy streets around me. I was rewarded with a fresh wad of cash that I pretended, for a moment, was serendipitously bestowed upon my wallet, and I guess in an abstract way, it was.
To go to the library. “I have some books on hold,” I told the librarian, and she told me I had three book waiting but only came back with two. “I was so startled by the contrast between these two books that I forgot about the third,” she told me, indicating Life by Keith Richards and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand with a kindly chuckle. She ventured back into the stack of reserved books and brought back an Amharic phrasebook, her amusement complete.
To get fruit. I signed up at work to bring in a fruit salad for a company breakfast, so I ventured into Johnny Foodmaster and bought pineapple, cantaloupe, blueberries, grapes, bananas, apples, oranges, and kiwi. Hey, it’s winter, but it’s obviously in season somewhere. I hurried back to my car at the laundromat, eager to read the Keith Richards book while my clothes dried. The night had just begun.
Our local cinema’s repertory series this week was a double feature of two films by French New Wave director Francois Truffaut. I balked at “French New Wave” because my history with the genre is a rocky one, but I thought the big screen would improve the experience, plus I’m a sucker for double features, and the gloomy weather (rain) warranted holing up in a theatre for four hours. Lucky for me, Truffaut wasn’t a terribly experimental filmmaker; his movies don’t have many of the painful hallmarks of French New Wave style, like disjointed scenes, morphing characters, trippy visual effects, and aimless plots.
First was Jules et Jim (1962), a movie set in the 1910s and beyond, about a decades-long love triangle between Austrian Jules, French Jim, and French Catherine, an enigmatic woman who demands total devotion from both of them. Catherine and Jules get married and move to Austria, and after World War I, Jim goes to visit them and their young daughter. He finds Jules resigned and despondent about Catherine’s infidelities, and when Catherine shows an interest in Jim, Jules encourages it so that they can all live together. It’s obvious to me that Catherine is a total nutcase, but so light-hearted and beautiful that Jules and Jim cannot help but to love her deeply while loving each other out of a deep bond that was forged before Catherine came into their lives. The movie is remarkable in that it’s a love story that is more about fraternal love than romantic love. Because women are crazy.
The 400 Blows (1959) is literal translation of the French Les Quatre Cents Coup, which misses the colloquial meaning “to raise hell.” It’s a semi-autobiographical movie about a young boy named Antoine who is deemed a troublemaker by his parents and teachers even though he’s just a typical, neglected-at-home boy who dabbles in petty crime. His mother is a self-absorbed, short-tempered woman who piles chores and criticism upon Antoine, and his father is kindly but oblivious. After getting in major trouble at school, Antoine runs away from home and stays with a school friend and then they plot to steal a typewriter from his father’s office, which lands Antoine in the hands of the authorities. It’s amazing how quickly Antoine’s situation escalates to such dire, helpless delinquency. Filmmakers have long sought to capture how the spirited energy of youth is crushed by twisted adults, but I have never seen it done with as much care and even-handedness as The 400 Blows.
After the double feature, Mr. P and I sludged back home through the rain, the rain-slicked ice, and vast puddles. As we ate dinner, the conversation somehow turned to the Smurfs. (Yes, we may be an ole married couple, but we haven’t completely run out of things to talk about.) “Do you know the Smurfs?” I asked. “The little blue creatures that live in the woods?”
“That sounds familiar,” Mr. P said, and I googled an image of the Smurfs, upon which he said, “Ah, Les Schtroumpfs!”
“What? You had the Smurfs in France?”
“We called them Les Schtroumpfs!”
My mind was blown: French Smurfs?! It turns out the Smurfs originated in Belgium and thus spoke French. Upon reflection, this really isn’t surprising — after all, the Smurfs were exemplary Socialists.
