blaugra

no drama

My brother's freeloading friend found a different family to dine with on Thanksgiving, and I am very thankful for that! 

My other favorite family moments were:

Me, talking to my 96-year old Grandma on the phone about her plum pudding recipe which she can recite and talk about every occasion she served it, and at the end of the conversation I said, "Happy Thanksgiving, Grandma!"  and she said, "Happy New Year, dear."

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My dad, serving a bottle of wine. 

Dad:  "It's a Bordeaux."   we all tried it and it was not very tasty.  Dad was the first to admit that.  "I don't usually drink French wine, but I thought Bordeauxes were supposed to be good."  I was like, "Daaaaad, just get wine that you like."   "But what I like isn't fancy enough for a holiday."   What?  I'm like, what do you normally drink, Night Train?  Thunderbird?  No, he drinks smooth California pinot noirs and cabernets. "Well," he said, "The guy at the liquor store recommended this, so I'm going back there tomorrow to tell him what we think!"  I almost feel sorry for the liquor-store guy.

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My mom likes to keep secrets from me, because she says I "overreact."  WHATTT?!   ME?  Nooooo.

But my dad spilled the beans on my mom's Black Friday plans.  "Your mother is going to the casino!"  My mom glared at my dad and yelled his name.  "Why did you have to say anything!  She overreacts every time I go to the casino!"  I do, because I think she goes to casinos too often for someone with a fixed income.  I said, "Why the hell are you driving two hours on Black Friday to go to a casino!?"  and lose money...   She said, "because I won't be able to go every week in December, and I have comps to use!"  Comps in the buffet. So drive to spend money and eat crappy food.  I don't get it.

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Whatever, there's enough real drama in the world that it's good to have a calm homefront.  

Salty D. and I are headed to Connecticut.  Heyoooooooooooh  !

time passages

  How is it that we're coming up on the anniversary of this disastrous plane crash? 

The day that final exams were put on hold and we sat around the radio to hear the list of names of the murdered to find out if friends were on board - 20 years has passed already?  I got an invitation in the mail last month to go the "commemorative remembrance dinner" - another clever fundraiser, probably for the scholarship fund or monument upkeep.  Weird. 

I found this today whilst cleaning my desk and decided to reflect for a moment and be thankful.  Happy thanksgiving!

Who's coming to dinner?

My in-laws have skipped town for Thanksgiving, which means I don't need to host the annual family summit this year, and also that I don't have to consume any Xanax.  This is good.

My mom wants to have Thanksgiving at the family homestead.  The menu is, of course, extensive.  More food than any of us needs to see on the table. 

I'm in charge of a vegetable and desserts.  Today I was informed that I must make my vegetable green or orange so that the meal would be colorful.  I was hoping to make a brussels sprouts dish because I wanted to be all local and in-season but I was also informed that nobody likes brussels sprouts.  Then mom said "We like carrots and broccoli and cauliflower..."  Cauliflower is not colorful, MOM.

I'm rather confident that nobody will be able to turn down my brussels sprouts.  The secret will be prosciutto, which is basically how I make any vegetable taste good.

My mom called today to ask to borrow a few serving items for the dinner, and told me she wanted fall-color napkins and did I have any?  Sure, I have some yellowish damask cloth napkins. 

Mom:  Great, I'll need 6 napkins.

Me:  Six?

Mom:  I invited Henry.

Me:  Who's Henry?

Mom:  He's your brother's friend. ₁

Me:  Oh.  Is he...able to have regular conversation or is he a weirdo?

Mom:  He's fine.  Just be nice.

Me:  Me??!!?  

Mom:  Henry lives with your brother.

Me: What?  Is that a recent thing?

Mom:  It's been several months, I thought you knew. It's fine, that's all we need to say about it.

Me:  Really?  OK.  As long as he's not a psycho druggie mooch like the last roommate.  Does he work?

Mom:  Yes, he runs a business and he's about 50 years old. 

I hung up the phone and said to D., my brother has a friend.  Do you think he's a friend or a "friend"?  

This should be interesting.

₁   Last time I found out my brother had a friend I discovered that the friend was mooching rent off of the family and causing my sick misguided brother to be sicker and I hauled off and vaporized the bugger.  So you can understand my alarm about hearing of another roommate.

I'm testing out the new Typepad composer editor stuff and I'm not quite feelin' it yet so this post feels weird. Does it look weird?  It feels weird.

 

disk space full

I have reached full mental capacity today.  Information saturation from the last month or so.  Time to defragment my head.  Back to more interesting programming in a couple of days.

I was going to post something about how I loved Justin Timbalake and Andy Samberg on SNL with Beyonce but apparently that video has been totally blocked so good luck seeing that if you missed it.  I think Andy had moves on par with spastic dancer B.  Instead I'll just put out another former N'syncer in a cute little sailor outfit. His partner is super strong and they each lose a shoe which just adds to the cuteness. 

The show gets more and more like Lawrence Welk and/or Solid Gold every week.  Awesome.

Envy

I just talked to my familia in California.  While I'm sniveling and hunched over a keyboard, their workday consists of driving to Hollywood to the Roosevelt Hotel and hanging out by the pool. 

Maybe I should move to Fantasy Island.

In, Of, About, What?

At the risk of insulting some local artists, I need to talk about a recently released film.

No, forget it, I don't care if I insult anyone.  You put a work of art out there and hype it like crazy, you need to expect criticism.

I wasn't going to watch the whole thing until a friend urged me, saying "consider it research" and I love research.

The film: In Search Of (all one word but I refuse to do that), the tagline: "We all have choices." 

So these are the choices of the dozen or so characters lauded as an ensemble cast. 

Wait - there's a difference between "ensemble cast" and "clusterfuck."  When we have to pause the movie and ask each other, "which guy is that, the psycho or the gigolo?" you know you either have too many characters or just too many who have the same doughy-faced appearance.

So, now, these are the choices the characters have to make that eventually land them in "severe circumstances":

• Do I let my jackhole friends call me gay or do I rape a retarded woman with AIDS?
• Should I tell my cranky wife to stop bitching about not being able to go on vacations or become a gigolo and screw my potential brother-in-law's girlfriend?
• When I'm cranked out and freshly-screwed by my gigolo, should I wear my boyfriend's Yuengling t-shirt to get paid for product placement, and is that something the Yuengling family is excited about?  Is that a choice ?
• After my friend's bachelorette party, do I take her drunk ass home or have hot girl-on-girl sex with her in my Mini Cooper?
• When I realize that my girlfriend is paying to have sex with a gigolo who also happens to be my sister's husband, should I nip it in the bud by paying a transsexual to slip him a roofie and violate his bum so badly that it results in an "artistic" morning-after scene of bloody full male nudity?  That's a clear choice, there are no other options.
• If I'm an OB-GYN doctor, and my wife has an affair and becomes pregnant by her lover at the ripe age of 48, should I knock her out and abort her baby?  That's certainly not pro-choice.

Salty D. was laughing, but not because it's an "intense, spectacular, at times funny story."  If anyone thought this film containing 3 rapes, 1 teen pregnancy, 2 abortions, 1 prostitute, 2 confirmed cases of AIDS, was funny then you are one sick fucker. 

We were laughing because it was a never-ending string of scenes that didn't reveal why any of the characters had made all those zany choices. Some people who liked the movie said, "It made you think."  About what?  OK, I admit, I'm thinking a little bit about this uptight white family.

The sell copy calls the characters "good people forced into severe circumstances." I didn't see anyone except for the rape victims forced into anything. 

If you want to elicit real emotion from people then you'd better have a script and direction that's more real.  Women and men in relationships don't talk to each other like these characters did.  It was like someone's weird fantasy of how relationships are. 

Applause for decent camera work, and it was fun to play "Is that the restaurant near the place on that street...?" by spotting local landmarks used as locations in the film.

As a formula for In Search... I came up with:

American Beauty - reality + hot greek actor + Shortbus - provocative humor + Midnight Cowboy - (good acting, direction, iconic music) + really weird mid-story transition using a sparkler + sloppy ending. 

The only thing worse than a sloppy ending is a pageantry ending (Unless it's a pageant. Or musical theatre.)  I think story endings are the hardest things to do right.

So here's a sloppy abrupt ending to this review.

Dyslexic Heart

I wasn't feeling too shiny yesterday so I cocooned myself and caught up on rest.  I woke up to say "have fun!" to D. as he was headed out to go drinkin'.  Then I watched two movies on basic cable.  That's how lazy I was. 

Singles (1992) starring a flat-chested Bridget Fonda, a huge-eyebrowed, long-locked Matt Dillon, with appearances by Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell and some other seattleites and a super special 30 seconds with Jeremy Piven.  This was semi-painful to watch again, because this was the scene of the early 90s and I was that age, in my first apartment with my first real job and a tentative boyfriend. The little denim shorts worn with black tights, a vest and t-shirt and some kind of hat - why is it that we dressed like birthday party jugglers in 1992 ?  "That's a very nice hat you're wearing. And I don't mean that in an Eddie Haskell kind of way."   

Seeing Jeremy Piven of the early 90s proves that human males do get more handsome as they age.  Addictive, still, are Paul Westerberg's songs for the soundtrack.  D. walked through, on his way out, saying, "Wow. Remember when Westerberg was GOOD?"  Aw, snap.  Almost every Cameron Crowe movie is so earnest it causes me to wince years later - except for one, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 

For some reason I then flipped over to a family channel, always a bad sign that I'm depressed, and watched Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.  Starring Ugly Betty, Gossip Girl, Gilmore Girl, and Amber Tamblyn.  No, I had never seen it before, and I was expecting something in the shallow end.  But it was really, really good.  Two hours later I was crying - no, bawling, sobbing, going through an entire box of Kleenex.  D. came home. 

"What are you doing?"

I answered with a long snotty run-on sentence, "The little girl died of leukemia and America Ferrara threw a stone at her dad's new family and and and then she and her daddy made up and the other girl's mother killed herself and WAAAAAAAAAH it's all so SAD. But happy!!!"   

D. looked at me and said, "Huh.  Did you have a good cry?" 

"YEAHTHTHTH whaa hhhaaaa haaaah!" 

And lemme tell you, I am going to see Sisterhood 2.  Especially to see that hunky greek boy again. 

That hunky greek boy also appears in a new movie that I saw parts of, I'm going to try to forget him in that film because he plays a nasty man and the movie is in search of the most twisted portrayal of relationships possible - "It's all relative, but relationships are never what they seem." They aren't? Never? Whaaaat?  Take me back to the Greek island please. That's better.

I leave you with a total 90's flashback.  Comfort food.

Why I split my ticket and voted for Obama and Why I'm Happy Today

Not because I think he's the savior, not because I agree with all of his policy plans, not because he's multi-racial, not because he was endorsed by Oprah, not because he's a democrat.

But because an attitude shift is so desperately needed in this country, and he represents that.  Young, well-spoken, inspiring, smart, a "real person," he represents our country well.  Not a legacy, not a good ol' boy.

One of my friends, I hope he don't mind nothin', but this is part of what he wrote and I echo the sentiment.         

"Ok...here we go...im the promise collector....member when you walked around with Jehovah Witness' glaze...telling everyone within three feet how to choose their days?..member?...Ok...your boy won..better come out of that cannon like a fresh fired gun...keep those stickers and clip boards out...buy a pack of fresh gum...your moment has come...time to earn it...told everyone to buy a candle..you better be the first fucker to strike a match and burn it...it means shut your fuckin tv off...it means go out and pander and get the public off..it means no time what so ever to get lazy and cock off...time to go folks..."

Get off your ass, shake a tail feather, together.  It feels again like a world full of possibilities and not doom but Obama is a leader and we all need to act.

Jumping off of soapbox now.  Rock on.

Love letter

Dear New Orleans,

I think I love you.  You are so beautiful.  To me. 

I thought the place where I live was spirited, but the spirit of place in N.O. is so strong, so great, it hit me in the face as soon as I deplaned.

Much of the land and buildings ripped up by "the" hurricane are still woefully neglected by major government overhauling, but I've never seen such pride in gettin-r-done.  The media didn't tell this story quite right, they didn't - couldn't - tell us of the extent of the destruction nor the palpable feeling of rebirth and human kindness.  Brad Pitt has it right.

Til next time, 

LYMIB

Sufferin' Till Suffrage

I can't wait to vote, I can't wait until the new president is elected.  I am so sick of all the weeks of "last minute" campaigning.  I'm annoyed by people who assume they know how I'm going to vote.  I'm really, really annoyed by people who say the most hateful things as a way to express differing political viewpoints.  That goes for people of both major parties.  Just. Stop. Being so mean.

In the meantime, I'm sure many of you, especially women, received the chain email about "Why Women Should Vote."   If you haven't, read it and then just try to stay away from the polls on Tuesday. As if.

Almost 91 years ago, the "Night of Terror" took place.  Suffragists were fighting for the right to vote.  The U.S. had just declared war on Germany. Just 88 years ago, women were granted the right to vote.  It seems so long ago but, no.  Not when you realize that your great-grandma wasn't allowed to vote. Can you even imagine this, girls?   

Anyway, most of this I learned from Schoolhouse Rock.