All posts by ester

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

( i’m ishtar42; avithepilot is my friend avi)

avithepilot: Incidentally, when do you become so cynical?

ishtar42: um, what do you mean?

avithepilot: I distinctly remember a while back when you got pissed at me for calling you cynical, and now you’re telling the world that this country worships money and the world sucks.

ishtar42: i still don’t think i’m cynical

ishtar42: this country does worship money

ishtar42: i don’t recall saying the world sucks

avithepilot: Actually, the word I was looking for was disillusioned, but I wasn’t sure if you were every illusioned to begin with… And I oversimplified and exaggerated on the world sucking.

discussion ensues. …

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

in continuation (can you tell i was thinking of this while sleeping?): top 5 off-beat comedies: rushmore; harold and maude; slums of beverly hills; the big lebowski; living in oblivion

top 5 performances in movies that aren’t as good as they are: angelina jolie in girl, interrupted; kevin spacey in american beauty; jeneane garofolo in reality bites; jim carrey in truman show; faye dunaway in mommie dearest (alternate: brad pitt in legends of the fall)

top 5 mainstream comedies: clue; clueless; ace ventura; ferris bueller’s day off; groundhog day

oh, and one of the tom tykwer films is going to have to make way for in the mood for love, which i entirely forgot about and which is one of the best foreign films i’ve ever seen. but i’m not sure which.

all of these are still in progress. no worries.

top 5 funny women (modern): jeneane garofolo, christina ricci, renee zellweger, catharine keener, uma thurman

top 5 funny men ( ” ” ): (early) robin williams, jim carrey, bill murray, kevin kline, john cusack

top 5 women actors ( ” ” ): faye dunaway, katharine hepburn, emily watson, helena bonham carter, kate winslet

top 5 men actors ( ” ” ): jack nicholson, morgan freeman, kevin spacey, edward norton, steve buscemi

(alternates: cameron diaz, jeff bridges, emma thompson, guy pearce)

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

johnny and i are now debating top film lists. (ahh it’s wonderous not to have to worry about getting up tomorrow morning for work!)

top 5 foreign films (non-british): chungking express; delicatessen; 400 blows; run lola run; princess and the warrior

top 5 british films: monty pythton and the holy grail; brazil; lock, stock, and two smoking barrels; … oh gee i’m blanking. well, i’ll return to this.

top 5 uniquely-bizarre films (aside from those listed above): all that jazz; heavenly creatures; barton fink; 12 monkeys; hudsucker proxy (alternates: memento, fargo)

top 5 most successful literary adaptions (aside from those listed above): high fidelity; much ado about nothing; sense and sensibility; amadeus; one flew over the cuckoo’s nest

top 5 best depressing films: happiness; dancer in the dark; breaking the waves; clockwork orange; network

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

i just installed reblogger, which means all of you can comment directly on particular posts instead of using the guestbook. and fight there, or joke around, or whatever. i’m really excited — i’ve been trying to do that for ages.

today’s been calm. i watched the pillow book, which was all right, tho during one of the nude scenes (of which about half the film is composed) it occurred to me that my parents could walk in. i was in the library which is my sanctuary, but it also happens to be my father’s and he doesn’t always knock. growing up, he was chill about me deciding what art i exposed myself to — with a few notable exceptions. in living color and married w/ children were, in his opinion, trash, and he didn’t want my brothers and me watching them; he saw like water for chocolate on my shelf when i was 12 and told me i was too young for it; and he didn’t want me reading the narnia books b/c he said they were thinly veiled christian propaganda. he’s right, they are, but he didn’t need to worry about me being influenced and wanting to convert: if anything, he should have voiced concern over mists of avalon. not that i would have listened; i never did. he didn’t really care either. i think he respected my independence, and he was too pleased to be having a child who was so in love w/ words.

as ilana put it, tinman scored! i’ve only been following his blog for a couple weeks but he has an earnestness in his journal i find really appealing. so good for him.

and mermaniac has a kickass collection of show links. i’ve been very quiet since my friendship w/ shira died about my love for certain shows, except w/ marc of course. but sondheim holds a special, undiminished place in my heart. lyrics have always been what’s most important to me, and he’s a lyrical genius.

my silly father bought pulp fiction today despite the fact that he’d never seen it. so he watched it and of course he didn’t like it and we argued this evening about its merits. it’s one of my top five (in no particular order, the others are shawshank, terms of endearment, when harry met sally, and chinatown. others in the top ten: fight club, princess bride, being john malkovich, magnolia, empire records.)

and i talked to michael today for a while. he invited me to take a year off and travel the world w/ him. it’s funny: he still thinks of me as 16 and i still call him “professor” (where did that come from?). i had to turn down the globe-trotting proposal, however tempting. sweden spring semester is enuf of an adventure for me.

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

everyone, exhale.

just like that, come on: ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh …

yeahhh.

today is exhalation day. after my roller-coaster-type (ew, cliche) week, this weekend has been a huge relief. no stress. becca came over friday nite, quieted me down. we drank tea w/ my family (why should they be exempt from the scattering fad? my grandparents left for vt yesterday and my brothers went to cornell til tuesday.)

then we slept and slept and slept. when we woke up, we had breakfast, read comics, came back upstairs, crawled back into bed, read tarot for every person we could think of, stayed in bed a little longer, finally leaving to get diet coke. we drank, sitting on a bench in front of politics and prose, still wearing our pajamas. momentum carried us to my favorite indian place; we got a couple funny looks from other patrons but the food rocked, as always.

we changed once we got home (after lounging in bed some more and reading more tarot). ilana called as we were out the door to come visit her at the seed. we met her just as she was going on break and ate custard and i posed the same question i’d posed to becca earlier: if you could pick the number that was your fixed IQ and your weight, and it had to be both and you couldn’t change either, what would you do? it works best if you’re littler, b/c if you’re tall, you can shrug and say 150 or 160 or whatever and it’s not that big a deal. but 150 or 160 on a medium 5’1″-and-a-half frame would be somewhere b/w mattress and couch.

lots of talk about IQ recently. not sure why. i don’t even know what mine is.

becca dropped me off and went home; i watched sophie’s choice, which, like ghost world, i recognized to be a really good movie but which nevertheless didn’t really affect me. again, i’m not sure why. both had great acting and interesting stories (tho the ending of sophie’s world wasn’t as shocking as i expected it to be). hmm.

after a detour at jackie’s, which was too awkward for words, ilana and i ended up back at becca’s and this morning, becca drove me home. it’s weird that everyone’s away. now that they are, of course, i get the impulse to call. *shaking head*

what am i going to do next week? mmm, write, maybe. or send stuff out.

incidentally, the FTP problem turned out to be a problem w/ kestrel, the swarthmore server. they fixed it; hopefully it’ll stay fixed. i put the pages back up and all is fine.

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

my computer is scaring the shit out of me. all of a sudden, my usually-helpful FTP program is refusing to load basic files, stating that there isn’t room. worse, it’s erasing the files — there are two that just aren’t there anymore. i’m trying not to panic but it’s hard when pages just disappear. the html pages still exist; they’re even present in the first stage of the FTP process. christ, sometimes i hate the internet.

my grandparents are here. it’s time for shabbes. i guess i’ll have to store the worry and get back to it later.

briefly: had my last real day w/ wifp. said goodbyes to all involved. then saw ghost world w/ dyannah and ilana. good on many levels which i guess i’ll address later.

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

pleasant occurances of today:

* i burnt off the remnants of my questionable mood w/ a 3 mile walk and 32 ounces of diet coke

* read more of in america by sontag — found it intriguing

* talked to him, resolved the misunderstanding (funny: he anticipated my complaint and apologized before i even had to tell him specifically what my problem had been)

* was extensively flattered at class for the piece i submitted. the criticism was smart and sound, too. i wrote the thing awhile ago; i think only mariah read it at that point. it was when i was just getting over david. anyway, once i’ve revised it a little i’ll post it up here and y’all can tell me what you think.

* discovered that my worth as a person is measured at $1,768,820.00 according to human for sale. not bad.

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

i tried to post last nite but blogger was down for some reason. so this now is my first official blog to babblebook. ilana was w/ me while i made the bold decision. we were hard pressed at first to think of something adequate, so i handed her a book of poetry and told her to open to random pages and read random words. we had just finished watching harold and maude, a lovely off-beat film, and drinking chai; we were buzzed on beauty. i figured it was as good a time as any to make the switch.

earlier, i took my little brother shopping. it’s incredible how out of the GAP realm he is. he’ll be 17 in a matter of days, but if he had his way he’d spend all waking hours in sweatpants. the peculiar clothing choice matches his chosen occupation: playing computer games and watching anime. everyone says, for the irony of it, i guess, that he’ll be the rich one and support adam and me. *shrug* there is no telling, that’s true. but i don’t intend to have anyone support me, except perhaps a benevolent Dickensian person who has a soft spot for poetry.

speaking of professions and the future, my sweet Harold and Maude experience was countered later in the day by Manhattan with becca over chili. becca and the chili were fine; it was the movie that sort of dampened my mood, i think. its lesson: love is fickle and unpredicable, and people are self-indulgent fools. woody allen irks me sometimes b/c he embodies a trait i particularly dislike. he seems to think that admiting a fault or even making fun of himself for it is a substitute for attempting to improve. in my opinion, it might even be worse to realize there’s a defect in you and not try to fix it at all.

we didn’t talk about that. our conversation centered around each other’s future. becca decided that she saw me moving west for a year, maybe to seattle or to SF, then becoming disatisfied and returning; then i’d disappear for a while, traveling, and not talk to anyone while i’m gone. i told her she thinks i’m more of a hippie than i am.

accordingly, i created a coroporate-drone-type life for her, but one involving a cat named tigger, an east-indian PLoTSO [permanent long-term significant other], near-adoption of an east-indian child, and eventually a marriage to a jewish divorcee.

something else upset me last nite tho i was hard-pressed to figure out exactly what.

stemmed from this. this morning, tho, i remembered that misinterpretations &c. can occur from writing as well as from speech. so whatever.

Uncategorized
Leave a comment

welcome to august, folks. this is the month of dispersion, of reuniting, of leaving, of arriving, of thresholds. (ooh, do you feel that shiver?) i don’t really know what to feel, it all being so contradictory, that i’m content to just be calm.

on the good news front, my site finally made it onto google. only took a month and a half. 🙂

last nite the usual suspects gathered at my house and i fell to pondering where all my male friends went. suddenly my friend distribution is at like 80/20 rather than 50/50. it’s strange. at swat, it was about equal; when i was on kibbutz last spring, if anything, i spent a little more time w/ guys.

now the only ones i see regularly are ari and johnny. but the former is often drowned out in the clatter of estrogen and the latter i encounter only once a week. craziness.