cake or death

cake, please!

okay, here’s a real question. how many movies have you walked out of or stopped?

my list:

• waking life GOD that film is a pretentious waste. those conversations are not deep. they’re intellectual roadkill. we have those conversations during the first week of college before we realize college students are meant to limit their conversations to the subjects of teleology and poop.
  

• playing by heart
  

• age of innocence

i mean, as a general rule, i don’t see bad movies, so as a general rule i don’t stop or walk out of things no matter how badly they are in need of stopping or walking out of. case in point: love, actually to which i subjected not just myself but four others on friday.

a bit of advice, gov. when you’re making a romantic comedy — or eight at once — you do not need to begin with a pious lecture to your audience about how Love is All Around Us.

your audience is watching your movie either because (a) they believe that already, fervently, and expect you to back them up; (b) they are skeptics reasonably willing to be convinced; or (c) they think liam neeson, emma thompson, alan rickman, & colin firth are terrific actors and wouldn’t be in a movie all together if it were rubbish. for the (a)s, the lecture is redundant. for the (b)s, it induces vomiting. for the (c)s, it starts heart palpitations and alarm bells ringing and the unpleasant thought, “christ, what i have gotten myself and/or four others in for?”

romcoms are by definition not radical acts of resistance against the man (tho wouldn’t it be could if they were?). still it’s downright CREEPY to populate a supposedly sweet movie with adulterers, wannabe-adulterers, chronic sexual harassers, and men in positions of power who take advantage of their female underlings. especially when you’re not given time to know these people or understand their intentions, if they have any besides “it’s christmas! i’ll do what i like!” in the spirit of jesus, the original hedonist, of course.

rant To Be Continued and To Lead Up to a Point about Do The Right Thing.

teleology

at dinner tonight, someone brought up teleology, which, in respect to history, refers to the belief that events happened because they had to, one after the other, to lead up to the present moment. more than anything it affirms the endpoint. the present.

teleology falls under the rather expansive category of Things That Are Not Okay.

i do not espouse teleology. i find theory tedious in general; i’m not going to spend my valuable snood-playing time decided whether to identify as 40% New Historicist, 40% Feminist, 20% Kid in the corner who didn’t do the reading.

however, when i dismiss ani difranco or the indigo girls [simply?] because they featured prominently in a rearview mirror part of my life, i am being teleological. ditto when i make fun of my old poetry or old friends or pre-swarthmore modes of thinking.

they should teach classes here in how not to be disdainful of the past. (SOAN 087: RECLAIMING ANI. 1 credit. cross-listed under MUSIC AND DANCE and EDUCATION.) it’s SO tempting. so easy. who wasn’t an underdeveloped twerp at the age of 13?

it might be a touchy subject to me because i still look more or less the way i did when i was 13. under such circumstances, naturally i would want to differentiate myself from my tween self as much as possible, in the only way possible.

but um, i was kind of cool when i was 13. i didn’t care what people thought of me. i spent no time or money on fashion. i wrote limericks. i asked out a boy. even after that didn’t work out (see entry, November 19) we remained friends. my posse of friends were the coolest people ever; i didn’t NEED a boyfriend. in fact, when a boy asked me out — a boy i thought i really really liked — i surprised both of us by saying No.

good to remember. go ahead, try it!

unlucky in love day

apparently word spread that i managed to convince several people in our class that our film teacher would be showing porn classic deep throat instead of midnight cowboy. after seeing cowboy i almost wish i’d been right: i’m discovering a newfound antipathy on my part to films that are THAT depressing. unless, like, say, Happiness, they’re also THAT good.

the plan this evening is to celebrate Unlucky in Love Day, which dates back to November 1994, by going into the city, toasting each other with $3 margaritas and watching a free screening of high fidelity.

blueberry pie

i needed to write six pages of my screenplay this afternoon. i wrote eight, AND did my laundry, AND put it away, AND wrote my review for the phoenix (on the station agent, one of three indie, character-driven, written-and-directed-by-a-white-man flicks i’ve seen lately. two of the three have starred the remarkable patricia clarkson, who is to this year what carrie-anne moss was to 2000).

the way i see it, i have earned my right to enjoy tonight’s screening of midnight cowboy. after that, however, and more or less for the next two weeks, it’s back to work.

between 3 and 6

my first night back at skool, i considered a play, a movie, an evening of games, and decided i wanted quiet. a book and a bed.

at 1 a.m., the fire alarm went off.

at 1:45 a.m., the fire alarm went off again.

at 2, i finally crawled back into bed. at 3:30 i finally fell asleep.

i woke at 6, at 8, at 10. at 10 i got out of bed, urged by an unusual feeling of activity around my nostrils. i wish i could say i woke up, bleeding out of my face, after dreaming of mountain climbing or hand-to-hand combat with donald rumsfeld.

it has stopped. my worry that all of a sudden today someone will point at me and shriek, “ohmygodBLOOD!” has not.

otherwise, i’m fine. it’s good to be back.

shiva

the jewish ritual of mourning involves spending a lot of time sitting in little chairs. they look like something out of a fairy tale, especially set among the high-backed chairs and sofas of my living room.

already my time among the little chairs is winding down. tomorrow my cousin eric drives me to skool, barring the same kind of unforeseen circumstance that detained us earlier in the week. i’ve been gone since last friday. i’m braced to see that skool life has managed to continue without me, but people have been exceptionally sweet.

i spoke at the funeral yesterday.

i shoveled earth into the open grave.

when the limo dropped us back at the house, the electricity had gone out. it came back on just before the 7:30 service in my living room. before then, the candles everywhere and sheets over the mirrors gave the appearance of a seance.

and now, what.

everyone says “not yet,” no one says “yet.”

yet.

as it turns out, it was the end. i’ll be at home for a while.

for whom the phone tolls

as it turns out, this is not the end exactly. this is the beginning of the end. i head back to swat tomorrow morning in time to make it to my film class. but of course for the rest of november i’ll be hovering over my phone, waiting for it to ring.

at least i got a chance to sit with my grandfather, to thank him for everything he’s done for us, particularly the challah he made every friday night for shabbes dinner. he got to call me ester bloomie. he got to hold my hand. i’m his only granddaughter. he’s my only grandfather. at least we got a chance to say goodbye.

i look

three red bumps plotted on my face like the vertices of a triangle. glasses. hair parted straight down the center, pulled straight back into a ponytail. i don’t know how many days i will wear these clothes. i only expected (packed) for a weekend.

family trickles in by plane, train, car, phone. everyone murmurs, feeds each other. when the need strikes each of us, we move to a different room in my grandparents’ apartment and face a different wall, a different window. or sometimes. we hold each other. the rabbi comes when called, surprising pleasing me, and stays, encouraging my grandfather’s stories. for the rabbi’s sake, my grandfather speaks more than he has all day and in a stronger voice. he likes to say the word, to call him simply “Rabbi.” the rabbi listens until the tape in the player runs out. he speaks to my grandfather with respect, not the way you fear people will speak to a man in the last stages of cancer.

the siddur sits open on the kitchen counter to the “viddui” page.

my father sits open in the kitchen dressed for the yeshiva, white button down shirt, dark pants, dark kippah, reading, not the New York Times, but “Psalms.” he says things in yiddish to my grandfather, who answers in kind.

deli, chinese in the fridge. i make tea. everyone loses it but no one really does. it is as though we carry ourselves in our fists. politics. movies. a day passes, a full day, not just the time between lunch and dinner. there is no lunch and dinner. there is tea, deli, chinese. coffee cake. my grandmother tells me gently i made the tea too strong. i make more.

inevitably, because the family has gathered, it feels like a celebration. we make jokes. we suggest movies to see. we try to watch the english patient but who has patience for it even outside of this apartment? my grandmother amazes me. my uncle amazes me. everyone amazes me. my father, my mother. my grandfather tells the rabbi, She’ll be America’s Poet Laureate someday.

he is conscious, at least for now. he knows who he is, who we are, if not who we’ll be. of course, he amazes me. the rabbi asks him, Do you want me to read the viddui, the confessional? my grandfather says, Not yet.

thank heaven for …

– rational human beings and courts that work with them:

Allowing Congress to practice medicine without a license endangers the lives and health of women,” said Vicki Saporta, chief executive officer of the federation.

– billionaires with consciences:

When Ray Kroc died in 1984, she took control of the San Diego Padres, which her husband had purchased 10 years earlier. And though Ray Kroc had been committed to philanthropy, opening the Kroc Foundation in Chicago to support medical research, his wife took giving even more seriously

my dad gave the salvation army $1 million once, $1 to each of three other national charities. it wasn’t his money to distribute, it was the government’s, but it pleased him that for once government money was being allocated the way it should be.

it makes me wish i had a lot of money to give away. first i’d have to have a lot of money, which would also be nice.

– tamara jenkins, writer-director of slums of beverly hills, is going to be my honors examiner. for you non-honors-program-swatties, that means my senior year will culminate in an intense discussion with her about my screenplay thesis. she will read and then grade my thesis. considering that slums is the most authentic, effective film about an adolescent female, this is (a) intimidating, and (b) um, fucking amazing.