This fruit is liable to snap.
Triumph of the spirit.
Words cannot express how happy this little item in a newsletter made me. I had a crappy day, and then I found this, and it pierced me with the light of goodness and hope.
Of course, the mock tragedy that has befallen these people is itself very sad. Although you have to admire how egalitarian the disaster apparently is. Everyone has, more or less, the same injuries: a broken arm, and then that ailment whereby someone tried to cut open their heads to eat their brains. Better yet, everyone on the right needs to have their left arm broken, and everyone on the left will sacrifice their right. It's poetic symmetry, ruined only by that malcontent third from the left. We should fucking break his other arm.
And then everyone is so full of, how you say, joie de vivre. Look at how unbearably ecstatic they are. Their beatific smiles say: you may have cracked our skulls, but you can't crack our spirits! You may have dined on our brains, but we are still mindlessly full of the happy, hee hee ha ha! That guy in the middle is, I believe, actually walking on sunshine. And two women are practically Meryl Streep about the whole thing: we'll hold our broken arms in case the sling isn't enough support. Because, ow, it hurts, it hurts. Utter devotion to their craft.
I have something in my eye. Talk among yourselves while I regain my composure.
Tubular belles.
My colleague and his wife are very excited, because they bought a bath tub. It's all he's been able to talk about for the past few weeks: considering it, shopping for it, "impulsively" picking one, waiting for its delivery. You'd think that this must have bored me, especially since I'm normally so self-centered, but I've felt all sorts of strange chills of excitement for them.
It is a bit of an achievement, what they are doing. They live in this rented cellblock that, like many in Zingerbore, are all about functional showers, and didn't think that they could install a tub. But we now know that bath technology has advanced. Along with our ability to put a man on the moon and manufacture pop stars, we now have tubs that you can basically just put in your shower area. No construction necessary. "They just had to custom drill the hole so that it sits directly over the thingy in the shower stall," he told me admiringly. "The whole tub is so light I can lift it." I'll admit, I was a little dubious. "Are you sure you didn't just put a $500 downpayment on an inflatable kiddie pool?"
I've been pretending to run through some imaginary checklist to help them prepare for the arrival of the tub; each morning I would go into his office, and ponderously ask: "Have you already thought to buy...a rubber duckie?" Bath salts? A waterproof headrest? A tray to place over the tub, for dinner plates and wine glasses? Check, check, check, working on it. Finally, the tub arrived a couple of days ago. I've already seen photos. They are thisclose to storing the pictures in heart-shaped lockets around their necks.
I'm not jealous, and not just because they've invited me to go over and take a bath any time I want, as part of what would undoubtedly be a slightly creepy dinner party. I do like tubs; as I've mentioned before, I associate them with unbearable heights of luxury. But oddly, the two apartments I've lived in over the past three-plus years, despite being in Zingerbore, have had tubs. For fuck's sake, the first one had an uncrackable electronic lock, so of course it would also have had something so trivial, and actually useful, as a tub.
The current place comes with a pinkish model. Embarrassingly, since moving in in November, I haven't filled it once. When I lived in Boston, the tub I had then wasn't in heavy use -- mostly because it was old, and while not actually filthy, was a fixture I could never get perfectly clean. One time, in fact, a guy I was dating really wanted to take a bath, and got on his hands and knees and started scouring-powdering away. What a keeper, although on further thought I had to wonder if the voluntary scrubbing was his comment on how I was a dirty boy, or if he just really wanted me to be a dirty boy.
This present-day pinkish tub is relatively easy to keep clean, so I have no excuse for thus far underutilizing it. I plan on using it soon. Even though it doesn't serve that function for me, as it does for my colleague and his wife, the long bath I will take will remind me of the little things we each do to make life just a little more bearable.
I so could be a school principal.
Emblazoned on a school wall:
EVERYONE IS UNIQUE
ALL CAN SUCCEED
Wouldn't it be awesome if this instead read:
EVERYONE IS UNIQUE
ERGO ONLY ONE OF YOU WILL SUCCEED
THE REST, HOWEVER, COULD ALWAYS FAIL IN DIFFERENT WAYS
And then it was all a vegetablur.
A couple of days before I left DC, Heather accidentally ingested a tab of ecstasy. Well, it certainly seemed that way, because she suddenly had all this energy.
I took her for a walk around the neighborhood, but that didn't help.
She kept bugging us as we were trying to watch TV. She would stomp her little feet on the bamboo rug, and look at us half imploringly, half threateningly.
Of the numerous presents that she got for Christmas, her favorite was a squeaky stuffed toy in the shape and form of a smiley carrot. I don't know what a carrot has to be happy about, but there you go.
For some reason, one squeak from the orange veggie would totally set Heather off. Why, it was almost Pavlovian.
I found this very useful; if I was coming into the living room with a dinner plate in one hand and a drink in the other, and Heather was sprawled out on the couch in the exact spot I wanted to sit, I still had a free foot that could accidentally step on the carrot, making it emit the squeak that would free up sofa space.
But even better, from Heather's point of view, than a solo attack on a defenceless squeaky carrot, was an honest-to-goodness wrestling match. Man vs. dog, with an unfortunate vegetable caught in the middle. Needless to say, the stuffed toy didn't stay stuffed for long. For days afterward we kept finding carrot innards strewn all over the house. Rest in peas, dear carrot friend. (Sorry.)
One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell...
It's official: I'm dead inside. I went to see The Sea Inside last evening. Actually I really wanted to watch Being Julia, but Ooh-Child was ready to set off on a journey involving twelve continents, too many wardrobes for too many climates, and multiple airplanes, and had already checked the inflight movie screening schedules and determined that he was going to be able to catch Ms. Bening between courses of peanuts and cold meat. That seemed to me to be carrying iterinery planning to an extreme level, but nevermind.
Anyway: I didn't like the movie much. Granted, I was so tired from the workday that I fell asleep at the start and dozed for a good 20 mins. I have to say that if you have to nap, that's a good time to do so -- it's not hard to catch up, and the next time I'm on a plane it'll be simple enough to remember the parts I need to rewatch. In fact I would probably start watching it, feel that I've never seen this film before, and then be pleasantly surprised 20 mins later.
Anyway: I didn't like the movie much, because it seemed to me that the more interesting stories kept happening elsewhere. Although the very dignified character of Ramon Sampedro was interesting (and Javier Bardem acted well enough to make my rational and cynical mind forget that his performance felt first and foremost like Oscar bait), the fact that he never wavered in his desire to die made him in some ways the least interesting character to me.
The husband of Julia, for instance -- a man who had to take care of a wife with a degenerative condition, from all appearances did so caringly, and yet had to face the fact that she was falling in love with Ramon -- was in my mind a character with more shit going on. Likewise, Rosa, nursing a crush on Ramon, goes from refusing to let Ramon go to realizing that she should assist his suicide -- but that transformation was dealt with in very little detail. It was not either of their movies, but a less involving one for that.
Nevertheless, at the end of the film, Ramon lies on his deathbed, and I was almost, almost moved...but, staring at his gaunt visage, I suddenly realized how much Bardem, in his make-up, looks like Brad Garrett on Everybody Loves Raymond. A show I watch sometimes, and hate myself for doing so everytime. It's an unfortunate resemblance, especially given Garrett's penchance to appear with, and as, a gaping maw. I didn't quite laugh out loud at this realization, but only because I pinched myself really, really hard. Well, at least the nerves in my arms aren't dead.
Is this because I'm a lesbian?
I love -- after I got past officially being horrified by the homophobia, of course -- the news about the gay bomb. It's an "'aphrodisiac' that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other." It reminds me of an episode of That '70s Show where dumb Kelso walks around trying to invent things like "a stroller for adults" and "a bicycle with a motor," only to be told that those would be called, you know, "wheelchair" and "motorcycle." "Kelso, wouldn't that just be 'the military'?"
Say hello, wave goodbye.
Returning to my apartment last weekend after my vacation in DC, I found that one of the pictures on my wall had fallen, and couldn't get up. The same fate hadn't befallen (ha) a second picture, though. This latter one I've had, in various apartments, for a long time now. It's just a framed card that I've always liked. The very Japanese graphic on the front shows a gigantic wave, with white foam at its crest that prettily turns into a swarm of doves. The caption: "Peace."
Oops.
Oh, cruel irony! I can't look at the picture any more! It taunts me so! I have to turn it so it faces the wall now! Etc.. Okay, not really, but it is a little funny to look at a picture of a tsunami underneath the word "peace." Watching the news in DC after Christmas, I couldn't quite believe that nothing had happened to Zingerbore. Given the often myopic nature of the American news, I was almost convinced that the waves had swallowed the island whole, but the stations simply didn't see fit to report it. We now assume, of course, that the Sumatran landmass blocked the impact, because, really, we were so close to the epicenter of it all.
Some people I've talked to say that friends of friends vaguely felt the quake. I don't know if my fallen picture is testament to this, or if they are just big fat melodramatic liars. For all those truly affected by the disaster, it was certainly an awful end to 2004, which ended not with a whimper but a bang -- just not the good kind.
Also, I'm taking bets on how long before I get off my lazy ass to put that other picture up again.
