Right Now

Observations:

1. I think it's hilarious to walk around in my Renaissance Faire clothes while talking on my Bluetooth.

2. I saw Sex and the City the other day. It was wonderful, like a sparkly punch in the gut followed by cocktails and a hug from your best female friend. More than the emotional taffy pull with our beloved characters, I was shocked by how this movie made me crave beauty again. I get along most days quietly noting real Tiffany's from fake, culling out the imposter handbags from the genuine article. I wear approximations of good perfume purchased on the cheap at the drug store down the street. I've been unemployed and broke for a while and I had forgotten how much fun it is to really clean up and feel shiny and new. It was a very girly moment I had with Jennifer Hudson on that screen. (Skinny smoker Carrie I ain't.) She was curvy and self-posessed and lovely and knew what she was worth to the last penny and pound.

3. It costs nothing to dream, but it costs damn near everything not to.

4. I was reading "The Girl with No Shadow" by Joanne Harris at the Barnes and Noble the other day. It's $25 in hardback and they have comfortable chairs; do the math. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and after a half hour and the first 100 pages we had to leave. Throughout the rest of the day, I had that sudden, jarring feeling that I had forgotten something important like my cell phone or my wallet... or a small child. I so loathe separation from a new book I'm reading. Ask my lovely mother-in-law; she's seen me brave car sickness to tear through Diablo Cody's memoirs on the dusty back roads of Temecula. I am insatiable until that last page is turned.

5. Tomorrow I meet the widow of my husbands best, favorite, most influential seminary teacher. So many occasions when I don't know what to say. (Maybe it's a sign of weakness when I don't know what to say. Maybe I just wouldn't know what to do with my strength, anyway.)

6. John is a dream, the gentlest part of my dreaming. The only one that doesn't fade in the face of reality. Ever mine. Ever thine. Ever ours.

7. Cars are so complicated. Gods bless everyone who understands them- particularly the intrepid souls who have given us advice this week. We have a carburetor! Who knew?

8. I can't find a new diary anywhere. They've stopped my making mine. I'm at a loss when the intertubes fail me... (YOU SHOULD ALL BE KEEPING DIARIES. Yeah, I went there. I used all caps. That's how important it is. Ask me why sometime.)

9. Forget about summer in the desert. By the time you realize it's over 110, the numbers mean nothing. It's like asking what circle of hell you're in. It's so over by noon.

10. Water. My gods, water. Get dehydrated once. I dare you. It will change your consciousness.

I Want

I want to be a postage stamp; to stick tenaciously to te thing I was meant for until I get where I am going.

I want to be a cup of coffee; a custom and a comfort, a meeting ground and a pleasure to all who partake.

I want to be the best book you've
ever read; the one that made you laugh and cry and imagine yourself in another world.

I want to be that sixty-year marriage between best friends who still make each other laugh and give footrubs even though they have arthritis.

I want to be as smart as my husband thinks I am. I want to be the person my best friend holds me to being.

I want to be as good a student as I was in fifth grade; before I figured out that I knew everything and nothing mattered.

I want to remember ever day how privileged I am to go to school; that I don't fear stoning or shunning for being a woman with a book.

I want to remind everyone with whom I interact that they are important, that their contribution is unique and priceless.

Movie Review: Speed Racer

First of all, we saw Iron Man, and nothing can be said about it. It is perfect.

After that, we saw Speed Racer.

Imagine your favorite low-budget Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980's. Now give it a million dollars and a generous hit of acid. Instead of watching it on your parents' nappy rug in your pajamas, imagine watching it trapped inside a kaleidoscope made out of the stained glass from Chartres cathedral. Also, you're wearing a slick vinyl jumpsuit fashioned in the most virulent possible shade of your favorite color, and it's lined with baby-soft fleece.
Speed Racer was as bright and shiny as any plastic toy you wanted with the whole of your child's heart and simply BURST with pleasure when you got it. I've never seen such use of color anywhere before and I think we may have raised the bar on cartoon adaptations. The Wachowski Brothers, in their damn-near infinite wisdom, seem to have postulated on the depressing lack of intensity we all suffer when the wants of childhood wane into less than life-or-death humdrum adulthood. They took this fade and turned up the contrast on it until we are reduced to an open-mouthed stare punctuated by involuntary laughs and cheers. Congratulations, boys, you've made us all eight years old again.

Emile Hirsch is a wonderful Speed, elegantly echoing the performance of Scott Porter as the haunted older brother, Rex. Nicholas Elia as young Speed is the portrait of a cheerfully ADD-addled child of the exact type the movie appears to be made for. Christina Ricci is wide-eyed and fetching as the spitfire Trixie, who in this adaptation drives a racecar as well. Female characters here are remarkably well portrayed, Susan Sarandon is lovely and genuine as always in her role as Mom. John Goodman shows us a depth of chracter undreamed of in his other roles and frankly unexpected in such a film. Comic relief comes to us courtesy of the perrenial Fat Kid. Following in the footsteps of the Goonies' Chunk comes Paulie Litt as little brother Spritle, replete with chimp sidekick and a lust for all things candy. All in all, the cast is well-chosen and well-directed, providing a formidable distraction from the almost non-stop action.

The racing sequences are dizzying, pulse-pounding and wonderful. John remarked as we watched that the racers seemed to be practicing the long lost martial art of Car-Fu. The drivers are wildly out of control and daring, the terrain nightmarish and swooping through the Technicolor skies. The gadgetry is the of the gleefully impossible type only known to the world of animation, and we do not disbelieve it for a second. We are drawn in past the point of grown-up skepticism.

I highly reccomend you take your kids to see this. On the other hand, if you don't have kids yet, or if you sometimes think wistfully that the sky was bluer, the trees were greener, and everything was so much brighter when you were a kid yourself... buy yourself some popcorn, promise to be quiet and sit still, take yourself in hand and go see Speed Racer.

Puerto Rico

John and I just got back from Puerto Rico. We spent 5 days at the Wyndham Rio Mar resort on the beach and had a really great time. We had a few nice dates, one in a fantastic sushi bar. I'm glad I'm married to him. It's been a wonderful anniversary.

Apparently the dominant species of Puerto Rico is iguanas. They even swam in the pool with the tourists. Also, there is an odd species of bird quite prevalent in the skies there that looks alarmingly like pterodactyl. Squint a little between the lizards and profuse foliage: Jurassic Park.

We're back, both cultivating degrees and job offers. Things are looking up, for those of you sick of my pronouncements of doom and gloom. :)

Pictures are on my FaceBook!

Easter Plans and Accidents (from earlier this spring)

I celebrated St. Patrick’s this year in proper Irish green, but stayed sober. I honored the Pagan "snakes" of Ireland with a snake wrapped around my left wrist and told the truth of the story to any who would hear. Ahh, Patricius, you lost after all. We’re back, and we revel drunkenly in your name, sporting the symbols of a liberated Eire. May you understand better, now.

I celebrated Ostara with family for the first time. It was beautiful, the fruit trees are fluttering, their arms full of pink blossoms. Hemet is greener than I remember it ever being. The mountains were clear on the horizon and I did not greet the spring alone. Blessed Ostara, to those of you who would keep or did keep this sabbat. May you hatch from a shell, germinate from a seed, rise with the sun and be reborn! Blessed be!

I will celebrate Easter with family and friends of the Christian persuasion. I’m entrusted with making some of the more important dishes of the day and I honestly look forward to it. Easter is one of the easiest days to see the way our faiths entwine.

This year, these three feasts seem to dog each other’s heels in a way I never perceived before. A Catholic saint’s day, a Pagan day of remembrance, a public spectacle of drunkenness. Corned beef and cabbage, rye bread with the family. A Pagan holiday, the day my nephew came into the world, a beautiful moment of spring. Lamb steaks and asparagus, fresh strawberries and Martinelli’s to taost the babe. The gravest of Christian holidays, the miraculous rising of the slain Christ, celebrated with the Pagan symbols of the egg and the hare. Roast ham and enough eggs to satiate an ovaraptor. All braided together this March, in the windy time, all proving my vision to be true.

It is all one. Bring your faith with you. There is a place set for you at our table if you will choose to join us.