that home practice post I mentioned

The thing I like best about home practice is the focus that’s possible on every pose. Much of the time in class, parts of my mind are wondering when we’re going to release the pose, how I look to the teacher and the rest of the class, what the teacher is going to have us do next, what time it is, and all the other things involved in the fact that you’re in a class with other people instead of at home on your own. I have to expend energy on listening for the teacher’s instruction, on making sure my underwear isn’t showing, etc. At home, none of this matters, and I’m able to focus on the pose entirely. I can release it when I want to, instead of listening for the cue. I often feel during home practice that I’m getting the point, somehow, of each pose.

The home practice I had on Wednesday was almost the epitome of this focus, because my eyes were closed almost the entire time. I wanted to see how much I could do, how much correct alignment I could accomplish, without checking visually. The answer turned out to be a lot. I relied on how my body felt instead of how it usually looked, and without the comparison the poses felt more natural. My body’s own talents for alignment stepped forward, and the muscle memory I’ve built over the last almost-year was what guided me.

I found that there were a few poses where, unless I kept my eyes open, the balance escaped me and I was falling over. But generally without the visual stimulus I was able to bring even more focus to the practice.

Something else I like about home practice – and it may be self-serving instead of actually being a positive thing – is that I feel so much more accomplished. I’m amazed at the length in my hamstrings, at the flexibility in my spine. The things I can do in yoga are starting to be less advanced-beginner and more intermediate, and I’m quite proud of myself for it. In class I almost always feel that I’m jogging a little to catch up with the teacher and her expectations, instead of comparing myself to myself, how I was last week at home and how much ground I’ve gained in the last few months. Not so at home; my perspective is a bit more complimentary.

Even better, I think I might be on the way to handstand without misery. Handstand (which I talk about towards the end of this post, or just read on here) has never yet been a pose that I enjoy. Trying to do the initial build-up poses to it makes me unhappy, and flipping up into the pose with assistance from teachers is even worse. My shoulders just yell and scream at me until I get down. It’s not pain, exactly, just extreme discomfort.

A lot of people on yoga sites talk about how vulnerable handstand makes them feel, how much the fear of falling affects them, how disquieting they find inversions. I don’t experience much of this; I like inversions, I don’t feel at all vulnerable in them (just challenged), and falling does hurt, but not very much, so I know it’s not something to fear that badly. My problem is some other kind of block, possibly an emotion or an old muscle memory that’s tied up in my shoulders. It’s a mystery.

Last Saturday, I went to a class taught by a gal who’s perfectly nice, but I consider her the epitome of the Yoga Flake. She taught fairly well, and one of the poses she decided to put in was handstand. She spent a good amount of class time on it, instructing us in preparatory poses and then saying that we should try flipping up facing the room instead.* I tried it a few times, expecting nothing but that awful discomfort, but after a few hops, the discomfort was starting to fade, and the exertion was not so awful. “Huh,” I thought. “Can it really be true that all I need is practice in this stupid pose?”

*Like so: you stand more or less like a runner about to race, with one knee bent under your torso and your hands on the floor in front of you. Lift the extended leg as high as you can and try to hop with the foot that’s under your body, shifting your weight to your hands, and then quickly try to lift that foot to meet the other leg such that you’re handstanding. It takes a whooole lot of faith that the wall (or your abdominal muscle control) will be there to catch you, and some substantial coordination, but it’s definitely possible.

So, on Wednesday, I tried the preparatory poses against the wall. The discomfort was so low it barely registered; I felt the strain of holding my body upside down in all the right muscles, but my shoulders weren’t screaming at me to GET DOWN ALREADY like they always do. I was at the end of my practice and not prepared to try to flip up and hold it against the wall, but I felt pretty sure that I could have if I wanted to. I may try it more seriously this weekend with BF spotting me.

Breaking through on handstand will be one of those moments for me – one of those times where I marvel to myself that I was positive I’d never get the hang of this. The openness I feel in pigeon pose is sort of the same way, along with the ease and effort I feel in standing split (but that deserves a post of its own). Like, no way I’ll ever get this down, but, magically, now I have. But as I’ve said, I never truly believed that anything was possible until I started doing yoga…and now I definitely do believe it. So it’s not so much of a surprise anymore that I’m able to learn these things. Eventually.

It just takes some focus.

while I pondered, weak and weary

Caution: long, bitching, rambling post ahead.

I can’t sleep. This is the second time in a relatively brief period, when for many, many months I have not had this problem. I feel concerned about this.

Today was one of the worst days I’ve ever had since I took this fucking job. The reasons involve a very nice lady who died due to negligence, her three mourning adult children, and deadlines that poof! suddenly came upon the attorney who asked me to answer the interrogatories in her case. It took me all day to do this task, and on into the evening, and if she’d taken just an hour to train me and help me…but that is just one of the problems. I didn’t get to do any of my other work, and by the time I got around to it more than an hour after the office closed, my ridiculously out-of-date computer decided to run a virus scan which it didn’t need and caused a delay of three minutes plus to open a file. Much less save it and attach it to an email. And I didn’t have network permission to shut down the scan.

I also found out that not only is the furlough totally non-negotiable, even if I want to work for free on a furlough day because EP has no ability to manage deadlines, but we’re also getting paid several days late this pay period because the firm has. No. Money. OG chose to tell us this the day before supposed-to-be-payday, instead of warning us of the possibility some days earlier. She promised she’d make it up to us sometime in the next few months, when there’s more money in the bank. Cf. “you’ll have a new computer before Thanksgiving” (I know I bring it up a lot, but my computer is running Windows Fucking 2000, which is a ten-year-old OS. Inexcusable!). Also, I find “make it up to us” so vague as to be impossible to believe.

Part of the reason the interrogs took me all day is my own fear and avoidance and laziness, I admit, but another part is the utter lack of a deadline – or training – given to me by EP, until suddenly they were due in two days. Two days when I was furloughed. Because it was my first time doing interrogs, I have no idea if I did them right or just made more work for EP, for which she will punish me with iciness and isolation. I keep trying to tell myself that I did my best, I did my best. That’s all I could do, with so few resources. But there were so many little bitty pieces that were left undone. The legal profession is so much more sloppy than I thought it was when I first went into it that those little bitty pieces may not in fact matter whatsoever, but I never know what’s going to matter and what’s not.

So here I sit. Awake. I watched an episode of Good Eats on BF’s laptop (standard before-sleep fare), felt sleepy, and started drifting off, and then I had a half-dream/half-vision of an enormous spider retracting up towards the ceiling of my bedroom, its claw-legs moving, and I was thence fully awake. I tried to relax for a good hour, but here I am instead, with a cup of chamomile tea, fucking worn out from my horrible day but unable to sleep.

The worst thing that will happen in the immediate future is that a deposition will get moved back, and that happens every day, I swear, but it’s still not something I want to happen on my account. Enough! I did my best!

I think.

I, for one, can recite “The Raven” (or at least the first few verses of it) far more easily than “Casey at the Bat”, but for those of you who haven’t watched that Simpsons Halloween Special enough times, these are the lines I’m thinking of right now:

Once upon a midnight dreary
While I pondered, weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…
Eagerly I wished the morrow
Vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow…

I guess I can be grateful that I have no lost Lenore to pine over. I hear she’s a rare and radiant maiden.

Tomorrow I have a furlough day, so the good news is I’ll be able to nod, nearly napping, at any time. I may or may not be planning to enter a Writer’s Digest contest, with entry fees I can’t really afford right now, but I’m all “what the hell” about it. Monday I have an appointment to see a man about a leg (actually a lady doctor, about my leg), so it’s easier for me to be furloughed on Monday too, and then it’s another week of whatever will be thrown at me next. I know a four-day weekend sounds nice, but I’ll be spending most of it worrying about what I should have tried to slot in during this past week, when no one was asking me to do anything. Until Thursday.

I think I’ll write up an account of Wednesday’s interesting home practice tomorrow. It might help me relax a little. I wish I’d had the chance to do yoga today; I think I reactivated the healed pinched nerve in my neck from hunching in misery over my desk all day, and my shoulders and lower back are complaining a little from compression they haven’t been accustomed to for years. But I didn’t get the chance to eat much today, much less do yoga.

My tea is drunk. My cup is emptied. I’m going to try for sleep again. Thanks for listening.

bloody pirates!

7:50 AM: arrive at work.

7:54 AM: day is ruined.

I was all ready to write a long happy post about my interesting home practice last night, and then I came into work and everything is immediately shitty. So I think I’ll just forgo posting today. I haven’t been too happy with my output lately anyway, and judging by the [lack of] comments, y’all haven’t either.

seriously MPD post

MPD stands for “multiple personality disorder”, because calling it a schizophrenic post would be inaccurate. What I mean by that is in the last week or so I’ve been starting new posts every time I have something new to say, and then not posting them because they’re too slight. So here’s a hodgepodge of all the collected non-relevant stuff I’ve had to say for a week or so.

1. Pure Bitching(tm)

The community college has a woman in the registrar’s office who is either blind or incompetent, or something. I got a letter last week telling me I was scheduled to get my certificate just fine in May, as long as I sent an official transcript from my alma mater before March 20th. I submitted an official transcript when I applied to the college, one I paid $4.00 to my alma mater for, and I know this because I kept the copy (I have it in my desk drawer right next to me, right now) and hence must have sent them the original. The woman at the registrar’s office told me on Monday that she had an unofficial transcript, not an official one. I told her that I was 100% sure that I sent the official one to them when I applied, and she said no, we don’t have it. So I sent a request and another $4.00 to the registrar at my alma mater. It’s a little thing, but it pisses me off that I am positive I am right about this and still have to pay for another one.

2. Amusing Excerpts from Legal Cases

When I opened this post I thought I’d wind up with  more than two examples, but I haven’t found any more, so I guess there are only these two for now.

All the teachers I’ve had at the community college have expressed their sympathy to their classes for making us read cases. There’s no other way to learn the law, they say, but I understand that it’s not very interesting and I’m sorry.

Aside from cases that are more than 50 years old, or breach of contract cases, I have never found this to be true. I love reading cases. They are almost always interesting, the way that they put together a legal issue and then take it apart. Sometimes there are details of the case circumstances that are amusing or that reveal human nature, sometimes the court phrases things in interesting ways for the sake of clarity. So I present a couple of those to you.

From 56 Md.App. 125 (1983):

EL: The problem is I committed murder in self-defense. I wasn’t going to be beaten again.
911: OK. Is the person that beat you there now?
EL: I would imagine so. He’s up lying in bed dead.

From 235 Md. 556 (1964):

Wife’s paramour was convicted of murdering husband. The Circuit Court…[found] paramour guilty of second degree murder, and paramour appealed.

3. Send Me a Reader (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh)

Yesterday I spent nearly four hours looking over the draft of what I like to think of as a very short novel, instead of a very long novella, in between short bursts of work when it was asked of me. It’s something that’s been kicking around in different forms since 2003, and in 2007 I managed to take it from an overly dramatic piece of juvenilia to a twice-its-size almost-novel that might actually be saleable. It’s a ghost story, overall, but it’s also about isolation, love and loss, and furniture.

The problem I’m having with it is that I find it very engaging, and I can see a few points where I think it might need work, but I’ve been too close to it for too long. What I really need is a reader. Someone who will not only read the book, but talk it over with me, tell me what parts need work and what parts had unanswered questions and where the hell I can slot in the other 15,000 words’ worth of short stories that are tangential to this book and which I need to fill out the length but which right now seem to have no place whatsoever in the manuscript. And other such details.

Granted, I could use a reader for just about every project on my slate, but especially with this one, because I believe it’s fairly close to completion. The more projects I have that are completed, the more query letters I can send out.

This is yet another problem with social anxiety, by the way. Writers’ groups are the lifeblood of writers’ growth, and trying to make your way without a group of fellow writers to support you, read your drafts and talk to you about them (and of course you return the favor!), and bounce ideas off of, you’re kind of swimming the Atlantic without an emergency boat following behind you. But the model hasn’t worked for me. I took a fiction writing class at a community college (a different one than where I am for the paralegal cert) two years ago, but I was the only person other than the instructor who had lengthy comments and lots of suggestions for the other writers, so…it wasn’t much help for me. Something of the same thing happened at the conference I went to in the summer of that year. I could get out there and try to find local writers’ groups that meet in bookstores and the like – there are tons of them out there, trust me – but I don’t know if I’ll get anything out of it, and I don’t really want to meet all those new people and make myself and my work vulnerable in that way. There are much more snotty reasons why I don’t want to do this, but I’ll just save those for another time.

4. And Now the News

I know it seems like I haven’t been doing much in the way of work at work lately, but it’s just a really slow period right now. I feel extremely, ridiculously guilty about not doing work at work, but if there isn’t any work to do…?

I got a 96 on my first major assignment for Legal Research & Writing, and a 10/10 on the first grade we got back in Civil Procedure. Hopefully this will be another slide-through semester, and thank goodness it’s the last one. The cop-ish lady (5th paragraph) in CivPro is proving herself to be interesting yet again; on Monday night she made some comments to me in a way that made it seem like she thought the teacher was incompetent. He is, but she was pretty impolite about it. Also, she jumped in to a discussion that the teacher and a student were having about their Greek heritage to say “My people came over here a long time ago too.” The teacher asked from where, and she laughed and said “On slave ships.”

Awk. Ward.

I love taking nice long lazy showers, but I really dislike taking a quick shower when I’m half-asleep and then being freezing cold when I get out. Which makes most mornings unpleasant for me. Lately I’ve been alternating my morning shower with a day where I’ll dunk my head under the tub faucet and shampoo my hair, and then give a quick swipe under my arms with a washcloth and call it clean. I don’t freeze to death when I get out, I’m presentable, and I don’t smell. Is this unhygenic? I don’t seem to be scraping patches of crud off my body when I shower on the alternate day.

And now I’m off to…not work. Likely for most of the day. Why don’t you guys blog more often for my amusement? Sheesh.

jetsam/open letter

Quote for the day: We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men. -Herman Melville

Yesterday was a Saturday in disguise at work. I mean there was NOTHING going on. In the afternoon I managed to write another half-chapter of the novel and no one noticed. I felt a bit guilty, but the phone wasn’t ringing, no one was asking me to do anything, and the only shit work I have to do is the kind that no one will notice if I put it off until the cases settle.

Although just before I left yesterday, I dealt with a series of phone calls that inspired me to write this open letter:

Dear Not-Quite-Client,

I am sorry you have not received the certified mail packages I sent you in January. I have tracked these packages twice and was told that they have been awaiting your pick-up at the post office since January 20. I have previously spoken with your daughter about this issue, and I find it unfortunate that she was no friendlier than you. I cannot explain why the post office did not send you a notice; I do not work there. I truly am sorry for the mix-up, but I fail to see how it’s my fault that you were unable to pick up the packages in the three weeks between your daughter’s call and your own, nor do I understand why, if you worked for the post office for 25 years (as you have so helpfully informed me five or six times), you have never thought to ask me for the tracking numbers yourself to solve this mystery.

I’m glad the post office was able to be more helpful once I had called them (twice), and also glad that you were able to confirm that your packages were indeed at the post office. The fact that you didn’t call me back to let me know I was correct about this is encouraging, because it likely means I will not hear from you again.  Please go your way and let me go mine. Forever.

VTY,
Crisitunity

I didn’t get the state job I interviewed for. They sent me a nice letter saying they’d found someone else. I think I’m learning to cope with disappointment better than I used to, because I just shrugged about this and moved on. Maybe I just didn’t really want the job.

Yoga class yesterday was fine. There’s little changing in my practice right now, so I haven’t found much to say about it. Civil Procedure last night was the same – he lectured about stuff I use every day in my job, I wrote Chapter VI on my laptop. More guilt.

I had the most awful dream last night. I dreamed that I was an observer on a battleship during a war. On the deck of the ship were these enormous square wells with water way down in the bottom, and since the battle had been going on for a while and there were casualties, all the dead were wrapped up in mummy-bandages and thrown down there to keep until the ship made for land. During the battle I was observing, a bunch of the soldiers needed to hide, so they were thrown down in the wells with the mummy-bodies. They bobbed there, next to the corpses, shouting to please come and let us out. It was horrible.

So, now that I’ve brightened your day, I’m off. I’m sorry if I haven’t been my usual self-analyzing Crisitunity in the past couple of days. The book I’m writing is absorbing me and I’m walking around in sort of a trance thinking about it all the time, so it’s hard to find much to say.

largely about film and Coraline

So, yesterday BF and I went to see Coraline in 3D. 3D seems to be making a spectacular comeback, the likes of which haven’t been seen since 1956, and I am a little intrigued as to what’s causing it. My guess is that Hollywood is still unaware that it’s been releasing largely shit over the past 7 or 8 years, and thinks that people are staying away from theaters because of DVD and Blu-Ray and HD and so on. The good news is, we’ll probably get Smell-O-Vision again soon. Ah, the joys of history repeating itself.

The point of that paragraph was meant to be Coraline, which was utterly transfixing. It was gorgeous, it was magical, it was visually stunning, it was moving, it had larger themes, it cooked along with no dull spaces, all questions were answered…basically, it was a fine film that happened to be the most enchanting movie I’ve seen in many months. (Since Enchanted, come to think of it.) It may be just about out of theaters by now, but if it’s still around in your area, check it out. The 3D is well-placed, but I think it’d be nearly as wonderful without.

I once wrote, in what context I do not remember, that no matter what you’re going to the theater to see, no matter your reason for opening the drawer of your DVD player, everyone watches movies to see something extraordinary. From enormous explosions in Bruce Willis movies, to the unimaginable effort that’s put into a stop-motion film, to the shocking soul-baring in a movie like Closer, to the dance of love and sorrow in an Ophuls film, to the structured, worrisome genius of Kubrick, to the comic joie de vivre evident in any Keaton film, even to the simultaneous concentration and boredom of a Brakhage piece – all of these things are extraordinary, and all different, but they all have the movement in light and shadow in common. This is part of the reason why movies are so much better in theaters, and part of the reason why our culture has sunk its fingers into the medium and failed to loosen its grip for over a century now. We just want to see something extraordinary.

That was what I kept thinking when I was watching Coraline (as well as thinking “why wasn’t Pan’s Labyrinth like this?“), because that promise was delivered upon in spades by the film. I felt the same way about Big Fish, a film I can’t praise enough. Brakhage once said that even the shittiest of films (I’m paraphrasing) has something sublime to deliver to an audience, even if it’s just a single moment. He went to the movies a few times a week, every week, until he died, and saw all kinds of movies. I’ve seen a lot of shitty movies and a lot of really wonderful ones, and while the best movies are constant picnics of sublime moments, Brakhage is right, that even the worst of them has something to offer. I think this is because the very medium of cinema is a strange compromise between the real and the false, that you’re stepping into a dream world every time you walk into the theater, and dreams are never fully dull. The best directors exploit this compromise emotionally, self-reflexively, and the best fantasy directors exploit it on a purely creative level to make films like Coraline.

I wish I’d read Gaiman’s book first, but I didn’t. I’m overwhelmed by his talent every time I see/read something of his. I admit that I have an innate fascination with little mysterious doors where you don’t expect them, which may or may not lead to fabulous fantasy worlds, but what do you expect from a person whose favorite book is still and always The Chronicles of Narnia? I just feel fortunate that we have him around, and wonder what we will do for modern fairy tales if/when we lose him.

—

I had a pleasant weekend.  I wrote the first death in the horror book, and thanks to a brilliant suggestion by BF, I think it went well. We watched A Fish Called Wanda, I made the most amazing black bean soup ever, and I did my homework. Lots of TNG and cross-stitching as well. Your basic dull and happy Crisitunity weekend.

This morning there doesn’t seem to be much going on. I have to go to the P.O. to mail a query to an agent and an application for a job. I’m hopeful but realistic about both prospects.

couple meme

Thieved from Laura.

What are your middle names?

Sorry, but I can’t say. Mine rhymes with “ukelele” and his rhymes with “happy happy joy joy”.

How long have you been together?

Just over three years. We started seeing each other for reals in December 2005.

How long did you know each other before you started dating?

A decade. We likely met in 1995.

Who asked whom out?

It wasn’t really like that – we agreed to see each other as friends, and then we just sort of…started being together. I roped him into saying ILY first.

How old are each of you?

We both turn 28 this year. He’s three months older than me.

Whose siblings do you see the most?

I don’t have siblings, so his by default.

Which situation is the hardest on you as a couple?

Last year, it was the fact that he was working 60+ hours a week and nothing was getting done around the house and I HATED being apart from him. This year, I’d say that it’s the stress I feel from being squished between my various feelings about his family, because I find it hard to complain about it without worrying I’ll hurt his feelings.

Did you go to the same school?

Same high school, different colleges.

Are you from the same hometown?

No.

Who is smarter?

I haven’t the foggiest idea. We are both smart, and smart in many similar ways. He tests a bit better than I do, but I write a bit better.

Who is the most sensitive?

He is, I’d say. He won’t watch horror movies because he feels too sorry for the victims. I am moved a bit more easily by beauty and fictional situations, but we both handle confrontation very poorly and have an enormous capacity for compassion.

Where do you eat out most as a couple?

Probably Chipotle, if that counts. Actual restaurant would be Lemongrass.

Where is the furthest you two have traveled together as a couple?

Las Vegas.

Who has the craziest exes?

Oh, jeepers. I make fun of him a lot for a girl he went out with in high school, but I did date that thunderstorm guy and a lot of other weird LARPers. Neither of us really has any crazy exes, but his are far more successful at, you know, getting jobs and staying out of bankruptcy, so I’d say me.

Who has the worst temper?

Me, by far. I have never seen BF go any further than impatience and irritation, and good-natured ranting, where I have been known to scream and yell uncontrollably. (Never since we’ve been together, though.)

Who does the cooking?

I do. BF understands food and how ingredients go together a lot better than I do – I think he’d make a pretty good chef if it was for some reason necessary – but I get home earlier and I have the wherewithal to make shopping lists and gather recipes, so I’m the cook.

Who is the neat-freak?

Neither of us are remotely uptight about neatness. I am a lot harder on myself for things being messy than BF is, but he’s not a slob either.

Who is more stubborn?

Me.

Who hogs the bed?

BF, purely by virtue of his size, takes up more of the bed. Heh. I tend to accidentally pull the covers over to me more often and always feel terribly guilty. Neither of us actually hogs the space in the bed.

Who wakes up earlier?

It really varies. Lately, me; for many months before that, him; on the weekends, sometimes me and sometimes him.

Where was your first date?

His parents’ house.

Who is more jealous?

Neither of us have ever been in a situation to get jealous. We are both laid-back about exes, and while I have friends of the opposite sex and am nervous about him thinking there’s something going on there, he seems not to care at all. (No, you can’t have a clone of him, ladies.)

How long did it take to get serious?

I have no idea how to answer that question. The simplest answer is probably about six weeks. We reconnected over Thanksgiving of 2005, and we were in love with each other probably by January if not a bit earlier. We moved in together in May 2006, but it was partially out of practicality; our relationship grew and strengthened exponentially in the months following. I don’t remember when I was sure I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life.

Who eats more?

In terms of sheer volume, him by a mile. By a square country mile. I probably eat more frequently, and he can probably go without food for a hell of a lot longer and still function.

Who does the laundry?

Me.

Who’s better with the computer?

He, uh, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

Who drives when you are together?

It depends on whose car is behind whose in the driveway, and even then it can depend on where we’re going. Most frequently him, but it’s not uncommon for me to drive.

Hard Candy

Horrifying. 

(This review has spoilers, but in this case I don’t think that’s a bad thing.)

I generally like psychological thrillers, I generally like smart movies, and I generally like role reversal movies, and while this one was intelligently put together, it had one major plot piece that was so horrible I had a hard time enjoying the movie on the whole.

It’s obscure, so I’ll summarize. A 14-year-old meets a guy in his early 30′s for coffee after they’ve chatted on the internet, they go back to his house, and terror ensues. But, well, not the way you might think – it is she who has ensnared him. 

Good: Ellen Page’s performance is pretty great. Patrick Wilson is also extremely good, although after he starts to get a little sweaty he strongly resembles Kevin Costner. That’s not bad, it’s just odd. The script is clever, and while the direction is somewhat pretentious at times, it’s also sincerely integrated into the film’s subject matter. It’s shot almost exactly like television – nearly all close-ups. The framing is interesting, too, often cutting off the forehead and chin for a focus on the features. It’s alienating and yet intimate. The fact that there really are only four people in the cast makes it a nice ensemble piece. 

There is an unforgettably good little piece of the script where Jeff is trying to convince Hayley not to go through with that certain plot piece, when he talks about how hurting others hurts you, and is impossible to forget. It’s a piece of wisdom from the older person in a movie that’s entirely concerned with the problem of age gaps, but only in a technical way, not in terms of the wisdom and experience gap that exists between people of differing ages. 

Right until the very last moment of the film, there was movement in the plot. Even though there was a lot of cat-and-mouse, a lot of escalation in restraints and threats, and that can get a little repetitive even in the best thrillers, the film is never complacent – it never sits on its haunches to let you consider it. 

It also made me ponder masculinity in a way I’ve only flitted over in my mind before – how you contrast it with femininity when it comes to bits of anatomy and, um, their removal, how men define themselves as men, etc. This thinkiness is good, but how I got there does not at all belong in the “Good” section of this review. 

Mediocre: The constant, vitriolic anti-molestation rhetoric that Ellen Page’s character was given got tiresome, to me. (I don’t know if anyone who’s been molested would feel the same way, but that’s how it felt to me.) Also, the few “action” sequences – where things moved more quickly and were not so talky – were over-directed, over-stylized. I thought one of the major revelations of the film would be what happened with Jeff’s first girlfriend, and that revelation never came. I was bummed right out that Jeff seemed to have figured out what he was, and hopefully was going to be on the road to rehab, and then…well, never mind.

Bad: There is a lengthy, tense sequence wherein Hayley castrates Jeff. Although not gory, it was extremely upsetting to watch because of Jeff’s emotional reactions. I stopped and started the scene several times, checking the chapter selection to see if I could find a bookmark to move on to, fast-forwarding it, etc. I nearly turned it off altogether. Although Jeff is written as a pedophile, he’s also sympathetic, and I did not want to see him castrated. It turned out to be a bluff, and the character was not in fact castrated, but I would much rather have known that before seeing the sequence. It was horrible. For this reason I’d never recommend this movie, not even to people who think they’ve seen everything there is to see in cinema (ahem). Lovers of Saw and torture porn like it would probably not have minded, but it ruined the experience for me. 

Overall, though, a wonderful premise, and very high marks for execution.

a sachar joke (hi, BF!)

The only thing on my mind this morning is what I wrote yesterday and the fiction I wrote last night. I am really charged about my idea and how it’s going and have no one to talk to about it. So I don’t have anything to say this morning. Stay tuned for tomorrow, though, because I’ll be posting my eagerly-awaited review of Hard Candy!

There is no post today. There is no 13th story. Sorry.

in which I discover an insidious network of compromises

Something’s just occurred to me that’s going to lead me to one hell of a navel-gazing post.

I happened upon this page in my browsings (I actually have done a good deal of work today, believe it or not), and reading through the comments sparked a memory of something I’d written in a long-ago journal, or perhaps sent in an email to a long-ago friend. I said that I thought my parents, my mom in particular, were so thoroughly unimpressed and dissatisfied with me as a daughter that the only way I could make them proud of me was to get some obscene accomplishment, like win the Nobel Prize.

But, I said, I thought that it was probably easier for me to actually win a Nobel Prize than it was to accept that a) despite appearances, they probably liked me okay, OR, b) their approval doesn’t necessarily matter in the first place. Another option would have been to explain this feeling to one or both and say, look, your expectations of me have felt unreasonably high since I was 12 years old. I obviously haven’t grown out of it. Can you please tell me honestly that you’ll love me even if I decide to be a beautician in Fort Worth?

Of course, I did grow out of it, and I no longer feel that I have to meet some invisible parental standard in order to be happy in my own mind and heart. (How I’ll feel about telling them I want to teach yoga is another matter.) So I don’t think it’s necessary to have that particular talk with either one of them.

But.

I sent an email to Marcus earlier this week explaining some of the circumstances of my life. I told him about the paralegal certificate, and explained that the reason I was getting it was to make MD’s perception of my skills and knowledge accurate. I said that it was easier for me to spend 18 months and $5,000 getting this certificate than it was to explain to MD that it makes me uncomfortable when he calls me a paralegal.

In this case, of course, I did try the explanation route; I tried to tell him that I didn’t like it when he introduced me to people as a paralegal (frankly, I don’t like being introduced to people at all; he usually does it at the beginning or the end of meetings he has with various clients/attorneys/whoever and it makes me feel like a performing bear on a leash,  especially since I usually never speak with these people again), and he just brushed it off. I know that OG mentioned my discomfort and the inaccuracy problem to him as well, and he brushed it off again. Let’s set aside the hurting-my-feelings aspect of this, and the fact that it has made my work life more complicated in certain circumstances, and all that.

Let’s just examine the fact that I have found it desirable to put myself to considerable trouble and expense, and the exercise of fitting my round-peg self into a square hole that does not really fit me, such that I can avoid standing up for how I feel. Exactly as I felt it was easier to do whatever was necessary to gain my parents’ approval rather than finding the strength within to be happy with who I was and what I was already achieving.

I feel that I express myself reasonably well, but I also believe in the limits of other people’s emotional intelligence and listening skills. My mother’s emotional IQ is well below 50, and I know that trying to explain how I felt about the way she treated me during my college application time in high school (s-h-u-d-d-e-r) would just be greeted with defensiveness and simple apologies, rather than a hashing-out. My father listens but doesn’t change, so if I tried to explain that I’ve been so petrified of his disapproval since I was eight years old that I would rather not talk to him at all than tell him something that might be met with indifference, he would apologize profusely and not at all connect the conversation to any further interactions with me.

MD, much as I admire and care for him, is pretty assured of his own perspective, and he will listen and consider the perspective of others with about the same consideration I’d give a teenager who was giving me advice about how to run my life. “You, in the larval stage, might have some rudimentary truth hidden in what you say, but the complexity of life is rather beyond you.” The problem is that he manages to be correct most of the time, which makes larval little me quite resentful. (See why this work situation is such a problem? I swear I really like the guy on the weekends!) In this case, though, he is not looking at the simple fact that I am correct about my own feelings. And I don’t believe there’s any way to explain this in a way that he will believe, or that will change the situation.

Which is why I went ahead and signed up for classes at AACC. Nothing else to do but put  myself to all that trouble. I couldn’t make him listen. I couldn’t impress my parents any other way than with a Nobel. I guess I’d better just start learning physics.

There is something seriously wrong with this line of thinking. I mean, really. There’s got to be some kind of Middle Way – something between being miserable by sacrificing time and effort and being miserable by remaining silent and getting hurt. Speaking up in these two situations, though, wouldn’t have worked. Is there a place where I should stand up and say, firmly, I believe this and I am this and I feel this and I will continue to correct you and your hurtful behavior until you stop treating me this way? I deserve better? Or…are these the kinds of little (or big) compromises that you just have to keep making as you continue to be an adult?

Where else have I done this and not realized it? What kinds of trouble and expense have I put myself to, how far out of the way have I gone, just to avoid being petulant, or difficult, or insistent – all those adjectives in support of my own feelings? There’s some of this attitude in the college I chose; there’s a great deal of it in the way I’ve lived with roommates, housemates, even boyfriends; and I can feel it sitting, coiled, inside my heart when I think about the wedding I will most likely be required to have instead of the one I want. This is important stuff. Not just a matter of how I was spending 15 hours a week during the last 18  months.

Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes once said that a good compromise leaves everybody mad. I’ve both believed this and thought it unbearably cynical since I read it; right now I wonder if there are just two kinds of compromises – the ones where everyone gets a little of what they want, and the ones where everyone walks away angry about their sacrifices. I wonder, now, if I’ve been the only one walking away angry for too long.