where’s Mr. Peabody when you need him?

I spent most of yesterday on the futon, or on the couch, resting my leg against a bag of ice. It feels 75% better today than it felt yesterday, much less swollen and painful, but there’s definitely an injury there. I spent a lot of the futon/couch time yesterday feeling angry and sorry for myself due to this. I do have reasons, and normally I’d be writing and writing about them, but yet another source has accused me of an entitled attitude, and I’m pretty tired of hearing it, and am pretty hurt and depressed in general, and it’s Monday morning and I want to take the Way-Back Machine to Saturday night at midnight and start everything over again with some Tylenol PM.

So I don’t think I’m qualified to talk about my emotions today. They’re dull and tiresome and painful. Instead I’ll talk about movies and ordinary things and then sign off.

Frances. This is a 1982 movie with a hella powerful performance by Jessica Lange. The subject is Frances Farmer, but after the first 45 minutes I took a break to read about her on Wikipedia and decided to take most of the movie as fiction. She never had a lobotomy or a lifelong love interest or hated her mother or any of that. Although the lobotomy scene was a horribly painful thing, because I’m sure that exact thing did happen to a number of people. (I read about that, too.) The movie is overbaked and generally a lot of hooey, but still somewhat interesting to watch. Great hair, great costumes.

Cactus Flower. I kid you not: Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau, and Ingrid Bergman, in 1969. Goldie is about fourteen (or so it seems). Ingrid Bergman is still extremely beautiful. (And she has a flair for comedy I did not imagine.) The movie is not extraordinary in any way – I almost turned it off three or four times out of boredom – but it is an extremely flamboyant slice of 1969 America. It would be one of the most useful anthropological documents I’ve ever encountered for future researchers of the 20th century.

Written on the Wind. I’d seen this one before, in film class – it’s a 1950′s melodrama by the master of masters, Douglas Sirk. I made BF watch it with me, because it is unmissably hilarious. To the point where I have no idea who could have taken seriously melodrama and symbolism this silly, at any time, anywhere. I’d go so far as to call this the ultimate melodrama, and say that if you must see one, see this one. (Although I haven’t seen Mildred Pierce yet, so that opinion may change.)

Friday’s restorative class went somewhat better than I’d expected. I had one student, a woman who was a fan of N’s, and I explained that I was teaching full restorative with no active poses, but she stuck around anyway. She appeared to have a wonderful time, and I had a pretty good time teaching, even though there were long, long stretches where I simply sat, having no idea what to do with myself. Overall, successful. I think I’ll be making flyers for that class to draw people in, because with the audience of this studio, I think a class that’s pure restorative will be well-received. And that’s a class I can teach even if my right leg falls entirely off.

Which I almost wish it would do, just to end the ambiguity. I told BF last night that at least one thing is clear: my body was not meant to be that of an athlete. It is just too fragile. For the record, I wasn’t doing anything unsafe at all – it was a move I’d done dozens of times before. This time was just different, I guess. And bad.