Thursday, January 29, 2009

Consolation

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Jay is usually not very expressive about feelings of fear or sadness, so I was surprised the other day when he told me he had been thinking about how hard it will be when sometime in the future (hopefully many years from now) we have to say goodbye to Rocky. But, he said, then he thought that he would say to Rocky "Go to Grandma Alice!" and that would be okay.
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James Rosenquist, "Carousel"

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This is the original print that we bought over Christmas. Although I quickly regretted bidding on it because of the price, I have to admit that it gives me pleasure every time I pass it in the hallway. Plus, we get to refer to it as "the Rosenquist." As in, "Where shall we hang the Rosenquist?" Like we have a vast collection of artworks by modern masters.








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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Family Photo Phest

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Ed and Tim's view at the Inauguration:




















Jared in Japan (Japan!) for work:












Tubing Confidential

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Eve, Ryan, Lindsey, and I went snow tubing at Ski Liberty yesterday. We messed up our meet-up, had to wait two hours to get on the hill, almost weren't allowed to tube because of child-age regulations, and I ended up with the following contusion after falling off a lodge bench:












But at least I wasn't rope-towed down the mountain in a toboggin by rescue-skiers like Eve was.

Nonetheless, we had a blast.














Me and my namesake















Ryan in his favorite color







Eve, before her knee injury
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Saturday, January 24, 2009

Top Ten Movies of 2008

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I still need to see a few key movies (Milk, The Visitor), but here is my list of my favorite movies so far:

1. Twilight. An enchanting story, perfectly told. This is one of the best adaptations of a novel that I've ever seen---including just the right elements, in just the right amounts, and told at the perfect pace. And if you think a movie about teenage vampire romance is juvenile, consider that love, war, and death are the timeless themes of art throughout the ages, and this movie combines them all. There's no story more important than how we come to find love in this world, how we emerge from loneliness into intimacy.

2. The Duchess. People sometimes think of costume dramas as being prissy and irrelevant. But most costume dramas take place at a very specific and interesting nexus of history, when individual desires are emerging as legitimate while societal constraints are still very much in force. This is a very poignant story about just that nexus.

3. Vicky Christina Barcelona. It's been years since I've seen a film that reminded me how it felt to be young and traveling abroad, when the very air of a foreign city was filled with romance and possibility. So what if three out of four Woody Allen movies these days are failures? Every fourth one is a masterpiece, and that's a hell of a record.

4. Doubt. This story of accusation within a Catholic school is, again, perfectly told. It was directed by the playwright himself, and it shows, as scene after scene includes shots full of symbolism and suggestion. And it rescued Meryl Streep for me: I really hated her performances in The Hours and Mamma Mia, and this restored my faith.

5. Wall-E. Yowza. An art film masquerading as a summer blockbuster.

6. Priceless. For some reason French dramas are touch and go with me, but I almost always love French comedies. This one with the lovely Audrey Tautou joins the list with The Dinner Game, Les Comperes, and others.

7. Slumdog Millionaire. In a way this movie reminded me of Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto, because I found myself caring about and rooting for the protagonist more than I have about any character for years. It almost aches, how much you want this character to overcome.

8. Burn After Reading. Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button: HATED. Brad Pitt as bouncy, energetic, yet dumb gym dude: LOVED.

9. Tropic Thunder. Just flat-out funny. And Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise had my head spinning.

10. In Bruges. It's got an unpredictably deep friendship, a course on business ethics (don't kill children), and, of course, "f**kin' Bruges."

Bonus: The Dark Knight. It was precisely 50% too long (they should have held the Two-Face plot for the next movie), but it was otherwise great, clever, surprising. And I really hope Heath Ledger wins the Oscar, because there's no other supporting character who did more for a movie this year.

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Jay's Count-to-Six Diet

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Decide on the minimum number of calories you need per day to feel satisfied and stay healthy (for example, 1500). Divide this number by five (300). This is one unit.

You have six units for the day.

Every time you eat, you use one or more units. For example, one unit if your meal or snack is under 300 calories, two units if it is under 600 calories, etc. There are no partial units. In this example, 450 calories counts as two full units.

This spreads out your nutrition over the course of the day and ensures that you stay within the caloric range needed to lose weight. And it's easy, because you don't have to keep track of every calorie!
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Tuesday, January 20, 2009

What a Wonderful World

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I just finished watching the Inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States. I cried five separate times. It's just the most incredible thing, after such a long, long spell of the citizenship version of "cognitive dissonance"---where everything your country is doing is at complete odds with your core values. I felt today what I felt from the first times I heard Obama speak and write: He is saying exactly what I believe. That doing the right thing is also the advantageous thing. That you can pursue peace and justice without surrendering to those who pursue evil. That our freedom depends on every person acting with virtue, in big ways and small. That we can admit the terrible wrongs of our national past without abandoning our pride or dismissing the things we did right. This was a beautiful day, and my heart surges in gratitude for every soul that made it possible.
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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Postcard from Texas

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I'm out here in West Texas, enjoying balmy 30 degree weather versus the 3 degree weather at home. I arrived Thursday, and Sally was released from the hospital that night. She is doing great and is not in much pain. However her boyfriend and sister continue to display "excessive gaiety," causing her to laugh and double over in pain. We're working on being less funny.

Note: Ed and Tim's pastor is scheduled to be on The Daily Show on Monday night. Tune in! He's the pastor at the church the Clintons attended, so I guess this is Inauguration/Obama related.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Traffic Situation on Inauguration Day Just Got Much, Much Worse

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Apparently Deb will be chauffeuring "VVIPs" around town as part of her volunteer work for the Obama team. I'm imagining:

* Deb, in a 40-foot-limo, with a fuming Angela Merkel, trying to parallel park

* Later, stuck in DuPont Circle in a big fat Escalade, unable to exit with an increasingly suspicious Hosni Mubarak

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

What Women Want

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I had read Caitlin Flanagan's article "What Girls Want" (about the movie and book Twilight) online last week. But when someone brought me a hard copy of The Atlantic this week, I saw that it was advertised on the cover with this title:

What Girls Want:
Vampires

Which I think is pretty funny. It also reminds me of a story that my sister Sally tells about her third-grade students. Every year she tells them the story of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, in which Sir Gawain must guess the answer to the question: What do women want? When the story reaches its climax, Sally stops and asks her class: What do you think the answer is? And every year, two things happen. The girls sit and cock their heads, obviously thinking, What DO I want? And the boys all yell out: Boyfriends!

Of course the answer, given as well by The Wife of Bath (as my cube mate Krista reminded me today), is: their own way.
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Monday, January 12, 2009

Some Music

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Some things I've been listening to lately:

REBEKAH LEBEAU
"Find My Way," "Beautiful World"

HOUSE OF HEROES
"If," "In the Valley of the Dying Sun"

CHRIS CORNELL
"Euphoria Morning," "Follow My Way"

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Wednesday, January 7, 2009

I Love You, Caitlin Flanagan

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I love love love this article in The Atlantic on the topic of Twilight and girlhood, titled "What Girls Want":

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/twilight-vampires

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Monday, January 5, 2009

The Assassination of Jesse James . . .

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. . . was all to the good, in my mind. We saw the movie last night--full title: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford--and it was really good. But it was also infuriating because of the dynamics it portrayed. Jay has said that the thing I hate most in the world is bullying, and those who allow it. And this is a classic case: The movie portrayed Jesse James as someone brutal who nonetheless had the charisma to induce loyalty, even by those who he threatened. It is almost like cult leaders like Warren Jeffs or David Koresh, who are ruining the lives of those around them but are able to compel a crazy loyalty. Or battered spouses who find themselves unable to imagine leaving. It just makes me want to kick someone.

This reminds me of a former Miss USA who was on Oprah last year, describing this brutal attack by her husband which almost killed her. He basically beat her up all one night, and when Oprah asked her if he had ever displayed this kind of behavior before, the woman said no. But then she went on to say that he did have outbursts of bad temper, and that, for instance, he would get angry, knock all the pictures off the wall, then make her clean it all up. And I am thinking, Huh? This was acceptable to you? No red flags? What the hell is wrong with people.
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Saturday, January 3, 2009

Sleep

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Dorothy Sayer uses this quote from Thomas Dekker as an epigraph to one chapter in her novel Gaudy Night:

“Do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot beat quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tributary, half our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men's oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings.”
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Friday, January 2, 2009

Doubt . . .

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. . . not that this movie is as good as they say. I had lost faith in Meryl Streep after The Hours and Mamma Mia, but she's back, baby!
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Thursday, January 1, 2009

New Year's Eve

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May all our days in 2009 be as lovely as this one . . .