Kazuo Ishiguro

It seems Ishiguro's most famous book is Remains of the Day, mostly because Merchant Ivory made a movie out of it—starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. You can't go wrong with those two. And actually, the cast was a lovely list of the finest actors and actresses England has. It was a good enough film that I wanted to read the book, which I did, several years ago. It was a brilliant portrayal of a stuffy English butler. English? I thought this author was Japanese. Well, he is. He seems to have this thing for World War II England, though.

I just finished reading When We Were Orphans. It was a trip. I really do enjoy the whole unreliable narrator thing, especially when said narrator isn't too far off base. I've experienced the Roger Ackroyd effect, as well as The Sound and the Fury, and it's unsettling to be put inside the mind of murderers and the mentally handicapped. I think it just might be more unsettling to be put inside the mind of someone who is sometimes insane and sometimes not; someone who is so haunted by his past that he mixes things up to the point that you really think he's dangerous.

The narrative centers around the investigation Christopher Banks, a young English gentleman, is putting together to find his parents, who mysteriously disappeared when they all lived in Shanghai, when he was nine or ten years old. When it became clear that his parents were not coming back, officials sent Christopher to England, but he grew up believing that if he could become a brilliant enough detective, he could figure out what happened and save his parents from captivity, and at the same time fix the mess China was in at the time (the fight between Chiang Kai-shek and the communists, and the invasion from Japan). At the same time, he mixes up his memories of the events surrounding his parents' disappearance with some confusing things going on with his best friend. His half-hearted love affair with a London friend, Sarah Cummings, and his adoption of an orphan named Jennifer deepen the theme of the lost, confused child who can never manage to pick up the pieces of the past.

The most striking thing about the story is the obvious portrayal of the incompleteness of a child's comprehension. Our perceptions of the world are shaped during childhood, and misconceptions become hard-wired. I find myself remembering very small things that happened when I was little, that have had a deep and lasting impact on my life. It only makes sense that something as big as having one's parents disappear, and subsequently being sent to a boarding school on the other side of the world, could be unsettling enough to send one very near the edge of insanity, where all it takes is a little trip into a war zone to tip the scales.

It wasn't as depressing as I make it sound. There is some resolution, though not the sort to make for a happy ending. And I would never, ever attempt to make it into a movie. Certain scenes would be too gruesome. The book is finely written, and I would recommend it (not for everyone, of course) but I will never read it again.

I Am Legend

For some really strange reason, when they started advertising the movie, I was all about it. I watched all the trailers, I talked to my students about it, and I tried to find friends to go see it with me. No one wanted to.

What's not to like about a zombie apocalypse movie starring Will Smith, a German Shepherd, and lots of badly-designed CG monsters? Not to mention all those weird mannequins.

When I was a child, I happened across the old version of the story, which was called The Last Man on Earth and starred Vincent Price. Of course. It scared my socks off—but not any more than the Will Smith version scared me when I finally did watch the dvd with the siblings, several months after all the hype was gone. I was lying on the floor in the dark, trembling. Gingey can call me a pansy all she likes, but that doesn't change much, I guess.

I think it's because, almost like my annual cravings for hot dogs, sometimes I have an uncharacteristic desire to be frightened, but only in a way of my own choosing. There's a big difference between the tension you feel when Will Smith is driving around singing Bob Marley to his dog and the tension you feel when Vincent Price is wandering around plunging stakes into the undead.

And what brought all this on? The book. I went to a friend's house last weekend and we spent the better part of the day watching episodes of The Twilight Zone. He was convinced that I would love it, and he wasn't far wrong. In one of the stories, a man passed a display rack of the 1950s version of the story—re-titled, apparently, to the Vincent version. Before I judge, I should probably make sure that wasn't the original title, but it appears to me that the original title is actually I Am Legend. After all, it is the last line of the book.

I got ahold of the book last night and decided to read it. For variety. Too many princess books is bad for the intellect, and everything else on my immediate reading list is massively long. That, and I'm sort of on a sci-fi kick right now. We read A Wrinkle in Time for my book club, and I recently watched In Time (an okay movie if you can get past Amanda Seyfried's fringe ... well, actually, I liked it a lot. Not in a "that's such a mind-blowing concept and a great movie!" way, but an "it was mildly interesting and even a little bit sweet, and I guess Justin Timberlake isn't so bad" way).

The book, though, was rather a surprise. It wasn't anything like the Will Smith version, which makes Robert Neville much more noble and ends much more happily. Must be the difference between 1950s and turn-of-the-century media. We tend to like happy endings more these days. Aside from the depressing ending, however, it was a really great book. It's hard to describe the style, but it was somewhat like these more modern writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Norman Maclean. A lot of it reminded me of The Road. The movement by movement detail created a beautiful tension, rather than boredom. It referenced Shakespeare, great Classical music, and other great stuff. I especially liked the parts where he made fun of Dracula (a really dumb book).

I could quote a lot of impressive passages, but I will leave with one of my favorites: "Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?"

A Short List of Awesome Things

1. When Adobe suddenly decides, for no specific reason, that your document needs to be in Cyrillic instead of English

2. Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes

3. The hot cocoa dispenser at work

4. Attending my third meeting of a book club, several members of which actually seem to have read more books than I have

5. We're going to Boston ... and so is Heather!

6. Being outside at night means almost always seeing frogs, rabbits, and deer

7. Admitting to myself that 5 am is not a sustainable start time for the day

8. Never feeling professionally obligated to read another paranormal romance, ever again

9. Blisters turned into calluses

10. My three-minute commute

If I wore bright red lipstick like Peggy Carter, maybe I could date Captain America.

I went to see The Avengers this evening with some friends. Movie ticket prices are outrageous, but I'd still say it was $10 well spent.

Oh, and on a side note, I fell in love with Captain America on Monday night while making a pie. I have got to get me one of those. The 'ceps are nice, but I turned all mushy when Tommy Lee Jones threw the grenade and Steve ran, curled around it, and shouted at everyone to run away. It seems to me I always get a crush on the little guy--because he's always the bravest and the smartest. But then to take him and turn him into a Buffster without losing the brave and the smart. Wow. Do they make 'em like they used to?

I don't usually care for super hero movies. I only saw Captain America because a friend told me I should see it before seeing The Avengers. And I only wanted to see The Avengers because Joss Whedon was in charge. Well, I must confess that the hype had something to do with it as well. I don't conscientiously avoid trendy stuff, but I do make sure it's trendy because it's good and not just because people are lemmings.

Everything about The Avengers was good, except maybe the last line. It was so bad it might have spoiled an otherwise good film, but this film was, fortunately, enough to fight it ... and the extras in the credits helped. Well, there were a few other things that made it less than perfect, such as a few unexplained holes in the plot. But one expects that and doesn't mind when everything else is so well executed.

Just as I had decided that every movie has to sacrifice something major, that it can't be a balance of good in all its elements, I am proven wrong. It actually is possible to have a good cast of characters who work as individuals and as a team, with a good story (and an excellent script, not always the same thing); expensive, showy special effects; and beautiful set design and camerawork.

On that note, I will end, because I don't like spouting spoilers, and I've run out of intelligent things to say. Thus, I will end with a quote.

"You're walking on tiptoes, big man. You need to strut."

Room mates

I like to think I'm equal opportunity when it comes to who I let live with me. I don't discriminate based on species.

So I watched a spider roam around my kitchen during General Conference a little over a week ago, and while I kicked the caterpillar out of the dining room, I left him outside the patio and wished him well. Beetles are left to bumble undeterred. But.

Roaches are not welcome. They are specifically excluded from the equal opportunity policy. Period. It must have thought it could get away with loitering in my lavender and tea-tree oil-scented home, but it thought wrong. The solution to the game: Me, in the bathroom, with the library book. I disposed of the remains rather messily, so I'm sure if someone comes to investigate they will find evidence in the form of roach guts but hopefully not smeared on the walls after I took a disinfectant wipe to them.

I had this awesome room mate one time. She asked me the day after I moved in if I liked to kill bugs. I believe the answer is now a decided no.

My Plant

I have this horrible fear of killing plants. Perhaps it's because I've never managed to keep one alive ... until now.

Almost 2 months, and my basil plant is alive and well. This is a record worthy of public rejoicing (yay!). Look how pretty it is there, sitting next to the artificial tulips.

Maybe now I can get another plant to keep it company. I don't know. I might worry about them getting along while I'm away at work. Basil might be a bit fiesty, or even territorial.

Welcub to Dorth Carolida

It's snowing! Oh, wait. Snow isn't yellow. Um ... (epic sneezing session ensues).

Check it out.



Okay, so the pollen man is a bit of an exaggeration, but not the rest of it. This morning, we woke up to what looked like a fog—but it wasn't moisture, it was pollen. I took a few photos of my car, but they don't capture the craziness anywhere close to the comic strip. Every outdoor surface now has a protective layer of yellow film.

Also, I wish I knew how to safely take good pictures of scenic views while driving—because my route to the temple is a slice of heaven. Trees, meadows, log cabins, a vineyard, family farms, plant nurseries, a gorgeous lake, and a few picturesque ponds. It sure beats 635 during rush hour. The temple itself is rather nice as well.

I love it.

:D

Some days I'm so overjoyed by the privilege of being alive, it's unreal. I took a walk on a nature preserve near my apartment and I shopped for curtains. Nothing special about that, except that I'm alive.

Do you ever think about how you felt in the pre-existence about what your life would be like once you were born? There's the scripture that talks about all the sons of God shouting for joy, and I wonder how that joy compared to the kind of joy you can feel on a good day on earth—especially when it's a day that's good just because it's good and not because anything amazing had to happen.

I Love Food and Food Loves Me

Eat clean. Do it because it tastes so very good. I mean, it's nice to go to the grocery store and be told by the person behind you in line that you eat really healthy. Then it's not so nice to get your bill, because fresh is always more expensive than packaged, even when you don't buy meat because you only eat it on special occasions. But then you get home and have these kinds of meals:

Cauliflower soup
Rutabaga and potatoes sautéed in olive oil and garam masala (I made that one up myself)
Cucumbers in lime juice
Red peppers dipped in edamame hummus
Spaghetti squash with tomato-barley sauce
Green salad with four kinds of lettuce, shredded cabbage, and cilantro
Butternut squash soup, in vegetable stock

And finally, do it because it feels classy to eat a meal of vegetables whilst sitting in a clean apartment decorated with glass vases full of purple flowers.

That's what I do. I don't have a social life, but I sure have a culinary life.

On Moving

Because I know there are so many readers out there who are avidly awaiting an account of my move, I will give one.

I drove 19 hours to my new home, passing through 7 states and stopping 4 times (three times to refuel the vehicle, once to sleep).

The southern states are quite picturesque, so I will give a somewhat detailed account of each one:

1. East Texas. What’s not to love? There’s a great Texas icon on the East side of Dallas. I, however, had seen it all before, so the most exciting part was how quickly I got to Louisiana.

2. Louisiana is much prettier than I expected, based on the view from I-20. Most of it was dead trees (it was January) and fields, with the occasional boggy swamp. Some of the cities didn’t smell too nice, but we won’t hold that against them. I stopped in Shreveport, and the girl at the cash wrap called me honey.

3. Mississippi was more of the same.

4. I was advised that when I got to Alabama I should just keep on driving without a stop, however, I ran out of gas and was really, really hungry. The drivers were friendly, but the people at the filling station weren’t. They ignored me at the sandwich shop, which was just as well, because I’m not crazy about food obtained from filling stations. I’m sure it’s sanitary, but it doesn’t seem like it could be.

5. It took so long to actually get to Georgia that I began to wonder if I had missed the “Welcome to Georgia” sign. I was feeling pretty good, to the point that I almost decided not to stop in Atlanta for the night according to my plan. But I hit a wall as soon as I passed through. The drivers all seemed really rude, and the bright lights of downtown started to blur together. So I did the intelligent thing and found a hotel. I am beginning to wonder if it is common in the South to have a limit on how hot the shower water can get, because in Georgia, as well as here in NC, it’s plenty warm, but not warm enough to turn my skin red the way I like it. Scalding hot showers are the only reason I survive winter anywhere. Anyway, after about 4 hours of sleep, shower, and a free hotel breakfast, I got back on the road bright and early.

6. South Carolina was the prettiest to look at, from the 20 anyway. So many rivers. I never realized it before, but I love being able to drive over a river. People back in the day didn’t have that privilege, so I have decided not to curb my enthusiastic enjoyment of it.

7. Then I got to North Carolina, and everything since then has just been a big blur.


Here are a few fun (or commonplace) facts:

If you tell people in North Carolina that you just moved from Texas, they want you to A) decide on the spot whether you’re for Duke or UNC, or B) display your outrageous Texas pride by procuring a flag or a twangy accent. Sometimes both.

Air mattresses are cold.

Trees are everywhere!

Trader Joe’s is a great place, especially if you don’t have any cookware or utensils. Eating baked potatoes with your hands after cutting them up with scissors is pretty cool once, but not for a whole week. I recommend the butternut squash soup, although the stuff I make myself is much better and doesn’t have sugar in it.

Don’t move Back East without a GPS or a handheld device with a google map. Even with one of said devices, you will probably get lost.

You can’t always trust the Meetinghouse Locator on the Church website. I went to the wrong ward on Sunday. But then I went to the right ward, and we have a Singing Sunday School class and a seriously cool bishop (he invited me to have dinner with his family and the missionaries, and afterwards, we all played their 8-year-old daughter’s Roboticized Uno game).

You can seriously buy a huge bag of collard greens cut up and ready to go, just like spinach back home, but I won’t … partake.

When the photographer took my photo for my work ID badge, it actually came out rather nice. How often does that happen? We'll see how the driver's license photo does ...

By Popular Request (Heather)

The Art of Pie.

Pie should not be difficult to make. I think it's hard for me because I stubbornly refuse to use recipes.

However, I used the apple pie recipe in my Better Homes and Gardens standard cookbook, and I followed it so closely (well, for me, anyway). What happened?

It burned.

Black.

I blame the oven. It was overenthusiastic. It had nothing to do with the fact that I put it in to bake and promptly went back to bed.

The tragedy of the burning of the apple pie was that I didn't exactly follow the crust recipe. I made a crumble for the top, involving hazelnuts ground up in the food processor I tend to forget about. It should have been divine. It would have been divine, had it not burned.

So I did what any self-respecting food artiste would do. I took it to the company dinner anyway, and then guilted my friends into eating it, burnt crust and all.

That was a dry run, the week before actual Thanksgiving day. The real pie was yet to be created.

In my own defense, my trusty BH&G cookbook had no recipes for berry pie. I call that gross neglect in covering the basic food groups, but that is immaterial.

I went online, because that's what we milliennials do when we want to cook. I found dozens of raspberry pie recipes. So I glanced through enough of them to assume I had got the hang of it, then I went to the kitchen and started shelling hazelnuts again. This time it wasn't as time consuming because I had a nut cracker that actually believed in cracking nuts. And because Gingey helped (Yay, Gingey!).

The root of the problem was that I assumed that when you see cornstarch as an ingredient, you can just estimate how much you need, and I didn't put nearly enough. Not only that, but I forgot to follow the recipe I invented for the crumble top, and I put excessive amounts of butter.

I'd like to say we had raspberry pie for Thanksgiving, but it was more like raspberry soup. However, the point is that it tasted good. That, after all, is essential to the art of baking a pie.

Proof that it tasted good? Gingey ate at least four "slices".

Incidentally, I bought some more raspberries yesterday, and I still have an entire bag of hazelnuts left. For anyone who has the patience to come over and help me crack them, there will be pie with your name on it. And it will be a work of art.

On Blogging

It's hard to blog (is it strange to you how many verbs are seeping into polite conversation?) without an Internet connection, so I'm just going to make a list of the topics I would have posted about in the past few months had I shelled out the funds for it.

Mistborn, book review of an obsession-inducing trilogy

The Art of Pie

Turkey Day. Yuck. Haven't we figured out it's about the mashed potatoes?

Anyone Can Draw (?)

I don't agree that All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. But I probably did learn it when I was five.

You did not give birth to that dog, so why do you refer to yourself as its "mommy"? The limitations of the English language

Expound if you will.

The Truth

The truth is that I am not as nice as I assume I am.

We live life based upon a set of assumptions about ourselves, otherwise every moment would be too overwhelming to survive, and not just for those with the emotional range of a teaspoon.

However, sometimes I find myself in situations where I am decidedly not the person I assume, and it is uncomfortable. I say things that are unkind. Or I interrupt people. Or I talk endlessly about myself and don't really listen to people. Or I even encourage them in negative thoughts, conversations, and behaviors. Then I think about it later and realize my actions were contemptible. I realize that I had no business to say or do what I did, and I wonder how I let myself get out of hand, because I'm supposed to be better than that. My self respect is intact because I wake up every day assuming that I am not the sort of person who does those kinds of things.

So today, most of all, I am thinking about the ability to re-evaluate my life and repent. The Lord gave that blessing to me, because I sure need it—and that is what I am most grateful for. Today hasn't been about a gluttonous turkey fest (my fam went out of town, and I stayed behind to be with my sister, who had to work; I cooked a nice meal, without any turkey, and was just happy to be able to do something nice for someone else for a change). It's been about what I can do to change my attitude, my thoughts, my words, and my deeds and actually be the person He wants me to be.

Bad experiences don't mean anything if you don't respond to them with faith, so my leap of faith is starting now, with being thankful for the people I usually talk badly about. There are people who have hurt me deeply; I have allowed their choices and/or personalities to make me angry. But it's not my place to get angry, it's my place to be grateful, for the good and for the bad.

The truth is also that I happen to be one of those people whose life is overwhelmingly full of good things over bad things.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I hope you have as much to be grateful for as I do.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged

This is going to be a long, somewhat pretentious post.

I think people assume I like Jane Austen a lot more than I really do. Occasionally, a friend will assume that I have even gone as far as to read some of the endless (brainless) Jane Austen spinoff books. I must admit to having read one of them, Jane Fairfax. It was awful, and I will never touch another one again, even if it isn’t a bodice-ripper, which most of them are. For the record, Jane Fairfax was a tame, if stupid, retelling of Emma, from the point of view of the titular character. Can you see that working?

The fact is that when it comes to literature written by women, I prefer Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and even Virginia Woolf. My favorite book in the world will probably always be Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and North and South will remain in the top 10. I can’t say I will re-read Virginia Woolf often, but when I read The Waves, I wanted to underline the entire text, it was so beautiful.

However, I do love Jane Austen and will freely admit to having read all of her completed works, including Love and Freindship and The History of England, comic pieces she wrote in her teens—some of them multiple times. (No, I have not forgotten how to spell. She wrote the novella before spellings were standardized, and that has always been its official title.) And if you want a good, solid spoof, her early works are screaming at you. There are few books I could classify as being funnier than L&F and HofE.

Sometimes I come across recommendations for books on Amazon.com, and I can’t seem to leave them alone. Eventually I add them to my wishlist, and at some point they end up in my hands. This was one of them. I resisted for a long time, but temptation got the best of me, and I caved in a big way.

But it was thirty-three chapters of what I love best! I make fun of myself often and roundly for liking to read the introduction to a book just as much as I like to read the book itself—and I can’t seem to get over a mania for Norton Critical Editions of classic works—because of all the fun literary essays in the back. With that explained, what could be better than an entire book of literary essays by intelligent people—most of them great fiction writers themselves—about Jane Austen? My favorites were probably by Lionel Trilling, who I am guessing is a famous Jane Austen scholar. He started one of his essays by recounting the creation of a university class focusing entirely on Jane Austen, and realizing it was so full the only fair way to pare it down was to have each student come to his office for an interview. He was startled and dismayed to find out that not only did all these students come and interview, but they were not at all put out by having to justify their reasons for taking the course—in essence, they had to persuade him of their worthiness to be on the roll in the first place. What followed were bribes, letters of reference by former professors, and desperate pleas … and in the end, those who were excluded were very bitter. What other college class could create such a scenario?

Other essayists included Virginia Woolf (of course), Susannah Clarke (the incomparable author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), C.S. Lewis, Eudora Welty, and E.M. Forster, just to name a few. I must say, too, that these people know how to write a good essay. I didn’t get tired of reading about the same person or the same six books until the very end. And even though I was heartily glad to have gotten through the entire collection, I was a little sad there wasn’t more.

Talk about pontification.

One of the greatest things I take away from this experience is a greater appreciation for a writer who can capture the comedy of everyday life. It is quite fair to state that there is nothing in Jane Austen’s work that is paradigm challenging, or that stands out as making them essential to the canon of great literature. This is even more true if you are coming from the perspective of a male.

But as a woman, Jane Austen is worthwhile for several reasons, the most prominent of which is that her work shows, in a way that is light-hearted and amusing, issues that women have dealt with and continue to deal with no matter what era they live in. What do you do when the people you are hanging out with are giving you a bad reputation? What do you do when the sister you love is destroying her future? What do you do when your family members are idiots? What do you do when you don’t have any money but you still want to be respectable? What do you do when it looks like the only respectable life is earned through securing the hand and heart of a respectable man, but there are so few respectable men to be found? What do you do when you have a sincere desire to see everyone around you happy, but they are constantly stepping on you? What do you do when someone you love and trust disapproves of a decision you made?

Real dilemmas, tackled in a hopeful and fun way.

Jane Austen looks at the small picture, focusing on three or four families in a country village. She lived through the war with Napoleon. She had a family member lose a husband to the guillotine. She wasn’t stupid or unaware of the big picture.

But she wrote about relationships, because for women, everything boils down to relationships. Shakespeare writes about kings and princes, Dickens writes about great philanthropists and adventurers, Dostoyevsky writes about the philosopher. They are great authors, and their works are much more striking as contributions to a societal significance. Jane Austen, well, she helps people feel connected.

Inequality

I have probably been reading too much mass media lately, because I find myself very cynical about the future. But one morning a few days ago, as I was doing some cooking, I was reminded of a story told by one of the speakers in General Conference not long ago. I’m going to paraphrase that story.

Two men shared a field that they both worked to plant, tend, and harvest. One of the men lived alone, while the other one had a large family. One day, perceiving an inequality, the first man decided it wasn’t fair that he should get a half share of the harvest when he had only himself to provide for. So he went out in the night and transferred a large portion of the harvest to the pile of his neighbor and went to bed happy. Meanwhile, the second man perceived an inequality. He decided it wasn’t fair that he should get a half share of the harvest when he had so many sons to help him and his neighbor was all alone. So he went out in the night and transferred a large portion of the harvest to the pile of his neighbor and went to bed happy. In the morning, when the discovery was made what had happened in the night, they talked it over and were touched and amused, and they parted friends.

What strikes me about this is that neither one of them had very much—they were just simple farmers—but both of them were able to see that they had blessings beyond those of their neighbor, and their first thoughts were of sharing. I would assume that the sonless neighbor would have shared food from his own table if there were ever any want in the house of his friend. I would assume that the family man neighbor would have taken in his friend in their waning years so that he wouldn’t suffer old age uncared for.

This story wasn’t about a Utopia, or an idealistic dream of world peace and equality. There wasn’t any protesting or sitting around in parks. It wasn’t someone demanding his rights or shirking his responsibilities. Neither one of them went to the government to demand that their neighbor’s taxes be raised, and neither of them whined that they had less and should therefore be entitled to more of a share. Neither of them sat in opulence and judged the other’s difficulties or asked for a loan to buy something that would make their workload lighter. They didn’t give away anything they didn’t have. They didn’t complain that they didn’t have money to hire someone else to do the heavy work. They didn’t call each other a liar or a hypocrite; they didn’t blame each other for not having more of a harvest.

They worked hard, they thanked God, and they loved their neighbor.

The American people are generous. I think maybe not all, but most, want what is good for their neighbors as well as what is good for themselves. And if that isn’t true, well… we have a hard road ahead of us. But I, for one, would wish to live my life like those two fine farmers, refusing to see myself as less fortunate than my neighbor, and striving to always eradicate what inequalities I can.

Curry

As a former teacher, I feel quite adept at giving grades. I kind of hate doing it, though. Mastery of reading, writing, listening, and speaking is very hard to quantify. But it’s pretty much a law that teachers in public schools have to give grades, so I did it a lot—so much that I sometimes internally grade things in my regular life. The result? A progress report on my new apartment.

Refrigerator: 70
This grade is based on performance, as well as interference in regular daily activities, such as sleeping. Full marks for functionality, but minus 10 for freezing my cottage cheese and minus 20 for making noises that sound like someone breaking and entering through my kitchen window after dark.

Air Conditioning Unit: 80
I started to rate this one lower, but the A/C can’t help the fact that I forget to turn it off sometimes when I leave for work. The minus 20 is actually for rattling the building so violently my closet door clicking up against the sticky paint job in its frame begins to sound like a Harley engine. I generally try not to whine about stuff like this, but when you live by yourself, nights can be a little scary, and any extra noise is unwelcome. Still, an 80 is a B, and I do appreciate having a cool place to live.

And now, on to a list of comparisons for effectiveness at removing the reek of tobacco left behind by the previous resident:

Leaving the windows open: 10
Only effective the moment the window is actually open, thus not so useful when it’s hot outside or when one would like to sleep and feel safe.

Home Fragrance Mist, Kimono Rose: 20
I really like the smell of this stuff, but it fades within half an hour. Plus, it doesn’t smell as good as it did in the store.

Scentsy warmer, Flirtatious, Coconut Lemongrass: 50
I am particularly fond of the Flirtatious smell, too, in spite of the prejudice I feel against it for its ridiculous name. The problem with Scentsy is that the little scented wax bricks don’t last forever, and you can only leave it on for five hours at a time—obviously not when you’re absent. So they’re great when I’m home, but I want something to get rid of the reek that punches me in the face when I walk in the door.

Scentsy warmer, Coconut Lime Verbena: 60
This one gets an extra ten points because it’s very strong. It was much more effective against the smell of eighth graders, though.

Bath and Body Works Scentportable, Pink Sangria, Pink Lemonade: 75
One of these is in my closet, the other is in the living room. They are very nice after they’ve been out for a few days. Eventually I’ll have to replace them. It’s a good thing I got them on sale. I always meant to save them for my car.

Yellow curry, cooked over the stove with garlic, mushrooms, and lentils: 100
What else is there to say? I made dinner earlier this week and thoroughly enjoyed it before putting away the leftovers. I forgot all about it. Then, when I stepped in the door after work for the next two days, all I smelled was curry.

Which of these things does not belong here? There you have it. Even after subtracting points for staining my countertop, thus disqualifying me from reclaiming my cleaning deposit when I move out, curry wins.

☺

Beauty is ...

watching the newest Jane Eyre movie twice in one day. I love this movie so much it's ridiculous. The DVD cover is a disappointment, to be sure, and my sister and I decided a long time ago that sidewhiskers are, without exception, one of those fashions (like bangs from the '80s) that are best forgotten. But I still love it with an immortal passion.

Want v. Need

People usually talk about wants and needs in the context of spending money, but after a discussion with family members yesterday, I'm left with some questions about this dilemma—but referring to doing stuff instead of buying stuff.

They pretty much said all of my problems might be solved (yup) if I could figure out how to turn off my need to be nice.

Apparently most people are nice because they want to be, and I'm nice because I need to be.

Maybe, though, I don't really need to be nice, I just think I do. I'm sure I'm not the only one, which is why I'm blogging about it (although I've said before and will say again that this blog shares entirely too much personal information).

Am I the only one with this problem? Because the truth is that when you're trying to decide how to spend money, or time, or other resources, it's not too hard to distinguish between what you need and what you want. But when it comes to deciding whether you want to do something nice for someone because you want to, or because you need to in order to feel okay with yourself, it gets much trickier. If you try to turn it off, it creates horrible cycles of inward guilt and angst and agony, usually ending in rage.

Then, there is the insulting insinuation that I'm not really nice of my own initiative, but because I have an emotional illness. What can one do to counter that?

I was never a Friends watcher, but I was told about an episode where the Lisa Kudrow character was accused of being selfish because she got so much pleasure out of doing nice things for people, and the point was that there really isn't any way we can do something purely, unconditionally philanthropic because there's always payoff.

I'm afraid I might have meandered a bit too much with this one, but what I really wanted to say was—does it really matter why you do nice things, as long as you're doing them?

Because I'm not that nice to begin with.

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick. You either love him or don't get him, I think. I've been interested in his films since I fell in love with The New World, which is basically a poem written to Pocahontas and early America in the form of a movie.

Now, I'm usually willing to believe that if most people hate it, it isn't good. But Terrence Malick's films are one exception, particularly The Tree of Life. This was no Where the Wild Things Are. I bring that up because it was another highly anticipated film that a lot of people went to see and walked out booing. To each his own, really, but I was a booer on that one. However, I felt the loud booing and complaining about The Tree of Life was completely unwarranted.

Have you seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? It is the closest comparison to The Tree of Life I can come up with. Pretty much a beautiful series of images, with a little bit of dialogue and lots of questions as whispered voiceover, it was graceful and ponderous and stylistically daring. I loved it.

Malick has a way of using actors who are already famous in ways that people aren't used to seeing them—in The New World it was Colin Farrell, Christian Bale, and Christopher Plummer—and mixing them up with unknowns like Q'Orianka Kilcher, whose innocent beauty was enchanting. The Tree of Life claimed to star Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, but the real star was Hunter McCracken, in a performance that leaves almost every child/adolescent actor looking like a piece of candy or a dirty kleenex.

Child actors are an interesting study. For example, Shadowlands is a biopic of C.S. Lewis made several years ago, starring Anthony Hopkins and Deborah Winger. I highly recommend it, but to this day, I'm not sure if Joseph Mazzello was good or if Attenborough just knew how to use a kid in a heck of an effective way. In the case of Hunter McCracken, I'm pretty sure it was both. He had so much screen time it couldn't have been just the stellar directing.

I think that the touch that took it from being just an interesting series of images that were both cleverly and lyrically filmed (can a picture be lyrical? I say yes) to being what Roger Ebert describes as "a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives ... [with] fierce evocation of human feeling" is the music. Alexandre Desplat did the score, but only a few minutes of that actually made the cut. Most of it was timeless pieces by Holst, Smetana, Berlioz, Mahler, and others, with my personal favorite piece, "Lacrimosa" by Zbigniew Preisner. Just listen to it.

Grief really is the universal theme, and what I liked about this film is that it truly was simply a meditation on the grief one feels over losing a family member—how knowing that life has been going on and on for so long and people have been living and dying for centuries doesn't make any person's individual sorrow any less cosmic. But all the same, life is beautiful regardless of all of that.

It might have been a long, slow, meandering film with a few really strange scenes, but I loved that Malick tackled such a subject, and that he did it with sensitivity and taste.

And then ....

I found $20.

My friend just taught me that phrase. Has it ever happened to you? You've been telling a story, and it's just not going where you expected it to, and the people who are listening are obviously tuning out, their eyes glazing over or searching the room for a polite comment they can make that will serve to distract and interrupt you? You get the hint (duh), and instead of branding yourself forever as the teller of boring stories, you wrap it up quick with a completely unrelated punchline—"And then, I found $20."

Try it. It's brilliant.