Christmas! (Day 25)

Christmas has a weird quality of taking me by surprise by being more or less the same every year. There’s a bit of an illusion to that — if I really went through and listed where we’d been every year, and who was there, there would have been a lot of changes — but for the most part I’ll be at my parents’ home, with most or all of my four siblings plus assorted spouses/significant others, kids, and pets. Also, lots of food, and probably traditional Christmas movies or two. This year, there’s been a lot of that, plus we have a ping-pong table, and I had pictures taken of my niece, who is 3, teaching me bumblebee dances.

Happy Christmas to all! I hear a ping pong game happening, and I should go get involved.

Odds and Ends (Day 24)

I’ll dash this one off quickly since I need to head to my parents’ in a few, and I’m not remotely packed or anything.

Following up yesterday’s thoughts on charity, last night was the first time I ever went out of my way to do a good deed for a plant. I got this poinsettia as a door prize in a Christmas party and I’ve never, through my own efforts, kept a plant alive in my life. I didn’t know if it would fare well over the weekend, so I put it in my car. (I think it’s going to end up as part of my mother’s Christmas gift; my mother loves plants as much as I forget they exist and let them die). Once I had it in my car, though, I remembered that I was planning to go straight to the comic book store, then to dinner, then to the movies, meaning the plant would be sitting out in the car in 20 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple hours. I’m not a horticulturist, but I think this is probably not good for them. So I went out of my way to go home and set the plant on the dining room table, and then went on to the shop — which probably took about 20 minutes and cut my chance to read a couple comics BEFORE the movie started, but in the long run, who cares? It was just interesting that I’d never in my life thought about having a moral obligation to vegetable life, and that probably comes from thinking too much about the true meaning of Christmas over your lunch break. I feel a little absurd about it, but I’m also using this to remind myself that I’d better spend the weekend being equally charitable to the people in my life. I mean, they’re family, and I love them, but also they’re family with everything that means.

The movie was Up in the Air, by the way, and I liked it quite a bit. I’m sure it’s partly because I’ve been talking about Say Anything so much, but it occurred to me there’s a quality to Jason Reitman’s movies (he also made Juno) that reminds me of Cameron Crowe’s early movies. There’s a sense of the pacing of everyday life, and a kind of generosity and affection toward characters who you wouldn’t exactly expect to deserve that generosity, and yet it never teeters into sentimentality. Just flat-out good storytelling. I thought the ending was a little abrupt — the final act could use another beat — but overall, the movie is sharp and sad and funny, and very very human. George Clooney doesn’t hurt, of course.

Now, I really am about to take off for the weekend. I’ll take my laptop with me, but it’s not that good for carrying around the house, so I probably won’t be on much. Also, should probably spend the time talking with my family (or at least playing ping-pong and watching It’s a Wonderful Life!

Happy Holidays to all!

Charity Begins in the Parking Lot (Day 23)

There is really nothing like going to Target on lunch break two days before Christmas to make me ponder the meaning of charity. Not the “give an extra dollar to fight heart disease” charity that you associate with shopping, or the guilt-trippy “So This Is Christmas” Save the Children ads you associate with impending holidays. I should be clear that I absolutely believe in that kind of charity — though I don’t always take part as much as I mean to — but here I’m going for the more basic St. Paul in First Corinthians, “Charity suffereth long and is kind” variety. (Modern translations tend to render this as “Love is patient, love is kind,” which is a perfectly reasonable translation, but for a complicated set of reasons including the profound amount of Shakespeare-damage I’ve acquired over the years, I tend to default to King James English. Anyway.)

My interpretation of what St. Paul means here, applied to the situation at hand, is something like, “Give thy fellow humans a break,” or, “Thou shalt not be like unto an asshole.” This is exactly the thing that the Christmas season is supposed to put us in mind of, while in fact, it tends to the opposite, by giving us mandates like, “Drive over roads that stilll have snow on them through the busiest traffic in town, to the busiest store in town, acquire the things for your loved ones that they most desire, and get back to the office in less than an hour. And while you’re out, get something to eat, so you don’t spend the whole afternoon stuffing your face with the cookies in the break room.”

This was my battle plan for the lunch hour and it went — well, not that badly, really. I got to the store without incident, in spite of the woman behind me who was both talking on her cell phone and gesticulating the whole time — how did she steer the car without touching the wheel? a Christmas miracle! — found enough of the things I needed that I decided I don’t have to go back to Target again until January, and decided I even had time to buy a personal pan pizza on the way out. (I also decided to convince myself this was in anyway a more health-conscious choice than the breakroom-cookies-all-afternoon strategy). So I found myself in line behind a man with several shopping bags, and three children between the ages of maybe five and nine.

Here’s what he was doing: ordering pizza and drinks for his kids. Here’s what his kids were doing: behaving perfectly nicely. Here’s what I was doing: (on the outside) behaving perfectly nicely (on the inside) oh my God, oh my God, he is taking so damn long when I am standing here and doesn’t he know I have to go back to work if that cashier doesn’t count that change out soon I will send a sarcastic Twitter about it oh my God I bet this never happens to Wolverine I deserve a medal for NOT screaming at these people.

Here’s how long the whole thing took: about five minutes. Here’s what I did next: went out into the parking lot, and spent significantly longer than that trying to remember where I parked my car. In the continuum of moral victories, then, my experiences can be weighed this way. Positive: didn’t scream at the kid-pizza guy, am not still huddled in a fetal position in the parking lot as an admission of defeat. Negative: spent a significant amount of my Christmas shopping experience wishing ill on another human being because he was not yelling at his kids to hurry up already. In the end, it’s a net win for the Christmas spirit (when I see my brother tonight, I’ll be able to give him his Christmas present, early), but Jesus and I know: I have been an asshole, today, in my heart.

I don’t identify myself as a Christian — I don’t have a great understanding of Christian theology (I learned my Bible via Mormonism, which is in some ways just any Bible-based faith and in some really not, and in any case, I haven’t considered myself part of that since I was a teenager), and what I know I have some problems with. But there are some basic moral principles in the New Testament that still mean a lot to me: it matters what your actions do to other people, and it also matters what your thoughts do to yourself. It’s not even that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is insufficient; it’s that as far as our spiritual growth goes, it’s not even the right thing.

And that all has to do with why I spent my afternoon in the Target parking lot, thinking of Reinhold Neibuhr’s serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Next time I’ll have to spend a little less of my mental energy raging about traffic and snow and the nerve of other people to be standing in front of me, and a little bit more remembering where I parked the car. If I’d taken the right kind of care over the things I could control (like, not expecting time and space and Broad Street to change course so I could get some shopping done), I wouldn’t have needed to blame other people for making me late.

I don’t mean to say any of these ideas are unique to Christianity, of course. It’s just that this particular filter helped me make sense of what I was feeling this afternoon. Getting lost in the parking lot, though, that was clearly karma catching up with me.

Amazon Kindle (Day 22)

Today’s post was going to be about how I finished watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles and how, OMG, I can’t believe the series ends there, and I love it and I hate it, and. . .well, I’ll wait on that. I promise a Terminator-universe loving, FOX network haging post, soon.

But I’ll put that aside for the moment to talk very briefly about my experience with the Amazon Kindle e-reader. I’ve seen a few references that the order-for-Christmas window is closing, and gotten some questions about how I like the Kindle I bought a few weeks ago. So I’ll answer briefly in a post.

Basically, I love it. I have to thank Kelly Stephenson at the great multi-dimensional website Murmur for talking it up on a podcast and inspiring me to take the plunge. (Digresses for a second to plug the Murmur podcasts; I’m usually wary of listening to ‘casts that cover multiple subjects because I anticipate having to fastforward a lot through things I don’t really care about. But Murmur’s rotating cast of hosts does such a great job of keeping things lively and interesting, that they trick me into learning about things I didn’t think I cared about, like Blu-Ray players and baking).

Back to the matter at hand: I love the Kindle, and it’s great for what I want to use it for. That’s the caveat with any gadget, I think — what do you think you’ll do with it? I got the small-size model. I’ve seen and used a large one, and it gives you a bigger screen which would certainly be better for visuals and for textbooks. But it costs a lot more, and is less portable. Cost and portability were my priorities. (ETA: I should emphasize the thing isn’t cheap. There is no good reason I should pay $250 so I don’t have to carry books around, especially for a device and format that might not stand the test of time. This is a toy, and I’m not going to pretend it’s a necessity. Toys are nice sometimes, though).

I like to read, I also tend to have a short attention span and flip between a lot of things at once. This can be a pain when I’m traveling, or when I just can’t figure what I did with the book that was consuming all of my attention three days ago. For this purpose, having many books at the same time at my finger tips, Kindle is perfect for this. The first things I bought were a subscription to the New Yorker and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare ($2.00 to have it with table of contents, which is probably a good bet with that many pages; as a sidenote, this also featured the best Amazon user review I’ve ever read: “This is pretty good, if you like Shakespeare.”)

I’ve also read a couple (shortish) books already, and I’m pretty sure that Kindle has a positive effect on my reading speed. I haven’t read any science on this, but basically, I’m looking at a fairly small number of words on a small screen. From what I remember from speedreading classes, one of the techniques they teach is to cover part of the page and look at as small a group of words at a time as you can. This is basically what the Kindle does — not that I bought my Kindle specifically with reading speed in mind, but it’s an interesting side effect. At least for me, this is basically the opposite of reading on a computer, where the screen is SO big that I have to make a conscious effort to read every word or it’s Skim City.

I have a hypothesis — I really shouldn’t use ‘theory’ for my uninformed guesses; I shouldn’t even really use ‘hypothesis’ because it’s not like I’m going to test it; what’s a word for an idea you like to run your mouth about because it seems clever but you don’t plan to make any effort to figure out whether it’s true? I have one of those — that one of the reasons that debate on the Internet can be so obnoxious is that it takes effort to make yourself read every word on a computer screen. So when people seem to be responding to things they didn’t actually read closely, or at all, so that there that may in fact be what is happening. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that any of my readers have done this though I know that I have but it’s a reasonable way of explaining the world.

Anyway. Reading on a Kindle might be a lot more like reading on a page, and thus a lot more like actual reading, than what we do with our computers. I like what I do with my computer, obviously, but I’m not sure it’s exactly the same thing as reading. So I actually see the Kindle’s small screen size as an advantage. Add to that, it’s not backlit like a computer screen, and while that takes some getting used to, it’s easier on the eyes in the long run. (You can also adjust text size; I read with the largest font/fewest words on screen that I can get — this means that I flip a lot, but I actually like that pretty well, and most books have chapter divisions indicated at the bottom of the page to show you how far there is to go).

When talking about the reasons I like a Kindle, I should emphasize this is my first e-reader and my first real experience with ebooks. So if you’ve already got a collection and are worried about transferring files, I don’t have helpful advice. There is supposed to be a function to mail PDF files to yourself and open them, but I haven’t tried to use it yet. What it is good for is buying things directly off Amazon — via a wireless connection — quickly and efficiently. This means you’re more or less stuck with what Amazon has to offer, so flip through the Kindle store on the site and see how it suits you. They certainly don’t have everything I want to read, but there’s a fair amount, and for me the question is, “Can I get enough reading material on here to keep me busy at any given time?” So far that’s working out. In fact, I already have a stack.

You guys, I am sorry, this is the worst product review ever. But it is a pretty good post about my neuroses, and also how much I like my Kindle. And that’s what a blog is for, right?

Monday Night (Day 21)

Monday nights are usually my pub quiz night, but this is the second in a row that I’ve missed. Last week was my choice because I was tired, but tonight I’m staying in because I don’t have much confidence in the roads being sufficiently clear when I come back late. I get that they can’t plow everywhere at the same time, but the two non-major roads that lead into my subdivision were plowed pretty half-assedly.

I repeat, this is the South, we’re not supposed to have to do this. (Go ahead and make a joke how it’s a tradeoff for having to live with a bunch of rednecks, or whatever; I’m too tired to think of one).

I’ve completed the writing project I was working on over the weekend, and the next major thing I have to do is Christmas shopping, assuming that there’s a parking lot at a Target somewhere that’s sufficiently free of ice. Gonna watch some Sarah Connor Chronicles, or else go to sleep — depending, I guess, on whether I fall asleep.

Running out of Euphemisms for Snow (Day 20)

If I had a working camera, today’s post would be a picture of my neighborhood, in the sunshine, under two feet of snow. As it is, I could try to paint a word picture, or whatever, but the truth is, you guys KNOW what a cul-de-sac covered in snow looks like. If you’ve never experienced it, you’ve seen it in a movie or something.

You would think from my blogs this month that it snows a lot where I live. It usually doesn’t, though, which is my excuse for not being really prepared for it. I have a shovel SOMEWHERE (a small one for digging cars out, not a big one for shoveling sidewalks), which I bought the last time there was a major snow — January 2003, I think? — when my sister, who went to college in upstate New York, made fun of me for not having one. At some point, I have to go knock white stuff off the car, but I keep thinking the sun will melt it and make it a little easier.

I do not go out in this stuff voluntarily, you guys. My car already hates me, I don’t want this relationship getting worse.

Meanwhile, I luckily have enough food provisions that I’m not going to be knowing on coffee beans by the end of the day, and I bet by this evening, I can even get a pizza delivered. I have projects I can work on (and need to work on) without leaving my house, and I have friends with whom I can exchange emails about Grant Morrison’s cat* (which is arguably distracting me from *projects*, but simultaneously reminds me that I have awesome friends, and they are the thing that makes projects worthwhile; I’m pretty sure there is a quotation on the theme from Dead Poets Society.

On that note, I want to mention my Three Stories post again, and thank you all for the great response. I’m learning a lot about what cool people I have reading this blog (and adding to my own reading list as well). If you haven’t seen that post yet, I encourage you to go there, and read the comments, because everybody’s contributions have been so unique and wonderful

Now! I must proceed with my projects. And eventually go out in the snow. Uggh.

*Grant Morrison writes comic books, occasionally, from my understanding, ones about how much he loves cats. I would like to pretend there is some deeper meaning to this reference, but really, not.

Dollhouse FollowUp (Day 19)

Two more episodes of Dollhouse aired last night, and since my city is covered with snow, I was actually home last night to watch them. This series still has some Big, Sexy Hospital elements to it (part of last night’s second episode, “The Attic,” involves Eliza Dushku’s Echo on a teamup with a character she really has no reason to trust or work with, but the synergy between the two actors still had me giggling with glee). But the more Dollhouse really digs into series mythology, the more I think, “Wow, this is a really cool sci-fi concept which somehow got dressed up as a borderline softcore riff on women-in-danger cliches.” That’s really too bad, because now that the series is almost over (the final three episodes will air in January), we’re finally seeing some extremely interesting reveals.

It’s the blessing-and-a-curse feeling I got from the fifth (final) season of Angel, which I found to be kind of a painful slog until exactly the point when cancellation was announced. The episodes after that are some of my favorite genre-TV ever, so part of me was extra sad over the cancellation, and another part was going, “Why didn’t you show us the good stuff when there was still a chance at renewal?” (Quality doesn’t guarantee renewal, of course, but at least when a good show gets canned for lack of viewers, the ‘enlightened’ among us can rail against the public’s bad taste; I can’t exactly blame anybody who gave up on Dollhouse. And I’m mostly kidding about being ‘enlightened’; unless we’re talking Freaks and Geeks, because how do we live in a world that didn’t love that show? /digression)

I don’t want to spoil last night’s episodes. (And note to Dollhouse viewers who haven’t seen them yet: even if you usually read spoilers, I think last night’s reveals are good enough to warrant watching the episodes fresh). But there was a moment in the first episode, “Stop-Loss”, that made me think about what’s been going on in the series up to this point. Some basic info in case you’re not familiar with Dollhouse: many of the main characters are “dolls,” ordinary people who are recruited (through varying degrees of coercion) to allow their minds to be wiped and reprogrammed with the brain patterns of other people, in order to do whatever the Dollhouse’s clients want them to do — sometimes sex, sometimes special security or fighting skills; whatever the week’s plot requires. This is kind of a cool idea at its core, but one of the things that made it hard for me (and I’m sure for others) to get into in the show is that the dolls themselves didn’t seemed to have any personality. They just wandered around the house, smiling and looking brainwashed. Any attachments we could develop were to the actors — primarily Enver Gjokaj’s Victor, Dichen Lachman’s Sierra, and Eliza Dushku’s Echo. The first two, basically unknown before this series, have turned out to be fantastically versatile and talented performers, and I’m wishing them best luck in post-Dollhouse projects.

Dushku is a little tougher to talk about. I, like a lot of Whedon fans, have enormous amounts of goodwill to her because of her performance as Faith on Buffy and Angel. Unfortunately, what it takes to be a successful regular character on most TV shows — the ability to do more or less the same thing week in and week out, in an appealing way — is a lot different than what Dollhouse asked of Dushku-as-Echo. (The contrast is especially visible with a character like Faith, who was always recurring rather than regular — so she really didn’t have any bad or filler storylines; she showed up when there was something for her to do, then went away when the story was finished.) So, as much as I loved Faith, I’ve never been able to get a sense of Echo.

Gradually, we’ve developed some sense of who the dolls were before they came to the Dollhouse: Echo was an activist named Caroline, Sierra was an artist named Priya, and Victor was a soldier named Tony. In “Stop-Loss,” for plot reasons, Echo-as-Echo ends up in a conversation with Priya-as-Priya (not her doll self). Echo mentions Sierra (the doll persona that belongs to her body) and Priya wants to know who Sierra is. Echo, who has gradually been shown to develop a somewhat integrated sense of self, in the way other dolls haven’t and thus should have the best idea of what it means to be a doll, says, that Sierra is “Priya, without the complications.”

This, to me, is a totally fascinating idea. That the dolls themselves are not actually blank slates, but the simple baseline form of their personalities, without the memories and attendant traumas and neuroses. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is what we’ve seen on the show. The dolls, acting on their own, have come across as blank. Not even childlike, or infantile; anybody who’s been around small children knows they’re anything but blank. But even if the dolls had been portrayed as children, I don’t think that’s the same as what Echo’s statement implies. I’m not a psychologist, but I think it’s fair to say that children process experiences differently than adults do. “Priya, without the complications” doesn’t so much imply Priya as a child, as it does Priya as an amnesiac. I’m thinking of the Buffy episode Tabula Rasa, where the gang all wakes up with no memories, as a result of a spell gone wrong, and have to try and figure out who they are based on clues. It’s a favorite episode of mine (most of my favorite Buffy eps are ones that break format in some way) because we get to see the characters unconsciously fall into the groupings and behavior patterns that are natural to them, which sometimes are the same ones that their conscious selves have adopted — and sometimes really really aren’t. The Willow and Tara who fall in love in Tabula Rasa really are Willow and Tara without complications (in the real world, with their memories intact, they’re in the process of a bitter and emotional breakup).

I definitely wish that the “without complications” formula was closer to what we’d seen of the Dollhouse from the beginning. Have the dolls be real, distinct people who just happen to be brainwashed not to want to defy authority, or to escape, or whatever. Honestly, based on that paradigm, I think it’s easier to understand why anyone would want to be a doll in the first place. Nobody wants to imagine themselves drifting around like a zombie. But spending a few years surrounded by pretty people, having all your baseline needs met, and coming out with all the things that currently scare you in the world having a chance to run their course without you having to worry about them has a certain appeal. I mean, those motives aren’t entirely different from the reasons most of us go to grad school. I can see signing Adelle DeWitt’s contract and thinking, “Well maybe in five years the job market will be better.”

Since I mentioned Adelle DeWitt, a final note. I’ve discovered a lot of people don’t even realize Olivia Williams appeared in X3 as scientist Moira McTaggart. It’s just a short cameo, but let’s add her to the list of actor/characters who could come back a new X-Men movie and make me want to see it. Olivia Williams, Anna Paquin, and Ellen Page as your core cast? Hellz yeah. I’m pretty sure Fox is too afraid of girls to do this, though.

My Three Stories – Come Tell Me Yours (Day 18)

When I started musing last night about the ways favorite a favorite movie unconsciously sneaks into my life, this was quickly followed by another thought: well, if all the stories in the world were Say Anything. . ., X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga, or King Lear, I wouldn’t complain too much. That was a spur of the moment set of associations, but as I tried to improve on the idea — to come up with a more appropriate set of stories — I really couldn’t.

It’s not so much that I’m saying those texts (a movie from the late ’80s, a comic book from the early ’80s, and a play from the seventeenth century) are my favorite stories. They’re not even my favorite movie (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, most days), favorite X-Men comic book (Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men), or favorite Shakespeare play (probably As You Like It). And I haven’t even gotten started on novels (Pride and Prejudice, The Hobbit, Mysteries of Pittsburgh). But as much as I love those texts, they don’t quite go to the heart of the matter.

What I mean when I talk about my three stories is that I feel about them the way I feel about the song “Badlands” by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. I don’t know if I can say that’s my favorite song, and I certainly wouldn’t try to argue it’s the best song I’ve ever heard, even by my own idiosyncratic standards of music (that would be Frank Sinatra singing “I Wish I Were In Love Again”, maybe? or Paul Simon singing “Graceland”?) But there’s not a single thing I can think of that I want a song to do that isn’t in “Badlands”. Affirmation of life in the face of hardship (“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive”), a chorus you can shout along to, Max Weinberg-the-human-metronome on drums. If I had to take someone who had no idea what a song was, I could play this for them and say, “This is what I mean when I say ‘music,’” I’d have to go with “Badlands.”

In the same vein, I can look at the stories that are what I mean when I say “story.” Say Anything. . ., as I hinted yesterday, is about two people finding each other in a world that discourages meaningful connections, and breaking away from the expectations of the past to build a future together. Dark Phoenix is about facing the power of a hostile universe with the power of love (it’s also about how that doesn’t actually work, but makes us feel like it goddamn well should). And King Lear is about. . .I don’t know, the way small acts of personal rejection and cruelty can escalate into cosmic cruelty and shocking violence? I’ve been a bit obsessed with that one for years and I’m still trying to crack it.

Of course, these stories have this meaning to me. I don’t (and shouldn’t) expect anybody else to get the exact same thing out of them. But for me, these — and all the stories I’ve read — are always there in my head (“this is what I mean by ’story’”) to bounce against every new text I experience.

I guess everyone has a few of these. I’m curious, then: What are your three stories? Or one or two, whatever — those things that are constantly coming up, as a palimpsest, maybe, or some kind of reflecting surface that new stories always seem to intermingle with? I’m thinking of some kind of equivalent to those archetypes (hero’s journey, etc.) that we’re always hearing about in storytelling classes, but on a more individual level.

I want to know what your stories are! (Or if you don’t do this and you think I’m nuts, tell me that to. I just ask that you don’t use the comments to say why you don’t like my stories, or anyone else’s. Because there are no wrong answers here!)

[ETA: I know this is a complicated question for a spur-of-the-moment, comment-sized answer, so I encourage anybody who wants to steal the meme for their own purposes (or blogs, or whatever). I really would like to know other people's thoughts on this!]

Say What? Unconscious Plagiarism Plus X-Men Links (Day 17)

A series of not entirely unconnected thoughts:

1. I had a motivational, communication-improvement seminar training thing at work today, which is actually not bad; I only lament that this is the probably only place I’ve ever worked for any amount of time where I don’t feel like such training is desperately necessary. I keep hearing things and I think, “I wish this kind of communication had been facilitated among co-workers at the nightmarish workplace I went to straight out of law school; those couple years would have been a lot more bearable. But I’m pretty sure a prerequisite for instituting this kind of program is having management with the insight to realize that such a thing is helpful, and when you have that, it’s not so desperately needed.

Still, I don’t mean to complain about working in a functional workplace that lets me take two hours every once in a while to sit around a room with pleasant people and talk about our goals. It’s just that, at one point in the session, as we were going around the room talking about, “Who Do You Want to Be?”, I listened to some really sweet and candid statements from my co-workers, and I started — as you do — to make up a story in my head. In this story, there’s a character in a similar situation, listening to a co-worker they don’t know well talk (I use ‘they’ because I hadn’t worked out the genders), and the person talking gets a little more personal/vulnerable/revealing than you’d expect in that situation (this didn’t HAPPEN in my session, but fiction lives in life’s little what-ifs). The listener is inspired by the speaker, consequences ensue, there is a love story, etc. I jotted something to this effect down in my notebook — I haven’t started any new projects lately, but you never know. Then, as I was driving home, it hit me: that’s totally the plot of the movie Say Anything. . .

I mean, it’s not exactly the plot. But storywise, the fundamentals are there. At the beginning of the movie, Diane, the sweet and seemingly perfect valedictorian of her high school class gives a speech — a thoughtful, literate speech (even if the jokes fall flat), in which she foregoes the usual platitudes about hope and achievement and simply says that, when she looks at the future, “I am really scared.” From this point, our hero, sweet and directionless slacker Lloyd Dobler is inspired to ask her out. Consequences ensue, there’s a love story, et cetera.

It’s not, actually, surprising that I had Say Anything. . . in the back of my mind during a motivational seminar. Really, it would be fair to say the movie was in the front of my mind, since a couple other phrases scrawled in my notebook over the course of the afternoon were, “How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood?” and (during the discussion about life goals), “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career.” (Yes, both Lloyd quotes from the movie). In the commentary on the 15th anniversary DVD release, writer/director Cameron Crowe says that Lloyd and Diane’s story is really about “optimism as a revolutionary act.” We see how much life can suck, and we try to do something about it anyway. It occurs to me that a slightly more erudite paraphrase of that mission would be, “The audacity of hope.” I’m not saying that President Obama was thinking about Lloyd Dobler when he wrote his campaign biography. On the other hand, he seems like the kind of guy to watch DVD’s with the commentaries on, and I know from experience how deep Lloyd can dig into your brain. And it’s a more interesting motto than, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I’m just saying.

One last thought on my love for Say Anything. . ., and why I adore when so many films of the ‘romantic comedy’ genre it gets grouped with leave me cold. The most famous image of the movie is undoubtedly Lloyd (John Cusack) standing in Diane’s driveway with a boom box over his head. Even in the context of the movie, it’s a weird gesture, borderline stalker-ish (especially if you take into account that he’s standing in her driveway because she won’t take his phone calls, and the song he’s playing, Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”, was playing in the car the first time Lloyd and Diane had sex), and to me, Lloyd only gets a way with it because (a) he’s a teenager and (b) he has a LOT of good guy cred to burn from earlier in the movie. But what’s most striking about this scene is that it doesn’t resolve the problem in the relationship. It doesn’t resolve anything, because Diane’s problems aren’t about Lloyd, but about problems going on in her family. (I don’t want to spoil everything for people who might not have seen it; because you should, because it’s the most amazing movie, and I’m not biased about that in anyway). The romantic plot only gets resolved some time later when Diane takes action, after having made the choices necessary to deal with her own problems.

And I’ll tell you, I remember when I hated this about the movie. I didn’t see it when it came out in 1989. I’m kind of sorry about that, because I think it’s a story I could have used when I was fourteen. But I didn’t catch it until it ran on TV, some time in my first couple years of college. I didn’t really care about Diane, then, or her family drama; I was in the movie for Lloyd, and his wacky friends like Lili Taylor’s grunge-singing Corey. When I first saw Say Anything. . ., and Lloyd showed up with that boom box, I desperately wanted Diane to take him back. Because it was so clear that the two of them made each other happy, and I wanted them to stop being apart. Re-watching the movie over the years, though, I’m very grateful that Crowe let everything develop the way it did. Ridiculous, overwrought teenage gestures can be awesome, and even important — Lloyd wanted Diane to know he wasn’t giving up on her, that he’d be there when she was ready. But, while so many contemporary rom-coms seem to feature characters who want to be teenagers forever, I appreciate that this movie about teenagers lets them grow into their adult choices.

I don’t know if any of this means that I’ll try to write that story, or that I won’t. By the time I’m done with it, it might take place on a space station.

(Now much shorter thoughts on a couple items I saw today):

2. Bryan Singer is directing a new X-Men movie. I think I’m supposed to be excited about that, because the X-Men films were my entry point into the crazy rabbit hole of comic book fandom. And, you know, I like those movies pretty well, but I’m not convinced they’re actually all that good. Granted, a lot of the not-so-good involved the hashed-together scripts, and this one is supposedly going to be made from a screenplay by Josh Schwartz. Schwartz works on some TV shows I’ve never watched, so that in itself doesn’t excite me much. But having a prestige writer attached to the project suggests that maybe the studio will pay some attention to the script, or at least that there will be a script.

Still, I’m not sure I have enthusiasm for another X-movie in me. Reports don’t make it clear if it’s a prequel or a sequel. X-Men: Origins: Wolverine convinced me once and for all that prequels are almost always a bad idea, and any potential sequel would run into the problem that most of the characters in the movies I cared about are either dead, or Wolverine, who already has his own solo project. At this point, the only way I can imagine getting enthused is if they made a sequel and centered it around Anna Paquin as Rogue and Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde. I guess it could happen, because they’re a couple of appealing actresses with built-in fanbases. But I’m thinking the audiences of True Blood and Juno aren’t especially what Fox has in mind for selling a superhero movie. I’d say “their loss,” but it’s not like I know how to make a movie that makes money.

3. Leaving behind movies that don’t sound like they’ll be up my alley, I can make the happy transition to a comic book that seems aimed at a core audience of me. X-FACTOR FOREVER is one of those nutty vanity projects where a writer takes up where a previous comics ran left off, years ago, and I wouldn’t care except that this is Louise Simonson picking up X-Factor after issue 64. Let me tell you, Internetz: if I were magically given the opportunity (and you know, the qualifications) to start writing any comic book series at any point in history, I would probably say, “X-Factor, picking up after issue 64!” As Simonson tells it:

Scott has asked Jean to marry him, but Jean has refused since she’s having trouble integrating the confusing and terrible memories left her by the out-of-control Phoenix entity – a being that once impersonated her and became a destroyer of planets – and the Goblin Queen, who tried to sacrifice her own son. Though Jean is no longer telepathic, she’s beginning to have low-level telepathic flashes. Because this seems linked to the Phoenix persona, she’s not quite sure how to react.

You guys, that is everything I want to read about in a comic book. EVERYTHING! I do not pretend to have any expectations about the quality such a book is likely to have. I don’t really pretend to have any illusions about the quality of the original X-Factor, for that matter. I just love the overwrought psychic soap opera of it (as discussed in this comic book guilty pleasures post at Fantastic Fangirls) and it tickles me that somebody decided there were still people out there who would care enough to read it. Even if it turns out I’m the only one.

4. Anybody who slogged through the above and desperately needs synthesis between my pressing need to discuss comic books and my pressing need to discuss Cameron Crowe movies (N.B.: This is not even my first post in two weeks of blogging that I began by discussing a Cameron Crowe movie). Once I was having one of those conversations with friends about, “What if Say Anything. . . was about the X-Men, and Lloyd was Scott, and Diane was Jean. . .or maybe Lloyd was Jean and Diane was Scott. . .in which case Wolverine would have to be Corey, and her ex-boyfriend Joe was one of the government agencies that screwed Wolverine over and made him do terrible things against his will?” All of which allows me to leave you with the image of Wolverine as a teenage grunge singer, belting out angry songs about Nick Fury.

You’re welcome.

Not too chatty today (Day 16)

I started this blog knowing I wasn’t always going to feel like writing. Today’s one of those days. Though it may not be so much that I don’t have things to say as that I don’t quite have the energy to put them into paragraphs.

It happens.

I’ll just mention that the Golden Globe nominees are out, and there are a lot of movies I’d like to see, but none of the ones I want to see seem to be playing in Richmond right now. Out of the few things from this list I have managed to see, I’ll say Carey Mulligan was very good in An Education, and any nominating scheme that thinks The Hangover is worth honoring and Star Trek isn’t, this is something I want no part of. The only nominated TV shows I watch are 30 Rock and Mad Men. 30 Rock wasn’t at its best, and I don’t really understand January Jones getting the lead actress Mad Men nod, as opposed to Elisabeth Moss, but the real point of these lists is arguing.

So if there are any movies you think I should see that came out this year, or any performances to take note of, let me know! I’m not so much asking you for your best lists, as things you think I’d like, based on my ceaseless babbling about myself in public forums as I like to do.

Right, then. I’m going to watch another disc of Sarah Connor Chronicles right now. I’m sad I completely missed this show while it was airing, because I can tell it’s something I would have been insanely fannish about from week to week. It’s kind of a mystery to me how I got hooked on Big, Sexy Hospital instead