But Call Me Betsy

Maybe I should pretend to write this blog post as a compare/contrast paper as I've requested that my students do. One of the habits they have that I fight to break is the sentence that stretches on and on until you understand that they are trying meet the word count so that they can call it quits. Title: Two movies based on factual occurrences that happened. First off, both oaf these movies, Trumbo  and Spotlight , have one word titles which are Trumbo and Spotlight . Both are about topics in society today that we care about. Both feature actors and are set in a specific time period not in the one of today. Trumbo , for example, is set in a time period known as The Cold War, or McCarthyism or Reaganomics. The second movie, Spotlight , is not about what it sounds like it should be about. For example, it is not about Mariah Carey or someone else on the stage where bright lights can be found. It too is set in a time period that is not the one we are in currently at this time, the ...

I remember that when the original movie that came out in 1977, I liked Luke Skywalker the best. He was the good farm boy, with sky blue eyes and a cleft chin. He was the innocent, the one who was orphaned, the one with the quest. Han Solo, I thought at age 8, was too conceited, mean, and old. I identified with Luke, because he was in love with the Princess and she didn't seem to even notice him (much like Rawl Brown in my third grade class). Han Solo bossed him around and was unreliable, a rebel who had a giant teddy bear sidekick and a sneer. However, by the time The Empire Strikes Back c ame out in 1980, I had aged considerably (age 12) and so saw both Luke and Han differently. The actor, by this time, had been in a car accident, which aged his face and took away his boyishness. I actually don't remember much about the movie, except that the love story between Han and Leia was more of a focus and I was at an age where swooning kisses seemed like the only thing I ever wanted...

Addendum: We watched the second half of the film the next night and I liked it much more, even though it ended as I predicted below, with a kiss on a basketball court. Trainwreck should not to be confused with Trainspotting or Strangers on a Train or How to Train Your Dragon or Planes, Trains and Automobiles , or Titanic (though I did get a sinking feeling after the first five minutes of viewing). I love Amy Schumer. I've read lots of interviews with her where she's normal-sounding and modest and messed up and interesting. Inside Amy Schumer was always entertaining, even if the skits sometimes feel flat or were clever versus guffaw-inducing. And I knew from other people who have seen the movie that it wasn't going to stray too far from the rom-com genre. But I still am not loving the movie (we stopped watching it On Demand after the first hour because we had to go to beddy-bye). I'll finish watching it, even though I know how it ends based on the first hour. Rig...

Every other "how-to-be-happy" article recommends giving thanks. I know that would be the case around Thanksgiving, but I recall reading this advice prior to the holiday. I was also recently skimming part of Mary Karr's memoir, Lit , and she talks about trying to get sober and not believing in God and so not wanting to do the twelve step thing where you have to have faith in a higher power. And someone from AA kept telling her to do it anyway, to pray to the universe. So, she does, she prays and she also asks for things, and she ends up getting sober and winning this huge chunk of money for her writing. But still, she doubts. I've been trying to do this, every once in a while. It mostly happens at the end of the day, when I get out of the car and have to walk two blocks home in the dark, tired, in boots that pinch, hungry, cranky--I try to think for thirty seconds, okay, I'm glad I have most of my teeth. Thank you, universe, that I can walk. Thank you that I live...

Started reading The Girl on the Train last night and was caught by the totally familiar, depressing existence of the main girl, Rachel. She's in her early thirties, takes the train to London to work every day, and likes to imagine the lives of the people she passes as the train creeps by the apartments. She's mostly interested in one particular couple who seem to have an ideal life. She calls them Jess and Jason, and imagines that they are totally in love and problem free. She's also got a fairly serious drinking problem, brought on by her loneliness. Or maybe the loneliness is exacerbated by the drinking. In any case, the drinking has led her to lose her fiancé and she finds herself becoming more and more out of control with the her consumption, having moments where she blacks out and comes to with vomit on the floor and a cut on the back of her head with no recollection of what happened. Then, one day, she sees the woman kissing another man on her patio, and later the ...

Is it too early to concede that I've failed at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? The goal with this annual challenge is to get you to write an entire novel or most of a novel or to write at least 50,000 words, whichever comes first, in the month of November. That breaks down to about 1,600 words per day. I try to write 750 words a day and so far this month, have done that twice. Intention must count for something. I have every intention of writing every day and I get to work at least a half an hour early each morning, but often, I end up checking email, checking the sheep on my virtual farm (this is a full time job) and leaving myself ten minutes to write. For this year's writing challenge, I did write over 1,600 words a day for five days in a row, but it was at I wanted to see what it felt like to try to produce that amount of content in one sitting. I found it wasn't too difficult. It took about 45 minutes. I started with what I thought would be a fun and easy...

I almost choked on a Corn Pop the other day and thought for a second, "Oh, is this how it ends? Death by Corn Pop." Could  anyone have predicted it? Possibly my college roommates since my taste in cereal and inability to create a meal for myself has remained unchanged since those days. And then, when I realized I was going to survive, I thought, "Oh, I have all of these extra days now, what will I do with them?" Days when I should've been dead, were it not for my coughing reflex. It seems like I should make some changes, travel to India, stop playing Hay Day, do something with my life so it will have had meaning. Today, I started that journey by ordering a large coffee with a shot of pumpkin spice in it. Taking risks, changing things for the better, getting out of my comfort zone. And then there was another moment of realization of my mortality last night. We were watching Dolores Claiborne with Kathy Bathes and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Have you seen it? It...

We watched the movie Frank , starring Michael Fassbender, though unfortunately, he is not nude in this film as he was in Shame . In fact, you don't see his face until near the end of the film, because he's wearing a giant paper mache head for most of the time. The head is cartoonish, with big blue eyes and painted on brown hair and a red-lipped mouth. Kind of like the Big Boy character except without the Brillo cream whoosh to his hair.  The film is about this wanna-be redheaded keyboard playing musician who works in an office and lives with his parents. By an accident of fate, he ends up being asked to perform with this odd band passing through town and then joins them in the woods to make an album. Frank is the main dude in the band and the others are hostile misfits, including Maggie Gyllenhall at her frown-iest. She wears her hair in a page boy with bangs and walks around in a silky robes as if she's just stepped out of Joan Crawford's dressing room. She doesn...

Just finished a book called Mayhem but Sarah Pinborough. It's a suspense novel set in Victorian England around the time that Jack the Riper and the Thames Torso Killer were at large, murdering and dismembering women. In real life, neither were ever caught, but this book focuses on Dr. Bond, a man who helped try to solve the murders. In the novel, he's plagued by an addiction to opium and laudanum, but you get the sense that his sleeplessness and need to numb are due to this evil force that has come to England and wrecked "mayhem" (see title) on the city. The book is interspersed with real newspaper articles from the time, describing the murders. I finished that book in about four days and then yesterday, I checked out the second book in the series, Murder , joking with the librarian that the other rewrote them out of order (mayhem and murder vs. murder and mayhem--she laughed politely but didn't teem to have a clue what I was saying). The second book also fea...

We recently watched a documentary called Dear Zachary. The description appealed to me because it was about a murder and a custody battle, so like, this longer version of a Dateline or 48 Hours, but more artfully done. The film was about a man named Andrew who was killed after being shot five times by his ex-girlfriend. Whether she did it or not isn't in dispute. Andrew told his friend he was going to meet her one last time and then turned up dead. She lived 16 hours away but had driven in and cell phone records pinged in every location, showing her movement into his town of Latrobe, PA (where he was a well-liked resident doctor) and then away after the murder, and also acknowledging that she had bought a 22 caliber gun and taking shooting lesson a few days prior. And a history of violence and erratic behavior. And so the documentary (made by one of Andrew's closest childhood friends) isn't about figuring out her guilt or innocence; it's about getting to know the vic...

Somehow during my middle school, high school and undergrad education, I missed reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (I can't even write that name without thinking about the movie Young Frankenstein where Gene Hackman keeps correcting the pronunciation of his name, "It's Frankenstein!").  In fact, the only book I can remember easing in high school was Silas Marner by George Eliot (a female writer, by the way). I wrote a paper about it or put on a play about it, or something, and I remember that the little girl's name was Eppie, and she had sausage curls to color of gold. One of my first brushes with symbolism--the gold of her curls mirroring Silas' own love of gold. But I can't recall any other books we were required to read. I read a lot anyway, so I got my Bronte and Austen from the public library or as gifts from my mom or grandma ( Little Women , The Girl of the Limberlost ). We probably read Mark Twain's Huck and Tom and we may have read some...

Have you heard of this not so new but still startlingly American phenomenon of paying a total stranger to send you presents? You can do this for all sorts of products--makeup, dog treats, clothes, arts & crafts, whimsical house items. The way it works is that you sign up for the service, and add some specific details about your skin and hair coloring, your likes and dislikes, the size of your bra. For Stitch Fix, you give them all of your measurements and choose colors you like and dislike and take this little quiz that gives you options of sets of clothes in certain styles--like, one that's termed romantic because it has lacy blouses and floral prints, or "classic" which includes polo shirts and khaki pants and an anti-choice button. You also say generally what you want to pay for certain items, though there is no range option for 0 to $20. Once you've filled out your style sheet, a person in this company picks out five items of clothing or jewelry for you ...

We went to see Mistress America on Saturday and it was charming and annoying and I felt like we were 20 years too old to enjoy it. The plot is about a first-year college student in Manhattan who feels out of place and so calls up her stepsister to be, who introduces her to the city and is quirky and funny and damaged and egocentric and grandiose. The young girl writes a short story about her called Mistress America and it's not flattering and then there is this long scene at someone else's house that felt like a play--all dialogue in the living room for twenty minutes between secondary characters. After the movie ended, I tried to uncover a second meaning. How the character played by Greta Gerwig is really a metaphor for the city or for lost youth or for America as this hopeful yet misguided place where amazing and terrible things happen, but I couldn't sustain it. Mostly, I watched the movie never forgetting that I was watching a movie, because the dialogue and acting ...

No one has ever died there (to my knowledge). One cat was put down, but not on the premises and it was his time. Not this cat. This cat lives and has moved to New Jersey. Exposed brick, built in bookshelves in the kitchen. Very lovely and perfect for cookbooks or a row of increasingly smaller Russian dolls. This little secret toothbrush holder in the bathroom. It's listed as a two bedroom, but there's a small room that could be a baby's room or an office or a huge luxurious walk in closet. My mom used it to keep her Singer happy. I used it for bookshelves. The previous owners kept a baby in here. Along with having central air, it has ceiling fans in both bedrooms and the living room (I'm proud of that one because I commissioned it). Which fan is it?? You'll have to come visit the house to see. The bathroom and kitchen have both been redone in the last three years and I got this little bitty dishwasher, and there's a garbage disposa...

I've been thinking a lot about college and a particularly bad crush I had. I don't know why this is on my mind, maybe because there are so many songs that remind me of college on the radio lately. For instance, every time I hear Prince's "When Doves Cry," I picture him, but only like the physical details of him, like my brain is making an amalgamation of the MTV video and his corporeal self--ladder-like abs, too-long curly hair and blue eyes. And it also reminds me of a certain stillness that would come over me in his presence, and awe that he didn't deserve, but I couldn't seem to stop myself from feeling that way. And thinking of my younger self reminds me how long and short life is. That sounds trite, but it's weird how thirty years ago seems both like forever and not long ago at all. I was thinking about far away/close when I was singing to a Pat Benatar song this morning in the car ("We're running with the shadows of the night......

For whatever reason, this super beautiful girl is into this super redneck wearing a flag for a pair of swim trunks. Pretty much all they do is make out in pool and she lets the curtain of her hair fall over his sunburned, cross-eyed face. Again, I feel bad for these cast members who have to pretend to care about any of this. Samantha claims that she, as a human being, would never plot against another human being. After she says this, they show secret footage of her as human being, plotting. She looks like she stepped off the pages of Vogue, circa 1962. She has really long hair and a wide mouth and should be wearing white lipstick and go-go boots. Everyone is upset because they feel like Juelia (who can't spell her name) has been played by Joe and that it was super unfair because she has a dead husband and a baby girl. Like, it might have been okay if she was single and no one died. This new girl has arrived. Her name is Amber and she is of indiscriminate ethnicity (i.e. sor...

I watched a little bit of last night's show and here's how I can summarize: the women all got together and decided to wear fake eyelashes. The men all got together and decided to get bad tattoos. I don't know what else happened except that I felt sorry for the contestants because they were forced to have these phony conversations where they pretended to care about who is scamming who. I have no idea who went home (did anyone?) or what happened of any significance, but I'm confident that the first ten minutes of tonight's show will be a recap of those 3 important minutes. I also don't understand why the show is now three hours long per week, when it really only needs to be 9 minutes. Clare and Jarrod/Ashton are on the sailboat, guided by a ghost. They will now be forced to go bungee jumping. Cue picture of love birds grooming each other. Both must go down topless. I'll say that it's pretty high. Clare and Ashton bond over Clare putting her nose in hi...

Watched Cameron Crowe's  Say Anything last night for the first time in about fifteen years. I am trying to decide if it's a feminist film or not. It's one of the few teen movies where the guy is totally willing to give up everything for the girl and the girl is the one who has big plans. In this movie, she's the valedictorian and she has earned a fellowship to study in London. Conversely, Lloyd isn't sure what he wants to do (aside from not want to "sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career"). His main goal in life is to be the boyfriend of Diane Court. He's Lloyd Dobler, as played by the long-eyelashed, super tall John Cusack, who I have a fondness for because he's a native Chicagoan and because I also like his sister, actress Joan Cusack, especially her green-eye-shadowed character in Working Girl.  There was a spat of these "unpopular guy gets popular girl" films in the 80s, like Patrick Dempsey's Can...

Wait, this is on again? I was watching  Unreal , a TV drama about the making of a reality TV show. Here's that one girl from Chris' season (Clare?) going on a one-on-one with Mikey. Mikey, the muscle monkey. Mikey, with tattoos who says things like, "Deep down, I have always had like this fifth grade crush on you and I think you're like so awesome." Their date is to simulate sex in yoga poses. No kidding. They will be focusing on the four chakras--the heart, the mind, the groin, and the butt chakras. They must touch ads to ads and pull each other back and forth. Please do not fart, they're both thinking. Actually, only Clare is probably thinking that. I doubt that Mikey cares. His favorite position is downward Clare and hopefully, he will be "able to experience it with he done day without all the cameras."  They dive into a pool and Mikey says that he wants to get to know her bette rand would like to kiss her. She says, in not so many ways, I am no...