But Call Me Betsy

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...