Tabula Rasa

Zooming to meet our thunder

2012-01-23T23:32:00.000-08:00

Back when I was a junior in college and trying to think of subjects for either an honors thesis or a senior scholars project, the Tuskegee Airmen made my Top 3 list (the 442nd and ads between the World Wars were the other two).

Also, since my parents let us watch any historically-justified violent movie (because violence was ok, but sex was not), my sisters and I have seen almost every movie about World War II. (That's basically all we watched as kids. The one movie I have seen most in my life is The Great Escape. )

I liked Red Tails. I didn't love it, but as the war film genre goes, it's not bad (I've seen far worse). The manly bonding, predictable daredevil exploits, caricatured enemy (the one Nazi pilot was pretty bad), woman representing postwar hope ... they're all familiar.

But as a civil rights movie, it was pretty tame. The Red Tails served as escorts for (white) bombers, ensuring that they reached and bombed their targets with minimal air casualties.
While it's clear the skies are segregated, without any connection to the home front, it's a little disjointed: the characters aren't really developed outside of their unit; they rarely reference home or their pasts or their families, so it's hard to tie the storyline to any historical significance that the viewer doesn't already know. Without that connection, the movie is like any other underdog tale: scrappy unit isn't given respect but eventually proves itself after working through some personal issues and passing tests of valor. Though there are many scenes where the airmen face racism and bigotry, there are also many cheesily heartwarming scenes where white colleagues show their gratitude for the air protection the Red Tails provide. (There's also some bad acting on the part of some of the white pilots.)

And then it's sobering to realize that the Civil Rights movement doesn't reach its apex for another two decades, and that racism in the military or anywhere else isn't close to being eradicated, either.

Overall, the movie is pretty light-hearted, as many in the genre can be.

And speaking of the genre... In one subplot, one of the Red Tails is shot down and taken to a POW camp, where he takes part in an escape. The scene where the German guard patrolling the forest stumbles upon an escaping prisoner is taken almost directly from The Great Escape. (See above. The Palmer girls, we have that movie memorized.)

But my big geek-out moment (I believe I squealed in the theatre) was when I recognized Adam from MI-5 faking an American accent in the 3 minutes he's barely onscreen.

Above us only sky

2012-01-19T23:16:00.000-08:00

I was really excited when the latest Maisie Dobbs book arrived for me at the library. But then snowshoeing and soccer and Jasper Fforde and Snowpocalypse 2012 took up a lot of my time. So I risked more overdue fines (snow-induced overdue fines, to boot!) to finish the book.

Each Maisie Dobbs book addresses some aspect of the Great War (cartographers, chemists, artists, disabled veterans). In A Lesson in Secrets, conscientious objectors take the stage. Maisie goes undercover for Special Branch, teaching philosophy at a college to determine whether or not political forces that do not have the interest of the Crown at heart are infiltrating Britain's institutions of learning. And of course, there's a murder that she has to solve that happens to be connected to her task.

Maisie as a character has definitely blossomed in the past few books; Jacqueline Winspear does a wonderful job at slowly developing our heroine's character. For much of the series, Maisie was serious and rather dour, held back by an inability to let go of her war trauma. But since both her wartime love and her lifelong mentor died in recent books, sad as those events were, it's as if our heroine finally has wings of her own to grow.

The next book is due out in March. I'm already on the waiting list at the library!

Virtual verisimilitude

2012-01-15T19:19:00.000-08:00

Once again, Jasper Fforde managed to top his last creative achievement. As if the entire Thursday Next series weren't already a testament to ingenuity and imagination, the latest book adds one more meta-layer to the intersections of mind, text, and conceptions of reality.

The first five books star a kick-ass character named Thursday Next, who is able to both book-jump and time travel. She interacts with characters from books as well as people in the "real" word (an alternate-history version of Swindon, England).

One of Our Thursdays is Missing stars the written version of Thursday, a character in the books based on the "real" Thursday's adventures. The real Thursday has gone missing in the middle of a possible genre war, and the key to her whereabouts lies in various nefarious characters' attempts to control natural resources of unmined metaphor in the land of Fiction.

It's Jasper Fforde; it's automatically brilliant.

Reel diversions

2012-01-15T16:14:00.000-08:00

I hadn't planned on seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but Thuter's text that Colin Firth is in it was enough to get me to the theater. I've never read Le Carre's book, but I think I saw the 1979 film version a long time ago. This latest was good; though at times it was rather slow, it was an old-fashioned Cold War spy thriller. (It's been a while since "defection" has been central to a film plot.) The costumes and set design were all admirably (sometimes disturbingly) spot-on for capturing the early 1970s in all its fashion "glory" and technological limitations.

I had to counter the heavy espionage subject matter with something light and fluffy, so a friend and I watched The Adventures of Tintin. I've never read the original comics, but I did read a great article in The Atlantic about how Spielberg handled some of the racist stereotypes from the original Tintin books.

I really liked Tintin. It was good fun, an whirlwind adventure story à la Indiana Jones and National Treasure: there's a pirate treasure, travel by air and sea, the Sahara, and a sheikh's palace. It provided a good counterbalance to Tinker!

...and beyond

2012-01-07T12:54:00.000-08:00

Ammo, amas, amat

2012-01-07T12:30:00.000-08:00

I forgot one rather important "first" from 2011...

Going shooting at a gun range - It was definitely a cross-cultural experience. I didn't like the idea of shooting at a target that looked like a human, so my friend and I chose a zombie. My only other experience at a gun range was when my father took me and my sisters once, almost 20 years ago, because he thought we should be prepared for the Apocalypse (much like all the camping trips where we had to "rough it"). It's a pretty traumatic memory, so the fact that I went voluntarily as an adult was a huge step. My politics regarding guns and gun laws, probably due to that adolescent memory, remain the same. I know Mi Hermana and La Otra Hermana were equally as affected.

Many a weary foot

2012-01-02T13:55:00.000-08:00

I love New Year's celebrations. I love the feeling of starting fresh, of a clean slate (haha, get it?), of the almost religious idea of starting anew with no sins. But I also love the idea of a progression, of time and life moving forward and amassing new experiences every day.

As longtime friends and readers know, I reflect on the past year by being thankful for and celebrating "firsts". And 2011 had a lot of firsts for me!

Snowshoeing - I went several times and liked it so much that I bought myself snowshoes after Thanksgiving. Two trips already planned for January 2012.
Baking more than I have, ever - I think I baked more in 2011 than I have the rest of my life combined. In the process, I discovered that it's relaxing and that I'm quite good at it!
Visiting the Caribbean - Aside from the beautiful beaches and wonderful sailing weather in the British Virgin Islands and the amazing history of Puerto Rico, there were also many "firsts" for food from this trip: mofongo, plantain lasagna, conch ceviche, and Pusser's very excellent rum. Another "first" from the trip was the agonizing realization that I am either allergic (like Mi Hermana) to a sunscreen ingredient or (like La Otra Hermana) to the combination of sun and sweat.
Getting help for anxiety and depression - It took 14 years. What college counselors failed to observe and subsequent MSW therapists failed to point out, both a psychiatrist and a psychologist saw immediately. I'm grateful to everyone who was so supportive in 2011: from driving me to that first appointment, to recommending certain doctors, to calling to see if I was okay when first starting the medication regiment, to checking in every now and then since. It might take a long time to work through, but I think 2012 will build on a lot of the foundation laid in 2011.
Paddleboarding - This was the coolest accidental "first" ever - I thought I was going pedal-boating, which I've done before, and ended up trying something leisurely and fun.
Being pulled over by a police officer - In 16 years of driving, I'd never been pulled over!
Getting a traffic citation - In 16 years of speeding, I'd never gotten a ticket! Figures it'd happen in California...
Climbing a rock wall - Turns out, I liked it! It was definitely scary at points, but I managed to coach myself through the paralysis and finish.
Shopping on Black Friday ... on Thanksgiving - Mi Hermana and I have napped and gone shopping at 4am in the past, but this time we put the kiddos to bed, then drove to the outlet mall a little before midnight. When we got back to the house around 7am, we slept until 2pm. Living and learning... we might be too old for that now!
Running multiple 5Ks - I beat my own record of 2 per year. I ran 5 in 2011!
Driving a car onto the ferry - In 16 years of driving and 32 years of living in the Northwest, I've never 1) driven a car onto a ferry and 2) never done it alone. My God! The fare is exorbitant! But it was fun, since it was a first.

Here's to 2012, and all the new adventures it will bring!

Some corner of a foreign field

2012-01-01T12:13:00.000-08:00

I didn't read the children's book, but I wanted to go see War Horse on Boxing Day. It reminded me a little of Black Beauty - the horse is sold form an English farm to the cavalry, and through the chaos of the battlefields drifts from the British to the German to the French to the Belgian sides, playing a different role in each. It's also a cute boy-and-his-horse tale (also not unlike many other animal stories).

Being a war movie as well as a children's book, you couldn't escape the fact that death and dying are everywhere - but I thought Spielberg did a tasteful job of showing the tragedy of war without getting an R rating: windmill arms block the execution of two teenage boys, a French girl's death is mentioned (but not described) only at the end, the riderless horse charging out of battle lets the viewer know the fate of the cavalry officer. In a way, it was more poignant and heartbreaking not to show how everyone who loved the horse met their ends. I'm not quite sure how the book pulled it off, though.

In the end, most stories about the Great War are anti-war. This one was no different: the Boer War regimental flag that both father and son took with them to their different battlefields signifies the silence of survival and the hope for an end to conflict.

And the scenes of the Devonshire countryside were also beautiful, even if a bit Gone With the Wind-like with the silhouettes against red skies.

What passing-bells for these?

2011-12-29T15:34:00.000-08:00

After reading the light-hearted, Riviera-vacationing Lady Georgiana series again, it was back to the legacy of the Great War with Maisie Dobbs.

In Among the Mad, our psychologist-detective heroine works with Special Branch forces in a race to find a terrorist (though I'm not sure they had that term in 1931). With still-shell-shocked veterans being released onto the streets at the beginning of the Depression, someone intends to set off a gas bomb on New Year's Eve at St. Paul's. But, like the anthrax attacks 70 years later, the particular gas used as a warning is military-grade. It's a decent thriller, and sets up the reader for Maisie's involvement with Special Branch or other intelligence-gathering efforts later.

The Mapping of Love and Death actually had more significant character development and drama: Maisie's mentor dies, she strikes up a relationship with her old employer's son, her briefcase (a gift from her fellow servants when she went off to Cambridge, symbolizing her working-class, pre-war past) is stolen. The case at the center of the book is fascinating as well: the role of cartographers in World War I. The remains of a cartography unit listed as missing in 1916 are recently discovered, and an autopsy suggests an American mapmaker in the unit was murdered. One of the characters from the first book in the series also makes an appearance, making the plot ends come full circle. It's as if Jacqueline Winspear is collecting bits of the past in order to set readers up for an entirely new Maisie. I certainly hope so!

Counter rucking

2011-12-27T23:58:00.000-08:00

We had to memorize "Invictus" back in seventh grade, and it's a fairly easy poem to keep in one's memory. So when the movie about South Africa's victory over New Zealand in the 2005 Rugby World Cup came out about a year ago, my curiosity was piqued. (My rugby-playing Kiwi bro-in-law also rushed out to see it.)

Since New Zealand won it this year - and I had some free time over Christmas break - I finally watched it. I do tend to like movies about sports teams: in the end, they're about working out differences and cooperating, which is why they also make such great parallel stories about nation-shaping and identity-forging.

But I'll admit, I was a little disappointed with Invictus. I wanted to love it, because the set-up was so great: a Nobel Peace Prize-wining man who spent 27 years in prison becomes president of a country struggling with racial strife and poverty and all the other legacies of apartheid, and an almost-all-white rugby team comes from behind to unite their divided country and win the World Cup. It's a great story. But for some reason, I found the characters to be pretty one-dimensional: Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela was always the wise Madiba and only seemed like an ordinary human in a few scenes, when his estrangement from his family is mentioned. Similarly, Matt Damon as the national rugby captain seems to just shuffle along - there's never any insight into his words or actions.

To me, the most compelling characters weren't the rugby team or the history-making President; the motley crew that made up Mandela's security detail were actually the most fascinating. Rugby was irrelevant to their transition from old guard to integrated unit, from pre-apartheid suspicions of each other to trusting each other as a cohort protecting the President. That was the story I was looking for in this movie, with rugby as the metaphor. Turns out, it didn't really need rugby to tell it.

No. 5

2011-12-22T23:51:00.000-08:00

Having finished both of the Rhys Bowen mystery series I loved, I can now only wait for new books to come out. So I was ecstatic when, instead of reminding me I had overdue fines, the library notified me that Naughty in Nice was the fifth and newest book in the Lady Georgiana series.

Nice, as in the city in France. (I do love a good pun.)

Coco Chanel, a stolen royal necklace, and fabulous parties and yachts are all part of the plot. All of society are vacationing in Nice, where the Queen sends Georgie to discreetly steal back her favorite snuffbox from a rich kleptomaniac.

It was a good, fun, light read (as much as murder mysteries can be), especially after the heavy slavery double-whammy of March and Kindred.

It's also a bit fascinating to read the Lady Georgiana series at the same time as I'm reading the Maisie Dobbs series: both take place in the early 1930s, both heroines have one Cockney relative and one partying best friend, and both settings emphasize the Depression. But Georgie's world is all glamour and glitz and trying to hold on to the Roaring Twenties; Maisie's world is still emerging from the gray, silent horrors of the Great War. It's a sobering difference indeed.

As harsh as truth

2011-12-22T23:33:00.000-08:00

Because I rifled through Mi Cunado's book collection while in Michigan, I ordered March from the library when I got home. Told from the point of view of the father in Little Women during his time away during the Civil War, it was an intriguing tale of idealism clashing with reality.

The protagonist was an incredibly naive abolitionist minister; for much of the book, he worked in Union-held territory teaching slaves how to read. His life story flashes back to his strong abolitionist past, his friendships with Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Brown. And as the eager Northern do-gooder encounters the real-world scenarios of his ideals, the reader too has to witness the horrors of both slavery and war.

I appreciated how Geraldine Brooks added more flair to snippets from Little Women. In this alternate telling, the March family were secretly all involved in the Underground Railroad. Marmee's temper - mentioned briefly in Alcott's classic because she tells Jo she learned to master it - takes center stage in many of the chapters (actually, it was a little scary how Marmee's temper in March reminded me of mine).

When I finished the book, I knew there was more to the story of the March family - and more to the story of the war, which would drag on for four more years. In Little Women, the characters on the home front are so removed and sheltered from the war that the story could be feasibly occur out of that historical context; for readers raised on Louisa May Alcott, March finally makes a tangible connection to it.

Back when I was read all of Connie Willis' books because she was a female sci-fi writer, I intended to also read Octavia Butler. I finally got around to reading Kindred, and by a total coincidence it had much the same subject matter as March.

An African-American woman in 1976 is repeatedly "called" back to the antebellum South by one of her ancestors, a slave owner. Without knowing when she'll go back and forth between time periods, she becomes more paranoid in the modern world as her encounters in the 19th century become increasingly violent. What starts as meeting her ancestor when he was a small child slowly turns into watching him learn cruelty and how to be the master of a plantation. Kindred is incredibly well-written; I had to read it in one sitting, into the wee hours of the morning, because I couldn't put it down.

The book ends so disturbingly and violently. With no neat resolution, the reader is left to wonder about the symbolism: is the America celebrating its bicentennial trying to reconcile with its past? Is the woman called back specifically because she's in an interracial marriage in the 1970s? The whole story is a jumble of emotions, but in ways that are more thought-provoking than merely shock-inducing.

A pulse in the eternal mind

2011-12-11T22:27:00.000-08:00

I love the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. Now that I'm halfway through it, I'm starting to get sad that it will end soon.

Messenger of Truth takes our psychologist/detective heroine into the world of art, where she is commissioned to determine whether an artist's tragic death was accidental or connected to any of the controversial scenes he painted.

Parts of An Incomplete Revenge reminded me of "The Lottery" - the book takes Maisie to Kent to uncover the thoroughly dark tale of what one small, xenophobic town does during the War in the aftermath of a Zeppelin raid, as well as in the subsequent ten years during annual hop-picking season when Gypsies and Londoners camp in fields to help with the harvest. (It also reminded me that I've been meaning to read a comprehensive history of the Roma for a long time now.)

In these two books, the main character starts to shed her wartime burdens - a rift with her mentor forces her to be more independent; her wartime love, brain-dead for a decade, finally passes away, so she can no longer carry a torch for him; she starts to have hobbies that bring brightness and color into her life. And readers get to see Britain change with Maisie: slowly, book by book, telephones and electricity reach more homes; cars replace horses and carriages; rigid class distinctions fade.

Of course, the tragedy is that readers know that another war is looming 8 years on the horizon.

Roar!

2011-12-11T21:27:00.000-08:00

Between all the reading I've been able to do lately, I also ran two 5K races within 10 days of each other, with a soccer playoff game sandwiched in between.

Aside from the Run for Your Rights, the Ann Arbor Turkey Trot is the only race I've run more than once - and I don't even live in Michigan! I like this new tradition, though I have no idea if Mi Hermana and the kiddos will even be in A2 next year for me to continue it; if Mi Cuñado finishes his dissertation and gets a teaching job elsewhere, they might move.

Mi Hermana the former cross-country runner bluntly informed me that what I've been counting as my watch time was actually my gun time, so I haven't been as slow as I thought. To keep it straight, I made a spreadsheet of all the races I've run in, with both times listed (thanks to Google caching, most records were still online). Fun spreadsheet-making! It was the closest to work that I got over the holidays.

When I returned home after a lovely Thanksgiving holiday meeting my newborn niece, my soccer team's had a playoff game, where I blocked a cannonball kick at point-blank range.
The bruise on my inner left thigh was a big as a soccer ball and shaped like one, too. (I thought it was really bad ass, and took a ton of pictures to show off my war wounds to La Madre, who told me they made me look like I'd been abused. Since the bruise hasn't gone away yet -- 9 days later -- I'm now paranoid about stares in the locker room at the gym.)

Then, with the fresh huge bruise, I ran the Girls on the Run 5K. Another fun race! I've realized I enjoy the family-friendly races where competition isn't the focus on the event.

When I entered my gun time and watch time on my newly-created spreadsheet, I realized I also seem to gravitate toward races that focus on women and girls or on women's rights issues (NARAL, BARCC, Iron Girl, Girls on the Run).

Hmmm.

O' both your houses

2011-12-02T22:53:00.000-08:00

Because I couldn't stop talking about how wonderful Middlesex was, my bro-in-law said, "I have a few other Pulitzer Prize-winning books too, if you want to read those."

So I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the title of which naturally reminded me of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" ... in fact, it was strangely similar enough to the Hemingway short story, and yet different enough that I liked it.

The book moves back and forth between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, between three generations enduring their own hardships, and from the Trujillo dictatorship to teen angst. From the opening lines, the reader knows it's not an entirely happy tale: the idea of a family curse is introduced and reiterated throughout. References to "the final days" and "the end" are repeatedly mentioned, so it's pretty obvious that the characters are ill-fated. Themes of family, sex, and education each alternate as both nurturing and oppressive.

Most of the book drops Spanish phrases or Dominican slang, with no translation. There are footnotes for historical references. The narrator is hilariously snide and irreverent, relating the stories with a mix of multinational street slang. Each portrait of the cursed family is depicted with and bittersweet emotion. The cultural references are brilliantly and intricately mixed: everything from Dominican slang to comic book geekdom to 80s films to sci-fi lore. Through it all, the reader really did become part of the binational, bicultural, class-straddling, racially-polarized world of the main characters.

Then, on the plane ride back home, I realized I had one more library book to read. I no longer remember who recommended it to me, but 2030 was utter crap. The characters lacked depth, the plot read like a B-rated Hollywood movie, and the science, politics, and economics described (hell, the entire book) could have been written by a 12-year-old.

In a nutshell: the cure for cancer leads to prolonged lifespans in the U.S. Young people start to hate old people to the point that there are suicide bombs at AARP headquarters. When a mega-earthquake wipes out the city of Los Angeles, the government can't afford to rebuild because it's been bankrupted by Medicare. So the Chinese offer to rebuild the city for half of the net revenue produced forever after.

I'm not kidding. It was that bad. It was painful to read on two main levels: as a history major and as a politico-wonk. I had to suspend all knowledge of the political process, election campaigns, community organizing, infrastructure, and geology, among many other things.

But I was bored on a plane for 5 hours with nothing else to do. If I hadn't been trapped in the air sans sudoku or crossword, I would never have read the whole thing. Because in the back of my mind the entire time, I kept thinking that the book was written a few years too late to be relevant: #OccupyWallStreet has shown that young people can protest unfair policies in smart and nonviolent ways, we've been post-HCR for a while now, and the separate ideas of a living will and death with dignity were flashes in the news cycle pan during the Bush Administration. 2030 tried too hard to be a social commentary; in the end, it's too shallow to spark any kind of meaningful conversation.

Not a book to read after finishing a well-written, intelligent novel that won a Pulitzer.

But at least I have more books from the library to help me erase the memories of this one...

London to Grosse Point

2011-11-28T19:51:00.000-08:00

The great thing about being on vacation is that, once the nieces and nephew zonk out around 8 or 8:30, I have plenty of time to read.

In the third Maisie Dobbs book, our heroine finally returns to France twelve years after her war injury. Two tough cases (both involving MIA soldiers from the Great War), coupled with her suppressed psychological trauma from the War itself, lead to a near-mental breakdown. (But, of course, she muddles through. As one does.) Two interesting developments for the series that I'll be curious to see in the next few books: that a breach of trust occurs between Maisie and her mentor, so she must start to learn to solve her most intellectually rigorous cases alone; and that since she finally returned to the now-graveyard scene of her greatest anguish, even after a decade she can hopefully start healing and moving on.

Books 4 and 5 are waiting for me at the library when I get back home.

But for now, one great thing about being on vacation in Michigan with a brother-in-law who teaches history is that there are tons of spare books in the basement. So I grabbed Middlesex, erroneously conflating it with both Atonement and March (also on the bookshelf).

Turns out, the books are very, very different. I haven't (yet) read the two I mentally confused with this one, but Middlesex is sheer, utter brilliance. Jeffrey Eugenides' novel about a hermaphrodite growing up in a changing Detroit is extremely well-written. The narrative voice pulls you in from the first couple of lines, hinting at intertwined family scandals and historical flashes and self-discovery spanning 70 years, all with teasing details that aren't fully revealed for several more chapters.

The book's genius is that it also draws on so much literary and historical richness: it starts on the slopes of Mount Olympus in 1922 and moves across violence and Depression to the streets of the Motor City. (Yes, I did feel like re-re-re-watching the Chrysler SuperBowl ad.) The protagonist's grandparents' flight from Smyrna also had me recalling the first vignette from Hemingway's In Our Time; and a chapter that involved the fledgling Nation of Islam had me running out to google-verify that it did, indeed, begin in Detroit. Storyline transitions in Middlesex flow from Old World to New, superstition to science, immigrant to assimilated, rags to (middle class) riches, rural to urban to suburban, east to west, parent to child, girl to boy... and the reader (at least this one) is left with an awe-inspiring, incredible, complex tapestry of overlapping identities, sexualities, and families.

Fear factor

2011-11-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

I'd never seen Monsters, Inc. - but a post-turkey Thanksgiving stupor was as good a reason as any to watch it.

I thought it was clever, though I suspect much of it was too sophisticated for smaller children. (Monsters are deployed through doors in the monster world to scare kids in the human world. An energy company, Monsters, Inc., harvests children's screams as energy. One day a little toddler accidentally crosses the threshold to the monster world.)

Boo, the little girl, was adorable. And the ending was wonderfully environmentally positive: instead of relying on energy based on fear and the collection of children's screams, the monsters make a complete U-turn and change to energy consumption based on laughter and fun. I approve.

Dulce et decorum est...

2011-11-21T19:09:00.000-08:00

On to the next mystery series featuring a smart female detective! The latest one I've found takes place in the aftermath of the Great War, so naturally it's right up my alley.

Maisie Dobbs makes her debut as a detective in the first book, which details the title character's story: a working-class girl with a keen intellect is given a chance to study and go to university; then World War I breaks out and she becomes a nurse on the frontlines. The reader learns of her story ten years later, when the immediate legacy of the Great War sets the backdrop for our new sleuth's first case. The book is a poignant tribute to the Lost Generation as well as a testament to survivors and strength to rebuild both personal lives and a more egalitarian postwar society.

In Birds of a Feather, Maisie is hired to find a missing heiress whose three friends have just been murdered (and white feathers left hidden at each crime scene). I must admit, the feathers were an immediate clue early on, and I guessed both the motive and the guilty party long before the final chapters revealed them. However, while that usually discourages me from continuing a series for very long, it seemed rather trivial in this one. I love the psychologist-as-detective aspect of the two Maisie Dobbs books I've read so far, I love the fact that the heroine is my age, and I love that the series takes place in my particular pet period of history.

But the real reason I'm drawn to this series is because the main character lives on the edges of identity: a working-class family and childhood erased from her future by a Cambridge education; a woman in a traditionally male profession; a nation desperately trying to forget the War to End All Wars while being constantly reminded of the incredible loss it suffered from it.

I've ordered the rest of the books from the library!

If I can make it there

2011-11-13T20:47:00.000-08:00

It's always sad when a good series comes to an end. I've enjoyed Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy mystery books, and finally finished the last two.

In The Last Illusion, Molly goes undercover as Harry Houdini's assistant after several gruesome accidents during his shows. I was unaware that Houdini may have been a spy, but the book runs with that premise - Molly not only helps NYPD solve a few cases, but the Secret Service as well. What I did find particularly interesting were the descriptions of a few illusionists' secrets.

Bless the Bride ends the series with Molly's wedding to her NYPD captain (a dance which started with Book 1) . Before the nuptials, however, she gets in one last case: finding a runaway Chinese bride in Chinatown, in an era when the Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese women from entering the U.S. I've always appreciated how each book in this series makes Molly interact with so many of the different communities that made up New York City circa 1902, and this one was no different. From settlement houses to "paper sons", I re-learned and re-lived a lot of lessons from my women's history and Asian American history classes!

And by complete coincidence, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution denouncing the Chinese Exclusion Act last month.

There aren't any more books in the Molly Murphy series, but I hope there will be more! Of course, I have half a dozen mystery series where I hope there will eventually be more books... Ah, well. On to the next!

La ville, la vie, la veille

2011-11-02T22:42:00.000-07:00

I lovelovelove this video. The song is so beautiful too, no matter how slightly objectionable (and probably bad for me right now) the lyrics are.

But it's Paris, the eternal city for love, in a highly temporal world. I'm drawn to the bittersweet melody and the single-camera viewpoint that simultaneously moves forward but flashes back.

In unexpectedly related news, the #OccupyOakland protestors have managed to shut down the Port of Oakland. (How can a proud Seattleite not hear that and think of the 1919 General Strike?) Meanwhile, I have friends at #OccupySeattle, where earlier today SPD pepper sprayed some demonstrators.

It feels like the eve of something big, the proverbial crossroad where you choose to be a part of history or not. But then, maybe it's just the effect of the rain tonight.

May we live in interesting times, indeed.

If your colors were like my dreams

2011-10-24T00:21:00.000-07:00

A friend of a friend was in "Year Zero" at a local theatre, so I went to see it. The play focuses on young Cambodian Americans growing up in Southern California and the legacy of the Killing Fields in their lives.

It's definitely a drama, but it's interspersed with many moments of comedy - which, I think, made it more real. Aside from the incredibly heavy topic of the Killing Fields, the play also addressed school bullying, gang members, prison terms, reincarnation, and the death of a parent. And amid all that, it managed to capture the funny and tender moments of sibling relationships, teenage angst, and old flames rekindled.

One of the central themes that struck me was the idea of running away in order to survive. Each character runs away from something (bullies, repressed memories, a gang war) - even going back to their parents who fled a genocidal regime. But they're also running toward a slightly more stable, if uncertain future: college, a new home, the promise of financial stability, or simply being alive.

It reminded me of high school, where second-generation peers from immigrant families faced a lot of the same push-and-pull waves of culture, memory, and dreams.

At one point in the play, two characters debate reincarnation and how they would like to be reborn: with absolutely no memories of their previous lives, or knowing and remembering everything from the past. In the end, their "Year Zero" is reset mid-stream - and the only choice they get is to decide whether or not to run towards rebirth.

It's a sobering thought, to think that survival can be so similar to reincarnation.

It's not right, but it's okay

2011-10-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, I watched the Eminem/Rihanna "Love the Way You Lie" video. I'd heard the song everywhere - it was certainly a pretty enough tune, thought the lyrics were a questionable. So I googled to see the video. And then I watched in horror as I recognized parts of my own behavior and dependencies. In fact, I watched it about a dozen times in a row, not wanting to admit that I could relate emotionally to a song and video that, in effect, glorifies mutually abusive relationships.

Because Wehrenberg's book on anxiety management was somewhat useful, I decided to read her book on depression. And while some of the same issues I had with her other book are in this one as well, I've actually found most of the tips to be more helpful - especially the ones about getting out of cycles of negativity and despair and lashing out.

It's a very weird thing to stop feeling extreme emotions but not stop thinking them: for instance, pain manifesting itself as anger. Pre-meds, I'd get flushed and jittery and my heartbeat would pump up and I'd be thinking the stereotypical "Oh HELL NO" thoughts. But establishing a stabilized mood has eliminated those visceral reactions almost entirely, and what I'm still left with are the thoughts. And changing decades of the thought patterns about emotions is what I know I need to begin in order for an unhealthy cycle to stop. Despite great strides in the past year, there are still occasional lapses.

And there's still that damn laird's lug... the one that makes it seem like I'm invisible and watching my own life from a distance and can only watch helplessly as things fall apart and someone posing as me is complicit in it. But "hologram" is the only word I can find to describe the walls it seems like I'm trapped behind. It takes a lot of effort to realize they're not real, and that I can wrestle for control.

Light up, light up

2011-10-16T22:48:00.000-07:00

Another day, another 5K - unlike last time, I didn't randomly sign up the evening before having to run 3.2 miles. This time, I'd also been playing in my soccer games and hadn't been drinking at weddings and birthdays for a week straight.

Luckily (though ironically), because I didn't drink beer at a friend's Oktoberfest birthday celebration the night before (though I did try to carbo-load on crackers), I did fine in the race and even beat my time from September. Didn't beat my personal record, though.

Next goal: to beat last year's Ann Arbor Turkey Trot time this year. It will be done!

Step around the heart of it

2011-10-11T22:40:00.000-07:00

In the current mystery series I'm hooked on, the detective is an enterprising Irish immigrant in New York at the turn of the last century.

In Tell Me, Pretty Maiden, Molly Murphy is juggling five different cases - everything from an amnesiac woman to a haunted theatre - and of course most of them end up being connected in some way.

In previous books, real-life people (like President McKinley's assassin, the police Commissioner in 1901, and one of the first female NYPD officers) leap out of the pages of history and into Molly Murphy's world. In this one, Nellie Bly features prominently. (My grandparents gave me a biography of Nellie Bly for my twelfth birthday. I loved it.) And like Bly, Molly ends up going undercover in a women's mental institution to solve a case. She also jets down to Yale to dig up the truth about a missing student and joins the cast of a new risqué musical to find out who is the "ghost" scaring the performers in it.

In a Gilded Cage has less gallivanting around: Molly investigates several suspicious and sudden deaths during an influenza outbreak in the city. I guessed the identity of the murderer - that marks a first for me for any Rhys Bowen book. (I didn't, however, figure out the motive.)

The thing I love about this series is that there are so many different social movements and political undercurrents during this period in American history, and New York is a perfect melting pot for all of them. Each book has Molly encountering some new community or subculture; in Cage, it's the suffragist movement, as Molly joins a group of Vassar alumnae who march in support of votes for women.

I've already reserved the last two books in the set at the library - it's going to be so bittersweet when I've finished them! This series has been such a delight.

They don't love you like I love you

2011-10-08T22:14:00.000-07:00

I found myself having to give a glowing introduction at a recent community screening for a documentary I hadn't yet seen. As it turns out, Gerrymandering was a good primer on the use and abuse of drawing political boundaries in America. It does a pretty fair job of pointing out that both Republicans and Democrats have redrawn political maps to their own advantage. And it did an equally fair job of pointing out that while gerrymandering has historically been a tool to break up and disenfranchise blocs of voters (African Americans, Latinos) or even individuals (challengers to incumbents), it has also been a good way to elect people that would otherwise never have a chance at winning in existing districts (African Americans in the South, for instance).

The film heavily favors independent commissions as the solution to creating a fair redistricting process: it lauds Iowa's existing (and extraordinarily geeky) process and tells the story of California's successful 2008 ballot measure.

And because I nerded out two years ago over the Washington State redistricting board game, I could barely contain myself at the screening when the film highlighted the USC Annenberg Center's online redistricting game.

In an effort to gerrymander (of sorts) my own brain, I read a book recommended by a friend. The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques had lots of great tips for breathing exercises and getting out of the mental ruts and agonizing, circular thought patterns that characterize anxiety. (On the other hand, it also had a lot of fairly unhelpful tips too.) And I appreciated the chapter on neurology that explains some of the basic science behind anxiety.

At some points, I started to have minor hyperventilation episodes just reading about some situations and realizing I exhibit some of the same mental loops and behavior patterns. In the end, though, I'm glad I read the book.

Even though the author (a practicing psychologist) favors management techniques independent of medication like SSRIs or SNRIs, I'm actually grateful for the drugs. I like the idea of "using your brain to change your brain" by overcoming destructive and debilitating thoughts caused (in part) by chemical imbalances, but I also understand how drugs work on the same neurotransmitters. With or without either techniques or prescriptions, or using a combination of both, managing anxiety so that it doesn't overcome you is still a difficult and sometimes exhausting challenge.

Leader of the pack

2011-09-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

I loved Kathryn Miller Haines' Winter series, so when I saw that she had a new book out, I immediately reserved it at the library without knowing anything about it.

It didn't take long to realize that it was intended for young adults. The heroine is 15, for starters; and all the drama revolves around different cliques at school, staying out past curfew, and getting in trouble with parents who don't understand what it's like to be an almost-grown up in wartime NYC.

And, despite the title, it turns out it isn't a murder mystery. (The term "murder" is 1940s tween slang equivalent of "the bee's knees", which the reader learns almost 2/3 of the way through the book.) The story is about the disappearance of a high school kid from the Lower East Side, whose school the heroine just transferred to from her posh private school on the Upper East Side after her mother dies and her father is injured at Pearl Harbor. Her dad is private investigator hired to find the missing boy, but because he won't let her help him with his work, she goes ahead and does it anyway. Teenage drama, heartbreak, and rebellion ensue.

As a story about teenagers navigating their independence, it's not a bad book. It feels like it might become a series: a lot of the sub-plots aren't wrapped up, and a lot of tiny questions about characters aren't answered. As a mystery, though, there wasn't much to keep me reading. The end was a little anti-climactic, and the heroine doesn't really have anything to do with solving the case.

What the book did a good job of capturing, though, was that awkward in-between phase of the teenage years, where high school is its own social realm of mini-cultures and where adults just don't get how clueless they are about how capable and responsible teens can really be if they'd only be given opportunities to be independent. That adolescent mentality pervaded the book so naturally, it was brilliant.

Milepost X

2011-09-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

Another 5K down!

A friend (in town for only 5 hours) convinced me to sign up last-minute for a 5K before she got on her flight to DC. We saw a bunch of tents while walking around Green Lake and wandered over to see what was up. With 6 minutes left for last-minute registration an 14 hours left until the race (and having done no cardio workouts in 2 weeks since I left for SoCal), I registered spur-of-the-moment. It was a women-only race, with an emphasis on mother-daughter teams, and that was definitely part of the appeal.

This might be the first year I complete three 5Ks! I really do need to start doing 8 or 10K races. I've already done two 5Ks this year, and am planning to participate in the Ann Arbor Turkey Trot again this fall.

Also, I might have to become a corporate sellout. This was my first race sponsored not by a nonprofit but by an athletic clothing line. The free swag and free post-race food were seriously pretty cool, as were the heavily, clearly branded items for sale. I think the race fee alone was worth it for the quality T-shirt. ( Causes, meh. They only give you water and a banana afterwards, and the T-shirt is generally bulky and unisex. Was my soul bought so easily by cute tops, stylish running shorts, and yoga pants? Yes, yes it was. Because I finally found a quality purse hanger! It has the Iron Girl logo on it, of course, but whatevs. It's a cute logo with purdy colors. Squeeeeee.)

Commercial stuff aside, it was incredibly fun. And I think it got me back on track for being active. The past couple of weeks, with travelling and a slight post-vacation cough and a general bout with depression, have made it a little difficult to get back into my active routine. Too bad I'll miss soccer this week for a nonprofit dinner!

Immediately after the race, I went blackberry picking with some friends. Gotta love summer in Seattle!

Alive, alive, oh!

2011-09-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

When post-vacation, possible airplane-induced coughing fits and a sore throat prevent nighttime sleeping, reading is always a key part of recovery.

In the next Molly Murphy installment, our feisty heroine is hired to locate a long-lost relative of a wealthy New Yorker. She is sent back to Ireland, where she accidentally swaps identities with a gun-smuggling actress and gets herself wrapped up with the IRB. I liked how the book connected the wave of Irish immigrants from the Great Famine to the ones from the turn of the century, as well as the 19th-century Irish freedom fighters to the increasingly successful ones at the turn of the century. The book spanned incidents and events across two generations. And of course, it being an Irish story (not an American one), it's largely tragic and sorrowful.

I found myself reflecting that I was glad I ditched my tour cohort and went to the National Museum of Ireland instead of the Guinness Brewery when we were in Dublin.

And yes, I had "Forgotten Hero" stuck in my head while reading the entire book. (Teenage Rainster loved that song. She was an odd duck .)

Not the HTML kind

2011-09-09T16:35:00.000-07:00

Being so near to the Dream Factory made me realize I hadn't watched any movies in a really long time (since I cancelled my Netflix subscription when they separated the online streaming from the DVD rentals).

While in SoCal, I visited my aunt, uncle, and cousins. We watched Source Code as a compromise between no horror films (me) and nothing "boring"(19- and 21-year-old male cousins).

I'm partial to both time-travel and alternate-reality stories, and this was a bit of both. Jake Gyllenhaal plays an Army vet who is part of a government security experiment: he must re-live the final 8 minutes of a doomed train until he finds its bomber and prevents a second attack. At the same time, he's trying to find out how he got to be part of the situation. There are some pretty big, gaping holes in the plot - but other than that it's a decently engaging (if somewhat predictable) movie.

A pocketful of mumbles

2011-09-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

I read the next two Molly Murphy books in lieu of packing for a trip to Southern California. (As a result, I forgot flip flops and a swimsuit, which are rather key for any stay in 90-degree weather.)

In Like Flynn takes our detective heroine to a countryside manor to investigate fraudulent spiritualists. (Doesn't there have to be a fake seance in every mystery series? Did Agatha Christie set that standard?) Naturally, there are a few murders that she has to solve along the way. A few of the plot twists seemed hastily thrown in and a bit improbable (like the sudden reappearance of the would-be rapist she thought she killed back in Ireland), but then others were definitely welcome (she and the police captain finally get it on, after three books of too-proper behavior).

In Oh Danny Boy, though, we are soberly reminded that those too-proper behaviors often prevented unwanted pregnancies in an era when women had extremely limited ways of supporting themselves or a child. The book focuses on an NYPD bribery scandal, and Molly attempts to prove the innocence of her somewhat selfish police captain and future baby daddy. In between bouts of morning sickness, she stumbles upon a missing heiress and a Jack the Ripper-esque string of killings; of course, the two cases end up being connected.
And because the Irish family she shares a home with is conveniently out in Connecticut recuperating from typhoid, Molly is alone to grapple with the drama and trauma of a potential abortion and miscarriage. One other very interesting introduction in this book is the (real-life) character of one of NYPD's first female officers. I love how, after a few books of Molly stumbling around to find her way as a female private investigator, Bowen has managed to find her a female mentor.

Perhaps it was appropriate, then, that I was pulled over for speeding on my way to Santa Barbara by a female California Highway Patrol officer. She kindly informed me how fast she believed I was going, as she wrote me my first-ever citation. (In fact, it was the first time I've ever been pulled over. Oh, firsts! I'm bizarrely relieved.) At any rate, Mi Cuñado's sister is a cop too; she loves her job but also has acknowledged the glass ceiling and social double standards.

Though a lot has been achieved in women's rights in the 109 years between Molly's time and mine, there's still a long way to go.

Where the ragged people go

2011-08-21T23:58:00.000-07:00

Unlike Rhys Bowen's Lady Georgiana series, which it took me two books to start to appreciate, I instantly loved the Molly Murphy series. Maybe it's the simple difference between a destitute immigrant protagonist and a royal one, even if they're both intelligent and plucky. Whatever the reason, I really like this mystery series.

Books 2 and 3 have our heroine attempting to start her own detective business.

In Death of Riley, Molly manages to convince a local detective to hire her as his office assistant, though she wants to be his apprentice; when he is murdered, she takes over his business and hunts down his killer, who also turns out to be President McKinley's assassin. (She couldn't stop him in time, though part of me wonders what if? How would the 21st century have panned out if Teddy Roosevelt hadn't first inherited the Oval Office?) While chasing crooked cops and retracing her boss' last footsteps through the seedy parts of the Big Apple, Molly manages to ingratiate herself with the counter-culture Greenwich Village artist, feminist, socialist, and LGBT crowds.

In For the Love of Mike, Molly gets her first two legitimate cases as a detective (which of course turn out to be related): find a missing Irish heiress, and figure out which garment factory worker is stealing clothing designs and giving them to a rival shop owner. In the process, she helps organize a strike for better working conditions in factories - my kind of chick!

I think I love this mystery series because I like how Molly's investigations lead her to all parts of New York, which reflect all parts of America. As an Irish immigrant, she finds herself connected to the power structure of Tammany Hall and the police beat but also the hard labor experiences of the fish market, garment factories, brothels and bars, and gang protection; unlike Italian or Jewish immigrants at the time, she has a jarring but believable ability to move fluidly between social classes and neighborhoods - as a maid, a lady's companion, a garment worker, a union striker. In the third book, she goes to jail several times (mistaken as a prostitute, mistaken as a murder suspect, and for striking) - and I'm enjoying reading her character development as a somewhat naive but also somewhat privileged immigrant (she's educated) who is slowly learning the ropes of American justice, American double standards, American determination, and American dreams.

Brains in your head and feet in your shoes

2011-08-08T01:40:00.000-07:00

And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew.
Just go right along. You’ll start happening too. . .
- Dr. Seuss, Oh! The Places You'll Go

Today was one of the most awesome, unplanned adventurous days I've had in a very long time. I got out of my comfort zone; I challenged myself; and I surmounted unexpected obstacles.

A friend suggested paddleboarding - which I mistook as pedal boating and didn't find out until we got to the lake. Since I was prepared to sit on my ass and pedal leisurely (not stand and balance on a surf board and paddle), it was quite a leap for me to go along with the activity. Once on the water, though, it proved to be incredibly fun - I was first to climb aboard and the last to disembark!

Next up, I climbed in a 60+-foot rock wall. Because the past two weeks have been intensely emotionally draining, it was something I felt I needed to do to symbolize moving forward - alone and whole. It freaked me out, but I worked through the anxiety and fear and my perceived inability to complete the task. Once I broke past the paralyzing "ZOMG I can't do this" attitude, I powered through, rang the bell at the top of the wall, and belayed down to the bottom.

I'm not going to lie, it was scary until I reached the bottom. I was shaking when I took the gear off, but ultimately I was proud of myself for finishing the course and trusting myself to accomplish something scary and new.

Then I packed bread and cheese and met up with some friends to watch the sun set at a woodsy, isolated park in Seattle. We walked around the trails and on the beach, ate, and then promptly got lost in the dark once the sun went down. We ended up wandering around the trails, lost in the forest in complete darkness. (Luckily, we had a headlamp.) We were three safety-conscious women alone in a huge, pitch-black park where bad things have been known to happen. We meandered around for about 6 miles, but in the end found the correct dark, sketchy, after-hours parking lot and drove home, safe and sound.

I generally dislike it when people use the phrase "at the end of the day" in a sentence. However, it's entirely appropriate in this context.

The last half of this summer has not been what I anticipated or hoped it would be. The next few weeks will be immensely difficult, both professionally and personally, and I have no idea where I will be in a month or two or six.

But at the end of the day - after trying new things, having faith in myself, and trusting friends - I know I have an incredible amount of strength and courage that I don't always recognize or utilize. I''ll be okay. I'll survive.

Blood, toil, tears, and sweat

2011-08-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

In the last of Rhys Bowen's Lady Georgiana mystery series, the entire cast is trapped in a blizzard in a creepy Transylvanian castle for a wedding. Like the third book (which over-cheesed the Scottishness), this fourth one is pretty campy: vampire tales, trap doors in staircases, Balkan feuds, a Robespierre-like head of the secret police, and superstitious townspeople. And just like the third book, I loved this one too. It was horribly delightful; the cast of characters was Christie-esque. And unlike the previous books, the plot finally didn't revolve around spying on Wallis Warfield-Simpson for the Queen of England.

Since I finished the Lady Georgiana series, I moved on to another one by Rhys Bowen: the Molly Murphy books. And though I like both protagonists from the two series, they couldn't be further apart on the social scale: one is 34th in line to the British throne in the 1930s, and the other is an Irish immigrant to New York City at the beginning of the 20th century.

It's like the adult murder mystery version of American Girls... except that the heroines all hail from the British Isles.

Having finally visited Ellis Island myself a few years ago, I could visualize the processing procedures the characters had to endure. The most heartbreaking part of the story was that a fellow Irishwoman gives Molly her identity and boat ticket to take her two small children to America to be with their father; the woman is dying of tuberculosis and would never be allowed into the U.S. It did, actually, remind me of a lot of the heartbreaking stories you can read on Ellis Island - of refugees turned away or families split up if not everyone passed through the immigration inspection.

At any rate, it's a good start to a murder mystery series. The main characters are all lovable and colorful and believable. As an immigrant tale, it's not so bad, either - the plucky heroine tries to apply for jobs everywhere but discovers that immigrants are divided in the labor market by ethnicity, and that Tammany Hall sometimes makes being Irish a benefit.
There are certainly little impossible and improbable twists and turns as the characters try to solve a murder amid Irish home rule sympathizers, tenement housing, and rigid gender expectations... but then what's a New York story without a little suspension of the rules?

Hold the world but as the world, Gratiano

2011-07-30T00:28:00.000-07:00

In particularly difficult personal times, I've always turned to this poem by Robert Frost.

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain --and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

I think it appeals to me because of the emphasis on binaries (in/out, wrong/right, stay/go, dark/light, up/down) as well as reflective pauses (the silence of footsteps, the glance at the clock). It reminds me that shifting borders can be home, that existence and presence can slip between discrete concretes.

Living with both anxiety and depression has been similarly fluid. One comes, the other goes, and vice versa. Having grown up with several bipolar and anxiety-ridden family members, "manic" is my default standard for acceptable human interaction... so it took me years to recognize that emotional ping-pong tournaments are not the norm for everyone. Though they're inherently a part of me, what has proven incredibly difficult is the process of un-learning it.

At one point in my life, being biracial defined my worldview - explaining identity in terms of (but inherently against) a constructed binary, and rejecting everything that demanded a monochromatic tone. I've moved past that introspective period of my life to a firmer, confident identity - but the underlying acceptance of fluidity and shifting states of being doesn't seem to go away.

Both the anxiety and depression are manageable, even when triggered unexpectedly. For starters, medication helps alleviate some of the agonizing and destructive mood spikes. Coping with just thoughts and emotions but not the chemical, tangible feelings and visceral reactions is rather bizarre, though, after living with mental chaos. I described it to someone I once counted as a friend as feeling like Super Mario: running along on a level path, jumping up slightly, but unable to skyrocket, fly, or plummet erratically. (It wasn't a perfect analogy, given that I don't play video games, but it's what my brain gave me in order to explain itself and its chemical changes.)

I love my family. I love my friends. I have many close friendships, and every day I am stunned by how many amazing people I am privileged to include in my life. I enjoy writing and singing and dancing, and am told I do all three incredibly well. I prefer to have philosophical conversions with a few people over wine, beer, or good food rather than loud times at popular, crowded places. These are the moments and pieces of beauty that make me happy and give me strength.

But still, there's that little stone room, that damned laird's lug, that sees and hears and senses and feels that very full life from a distance. Voices echo in it. Sometimes it's a struggle to breathe inside, and sometimes it's a struggle to realize that the walls themselves are a mere hologram.

In one of my favorite movies, one protagonist says to the other,

"I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt."

Indeed.

Brown heath and shaggy wood

2011-07-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

Between toddlers visiting, weddings, baby showers, bridal showers, and accidentally hiking steeper trails, July has been a fun whirlwind. I haven't had much time for reading until recently.

It took me a while to get into Rhys Bowen's Lady Georgie mysteries (see below). But the third book is easily my favorite: for starters, the heroine's "spy" activities are no longer reporting the Prince of Wales' activities with Wallis Simpson (silly) - this time, she's sent by the Home Office to figure out why members of the royal family are prone to life-threatening "accidents" near Balmoral (definitely more spy-like). Plus, the Loch Ness Monster is part of the plot, as are conspiracies involving Queen Victoria's son the Duke of Clarence, a record-breaking aviatrix, haggis-eating, caber-tossing gaffes, and hiking in the Highlands. What's not to love? Lastly, Georgie's debonair-and-possibly-secret-agent romantic interest is finally resolved, after two books of the "Will They or Won't They?" game. (One doesn't like to be led on.)

Totally worth both the overdue fines at the library and staying up until 3am to finish.

Once I built a tower up to the sun

2011-07-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

On to the next historical mystery series, of course! This one took a while for me to get into, but now I'm kind of charmed by it.

It's the early days of the 1930s; Rhys Bowen's erstwhile sleuth, Lady Georgianna, is 34th in line to the British throne. The Queen asks her to spy on Wallis Warfield Simpson and the future Edward VIII, and in the process of doing so she solves several murders.

The reason it took me so long to get into the series was that it's a bit like reading Georgette Heyer - complete with a dashing and mysterious Peer. The plot is high society party after high society party with a few nods thrown in to the working poor. Though living in genteel poverty, Lady G cannot be seen working, so she sneaks around London as a cleaning service to members of her own social class. Though her father is cousin to royalty, her mother is a social-climbing actress and her grandfather is a Cockney former copper. Though she visits Buckingham Palace to have tea with the Queen regularly, she also slips around the South End solving murders.

At first I thought the series tried too hard to be too inclusive of every possible class of Briton during the Depression. But after a while, it grew on me. They really are very good murder mysteries - all the gallivanting from Palace to poorhouse made for some good twists that kept me on my toes.

Naturally, the books are currently overdue at the library. And the next two in the series are in my queue!

Big lights will inspire you

2011-06-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

Coincidentally following the recent "Rah Rah New York" theme, I finished the next (and sadly, last) two books in my current mystery series. Set against the backdrop of the World War II home front, the Rosie Winter mysteries are pure joy - though it seems a bit disrespectful to say that, given that the overall tone is noir-esque and the author convincingly paints wartime society as an anxiety-ridden and depressed collective consciousness taunted by ghosts of hope.

Like the first two, I loved the sarcastic, plucky, crime-solving, struggling-actress main character. Unlike the first two, I had no clue who the culprits were until the heroine did - something every mystery fan secretly loves, especially if they've been catching on to the clues way too early in the capers lately.

In Winter in June, Rosie and her pal Jayne join the USO and tour the South Pacific with a performance troupe, lifting the morale of servicemen and women. Then in When Winter Returns, they go home to NYC as war veterans who saw combat as civilian entertainers. Murder and mayhem ensue, on top of all the stress caused by wartime food rations and saboteurs.

What was impressive about these last two was that characters and stereotypes from some of the previous books were completely upended. There was definitely continuity, but since the contexts and settings changed, so did new and shocking developments about some of the protagonists. Each book didn't neatly wrap up a chapter in the lives of all the colorful characters; it picked up with their personal drama in the next few books. And since actors and actresses (as well as mobsters) are the focus of these addictive whodunits, it all worked as great theater - not in an unbelievable soap-opera manner, but in a small-town-with-some-serious-skeletons kind of way.

And the subtle way the author addressed racism and sexism in the 1940s (both in and out of the armed forces) is definitely appreciated by a modern reader.

Looking forward to whenever Book 5 comes out!

These streets will make you feel brand new...

2011-06-24T20:57:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, at a karaoke function for a conference in DC, I discovered I could sing the Alicia Keys part of Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind".

I can't get the song out of my head now, after the State Assembly voted to make New York the 6th and largest state to allow same-sex couples to marry.

Great image from Manhattan tonight, via ThinkProgress:

When the lights go on again

2011-06-19T16:13:00.000-07:00

After finishing the mystery series set during the Depression, I've found a new series set in NYC during WWII. I like it better than the first, despite the same problem of guessing the murderers' identities in the last few chapters before the sleuth does.

The heroine, for starters, is hilariously witty. She's a struggling actress whose sort-of boyfriend is missing in action in the South Pacific and whose roommate is dating a guy with mob connections.

Before ordering the entire series from the library, a few reviews I read claimed that the books have many historical inaccuracies. There are so many references to wartime New York and 1940s popular culture and slang that there's no way I would catch most of them. Besides, they don't really affect the plot or distract from the tale.

I appreciate how the changes the war caused in everyday life, relegated to history books, are the central backdrop for these whodunits. In The War Against Miss Winter, a pervasively patriotic entertainment industry is the main focus of the mystery; in The Winter of Her Discontent, it's wartime meat rations that take center stage. Though I (disappointingly) pinpointed the murderer in each book, each one had an important plot twist that was impossible to foresee. What I loved was that the unexpected turns highlighted gray ethical areas and the irony of making sub-moral choices on the home front of a "Good" War.

I also really, really like the heroine. Aside from being sarcastic and perceptive, she also has an overly active, sometimes damaging imagination and a sort of war-induced social anxiety ... and I can definitely relate to both of those things.

El tiempo de la isla

2011-05-28T16:53:00.000-07:00

In the first "real" vacation I've had in a very long time, I finally made it to the Caribbean. I spent a few days in San Juan, Puerto Rico before joining 8 friends on a 45-foot catamaran to go sailing around the British Virgin Islands. The two parts of the trip are distinctly different, but enjoyable in their own ways.

I loved loved loved San Juan. I never left the old walled city, but that was definitely enough to captivate me. Next time I visit, I'd like to see the rain forest, caves, and beaches, but for the few days I was there, two Spanish forts, the old city wall, a cathedral, parks, a ton of museums, and various ruins held my fascination and imagination. At night, I loved the sounds of live bands and music coming from clubs, apartments, and street corners.

And the food was amazing! I think my favorite was a sweet plantain "lasagna" ... actually, all the plantain dishes I had were delicious. I ordered mofongo at one restaurant not knowing what it was, and it turned out to be a tasty, uniquely Puerto Rican dish. I also discovered a new appreciation for piña coladas.

My adventures in Spanish are an ongoing saga - and of course, everyone thought I was Boricua. Which was part of why I think I felt immediately at home in San Juan: it struck me as a multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-racial society with rich traditions spanning several continents, and I'd love to explore it more.

Sailing around the British Virgin Islands was also beautiful and fascinating! We sailed from island to island, docking or mooring every night in a different harbor. (One yacht club where we stayed played Pirates of the Caribbean, which we giddily watched because we were in the Caribbean.)

I've never been a big rum fan, but after having Pusser's Rum, I think I've changed my mind - what better way to start a new beverage experience than with the very rum the Royal Navy served its sailors daily for over 300 years?

After San Juan, the food couldn't really compare - I thought the best food of the trip were dishes we prepared on the boat (like bourbon-marinated pork chops with marmalade glaze). I had conch ceviche at a beach cafe, though, which was interesting and different.

I tried snorkeling for the first time; unfortunately, I jumped right in and tried it in fairly open water. Three daily attempts and three panic attacks later, I finally plunked my head

down in 3-feet deep water on a beach until I got used to the snorkel.

One couple on the boat got engaged during the trip! The next day, they lost the ring; hilarity and heartbreak ensued as we tore apart the boat trying to find it. Ultimately, it wasn't found until about half an hour before we had to leave for the airport.

One thing that haunted me the whole time was the role of tourism and the legacy of colonization. There was something perpetually jarring about a majority-black native population serving majority white, super-wealthy vacationers in the yacht clubs, marinas, and resort towns across the islands. The fabulously gorgeous houses, restaurants, and harbor buildings sometimes seemed like the facades in an Old West town - a block or two inland past the tree buffers, there were actually a lot of poor, destitute-looking areas. This is what struck me the most about my first trip to a Caribbean paradise, and it was rather depressing; I spent many nights on the boat reading up on the history of the Virgin Islands and pondering economies of complicity.

All in all, though, the trip was very relaxing.

The transition back to work has been difficult, especially with a new medication regimen I just started (courtesy of the snorkel-inspired anxiety attacks). It's heartening to realize, however, that I do have good friends - from San Juan travel buddies to the BVI sailing crew to someone willing to drive me to my doctor's office post-vacation.

I have no idea if my impressions of my trip would be different if I hadn't been in the middle of some of my worst bouts with depression and anxiety, but all's well that end's well. It was a beautiful two weeks, and a refreshing break from the hectic rhythms of my busy brain and busy life.

Pacing, pacing, pacing

2011-05-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

The first 5K I've actually run twice, NARAL Pro-Choice Washington's annual Run for Your Rights, was today. Continuing the all-jogging-no-walking trend from Thanksgiving, I also ran this entire stretch. (It helped that the course was entirely flat, unlike the surprisingly hilly route for the Ann Arbor Turkey Trot.)

I even beat my Ann Arbor time by almost 9 minutes.

w00t, yo. w00t.

Next up: maybe an 8K or 10K. Sometime...

This fortress built by Nature for herself

2011-04-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

Netflix keeps suggesting really quirky, insightful films that I end up appreciating.

The Opposite of Sex is narrated by a sarcastic, manipulative, 16-year-old pregnant runaway who seduces and then absconds with her half-brother's bisexual boyfriend. Throw in the thousands of dollars she also takes off with, a false molestation charge against the brother (who is a teacher), and the neurotic and meddling sister of the brother's former lover, and it's a head-swirling recipe for an edgy and enjoyable comedy.

It did get to be a little tiresome, though, the way the whole entourage of characters kept trotting across the country and over the northern border - Indiana to LA to Canada. That may have been symbolic, however; though the traipsing about North America wasn't very realistic, what was real was the range of characters' reactions to and relationships with "traditional" setups involving sex and love, and the defenses they put up to cope with both. From the media and political frenzy over a gay teacher to ignorant comments about "deserving" AIDS to judge-y comments left and right that are turned upside down, the snapshots are all definitely art parodying life. Even the narrator toys with the audience, telling them what they're probably expecting in the plot twists, what they should be foreshadowing, etc. It's a clever and tactical mirror for the social scenarios playing out in the storyline.

Based on the Netflix description, I expected to somewhat dislike the film, but I actually ended up liking it. And apparently I didn't learn my lesson about not judging a film by its Netflix description, because I expected to be somewhat bored with Me and You and Everyone We Know, but ended up really liking it too.

The focus of Me and You and Everyone We Know are the little eccentricities everybody has that make up their identities. So the whole film is basically about finding beauty in everybody's weirdnesses. Which is kind of appealing, given that the uber-OCD freak in me has been coming out a lot lately due to stress and anxiety.

There were also the themes of not taking anyone at face value, about technology both giving people the courage to be themselves and giving them the anonymity to pose as anything they want, about innocence and cynicism in navigating social facades, and lastly (but crucially) about misinterpretations. Naturally, I appreciated the "new" communications (chat rooms, video messages) both complementing and working at odds with "old" communications (phones, notes left in a window). Then there were the images of self-presentation - the shoes people wear, the makeup they put on, the large magnets that change a motor vehicle from a car to a cab.

I really liked how all the fragments and idiosyncrasies made a believable patchwork of a neighborhood and people's lives - and how the film ended with a generational torch-passing of sorts.

The Village people

2011-04-17T23:53:00.000-07:00

At a community screening of The Stonewall Uprising, I don't think there was a dry eye in the theatre at end of the film.

It's a powerful and short documentary about identity, safe spaces, civil rights, and political power. Most of the people featured in the film were all at the Stonewall Inn the night police raided it - bar patrons, a reporter, a cop commanding his squad.

Half of the documentary focuses on laws that persecuted gays and lesbians, and on making the viewer understand the very real fear and culture of hiding that accompanied being gay or lesbian before the 1969 Stonewall "riots" that sparked the beginning of the LGBT rights movement began to change that. It's interspersed with horrible propaganda clips from the 1950s and 60s about how gays and lesbians are deviants, sociopaths, and predators; it highlights how people were methodically hunted and their lives ruined for trying to find both public and private spaces to be themselves. Without that context, it's impossible to understand how monumentally important it was that people resisted and fought back during this one bar raid in New York.

A friend remarked that, from an organizer's perspective, it's extremely moving and humbling to realize "Holy shit, there's something huge going on here, socially and culturally." (Having just wrapped up about two solid months of rallies and protests of our own, we could definitely relate to certain parts of the movie about mobilizing people and finding out that you have vastly underestimated the level of interest in your event.)

The most poignant scenes of the documentary were the moments where participants said, in their own words, how proud or shocked or happy they were that the "riots" were the first time they felt empowered.

The film ends with the first Pride Parade, organized in New York City to commemorate Stonewall a year later. It was a great way to end, showing how the momentum from Stonewall was channeled into something enduring and amazing.

Though there's still a hell of a long way to go in America in terms of gay rights, this documentary was a good tribute to how far we've come - and in the lifetimes of pioneers who were there 42 years ago.

When you know the notes to sing

2011-04-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

I watched High School Musical a few days ago.

And I liked it.

There. I've said it.

It was nothing close to what I was expecting. Netflix kept suggesting it because I like Glee, but there's really no comparison. I was expecting High School Musical to be another variant of the same old plot: unexpectedly good singer lands starring role in production, finds love, shows up rivals.

Instead, it was a cheesy but cute story about kids in high school being unfairly constricted by stereotypes: the jocks, the nerds, the stoners, the drama kids. In fact, the title's musical is never actually performed - the tryouts are the endgame, not the production itself.

The acting is bad and overdone (it's a made-for-TV Disney movie, after all), the songs aren't all that memorable, and I can't relate to these young 'un pop stars (though my niece watches the Disney Channel all the time). But I thought it was a cute story with a healthy message that trying new things, taking risks, and not conforming to what is expected of you can all be liberating.

Quo fata ferunt

2011-04-11T23:48:00.000-07:00

The fourth and so far final book in the Depression-era mystery series I've been reading took place in a fun new locale: Bermuda, where the small-town Connecticut protagonist detectives are honeymooning.

Unlike Books 2 and 3, where I somehow (disappointingly) managed to figure out the cases fairly early on, in this one I merely identified the murderer based on a short description of his eating habit, but not the motive.

So now my opinion of the series has changed completely. I love the characters and the settings; but the quality of the mysteries are somewhat lacking. I might be a mystery fan, but I shouldn't be able to guess 3 out of 4 of a series' whodunits. The enjoyment comes from the suspense of being completely surprised by the ending.

Having said that, I think this one was my favorite of the series. The tropical location, the classic Agatha Christie-esque crime in a big house with a dwindling number of suspects ... even if it ended on a sad note (the looming Second World War), it was still good fun to read.

It happened one night

2011-04-04T23:39:00.000-07:00

There are few things more affirming and disappointing than solving back-to-back mysteries in a series. It makes you wonder if the writing and twists are too easy that your first suspicion (which clouds your reading of the entire book) turns out to be spot-on.

The third book in a mystery series that amuses me, Shadow Waltz was the second where I guessed the murderer's identity less than halfway through the story. So naturally, I had to stay up until 2am to see if I was right; it was a bit anti-climactic to discover I was.

Like the first two books in the series, this one featured a great cast of characters, with the recently engaged detective protagonists solving yet another murder while also planning their wedding.

I'm drawn to the series because it does, in fact, mimic the gritty innocence of a Depression-era film: it effectively captures the attitudes of both noir and musicals from the 1930s. However, though I understand the need to connect a modern audience to the characters, the historian in me is beginning to find the speech anachronisms unappealing - this book had characters dropping the word "pregnant" left and right, instead of euphemisms used at the time and certainly in mixed company.

Quibbles aside, it was still a fun, light means of escaping this upcoming busy week.

A serpent's tooth

2011-03-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Because I've had it out from Netflix since before legislative session started, I finally got around to watching Confetti, a mockumentary about three couples vying for "Most Original Wedding" and fame and fortune on the cover of a wedding magazine.

The problem from the start was that two of the three couples didn't seem to work as couples. And the couple that did had the most gender-stereotyped nostalgic wedding (a Top Hat-esque musical number), and (spoiler alert) of course they won the contest. Ironically, I thought the really annoying couple (super-competitive tennis players) had the most original wedding, and the nudist couple were just there for shock value.

I think the film was trying to mimic Christopher Guest's hilarious faux-documentaries, but it in my mind it fell far short.

In a similar vein, I found myself a little disappointed with Fool, Christopher Moore's retelling of King Lear from the fool's point of view. It took great liberties with the plot, which was to be expected.

The concept was great - since the fool appears so little in Shakespeare's play (plays if you count the quarto and folio as two), his off-stage activities leave a lot to be imagined. It turns out, in Moore's story, that he is secretly directing the flow of events by both accident and design. It's an old theme: the fool as wise man, the caste-less as the most noble or powerful, the public funny face contrasting with the private personal struggles, the acerbic wit a biting social commentary.

As the author's postscript notes, the play was performed for centuries with a rewritten happier ending, so this particular new revision is nothing new. I was intrigued for the first half of the book, when it largely paralleled the original, but then by the end got tired of the obvious deviation from it. Honestly, most of it was the numerous incestuous plot twists - though true to both the time and the rank of the characters themselves, this modern reader was really grossed out and disturbed by it all.

There were, however, several clever aspects that I loved. For starters, chapters were peppered with casual quotes (and characters!) from Shakespeare's other works, which were great little inside jokes. Turning Shakespeare's greatest tragedy into a partially irreverent sex romp was also subversively laudable.

In the end, I appreciate all Shakespeare retellings, remakes, reiterations, and reduxes. I don't always love them all (like this one), but I love the creativity that goes into re-imagining a well-known and well-regarded classic.

In sunshine or in shadow

2011-03-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

As someone who can sing "Danny Boy" by heart (in various harmonies), I lovelovelove the Muppets' version:

Thanks to the FG for posting on FB!

In related news, in support of a rally in Olympia today, we sent out an email alert from a staff member named Erin. Totally went over our heads that that made sense on St. Patrick's Day until a member replied, "Erin Go Bragh!"

Love that too.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart

2011-03-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

I am admittedly biased because Mi Hermana is a linguist, but the short documentary (56 minutes!) about two American linguists documenting dying languages around the world is a must-see for anyone who cares about language, communication, and knowledge in general.

Two linguists visit Siberia, India, Bolivia, and Arizona to find native speakers of dying languages. In doing so, they address some of the reasons languages become extinct: no writing system, colonization, economic opportunities associated with speaking a dominant language, social pressure to stop speaking a language.

But the most compelling reason to try and document dying languages: that language is the complex expression of human knowledge itself, and unique ways of seeing the world will die with the language's last speaker. In India, for instance, they found a numerical system based in both 12 and 20; in Bolivia, a moribund language taught to only male healers contains generations of medicinal knowledge; in Siberia, one-word sentences include subjects, verbs, and objects.

For me, the most powerful takeaway from the film was something one of the linguists said, in a call to action for fellow linguists: "I don't see how you can justify devoting your research career to the syntax of French - a language with millions of speakers - when the skills that you possess could help document a language that is going to go extinct in your lifetime."

I know not everyone (in any field) feels called to be an activist, and that linguists who do study the syntax of dominant languages are also doing good work and contributing to the body of human knowledge. But that statement was one of the many poignant moments from the film. Another would be the last speaker of a vanishing language in Arizona admitting that he talks to himself in it because there's no one left with whom he can carry on a fluent conversation.

Again, I'm admittedly biased because my own mother didn't teach me or my sisters Tagalog (and we resisted the few lessons she sent us to anyway - children choosing not to speak languages is another reason they die). Tagalog is by no means a vanishing language, but passing on a language to children can be incredibly difficult if it's not spoken in the home or elsewhere in their lives. Mi Hermana is having problems teaching the pingüinitos Spanish while living in Michigan, and La Otra Hermana is trying to teach the kiddos Samoan completely separate from any regularly spoken exposure to it.

Since St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner and all things Irish are everywhere in America, I'm reminded of some of the classes I took comparing the Welsh and Irish efforts at reviving the respective languages that English eventually replaced. Some were successful, some were not; elsewhere in the world, resources are not necessarily available to resurrect a linguistic identity and culture.

At any rate, The Linguists is definitely on my list of highly recommended films.

Chess on ice

2011-03-13T16:16:00.000-07:00

New in the "2011 is the sportiest year ever" saga: curling!

Two friends' joint birthday celebrations started off with a visit to the open house for Seattle's curling club, where non-members get a quick lesson and some time on the ice.

Fun fun!

Sweeping was equally as fun as actually throwing the stone across the ice.

And what with the many Cross of St. Andrew emblems and the club's excellent scotch selection, I felt right at home.

Le singe est sur la branche, every inch a king

2011-03-11T22:01:00.000-08:00

Because my brain has been a little fried lately, I watched Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill. I think I've seen snippets somewhere before - the last half of the show was very familiar.

Nothing like watching an intelligent stand-up comedian whose routines draw on history and language to restore a vestige of my sanity.

One thing that did not help with restoring sanity: re-reading King Lear, which is currently overdue at the library and accruing fines.

It remains, undoubtedly, a masterfully told tragedy about family, betrayal, loyalty, duty, power, and nature. But it is a rather depressing tale after dealing with budget cuts and union busting for two straight weeks.

Oh, and La Otra (Loca) Hermana is moving to New Zealand in a month. She's quitting her teaching job and moving to Wellington with the children so that her husband can possibly find a better job in his hometown. It all came about very last-minute, and it is an understatement to say that Mi Hermana is incredibly hurt that they won't wait until she'll be in Seattle in June (for La Madre's surprise birthday party) so she can say goodbye to the little ones. I'll also miss the kids something fierce.

Maybe King Lear was close to home after all...

Wisconsciousness

2011-02-26T19:52:00.000-08:00

I woke up at 6am, I was in the office by 7:30, on the road to Olympia by 7:45, shoveling snow and salting pathways by 9:30, singing the national anthem at (and with) anti-union protesters by 11, and rallying with 2,500 fellow Washingtonians at my state's Capitol by noon.

My favorite picture:

I also liked a sign that said "Raise your Wisconsciousness," but I couldn't snap a photo in time.

There were also so many firefighters and firefighters' unions! I was hoping they'd march to the rally playing bagpipes like firefighters in Madison did last week, but (alas!) it was not to be.

More pics here. Video with my coworker being interviewed here.

Easy wind and downy flake

2011-02-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

2011 might be my sportiest year yet, if the past few weeks and upcoming plans are any indication.

The first weekend of the New Year, I went snowshoeing for the first time. (And in the process of renting snowshoes at REI, I discovered it was way cheaper to finally become an REI member. As a native Seattleite, perhaps it was destiny. At any rate, because the outdoor activities I've played all my life generally involve cleats, balls, or bats, I've always felt a little out of place in outdoorsy-themed stores. Maybe I can remedy that.)

I was expecting the appropriate gear to look like the tennis racquet-like items that Grandma has displayed in her basement den.

However, much to my delighted surprise, snowshoes actually look pretty sleek these days. Who knew? Clearly not me - somewhere in the back of my brain, I obviously thought they wouldn't have changed in centuries.

At any rate, it's always very cool to try something new and learn that you like doing it.

Snowshoeing is fun!

This weekend marked my second-ever snowshoe trip. The trail wasn't as challenging as the first, but there were great views. If Mt. Rainier had only been out, the view would have been even more spectacular.

For half the hike, though, I had "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" echoing in my head.

What's the good of scheming

2011-02-12T09:50:00.000-08:00

The second book in the latest mystery series I'm reading was better than the first. Mainly because half of it took place in Boston. And in my old neighborhood!

Ghost of a Chance, like Million Dollar Baby, played out like a Depression-era film - but instead of the hat tip to luxury that the first book was, this one largely took place in seedy bars. The love triangle from the first book was finally resolved as well; it was obvious how it would end up, but what's a good mystery-cracking team without a little internal drama?

I did, however, figure out the identity of the murderer halfway through the book. If the book's detectives don't suspect someone, and the character happens to mention something vaguely tied to the case but it's phrased in a very different way (in this case, "Argentina" instead of "South America," where the imported poison was from) then it's kind of a giveaway. Oh, well. There are usually a few books in a mystery series where the reader catches on before the characters do.

Books 3 and 4 await.

No Comment

2011-02-09T15:22:00.001-08:00

From Anne Taintor:

Order oysters and cancel the ersters

2011-02-07T20:49:00.000-08:00

On a friend-of-a-friend's recommendation (in a Facebook status comment, no less) I read Amy Patricia Meade's Million Dollar Baby. Since I finished my now-favorite historical mystery series ever, I've been looking for another one. Only requirement: plucky female protagonist.

The first of three Marjorie McClelland books, Million Dollar Baby takes place in a sleepy Connecticut town during the Depression. The heroine herself is a mystery writer, and naturally stumbles upon a cold case. To help her solve it is a fabulously wealthy Englishman who has just bought a mansion in town and a dashing police detective (foreshadowing the triangular drama was not difficult).

The charm of the book is that it plays out like a film straight from the era in which it takes place. In fact, I had visions of Top Hat and Bright Eyes in my head while reading the whole thing. At various points, I found myself identifying several potential anachronisms (mainly speech patterns and slang). But I wanted to finish the story, so I didn't double-check. And in the end, none of them mattered to the story anyway.

Though it wasn't a gripping, suspenseful page-turner, I still couldn't put it down. Maybe it was the often comical dialog between two of the main characters, but I think most of it was that the background stories of the townspeople was so real and tragic. Meade did a good job of painting a picture of a town with colorful, caring, or tragic characters during some of the worst economic times in history. The book is presented as a light-hearted period caper, but there are darker, pathos-ridden elements brimming under the surface. I liked that.

And of course, it all takes place between the Wars, so I'm partial to it anyway (see below).

Books 2 and 3 are in queue at the library.

Speak the speech, I pray you

2011-02-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

What's the perfect mid-day sanity break for a history major whose focus was "Between the World Wars"? Going to see The King's Speech, of course.

(Colin Firth as the star had ~~nothing~~ maybe ~~everything~~ something to do with it.)

At any rate, I really liked it. Even though I tend to agree with the local paper's review (they sent a Marxist critic to a movie about King George VI), as a story about a protagonist with a stammer and the relationship he forges with his Shakespeare-quoting speech therapist, the film was quite good. Historical inaccuracies abounded, but overall it was captivating.

But the movie appeals most to raving Anglophiles, particularly former nerdy tween girls who spent much of middle school obsessed with Edward VIII's abdication and would dramatically roll their eyes when classmates blinked and said "Wallis who?"

(Twenty years later, those girls dive into a matinee to temporarily escape the madness of legislative session. And then they geek out for the whole movie because they recognize all of the film's minor characters as major historical figures from their pet era.)

Ahem. I digress.

Geoffrey Rush was good as usual, but really his role didn't really differ drastically from any other role of teacher or coach in any other film. Colin Firth (and I realize I'm biased) had the more difficult role of mimicking a well-known voice in a particular accent as well as acting out the stammer itself. But the character I was fascinated by the most was the future Queen Mother: Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Mary. For starters, she was the only major female character, even if she basically played the aristocratic version of the stand-by-your-man gal. We got small glimpses into the personal life of the speech therapist and certainly the king - but of the one character who lived to most viewers' lifetimes (she only died in 2002), we got virtually nothing.

One theme that didn't get played out as much as I had hoped was the way in which radio and newsreels changed the relationship between Britons and the monarchy. (Buckingham Palace has a youtube channel now, and first announced Prince William's engagement via Twitter, so the idea of technology changing royal communication - and why - is certainly prescient.) Though there were many fleeting references to the role of the Royal Family, I think that the connection to the rest of the realm (or lack thereof) - and how radio changed it - could have been emphasized more. Without it, the climactic scenes where subjects throughout the world are inspired and comforted by their king's wartime radio speech just didn't seem very convincing.

Ay, there's the rub...

Gloriously dorky

2011-01-31T23:02:00.000-08:00

A friend on Facebook posted a video from these self-described "kooky teachers making history-based pop music parodies."

SERIOUSLY. GEEKING. OUT. Now, instead of watching Season 2 of "Dollhouse" on Netflix Instant Viewing, I am compelled to watch as many of these videos as possible before I fall asleep.

This one brings me back to my high school freshman history class:

Like jasmine petals, fluttering down

2011-01-26T22:32:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to watching Persepolis, which was a minor miracle, considering that Netflix shipped it to me in late November.

The graphic novels, which I read a few years ago, are definitely better. But the film was good too: even onscreen, Marjane Satrapi's memoir about growing up in a changing Iran remains a poignant coming-of-age tale for expatriates everywhere.

The film is also proof that there are many instances where animation can convey quiet but powerful scenes in ways that frames in a comic book can't.

Börk, börk, börk!

2011-01-17T19:24:00.000-08:00

Back when I made the same New Year's resolution every year (to re-evaluate my relationship with food), I would spend the first few weeks of January preparing meals and actually learning about flavors and techniques. Then, each year, as legislative session became progressively chaotic, I stopped. Then the resolutions ended altogether.

The behavior and the routine, however, have staying power.

After a building open house party, our office had half a keg of porter leftover. So I made a chocolate stout cake (marking the first time I made a layered cake!) and bland beef porter stew. Then I made a less bland stew, followed by Batch Three of the beef porter stew, which turned out pretty well.

Next up: a vegan lemon cake!

I spent all day at the MLK Day rally and march and post-march rally, though, so I'm too tired to crawl to the grocery store to buy ingredients.

Oh, and I'll be running an 8K in Vancouver in May.

Clearly, I'll have to balance all this rediscovered baking-and-cooking enthusiasm with an aggressive soccer-and-Zumba regimen.

A cup o' kindness yet

2011-01-04T23:44:00.000-08:00

I've done this every year for the past 6 years on this blog: welcome the New Year by reflecting on all the new experiences from the previous one. I do it mainly to remind myself that life isn't stagnant, that it's constantly exciting and rewarding, that happiness and joy can (but don't have to) come from huge life-changing events, that sorrow and tragedy force you to grow and change and adapt, and that small wonders never cease.

Notable "firsts" from 2010:

Held a 6-hour-old baby - my newest niece, Sailo! Previously, the youngest baby I'd ever held was about a week old (her sister, my other niece). I'm still secretly afraid I'll break newborns when I hold them, because they're so tiny and fragile. But I doubt I'll get to meet a newer baby anytime soon!
Joined a soccer team - a real one, not a dorm-based or ad hoc assembly. The spring season I started, we lost every game; we wrapped up this last fall season as division champions.
Had makeup done at a department store for a wedding. I will probably never do it again, but it was part of a group activity for the bridal party. None of us really knew how to put on makeup, so I wasn't alone. And now I have $40 Dior lipstick I need to finish in 2011.
Fell under the influence of cannabis. I was bored and antisocial at an isolated weekend cabin, and ate an entire "special" cookie when everyone else knew to eat just a quarter. I amused my roommate by spouting nonsense about being a rainbow in a cloud hammock under a tree, before hugging my pillows to avoid falling off the merry-go-round of Earth. Oy.
Heard tornado sirens and spent half a night in a basement. While visiting Mi Hermana in Michigan, two tornadoes touched down a few miles away, in the middle of the night. We had to get the toddlers out of bed, take them to the basement, go back upstairs, then back to the basement, etc. Mi Hermana y Mi Cuñado have a few harrowing tales of tornadoes from their college years in Minnesota, and my admittedly tame twister introduction definitely pales in comparison.
Ran in two 5K races! I jogged/walked one in Seattle in May, but jogged the entire route in Ann Arbor in November. It was my third 5K ever (in as many cities).
Finally upgraded to a smartphone. My God! How did I function in the Stone Age for 7 years? My prehistoric flip-phone went extinct in a rainstorm in D.C. in June, and now I can't live without my crackberry.

2010 didn't have a lot of the drama or tragedy that past years have had. (It didn't have a lot of free time, either, what with the crazy GOTV hours during both the primary and general elections.) But it was a good year. I'm content.

Here's to 2011...

Retrospective veg-out

2011-01-01T15:05:00.000-08:00

I finally had time to re-order my Netflix queue and discovered I did, in fact, watch a few movies in the past 6 months.

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary was, perhaps unbelievably because it's just 80+ minutes of one woman talking about her wartime work experience, completely riveting. The woman happens to have been one of Hitler's personal secretaries, and the entire film is her recounting the last days in the bunker as the war. Her own story is captivating and necessarily includes a reflection of apolitical attitudes that enable political atrocities, the cults of personality and power, and wartime psychological survival. The fact that the film isn't a documentary or a biography is especially powerful - for almost an hour and a half, the viewer listens to this one woman's tale about a job she once had, with the horrible burden of knowing about the rest of the war and a continent that burned around her.

Unfortunately, other films I watched to escape election madness were not as disturbingly mesmerizing.

Once bored me, though I love its concept. The music was beautiful and deserved to win the Oscar it did. But the story itself didn't grab my attention: two musicians meet randomly on the street in Dublin, form an awkward friendship, and eventually record an album together. Watching it was slightly uncomfortable at times - perhaps it was the combination of the vague and unconsummated sexual attraction coupled with the undeniable musical compatibility of the two characters that made the storyline more tragic than bittersweet. I appreciate that the fleeting moments of an incomplete relationship in the larger completion of painfully beautiful music are what make the film a true artistic statement. It was just a little tedious to watch...

The Namesake also bored me. I didn't read the book, and I admit I only put the movie in my queue because Kal Penn stars in it. It turned out to be a lot longer than I thought, for a story that is told frequently for a variety of cultures and communities. This incarnation of the struggle-between- immigrant-parents-and-identity-forging-second-generation-American focuses on a Bengali family. I sense that the film doesn't do the book justice, that the book probably has more nuanced descriptions of the characters and their relationships with each other.

Similarly, Kung Fu Hustle quickly tired me. I loved Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer, but Kung Fu Hustle had too many dark and violent scenes to justify the enjoyable over-the-top martial arts spectacle. In the story, a wannabe gangster pretends to be part of a huge organized crime syndicate that has taken over Shanghai, and then hides out in the one poverty-stricken section of the city that the gangsters haven't taken over. An urban kung fu war ensues.
As in Shaolin Soccer, martial arts are portrayed as a marker of cultural authenticity: the ghetto where outcasts from all over China live "happens" to harbor so many kung fu masters who are too modest to display their skills until the hour comes when they have to save their community from the Western-styled gangsters clad in suits and top hats. There were also a ton of other plot similarities to Shaolin Soccer (the love interest as "girl from traumatic childhood memory" is the most obvious). I don't really like gangster films in the first place, so maybe I should have expected to not really enjoy this genre-blending parody of one.

Netflix Instant Viewing of 30 Rock, The Dollhouse, and Weeds made up for some of these recent disappointing movie choices.

Goal for 2011: visiting the library more! Since May I haven't had much time to read. And since May, the library clearly needs my overdue fines to stay afloat with all the budget cuts...

Notes from the field

2010-12-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

Taking a cue from the ever-trendsetting FG (and also because a colleague tweeted her most recent blog post, which reminded me that I have one too)* ...

HOLY HELL. I haven't posted anything in SIX MONTHS??? Granted, I've been working mad hours, but that's still no excuse for not keeping up the writing. Unfortunately, however, it means that I haven't had much time to watch movies (TV shows on Netflix don't count) or read (news commentaries and articles don't count, either).

I have, however:

moved into a new apartment on top of this famous hill in Seattle. I have now lived in 3 of Seattle's 5 legislative districts.
finally purchased my own wi-fi subscription after the Firesheep scare - auf wiedersehen to mooching from neighbors and nearby cafes.**
acquired a new niece! Little Sailo was born in July, and she is a bundle of joy. She is also quite stocky and large for a baby. I visit her once a week.
run another 5K! This time I really did jog the whole thing. I even woke up early in Ann Arbor to run it on Thanksgiving morning.
crawled out of bed at 7am on a Saturday to watch CSPAN so I could see Don't Ask, Don't Tell finally come to an end in the Senate.

Everything else in the past 6 months has been work-related. Our state primary in August had some great victories for progressive candidates; the national midterm elections were slightly depressing, though in WA we held on to Sen. Patty Murray's seat (even if it took a lot of work); and because voters failed to pass many revenue-related initiatives, tons of core services are being cut. Gearing up for 2011. Oy.

To end on a happy note: my soccer team won the league championship! We won the game 5-2, and beat the team that had been sporting Reichert '10 T-shirts the entire season. At the victory party, I discovered that most of my team (friends of friends from high school) are either nonvoters who lean Republican or consistent Republican-voting Independents (yes, I quizzed them). Sooooo, will not be talking politics with them off the field when winter season starts! At any rate, we won. I joined the team almost a year ago, when we were losing every game. Watching us learn to play together and eventually become a winning unit has been fun and amazing.

* and also because my home wi-fi network name is a hat tip to this blog

* and also because a New Year reminded me that I post "Firsts" from Last Year
* What the hell, the stars were aligned...

** I remain a staunch advocate of free public wi-fi, despite its political demise.

On the mark

2010-05-08T15:41:00.000-07:00

Even though I promised to do it before the horrible anti-family, anti-doctor, anti-choice law passed in Oklahoma, the Sooner State's legislation nudged me to actually register for the 7th Annual NARAL Pro-Choice Washington 5K Run for Your Rights.

I quasi-jogged this one, in stark contrast to the only other 5K I've done, for an equally good women's rights cause.

I feel confident that I can eventually jog an entire 5K ... maybe next time without a backpack and without running half the route 15 minutes before the race anyway (due to a misunderstanding of which building was the check-in location).

Corner kicks

2010-04-11T21:56:00.000-07:00

Accidentally in honor of the Sounders season starting up a few weeks ago, I've been very soccer-focused lately.

First, there was the Iranian film Offside, about a group of young women who get caught sneaking into a World Cup-qualifying match. (I was previously unaware that women are not allowed into sports arenas in Iran.) The women are put into a holding pen until the end of the game, argue about women's rights with the soldiers responsible for transporting them to the police station, and end up listening to the historic game without ever seeing it while at the stadium. The underlying, and fairly basic, idea of the film seemed to be that women are just as patriotic as men - it wasn't so much sports that they were interested in supporting as their country.

This was the first Iranian film I've ever seen, and while I felt like I was missing a lot of cultural subtext, the injustice of sexist double standards is pretty universally understood. The main characters in the film were just young women who wanted to sneak in to see a soccer match and cheer on their national team. They argued more for their immediate rights (to see the game) rather than for larger structural and cultural changes. But the personal, after all, is political. I appreciated the film for its bittersweet snapshot of national pride and inequality.

And then! Shaolin Soccer rocked. That is all I have to say about that....

... or mostly all I have to say. Soccer + kung fu = awesome. It had an over-the-top cheesy plot, and was a self-parody of both the kung fu and sports film genres. A Bruce Lee-like kung fu master wants to bring kung fu to the masses, and teams up with a disgraced former soccer star to do it; he then
(And yes, there's an awesome female kung fu master. Otherwise I would probably merely like the film rather than lovelovelove it. Even if she's stuck in a few other traditional roles. )

But like Offside, there's an element of cultural regeneration: in the beginning everybody in Hong Kong is clumsy and unbalanced, but at the end of the film everyone has gotten back to their shaolin roots and rediscovered how to live a happier life.

I watched it twice.

Then an old friend from high school convinced me to join a rec soccer team. Our first game was this past weekend, and because we had the minimum number of women for a coed team to be able to qualify, none of us had subs. Also, I got stuck playing midfield, which runs virtually nonstop. I fell several times, scraped my knees in ways I haven't since my teens, and had a fantastic amount of fun.

As a result, I hobbled around the immigration reform rally the next morning, and quickly developed a hoarse voice shouting "SI, SE PUEDE!"

Here's my favorite sign, because to me it illustrates how complex the issue of immigration and visa attainment is:

Media coverage tended to portray the one-sided stereotype of undocumented Mexican laborers "sneaking in and then demanding" amnesty. But the rally itself did a great job of showing the need for comprehensive reform, by highlighting the range of experiences, both documented and undocumented, within a broken system.

Translators started off the rally by saying "We are one America" in 32 languages. Loved it.

Whirlwind part quatre

2010-03-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

In film:

I finally watched Slumdog Millionaire. I liked it well enough, even if after the first 20 minutes it became predictable (though still enjoyable). Because I automatically like most films that play around with timelines, I appreciated how Jamal's answers on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" are drawn from various points in his life and lead to his present predicament.

The film had all the trappings of a feel-good movie: rags to riches with a little bit of luck and hard work and true love. It wasn't a typical bootstrap story, but it still had echoes of Horatio Alger.

Sadly, the one thing that didn't make sense to me was the love story itself. Either it was the acting or the script or both, but I didn't get the impression that the two protagonists were "destined" for each other. In fact, the two characters behaved more like siblings until almost the end of the movie.

Other than that, it was a decent story -- and had a great soundtrack to boot!
La Cage aux Folles had been in my Netflix queue for ages, and I finally got around to watching it. The Birdcage is an old favorite of mine, so I've long wanted to see the original.

....Aaand now I think a little less of The Birdcage. Turns out, there were few Americanizations in the remake of the farcical tale about two gay men who pretend to be a hetero couple for the benefit of their son's financee's ultra-conservative parents. Few changes in the American version also mean, unfortunately, little originality in the Robin Williams movie I've loved for so long. Despite the original French film being 20 years old and, well, French, the dialogue and antics and slapstick were identical. (Surprisingly --and a bit delightfully, I'll admit-- it all still worked and made sense decades later and a continent and culture away!)

Great movie!
The Hurt Locker was a disappointment. A friend and I found ourselves wondering how the hell it won Best Picture at the Oscars. As war movies go, this didn't bring anything new to the genre. The thing that made it different was that the servicemen were part of a bomb disposal unit.

But the character development was nonexistent, and there was a lot of random dialogue that wasn't followed up on later in the film. Then there was the machismo. Like any war movie, it's bound to be there, but without the character development the male bonding that war movies can normally do well, it was kind of bizarre.

We tried, for a few hours after the film, to read something deeper into it. (The isolation of the viewer from the characters mimics the isolation of the soldiers from everyone else as well as the desert itself? The character who changes his mind about kids and says "I want a son" in the end reinforces the changing nature of masculinity, paternity, and/or paternalism?) In the end, we concluded that we were over-reaching.

And even though I know it wasn't an anti-war film, parts of it didn't sit well with me. (How can you not think of current, highly publicized human rights abuses in Iraq when the main character in the film goes vigilante with a gun in a residential section of Baghdad and invades civilian homes? Compartmentalizing can only go so far. I can't watch a movie about a war that hasn't ended and pretend to be in a vacuum.)

As war itself changes, so do the films and literature that take place in it. Maybe I haven't changed with the times, and am trapped watching a new kind of war movie with the old kind's experience. Maybe that was the point?

But that might be over-reaching, too...

In books:

I have a new medieval mystery series that continues my trend of female protagonists. Margaret Frazer's Sister Frevisse seems to be the nun equivalent of the Brother Cadfael series that started me off on the genre decades ago. Loosely based on some of the tales of Chaucer (who is also part of the background story), the series takes place in 15th-century England. The Novice's Tale featured a fierce pack of nuns, defending a wrongly accused novice from accusations of murder. I liked the main characters enough, so we'll see if the next few books warrant reading the entire series!
The author of my last medieval mystery series has a new book, and it's set in 19th-century Portland, OR. The Shanghai Tunnel was nothing like Sharan Newman's Catherine Levendeur series. Our heroine this time is a missionary's daughter and sea captain's widow. But the plot itself was slower to develop. The idea was fascinating: tiny, new little town on the Willamette River becomes the center of dark dealings in the opium trade and Taiping Rebellion. As a stand-alone mystery it was okay, but not overwhelming. If it becomes a series I would read more -- the characters have such rich, if fictional, backgrounds that would be fun to delve into more for future books.

But clearly I'll need to tour the Shanghai Tunnels in Portland next time I visit!

In shoes:

Love Privos. Third pair already. So comfy.
The Bellevue Arts Museum's exhibit on Beth Levine was fun. I'd never been to BAM before, so that was a pleasant first. But because the exhibit is titled "The First Lady of Shoes" and I only scanned a review before going to see it with Mild Abandon, I mistakenly thought the exhibit had something to do with shoes worn by the various FLOTUS. (I wasn't far from wrong: Beth Levine did design shoes worn by a few First Ladies in the '60s and '70s...)

At any rate, in a time when women had fewer economic (let alone creative) independence, Levine designed the shoes that were sold under her husband's name. She also introduced a lot of shoes to the American shoe market that I have not necessarily been able to walk in properly but can appreciate and coo over nonetheless: the mule, the stiletto (though Dior apparently inaccurately gets credit), and the fashion boot.

It was a fun exhibit, and refreshing to see fashion intersect with both women's history and historically male-dominated business and industry.

Why does this remind me to put Coco Avant Chanel in my Netflix queue?

Logo mojo

2010-03-15T23:52:00.000-07:00

I have also had time (16 minutes, to be precise) to watch the Oscar-winning short film Logorama.

The film is a mish-mash of Hollywood disaster genre scripts, set in a Los Angeles (naturally) made up entirely of logos. Ronald McDonald robs a bank and takes hostages in a diner; Michelin men are the police. A waitress and kid flee the disaster zone but still can't escape Logo Land and the destruction it wreaks on LA.

It's hard not to draw a social commentary from the film, or be reminded of Naomi Klein's seminal book about logos and branding. Like the logos that make up a collective, trademarked Toontown, the viewer is visually barraged by the brands that make up our everyday lives. Is it art or infiltration? (Or both?) The film has three layers, in essence: the actual robbery-hostage-escape drama; the destruction, rebirth, and symbolism of the logos themselves and the logo world; and the silent commentary on the viewers' consumerism.

Take a bite out of the Apple apple, Eve?

'Frisco fangs

2010-03-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

Oh look! Some down time, as the state legislature debates revenue and possibly goes into special session. All my overdue library books were not in vain.

The sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends, in typical Christopher Moore style, was hilariously irreverent. You Suck starts with Fiends' unwitting vampire turning her boyfriend into one, too. The cast of characters from the old book returns -- everyone from the ancient evil vampire to a Safeway peanut gallery stoner crew. An amusing and clover addition to the list of protagonists includes a goth girl who narrates of some chapters.

It was a quick read: nothing deep or heavy, and perfect for escapism while twiddling thumbs and waiting around for a revenue package from Olympia.

Eye of the Tiger

2010-02-14T20:54:00.000-08:00

Normally I do this every New Year, but this year has been a little too busy to afford consecutive moments of reflection. Until now, which is coincidentally Chinese New Year. So I'm late but can still save some face by tacking on a "tradition" to the lunar calendar instead.

Firsts or new things from 2009 or the Year of the Ox, for better or worse:

A graduate degree! Finished graduate school. Got the M.S. in Law, Policy, and Society. Got the diploma.
A niece and nephew born in the same calendar year! Different sisters, of course. Diego arrived in March, and Repeka was born in June.
Turned 30! Loving it.
Woke up at 4am on Black Friday to go shopping. Mi Hermana and I figured, why the hell not? Michigan needs all the economic stimulating it can get.
Called 911 for myself instead of someone else! Survived the Spring Break trip to the ER, after having a very public anxiety attack. Am indebted to the Seattle Fire Dept for a quick response time --granted, the station was only about 4 blocks away from the Farmer's Market, where I was, but still. (Also, how was I supposed to know I was hyperventilating and not having a stroke? Now I know.)
Used a hookah. That was actually my first smoke of anything, ever, too.

This new Year of the Tiger, which started today, seems pretty damn fierce and awesome so far!

Here's to 2010 and a new decade: its ups and downs, learning experiences, and opportunities for lifelong growth!

Seeing red

2010-01-31T23:28:00.000-08:00

Weeks ago, I borrowed a friend's advance copy of Shades of Grey, Jasper Fforde's latest book. A huge fan of everything Fforde, I then went to see him talk at a local bookstore, bought the book, and stood in line to have him sign it. Big fangirl. Done that twice now. (Different books, obviously.) There are very few authors I care enough about to wait in line for a signature -- in fact, most autographed books I have were either professors of mine or guest speakers at a community event I attended. So Jasper Fforde is a big deal. (Twice!)

Like the Thursday Next series (time- and book-travelling and pure genius) and Nursery Crime books, this new Fforde world blows your mind! In Shades of Grey's post-apocalyptic society, the colors people can see determine their social standing -- what jobs they have, who they can marry, where they can live. Industries are built around manufacturing synthetic colors; people can get high and overdose on seeing certain forbidden colors; good members of society get merits, and bad ones are sent off to re-education facilities if they get enough demerits. The underlying intricacies for this colortocracy are highly innovative, and yet highly disarmingly parallel to our own society.

The entire plot hints at subversion and fomenting revolution and messing with the dominant paradigms, so naturally I'm pre-inclined to like it. There's a murder. There's a sassy, radical girl. It's awesome. The last chapter, however, was truly disturbing, and its cliffhanger ending definitely did not sit well with me. (I was so disturbed, I rushed across town to return the book to my friend and vent about it.)

Luckily, there will be a sequel. And I trust Fforde to resolve some of the unanswered issues!

Best book of the year so far!

So-and-so has requested to add you as a friend on ...

2010-01-29T10:46:00.000-08:00

Cracked me the hell up, especially because:

1) Yeah, I was a Deaniac back in '04. (Oh, '04!)

2) In grad school, I did a PowerPoint presentation on the '08 primaries and social networking sites, and one of my more blatantly partisan slides included Fred Thompson and Friendster.

Love xkcd!

Bipolar Legislative Disorder

2010-01-22T23:41:00.000-08:00

Because a $2.9 billion state budget shortfall in the legislative session and super-depressing happenings in Congress and the Supreme Court mandate a lot of work-related heavy reading, I'm back on my fiction-only kick for the time being. (I think I was on it for most of grad school, too. Oh well. The book moods -- they come, they go... C'est la vie.)

Who knew Book Four in the Artemis Fowl series, The Opal Deception, would be slightly traumatic?

What's up with the magic-themed children's stories these days having sad, emotional death scenes of major characters?

It was, though, an excellent tool for escapism. The crazy, evil villain from Book Two comes back, intent on revenge. She plots to kill off not only the teenage genius/criminal mastermind title character, but the elves, fairies, and centaur who helped him defeat her. So she schemes to alert the human world to the existence of the fairy world, to start an interspecies war that will eventually allow her to rule the planet. A tale as old as time.

The larger story, of course, is Artemis Fowl's coming-of-age -- making new and different friends, being at a crossroads (whether to remain a criminal mastermind or become an honest kid), etc. It is, after all, a book series aimed at tweens.

Hooray for the Bildungsroman.

Next up: more medieval mysteries on order from the library. And Netflix movies. Mucho, mucho Netflix movies...

Moments of madness

2010-01-14T23:50:00.000-08:00

Apropos of nothing, the other day a colleague, who also lives in West Seattle, asked me to feed his dog and watch his house when he and his partner go out of town in a few weeks.

Colleague: We're heading to the Olympics that weekend.
Me: Fun, are you guys camping?
Colleague: What? Camping? Oh my God, no! We're gay men!
Me: Oh, so you're staying at a resort?
Colleague: Resort? Nooooo. Way too expensive, especially with everything going on.
Me: Wait, so it's a day trip? Why do you need someone to watch the house and dog?
Colleague: We'll be staying with family.
Me: Oh, I didn't realize you had family out there.
Colleague: We do. But we'll be out seeing the sights most of the time . . .
Me: Yeah, there are some good hiking trails. Bit late in the season, though, isn't it?

Whereupon we realized we were having two very different conversations.

In catch-up news, I saw the new Sherlock Holmes with an old friend the afternoon of New Year's Eve. (I vividly recall reading trading the Sherlock Holmes books with her and reading them during boring documentaries shown in our middle school science classes. Future humanities nerds, indeed.)

At any rate, it was fun. I liked the quirky, edgy, disturbed-genius characterization of Holmes himself. In most cases, movies that stray from the books are not exceptionally brilliant, but I liked it here. Holmes wasn't the cold, calculating, sterile brainiac we're all familiar with from the books and other adaptations -- Robert Downey, Jr. portrayed him as a borderline OCD nutso. That part was fun.

The plot was eh. Most of it was predictable: secret society (this time not the Masons) uses "magic" and murder to try and take over the world. Holmes and Watson sweep in to restore reason, thinking, and sanity. What was cool was the re-creation of London and some of the action sequences.

What I didn't like was Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler. In almost a hundred years of film, have we seriously gotten no further than the Perils of Pauline?

The nose, she is still above the water

2010-01-13T23:22:00.001-08:00

Good Lord, 2010 has been busy so far! But good.

I'd forgotten how ridiculously chaotic it gets the weeks before and the first week of the legislative session.

The only thing that could make up for leaving the office on Sunday at 11:30pm: this video of our campaign director accidentally running into the "anti-tax" sponsor of the initiative that voters smacked down this past November.

In other news . . . ZUMBA! Turns out, music in a gym class makes all the difference. I'm officially addicted. Two cool things about the class I'm taking: there is diversity of body type, and it's also ethnically diverse. Not that it's a Dove or Benetton ad or anything, but the difference is noticeable enough.

Seriously, it's like clubbing at a Latin dance club, minus the booze. (Also minus the men, but that's tangential.)

I mean, if you "dance" badly and secretly (sometimes in the grocery store, with your headphones on) to the same music anyway, why not just take the class and be productive?

Whate'er the course, the end is the renown

2009-12-24T22:49:00.001-08:00

I finished the last book in my new favorite medieval mystery series. The Witch in the Well was a superb tenth book and series finale! It had everything: a castle (with secret tunnels!), a siege, a myth, a few happy endings, a few sad endings.

Sharan Newman wrapped up some loose plot ends by bringing all of her surviving characters under the same besieged fortress to wait and see if an ancient prophecy comes true. ZOMG, so cool! (Mainly, the secret passageways were the coolest part.)

The tale was appropriate closure for readers to the life and times of Catherine LeVendeur in 12th-century Paris. The series was predictable at times, but was creative and entertaining enough to make me rush to the library in search of each successive book . If nothing else, it's brilliant because it incorporates both the story of Abelard and Heloise and medieval Jewish merchant life into the narrative. (The intellectual, plucky heroine helped. Just sayin'.)

Sigh. Now I need to find a new series...

Whirlwind, part trois

2009-12-13T21:28:00.000-08:00

It's amazing that there are only two and a half more weeks left in 2009! The last few weeks have gone by quickly.

Thanksgiving in Michigan was a welcome respite, though I spent my nights writing post-election analyses after the kiddies went to bed. I thought I'd have more free time to read or veg out, but that didn't happen -- though I was able to catch up on "Glee," most of the TV I watched was Sesame Street. I miss my niece and neffy already, but will get to see them at Christmas.
Mi Hermana and I woke up at 4 am on Black Friday to do our part to stimulate the local economy. (Hey, Michigan can use all the help it can get.) The main reason was that La Pinguinita wakes up at 7 and then runs around. So we woke up at 4 and took the 8-month-old, who required only to be put in a stroller. Oh, the suburban rebellion! The parking lot at the outlet mall where we did our holiday shopping was already a third full at 4:30am. (Stores opened at midnight, so we were already late.)
The fellowship changes into a full-time position with the new year, though the organization is undergoing some reorganization and I won't have a title for a while. In the meantime, I'll be helping mobilizing constituents on progressive issues and it keeps me in the political mix, so I'm happy.
I did have time to read the next installment of my favorite medieval mystery series, however. Sharan Newman's The Outcast Dove is, unfortunately, not about the heroine I've grown to like -- the star of this book is another character. There's a murder. It's Easter and Passover. There are monks, mobs, and Jew merchants. Like the previous books in the series, Newman throws in some heavy-handed stuff -- in addition to anti-semitism, this time we also have autism (or so the reader infers, since the concept didn't exist in the twelfth century) as well as slavery. It was a decent mystery story, though. A few plot threads from the earlier books were wrapped up. And I rushed to the library to pay my fines and check out the last book in the series...

Policy wonk alert!

2009-11-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

ZOMG, the Washington State Secretary of State's office has created a redistricting boardgame!

SO COOL.

As the Washington Bus put it,

"What could possibly be sexier than redistricting legislative districts? Exactly: not a damn thing. With the 2010 census rearing its head, the prospect of a significantly re-drawn legislative landscape is looming large. Your local political world will definitely be shifting… and remember: all politics is, in the end, local. Want to get a jump on the good times? Check out the Secretary of State’s Redistricting board game. We kid you not."

Geekingoutgeekingoutgeekingoutgeekingout...

Retweet

2009-11-13T23:49:00.000-08:00

I mentioned the death penalty in passing in that last post, taking for granted arguments against it and barely even relating it to the movie I watched.

But, as usual, my old roomie The Common Man is far more articulate than I. (I sputter -- "What? Who? That? No! So wrong! Gaaaaack! Arrrrgh.") He phrased his anti-death penalty arguments much better in his recent return to the blogsphere, in which he posts about the recent tragedy at Fort Hood and execution of the DC Sniper:

"... emotional reaction to these crimes is exactly why justice is not served through execution. Justice is a bitch goddess who constantly disappoints us; yet, to be effective, she must remain blind to the emotional undercurrents that make me want to slam Hasan and Muhammad into walls again and again . . . And, as several studies have demonstrated that execution does not substantially deter crime, there does not seem to be a rational reason for capital punishment. The world may be a better place without Muhammad in it tonight, but justice (whose guarantee is the basis of civilization and of our society) is not served by it."

Tomorrow is Another Day

2009-11-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

I've been sitting on these for a few weeks. Now that the election's over and I have time on my hands again (at least theoretically), maybe I can catch up.

Set entirely in New York, Kal Ho Naa Ho is a Shah Rukh Khan movie I hadn't seen yet. While I do tend to hate romantic comedies, Bollywood dramas are perfectly acceptable. This one was, as expected, incredibly cheesy. But I do love Preity Zinta, who usually plays relatively strong-ish as well as book-ish female leads. Here, though, I was a little disappointed. It's basically one big love triangle: she likes Shah Rukh Khan, who is dying of a heart condition and wants her to hook up with her school buddy. I wasn't the biggest fan of the storyline. Also not down with the faint homophobia. But of course, it's a shameless tear-jerker, and I was sobbing by the end.

Changeling was one of the most pro-death penalty movies I've ever seen. I thought it would be a nice, quick film to watch while working from home one day, and it turned out not to be merely a movie about how the corrupt LAPD (is that redundant?) conspired to toss Angelina Jolie into a mental institution when she insisted they didn't find her missing son and "returned" a different child instead. While I appreciated the points it tried to make about how women have been traditionally dismissed and demeaned in society, I thought those themes were secondary to the larger point of the story, which was that a serial killer needed to die. It was rather disturbing.

Lastly, National Treasure has been on TV twice this election cycle --funny enough, one of those times was on the local CBC station! And I am a sucker for watching the thing in its entirely once I see that it's on.

So inaccurate. So improbable! Such a rip-off of Indiana Jones. Too ready to perpetuate the Founding-Fathers-knew-best-and-were-superhuman mythology.

So bad. SO GOOD!

Several drinks later...

2009-11-04T23:40:00.000-08:00

I accidentally showed up in photos in both the PI and Times at a mayoral candidate's event.

Just like Forrest Gump!

Oh, what a night!

2009-11-04T22:25:00.000-08:00

I have a backlog of blog entries, but the most important announcement: election night ROCKED!

The ballot measure I spent the most time working against went down big-time, even in more conservative, anti-tax counties. In fact, Benton County, which has never rejected an initiative by the state's resident anti-tax "Initiative King" rejected this one. It was heartening to watch the early returns. (I'll be back on the job hunt in a week, but for now it's great to bask in the glow of victory.)

And then, Washington voters approved the state domestic partnership law that the state legislature already passed this spring. (The same is not true of the state where I went to college, which, on the same night, voted to overturn the marriage equality law its legislature passed earlier this year.)

Setting aside the horrible idea of anyone's rights being put to a vote, here's a great local article that offers some hope.

Right here, right now, history is incubating (Seattle Times)

I'm proud of my state for being the first to not vote down a pro-gay ballot measure. It won by a narrow margin, to be sure. But it won nonetheless.

The tide is turning...

Entre el mar y una estrella

2009-09-21T00:17:00.000-07:00

Few writings can make me feel intellectually inadequate. This one did:

After seeing Neil DeGrasse Tyson on The Daily Show a few months ago, I checked out his book from the library (after I paid my fines, of course). Death By Black Hole is not exactly written for astrophysicists, but for those of us who haven't taken any science course in over ten years, it might, uh, seem like it wasn't meant for our kind...

The book is actually a compilation of articles Tyson has written in magazines, so the chapters are fairly short. Tyson's humor comes through in every chapter, too! Though half the content was beyond what this bear-of-very-little-brains could hope to remember about planets and gravity and the speed of light, what I liked best about the book was its focus on knowledge. It wasn't about what we know about the universe, it was about the fact that we keep learning more about it. Each chapter was really just a history of what humans used to think about various aspects of the cosmos. The last chapter, in fact, was an incredibly beautifully-written essay against intelligent design in schools, and it fit perfectly with the theme of the book.

In other news, the new fellowship started last week, with an organization that provides online strategies for progressive campaigns. It's been extremely busy, to say the least! I'll be working with the No on 1033 campaign through the election -- including working with Micaela again! Woot.

Fingers crossed this horrible initiative doesn't pass; it'll be a ton of work for the next six weeks, but I'm already having fun, and it's a nice change of pace.

Whirlwind, part trois

2009-09-10T22:19:00.000-07:00

As the world turns...

Spent many days in August as a coalition volunteer, observing the signature verification process for Referendum 71. Unfortunately, it qualified for the ballot. Washingtonians now have to re-approve the domestic partnership law that our legislature already overwhelmingly passed this spring.
Saw a local production of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. The hometown being rather small, it turns out an old colleague's nephew is the owner/proprietor of the theatre. Said former colleague saw Lily Tomlin in the original play, a one-woman act which ties together stories from a bag lady's perspective. Watching it was amazing, as watching most one-person acts are: the actress switched characters, voices, and personas so quickly but brilliantly and effectively. I definitely liked the second half of the play more than the first, partly because it incorporated more stories and characters, and partly because is deftly addressed the ideas of what art and life and craziness really are. And of course, I'm a sucker for the existential agonies.
A friend and I celebrated her no-more-studying-for-the-bar-exam status by going to see Up, which I LOVED. It was sad, uplifting, cute, and bizarre all at the same time. We weren't the only ones sniffling in the theatre! Most of all, I thought the movie did a beautiful job of navigating the gulf between being kid-friendly and addressing "grown-up" issues like death and loneliness. There were talking animals, old-time adventure tales, and cool things that fly. Another theme I appreciated was the revisiting and reevaluating of childhood ideals and heroes as an adult. Also, the little boy is vaguely Asian. Kudos for that (if not the absentee overworking father, by extension). Wonderful movie.
Some college friends were in town for a wedding, which was great. Got to show off the home town again, which is always fun.
Heresy, the latest in the medieval mystery series I'm addicted to, was good but a little predictable. (Sometimes that happens with mysteries.) In addition to the theme addressing the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages, Sharan Newman has been slowly increasing the role of "heretical" fringe groups or cults in her stories. In this book it all weaves together against the backdrop of an ecumenical hearing, once the Crusaders from the last book have all left town. Also, one of her minor recurring characters had a more prominent role, and I figured out before I read the historical epilogue that he was destined to become one of the very real and more famous Archbishops of Canterbury. I credit taking Mediaeval History in a very cool medieval town with the fact that I remembered the name and the date for the particular character/real-life cleric.
Inglourious Basterds is a good movie to watch after several strong drinks with friends. It's deliberately irreverent, and the viewer needs to pretend that WW2 didn't really happen as we all know it did. Once you get over that, it's a movie about the movies. The characters are all one-dimensional archetypes, but they're supposed to be; besides, they're all incredibly well-acted. Oddly enough, it's violent but not as violent as I expected it to be; the wacky factor might have detracted from that a bit.
Saw Elephant's Graveyard at the same theatre mentioned above. Another excellent production! The play was incredibly well-written, though an utterly depressing true tale about a small town in Tennessee that decides to impose capital punishment on a circus elephant at the turn of the last century. Much food for thought, as there were several themes to unravel: the nature of public spectacle, justice, revenge, race relations, the role of religion, childhood/loss of innocence, etc. . . . With no intermission, little air circulation, and heavy subject matter, there was little choice but to try Seattle's new frozen custard place afterwards.
Lastly and most recently, a nonprofit I've long supported had a film-going fundraiser, and attendees got to choose a movie to see. I opted for Ponyo, having seen a preview at Up. It turned out to be cute and weird and vaguely Little Mermaid-esque .... aaaaand also unexpectedly chock full of sexual imagery and innuendo, from practically the first scene, where a crowd of jellyfish float through the ocean with -- I swear-- penis-looking appendages bobbing happily up and down. (I wasn't the only one who noticed that and the many, many other similar scenes and themes. A friend called Ponyo, an inexplicable sea-water goldfish who wants to be human, the "little sperm that could.") There are several gaps in both plot and reality, as well as countless " WTF?!" moments. Like my friend, who in addition to the "sperm" comment read the film as an evolutionary and environmental warning, I got all the "life-cycle" themes: children/old people, mothers/fathers, high tide/low tide, ocean/earth, prehistoric/future. I love the ocean, so I also appreciated the scenes of a town that lives and breathes by the sea, adjusting to the magic and menace on a daily basis.

And now, for autumn!

Mountain lions or cougars and bears, oh my!

2009-09-06T13:19:00.000-07:00

Not quite as funny as the bear that wandered around the city a while back, but the latest urban wildlife visitor has been caught after several sightings:

Cougar caught in Seattle park

Funny enough, when I was a kid I loved the huge slide at that park. But climbing up to the top of it involved maneuvering around heavily wooded areas, and I always thought some wild animal would leap out of the trees at me. I think I can feel justified in this premonition, a quarter-century later.

There probably really are monsters under the bed, too. And sharks in the bathtub...

In the jungle, the mighty jungle

2009-08-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

David Horsey, seattlepi.com
(one of my favorite political cartoonists)

I also just re-read the eulogy Sen. Kennedy gave for his brother Robert in 1968.

Clunkers

2009-08-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

The FG posted this on the FB, and I think I woke up the neighbor's dog from its nap with my laughter. HILARIOUS.

CASH FOR CLOGS

Whirlwind, part deux

2009-08-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

In all the summer haze, re-learning to walk away from drama, and interviewing for various jobs, I left some draft blog posts unpublished. They're updated and condensed here...

Mi Hermana was in town last week, with the new neffy. Mi Pingüinita is talking now! It's so damn cute, as is the new nephew. Perhaps because he has the same genes, he also looks like a penguin to me, so I've started calling him my Pingüinito. ZOMG, SO CUTE!

Influenced by last month's current events, I read the Persepolis books while house-sitting and watching the news, and loved them! They were fairly quick reads, and I couldn't put them down, despite the heavy subject matter. The books are the autobiography of a girl coming of age in the new and changing Islamic Republic, and they're poignant insights into the personal interactions of citizens in an oppressive regime.

I liked the first the best, though they're both excellent. The first had narrative amazement of a child who doesn't quite fully understand the political realities around her, who still plays around in her own filtered ideas about God, nationhood, and communism. The second book has Satrapi first in Austria, then back in Tehran after her life in Europe takes a vastly different turn than expected. The second book addresses more of the "personal is political" aspect behind subversive acts.
In the Company of Men was both brilliant and horrifying at the same time. Aaron Eckhardt is, as always, excellent. Here he plays a complete asshole who makes a deal with his coworker where they both simultaneously date a deaf woman and then dump her at the same time. Eckhardt is the epitome of a smarmball: charming in public and to parents and clients, but the guy who cracks sexist, racist, and other offensive jokes in the company break room and is willing to step all over colleagues in order to get ahead himself. The film is more a harsh critique of corporate culture than of the central misogynist plot.

However, I emphatically recommend watching your Netflix queue closely so that you don't accidentally get it shipped to you during a few weeks in your life where you are extremely cynical and slightly bitter about a certain more personal situation that, after watching this film, you see (perhaps unfairly) in an entirely new and unflattering light.

Just sayin'.

Ms. Tungsten moved back to upstate New York, in a chaotic apartment-vacating frenzy. I'll miss her in the Emerald City!

Oh, those hot summer nights

2009-07-31T23:38:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, Seattle officially had its hottest day in recorded history (103!), and it was not pleasant. Even though The Scot and I escaped most of it by hopping from movie theatre to air-conditioned restaurant to movie theatre to air-conditioned restaurant, it was still not a happy time for the Northwest. Films, alcohol, and food were definitely the way to go.

So, ironically and not surprisingly, I had a massive one of these the next day:
(I did, however, manage to hydrate and be coherent enough to attend a city council candidate forum later in the afternoon...)

The movie itself was okay. It had its funny moments, its jock humor, its questionable portrayal of women and Asian men . But that was all to be expected, given the plot of the movie. Other than that, I liked the format: Las Vegas bachelor party lose the groom and has to retrace their steps from the night before. There are missing pieces, and totally random clues to their wild and "memorable" night, and I think the movie does a funny job of capturing that "OMG, what happened?" post-drinking state of mind that is, uh, familiar to many. I also didn't really buy Bradley Cooper as the teacher/family man, and the dentist's shrewish girlfriend was a little too over-the-top. There were places where the movie hinted exploring lost youth, growing up, etc. But then it didn't. It wasn't really that kind of movie.

Bruno was better. Unlike Borat, the line between what was fake and what was real was a little more defined, but still savvy and socially relevant. And I swear, there are scenes where Sacha Baron Cohen could have gotten his ass killed in a hate crime, which of course makes it all the more salient.

The film has been criticized for being an over-the-top stereotype of gays; but that's the point. (So was Borat, but there was no outrage in America over the over-the-top stereotype of Kazakhs or other central Asians.) You take it with a grain of salt, but the reactions in the interviews and scenes are real. Like Ron Paul. He got an interview with Ron Paul!

Like Borat, though, many of the scenes that expose ignorance were relegated to the South, to poorer areas, or to under-educated populations. There's a danger, I think, in thinking the intolerances Cohen exposes can only be found, overtly or otherwise, in those Americas.

...Which brings me back to The Hangover. At one point during the film, I thought maybe --maybe-- the communal memory lapse of four frat-boyish white guys could be interpreted as a messed-up journey to others' stereotyped realities: in a city where whatever happens stays there, they get tased by police, duped by a black drug dealer, attacked by an Asian gang, trapped into marriage by a hooker milf, have their money quickly disappear and their expensive car destroyed, and are each physically altered in some way. And in the end, they return safely to their suburban country club wedding with vague memories and some snapshots of their adventures on the other side.

That analysis was fleeting. When I walked out of the theatre, I realized ... nah. Sometimes imagery is just jumbled, and some compilations are just meaningless. Then again, sometimes they're not.

... Which brings me back to the other hangover. NEVER DRINKING IN 103-DEGREE HEAT AGAIN!!!

Sun breaks

2009-07-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a long time since my last post! Meanwhile, Seattle's been experiencing a heat wave, and I've been trying to enjoy the weather. After all, it's the first summer in decades that I haven't been trapped in an office during most sunlight hours.

Apropos of nothing, this Onion article was hilarious:

Study: Abstinence-Only Lunch Programs Ineffective At Combating Teen Obesity
The Onion
WASHINGTON—According to the findings of a recent Department of Health and Human Services study, school lunch programs that teach children to avoid all contact with food may not be an effective method of reducing teen obesity rates.

Evolution

2009-06-22T22:26:00.000-07:00

Lesson learned the hard way #1764: Even if you know you don't really want something anymore, your stubborn nature might make you keep fighting for it simply out of habit.
"Habit" can also be a euphemism for "desperation". . . Realizing this, however, indicates the possibility for growth-- or so one hopes!

In related behavior patterns, I discovered (and ate) ice cream sandwiches in my hosts' freezer, then ran to the nearest grocery store and bought good old, tried-and-true Ben and Jerry's.

Then I vegged out.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay surprised me. I liked it. I wasn't the biggest fan of the first movie, and I admit I watched this sequel after a number of cold dessert products and several glasses of wine (which, also surprisingly, went well with the ice cream). The two title stoner buddies set off for Amsterdam to follow Harold's dream girl and smoke legal weed; through bizarre, slapstick scenarios they find themselves mistaken for terrorists and dumped in Guanatamo. They escape and make their way across the South to Texas, where Kumar's ex-girlfriend is marrying a Republican frat boy. (And yes, guess who they run into in Texas?) Along the way, they encounter others' prejudices and stereotypes as well as their own; however, these are frequently dispelled only to be revalidated.

It is not a deep, poignant film about the great melting pot that is America, nor is it a particularly thoughtful movie about tolerance. It included a wedding-wrecking scene, a well-documented pet irritation of mine. It's just a story about two dudes who want to get high, check out chicks, and make bathroom jokes ... and apparently that's all the rest of America wants, too. Even El Prez in Crawford.

Also, I'm a fan of Kal Penn. And NPH. Rob Corddry was great as an irrational Homeland Security agent.

The whole thing was actually fairly predictable. But really, I just needed to sit there staring at a flickering screen, shoving spoonfuls of ice cream into my mouth and sipping shiraz occasionally.

Damn, I need to go running tomorrow ...

All astonishment once more

2009-06-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the FG for posting this. I love all these social media retellings of P&P!

Pride and Twitterverse

My favorite excerpt:

Darcy:
DM to @LizzyB
In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire & love you.

[series of DMs between LizzyB and Darcy]

LizzyB:
WTF?

LizzyB:
Can you deny that you made Bingley quit Twitter thus destroying my sister’s chance for happiness?

Darcy:
I cannot. I even deleted all her comments on his blog so he wouldn’t know she was reading. Marry me anyway?

LizzyB:
And don’t even get me started on your offenses to poor Wickham.

Darcy:
Wickham? Oh yes, poor downtrodden Wickham. #eyeroll

LizzyB:
Gah! You are so haughty!

Darcy:
And you are such a hotty.

LizzyB:
Ugh. You are the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry. okthksbai

[Msg to LizzyB from Twitter: Are you sure you want to block Darcy? BLOCK]

EMAIL FROM DARCY TO LIZZYB:
You have blocked me on Twitter which leaves me no other recourse than to email you an honest account of my dealings with Mr Wickham. In short, he is a pedi-perv who tried to bone my sister when she was but 15. He had hoped to marry her for her fortune, but I stopped him. So there.

[Msg fwd to JaneB from LizzyB]

LizzyB:
@JaneB Oh shit. Have I ever made a mistake. Darcy = good. Wickham = bad.

Check out the rest! Love it.

All astonishment

2009-06-16T20:35:00.001-07:00

One of the friends for whom I'm house-sitting was really excited for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou when it came out a few years ago. She was ultimately a little disappointed that it didn't live up to her hype; that might have colored my opinion while watching the film, because I was bored and indifferent to the characters and the plot.

It's supposed to be both a parody of and a tribute to Jacques Cousteau, I believe. Bill Murray's aging explorer deals with bad relationships, a possible son, an elusive sea creature, evil rivals, and pirates. (Actually, the fact that the pirates spoke Tagalog was kind of cool. It's not a language usually heard in American films.) His quirky, ragtag crew are all misfits of some sort, searching for a deep-sea jaguar shark that the scientific world doesn't believe exists. There are metaphors in there, to be sure. I just wasn't very drawn in by it all.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, on the other hand, rocked! I admit, the skeptical part of me, the Austen purist, thought at first that nothing --nothing!-- should be allowed to soil the sheer, brilliant piece of literature that is Pride and Prejudice. But that damn Intellectual Property class has affected my thinking more than I thought it could: the great thing about public domain works is the possibility for endless creative engines.

And it worked! Fighting zombies actually fit in with the much-beloved P&P characters; the fight scenes were a bit random, but also completely hilarious. The book followed Austen's original pretty closely, including most of the dialogue. Grahame-Smith took a few small liberties with the general plot (the biggest one involving Wickham's fate, which had me rolling with laughter), but other than that remained reverently faithful to the story itself.

All of England are fighting the zombie hordes, and I loved how the fact that the Bennet sisters studied with Chinese zombie-fighting kung fu masters still marked their class status, true to one of Austen's themes (wealthier citizens studied in the Japanese warrior schools).

A good, quick read that can really only be fully appreciated if readers are familiar with the original ... but enjoyable nonetheless for those that aren't.

R & R

2009-06-14T19:19:00.000-07:00

Housesitting for some friends for the next week and a half -- a welcome, quiet break from the babymania! While trying to figure out dishes in order to use up all the perishable foods, I mixed myself a tasty concoction: Absolut Peach and lemonade. Normally, I'm not a fan of peach-flavored things, but it was good!

Whirlwind

2009-06-11T07:02:00.001-07:00

Obla di, obla da, life goes on!

The wedding was awesome. It was at a bar, which was a first for me. The ceremony itself was less than four minutes, and consisted only of the exchange of rings. Fun times!
While I was preparing to head out to the wedding, La Otra Hermana was giving birth to my new niece. It took them a day and a half to agree on the name, but it's Repeka -- the Samoan version of Rebecca, pronounced the same.

The neffy now demands more attention than ever, and wants to play nonstop (which is fine with me, since I've never quite been sure what to do around newborns) . . .

Also, in the ever-small world of Western Washington, a classmate from middle and high school is a nurse at the birthing center where La OH had the niecester.
I'm totally moved out of the old apartment in Boston! Woot. My back is killing me after sleeping on an inflatable mattress for a week, but a few hours of yoga today should start to remedy that.
During my four-hour layover at the Cincinnati airport, I got ridiculously excited to try Chick-fil-A when I saw it at the food court. (A friend, who grew up all over the South, raves about Chick-fil-A; one opened up in Bellingham recently, and she seriously drives up every couple of weeks for some fast food chicken burgers. She ignores the company's religious indoctrination program.)

At any rate, I decided to give it a try. Not bad, for fast food. I was also extremely hungry.

Also: I realize Cincinnati is just across the Ohio River from Kentucky (a dorm-mate from the area would go on about this my freshman year in college), but I was not expecting to hear so many Southern accents!

And now, loads of laundry...

Wicked smaht

2009-06-09T20:55:00.003-07:00

Xtina and I, once again known as Captain Blunder and the Awkward Silences (this time accompanied by a trivia newbie friend), finally came in first place at pub quiz!

My last night in Beantown, too. It makes sleeping on an uncomfortable inflatable mattress worthwhile...

Woot, woot!

The list, the list, the list is getting smaller...

2009-06-04T14:53:00.002-07:00

Got back from a weekend camping trip in the Olympics to find an email from my program director that I passed the comps and thus have the degree.

The resume has been updated accordingly.

And now, off to Boston again for a friend's wedding!

Toil, sweat, and tears

2009-05-29T18:37:00.000-07:00

It sucks to be repeated told you are overqualified for jobs. But on the upside ... at least they call to tell you? Um.

To console myself, I've begun a cycle of running to the beach, experimenting with various recipes and other cooking-related phenomena, and vegging out. I couldn't get into Veronica Mars after 8 episodes, so I've started The Wire. However, the neffy makes it hard to watch DVDs because he's learned how to turn the TV and DVD player on and off.

I have, however, managed to get some solid vegging done during his naps or when he and the rest of the fam are at church. . .

I'd seen the last hour of Blood Diamond several times, but I finally watched the film in its entirety. And I liked it. To be fair, though, the fact that it addressed the issues of both conflict diamonds and child soldiers got it on my good side immediately. Unfortunately, that's also the downside: the movie was more a vehicle. Leo's romance with Jennifer Connelly was a little out of place, and the story could have worked without it as well as her, and possibly him. (But, as La Otra Hermana pointed out in one of her few political commentaries that I agree with, tales about "Africa" are generally only understood by "the West" through a white experience there.) Also, I didn't quite buy Leo's mercenary -- though well-acted, the character's sudden transition from arms- and diamond-smuggler to noble humanitarian wasn't that smooth or believable.

But in all, I really liked the film. It had a compelling story with, for the most part, interesting characters. It got preachy at times, but then I guess it had to.

Sin City was different. For half the movie, I was really disturbed. For the other half, I was fascinated by the graphic-novel adaptation style and narration. In a few interlocking stories about serial killers, prostitutes, mobsters, corrupt cops and politicians, some of the plot twists were predictable; some induced cringes, as crime tales can do.

Overall, it was well done. The visuals alone were creative: comic-style animation based on real footage, drawn in black and white with only certain key colors to contrast.

I'm a sucker for narrative form that is somewhat disjointed and often incomplete, and that's part of the reason the movie fascinated me. The stories weren't necessarily that unique, but every level of presentation was.

Post-exam boredom

2009-05-16T22:19:00.001-07:00

There's nothing to do but sit around and wait now. Really, all I've been doing is job searching, jogging around West Seattle, trying to cook different foods, and meeting up with friends and family.

Oh, and vegging out. As usual.

When I first saw previews for Nacho Libre a long time ago, I was not interested in watching it. Then Mi Hermana called to say that her hubby the Latino Studies Ph.d candidate was watching a bunch of old Mexican films starring a well-known wrestler, and that they were going to watch Nacho Libre because it parodied many of the old movies.

So of course I put it in my Netflix queue.

Clearly, I did not get the parodic references. But it was a little obvious that the whole movie was, in fact, a parody of something -- most of the scenes were way too random. (Mi Hermana told me later which scenes she remembered from the original films.) (Also, how sad is it that I recognized the little weird kid from Hannah Montana?)

At any rate, Jack Black plays a Mexican priest who masquerades as a wrestler. He's the cook at the parish orphanage, and has a crush on a nun. His wild-man sidekick makes fun of him for being fat, and he makes fun of his sidekick for believing in science. Suffice to say, I laughed my ass off -- something I was not expecting to do at all!

Book Three in the Artemis Fowl children's series didn't take that long to read. A former colleague gave me the first book as a going-away present, and I'm now hooked. Not in a Harry Potter way, but still vested in the series in ways that are possibly unhealthy for an adult.

The Eternity Code follows our teenage criminal mastermind as he attempts one last scheme: to blackmail a multimillionaire using fairy technology. Naturally, the dwarves and trolls and gnomes and fairies and centaurs don't like this, and send a retrieval team to the human world.

I like this book the best so far, perhaps because the two underlying themes are that people can change and that aging and growing up are not necessarily bad, scary things. Artemis has been slowly growing a conscience along with friends as the series progresses, and in this installment his long-lost father renounces the family business of evildoing and pledges to do nothing but good. Meanwhile, the Fowl bodyguard deals with having to retire early and pass the torch on to a hot-headed successor.

Ah, summer! Time to come up with a more extensive reading list...

Pre-exam denial

2009-05-14T21:19:00.000-07:00

The comprehensive exams have been written, fretted over, and emailed ... but before they even started, the procrastination continued.

Perhaps because of the impending four-day intensive exam (though our department admin assistant was kind and emailed them a day early), I felt little connection to the 18-year-old protagonists in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.

I'm not the biggest fan of the graduation genre to begin with, whether it's high school or college. I just can't relate. Loved the friends I made at all the schools I've attended, but I still couldn't wait to get the hell out and get on with life.

At any rate, Nick and Norah stars Michael Cera, who doesn't seem to be able to leave his Arrested Development typecasting, which fits well with this high school breakup tale about a music geek who can't get over his ex until he meets this really cool chick who also likes the same type of music he does.

It's cuter than that, actually. As the graduation genre goes, it was slightly more creative in that it revolved all the drama around the indy band scene. (Also, positive inclusion of Asian-Americans and gays!) I just had a hard time relating to all the underage drinking and clubbing and friends-with-benefits and band-chasing --some of us barely (or never) had that experience in college, let alone high school. And the cynic in me kept thinking the teenage lovebugs wouldn't last in their planned long-distance relationship, even if they both go off to universities in New England.

In fact, I spent most of the film shaking my cane at the TV screen.

Oh, do I sound jaded? If so ...

Quantum of Solace -- pure and excellent eye candy! As Bond films go, it was definitely a disappointment after Daniel Craig's debut as 007 in Casino Royale. (But honestly, how do you beat that? It was amazing.) Still, this second Craig-as-Bond film was decent. It tried to follow up on the whole "explaining Bond's psyche" theme, but I thought that was unnecessary.

Cool gadgets and flashy computer technology, good chase scenes and exciting fight sequences. What more is needed to take one's mind off of studying?

Triple X

2009-05-04T08:36:00.001-07:00

The neffy has been over a lot. He claps for himself now, when he accomplishes something new ... like dragging a kitchen chair to the fridge and climbing on it just to grab the magnets we deliberately placed out of his reach.

Following his innocent and youthful example, I've been similarly celebrating ... or rather, dragging out the celebrating in order to avoid studying statistics. Birthday drinks, brunches, and happy hours have also given me good excuses not to study for the upcoming Master's-qualifying exams. I've officially been a thirtysomething for over a week now, and love it!

In other news, because La Madre used all her vacation time to visit the new neffy in Michigan and the soon-to-arrive new niece, I skipped my graduation ceremony.

So I was a little shocked and disturbed to hear on the local Seattle news that, had I walked, I would not have been allowed to shake my dean's hand as is the tradition because of H1N1 paranoia.

Guess the mumps scare the week I left disappeared rather quickly!