Börk, börk, börk!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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...

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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

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...

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!

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

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

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!

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...