Tales of a Neurotic Woman

My girls went on vacation with their dad, as they always do, twice each summer. This time he took them to Montreal. There was a huge ruckus on Saturday as my innocent children couldn't get past the border without their birth certificates. I must have received a dozen phone calls. I was out of town as well so it was hours later when I was finally able to fax over their birth certificates and they were able to enter Canada. (I'll refrain from making smart comments about my ex's wisdom in all this, not to mention the fact that my kid's were not the only ones without proper identification - ok so I tried to refrain). This was all resolved about 8pm on Saturday. It is now past noon on Monday and I have not heard from them since. I've called 5 cell phone numbers and left messages numerous times. I cannot call the hotel since I don't know where they are staying. My mind is reeling with thoughts of well-executed abductions including birth certificates willingly provided by the custodial parent.

Update: I've since heard from them and it seems they are in the only place in North America with no cell phone reception. I'm trying to figure out why I immediately went to the worst place possible. I did this a couple of weeks ago too, when a phone call at the end of a 5 minute walk never came. I usually assume the best unless I have a reason to otherwise. Maybe it's cause they're on the tail end of growing up and my influence is waning. This deep seated fear I never had before has suddenly reared its ugly head. I don't like it and I don't like the feeling.

There's another feeling I've had lately that I don't like. It's reminiscent of a deep, dark place I used to dwell in full of emotional intensity and addictive roller coasters rides. I used to revel in dwelling there, like there was no truth beyond it, no better place from which to view reality. Anything else was an illusion. I thrived on it, and it did me some good then. It was a place I needed to go to survive, at a time in my life that welcomed it. Even when I no longer required it, a piece of me remained, inextricably tied there. Finally and cautiously I moved beyond it. I haven't fully examined what it means to live where I now reside, joy is still sometimes elusive and love even more so, but I am happy to be here. These old feelings have awakened in me a desire to move further away from them, to continue to search out experiences of joy and light, and love. I've had an odd wish today to drink a glass of wine and dance, just dance as if dancing will set me free.

A Full Moon and The Dark Knight

Holy Fucking Movie Batman! I have so much to say about this movie and the experience surrounding it, but due to construction on the Schuylkill it took me over an hour to get home, so it will have to wait until tomorrow. (I actually wrote myself notes while sitting in traffic). If anyone plans to go, do not delay, go now!!

Ok, its time for the real recap of my TDK exerpience:

As the title says, last night was a full moon which I thought was highly appropriate for the night's adventure. As i said in my previous post, my tickets were free courtesy of my cable/internet/phone company. The movie was being shown at the UA Main Street 6 in Manayunk. I wore my bat tee for the occasion and upon arriving immediately realized how lame that was. We picked up our tickets and made our way to the nearby Manayunk Diner for some grub. As soon I walked in 2 of the waitstaff complimented me on my tee. OK, so I felt better. But I could hardly eat due to my nervous energy. This wasn't a Tool concert, I was surprised at how excited I was. The waitress even sat down and inquired how long I'd been a bat fan!

After eating, we made our way back to the theatre. We patiently sat through Regal's First Look
and then the 'turn off your cell phones' message. At this point , although the theatre was only half full, you know everyone there was raring to go. And then....nothing! The screen froze and there was no sound. We all sat there looking at each other until a security guard (not an usher mind you, a security guard) came in and told us the movie would be delayed another half hour.
Hmmm, whatever, I passed the time reading a vampire manga book my daughter lent me.

Finally, the previews began - most notably for me were The Spirit and of course, Watchmen.

Spoiler alert: (not really, I don't give away any major plot lines, but just in case)

Then, The Dark Knight began, with a wild opening sequence that I cannot wait to see in IMAX.
This film had much more action and cringe scenes (for me, anyway) than Batman Begins. It's much less of Bruce Wayne's personal story and more of the universal conflict between good and evil, sane and crazy, hero and villian. But taken on the heels of Batman Begins, it was golden.

All the hype over Heath Ledger's Joker was right on. This was really his movie. Whatever accolades he receives for this role are well deserved. I thought Aaron Eckhart portrayed a very believable Harvey Dent as well.

I also previously wrote about being schooled in Bat lore. I am certainly glad for that because I felt a certain kind of satisfaction at being able to recognize story lines, knowing that the writers did their homework and which of the plot turns did not stay true to the original comics. I was extremely pleased to see that the relationship between Batman and The Joker had the same psychological implications as that that was brought out in The Killing Joke. The scenes and the dialogue between the two characters were just as intense as I'd imagined.

I left the movie to view the sight of the full moon in the night sky, and pondering the themed takeaway questions. Is it better to know the truth even if you are 100% sure it will hurt? What hurts more, the staged reality or the truth? Does the lie truly protect the innocent? Does believing in the lie really help those who it is meant to protect? These themes played out for Batman as well as the good citizens of Gotham City. I couldn't help but think of my bat benefactor and wonder how they are playing out for him at this very moment. How are they playing out for me?

I love it when a movie makes me think, and The Dark Knight met that expectation fully. I can't wait to see it again.

Superheroes

This week I finally got around to seeing Iron Man. I had heard that it was good and was intrigued at the idea of Robert Downey, Jr. as the lead character. My only previous encounter with Tony Stark was through Neil Gaiman's Eternals series, though I was aware of his back story. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and it's awesome ending, which, for some strange reason was very validating. I had a harder time accepting The Dude as the villian, but that came together by the end as well. Must be those iron suits.

Next up is The Dark Knight. While by no means am I an expert on Batman, I do consider myself pretty well versed in Bat lore. I loved Batman Begins and I am beyond excited for The Dark Knight. I've been greedily devouring every preview, behind the scenes, interviews, articles, photos, etc I can get my hands on.I planned to see it in IMAX but had to wait till Sunday of opening weekend because the other times were already sold out. Then yesterday I get an email from my cable company offering free tickets for Thursday, before opening night! I jumped at the chance and scored my tickets!

Now here is the catch - I left Iron Man thinking Robert Downey Jr. (as Tony Stark) could be my superhero anyday, and I obviously feel the same way about Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne. However in real life, multi-millionaire, corporate, fast-car driving, suited men don't do a thing for me. Mind you, I've never met one, but you'd think that my values and tastes would translate to the big screen, and historically they have. So I've boiled it down to this - it's not the magic of the movies or Hollywood - it's the power of the comic, the fact that I've read these characters before, and of course the biggest aspect is the superhero factor. If I feel a connection to someone it doesn't matter what his day job is, and that goes for mogul superheroes as well. I can't wait for Thursday....

The Big Read

I stole this from Kali who stole it from Chrys:

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (Well, I can't figure out how to underline on here, so I'm going to star the ones I LOVE).
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee**
6. The Bible - I've read some and I have aspirations to read the rest.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte**
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell**
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - I'm italicizing because I haven't read the complete works, but I've read enough.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger**
19. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (the first one)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini**
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown**(for the leads it gave me)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (the first one)
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood**
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley**
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Well, I've read way more than 6 and some of them twice (mainly the books I was assigned to read during school, just to see if they'd have the same effect on a mature me vs. a teenage me. And they did. Heathcliff and Holden still rock my world). I'm going to add some as well:

American Gods - Neil Gaiman**(had to get some Neil on the list)
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore** (graphic novel representation)
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd**
Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt**
Women Who Run With the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes**

Disguises and Marital Advice

This is the min-blog, or jet-lagged blog before the real-deal blog which I'll get to at some point. Two things have stuck with me over the past few days that I want to write about. I was at a bridal shower yesterday and one of the 'games' we played was to write a bit of marital advice for the new couple on a card. The cards were then read aloud to the bride-to-be and she picked her top 5. The winners got prizes. This is what I wrote:

"Always make time for each other. Share your interests and your passions. Be friends."

It was a winner! Considering the demise of my own marriage, and my relation to the bride-to-be, I could not be considered an expert by any means on marriage. But I was flattered that I won.I do believe in what I wrote. I also believe that when my advice is not happening, or the parties could care less about sharing anything, the relationship is way over. I hope her relationship includes sharing and being friends, and does so for a very long time. I love the girl.

Saturday morning at the airport gate waiting for my flight from JFK to Philly, I noticed this guy. I noticed him because of his big bushy mustache. Then I saw his sleek body and nice physique which totally contradicted the out of date mustache. So then (and remember I am running on nothing, having just flown overnight from Seattle), I finally notice the sunglasses, weird longish blonde hair and red baseball cap. I realize the cap and hair is a wig, and the whole thing is a disguise. As I was watching him, he kept changing seats. I don't even know which flight he eventually got on, I think he was making a concerted effort to blend in, meanwhile to me, he stood out like a sore thumb. I'm sure he was some famous actor, but if he wasn't in disguise, I probably wouldn't have given him a second glance.

The whole idea of standing out more because you want to hide is what's running through my brain. Especially since, and I may blog deeper about this at some point, part of my trip was the realization that despite all the work I've done over the years, all the books I've read, the efforts I've made to be real, to live up to my authentic self - I am still not completely there. Its frustrating. Will I ever be?

The Spaces Between the Stars

I just finished reading The Merlin Effect, written by T.A. Barron. It was one of my daughter's reading olympics books. I always have a pile of books on my nightstand which my daughters add to whenever they've finished a book that they feel I must read as well. I was intrigued by the title, the connection to King Arthur, and not the least by the pangs of guilt because I still need to read The Mists of Avalon.

The Merlin Effect is about a young girl, Kate, in Baja for a research project with her father, a historian. The other members of the team consisted of Isabella, a marine biologist and Terry, a geologist. All 3 were participating for their own gains under the ruse of being a team. Her father was looking for The Resurrection, a 1547 Spanish galleon lost at sea and through folk legend rumored to have carried Merlin's horn. The marine biologist was studying sea life and the geologist, undersea volcanic activity. I loved the different themes played out in this story- science, myth, history, spirituality - even more so since this is a young adult book - and one my kid thoroughly enjoyed.

Certain parts of the book struck me, which is why I knew I should write about it. Kate's in-depth conversation with Isabella, regarding the spiral of DNA and the evolutionary creation of life, began with "All the future lies within the present" and ended with my favorite quote:

"Just as every star is part of creation, so are all the empty spaces between the stars."

Kate's conversation with Geoffrey towards the end of their adventure held more favorite quotes and life affirming realizations: "If you can choose, you can create." The magic of the horn has more to do with renewed life than everlasting life. It turns out Kate had the power all along, the knowledge that she could choose her own life, each and every day - to begin again. This has nothing to do with age, for each moment holds it own beauty and promise of hope and potential for change. It's our choice to make something of these moments and days in our lives, old or young, the lesson pertains to all of us.

"Never doubt the spiral horn,
Holds a power newly born,
Holds a power newly great,
Holds a power you create."

At the same time I was reading this book, I was also obsessing on a song by Dan Wilson, Free Life. Here are the lyrics:

Let's take a little trip down where we used to go
It's way beyond the strip a place they call your soul
We'll sit down for a while and let the evening roll


Don't worry 'bout the time we'll find a place to stay
The people 'round here seem familiar in some way
Look kinda like we did before we got so cold


And in the air the questions hang
Will we get to do something
Who we gonna end up being
How we gonna end up feeling
What you gonna spend your free life on?
Free life

Let's fall in love again with music as our guide
We'll raise our ready hands and let go for the ride
Down into unknown lands where lovers needn't hide


We got these lives for free we don't know where they've been
We don't know where they'll go when we are through with them
The starlight of the sun the dark side of the moon


And in the air the questions hang
Will we get to do something
Who we gonna end up being
How we gonna end up feeling
What you gonna spend your free life on?
Free life
Free life
Free life


It seems so long ago those empty afternoons
With nowhere much to go and nothing much to do
But sit up in my room and let the world unfold


In the air the questions hang
Will we get to do something
Who we gonna end up being
How we gonna end up feeling
What you gonna spend your free life on?


In the air the questions hang
Will we get to do something
Who we gonna end up being
How we gonna end up feeling
What you gonna spend your free life on?
Free life
Free life
Free life
Free life

I kept coming back to this song after I finished the book. I thought they went well together, both reminders that we get to choose, this life is ours, given to us free. The years, months, days, hours, minutes - -it's basically up to us - it's up to me to decide where I want to live, what I want to do, who I want to spend it with. Sure, there are obligations, but at the end of the day, we only have to live with ourselves.

I just love how synchronicity bestows itself upon me. From the moment years ago, when I decided to pay attention, it hasn't failed me. Besides the obvious message, I'm not exactly sure what this song and book may be leading me to, but they are just the most recent two in a flurry of similar ideas being thrown my way. I can't let go of the Tool connection either, (a very personal one), and I wonder what the next step will be....

The Waiting Room

As I usually do on weekend evenings when I stay in (which is 99.9% of weekend evenings), I watch a movie on demand from my cable carrier. Last night's choices were The Darjeeling Limited, Eastern Promises, Superheroes, and The Waiting Room. And my choice, more often than I care to admit leans toward a love story. From the preview The Waiting Room seemed to be a love at first sight type of movie and I'm always curious to see how that works out. The romantic in me has not completely ruled out the possibility. Spoiler alert from here on in: I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, the plot lines for the two main characters were interesting and very real, however the plot involving the two of them together was practically non-existent. The two meet by chance in the waiting room of a train station, exchange only niceties, yet can't get each other out of their minds. Life goes on and at the very end of the movie, they meet again in the same place, and walk off holding hands. Even the most hopelessly romantic cannot be hopeful in this situation. Could we have at least a conversation? A connection, something they have in common? During the movie we learn that the man is not ready for kids, meanwhile the woman has one. And we're supposed to believe things will work out in the end? Another crazy thing that bugged me was that the man's live-in girlfriend was painting and redecorating their apartment. When they split up, he stayed in the apartment! I know that's petty, but I thought she should have kicked him out. Maybe I was looking for more of the falling in love story, no, that's exactly what I was looking for. Like I said, I did enjoy the movie overall, but I would have liked more meat in their story.

The moral of the story is that the movie started me thinking about my own life and love. Have I ever met someone and instantly known that it was love at first sight? Hell no. But have I known on first 'meeting', that this encounter might lead to something else? Yes. I've only ever thought I was in love twice, and now after the fact I question if it really was love. Does love only count when you're in the midst of it? For as long as I've lived this life, I'm still rather clueless when it comes to matters of the heart. Not my own heart, I know that one pretty well, but I am not as good at reading other people's. I truly believe love and joy are two of our primary purposes as human beings, but I question whether that love is meant to be of the romantic kind. I'm not looking for love nor am I lacking for love in my life, but the mystery is still out there. What if? When? Where? Why? and perhaps most mysteriously, Who?

Tonight I will stay away from those types of movies ;)