Bouncing

We watched The Lucky Ones last night. Its a movie about 3 soldiers home from Iraq - 2 on 30 day leaves and one done for good. They end up sharing a rental car to get to their destinations.

I spent the whole movie veering between delight in expected soldier cliches that were avoided and absolute eye-rolling at the immense number of movie cliches. Only giving this one a 4.5, and that's mainly 'cause Colee was pretty adorable at times (although super annoying at others). Sigh...

I'd love to see a good movie done about both sides - the soldier away from family and his family struggling to get along with him or her away. If done well, that would be a good story.

"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. From the Interstate, America is all steel guardrails and plastic signs, and every place looks and feels and sounds and smells like every other place. We stick to the back roads, where Kansas still looks like Kansas and Georgia still looks like Georgia, where there is room for diversity and for the occurrence of small miracles." - Charles Kuralt, On the Road

it won't last

"There is Only One of Everything" by Margaret Atwood

Not a tree but the tree
we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind and bending down
like that again. What will push out of the earth

later, making it summer, will not be
grass, leaves, repetition, there will
have to be other words. When my

eyes close language vanishes. The cat
with the divided face, half black half orange
nests in my scruffy fur coat, I drink tea,

fingers curved around the cup, impossible
to duplicate these flavours. The table
and freak plates glow softly, consuming themselves,

I look out at you and you occur
in this winter kitchen, random as trees or sentences,
entering me, fading like them, in time you will disappear

but the way you dance by yourself
on the tile floor to a worn song, flat and mournful,
so delighted, spoon waved in one hand, wisps of roughened hair

sticking up from your head, it's your surprised
body, pleasure I like. I can even say it,
though only once and it won't

last: I want this. I want
this.







(This poem makes me ache. Don't you love poems like that?)

God I love them

More than I can ever explain





This one is my very fave.

Haven't we all felt like this at some point?

Luckily its been a few years for me.

Ache

We watched the documentary Man on Wire this afternoon. The film is beautifully done. Its a bout a man who dreams of walking a tightwire between the World Trade Towers in 1974. Philippe Petit tells a great story and the footage and pictures are breathtaking. The picture is so well done. The recreated bits (of which there are few) blend in to the feel of the film.

I was taken with how so many people caught on to his dream and helped it happen. But at the end we learn of how some friendships ended, and it broke my heart. I think it'll take me a few days to get over my glumness.

Giving this one an 8.

A narrow room, and tall,

"Interior" by Dorothy Parker

Her mind lives in a quiet room,
A narrow room, and tall,
With pretty lamps to quench the gloom
And mottoes on the wall.

There all the things are waxen neat
And set in decorous lines;
And there are posies, round and sweet,
And little, straightened vines.

Her mind lives tidily, apart
From cold and noise and pain,
And bolts the door against her heart,
Out wailing in the rain.