I. Saturday morning chitchat
It's an exciting day: it's warming up!
Jumping from below zero up to the thirties... and beyond.
AND, my knee let me sleep all night without stabbing me in the brain. I’m so proud of my body for knitting itself back together.
Yay, health!
Only: I have a small cold.
Gee whiz, come on you guys, enough already.
But, truly, it's small---I can breathe easily, and that's the main thing. The best thing!
"My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart,BREATHE!
the passing of blood and air through my lungs...."
The lines ^ are from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself", which I only truly registered when I heard them in the movie Nine Days.
I love that scene so much, I'm going to embed it here--it stands alone.
NOTE: It's a SPOILER
This movie stays with me--it feels so much like ME.
Me, as myself.
Sad and life affirming.
Sleepy, slow, and vital, vibrant.
II. Movies of Our Selves
Other films have felt like my life, my family, my times--the forces at work---but not about me qua me.
Some of them...
Moonstruck (1987)--My Sicilian (father's) side of the family. Still love that film. Presented as funny, but there's real hurt in there.
Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) felt like a home movie from my childhood. I haven't watched this in 30 years, so I'm not sure why, besides that my mother was a pianist, and my parents loved Glenn Gould. Beauty and befuddlement.
Love, Liza (2002)-- Phillips Seymour Hoffman, as a man blasted by the suicide of his wife, who left a note he spends the movie getting up the energy to read. Definitely a picture of me after my mother's death. Very loving.
Downfall, (2004, w/ Bruno Ganz), about the final days of the Third Reich, with Hitler in the bunker.
Weirdly, I found an uplifting message in this dark film:
IT MATTERS WHAT WE DO, what I do... even if the world falls apart around us. Do the right thing.
Paired ^ with Blindspot: Hitler's Secretary, a documentary about a young woman who chose not to see, not to do;
and The White Rose about young people who did see, and act.
Capote (2005), another with Philip S. Hoffman––a picture of how riveting narcissism can be... and also of how slim the line is between creation and destruction.
What door did you walk out of?
> > > What are the movies of YOU?
iii. Sad 'n' Cheerful
Ha! I was just texting with Tracy about wanting to
chit-chat lightly, but even if I start with the weather, I end
up chatting about suicide and liberation.
LOL... "And that's okay". That is the background radiation.
I'm feeling quite cheerful.
I relate to Cornel West saying to Toni Morrison that he is a cheerful person with a sad soul. He also said, “I'm not an optimist but I'm a prisoner of hope”.
Makes sense to me--like physics:
Entropy wins, but isn't it so cool we exist?
To infinity, and beyond!
I guess Harold & Maude (1971) felt like me, myself, when I saw it at fifteen. Or, it felt like who I wanted to be: Maude.
That didn't seem possible, at fifteen--I thought we were different species; but now I see it's a matter of different life stages. Bean sprouts don't look much like beans.
Now I have flashes that I have indeed grown up into my version of a Maude. The mature stage of me.
Sad 'n' Cheerful.
Maude in the greenhouse: " I like to watch things grow. They grow and bloom and fade and die and change into something else.
Ah, life!"
iv. Back to chitchat... What's poppin' at the store?
Let's see. Oh, Amina set up a Black History Month book display.
She is so lovely... and so clueless about physical things. She piled the books all on top of one another.
I used to get annoyed with her, but I like her so much--and she's extremely smart, and kind and funny--now I just follow behind and rearrange.
Many books have already sold off the display--this was yesterday's selection:
Volunteer Abby was excited about a set of Denby stoneware dishes, made in England in the 1970s.
I have some Denby mustard-yellow salad plates w/ brown rims that I love, but I don't much care for this Tulip pattern. Though I do like the sugar bowl w/ lid, below, right:
> > > Do you break things?
I was mentioning to the cashier that I always have to have a broom handy at work because I break something most every day--and never have dishes at home for long.
"I don't think I've ever broken any of my dishes," she said.
Granted she's only 26, but by 26 I'm sure I'd broken a lifetime's worth of crockery.
I was wondering if I'm mentally inattentive, or perhaps I have some biological lack of coordination?
I kinda think the latter:
I remember breaking things when I was little---a porcelain horse figurine I loved; my mother's Brown Betty tea pot she loved.
It doesn't feel like I'm distracted,
it feels like things are easy to break. They practically do it themselves!
It's nothing tragic, just a propensity to break things.
They're just things. There are a lot of them in this, our world.
Good thing I work in a thrift store. 😊
What else?
Four old dolls-of-the-world came in. The ones with blue shawls are Ireland.
