Million Dollar Baby Haiku:
<- Studdy Buddy. I spent today (and am still here presently) doggy-sitting for Joann Badley, my Interpretive Methods professor who lives a few blocks from me. So I've had a whole day free of the distractions that seem to orbit my desk at home (should I re-organize my DVD's by color instead of by studio distributor?), and with Toby, the scruffiest terrier on earth by my side, so I've got companionship without the temptation of conversation. 
It's been a lovely day, and actually, a pretty enjoyable paper writing process, considering I didn't get to mention Jane Eyre or Henry V. And I can now stop reading these! --> Huzzah!
Going out to mailbox this evening, and what do I find, but an Amazon.com box. "Surely, this is for a roommate" I think to myself, since it's been months (okay, weeks) since I've ordered anything. But still, my heart holds a glimmer of hope before I read the address label, because there is truly, no more beautiful sight than that of an Amazon.com box in the mail. Especially when I have no idea what it is or whom it could be from.
A similar incident occurred last fall when a mystery Amazon.com package appeared for me which turned out to be the 20th anniversary edition of Moonstruck, which I immediately knew must be from Richard, because what other person on earth did I spend countless adolescent hours quoting Cher and Nicholas Cage with, but Richard, and of course Erin, (our 14 yr old Moonstruck threesome- does that sounds weird? Come to think, I meant that we were 14 at the time, but it also holds true that it was 14 years ago. Good Lord!). Also, I had just mailed Richard my OfficeMac software so he could get Excel, so that was a pretty awesome pseudo-surprise thank you.
Well, I opened the package today, yelped out loud as the bright yellow DVD packaging revealed itself to be Little Miss Sunshine, and read the note from Kim's Mom, the incomparably loving and thoughtful, Toni Hamlin of South Paris, Maine, who sent it to me as a belated birthday, Xmas, pneumonia recovery present.
It used to be that my ride to work involved sitting on a gray plastic bench underground that travelled underwater until I got off that bench, transfered to a different (orange and red) bench and sat next to at least one Hasidic man and usually a Chinese woman and sometimes a Mariachi band would walk through and we'd all groan because 9:30am is never a good time for a Mariachi band to try and get tips. During this underground ride, I'd read about 19th century women in novels who, when rejected by their husbands who find out they had once been raped, are forced to wander the countryside of Southern England alone, burrying their dead babies and wishing they could be forgiven. I read these stories even as I walked off the train, headed up the three flights of stairs into morning light and walked as carefully as I could up Lafayette Street without bumping into any hot dog stands or bike messengers. 
I'm always the first one on the bus, because I'm the second stop, and if anyone gets on at the first stop, it's usually Joanne Badly, my Interpretive Methods professor and she's awesome and sometimes we've sat and chatted and sometimes we both gesture to the book we're holding or the papers we're grading, and we smile and I take a seat near the back door where I prefer to sit. 
the bus driver pulls over to Crown Hill Lutheran Church, one of the apparently designated bathroom stops approved by the transit board, and he/she gets off the bus and leaves me there alone for a couple minutes. I guess they can tell that I'm not going to try to drive the bus away, but rather, will enjoy the time alone to sing outloud while no one can hear, just like I used to do in the car when whomever was driving ran in to the gorcery store and I would sing "The Carpenters" or some Balkan folk song at the top of my lungs making sure no one was standing near enough the car to hear me.
dissapears under new paint. The last boat I saw down there was the Resolute, and before it, Augustine and the St. John. The boat there now doesn't have a visible name, but there's some Norse-looking desings painted on the front where a naked lady would be if it were a pirate ship.
...though I'm a Siberian winter storm at heart. Just as Shakespeare's Benedick complains that Claudio no longer wants to hear "the drum and the fife", but would rather hear "the tabour and pipe" because he is in love, so would I rather hear the blustery winds of autumn and the concaving crunch of snow underfoot than hear the cooing of birds in blossoming trees or the flip flop of people wearing flip-flops again - the heralds of Spring. I can't help it. I love the austerity of Winter and the hearth-warming homecoming feel of Fall. Maybe it's my Minnesota roots or the fact that San Diego had no real seasons, but I've never been excited about Spring, and I know this makes me an outsider. 
So, in an effort to be a little less moribund in my tastes, here's one of my favorite poems, and I dedicate it to Seth who has forever linked this in my memory to images of him dancing in a green sweater vest for paying audiences. 
(RE: Photo: Woodhull Hospital was originally built to be a prison-more on that another time...) 
to me, has always been about looking at the stars alone, feeling connected, then feeling even more alone in the universe. That's kind of just my take. I think it's about love too. Isn't most good poetry about love?
So I just learned about Daniel Tammet, a young Brittish savant who, unlike most number geniuses, is fully functional despite some genius compulsion issues. But besides the fact that Tammet succesfully memorized and recounted Pi to 22,514 digits, and spoke it aloud in only five hours, or the fact that he succesfully learned to speak Icelandic in only 7 days, here is what truly has me in awe of Daniel Tammet, in his words:
So I did some searching. This will not be news to some of you, but the numeric symbols we use are commonly referred to as Arabic Numerals, and originated in India somewhere around 400 BC. If you want to learn more, I suggest Wikipedia's article on Arabic Numerals, to get the history of how the written number morphed into what we have now. It's one of those "China Below Us-Constant Revelations of the Obvious" things that I never thought about again after kindergarten. You know, like the Blue Whale? I also recommend Wikipedia's short article on Daniel Tammet. Golly, I wish I could figure out how to make direct links in here. Anyone want to tell me how? If you want to see some Tammet interviews, and his rendering of Pi, just google his name, along with "60 minutes" and you'll get some pretty good stuff. 
Besides my mind being blown by the idea of colored number landscapes, I was really touched when I learned that Tammet tends to avoid beaches because of feeling the compulsion to count the grains of sand. Isn't that beautiful? And frustrating? It's just like how I can never have fruit in my cereal because there's too much stress involved in figuring out the ratio per spoonful of cereal to fruit slice so that I'm not left with tons of cereal and no fruit, or worse, 3 slices of strawberry and no remaining cheerios. Needless to say, Lucky Charms have always been problematic for me.
In the half hour "Making Of" documentary on the DVD of Sofia Copolla's "Marie Antoinette", actor Danny Huston, who portrays Emperor Joseph, remarks "As Oscar Wilde said, 'Only superficial people can't be superficial.'" It's a fitting quote for the film and its aesthetic of candy colors and powdered wigs that decorate the surfaces of desperation, lonliness and futility. It reminded me of director Baz Lurhman and his wife/creative partner Catherine Martin's aesthetic Film theory of "Real Artificiality" 
as opposed to mere artificial reality: that in exploring human stories and truth, the audience's imagination and empathy can go deeper when surfaces are taken seriously in their surfaceness, instead of putting all one's creative effort into literalism. Mars Hill Graduate School president Dan Allender posites one of the foundational theories of the Mars Hill philosophy when he says "Metaphors Change Lives" or, better explicated, "Metaphor[s]...reveal new and deeper truths than nominative truth."
1. "It is only superficial people who do not judge by appearances, the mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible" -- Oscar Wilde.
Aw heck, let's take it to the next level: What are metaphors? Surfaces? Mirrors? To me, it's like seeing your reflection in a river; part of yourself is shown to you while gazing at the surface of something deeper that you cannot quite see the bottom of.
So, believe it or not, last night was the first time I’d ever seen “Lethal Weapon”. Albeit, I’ve watched bits and pieces over its many years of TV syndication, but I’d never watched start to finish or followed the plot before last night. And watching it got me thinking. From the very first drug deal crackdown, when Mel Gibson whips out his gun and shoots like three guys in one second, I actually thought “this is fake, we’re gonna find out it’s a training practice for the academy or something”. The shootings were so casual and instantaneous that my 2007 perspective just assumed it was fake. No movie cop is allowed to kill that many people that quickly without some serious back-story to support it. And on top of that, the scene was clearly supposed to excite and entertain the audience. Look at how good he is with a gun! Nowadays, that’s the last thing we’re led to believe about our film protagonists. 
What a difference 1987 makes. Despite his anti-hero qualities- tortured past, suicidal tendencies, Mel Gibson’s character holds much more in common with Rambo than with contemporary “action” protagonists. And why wouldn’t he? 1987: It’s pre-gulf war, and the Berlin wall is still up, so of course bad guys are bad guys, so why would an audience be interested in a character’s moral struggle over casual killing. Cops kill bad guys. And we as the audience rejoice with Arnold and Sly with every commie or drug lord that they shoot. And boy, they shoot a lot. The weapons are big and sexy, and our heroes run through the middle of traffic, shirtless, chasing after the villain’s limo, until finally, they get to face off in hand-to-hand combat for the last seven minutes of the film, and when the final bullet gets the bad guy through the cranium, we shout “Take That!” and rejoice as if we’d been the hot shot behind the trigger our self. As my roommate Carrie remarked, the film was made when we still rejoiced in the idea of revenge. No irony needed or subtext, just kill the faceless evildoers then fall asleep at night knowing you’ve done your American duty. (I won’t draw out the contemporary political allusions, but you can do it for yourself if you want to).
