Beware the Number 3

A warning to all thinking, feeling, sentient beings:

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES go see the ill-conceived third installments of Shrek or Pirates of the Caribbean. Not that I expect most of you to have even considered it, but I give the warning just in case someone says to you "Hey, I enjoy computer animation and Mike Myers- let's go see the new Shrek." or "Hey, I enjoy swashbuckle-fests and sea monsters, and have learned how to close my eyes and cover my ears whenever Keira Knightley is onscreen- let's go see the last Pirates movie."
JUST SAY NO!!!!


I would elaborate, but i really don't feel like using up my vocabulary to describe the heights of folly and depths of stupuidty that were reached in these films' conceptions and executions. If you want a hint as to how absurd, frustrating and jaw-droppingly non-sequitor Pirates 3 was, consider that I had to use "Happy Feet" as a reference point. (And if you don't already know that "HAPPY FEET" is the worst film ever made in the history of cinema, then feel free to give me a call: I can give at least a three hour lecture on the tangential wanderings of sexism, racism, dogmatism, non-entertaining xenophobic rants of the anthropomorphized singing penguin movie made by the guy who wrote "Mad Max".

But at least there was a salvagable experience from last night's unfortuante 10:40 viewing of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"- which should also have been recognized as the harbinger of doom that it was:

So Cabe and I headed down to Bellevue (suburbia) for the late night show. We parked in the mall parking garage, but since it was after ten, all the stores in the mall were closed. So, you could still walk through the mall to reach the theaters, but every store had it's fence gates down, and I couldn't help but be reminded of the zombie film classic "Dawn of the Dead" (though I've only seen the new one, which I enjoyed thoroughly) wherein a group of ill-fated humans set up camp in a mall and try to survive the onslaught of crazed zombies that are marching outside the mall gates. As we wandered through the labrynthine, shiny-floored corridors of the Bellvue galleria, I couldn't help but expect a hockey stick-wielding zombie to jump out from behind a water fountain and eat both of us alive.

Well, we made it to the theater without being killed. But the movie let out at 2am (it's freaking 3 hours long!) and we headed back through the mall to reach the parking garage. The mall doors were open, so we got in just fine and started walking through the now even darker and more ominous corridors. Eerie light jazz played overhead, and pregnant mannequins looked on as if to say "Beware- None who enter here ever depart". At far ends of walkways, we could see silent, isolated cleaning folk pushing janitorial carts- like specters doomed to walk the halls of the galleria for all eternity. They made no eye contact with us, not even glancing our way as if to say "Why are you two walking in an empty mall at 2 in the morning?"

We finally made it to the parking garage doors, and surprise, surprise, they were locked. "Let's try upstairs." Locked. By this point, I'm wondering whom I would call if we were locked in the mall all night. Who would come get us? Does one call the police? Were we breaking the law if the doors we entered were open in the first place?

The irrepressably intrepid-spirited Cabe led us on from floor to floor, door to door, refusing to turn back and go out the way we came, which I would have done from the get go, being that I was convinced that every second lost was one step closer to death and eternal internment in mall-purgatory. Escalators we had just come up. would be turned off by the time we backtracked. I was sure even the door we came in would now be locked. The zombies were going to get us. It was all over.
But finally, after about ten minutes of spooky mall marching, we made it out from an employees-only delivery hallway, which brought us right to the car. It was one of the most surreal experiences ever, which was helped in no way by the Terry Gilliam-esque hallucination sequences in the movie we'd just watched. Also not helping, was the creepy escaltor wall-wiper man who walked right by us once like a ghost, whom we later had to ask for help in getting out of the building. I seriously believe that mall is where souls of the damned reside to be tormented for all of eternity. And they probably have to watch "Shrek 3' and "Pirates: At World's End" three times a night. Don't make the same mistake they/we made!

What to Believe?

"Some things just aren't meant to be"
"Nothing Lasts Forever"
"If at First You Don't Succeed, try, try again."
"If it came from and outlet mall, be prepared to replace it within six months."

What you see here, are the sad remnants of my brief venture into the world of feminine accesories,specifically of the reproduction-baroque-Marie Antoinette-redux variety. Yes, my wondrous-shiny fake pearl and pewtar wristwatch committed suicide last night, and you would to if you were forced to be on the wrist of someone while they heave a 30lb trash bag full of coffee grounds into a dumpster on a rainy Sunday night. Sadder even, is that said watch had to be carried home in a plastic food-handler's glove.

So what now? Do i take this as a sign that wrist jewelry and I should part ways forever? Was the watch offended that I only looked at it's sparkles and never actually used it to tell time (because I can't read clocks)? Or is there a deeper meaning here in regards to my femininity? The juxtaposition of a snapping wristband sending faux pearls bouncing along the floor of a theater concessions kitchen where bleach buckets and URNEX abound, causes one to wonder if perhaps my wrist is not the best place for pretty things to be. Has my environment won the battle over whether I continue my slow return to the world of high heels and picnic dresses- the world I left behind somewhere in the late 90's- or am i doomed to jeans-and-t-shirts-ville, where i've had uneasy citizenship for quite some time. Can i not live in both? And what about the fact that I've always been allergic to the basic metals used in earrings, and thus, can only wear them about two days a week? Must I face the reality that perhaps, I'm not allowed to dress up?

Maybe I should just replace my watch and not wear it when I'm working.

Release the Erudition!

I was about six years old, the first time I remember giving a correct answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. I was headed up for bedtime, and my parents were playing with guests at the kitchen table. Stopping by to say goodnight, I heard "Which ear, the left or the right, has better hearing?" and I offered the correct answer (no idea which one anymore) and received laud and honor from the amused adults. Oh those glorious days of precociousness...

Since then, I've sought various ways of feeding my love and obsession for all things trivial and factoid-oriented. It's hard nowadays to find an eager Trivial Pursuit crowd. Even more so, it's hard to function in daily life when every word someone says triggers a cultural, historical or literary reference that you feel physically compelled to mention outloud, even though you know you'll be met with silence and or/revulsion. But there's something inside that just says:"Mention How 'Le Petomane' was not only the middle name given to Mel Brooks' character in 'Blazing Saddles' but is actually the name of a 19th century French vaudeville artist who used self-contstructed plastic tube contraptions to play music with his farts, and how the popular juggling group 'The Flying Karamazov Brothers', whom you and your family have seen perform dozens of times since the early 80's, even back when the guys were just touring rennaissance fairs and your mom changed your brother's diaper on the back of the wooden stage they were performing on, how they wrote a play about Le Petomane and performed it at the La Playhouse in the mid-90's, during the time that you had regular season tickets that you purchased for yourself with your babysitting money and were definitley the theater's youngest individual subscriber at age 12, and how the play was quite creepy and political and not what fans of the FKB were expecting and thus, no one has heard of the play since, except when you mentioned its existence to Bill Irwin while you were having lunch with him and talking about the play he was writing about George L. Fox,



the 19th century New York performer who was one of america's first celebrity box-office breaking comedians, but who eventually went insane and died poor and crazy."





It's hard to have a lot of info floating around that you can't do anything with other than alienate or bore people with esoteric, erudite, obtuse references. (note broing, alientating habit of regularly using words like erudite).

Enter PUB TRIVIA

At last, there's a sport I can really get behind, and a team sport, at that! It has everything I could ever want in an evening: pubs, trivia questions and refillable soda. I've been saying it's as close to being a professional poker player as I'll ever get, insofar as it involves paying money to compete for more money while sitting at a place where people come by and ask you if they can get you another drink.

I've done it two weeks in a row so far, and by cracky, it's fabu! (And at Jabu's Pub in lower Queen Anne). So to celebrate this new part of my life that I've waited all my life for, here are some questions that have come up the last two weeks, and if you've got time, listen to the episode of This American Life that I linked below, I resonated with it intensely. Take an hour break from whatever you're doing, pull out some crayons, and doodle on paper while you listen to the splendiferous Ira Glass and his cast of genius correspondants as they talk about themes of Quiz-ness in our daily life.
This American Life
#326 Quiz Show


Pub Quiz (feel free to answer in comments section- answers will appear eventually)

category: Talk Show Hosts
Which talk show host began her career starring in John Water's 'Hairspray'?

category: Random Animal Facts
What is the largest member of the deer family?

category: 80's movies
What film had Michelle Pfeiffer laying across a piano singing "Makin' Whoopee"?

category: Eddie Murphy Films
In which film does Eddie Murphy play an FBI negotiator?

category: Sharks
true or false: the thresher shark's tail is as long as it's body.

Not Dead, Just Busy

As the title suggests, it's been hectic schedulewise, emotionally, and intellectually. I just completed my second term at Mars Hill and am now looking at options to expand my plan of study to a possible three year-more-broadly-defined program to incoporate more theology, counseling and cultural engagement/arts kind of stuff. More on that once there's something worth saying. But I'll say this much, I'm starting Hebrew classes next week. Huzzah!

My mom just finished a four day visit. Hadn't seen her (or Dad for that matter) since I left their home in Arizona last August. When I landed in AZ end of last June, I was in a wheelchair and needed an oxygen tank on the plane. When I arrived in Seattle end of August, I was walking and talking, but the mere carrying of a guitar case had me wheezing like I'd run 20 laps. When mom arrived the other day, she commented on how briskly I was walking, and I realized it'd been quite awhile since I thought about pneumonia or really noticed latent effects. That was nice.

And finally, Intiman Theater is back up and running for the new season, and I finally have regular work again. I'm now the senior bartender, which is pretty wacky, but everyone else left, so I get to set up stuff my way. No problems there. At last, the closetted efficiency-expert in me can come out of hiding.

And, as always, the emerging of Spring weather sort of sends me into hibernation. Well, actually, my insides go crazy and I wish I could go hibernate, but instead I have to buck up and try to brave the onslaught of emotions and memories that spring breezes unsettle. It's a pretty painful season for me. Everything's blossoming and I want to run and hide. Lillacs are popping out everywhere, and I think of Bennington, and Kim especially. And that is nice. But still, the smell of spring flowers sends me into emotional anaphylactic shock. Wish I could really figure out why. I have my suspicions, but mostly, it's just that feeling of everything else coming alive, and me, feeling no change at all. I feel like I stick out- the only thing that isn't pleasantly pastel and chirping joyfully. hmm... (Oh, Kim took this beautiful spring picture- I stole it off the interweb).

Anyway, that's some of what's kept me away from the computer. Here's a quote to finish. As always, great quotes brought to me by my favorite ex-con existentialist dee-jay, Northern Exposure's Chris-in-the-Morning. He quoted this in a season four episode I watched today. God bless that TV show.









"A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition." -GK Chesterton

Lanscape of Numbers

Some few of you may recall my March posting about Daniel Tammet, the high-functioning autistic savant who visualizes numbers by color and shape- and memoriezed Pi up to 22,514 digits. Well, at last, here is his water color rendering of how he sees the number Pi in his mind.



I hope my kids will paint numbers, instead of painting by numbers.

You can read more about Tammet on his blog in my Links section, and also read more about how I feel about him in my March post "The Color of Numbers"

I'm Becoming One Of Those People Who Write Poems At Starbucks...

Sign Language

The dog wants her to pet him.
He jumps onto her lap, puts his face against hers,
tries to tuck his head under her hands.
But she’s trying to speak to the man across the table,
and she needs her hands to speak.
Sign language and a sunny day and a straw hat-
And I can watch them because I’m on the other side of a tinted window,
though only five feet away-
But I might as well be sitting at their table,
the eavesdropping would be the same.
Watching their hands- hearing nothing except maybe the dog’s whimpering for affection.
I don’t know what they’re talking about,
but they embrace and smile as they part
and I wish I too could speak with my hands,
Wish I had infinite languages in my hands-
So I’d never have to struggle for words.
I struggle for words
Always
But more, I struggle for meaning
To know what I really want,
Want to say,
Want to be known,
Want to know.
Would it be easier with my hands?
Or would I still bark and whimper like the little dog-
Getting in people’s way as they try to communicate with one another-
and I try to be held-
“See me, see me
I’m here too.
I have no language like yours.”

Wednesday Night Haiku

Some things should not be
reduced to the size of min-
-iature poems.

At Last, My Pub Has Come Along

I woke up this morning after what was a good 8+ hours of sleep, and felt like I’d been pushing freight trains all night- or that I’d been run over by one. “Why so beat?” I wondered. And then I remembered- last week was one of the hardest, most full, challenging, encouraging, emotional, hopeful, disappointing, eye-opening, heart-stirring, enjoyable, sorrowful, happy, companioned, lonely weeks ever. It would be ridiculous not to feel that in my muscles, much less my brain and my heart. Hangover? More like hanging over a cliff- and sometimes it seems like I’m supposed to take a running leap over that edge and sometimes it feels like I need a thousand arms holding me from falling off it. But a cliff, no less, is right in front of me. Issues of surrender/submission and risk/endangerment surround this cliff jumping question, and the best I can do is wait up here till I feel the freedom to jump off or to run off in search of flat land. One of these options is good for me. Probably both. But as I sit in my exhaustion and dizziness, remembering how many places I’ve been taken to this past week, in my heart, in my head, in my past, in potential futures, what comes to mind is, what a vast amount of time I spent in bars this week. So I’m making a list.

Monday 9: 3-5 Edgewater Hotel, Happy Hour:
$4 Burger
Monday 9: 9-12:30 Park Pub:
4 glasses of water
Tuesday 10: 8:30-12:30 Park Pub:
$5 pizza and 3 Cokes
Wednesday 11: 4-5 Edgewater Hotel, Happy Hour:
$6 Sake/Vodka/cucumber/lime cocktail
Thursday 12: 11:30-12:30 Jabu’s:
4 glasses of water
Friday 13: 10-12 Greenlake Bar & Grill, Happy Hour:
$3.50 margarita, $2 ceasar salad, $2 mozzarella sticks
Saturday 14: 4-5:30 Belltown Bistro, Happy Hour:
$2 Corona, $4 garlic mashed potatoes
Saturday 14: 9-10:30 McMenamin’s:
$7 Burger, 3 Dr Peppers
Sunday 15: all day
Reflecting on what happened in/around/before/after/during/because of and in spite of this list.


With grateful acknowledgment to fellow pub-crawlers Sarah, Karen, Elizabeth, Erin, Justin, Jamie, Meredith, Smruti, Rachel, Brent, John, Cathy, Ben H, Kim, Mary, Ian, Ben O, Alisa and Cabe (who crawled to all but one of these).

Wednesday Night Haiku: Belated

I'll be consistent
and do my haiku tonight,
but not to shift gears.

I've thought about this
a lot, and it pours into
more than just this blog.

What does it mean to
say what you feel, when you're used
to being silenced?

The greatest gift is
your invitation that says
"I want to hear you."

You get used to not
hoping for things when your hope
has always been mocked.

Sometimes freedom is
weeping over who you've not
been allowed to be.

Response to an Anonymous Commenter on April 8 Post

"Anonymous said...
I saw this clip on the Today Show along with an interview of the family. The dad wanted to surprise his son. The media was tipped off. I don't believe the family had a hidden agenda; all they wanted to do was see each other once again. That boy is going to remember that moment for the rest of his life and the fact that it is captured on camera doesn't take anything away from the joy he felt.

Perhaps as a Christian you should stop being less judgmental and more accepting. Or hey, maybe you could even post something about Jesus' resurrection, after all Sunday was Easter.

Just a thought!"

Re: Anonymous

I must admit, I was quite shocked to see such a vehement reaction to my post regarding a private family moment. The fact that you read my words as somehow condemnatory of this family was definitely a disappointment. The very reason I posted this, was that seeing this moment between the father and son, brought up feelings for me personally that made me want to protect this family and their experience. I am asserting their worthiness, not laughing at them. I didn’t feel it was necessary to make assumptions about how the media had probably been tipped off, or how it must have been someone else’s idea to have the reunion happen at school and on camera, because this seemed like a given. I give the benefit of the doubt to the parents, that their first concern was about their son, not the media. And yes, this is a moment the son will remember forever, and he will have a taped document to re-watch, as he gets older. But my feelings in watching it was, if this had been my family, my husband, my son, my hope is that I would have embraced the right to keep my son home that day- so that we could be together as a family without the pressures and concerns of who is watching us- we would have time and space for all that needed to be said and felt, without the constant awareness of having an audience. At the end of the clip where we see the boy passing out cupcakes to his classmates and introducing his father to the class, in tears, I was just wishing that someone, be it newsperson, teacher or classmate, had said “Why don’t we leave them alone for a little bit- I don’t need a cupcake as much as they need to look into to each other’s eyes and hold each other. I’ll be happy to meet Bill tomorrow or the next day.” So many times in my life, when faced with tragedy or extreme emotion, I’ve ended up having to bypass what I really feel for the sake of meeting an expectation or playing a role- “take care of everyone else before you even know what you, yourself are feeling.” Seeing this little boy crying in front of his class while being asked to talk about his father, brought up those experiences in me, and that is a large part of why I felt it was important, on Easter Sunday, to post about something that has been sitting on my heart.
I’m curious about the accusatory tone you use at the end of your comment about seeing me as unaccepting, and questioning my faith because I wrote about this story instead of Jesus’ resurrection. A couple questions come to mind, and I hope you might respond to them. How do you know I’m a Christian? Do you know me? And if you know me, why have you written anonymously? I ask, because though I would love to think that somehow through my posts about Eugene Levy, Lethal Weapon and Haiku, that my faith in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, and the hope for all humankind to know the God of creation, would shine through, but since I can’t really think of a single place where I outwardly name myself as a Christian, I wonder how you were able to feel so assured in your condemnation of what to you experienced as non-Christian statements. Given what I believe is in fact, a shared faith between us in Jesus, who died and rose again so that all could be eternally reunited with a God who created us for relationship and exists as relationship Godself, I hope that you’ll ask yourself again whether or not I chose to write about the resurrection in my post. I saw a reunion marred and mangled by observers seeking to exploit the love of a father for a son, and that made me deeply sad in light of my own desire for love, relationship, and true reunion both with God, and my fellow human beings. I feel so often that our culture has given me the easy way out of resurrection and relationship. It’s been made so easy for me to “pass out cupcakes and make a speech” instead of saying “I’m going home now to be with my father whom I have cried over for seven months, and is now home. I want to sit in his lap, hear his voice, and tell him how I love him and have missed him.” The pressures to put my heart aside for the sake of what’s expected has made it so that until recently, I forgot what it was like to stand up on behalf of my heart, and align with love and relationship, instead of cultural expectations. This is what Easter has been about for me this year- a joyous welcoming of the risen Christ who says that my heart is worthy of reunion with him, and he will suffer death that I might no longer live in numb, heart-silenced death. That I will never have to be embarrassed to weep in my father’s arms.
I appreciate the information you shared about seeing the family interviewed, and I’m glad to know that they’re happy to have had the chance to share their story that has touched so many people. It certainly has touched me, and I would hope you could hear that this time in a way that had been unclear to you in my original post. But my hope still remains, that as more fathers come home, that more people would turn off their cameras, but instead, bow their heads in awe and wonder before the love of a father for a son and a son for his father. May we as a culture fight with righteous anger to protect those sacred things, where others would have them exploited for personal gain.