How happy we are…
March, 2006 Monthly archive
I really loved this movie. In addition to redeeming whatever faith I had lost in Natalie Portman following her flawless role as the incredibly annoying chic in Garden State, V for Vendetta is just all around great. Here’s why:
+ It’s based on a comic book, so all excessive theatrics and unrealistic stunts are excusable, even fun.
+ The whole movie is a complete metaphor for the power of organizing as a political strategy to overthrow the W. administration.
+ Just when you think Natalie is going to retain her nonviolent peaceful protest and somehow fix the conflict of the film without resorting to violence [insert fundamentalist ethical agenda HERE], BOOM! — she changes her mind, and that’s cool.
+ The acting is really good.
+ The focus is on the players behind the scenes of neo-conservative presidential dictatorships, much like Rummy & others. The president is merely a face on a screen, and spin doctoring the media is standard practise understood and acknowleged by the general public.
+ Inciting fear = political propoganda. Also, “terrorist attacks” = plotted within the administration.
There are so many reasons to go see this movie. It’s just pretty cool, minus Natalie’s cheesy socialist speech at the end. Go see it!
So, this weekend was interesting. We went to a fundraiser for City Life/Vida Urbana Saturday night, led by Steve Meacham, the tenant organizing coordinator, who delivered a moving speech about their ongoing initiaive to collectively bargain contracts with big city developers in lieu of rent control, a tactic that seems to be working. Anyway, it was a nice time, with great homemade hippie food — salad, beans, couscous, cake — all of which I puked up six hours later. Must have been something rotten in the salad. Oh well. Guess I’d better stick to processed foods.
Tonight there’s going to be an immigrant rights rally downtown by City Hall to protest the impending legislation against illegal immigrants in the U.S. It’s at 5p, for anyone in Boston interested.
In dorky tech news, Lifehacker just posted a neat thing about recussitating your unreadable CDs, which I thought was pretty cool.
In political satire news, this cartoon is funny.
In boring personal news, I have yet to organize my life or even unpack fully from my trip, I babysit too much, eat too much, make too many unrealistic plans, and really the only tangible goal of 2006 is going to be applying for fellowships for grad school in 2007. At least I have DD to keep me laughing.
We fought the whole time, and for the rest of the night all I could do was lie in bed, almost crying and unable to eat, but my seventeenth appointment was still kind of awesome, in a cheap-trashy-novel kind of way:
“So, how are the teeth looking?”
“Exactly the same,” I said. Except now, instead of a crossbite, I have an underbite.”
“Whatever. We completely fixed that crossbite.” Doc poked and prodded around my mouth, gloating about his sadistic prowess to his new, attractive assistant: “I’ve made this woman cry so many times, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Yeah,” I said, “And I see how proud it makes you.”
“Oh please,” Doc snuffed, gesturing to the computer screen with its before photos of my mouth from April 2005. “Look how awful your teeth looked when you showed up here. Those were tears of gratitude, darlin, not of pain.”
“I want so badly to hit you.”
Thus began another twisted appointment at the orthodontist’s. To really smear his smugness all over my face, as it were, Doc proceeded to force a thick METAL wire onto my bottom teeth. “Metal!” I yelled. “You’re breaking our agreement! I never agreed to a metal wire!”
“Oh suck it up!” he said. “This is the only wire that will really turn out your canines and widen your bottom jaw, which will fix that underbite you’re complaining about.”
“I can’t believe you’re so mean to me,” I whispered, barely audibly, his fingers twisted in my mouth.
“Are we whispering now?” he mocked back, his voice a shadow of my own. “Does it make you feel better if we whisper? You enjoy the torture, admit it.”
“I hate you.”
And then we started laughing, because shoving a heavy metal wire into the metal clasps on my back molars hurts like crazy, and sarcasm, sadism, laughter and pain have become the nature of our relationship.
And then he started singing “Sweet Caroline” so I wouldn’t notice how much it hurt, except he couldn’t remember the lyrics so he supplemented words with “daaa daa daaaa”.
“Good times never seemed so good,” I mumbled.
“Good times never seemed so good!” he sang.
“I’d be inclined,” (da da da) “to believe they never would…”
“I’m going to miss you,” he said suddenly.
“Uh huh,” I answered, because what else are you supposed to say to your young, cheeky, married doctor with six months of appointments left until you can eat a hamburger again?
This whole experience is so weird.
So it wasn’t 24 hours of travel after all. It was 42 hours of travel, with five flights (Phuket > Bangkok > Singapore > Frankfurt > NYC > Boston), all of which were ridiculous and uncomfortable and could have been avoided by booking us on the same direct flight we took the first time…but alas, some things always remain difficult.
I slept 20 hours straight when I got home. My colleague and traveling companion M., however, was not as lucky: she has little boys, and had a dinner party to attend, and had a class to teach at Brandeis this morning, followed by conference calls on Gulf Coast relief. Being merely the lowly staff photographer, my professional duties are limited to captioning the 1,214 Asia photos I took (not kidding, that’s how many I took), writing more about Thailand for our human rights blog and generally being incredibly out-of-it.
I’m cold again, not really ready to be here or be awake. I haven’t unpacked or anything. I think I might cut my hair, just to shake things up. I’d like to take a vacation, or go on some retreat where they make you cry for days, just to purify my situation, as P. Diddy would say. Oddly, I felt more adjusted to life up there alone in those airplanes than I do here in my freezing dining room. I guess, in a way, that makes sense.