What was the first movie you remember seeing in a movie theater?
Question submitted by mainmor.
According to my parents, I saw my first movie when they took me and our two dogs to see Lady and the Tramp at a drive-in theater. Apparently, I spent the entire movie arguing with Zeke and Joey about seat space.
The first movie I actually remember seeing in the theater was Star Wars. I'd never heard of the movie before, and when I asked my dad what it was about, his answer was along the lines of "Just like the title says." I had visions of two round balls of fire repeatedly crashing into each other and was less than eager to see the film.
Do you have any tattoos? If not, if you were going to get inked, what would you get?
I've got a generic rose on my left shoulder blade. I was feeling punchy after taking my Master's comp exams, so my housemate and I drove into Wilmington Delaware, stopped at the cleanest looking parlor, and I picked a flower from the designs on the wall. The total amount of time I spent thinking about the decision? Maybe the 20 minutes we spent driving from Newark to Wilmington, but I think I was on a post-exam high at the time, and probably singing along with the radio, so I don't know how capable I was of rational thought.
I never think about this tattoo because I can't see it. And it really has no meaning for me beyond "Oh, pretty flower." So for my second tattoo, I selected one of my favorite illustrations, a flower from Aubrey Beardsley's cover of the 1893 edition of Malory's Morte D'Arthur (mine's, of course, in black).
Then everyone got a tattoo. Even librarians. So while I the time, I thought my tattoo would say "I refuse to live a boring life," now all it says is "I had disposable income in the 90s."
I still like it though.
If you had a band, what would you call yourselves?
Question submitted by Zoot.
In grad school, my housemates and I would keep a running list of possible band names on an antique typewriter in the living room. The two I remember were "Uppity Wench" and "Ghee!!!!!"
In the interest of decreasing their future therapist bills, I resolve to stop referring to my children as "Spazpants" (the eldest) and "Fatty Fat Fat Fat" (the baby). Said resolution will go into effect as soon as they FREAKIN' NAP!!!!!
The semester is starting up again in 2 weeks. I still need to finish grading the finals from my summer World Lit class, and I need to create syllabuses for three classes. One of them is online, which means I need to type out all of my lectures, and the college has switched course management software this semester.
So what I am doing with my time?
Chrono Trigger! SNES Emulator! Naming the characters after family members! Good times.
I still have 14 days. That's an eternity, right?
Steve posted a short video of Nicholas on his blog. Nick loves to imitate his big brother, and since Luke loves rockets at the moment, so does Nick.
He's ridiculously cute.
If you could be on any reality TV show, which one would you pick and why?
In an alternate universe, where I was amazingly fit, looked great in a bikini, and didn't completely lose my shit when faced with the possibility of any airport uncertainty, I would be on The Amazing Race. But in this universe, I would also be phenomenally rich, so the pressure to win would be off.
And I would be traveling with Johnny Depp.
On a unicorn.
And ice cream would be good for you.
What was the question again?
Scrubbles sent me down a completely unnecessary flashback the other day with a through-away link to a YouTube version of Agnetha Faltskög's 1985 video "Can't Shake Loose." There's nothing memorable or remarkable (or even particularly good) about the song. I think I probably remembered it because a) it was on MTV, and therefore it seeped into my longterm memory, probably replacing a good chunk of the periodic table or some other useful fact and b) I was an embarrassingly avid ABBA (of which Agnetha is one of the As) freak when I was in middle school. I still have vivid memories of leaping around my room to "Super Trooper"; thank GOD YouTube didn't exist back then or I might have had the misguided urge to broadcast my "dancing."
The only think remarkable about the video is how watching it jostled loose a perfect recall of the song from my brain. I don't think I've thought about the melodic stylings of Ms. Faltskög for 21 years, but when I watched the video, I could recall every word, moments before she sang them. Why does my brain think I'm going to need that information? Why have I forgotten the names of my high school teachers, my college suitemates, and many of our country's Presidents, but these inane lyrics (sample: " I don't wanna stay here / But you know I can't leave /Please let me go dear / Please let me leave") are superglued in some dusty corner of my cerebellum.
And when could you ever rhyme "leave" with "leave"? That's cheating.
Here's the video for your viewing pleasure. Notice the trappings of the 80s video: everyone's afraid to move during a scene, the director has only the most literal interpretation of the lyrics ("These old shoes keep walking . . " Cut to Agneatha looking at her shoes), and the makeup gun is set on "Whore."
I'm enjoying a childless afternoon, thanks to the in-laws, at the Tattered Cover in Highland's Ranch. I've got my cup of coffee, my half of a ginormous chocolate-chunk cookie (because there are no calories if you split it with someone else), a stack of cooking magazines from which I am surreptitiously copying down promising recipes (I don't mind buying magazines, but I hate storing them), a comfy chair, and air conditioning. Tomorrow, the whole hectic cycle of teaching, childcare, and chauffeuring starts over again, but for the first time in a long time, I'm completely relaxed. It takes so little to make me happy.
Speaking of cooking and free recipes, I made this Talerine "Beef" Casserole last night (I used ground turkey and about 1/2 the cheese), and it turned out pretty yummy. Luke didn't eat it, of course, but that would have been nothing short of miraculous. Thank god for Whole Foods Unidentifiable Yet Organic Frozen Chicken Parts. I love the Simply Recipes blog; everything I've made has been wonderful, and Elise posts a nice mix of recipes, none with outrageous instructions or ingredients. Between her blog and the wonderful Epicurious database (and my current unscrupulous bookstore transcriptions), I hardly ever haul out my old cookbooks anymore.
I'm ABD in English Literature. That means that if I got off my butt and wrote my dissertation, I could get my PhD and possibly teach at a university. I'd have a higher salary and fewer classes, and I'd actually get to talk about books instead of the importance of thesis statements and proper comma usage.
But even if I had the time, I don't have the mental energy. When I tried to write for an hour or two in the evenings, I'd spend most of my time rewriting the same 15 pages over and over again. I couldn't develop my argument, and I kept getting bogged down in my prose. Eventually, everything stopped making sense, and I haven't even opened the file since I had my younger child.
One of the reasons I put the dissertation away, besides the futility of the endeavor, was that I started to hate reading. When I was a lonely nerd throughout kindergarten through middle school, books got me through each day. I actually got in trouble in 6th grade for reading too much. And I would reread my favorites over and over again, to the point where I could almost quote them. I've always thought that my success in my English classes was due less to any natural talent and more to my unconscious aping of the prose that I'd read. Considering some college students still can't recognize what makes a complete sentence, I could see how I stood out for my teachers.
But eventually, I just ran out of things that I wanted to read. Before grad school, I had the desire to be "well-read" and tried to fill in any gaps accordingly. But the exams and classes of grad school have both given me the illusion that I have read everything "serious" and have killed the desire to read anything that takes too much mental focus. But I also can't read bad writing any more, or at least mediocre prose. Some of my friends take guilty pleasure in "chick-lit." I tried a few of the books and quickly grew tired of the formula. The speculative fiction I like, I love, but most sci-fi and fantasy bores me. And anything Oprah touches, I want nothing to do with. Some contemporary fiction, I absolutely love (The Time Traveler's Wife, for example, or The Cloud Atlas), but I seem to find maybe two titles a year like these, if I'm lucky. And I no longer have the patience to read anything unless I really enjoy it.
So I went back to my childhood habits. Cory Doctorow's review of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy encouraged me to pick them up, and they started me on a young adult kick. I had almost forgotten the sensation of sitting down with a book and not getting up until I was done (because I wanted to, not because I had a paper due the next day). The stakes in young adult fiction seem so much higher, and while they're simpler, from an adult perspective, the earnestness with which the characters wrestle with them recalls the drama of teen-aged life perfectly. (Do you wrestle with stakes? It's probably a good thing I'm not a PhD.).
Westerfeld's trilogy takes place in a dystopian future society, where children are isolated from adults during their preteen and early teenage years. When they turn 16, they get surgically modified to be "pretty," their features tailored to the exact measurements that appeal to our evolutionary predilections. The rationale is supposedly that if everyone looks perfect, then no one gains or loses status from their appearance. There's no discrimination, no "lookism," no eating disorders, no low self-esteem (or "self of steam," as one of my students once wrote). Pretties live in dorms and spend their days in a perfectly controlled environment of endless parties. Nobody wants for anything, no one has any responsibilities, and no one leaves the city.
The heroine, Tally, can't wait for her sixteenth birthday and her surgery, but before that happens, she makes friends with Shay, a girl who is curious about the larger world. When Shay flees with a band of unmodified outsides, Tally is blackmailed into finding her by a group of terrifying, genetically enhanced "Specials"; if she doesn't cooperate, she stays ugly for the rest of her life. I won't spoil what exactly she discovers in the process, but you've probably guessed that the pretty world is not as benign as it seems.
Westerfeld is obviously exploring common teenage concerns of conformity and individuality, of the connection between our appearance and our identities, but the books never feel like heavy-handed allegory, and he never dumbs the prose down. Tally reads like a real teenager, but she's also an identifiable character, never a prat that you want to smack out of her angst. And I love a good dystopia, from the description of the perfect society to the inevitable exposing of the flaws. It's kind of like David Foster Wallace's essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" about going on a cruise, where he gets to indulge in a luxurious artificial environment and then dismantle the illusion so you don't feel so bad about not being there.
I don't miss being a teenager. Hell no. I was miserable and bored most of the time. But I do miss the escapism that I found in books when I was younger. It's hard to shut off my brain now - grocery list, doctors visits, meetings, playdates, finances, all these concerns prevent me from getting away from my quotidian reality. But good young adult fiction is not only easy to read, but it makes me feel like a young reader myself, and it allows me to suspend the world for a while. It's good to be a teenager again, especially if that teenager is not my former self. As an adult, I no longer desperately long for another life, but I appreciate the brief respites that these books can provide.
