Three sentence movie reviews: Glee season 2 disk 2

Season two is pretty uneven, which was the word on the street before we even started watching this.  Matt even stopped watching for an episode or two before being sucked in again. This DVD will always have a warm spot in my heart for having the episode where Rachel writes a song about her hairband.

Three sentence movie reviews: The Avengers

I was a bit worried that there were too many characters for the plot, but it all came together nicely.  This was a funny and engrossing film, so much so that I was caught up and actually said, “God DAMN you Joss Whedon” rather loudly at a critical juncture.  And people like me, who always stay to the bitter end of the credits, do appreciate a reward at the end.

The past and my own future.

Saturday night, looking for something to do while watching a
four-hour version of Hamlet, I set to combing through my boxes of memorabilia,
shuffling through old bus passes and identification cards, sorting through
pictures, stacking letters, and dipping into and quickly flipping past the
pages of the journals and planners of my twenties.  I got a lot done.  The photos were shifted to a drawer, the
journals and planners tucked away in a different part of the house and the
letters relocated to one box.  Hamlet was
good too.  I found it engrossing in
places, though nowhere near as engrossing as I found my own past.
Saturday night I was astounded—though really shouldn’t have
been—to discover that the same two problems that come up repeatedly for me
today were front and center in the journals of my previous decade.  I also thought about a great many people that
wander through my synapses only in passing, and only now and then.  After sorting my past, I retreated to the
computer, where I teased out information about those same people. The
information I found astounded and excited me: a previous coworker runs a successful business overseas, a sister of a former friend is a florist, a
not-surprising, (but-still-incredible-to-me) number of my former classmates are
ecstatic about their children, and a person I always assumed to be gay is apparently
not.
On Sunday, I thought about all these people, imagining
myself in some of their places.  I worked
hard to stay in my own present, a skill I’ve been building for some time now,
with still no mastery in sight.  But my
mind zoomed around to various points in the past, to what I imagine other’s
futures are, and refused to settle anywhere near my own present.
On Monday, I hit a high. 
I was in a fabulous mood because I was
not in my twenties any longer. 
Though I still have far to go to be the person I strive to be, I had
seen a massive amount of evidence of how far I had come.  The two recurring problems?  They are clearly a part of me and something
to be happily integrated and not a point of weakness.  I felt ecstatic and light and liberated and
happier than I had been in a long time. 
Some part of my conscious nudged me that this wasn’t a good place either
and I had better pull back, but I was unable and unwilling to leave that
feeling.
Monday night I awoke and stayed awake for hours, thinking
about connections between people, the present, the departed and the long gone
and mostly forgotten.  I wanted to sleep,
to be rested for my day, but sleep eluded me as people from my past wandered
through my brain.
Tuesday I crashed. 
Groggy from lack of sleep, I woke up to my own, ordinary life.  A life that seemed less shimmering and
satisfying than the one I lived only the day before.  Thoughts of my past began to fade and my
present loomed before me, the same as it ever was.  I was exhausted.  I stumbled home from work and into bed,
desperate for rest and oblivion.  I
didn’t sleep very long, but I awoke feeling better and unsure what to do with
this episode.  Essay writing time called
and so I sat down and wrote.
Over the past few months I have experienced this cycle to
lesser degrees again and again.  I fixate
on something for a day or two and it becomes a way to ignore my present.  I think I have engaged in this
pattern for years, with the object generally being a book I can’t stop
reading.  I seem to struggle with the
monotony of day-to-day life.  The daily
shower, the finding of food, the keeping house, the daily grind of the
job.  I want to make these things
rituals, but I push them away, again and again. 
I chide the boyfriend for constantly living in the future or the past,
but I am guilty of escaping from my own present.
I’ve come a long way from the rampant poor choices of my
early adulthood.  I’ve managed to build a
solid relationship, a community of people, a steady income and a home I
love.  But I probably need to pay
attention to the times I still seek to escape all of these things.  This is what I learned this weekend.

Books read in April 2012

A lot of book group selections, reading projects and YA stuff here.

Read
Whiteout
Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber
Matt and I read aloud.
I wish I read the afterword before I read the book because in it Lieber discusses the various ways he used to depict the Antarctic.  That would have been interesting to observe while I was reading the book.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Ransom Riggs (no really, that’s his name)
A great combination of good storytelling influenced by old photos.  It feels like there is probably a sequel coming, but this is still a good stand-alone book.

Rilla of Ingleside
L.M. Montgomery
I read the edition edited by Benjamin Lefebvre and Andrea McKenzie.  I had to special order it from Canada as American booksellers don’t have it yet.

I’ve now read all eight books in the Anne series, and I can say that this is by far the best one.  I liked the Anne books only somewhat as I found Montgomery strong on character and incredibly weak on plot in most of the books.  This, however, was an actual novel that was gripping to read.  Clearly World War I had a great impact on the author and she channeled her feelings into this novel, with great results.  It has such a clear plot, it could even be read without reading the other seven books in the series.

This edition also includes a handy glossary to define WWI era things that have gone out of our collective memory.  My favorite entry is “soup tureen.”  I figured people still knew what that was.  However, I saw one at the Goodwill the other day and asked Matt if he knew what it was and he did not.  Granted, he’s probably not the best representative as he continues to put “salad roaster” on shopping lists.

The Human Experiment: 2 years and 20 minutes inside Biosphere 2
Jayne Poynter
One of the crew of the initial Biosphere 2 mission tells her story.  This was interesting to read after reading Dreaming the Biosphere  as Poynter gives her view of the split that happened with the eight-man crew.  I also got a better picture of her work at Synergia Ranch and around the globe in various Synergian ventures.  Now to read the book written by the couple in the other faction.

Trask
Don Barry
Read for Kenton Book Group
This is a really fabulous early settler/Indian Oregon narrative that is also a gripping story. It’s slow to start (in fact, several people in the book group commented that it was a bit slow, but they liked it even though they hadn’t yet finished it.  Every single one of them had stopped around page 50) but picks up rapidly after that. The book included great characters, what I felt was a sympathetic portrayal of Oregon cost Indians circa 1840.  I’m not sure why this is not required reading in various high schools around Oregon, but it should be.

The Silent Boy
Lois Lowry
I grabbed this one day to read during lunch because I forgot my newspaper. It uses historic photographs to supplement the story.  Lowry is a darn good storyteller so this is a good story and with a non-standard character as it includes an Autistic boy in the early 20th century.  When I was younger, I never saw anything but “regular” children in the books I read, so I came away with the impression that people with cognitive disabilities didn’t exist except in the present.

The Magician’s Nephew
C.S. Lewis
And I’m off on another children’s series.  I can’t say I loved this book as it was fairly paternalistic, but it went quickly and had some memorable images, notably Jadis standing on top of the handsome cab whipping the poor horse through the streets of London.

Blue Pills
Read for Kenton Book Group
As mentioned several times before, the graphic novel is not my genre.  However, it was very nice to have a book group book I finished in about three days (rather than three weeks) and which explored an interesting topic.  Because the Kenton Book Group is made up primarily of people who don’t read graphic novels, we had quite a lively discussion, where I found myself championing the genre.  There’s some really great “early relationship” stuff in here and though the woman in the group who identifies herself as an artist said she would have given the author a bad grade because he couldn’t draw, I loved the art.

Happily, one member had never read any graphic novels before and was so taken with the genre he made it a priority to select another graphic novel for us to read next year.

Started and did not finish
Blackbringer
Lani Taylor
I like fantasy, I think.  But the I read something like this and wonder.  Do faeries (even somewhat bad-ass ones) sink the story for me?  Perhaps.

I want my MTV
Marks and Tannenbaum
This is the second book every which I have desired to read in some electronic format with internet connection (the first being 1Q84 because the darn thing was HEAVY.)  Reading this book, I greatly desired the internet as I was reading because I wanted to watch the videos as they discussed them.  Because watching videos while reading a paper copy involved me getting up out of my chair and booting up the laptop (which is chained up so I can’t bring it to my chair)I didn’t watch as many videos as I would want to.  Once I get that whole issue worked out, I will happily finish this book because it is FAN-TAS-TIC especially for me who came of age watching MTV during the time period the book covers (1981-1992)

The format is excerpts of interviews with people involved in MTV, the creation of the station, the VJs, the bands, the people making the videos.  It is very hard to stop reading, especially when you get multiple viewpoints of a single event.  This is pure delightful candy.

Three sentence movie reviews: The Tempest

Because Julie Taymor directed this, it is quite lovely and I must say the casting of Helen Mirren as Prosper(o/a) was interesting.  However, I did not enjoy this movie version as much as I enjoyed the bare-bones Shakespeare in the Park version I watched last summer.  That aside, it was not a bad way to spend two hours.

Four hours of Hamlet? Have I got a project!

I couldn’t really just sit through four hours of Hamlet with nothing to do.  So I assigned myself a project.  I went through five Rubbermaid storage containers and culled things.  It was a great success, I now only have three storage containers and the project lasted the entire length of the movie.
 

Requiem: Curtis Swimming & “wedding” dress

At Cottey College we lived in suites, a group of dorm rooms joined together by a living room, kitchen and bathroom.  At the end of the year, most suites would have Free boxes, which we wandered about taking advantage of, kind of like an early form of naked lady parties.  It was from a free box I got this sweatshirt.  I can still picture the woman who owned it previously, she was tall and blond in that reassuring Nordic way.  I wore the bajeesus out of this sweatshirt and then tried to make it last a bit longer by practicing some needlepoint on the frayed edges.  This was a great companion.

Interesting coincidence.  Cottey College is located in Missouri and when I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts, my downstairs neighbor saw me with this shirt and excitedly queried me as to where I got it. It turns out that he went to the very same Curtis High School as the original owner of this sweatshirt, though he didn’t know her.
 

I call this my wedding dress as it has made appearances at many weddings.  I bought it for Teresa’s wedding   in the late 90s, but that was just the first of many.  I love that it’s red, form-fitting and has an interesting pattern.
 
But what I really love is the back detail with the fabulous crisscross straps.  Many other people love this detail too and have told me so.  Goodbye beautiful wedding dress.
 

Found it!

In my essay about Mrs. Brown I reference a stir fry recipe.  I still have it, it was in one of my memory boxes.
 

Are you hungry for stir-fry, made in the style of 4-H circa 1985? Here’s the recipe:

You need:

  • 1 teaspoon cornstarch
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger (if you have it)
  • 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1 teaspoon soy sauce
  • 1/3 c. water
  • 2 tablespoons oil
  • 2/3 cup carrots, sliced thin
  • 2/3 cup celery, sliced thin
  • 2 cups broccoli, separated into flowerets; cut the stems into think slices
  • 1/3 cup onions, sliced thin
  • 1 cup bean sprouts (or use canned green beans) [Here I must interject and say, no, do not use canned green beans as they are nasty]

Equipment

  • large skillet with lid
  • knife
  • cutting board
  • measuring cups (nested and liquid)
  • measuring spoons
  • wooden spoons

Note: you can use frozen vegetables in this recipe too.  Be sure they are defrosted. Then dry them with a paper towel to prevent splattering.

1. Mix cornstarch, ginger, garlic powder, soy sauce and water in a glass measuring cup and set aside
2. Heat the oil in a large frying pan with a lid
3. When the oil is hot, add the dry carrots, onions and the celery
4. Cook for one minute, stirring occasionally
5. Then add the broccoli and cook for 2 minutes. Stir constantly.  The broccoli will turn bright green.
6. Add the liquid and continue cooking for 1 minute or until it’s bubbly.
7. Then add the bean sprouts, reduce the heat, cover the pan and cook for 2 more minutes
8. Don’t get your face over the pan when you take off the lid.  Steam will rise up and could burn you.
9. If you want, serve over rice.  Makes four servings.