a short year-end post

It seems every Christmas something really awful will happen somewhere in the world that reminds me just how lucky I am to live in a relatively peaceful corner of the planet. I was so horrified and disheartened to hear of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan earlier today and all the violence that appears to be unfolding after that event. What a tragic mess. If you pray, please do so for all the people in Pakistan who are grieving and afraid and deserve a better government and a safer country than they have.

I don’t want to leave you with such a bummer of a Christmas post; I just don’t have much else to say at the moment and while I have a spare hour here I need to get in some yoga before moving on to the next thing.

In the meantime, my blessings to all of you for the new year. My resolutions are to nurture hope and create peace wherever and whenever I can, and to eat more root vegetables. I hope you all join me. ☺

british TV

Eric and I have no TV. Or rather, we do have one, a years-old hand-me-down from his grandma, but we don’t get any channels. Instead, we buy DVDs of television shows now and then, and watch then over and over again until all eternity on our Macintosh computers. Most of our collection, which fits into two plastic crates, is British, the American exceptions being Arrested Development and of course, Buffy.

It’s probably the result of being raised by conscientious pro-education liberal parents who put strict controls on all television that wasn’t PBS. This could have backfired and turned me into a mad tele-slut, but it didn’t. American television is by and large just way too violent for my taste. Even when we lived in places where we could get network channels, I didn’t really watch. I can’t bear the ads, the forensic crime shows make me want to hurl, and the endless televised festivals of doctor-worship that are medical dramas I find a troubling cultural symptom and am unable to watch without making bitter side commentary throughout. (This is what made me give up on House after one season, despite Hugh Laurie, whom I of course knew from his more PBS-friendly incarnation.)

My favorite British shows, on the other hand, have a mild SSRI effect. It’s probably those childhood PBS associations—although the first DVDs Eric and I bought together were Absolutely Fabulous, which is way too dirty for PBS. I like the tamer ones too, the PBS faves like As Time Goes By, which I occasionally check out from the library and watch on my own since Eric finds it boring and I’ve never been able to bring myself to fork out for the whole series. Besides AbFab, we own Father Ted, (which is Irish), various compilations of French and Saunders, some Jeeves and Wooster, Fawlty Towers, and some All Creatures Great and Small (which is the TV equivalent of hot chocolate with cognac).

For Christmas this year, we bought each other the complete boxed set of The Vicar of Dibley, which is always checked out from the library (and even when it’s available, the discs all scratched, which dims the SSRI effect) and which we were desperate to have for our very own. (Eric refers to it as “Dib Dib.”) Plus there was the matter of the two-part finale special, which we had never seen before. Because we are children and can’t wait, we ordered our DVDs well before Christmas, so when they arrived on Monday we immediately sat down to binge on the finale.

I experience the occasional feminist discomfort while watching the cozier British shows. Like As Time Goes By: that program is written by a man with essentialist ideas about men and women that make my toes curl. The actors, however, are the sorts who, as they say, could enchant an audience by reading the phone book. In the case of Vicar, they get a lot of mileage out of making Dawn French’s character so desperate to get married that she behaves like an insane person whenever an attractive male is in the vicinity, forgetting all her priorities and doing things like hyperventilating and screaming and accepting proposals from total strangers. That’s pretty much the premise of the finale—gorgeous stranger rolls into town, sweeps vicar off her feet, comic misunderstandings ensue but are quickly resolved, crazy, whirlwind wedding, and now she is officially Happy, The End. This led to some curmudgeonly grousing on my part, but I’m not curmudgeonly enough to deny I laughed pretty hard throughout and will probably exploit this DVD, like all the others, for maximum value, watching it approximately 600 times per year.

I was somewhat taken aback when I looked at the cover and saw that the actor playing Dawn French’s new man is a fellow by the name of Richard Armitage. Surely, I thought, looking at the cover photo, the man who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to Robert Novak does not look like that. After some quick Googling, I realized my error, confirming that the American Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State, appears to be the offspring of a sack of potatoes and a pile of pudding, like most everyone else in the Bush administration. Whereas the British Richard Armitage has apparently recently unseated Colin Firth (aka Mr. Darcy), as the Smoking Hottest Period Actor in recent British history for the latest BBC drama involving ruffled sleeves, riding boots, sculpted sideburns and suppressed passion. The women in my mother’s family will doubtless stage a riot when they hear of this, brandishing their six-part boxed sets of Pride and Prejudice and signs reading, “We Heart Mr. Darcy Forever!” I, on the other hand, am going to the library in search of this latest BBC drama. It seems I am a tele-slut. A BBC tele-slut.

cheer

I’m restless. I don’t know if it’s pre-holiday mojo or what, exactly, but it’s been really hard to sit still and do the stuff I know I need to get done this week. It might also be cabin fever since we’ve had so much ice and snow that I can count on one hand the times I’ve gotten out of the house in the past week, and most of those times have been for boring errands. Even with the temperatures up a little bit, it’s been hard to get outside for exercise because the sidewalks are still a mess, and I look like enough of a tool when I’m running without the added humiliation of falling on my ass due to impacted snow.

The biggest excitement here in recent days has been the news of baby Anya, born to Suze and Stuart in the wee hours of Friday morning. For days beforehand I was getting a trickle of e-mails from Suze that went sort of like this: “I’m having contractions.” “Shit! They stopped!” “I’m having contractions again!” “WTF?! They stopped again!” “OK, more contractions.” “Dammit!” On three separate occasions I told Eric, “I think Suze is in labor now,” and then went to check my e-mail to learn otherwise. So for that and a thousand other reasons I was thrilled to get the call on Friday morning and hear that not only was the baby born, but she is a girl and she is named for a Buffy character!! Except…not. I am told this is absolutely not true. The fact that Suze and Stu own all the Buffy DVDs and ex-vengeance demon Anya is one of their favorite characters has nothing whatsoever to do with the name of their daughter. Ahem. Until the first time she gets out of line and one of them says “Anyanka! Stop that right now!” (Sorry. That one’s just for Buffy insiders.)

I’ve been thinking lately about the house, and how we never do anything to make it look Christmas-y. We have never done anything to decorate for Christmas in any place we have ever lived. We always sort of thought that once we had our own place, we might start getting a tree, but this is the second Christmas we’ve spent in our house and we still have done nothing. We haven’t even cleared the dead morning glory vines off of the porch railings, so not only do we not look festive, we look drab and unkempt. On the plus side, unlike our next-door neighbors, the college dudes, we do not have a full-sized floral couch that looks to be a trash rescue from the early 80s sitting on our porch. Our other neighbors, though, have lights and decorations and whatnot. Some of it’s tacky, but it’s still cheerful and welcoming. That’s what is wanting in our decor. Cheer.

We were students for so long, living far away from our folks and deserting our quarters over Christmas. We were never in the habit of decorating, and we never had any time to spare in December to do it anyway. Now we have an open living room with a twelve-foot-high ceiling; it seems criminal not to put a tree in it. And while we’re usually gone for the day itself, we’re in our own place for more of the holidays than we used to be. My parents are even coming here for a few days after Christmas this year. My mom is already worried that we are killjoy Scrooges who care nothing for holiday traditions (she wouldn’t buy it when I told her our annual LOTR-mocking ritual constitutes a holiday tradition) and that our hypothetical future child will develop a seasonal nutritional deficiency from lack of cookies. If she saw our house in its current state all her worst suspicions would be confirmed.

But we can’t get a tree, because of him: the Paper-Eater, the Sensei of Headbutts, the Master of Countertop Larceny, the Shredder, the Destroyer, the Cat. I want one—I really do want one. But after contemplating the logistics of it from every possible angle we concluded that the only way to have one and avoid daily catastrophe would be to eschew both lights and ornaments and hang the tree upside-down from the ceiling, which is probably an act against God according to the Kansas state school board or something.

I am still thinking of a way to put up a string or two of lights that doesn’t a) tempt the cats, b) look corny, or c) involve me climbing a twelve-foot ladder. But I haven’t figured out anything yet. Meanwhile, the only evidence of Christmas around our house is in the basement, where several dozen bottles of Eric’s new custom-designed holiday brew await our sampling this weekend. But they don’t light up or sparkle and they provide a rather different variety of holiday cheer—and probably not the kind my mother is trying to cultivate in us, alas.

papers

ETA: I changed the title of this post from "paperwork" to "papers" because the more I thought about it, the more the implications of my original title bugged me. (I mention why in the comments.)

This morning I spent working on adoption things. Any adoptive parents reading this probably know how sometimes this process feels like a quarter-time job—or more, depending on what stage you’re in.

Scenario: I am at the computer, printing out papers that could, frankly, end up being some of the most important papers I ever print out. It’s weird to think about it that way, so I don't think much at all. Then the cat starts getting in the way. He jumps on the computer desk. I throw him off. He jumps up again. I throw him off. He sneaks up from the other side and clamors up behind the printer, angling to jump on it. Swearing, I fish him out, my computer-sore wrists straining to haul all thirteen squirming pounds of him over the top of the monitor and back to the floor. By now I have five separate piles of Vitally Important Papers. I pull more printed sheets out of the printer tray. The cat headbutts me away (he has a serious headbutt), then edges for one of my stacks, mouth open, ready to take a bite. I roar.

Part of my problem with this cat is my complete unwillingness to physically intimidate him. I just can’t do it. I’m not talking about hurting or in any way striking out at the cat; it goes without saying that I’d never dream of such a thing. But I can’t do other things, either, even mild, Humane Society-sanctioned things like shoving him off of tables. I just can’t bear to see the panic on his little kitty face, even if I know he’s going to land on his feet and be just fine. Instead, I pick the cat up and toss him gently onto the floor, usually punctuated with a “Bad! Bad!” Eric thinks this is ludicrous. He is pitiless and has no problems with shoving. He also routinely offers this cat as a gift to company, claiming we are trying to get rid of him. Naturally, the cat worships Eric with almost dog-like devotion and treats me like a doormat. (The other cat prefers me, but she's less pathetic about it. She has more catly pride.)

But this morning, he's really pushing my buttons. I could even shove, were it not for the fact that we’re talking about a small surface area here and a shoved cat would take all my papers down with him. Then the printer stops working. Inexplicably. Just. Stops. I scream. I curse profusely. I remind myself of the futility of expressing rage at inanimate objects, but I am beyond reason. “Why?” I groan. “Why now???” The cat walks over the keyboard. He’s having a blast.

Eventually I get the printer working and pull myself together. It’s the mundane details that rattle me. I remember when I was a child and the things adults did looked like magic. How did they find their way from one place to another? How did they know what to do with all those papers that came in the mail? How did they know what to do with money and houses and cars? It is astonishing to learn that this magic does not descend upon you as a gift on your twenty-first birthday after you recover from your hangover. No, you begin by staggering around in the dark, falling, gouging yourself on sharp edges, until you learn to walk by the feel of the ground, deliberately, just trusting that your feet will keep carrying you.

I head for the grocery store, where I stand in the post office line behind a woman yelling at her preschool-aged son, who is crying and trying to get out of the shopping cart. “Do you want me to spank you in front of all these people?” she snarls at him. I feel such visceral disgust for this woman that I almost leave the line; the way she talks to her child makes me feel physically ill. I can hardly stand to look into his wet eyes when he looks past his mother at me, but I do anyway.

I breathe out slowly and try to generate some compassion for the woman, remembering how twenty minutes ago I was helpless with rage at a cat and a printer. I can’t. I feel rigid, then numb. For the first time today, I let myself really think about the fact that this pile of papers could be the thing that connects Eric and me to someone we don’t yet know in ways we can’t yet fathom. I try to think about parenthood, a thing that still seems so utterly separate from all these post office lines I’ve waited in with various packages of paperwork for our social worker. This is the last one, at least for a while. The pile of papers is our profile, the thing that expectant mothers (and possibly fathers) who are considering adoption can look at to decide if they want to meet us. I know I should feel something—excitement? self-consciousness? fear?—but it’s all so abstract as to be beyond my emotional reach.

Like I said, just trusting that our feet will keep carrying us.

weather

I know that I have checked weather.com too many times because those little animated gyrating dancing girls in the mortgage company ad that pops up next to the hourly forecast just now caused me to snap. I opened my mouth to holler, “Stop dancing, you annoying bitch!”, at which point it became apparent that perhaps I need to just let the weather be what it is. At least for today. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow night. And Saturday morning, when we’re planning to drive north of Kansas City for a family reunion.

Like I said, whenever I need to go somewhere. Blech. I’m sick of this. We had to cancel going to visit my parents for my dad’s birthday last weekend because there was shitty weather predicted every inch of the journey. Then there was this ice storm; fortunately, I don’t really need to go anywhere to read and scribble, and Eric was spared a treacherous journey to Topeka because our kind governor closed all the state buildings. We were also spared the power outages that have hit our area so hard, so we really can’t complain too much. The storm would have been a lot worse for us if it had been just a few degrees colder.

I don’t really have anything to say today. Just letting you all know we made it through the storm okay; hope all you other Midwesterners did too.

how come i didn't get a rumspringa?

Gade writes:

This is a little off subject, but I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the inter-relatedness of Mennonites' sense of "otherness" and non-infant baptism. I say non-infant because I hardly think I was making an adult choice at 13 years old.

Because one is either "in" or "out" depending on whether s/he "chose" baptism, there is already a barrier set between those who choose baptism and those who don't (including all the infants baptized without their consent). When you choose this baptism, it appears that you are also choosing to follow a written and unwritten set of rules that define what it is to be Mennonite.

Mmm. Baptism. This is a goodie. My baptism has been always been a bit of a sore point with me. At the time, it was just wet. Not wet wet, like, Baptist wet. If there are Mennonites who get into the whole pool-dunking thing, I haven’t met them. That’s just way too socially uncomfortable for most of us. My church made do with some discreet sprinklings of water on top of the head. However, I happened to be wearing a white top—not to symbolize rebirth or spiritual purity, but because it was the cutest thing in my closet at the time—and the pastor gave me rather more of a dousing than I think he intended, enough that the water tricked down the neck of my shirt. My first thought, upon joining officially the Body of Christ, standing before an assembled congregation of two hundred-some people, was omigod, my bra’s gonna show. Which, at the age of thirteen (or fourteen, I can’t remember), was a kind of death and martyrdom right there. So, hey, extra points for me.

Part of my Christian education was learning all about the martyrs who died in protest of the ways of the godless papists and not-enough reformers such as Martin Luther who didn’t recognize that Jesus meant us all to be baptized as adults. Adult baptism, or believer’s baptism, is a huge deal to Mennonites, or so the theory goes. (These days everyone’s doing it, what with all this borning-again going around, so it’s hardly exotic. Mennonites who are still nursing a great sense of “otherness” based on their baptism of those old enough to string together a sentence should probably take note of current trends in Christianity. Sixteenth-century Switzerland it ain’t.)

When Eric and I were attending a small Mennonite church in East Lansing I saw a woman in her early-to-mid twenties get baptized on a Sunday morning. Even though her parents were members of the church and she had grown up there, you could tell she’d put a lot of thought into her decision, and she spoke very eloquently and deliberately about it before the baptism was performed. It was a beautiful ceremony, not alienating or dogmatic, just a simple celebration of this woman’s choice to follow the path of Jesus in the way she understood it. It was, I think, a model of what many people mean when they refer to believer’s baptism. I had never seen anything like it.

My baptism was like a puppet show compared to that. Or a sheep herding. Choose your metaphor to imply frantic conformity and lack of free thought. Look, it’s not like bad people or brutal coercion were involved. My baptism was, quite simply, Catechism Graduation Class of 1991. That’s how they do it in a lot of big Mennonite churches. Freshman in high school? Good, it’s your time. Go to catechism, where earnest folk who have been to seminary will teach you…something. You may not retain it after a year or two, but don’t worry—what matters is that we retained you. So far as I can see, this is the thinking behind it. Eric has a pastor uncle who used to say that it is best to baptize in the early teens because, essentially, it will “get them while they’re young.” (I don’t know what his position is these days—he’s become a pretty liberal guy.) Putting aside for a moment the fact that this runs counter to the intent of believer’s baptism—that it be an adult decision, made in the face of alternatives—this is anxiety-based logic. Or just anxiety. Much though pastors and parents might wish it were so, baptism is not a binding contract. People who decide to leave the church are not going to be held back by a ritual they walked through around the same time they were taking “abstinence pledges” or swearing eternal fealty to Michael Stipe. Those who are going to stay in the church can certainly be trusted to wait until their actual adulthood and take their own initiative in the matter.

After I was baptized, I got a handful of cards and thoughtful notes from church members, welcoming me to the congregation and commending me on the monumental decision I had made. These were all kind, well-meaning people. But it wasn’t a monumental decision, and it had practically zero bearing on my future choices in regards to church. I got baptized because I noticed that the very few kids in my church who didn’t do so were on the defensive about it, and the common understanding seemed to be that they were “troubled” or perhaps “losing their way.” I was in the throes of pubescent torment and didn’t need any help feeling like a freak. I wasn’t strong enough to make any other decision.

I see this sort of baptism as a site of paradox. It is the moment when, by Mennonite understanding, you join a community of believers who cleave dearly to the idea of nonconformity. The surest way to start a fight is to start investigating what nonconformity actually means to them, but never mind that now. To impressionable teenagers, baptism is framed to make you feel like a real champ: there is this entity called “the world” trying to sink its insidious lures into you, but you’re not buying, because you have the strength of your convictions and you don’t care what “the world” thinks. Oh, and by the way, if you skip out on this, you’re probably “losing your way.” Not “doomed to hell,” because we don’t talk like that in this church. But we’re worried. Are you, by any chance, on drugs? Are you succumbing to peer pressure rather than taking the hard road to nonconformity with all the other nice freshman?

It’s quite savvy, really. What better way to play on the particular stew of mixed cultural messages bombarding the American teenager: “You can be a rugged individual, too—look, everyone’s doing it!”

I don’t know quite how Mennonites have gone from a sect that staked a large part of its identity on the principle of adult baptism to this kind of fretting over unbaptized fourteen-year-olds. It’s interesting to see how the Amish, coming from the same Anabaptist roots, insist that their teenagers go through rumspringa, or adolescence, before joining the church officially. I’m not going to romanticize that system or pretend I understand it very well. I do think, though, that it speaks to a primary difference between the Amish and the Mennonites: namely, the Amish aren’t worried about losing members. They have a lot of babies, and besides, for all we hear about the Amish drug dealers and rumspringa gone to seed, their kids overwhelmingly choose to join the church when they enter adulthood. Furthermore, the Amish are not trying to market themselves to America at large. Mennonites are. Mennonites want You. (If you’re straight. If you’re not, they will lovingly discern the necessity of pretending you don’t exist.) It doesn’t help their image as a church for All when their own kids are dropping off like flies.

Of course, if we do drop off, it helps to characterize us as succumbing to the narcissistic temptations of secularism and the consumerist lure of mainstream American society. Sigh.

I think I may have just violated a few of my new principles of ethnographic distance in the whole Mennonite arena.

the golden compass movie...

..SUCKS.

Five minutes into it, I was wishing I was at home watching Lord of the Rings again. Or a Harry Potter movie--even one of the first two, which were cloying, Disneyfied garbage.

I feel so sorry for poor Philip Pullman. I don't know how in God's name (well, he's an atheist, so God's name probably means nothing to him, but whatever) he could stand to watch this bastardization of his baby without wanting to rent his garments and smear his face with ashes. They killed his story on every level possible. If you haven't read the books, you will walk away from this movie convinced that they are a pile of convoluted fantastical muck with a contrived message about free will vs. fascist establishment quasi-religious creepy guys with dresses and bad comb-overs. Or you'll be too bored to care. Eric and I really wanted to go see this movie in part because we were so annoyed by the Christian right's mindless objection to it, but after it was over I was about ready to start my own protest. The difference is that in my protest, I would hand out copies of the book and tell people to just skip the movie before it killed all their interest in the brilliant source material. If evangelicals and all those Catholic bishops that are in such a snit about this movie are worried that it will attract children to His Dark Materials and thus lose them to the corrupting forces of the God-haters, they needn't worry. They should be cheering the movie on. Nothing is more likely to kill interest in Pullman's books, especially from children, who are going to be both baffled and insulted by the farce that stands in for a plot. (Though Lyra, the main character, did have some quite smashing knitwear.)

I hate that. I hate the blunt-axed, morally unsophisticated controversy over this movie, and I hate that the movie does such a profoundly lame job of representing the complexity and spiritual beauty of Philip Pullman's books, which I adore. Eric and I were both so mad we had to come straight home and throw back some homebrew to salve our wounds, bitching all the while: "And they totally fucked up this part!" "And they totally ignored this!" "And they completely trivialized that!" Yes, movies have to dick around with books to make them work onscreen, but they still have to have their own internal coherence. I have a new respect for Peter Jackson after seeing this. He turned books about which I am barely lukewarm into rich and engaging movies that I will watch in full extended version every year, mock them though I may (by the way, Feral Mom answered my prayers--see comments on said post). Chris Weitz, on the other hand, whom I hope they fire if they are insane enough to make the sequels, turned a book I adore into a movie I wouldn't buy on DVD if you paid me to do so three times over.

This review sums it up pretty well.

stranded

Due to some combination of global warming and our naturally spazzy climate, Kansas doesn’t get a lot of snow. In fact, lately, the only thing that really brings on snow is my needing to get somewhere.

You’d think that seven years in Michigan would have toughened me up on the winter weather front. After all, it snows a hell of lot more in Michigan than it does down here in Kansas, and I had many fortifying experiences, such as the time I tore off a barrier gate in a Michigan State University parking lot when my car skidded through it on wet snow, or the Christmas Eve day when Northwest Airlines paid to have a taxi take Eric and me to the Grand Rapids airport from the Lansing airport because our flight was rerouted due to a winter storm and our taxi driver spun us off the interstate (into a snow-filled ditch, thank God) because he was driving too fast, or the countless harrowing trips we took through lake effect snow in West Michigan on our way to Chicago (we still refer to West Michigan as Mordor). After all that, I should be the sort of person who faces the open road with fearlessness and a steel-hearted, business-like, life-must-go-on-even-in-bad-weather sense of duty.

But I’m not. I’m a terrified wuss, and that, in combination with the falling snow outside, is why I’m stranded in Kansas City. Yes, Kansas City, forty-five minutes from my home on a day with decent weather, but to me, on a day such as this, it might as well be traversing the Yucatan. So I’m in Missouri, actually, but the same cosmic calculus pertaining to my ability to bring on bad weather just by virtue of expressing a need to travel seems to hold (I’m the only person in the universe, you see, and weather is a subject on which the Big Cheese and I have trouble seeing eye to eye). See, I had this appointment this morning with an adoption lawyer (very routine—nothing dramatic is happening, no big news to report) in Kansas City. They were predicting freezing rain for the morning, so rather than deal with that, I drove up last night, when it was clear, and spent the night at my brother-in-law’s place, which as it happens is right down the street from the lawyer’s office.

As a nice bonus, my knitting group had a bar night outing last night, also just down the road from his apartment. I had originally thought to skip this outing because it involved manicures. Yes, the bar has a “ladies’ night” and for twenty dollars they give you a Cosmo and do your nails—or anyway, the salon person they bring in does your nails, and the bartender gives you a Cosmo. They also play Sex in the City DVDs on their television screens. Clever, no? Not for me, I thought. I have never understood the concept of spending money on fingernails. And I was further confused by the concept of spending money on my fingernails in a bar. And after my Thanksgiving o’ unintentional excess nothing involving hard liquor sounded appealing—certainly not a Cosmo. But then I was assured that rather than getting a manicure myself, I could feel free to just hang out and mock the manicure-ees, and I could order whatever drink I wanted. So I went and had a glass over overpriced wine and gabbed with my knitting buddies. That was all fine.

There was no freezing rain this morning as predicted, but by the time I finished at the lawyer’s office, late morning, there was wet, sloppy, slippery snow coming down like crazy, with no signs of abating, three inches of accumulation predicted. I practically spun out twice just trying to get to the interstate, despite going twenty miles per hour and giving myself decent breaking time. After several gruesome miles of that an inner voice spoke to me: “THIS SUCKS—NEW PLAN.” I did the slowest U-turn in recorded vehicular history, drove to the hospital where bro-in-law works, announced I would be imposing on him for most likely another night, and re-scored the key to his apartment. He is a kind and patient guy and stays at our place frequently when he has to work in Lawrence; we are used to each other’s routines and are great friends and have the same taste in wine. Still, I am praying that it clears up soon, because neither of us really wants me to become the Unwashed Sister-in-Law Who Will Not Leave. I have basically nothing to do but doodle around on his computer and reread the last Harry Potter, since all his other books are either biostatistics or depressing novels, many of which are cast-offs from me.

Not that I’m really complaining about being stranded away from all work-related items with nothing to do and nowhere to go so that I’m just forced to reread Harry Potter. I mean, bummer.

ow

I’ve never broken a bone, and it’s been awhile since I’ve sprained anything, but I have a remarkable knack for minor flesh wounds. Last night I sharpened my zingy chef’s knife in anticipation of hacking apart one of those squashes has the consistency of a boulder. Oooh, I made the blade nice and sharp. Next thing I know I’m screaming and bleeding on the squash. Okay, it could have been a lot worse. But I cut the pad of my middle finger pretty badly and it hurt A LOT and Eric, as usual, showed me, like, no pity. He just took over the squash-chopping calmly and then ignored me while I hopped around and swore and bled copiously into the sink. What do you have to do to get some sympathetic attention around here, anyway?

Then this morning I was trying to put my contact lens, which is more difficult than you might think when one of your digits is bandaged, and I felt something uncomfortable pressing into my bare right heel. Thoughtlessly, without looking, I took my right foot and brushed it against the top of my left, trying to remove whatever nasty piece of crap was pressing into it. And then again with the copious blood! The offending piece of nastiness was in fact a small, sharp piece of blue glass that gave me a freaking foot stigmata. Eric broke a glass downstairs a few weeks ago, but this was upstairs, meaning one of us probably tracked it up there, and it was probably him, since his feet are like hooves and he would not have been injured by in the same way as delicate moi. Something tells me I am not going to get the sympathy I deserve on this one either.

Anyway. Onward. I knew you guys would come through for me on the LOTR casting. If you haven’t already and you are geeky enough to care, check out everyone’s suggestions. (My fave is Pam’s vote for David Bowie as Galadriel.) Animal and all other Aragorn/Eowyn shippers should check out the parody link that Strangeite left, The DM of the Rings (I assume DM means “Dungeon Master”), which sucked up most of my Sunday morning because I could not stop reading it even though I know nothing about Dungeons and Dragons beyond what my gaming brother-in-law has told me. Omigod, hilarious. I still haven’t finished it but it’s going to be my reward to myself if I conquer my to-do list this afternoon. I’m sure it would have many more layers of resonance to me if I got the gaming part of the satire, but mocking the excesses of the movie is more than enough fun for me.

My friend June sent me an e-mail this morning in which she confessed that she watched LOTR in fast-forward with the subtitles on. I have some sympathy for that approach after this recent watching. God, those suckers go ON and ON. Eric bottled a five-gallon batch of beer during Two Towers and brewed up the next batch during Return of the King, and we knocked down some of his past product in order to endure those endless scenes of Frodo, Sam and Golem bitching at each other while they stumble around on rocks.

I’m procrastinating. I was getting set to write about how these movies seem more racist to me every time I watch them and how sorry I feel for all the big dumb animals in Sauron’s army who get shot between the eyes with Legolas’s arrows but honestly, I need to shut up about LOTR and tackle my list. Stupid list.

just for geeks

Eric and I have an annual pre-Christmas Lord of the Rings tradition. We find a free weekend and watch all three of them, extended DVD versions, special features, the whole caboodle. Last night we did Fellowship of the Ring, so we have two to go—maybe the Two Towers tonight and Return of Viggo with Better Hair and He should have Married Eowyn Dammit on Sunday. I am not a fan of LOTR without many qualifying statements (here and here I make a few) but I like this tradition, so long as I have some knitting to work on while watching.

LOTR is chock-full of Rocky Horror-esque fun for Eric and me. During the relevant scenes in Fellowship we ignore the actors and re-enact the French and Saunders parody of same. (”Quiet! He’s smelling my ring!") We cop artificially low voices and blather in fake Elvish. (In any scene between Liv Tyler and Viggo Mortensen, it’s either that or throw up.) We recite every line along with Orlando Bloom—he only has, like, five, and they’re all declaratory sentences—whom we refer to as Hot Elf (which is a joke, of course, because he looks like a computer program). When we’re not playing along with the action onscreen, we’re debating Viggo (my official position, unwavering, is that I have no quarrel whatsoever with Viggo in this movie, whereas Eric thinks he sucks) or groaning at the endless emotional diarrhea that is practically every scene involving more than one hobbit. It’s good times.

But to stay entertained this time around, we are attempting to recast the entire trilogy in drag. Here’s what we have so far:

Gandalf (Ian McKellan): Susan Sarandon

Aragorn (Viggo): Ashley Judd

Boromir (Sean Bean): Nicole Kidman

Gimli (Jonathan Rhys-Davies): Dawn French (Eric had the gall to suggest Judi Dench, but I have to override him)

Hot Elf/Legolas (Orlando Bloom): Gwyneth Pallid (ok, Paltrow, but that’s what Eric calls her)

Saruman (Christopher Lee): Juliet Landau with some serious age makeup

Theodon (Bernard Hill): Juliette Binoche

Golem (Andy Serkis): Madonna (Watch the French and Saunders parody.)

Wormtongue (Brad Dourif): Helena Bonham Carter

Denethor (John Noble): Now this is where Judi Dench belongs.

Frodo (Elijah Wood): Sarah Michelle Gellar (Think about it. Seriously. It’s inspired!)

Arwen (Liv Tyler): Orlando Bloom



What do you think? Are we on? And help us out, please! We still need:

Samwise
Merry
Pippin
Eowyn (make her a good one, please!)
Faramir (Eric thinks he’s too boring to bother with)
Galadriel
Elrond (we tried, we tried; we couldn’t think of anyone weird-looking enough except Juliet Landau, and she’s busy being Saruman)
Bilbo
Eomer
the Witch-King of the Nazgul (Angelina Jolie?)

Animal, if you at the very least cannot rise to the occasion then you are not the man I thought you were.