mmm

Movies I want to see:

1. Crash
2. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the witch and the Wardrobe (Even though it is so going to be anti-witch. ;) I loved these books when I was a kid! Loved, loved, loved them.)
3. Rise
4. Me and you and Everyone we know
5. Batman Begins
6. As you like it

Probably:

1. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
3. Bridge to Terabithia (This is a good, but sad children's book. I gave it to my cousin when he was young and after reading it and crying, he asked his mom, "Why did she give me that book?!" :(
4. Charlotte's Web (Another children's book. I love the old animation)

Maybe:

1. Mysterious Skin (might be too sad)
2. The 40 Year old Virgin (I like the premise, but possible too stupid for words?)
3. Beautiful Country (Haven't heard anything yet)

And more. Wow, there are a lot of upcoming movies.

Categories | Movies, Links

War of the Worlds

I have so much to tell you, but I guess I'll just do a short post about a movie today. I wish I had one of those programs that automatically posts. It would make my urge to communicate seem more regular and steady. Hey! I just thought of a way to write about the movie without spoiling it for those of you who haven't seen it. One of my proffessors came up with this nifty technique: Where there is blank space, just triple click to see the writing. [Update: the triple click doesn't work well here, just highlight.] If you haven't seen the movie, don't triple click!

So, today I go to get drug tested for my new job, because I'd been acting kind of funny and all... (Ok, I just decided that the rest of this story will have to wait, until I'm not working there. It may be awhile. I'll keep writing about it, but I'll do a post-job series of posts. I want to keep my new job. So, skipping to the movie, I went to see it while I was waiting for my drug results.)

I liked it! I put it in the category of movies that have suprisingly good messages, like Bourne Supremacy. Tom Cruise was not the rugged, never-phased, can-think-of-every-imaginable-thing-that-amazingly-saves-the-day hero. Thank goodness. He was this sort of everyday, crappy father guy. Yes, he thought of a few good things, but his situation still seemed hopeless. And my favorite thing, unlike so many disaster movies, is that the people actually seemed phased by the things that happen to them. I often notice the psycological unreality in movies. Where other people are screaming, "That could never happen, that 60 foot Gorgon would never be able to fit into that cavern!" I am yelling, "Those people need therapy! There is no way they would be acting like that if their Grandma just melted in volcanic water!" This action/disaster movie showed the most realistic psychological reactions I have seen. Yes, I too have heard of Tom Cruise's latest nuttery. However, I love him in movies like this.

The story of the alian invasion is definately secondary and clunky. Like Ebert, it did cross my mind that the alians sure made a lame plan, but unlike Ebert, I like that the story focuses on one person's experience. It was more humanizing and interestingly, more scary. If you can help it, don't read Ebert's review before you go, or anyone else's for that matter. I made a decision at the beginning of the movie to go with it, to be immersed, and the storytellers didn't let me down.

Categories | Movies, Post-Job Series, Links

Illustration Friday: Heroes

An uncertain Hero.

Categories | Visual, Illustration Friday

Act for Change

Every now and then I have an "armchair activism" hour (or two) and write letters and call my representatives. It was scary to call at first, but so far a young sounding person answers pretty quickly, takes a message and asks if I am willing to give my name and my zip. I am. That's one case where I don't prefer to be anonymous. Today while sending letters through the super easy Act For Change site, I came across the following quote.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has strongly opposed the proposed amendment. "The First Amendment exists to insure that freedom of speech and expression applies not just to that with which we agree or disagree, but also that which we find outrageous," he said. "I would not amend that great shield of democracy to hammer a few miscreants. The flag will be flying proudly long after they have slunk away."

It was in a letter that opposes banning flag burning. It's a hot issue. (ha ha :)

Categories | My Life, Democracy, Activism, Links

Happy Summer Solstice

Not only is it Summer Solstice, there is a full moon. May love surround you like sunshine on a sunny day.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Quote. Act ii. Scene.1

Science link
Religious link
Ceremonies
A Midsummer's Night Dream

Categories: Holidays, Visual, Links

Love and Survival

There are good days and bad days. Today is a good day for me. :) A list of my blessings:

My new roommates don't yell at me. They ask me how my day went and respond to like questions. Yay! :)

I got a job! Yay YAYAYAYAYAYYA! Does this mean I will have money???? I mean, to spend on clothes and non discounted groceries and stuff? A whole new adventure awaits me. ;)

Not only did French Toast Girl leave a comment on my blog, she linked to me! French Toast Girl is one of those people who is so talented but not inaccessibly famous and I vacillate between jealousy and admiration. I can't help it! But jealousy has a good side, it can show you what you aspire to. I don't aspire to being a great artist, but I do aspire to having a life filled with love, which leads me to...

Another blessing! I know my neighbors and they are down to earth and nice and easy to talk to and it's been a long time since I could walk over to my neighbors and say "Hey, whatcha doin?" Thanks, neighbors.

I like my family. Wow. Today my mom called. (Good luck studying!)

I met with my co-chair about a meeting we are putting together. (I'm a co-chair for a group at my church.) It's work, and it makes a difference, and it feels good to contribute.

I talked to one of my best friends and we are going to the fair tomorrow.

So, all in all, a good day. Many blessings. Thanks, world.

Categories: My Life, Links

A commencement speech

In case you didn't get to go to a long graduation this year, here's a cool speech someone on the UU blogs posted.

About you:

But I hope you don'’t walk away from the challenge. Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own. Not because you have a debt to those who helped you get here, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although I do think you do have that obligation. It's primarily because you have an obligation to yourself. Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

About America:

A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form a more perfect union” on this new frontier.
And as people around the world began to hear the tale of the lowly colonists who overthrew an empire for the sake of an idea, they started to come. Across oceans and the ages, they settled in Boston and Charleston, Chicago and St. Louis, Kalamazoo and Galesburg, to try and build their own American Dream. This collective dream moved forward imperfectly it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and marching, and petitioning their government, until they made America a land where the question of our place in history is not answered for us. It'’s answered by us.

Categories | Democracy, Activism, Links

Save Sesame Street!

Dudes, Sesame Street! Sign a petition to help save it, please.

Job Interview!

I'm about to go out and have a celebration lunch. I don't know if I got the job or not yet, but I'm celebrating just going on the interview. It's totally unrelated to the field I am getting my master's degree in. In fact, it is selling vacation ownership! (timeshares.) Laugh if you must. :) The good thing about this is, I can tell you all about the job without revealing my secret identity. Other good things: I might make a lot of money! It was so refreshing to go to a job interview and have it be ok that the reason I want the job is to make money! I mean, why else would I want a job? If I had all the money I needed I'd probably volunteer to do whatever I like to do, to contribute to people.

I'll let you know how it goes. I don't even know if I'll be any good at selling. Hurdles if I do get the job: 1) it is a 40 minute drive!!! 2) They work on Sundays and I like to go to church on Sundays. Will they let me have Sundays off??

So, getting really honest about money, (money isn't on my personal taboo list,) I am in a lot of debt because of student loans. I have lived pretty frugally all my life and I haven't had a lot of motivation to make a lot of money, my idealism was in the forefront, but now I want to be out of debt! And I have a burning desire to be financially independant, ala Your Money or Your Life. I want to be free.

Categories: My Life

Games I play?

Incredibly cynical, but you can probably find some truth in this, as in many models.

Categories | Links

Illustration Friday: Black and White

Say no to chaos. See the world in black and white.

Categories: Visual, Illustration Friday

Biddy, biddy, biddy, bum

Well, I'm feeling much better now. :) I was going to write a review of Fiddler on the Roof and tell you why I think it is so brilliant, (looks at moving from a traditional to a modern/post-modern society, looks at the tragedy of life and the saving joy of love, made a play about Russian Jews being evicted from their homes that people want to watch!) but instead, I just want to touch bases and say "Wuz up?!":) I'm still writing from a foreign computer so I don't feel quite my Braidwood blogging self. I'm still looking for a job, and tommorrow I'm going to start recording songs for my own CD! (Ultra private label :) My new room is taking shape- I'm sleeping on a camping mat till I get my own bed and I just realized that is why I've been extra tired. And I must be doing crunches in my sleep, because it feels like my abs are getting a workout. Happy Summer's Day to you!

Categories: My Life

Moving Chaos

Hi,

I'm in my new home and this is my frst time online since Friday! That's a long time for me. All is chaos and boxes and purple and lime green walls (soon to be soft gold!) My computer is not hooked up to the internet and so I'm using my roommates super faster computer. She uses Internet Explorer as a browser. Wow, I'm so sorry all IE users, my blog looks atrocious in this browser. I am still looking for a job with several helpful leads from friends. Thank you, friends!

The job hunting process, moving, and my previous hostile roommate have combined forces to awaken all my primal fears. Do all fears eventually find their source in the fear of death? I've been having such waves of fear. It's intense. I'm remembering to be gentle with myself during this transition time. I'm listening to a Tony Robbins tape about overcoming fear while I organize. While I walked around my new neighborhood exploring today, I thought that I need to do some serious meditation or something. A friend said that it's better not to think about death and the bad things that can happen, but I want to have my eyes completely open and feel at peace. Today I'm working on ordering the small chaos in my room. I think when I have soft gold walls, everything will be ok. :) Good luck to all ya'll today.

Categories: My Life

Illustration Friday: Summer

Picture a surfer on the wave! (My paint program is on the fritz.) Happy Summer!

Categories: Visual, Illustration Friday

The Value of Inner Work

I have become convinced that doing inner work is one of the most effective ways to get results in my outer life.

For example, I used to try and figure out how to make friends. I needed friend-making skills and I watched what good friend-makers did. Skills are important to gain, but there are so many intricate signals that people send out, that it is hard to replicate them consciously. Now, I just naturally attract smart, kind, fun people. (“Amen!" Say all my friends. :) And it is a result of doing inner work that had nothing to do with the goal of attracting good friends. In fact, it was strange when I noticed that I didn't have to try and get that kind of person to like me anymore. That's just who seemed to be around me. It was like the actual outer world had shifted. Unlike some people, I don'’t attribute this to any mystical forces. It is simply that we have fairly small orbits and what seems to be our whole world is just made up of the daily people, places, and activities we experience. Because of what we think, believe, and feel, we make certain decisions and socially, give off many subtle signals. This determines what is in our daily world and so this can make the whole universe seem to shift.

Next post: My inner work plan for the Summer.

Categories: My Life, Well Being, Essay

Some random links...

from this week of web surfing:

An interesting article about mothers in the news:

The discussions in my aerobics class, like the media coverage from which they originate, are skewed in many ways. Often, for example, the intensity of anxiety stands in inverse proportion to the prevalence of the problem.

Setting the record straight about family myths, and a great article deconstructing a psychics reading.

Categories: Links

Categories!

Hey, I just figured out how to have a page of category posts! I'm going to use Technorati! I apologize in advance to my friends who subscribe to this blog. I'm going to go back through the old posts and categorize them, so there will be a lot of new posts showing up. Sorry about that!

You can use technorati tags too. It might even raise your stats! I'll let you know how it works for me. Yay, categories! :)

Categories: Blog Talk, Links

I couldn't have said it better myself

I see now why people like the Real Live Preacher. Not a Christian myself, I have started to think of Christian people as cruel lately, sadly. It was nice to read RLP blog and open my heart again. I truly believe that it is not ok to sacrifice people for principle. I have been trying to find the words for that for a long time. Here are some good ones from a dramatized bible story at RLP:

Thomas said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about that night, and I remember something that Jesus said. It was back in Galilee, by the sea. He said that he would never sacrifice even one small person on the high altar of principle. And he said we would begin to know God when we understood that people were more important than ideas and principles. You know, it was like that other thing he always said, that the Sabbath was made for people and not the other way around."

And he said we would begin to know God when we understood that people were more important than ideas and principles.

Does that put a lump in your throat, too?

Catagories:To move to tender response,Links

On and off

I got the inspiration for this potentially irritating post from a comment on this blog.

In keeping with the digital theme:
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Get your secret decoder here.

Categories: My Life, Blog Talk, , Systems, Links

Illustration Friday: Digital

Digital: from the child of a computer programmer. The first thing I remember my mom telling me about computers is that all the information in the computer was in one's and zero's. I still don't know what that means. I used to walk up a biiiggg hill after kindergarten and eat lunch with my mom where she worked in the basement of hospital. I also spent many nights camping out in the little room she programmed in. At the time, the computer was so big it took up a whole refrigerated room by itself. I don't remember thinking about dinosaurs a lot, but the artifacts I have from that time are a pile of pictures on the old kind of printer paper of dinosaurs. They are all carefully labeled: "Sally age 43," "Henrietta 13."

So, I combined these two memories to create my digital dinosaur. Have a great weekend! I'm off to the mountains!

Categories: My Life, Illustration Friday

I've tried to take the high road...

Like some other bloggers, perhaps your roommate is not the best. Maybe your roommate is reading bad roommate advice, or maybe you have a schitzonphrenic cleaner on your hands.

Not to be confused with the Neat Freak, The Schizophrenic Cleaner is a slob 90% of the time, but during that other 10% (usually on Sunday afternoons), the Schizophrenic Cleaner becomes the most unbearable roommate known to science and attempts to clean two months of filth in two hours. Often this is accompanied by scathing diatribes against all other roommates in the house whose only crimes are that they aren't overcome by sanitary mania at the exact same time.

Some mean people seem to think they are doing you a favor or something. Mean people suck, but you can learn to get along with many kinds of roommates. Unless you have a roommate from hell.

No line remains uncrossed by a truly evil roommate.

So you may want to kill your roommate, but you should probably just Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills.

My evil roommate enjoys angry outbursts, schitzophrenic cleaning, self-righteous telephone indignation, and gardening.

Categories: My Life, Links