been thinking...

“Kerala is a state located in southwestern India, famous...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:46:00 -0500

^{“Kerala is a state located in southwestern India, famous for its sprawling backwaters and lush green vegetation. Kerala is generally referred to as a tropical paradise of waving palms and wide sandy beaches. It boasts of a higher Human Development Index than most other states in India. The state is bordered by Arabian Sea towards the west. Kerala has a 91 percent literacy rate, the highest in India. A survey conducted in 2005 by Transparency International ranked Kerala as the least corrupt state in the country.”}

In those spare little moments hidden in this terrific work chaos, I start to dream about next destinations. January is looking good for travel but my compass needle is still spinning. India? Nepal? Burma? Ideas? Let’s go!

courtesy of

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing - these..."

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:49:00 -0500

“They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing - these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which
was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”

- Tim O’Brien - “The Things They Carried”

scout: magnetic fields - i don’t believe you so you...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:55:19 -0500

scout:

magnetic fields - i don’t believe you

so you quote-love-unquote me. well, stranger things have come to be, but let’s agree to disagree, because i don’t believe you. … so you’re brilliant, gorgeous, and ampersand after ampersand. you think i just don’t understand, but i don’t believe you.

La-La-Love!

hotwheels: Take the money and run. Perhaps we should get to...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:27:34 -0500

hotwheels:

Take the money and run.

Perhaps we should get to know each other a little better.

"Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried..."

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:03:00 -0500

“Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed thirty pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself - Vietnam, the place, the soil - a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”

- Tim O’Brien - “The Things They Carried”

These past five or six years, I’ve been very drawn to war stories. To books that force you thick in to the middle of those places we work not to think about. One winter I read All Quiet on the Western Front and Slaughterhouse Five back to back and those two together will almost certainly break a heart. We have friends back from Iraq and those fresh from Afghanistan and I see the way they walk heavier now. How much harder it is to conjure enthusiasm for anything, really. I see the weight on their face of everything we don’t understand. Stony gaps where ease and tenderness used to spread, a harder eye, a slower mouth. It kind of kills me that I can’t understand this metamorphosis for them.

This seems the least we can do, maybe, this fictional reading, this visit to a world like theirs. For a few days even, I want to know what they carried, the heft of all that and the unbearable lightness of what they left back home. I want to understand why they carried it when I chose not to and what it cost them to do so.

beautifulordinaire: (photo via pforu) “This is the color...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:43:56 -0500

beautifulordinaire:

(photo via pforu)

“This is the color of her hair as it blew around her face whipping her cheeks and sticking to her lips and forcing her to squint her eyes as she spoke. My hair is brown, the same brown that you find in a crayon box with a name that is five letters long. Her hair is every color of yellow and gold and honey and sugar that money can buy. We stood in the center of the field with the wind coming at us from every direction and she raised her left hand to her waist and held it open with her palm facing the sky and she said, “you know, I guess I realized that you only have yourself” and my heart fell on the ground from the sadness in her voice. I closed my eyes hoping to find the right words and when I opened them I was looking down and saw that our feet were positioned at the same angle. I raised my hand to my waist, opened to the gray sky that was moving fast, so fast, but I stopped before I spoke. I thought of all the times I hadn’t been there for her because either I couldn’t or I wouldn’t and the times that she had done the same; neither meaning any harm, but simply doing all that we could. “

So we went to the Ben Folds concert Saturday night at Orchestra...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:30:37 -0500

So we went to the Ben Folds concert Saturday night at Orchestra Hall and he was even better than the very first time I heard him, which has got to have been a decade ago. After two hours, he sent the Orchestra home and divided up the audience to serve as horns and harmony and it was magical. Early on, I judged it as more of an Orchestra Hall crowd, but suddenly, every person in that sea was grinning up to the lights of the stage and singing their hearts out for him. I’ve never seen a crowd cheer and chant so adamantly, at such length for a third encore. And of course, he acquiesced and seemed so happy to do so - which is exactly why he’s so good live. Because he still seems to love it so much, because he tells you stories about being deliriously sick in Berlin and making songs up on stage and insulting the radio stations that sponsored him and getting his song pulled. By the end of the night, you’re his best friend. By the end, it was the kind of concert that makes you all run out in to the cold city night still singing “ba da da, buh duh dum duh” together, united and grinning.

Photo courtesy of the man himself

"I DUNNO, YOU SEEMED FUNNY AND SELF-AWARE IN A WAY FEW PEOPLE ARE THESE DAYS OKAY I MEAN EVERYBODY IS..."

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:34:50 -0500

“I DUNNO, YOU SEEMED FUNNY AND SELF-AWARE IN A WAY FEW PEOPLE ARE THESE DAYS OKAY I MEAN EVERYBODY IS THESE DAYS THAT’S PRETTY MUCH A THING NOW ISN’T IT, “THIS IS ME, HERE IS MY BULLSHIT, ENJOY,” IS THAT NOW HOW EVERYONE OPERATES LATELY- IDEALIZING NEUROTICISM TO SUCH A DEGREE THAT WE FALL IN LOVE WITH OUR VERY INABILITY TO LET EACH OTHER IN, BECOMING COMPASSIONATE TO A FAULT, FAMILIARIZING TO A FAULT, WRITING LATE-NIGHT MISSIVES TO NO ONE IN PARTICULAR BUT EVERYONE IN GENERAL, WINDING THROUGH CLEVER TURNS OF PHRASE TO OBFUSCATE THE VERY THING THAT WILL SAVE US, THE VERY THING WE REFUSE TO SEE, REFUSE TO WRITE ABOUT, TO SAY TO EACH OTHER, TO BLOG, THAT WE WERE WRONG, THAT WE WERE BAD FOR EACH OTHER, THAT WE SHOULD HAVE GIVEN UP A REALLY LONG TIME AGO.”

- Life is hard. Here is someone.:

Woke up indulgently this morning, without the alarm, without the...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:47:00 -0500

Woke up indulgently this morning, without the alarm, without the safe guard of any alarm around the corner. Decided to designate the twelve hours ahead as a slow down stretch, a day to not speak unnecessary words.

So how do you know the difference between content and numb if you never stop to consider it? All these days we run and work and play and produce and consume and I am happy – filled up. But let me tell you that in my bed, watching the afternoon light orbit the room and trying to catch that nap I will crave all week, I am….merely even. I am just here. Thinking about the speed of life versus the distance. Where are we even going? And how far have we come?

I think about the show last night and where everything is compared to the last time we saw them play. Remember that road trip? Out of the city and down to a little college town in the hills of the river valley. And we met my brother’s old girlfriend whom no one liked and I sang his songs up in to the rafters of that little auditorium and it seemed like life had never been sweeter. Even if I ignored the fact that you didn’t sing along. Did you really want to be there? It’s hard to tell in a dark car ride home.

These are the almost melancholy hours; Which are not lamentable if you acknowledge them for what they are and for the small span they cover, if you don’t allow them to speak for the rest of the hours.

No, these are not bad days, but they are so deliberately quiet. And that is when the past speaks, isn’t it? And that is when you reread last night’s texts and in the slow daylight think, “Was that kind of a dick thing to say?” So you sit at your kitchen table and work and smile in to your tea and feel like a mom. You issue ultimatums for yourself and think about men who are or aren’t worth your time and start a new book and listen to the father across the street call for his son, just a little too nervously.

The thing about these hours is that there is room in them and your job becomes sifting and selecting, letting what ought to drift by. Your job is choosing to be home and still for one day so you can sort and clear out. Pinning down truths: I am not ok because one is here, Not unbalanced because one is gone, Not actually determined by any of them. Your job is remembering what is enough.

Standing in line at a wine sale

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:33:00 -0400

Really? It’s come to this?

Standing in an endless line, half-heartedly loathing myself and this pretentious crowd. Unable to rally full anger or shame because they are plying us into complacency with samples every five minutes. Sigh.

Halloween Week: Stigmata (1999)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:01:01 -0400

In which I get to write about scary movies!

Thanks for the opportunity, Chad.

filmosophy:

LOSING MY RELIGION

by Erica

There are two genres of scary movies that I won’t watch: those portraying children as the killers and those that are uncomfortably blasphemous (I know, you probably haven’t heard that word since your Aunt Rose scolded you at communion in 1986; I’m unfashionably earnest and old – cut me some slack). And a third group - the mindless slasher and gore horror flicks - simply doesn’t interest me.

But I’ll tell you this: give me a scary movie that makes me think, or that manipulates my own realistic fears, and I am done sleeping. Blair Witch terrified us because of what we don’t understand; it tapped into our primal, if subconscious, fear of a dark forest – our basest suspicion that something too wild controls the woods. It was all shadows and sticks, noises and unknown places, men facing away from the camera in some horrifying submission we didn’t comprehend. And I think the movie’s acknowledgment of that fear, and even justification of it, is what left me too unnerved to camp for a good year after I saw it.

In that vein, Stigmata is an unusually scary movie that kind of spellbinds me.

In this case, it’s our subtle fear, avoidance, and unbearable attraction to God – or our perception of God - that is so relatable. Gabriel Byrne’s character, Father Kiernan, is a Jesuit priest and a scientist for the Vatican. He’s responsible for investigating miracles – spiritual apparitions, visions, divine occurrences – and validating or negating them on behalf of the Church. The irony, of course, is that his duty as a scientific doubter – and his chief objective to disprove the potentially miraculous – runs in direct conflict with his avocation as a man of faith. Beautiful stuff, right?

We first find Father Kiernan outside of Sao Paolo, Brazil where he has been sent to investigate an approximation of the Virgin Mary that turns out to be a mere rust stain. While there, however, he stumbles upon a statue of the Virgin Mary which has been weeping warm blood since the death of the parish’s beloved Father Almedia.

Despite the rare swelling of Kiernan’s hope and suspicion that he has discovered the legitimate, the Vatican is disinterested – hostile almost – and inexplicably orders him home. We sense there is something about this particular act of God that they’d prefer not acknowledge or publicize.

Enter Patricia Arquette’s Frankie Paige – an irreverent party girl in Philadelphia and self-confessed non-believer who begins displaying signs of Stigmata (the spontaneously re-enacted wounds of Christ at the Crucifixion). We learn that Frankie’s mother purchased Father Almedia’s rosary on the Brazilian black-market after his death and sent it home to Frankie (admittedly a slightly cheesy device that, along with an occasional excess of blood, is my only real complaint about this movie - but I understand how it ties the plot together and so can’t complain too much.)

Frankie’s afflictions soon worsen from pierced wrists to lacerated back to scars from a crown of thorns. Father Kiernan is dispatched from Rome to investigate. He concludes an initial interview abruptly after learning that Frankie is not Catholic and does not even attend church - informing her that Stigmata only chooses the deeply devout. Those whose reverence and faith is so profound it can only express itself in some kind of physical manifestation of empathy for Christ.

As Frankie’s symptoms worsen and she begins displaying signs of some sort of spiritual inhabitation (speaking and writing prophesies in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his contemporaries, for instance) Father Kiernan is drawn in. Despite the dogmatic definition of Stigmata and its preference for the holy, there’s no denying that for some reason, it has chosen to take control of the unworthy and disinterested Frankie.

Early on, you could be forgiven for judging this movie as another shallow or titillating film on satanic possession or the occult.

But in time, you start to notice ribbons in the weaving of the plot that are much more complex. We come to learn that Father Kiernan doesn’t pray any more. That he is questioning his faith in God and has all but lost it in the Church. And that for a Man of the Cloth, he has an alarming if appropriately resisted level of chemistry with this beautiful young woman. And for all her bravado, we find that Frankie is as susceptible to God and as worthy of His possession as any of the Vatican hierarchy; Maybe more so.

The movie’s conspiracies and Church cover-ups could be formulaic entertainment alone, but I was impressed by how the plot becomes a metaphor for the Truth the Catholic powers are attempting to suppress. There’s no M. Night Shyamalan level of reveal, so I don’t think I’m spoiling the film to admit that ultimately the Church is fighting to stifle and discredit an alleged gospel of Jesus – written in his own words - discovered in Northern Egypt six decades ago. The audience eventually learns that Father Almedia has possessed Frankie with Stigmata to draw the Church and the world’s attention and to demonstrate his belief in this gospel and its message:

“I am in you and all around you, not in mansions of wood and stone. Split a piece of wood and I am there.”

Father Almedia’s immortal, dire desire is for the world to hear what he estimates is God’s own cry for the Church to remove itself as a barrier between man and God. What better way to illustrate this available, egalitarian love than through a disenchanted priest and a disbelieving miscreant?

I love the power that sweeps through the film – the strength of God’s own righteous fury at those who have misrepresented Him and distanced us, which is terrifying and mesmerizing. And I love the grace that settles in the end of the movie, how Frankie becomes as pure and valuable as the Virgin herself.

In its sum, Stigmata is such an effective commentary about what we believe and why we believe it – about who we allow to define or misroute our belief. It’s a film about losing your faith and running from God - and the fearsome yet comforting idea that He might be able to find you anyway, and inform you that you’ve misunderstood His terms.

There is a John Donne sonnet I’ve always loved for the same reason. It’s Donne’s cry for God to be less patient and passive with our fickle hearts – for Him to subvert institutions and overtake us if He is true, if He wants us:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Woven discreetly into a film that definitely meets all requirements for fear-inducement this Halloween is the surprising notion that faith is larger than any of us and yet intimate enough to be just you in your complete worthiness and Him in his furious, unrelenting, righteous desire for you. If the power of that theory doesn’t make you think and unnerve you a bit, then you may be more comfortable sticking with Saw or Friday the 13th.

Erica is a guest contributor to Filmosophy, who last wrote about High Fidelity in these pages. Erica writes, works in non-profit development, and plans travels from Minneapolis. She tumbls here.

Read twice and then once more, even if you’re busy. It is just that...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:02:00 -0400

Read twice and then once more, even if you’re busy. It is just that good.

sometimesagreatnotion:

Making Love
- Rebecca McClanahan

Why make? I used to wonder.
Is it something you have to keep on
making, like beds or dinner, stir it up

or smooth it down? Sex, I understood,
an easy creaking on the upholstered
springs of a man you meet in passing.

You have sex, you don’t have to make it,
it makes you - rise and fall and rise again,
each time, each man, new. But love?

It could be the name of a faraway
city, end of a tired journey you take
with some husband, your bodies chugging

their way up the mountain, glimpsing
the city lights and thinking, If we can
keep it up, we’ll make Love by morning.

I guess it was fun for somebody,
my grandmother once said. By then
I was safely married and had earned

the right to ask, there in the kitchen
beside the nodding aunts. Her answer
made me sad. In her time, love meant making

babies, and if I had borne twelve
and buried three, I might see my husband
as a gun shooting off inside me, each bullet

another year gone. But sex wasn’t my question.
Love was the ghost whose shape kept
shifting. For us, it did not mean babies,

those plump incarnations the minister
had promised - flesh of our flesh,
our increase. Without them, and twenty years

gone, what have we to show
for the planing and hammering, bone
against bone, chisel and wedge,

the tedious sanding of night
into morning - when we rise, stretch,
shake out the years, lean back,

and see what we’ve made: no ghost,
it’s a house. Sunlight through the window
glazing our faces, patina of dust

on our arms. At every axis, mortise
and tenon couple and hold. Doors
swing heavy on their hinges.

"Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry."

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:57:00 -0400

““Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.””

-
For thirty six months and some very odd days, commitment was a vocation of sorts, my road map and my destination. Maybe because it was the first time I really wanted to be good at it, I invested myself in this fidelity until I was satisfied that it had become me. And it was funny and new – this place in which my finicky heart was finally tamed into dedication and, honestly, pretty happy to be so.

And as with most things, when I decided I wanted it, I wanted it fiercely, fully - to embody faithfulness not just in physical, societal ways but in my marrow. Heart, soul, spirit, habits, language, plans, thoughts. Every aspect of me lined up behind the agreed decision that This One was for life. That it was time for me and all my divided hearts and wants to line up behind the fate You and I had chosen together.

And of course, that probably made the summer harder to bear, didn’t it? Having avoided this kind of declaration of purpose and commitment for 29 years, I didn’t understand what it felt like to not have those intentions culminate into a framed degree in your declared major.

But months have passed – two seasons, almost. And nothing is the same. For a while, I was shocked. Betrayed by this beautiful concept – how the fuck can you be burned by goodness? I scowled out at the world and wished men were tagged or branded, begged the universe to teach me how to determine: Where are the Good among you? How will I ever know the good men?

Again, nothing stays. These weeks, I am less eagerly concerned. Is that sad? It might be. I think someday I have the potential to be Very Concerned again, but for now, it’s not exactly what I need.

I gave myself a lecture a month or so ago – cut our hands and made a blood oath not to waste time on men who don’t know what they want.

And then the past few weeks came and reminded me that I am That Man.

And What If I Don’t Know What I Want? I test out the language like a voice over warm up. Change the inflection, grow nimble. Ask the park and the hipsters drinking beer in cans against their bikes at the corner and the old women caving and dying slowly in the cold outside the retirement home down the street. I kick up these sepia leaves in the gutter and think of that. Think of that!

My Lord, what if I don’t have to know what I want for a while. What if I could be not good at fidelity or faithfulness or availability or choosing one thing or just caring so much. What if I am happy to be free?

I would never say a word against commitment and devotion or relationships that run wild and full. The pictures from my trip still sweep up nice memories.

But I will tell you this, at night my mind questions without apology whether I am just not that creature. Not for now. I am realizing how well this era of self-possession fits and I remember how well it always did. I don’t know what percentage of you are the Good Men. I don’t know that it’s my job to judge you so soon. I know I like talking to you and hanging up when I want to and charting my own weeks that I will not explain or announce. I like getting to know you slowly, like normal humans, without the rush or vacuum that began Us, that doomed Us. I like holding some of it all back.

And maybe this is just one hour, one orbit of the clock in which I get to enjoy the world and not expect so much of it. This release pose is beginning to feel like home and sometimes that worries me a bit. Our easy return to old tendencies. How much I am loving this all of me and a little of you when it fits easily, in measured doses.

For better or worse, Steinem might have been right.

sometimesagreatnotion: A Secret Life- Stephen Dunn Why you need to have one is not much more...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:18:00 -0400

sometimesagreatnotion:

A Secret Life
- Stephen Dunn

Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don’t say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you’ve just made love
and feel you’d rather have been
in a dark booth where you partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you’re brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.
It becomes what you’d most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.
When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
It’s why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who’ll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing,
a secret life is that important.

Sitting in writing class, reading this covertly (how appropriate). Wondering (lamenting and rejoicing) at the truth of this secret life.

“Fireflies” - Owl City So the other night I took a...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:47:00 -0400

“Fireflies” - Owl City

So the other night I took a long late night drive around the city with a fella and listened to music for ages. It was like high school but better because: Der, no curfew. And he introduced me to this song from Owl City, out of our very own Owatonna, Minnesota. Little known fact: Owatonna apparently also produced HarMar Superstar. Who is brilliant and clever and sleazy.

It was this particular Owl City song that had me swaying and smitten – composing love letters to young Mr. Owl City on college ruled paper with hearts and elaborate acronyms only teen hearts can decode.

“Time After Time” - Eva Cassidy So I heard this...

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:25:23 -0400

“Time After Time” - Eva Cassidy

So I heard this song in class tonight and it almost broke my heart. And I clutched together the pieces and ran right home to play it for you. You’re welcome.

"I wanted to go home, and for the first time since we’d split up, I missed Alicia. Or at..."

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0400

““I wanted to go home, and for the first time since we’d split up, I missed Alicia. Or at least, I felt nostalgic. I remembered how great it had been, the evening when we hadn’t gone to the cinema because we’d had too much to say to each other. Where had all those words gone? They got sucked into Alicia’s TV. I wanted them back.””

-
It was too frantic of a week and this weekend became the antidote. Friday night was lovely - maybe one too many basil lemon cocktails (I loathe that word) at Azia with Marchelle and her gang of charming, friendly men from Kerala. The kind of night that doesn’t suit you at all but feels clever and funny because there it is, happily blaring on anyway, unaware of how little you belong. So there was a Julia Stiles-like dance off in the back room and I stood in the second row bouncing on my boot heels, tugging at the too short dress I tried on in a wet Bangkok market all those months ago and bought anyway. Bouncing and nodding and fighting that impulse you feel at the edge of the Grand Canyon, just to relent and toss yourself right in.

And the rest of the weekend has been avoiding things I semi agreed to do, nursing myself through some half sickness (piglet flu?) and indulging in responsibility and solitude. Which sounds so lame but was luxurious. Cleaning and paying bills and working and finally running the cable cord up over the ceiling - ALL BY MYSELF.

Late yesterday afternoon I skipped yoga, took a two hour bath and got half way through “Slam” - Nick Hornby’s latest offering of sweet adolescent angst. I scampered out to reheat jasmine tea and back in to run a reserve army of hot water and I thought about Hornby and the week. Conversations in elevators that cause an involuntary grin. Actually talking on the phone, which I hate until I don’t. And one late night text that kept me awake for a while: “Interested in spending a couple of days in Paris?”

These days make me laugh. It has been so long since anything felt new, since I legitimately had no idea of the firmness or pitch of the ground three steps ahead. And there is so much to be said for contemplative living, for fallow time and the deepening of breath. But I believe I will also let it be balanced for a time with wonder and possibility and freedom and saying yes where I would have said no, sometimes, just to find out where these long unchosen roads head. Just to not end up too soon with all my words sucked in to another television.

Fake Dinner Party Conversations

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:01:01 -0400

tesslynch:

Christopher Walken: Have you ever thought. About? Adoption!

Tess Lynch: Thought about it how?

Christopher Walken: Tremendous! Amounts of homemade babies; they have no places. To go.

Tess Lynch: Homemade babies?

Christopher Walken: If you’ve seen, a baby, they’re — adorable!

Tess Lynch: Are you saying that I should adopt a child? I’m not in the market for that right now.

Natalie Portman: It’s a terrible thing, not adopting a baby when you could adopt one.

Tess Lynch: Then why don’t you adopt a baby?

Natalie Portman: I’m not getting into this with you.

Christopher Walken: Hey. Please, hold on. Natalie. I’ve been noticing — an attitude. Don’t? Disgrace yourself.

Natalie Portman: (gestures at Tess) She knows what this is about.

Tess Lynch: The adoption thing?

Natalie Portman: No. The vegan thing.

Tess Lynch: What vegan thing? What are you talking about? You think I hate vegans?

Christopher Walken: Hostility makes me unbearably uncomforta—

Natalie Portman: Look, it’s basically my cause, and when you demean my cause…

Tess Lynch: Demean?? I respect that it’s a personal choice!

Natalie Portman: Nothing is a personal choice! Every choice has consequences! Your choices affect basically everything! Everyone needs to make smart choices! [her cell phone rings] Can you please hang on?

Christopher Walken: Rude, I think, I’ve never seen the like, when a person can put a person in —

Tess Lynch: Chris, I’m sorry about this. You know how she can get.

Natalie Portman: Guys, I’m really sorry, my guru’s on the phone, and I have to run. I want to get the recipe for the wax beans. Next time?

[Tess and Christopher exchange looks as Natalie leaves]

Christopher Walken: Can I please offer you another? Kir? And then if at once we feel a chill…a fire, sure, it’s easy, I’ll light one.

Tess Lynch: Actually, I’d love a kir.

Oh my gosh. This is the best thing I have read all day; And I’ve not read a lot today but still. STILL.

Happy 400th Birthday, Dear Telescope NPR, October 19, 2009 By...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:56:37 -0400

Happy 400th Birthday, Dear Telescope

NPR, October 19, 2009

By Claire O’Neill

Exactly 400 years ago in 1609, one Galileo Galilei popularized a new invention: the telescope. The man had crazy gadgets to support crazy theories — such as Copernicus’ idea that the sun was at the center of the universe. He was condemned by the church for his subversive ideas, but both his telescope and ideas lived on.

To celebrate the telescope’s 400th anniversary, journalist/photographer Michael Benson has written a new book. Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle, similar to his previous award-winning book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes, is a compilation of those humbling deep-space images that never cease to amaze (me, at least). The images come from some of the largest and most powerful space-based telescopes scattered across the globe, such as the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory in the Chilean Andes.

Placed in chronological order, from within a few hundred light-years of Earth to 13 billion light-years away, the images tell the story of our universe. The coolest part of the book, though, is that Benson simultaneously tells the history of Earth. For example, next to images of Orion’s Nebula is a map of the Carolingian Empire (i.e., France about 1,300 years ago). That’s because it was about 1,300 years ago that light from Orion started traveling toward Earth. In other words, if a human were to look at Earth with a telescope from Orion, he would see the world of Charlemagne. It’s pretty neat.

"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was ‘thank you,’ that would suffice."

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:46:00 -0400

““If the only prayer you said in your whole life was ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.””

- Meister Eckhart

Oh gratitude. I’ve been working on it lately…well, gratitude and grace, but let’s not just now let this become a litany of ways I need to improve.

It is just this: Sometimes, in these feverish days where I am racing to be better and find more and accomplish what I should, I spend whole days running without even brushing gratitude. And when You stop me dead, and fold me down into a humble pose and let me remember how blessed I am, I am flooded with the gratitude I have not expressed. Thank You for everything, I have no complaints.