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Sunday, May 31, 2009 - 21:44:03
Can I have a Definition please?
I meant to write this post days ago, but it's been one of those weeks where I just couldn't convince myself to do the things I should. But I wanted to talk for just a minute about the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee that was on TV this week.
The first thing I want to say is that I am an abysmal speller (and don't think I didn't get a little help on the spelling of 'abysmal.')* When I lived in Austin, I applied for some jobs with UT, and they required a spelling test. I took the test twice and never scored high enough to apply for a secretarial position with the school. So, I was never a viable spelling bee candidate. But there's a documentary about students participating in the National Spelling Bee called Spellbound that I am in love with. I'm actually watching it as I type this.
*In fact, if you spot any typos in this post, let's consider them an intentional inside joke between you and me. A little wink and a nudge. Definitely not something you should point out to me because, obviously, I did that on purpose.
When the movie first came out, I suggested to a friend that we should go see it at a local art house theatre. Sometimes I'm such a nerd, I become embarrassed about something as I'm talking about it. When I taught, I sometimes brought in this game called Apples to Apples, and I'd explain how to play to the students by saying, "There are noun cards and there are adjective cards..." and some of them couldn't stifle the groans and sighs at how lame this sounds. But that game is awesome and by the end of class they want to keep playing. Sometimes I'm a nerd who just happens to be totally right. I think I'm right when I say that Spellbound is awesome.
It's "Academy Award Nominee" levels of good!
The film follows eight kids who are competing in the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee. They are from wildly different backgrounds. Ashley lives in inner city D.C., Ted is growing up on a farm where his family raises peacocks, Angela's father doesn't speak English, and Emily references her au pair and equestrian lessons. April compares her parents to Archie and Edith bunker, and bless her, she's not wrong.
As you meet these kids, they are all awkward in a way that is cringingly reminiscent of my own adolescence. I would have fit right in with them at that age with my frizzy hair and braces only on my bottom teeth. Maybe that's why these kids got to me so much. But once I'd met them in individual vignettes, I wanted them all to win, and that's where the drama begins.
Because, of course, they can't all win. And as they started being eliminated, it occurred to me that maybe NONE of them would win. This isn't a Hollywood movie. I'm not guaranteed a happy ending here. The film doesn't provide a correct spelling on the screen for the audience, so my friend and I would wait anxiously to see if they would ring the bell to indicate a misspelling. It also led to a few embarrassing moments where we would shake our heads because clearly it's an "e" not an "a" only to realize the kid was right. It's really intense, you guys!
The film is also full of really funny, quirky moments like catching Alex Cameron, the bee's official pronouncer, practicing words in his hotel room or one eliminated contestant's older brother saying, "I still think he spelled it right." Me too, kid.
So, if you can't get enough of likable young people being incredibly literate, you might want to check it out. And then we'll discuss why you should watch Murderball, the documentary about quadriplegic rugby.
Monday, May 25, 2009 - 21:59:20
Grillin' time
My parents called this morning and wanted to come up for a few hours to spend Memorial Day with me. It was a nice surprise--although if I'd had a little more notice I would have vacuumed, but dirty carpet is what they get for giving me little advanced warning--because my parents are kind of awesome.Mom mentioned that they'd thought we might cook out, but since it was rainy and I don't own a grill, I didn't give much credence to that idea. I was surprised, then, when my parents came up to my place carrying bags of groceries and a grill in a box. A tiny grill. One might even go so far as to call it cute, but the punishment for undermining the grill might mean one doesn't get to partake in the delicious charbroiled food cooked upon it. So, I didn't call it cute.
I let them in, and since it was close to lunchtime, Dad started prepping the food while Mom and I sat on the couch and got caught up on the latest news. It took me a while to realize we weren't having hamburgers. Or hot dogs. We were having kabobs.
Generally speaking, there's nothing wrong with kabobs, it's just that it wasn't what I was expecting. He got this idea and wanted to try it out, and that's the sometimes weird but often wonderful thing about my dad. He and my mother live in the small town where I grew up, and I sometimes used to joke that it was a town that almost forcibly resists culture. But sometimes major trends and fads make it all the way to our little corner of the state, and people like my dad find out about them. Five years after I tried my first mojito, he heard about the drink and decided he'd like to try one.
He grew his own mint for the mojitos, and the thing you should know is that my father is a much better gardener than he is a bartender. We had an abundance of mint, and the result was that he became very generous with it in order to prevent waste. The first time he handed me a glass, I stared at the veritable forest floating amidst the liquid ingredients.
"Next, time, I don't want a salad at the bottom of my drink," I teased him.
When the mint started to overrun the place, he put it in the iced tea as well, and insisted on calling it "mohi-tea." Because while he is often a really, truly funny man, my father sometimes cannot resist the siren call of a cheesy joke.
I like the fact that my father is curious and willing to try new things. Sure, I wasn't thrilled when he commandeered a bottle of my wine to try his hand at French cooking, and we have actually had an argument about what truly makes a sandwich a panini, but generally I think it's an admirable quality. It's one that I think I've inherited in small ways--I prefer to sample pop culture more than food, but I can be persuaded to try a new drink now and again.
The kabobs were good, even the slices of grilled pineapple that I pooh-poohed early on turned out to be delicious, and I was glad Dad decided to try something different. I did have hot dogs for dinner, though. You know, just to be patriotic and all.
Friday, May 22, 2009 - 13:57:21
Out With The Old? Not So Fast
I am off today, and I am sitting at home in what, sadly, might be my favorite pair of jeans. I say "sadly" because after close to five years of denim-y good times, they need to be retired. They were a gift from someone who couldn't wear them for some reason, but they fit me perfectly. And perhaps because I knew that they cost almost ten times what I normally pay for a pair of jeans, I have come to believe that my ass looks ten times better in them.No doubt this is why I have held on to them for so long. In places, they've worn away to a few strings struggling to represent basically the idea of pants, but I've still been wearing them. Their slow demise has come about at a time when I'm having trouble finding pants that fit well. Too tight, too baggy, too short, too long. I found a pair that fit ok, but they are four inches too long. I'm not that short, which begs the question: What kind of mutants are they making pants for these days? And all this time, my favorite pair began to erode more and more.
I stopped wearing them for a few weeks when I spotted the hole on the upper, inner thigh, but eventually I pulled them back out of the closet figuring that the hole was small and in a weird place, so maybe no one would notice. Besides, I wear swimsuits in the summer. People have seen my upper, inner thigh. Big deal. The hole has since grown, moving towards my upper, upper inner thigh, so last night, when I wore them out, I made sure I wore cute underwear, lest they be visible at the fringes of the ever growing rip. I told myself that this, too, was not that big a deal since I used to buy and show off my cute underwear all the time in college.
Sometimes I lie to myself. I usually know when I'm doing it, but I believe my own lies anyway because I'd really like them to be true. Usually, it's promising that I'll get up earlier or cut back on caffeine or start eating more vegetables, but I'm reaching a point where I can no longer keep convincing myself that it's okay to wear these particular jeans. I've seen What Not to Wear, and I know Stacy and Clinton would not approve.
But look it, I also have a pair of $12 flip flops that have tried to kill me twice, and I still have them.
My best friend calls them The Flip Flops of Death, but they're only dangerous on rainy days. When they get wet, their smooth bottoms become slick and caused me to once slip and crash into a door jamb before sending me crashing to the floor, where it is possible that I may have bounced a bit. My solution is to wear them on sunny days with no chance of rain. Because the shoes have molded to my feet, and when I slip them on, it's like their soft, rubber wraps my toes in a warm embrace and caresses my arches. It's very comforting, which is sometimes what I want in a pair of shoes. I need to intimidate someone, I go with the high heeled boots that put me right at six feet tall. You've had a rough day, you want these shoes.
I'm slowly accepting that the jeans and the flip flops, and all right, a pair of red belly dancing shoes with a hole in the bottom are going to have to go. I'm ready to look for replacements, but until I have a new favorite pair of jeans, I'm not quite ready to let the old ones go.
Thursday, May 14, 2009 - 22:12:43
What a Way to Start the Day
I've been running on fumes all week. My best friend came into town this weekend and stayed through Wednesday morning, so we'd been staying up late catching up, sometimes over pomegranate martinis. Wednesday afternoon, I should have come home and taken a nap, but instead, I changed and headed out to the Little Rock Film Festival. I didn't make it in time to get into the movie, and could have gone home and taken a nap, done a quick workout, and gone to bed. Instead, I drank a beer and read a book called Rapture Ready, which is about Christian pop culture. I skipped getting caught up on sleep in order to learn about Christian stand up comedy and Christian wrestling.
I don't exactly regret making that choice because the book is really interesting, but this morning, I drank as much coffee as I could stand, edging towards the early stages of caffeine poisoning where I buzz around like a hummingbird and start to think I can actually feel my hair growing before falling asleep on the nearest flat surface. Still a little draggy, I went to work.
We hadn't been open long before a patron who'd checked out one of our laptops came to ask me how to log on to the machine. I followed her back to the corner where she'd set up, pushed a few buttons, and up popped a picture of a smiling woman proudly showing off her vagina.
That woke me up more than another cup of coffee could have done.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009 - 21:41:37
Trainspotting
Today, I needed to buy something train related for a work thing. I could explain why, but you'd stop caring well before I finished. The main thing is I kept putting it off until we've gotten to the point where I'm running out of time to purchase something train-ish. At first, I thought the idea of Hobo chalk would be funny but maybe that's because I'm a fan of John Hodgman and I saw that one episode of Mad Men. The thing is, my item will go into a basket of similarly themed items that will be auctioned off, and I thought sidewalk chalk with a shoddily made label proclaiming it "Hobo chalk" might not be a reference everyone would find as amusing as I do. I'm not even sure it would make sense.
I thought I'd get a copy of Strangers on a Train, which would be sort of theme related, but it's also good on its own. I checked a couple of places where I might be able to buy a classic movie. The key word, though, is "might." It's a long shot because the first place I'd try to get it would be online, but I don't have that kind of time. So, I checked Hastings with no luck and was left with Target.
First of all, I feel like if you're going to have signage claiming you have great movies at great prices, you should not have Center Stage displayed beneath it. I'll let Troop Beverly Hills slide because I was once nine years old and thought that was fine comedy. But I have seen Center Stage. I saw it in the theatre as a matter of fact, and my friends and I enjoyed it immensely...just not in the way we were supposed to. If we're talking about awesomely bad movies, it's a fine choice. You have to put great in quotation marks, though.
That one quibble aside, I almost thought I would pull it off. They have a small classics section with a couple of Hitchcock films, but they didn't have the one I needed. I scanned the section twice, walked through the entire movie section, and then went back to the classics. Strangers on a Train still wasn't there, but maybe they'd have The Great Train Robbery. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles? Or...those are really the only train related movies I've heard of, and none of them were on the shelves.
There were movies about planes and cars and Speed was handy if only I needed something bus related. One movie had a trolley on the cover, which seemed to be taunting me with how much it's almost a train. I discovered that there are quite a few transportation-based films out there, but none of them was related to the one I needed. A quick trip through the books and then the magazines convinced me that trains are woefully under represented in popular culture for adults. What happened to the glory of riding the rails? I mean, that's mostly the self-pity talking because I couldn't tell you where the nearest train station is. If I had to guess, though, I'd say Atlanta.
Now, I was in that mood where I was determined to buy something just to have done with it. Here's where a liberal arts degree comes in handy because I remembered a quote from The Importance of Being Earnest : "I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train."
I picked up a gender neutral black journal to which I hope to find a relatively untacky way to attach said quote (Just long enough make the connection clear. It will also be easily removable.) I also grabbed a copy of Hot Fuzz for myself. Done and done!
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