The schedule for the 2010 Portland Oregon Women's Film Festival, Obvious Child's second film festival appearance. Conveniently screened right after "Whore" and just before "Bollywood". Perfect. Though, I wish we followed "Catechism". Still, we're practically famous.
Also, for local people -- there's a screening of the film this Monday, the 22nd at The Tea Lounge in Park Slope. Info here.
I'm learning so many new things about my self out there in the real world! Like this...
Today at my internship my already torn skirt (it has a small tear on the side, which looks like an intentional modest slit) got caught on the toilet paper dispenser in the bathroom and ripped all the way up to my butt.
Luckily, I have a friend in the office and after we batted around a few unsuitable suggestions (paper clip, glue stick, scotch tape, butterfly stickers) we came to the best solution: stapler. I took it into the bathroom and locked myself behind a stall. I sat down on the toilet, skirt in my lap, and began stapling the side seam back together. Very soon though, a flock of women came in and gathered around the sink and in the two stalls on either side of me. Now, if you don't know, staplers happen to have a very distinct sound, and finding myself no longer alone, I grew very self-conscious of the noise I was making. I tried to imagine what several repeated stapler clicks coming from inside a stall might sound like to other people. So I stopped and waited, and when a toilet flushed I rapidly finished the job.
Well, turns out, regular staples aren't meant to hold fabric together. I left my internship in the afternoon, staples still in tact, and got on the subway to go uptown to my other job. I'd forgotten all about my skirt mishap and when I bent over to sit down, the staples relented and the rip burst apart, exposing my entire thigh (covered in tights, thankfully) and releasing a loud rip noise that sounded like a fart. People looked at me. The staples were now noticeable, sticking out and bent, the occasional one pricking my skin. But I had seven more stops to go before I could get off. So I just sat there. I sat quietly, trying to anticipate the motions of the train in effort to keep my body still and prevent any further staple pokes. Soon enough, the people turned away from me and back to their newspapers and video games. All except the guy on the end of the train who was wearing a trash bag. He was still looking at me. And I was OK with that.
What I learned: there is nothing to be ashamed of, I am rather resourceful, and I might have a thing for homeless men.
Nonrelated: Below, a google earth shot of a friend's parents' house. It's in Iowa and the human-looking image in the grass behind the house is a garden that was intentionally designed to look like a fetus when viewed from above. An homage to Jesus.
Friend and loyal follower of my blog, Ryan, recently posted a clip from one of my all-time favorite film scenes.
When I was in high school, junior year to be exact, I was able to recite, word-for-word, nearly every line from the film American Beauty. My friends and I would get many laughs during a slow day in the chemistry lab by taking turns acting out the hysterical Carolyn Burnham (“This is a $4,000 sofa, upholstered in Italian silk. It is not just a couch!”), or the cool, recently liberated Lester Burnahm (“It’s just a couch. This isn’t life. This is just stuff. And lately it’s become more important to you than living. Well honey, that’s just nuts.”). It was also this particular role, underscored by his John Doe in Se7en, that beget my long, still withstanding crush on Kevin Spacey.
My connection to the film today is more about nostalgia than anything else. I came upon the film the year after it was released. I got home from school, plopped myself down on our living room sofa, and turned on the television to watch a Saved by the Bell rerun, as I always did. Instead of finding Zack and Kelly mid-make out, the television screen filled with the image of a woman. She was suspended from a ceiling and her naked body was masked by her blonde hair and covered in red rose petals. I later learned that the film had been left in the VCR by my mother. She’d seen a copy of it resting in the $5 video bin at the grocery store one afternoon and, remembering that it had recently won Best Picture, bought it as an impulse-purchase. Turns out she had paused it at this precise moment because, after only fifteen minutes, she found Kevin Spacey’s lustful longing for his sixteen-year-old daughter’s best friend “weird”. I though, a teenager myself, was naturally intrigued by the half-dressed woman and immediately pressed play, anxiously awaiting for what I hoped would be a follow-up sex scene. The anticipated romp didn’t come, but I continued watching the film anyway. I’d become transfixed. And I watched it in its entirety.
I’m sure the suburban setting reminded me of my own, as well as the characters, representing people I knew in my own life. There were several girls I went to school with who were just like Angela (Mena Suvari’s character)—slutty and bitchy—and I was usually friends with them for some reason. I could also relate to Angela, wanting to have sex with every boy, but never actually going all the way. And I felt like Jane (Thora Birch) too, trapped in a small town and resenting my parents for everything. And every now and then, my mother was capable of emotional breakdowns tantamount to those displayed by Carolyn Burnham. I truly believed that this film was made for me.
After my first viewing I watched it again later that night, and then I watched it dozens of times more. Soon I had memorized all of the dialogue. I even wrote the last line of the film down in my journal. (Further proof that the actions of teenagers are often melodramatic.) And the name of this very blog was inspired by the film, from the scene below.
I think it’s safe to assume that seeing this movie is part of why I moved out of the suburbs, to a city. Why I live in a third-floor apartment instead of a house on a cul-de-sac. Why I take the subway or ride my bike instead of driving a car. I think it planted a tiny idea in my head, an idea which was to be nurtured over the next few years by liberally minded friends and a withdrawal from Catholicism. I was also convinced that the reason my mother didn’t like the film was not because it was weird, but because it reminded her too much of her own life. Maybe this was another reason why I liked it.
In closing, thank you Lester Burnham & co.! Thank you for nothing short of saving my life. And also for giving me the idea to fake a seizure when I get bored at a party. This will be my goal for 2010.
I am reading The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster (nonfiction book about father figures: his own, himself, and other dads or dad-like individuals). The above title is a quote by Pascal and is referenced by Auster.
I read the book on the train today. I rode the J into the city with Owl Licks this afternoon. I on my way to babysit on the UES, he on his way to work at the metal shop at Columbia. There was a chubby gay man in green pants who boarded the subway with us at Gates. He was with an older heterosexual couple who looked to be from the Midwest. I guessed they were his parents, visiting. He was taking pictures of them and himself before the three of them walked to the front of the subway car (we were on the first train car) and stared out the window at the expanding tacks as we pushed toward Manhattan. Owl Licks and I had a hearty laugh somewhere over the East River, wedged between the two lanes of traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge. I don't remember what it was that made us laugh, but I think the two of us both needed a serious guffaw and that it didn't matter in the least how it came about. And we were both adamant about carrying the laughter on, all the way across the bridge. Perhaps we had exhausted what we were talking about or maybe we'd become self-conscious and the once earnest laughter had become a nervous continuum of giggles. Either way, I thought that the guy seated across from us probably believed us to be stoned.
I picked up the boy I watch from school and took him in a cab to midtown where he has a tennis lesson. I sat on the sidelines, on a comfortably cushioned wicker bench, and watched as he and three other ten-year-olds were instructed by a lean, tanned young man on the form and footwork of tennis. An older woman, clearly the mother of one of the other boys, walked in towards the end of the lesson and sat down next to me, on a matching wicker chair. At the end, all the boys ran over to the water cooler in front of where we sat and began voraciously chugging. The mother next to me tried to casually start conversation with the attractive, younger tennis instructor. She complimented his ability to keep all the kids respectful and in-check during the lesson. The instructor was standing on the other side of me, leaning against the wall and spinning his racket atop the turf of the court, and I inevitably found myself in the middle of their conversation. I smiled occasionally as they chatted, but had no interest in joining their prattle. He was attractive though. The mother then said something about someone being contrite. I'm not sure who she was referencing but the once talkative instructor suddenly shoved his paper water cup into his mouth, took a long drink, looked at the mother, smiled quickly, said Yes, and looked away, back towards the court where the four boys walked around with slow steps, almost hopping, covering and hiding scattered tennis balls inside fluorescent orange tubes that were taller than themselves. It seemed to me that the instructor didn't know what contrite meant. This might be unfair of me, assuming someone who is good at sports has a poor vocabulary. But his expression looked just like mine does when someone uses a word I don't know. Though, sometimes the proper response is indeed a blank-faced stare followed by a introspective Yes whether or not you know what the other person is talking about.
After the lesson, my boy and I went back to the UES apartment where he lives. He was reading on the couch, waiting for his piano teacher to arrive, while I leafed through the dozens of Christmas card pictures the family had gotten over the holiday season. One was from Justice Clarence Thomas. And his was more like a newsletter than a card. And it wasn't devoted to the children, as most Christmas cards are, but instead to Mr. Thomas himself. It was written in first-person, from the perspective of his wife and filled with lots of colored pictures of Mr. Thomas at Nebraska football games. At one point his wife listed off things that her husband had accomplished during the past year and at the end in parenthesis added, "not to mention being the best husband ever!!"
Another quote from Auster's book: "Impossible, I realize, to enter another's solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, where all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely."
After eight months of applying for fifty+ jobs and interviewing for nearly twenty, I've decided to take a break. Starting in January I will be interning, for the fifth time, at a lovely literary book publisher. I've become exhausted and my mind grows restless with every passing day of unemployment, so I must do something to revolt! And by something I mean work thirty hours a week for free. Again.
This morning I ate cranberry toast with butter and soft-boiled eggs. My roommate brought the food home from the restaurant he works at in Manhattan. Another roommate had bought grapefruit juice, which I had a tiny sip of and remembered that I just don't like grapefruit juice. It's too tangy, too high of an acidity. I always do this though. Retaste something I know that I do not like. But taste buds change, people change, we all change. Why just this week the weather changed. And while I used to hate olives as a child, they are now a favorite treat of mine.
With this new internship comes a whole new season of rationing my life. No more meals out, no more movies, and lots of staying home and eating pasta with just butter and olive oil for a sauce. I must also again pack lunches to take to work and I need to purchase a state-of-the-art traveling coffee mug. The kind that I won't have to worry about leaking in my bag, even if it tips upside-down on the subway.
I have a good feeling about this internship though. That this will be the one where I will meet the future Mr. Maine.
