my tragic right hip

I’m only mildly embarrassed to admit:

1. Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” is currently the most-played song on my iTunes. Now, there is good reason for this—being a band widow means pop music may flow through the veins of this house. Once my RRHB gets home, it’s forever banned from the airwaves. I take full advantage of this by listening to it very loud and dancing around in my underwear. Yes, I said, I’m mildly embarrassed to admit these things.

2. I can’t stop eating barbecue rice chips. I’m obsessed. And they’re not real chips, so it’s not that bad, right? Damn prednisone.

3. I can’t stop thinking about Pride and Prejudice. I watched the Keira Knightley film again on Friday night and was obsessed looking at the differences between Austen’s original (now that I’ve read it) and the adaptation. A couple of things really bothered me: Keira’s posture and the way she stroked Darcy’s legs at the end of the film; oh, and the fact that she was always wandering around in her bedshift. As if. And then, if I wasn’t obsessed enough, I watched Bridget Jones’s Diary. Again. For, like, the millionth time, just to see the similarities there as well. All I have left is to watch the PBS mini-series that everyone keeps raving about. I’m only 10 years off the bandwagon on that one. Talk about being tragically unhip.

So that’s how I’ve spent my weekend? You?

I know I’m not doing the Book or Movie A Day challenges anymore, but I like the way the titles look.

Sigh.

Annnywaaay. I went to see Friends with Money this weekend with Wing Chun. It’s taken me a while to post about the film because I’ve been thinking about it so much and it took me a while to elucidate exactly why I liked it. And it comes down to one thing: it’s about women, women of a certain age, going through womanly things. Oh, it’s all clear now, isn’t it?

No, really, it’s about four friends, each with very different lives and very different problems. One is wealthy and happily married (Joan Cusack), another is happily married but extremely unhappy (Frances McDormand), the third is unhappily married (Catherine Keener) and the last is just plain troubled (Jennifer Aniston). Each woman openly, even freely admits that they might not be friends now if they weren’t friends already, a long-lasting kind of knowledge about one another informs the performances of all four lead actresses, and truly makes the film feel like you’re watching a slice of their lives instead of a celluloid world.

At one point, Jane (Frances McDormand) simply stops washing her hair because it hurts her arms to keep them up there. A perfect and honest picture of depression, and despite the fact that everyone’s worried about her, she still manages to be a good friend to Christine (Catherine Keener) when her marriage finally breaks down. In the middle of it all is Olivia (Jennifer Anistan), who has quit her job as a teacher and become a maid. Franny (Joan Cusack) revolves around them all like a strange sort of life coach, trying to fix everything and buying expensive tables at overpriced benefit dinners so they all can be together.

And just to bring it all back to me (I know, I’m sorry), the film made me think a lot about how much I’ve been contemplating life in general these days. A very poignant Jane bemoans the fact that she’s now in her forties instead of just turned forty, and that’s kind of how I feel these days too. I’m in the next stage of life, whatever that may be, too old to live like I did a decade ago, but too young to hang up my dancing shoes forever; I’m still treading water in terms of imagining what life has in store for me.

In a way, I’m a late bloomer (it takes me forever to do things; we didn’t even get married until now and we’re 34), and sometimes I think it might be because I wasn’t sure I’d even make it this far. A little part of me was always convinced that I’d never live this long, my mother lost her life at thirty-four, the same age I am now, and I always saw that as the end. Now that I’m half-way through the year, and ready for another birthday in a few months, I can’t help thinking that I’ve never even considered that life actually moves past that age.

What do I do now? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? How do I face it all? What makes me happy? Why does it make me happy? It fascinates me that one line from an 88-minute long film sets me off on a philosophical and psychological journey that probably won’t end with the close of this sentence.

To sum up: it’s a great little film, mandatory viewing with a group of equally lovely and amazing girlfriends.

Okay, I know I vowed to read less crap, but when I left the house yesterday and actually forgot a book (which meant that I lost an hour of valuable reading time on the commute to and from work), I had to buy something to read. So, I bought The Debutante Divorcee by Plum Sykes. I mean, I couldn’t waste a perfectly good streetcar ride, oh, I don’t know, looking at the scenery, could I?

And wow, what a ridiculous book. I mean, ridiculous. I mean, even Candace Bushnell looks like high literature in comparison.

The paper thin plot revolves around Sylvie Mortimer, freshly married and already abandoned on her honeymoon when she meets Lauren Blount, heiress and the debutante divorcee of the book’s cover. The two become fast friends and in a whirlwind mess of fashion, parties, and ridiculous situations, they do what simply amounts to a lot of nothing.

The “conflict” in the novel comes from Sylvie wondering if her ultra-fab TV-producer husband is having an affair with a devious woman in their jet set circle. Shall I ruin it for you? Oh, come on, it’s not like you’re actually going to read this book are you? Of course you’re not. So, yeah, he’s not having an affair it’s all a big, say it with me, misunderstanding. Yawn.

You know, I’ve come to the conclusion that British chicklit is just so much better because it’s not ultimately obsessed with fashion, fur (I KNOW, the horror) and the rigid ideals of beauty. When you place a book like The Debutante Divorcee next to any one of Gemma‘s books it’s lacking a certain sense of reality. It’s like reading Danielle Steele, only more ridiculous if you can imagine that. There’s a difference between something being romantic and something being utterly vapid. The Brits understand that; it’s why Bridget Jones did so well, and it’s why the Plum Sykes and Lauren Weisbergers of the world will sell books, but are missing the magic.

And the dialogue, good lord, if I met a man that spoke like Hunter, Sylvie’s husband, I’d have to kill myself figuratively and bleed all over the pages in protest. With all the “darlings” and “sweethearts” and jewels and yachts, I was yearning for something, anything that approached a real emotion in this novel. And, like this world Plum creates, it simply doesn’t exist.

Sigh. I hate it when my brain is so tired all it can handle is dreck, but I resent myself so much for it in the end.

My recent thoughts about the decline of Gilmore Girls aside (and anyone who knows me knows how much I heart that show), I read this article and my heart broke just a little bit. I can’t even imagine what the show is going to be like with someone other that ASP at the head or where it’ll go in its final seasons. Gasp! What will the Faux-vo do without its Tuesday night schedule imprinted on its little grey brain?

Ever since I bought some Jo Malone perfume, I’ve been caught smelling myself more than once. Yes, this is just as embarrassing as it sounds. But it’s so funny, because I’m allergic and the majority of perfumes give me a headache, wearing one that doesn’t is a totally novel experience.

Sooo, it means more often than not, I’ve got my nose hunkered down to my chest sniffing myself. Because it smells so good and I can’t believe that it’s me that smells that way. It’s a total boost, one that I needed desperately as I’m having a kind of bad disease week.

As much as I enjoy being a band widow, there are parts of being left alone so much that are kind of hard. For example, when my RRHB got back from tour and saw me for the first time, he said he “recoiled in horror.” Honestly, those were the words he used. He backtracked and said it was because he hadn’t seen how puffy I was from the new dose of prednisone, but still: Recoiled. In. Horror.

Doesn’t do a lot for a tenuous ego that’s strapped to the edges of sanity for the most part these days. So anything that I can do to feel kind of even remotely attractive, be it perfume, or a new haircut, or new shoes, I’m kind of indulging myself. Well, I’ll admit it, I’m over-indulging, but as of May 9th (when I see the super-fancy disease doctor again), I’m back on new drugs for the disease, which will, in turn, make me feel like complete crap all over again, I’m taking the good where I can grab it.

Now, if I can only stop smelling myself in public…

Zadie Smith’s third novel On Beauty, thankfully better than her second (Autograph Man, which I really didn’t like) and a more mature book than her first, marks a change in the progress of her art, I think. It’s a serious book (not without comic touches and her own deft style) that could be studied and analyzed and debated and on and on. In short, it’s serious literature. And there’s no doubting that Zadie Smith is seriously talented.

Was Carlene Kipps one of these women who promises friendship but never truly delivers it? A friendship flirt?

This idea of a ‘friendship flirt’ works kind of as a metaphor for me in terms of my reading of the entire novel. At all times, I had the idea that I was reading something great, something magnificent, something prize-worthy and canon-inducting, but I also thought there was something off, something not quite right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I’ve never read Howard’s End, which the book writes back to (as I understand it), but I’d like to now, just to compare the two novels. The Howard in Smith’s book is a stumbling, bumbling white art professor whose infidelity ruins his thirty year marriage to his black wife Kiki. Their three kids, two in university, and one still in high school, are almost typical middle class suburban US kids, each with their own agenda (Jerome’s a Christian, Zora a super-student and Levi a wanna-be ‘gangsta’ with a heart of almost gold). The main conflict in the book, between Howard and a rival thinker named Monty Kipps, conflates when the latter arrives at Wellington, the school near Boston where the former has taught for ten years.

And I can’t put my finger on it, but as much as I loved this novel there was something in the book that just didn’t feel authentic despite the fact that it brought me to tears toward the end, especially when Howard’s marriage inevitably breaks down. It could be the dialogue, the American-ness of it all, it could be the fact that Smith sometimes uses words and phrases that could be simpler, it could be entire characters introduced for pages upon pages and then never brought up again, it could be a number of things where on the whole, I questioned On Beauty. But that didn’t take away from a pretty great reading experience and as I’m not writing a paper or defending a thesis, just keeping a silly little reading blog, I guess that’s all right in the end.

I went to the hospital today for my visual field test. Easiest. Test. Ever. You sit on a chair, rest your chin and then stare into a little plastic box with your eyes covered and then push a button when you see flashing lights. I, of course, saw flashing lights everywhere, so I’m sure I failed, but whatever, I didn’t get pricked, prodded, x-rayed, MRI-ed, shot full of dye, or any other number of annoying things that usually happen when I’m at the hospital. Oh! And I was early, so I was in and out of there in 10 freaking minutes.

How sweet is that?

It’s maple syrup I tell you, maple bloody syrup!

Will they remove the mute button too? And I know the age of the Faux-Vo is coming where they won’t let you fast-forward through commercials, but couldn’t they just give me a couple of years of uninterrupted bliss? Buggers.

From Margaret Atwood in this podcast interview on Bookbuffet.com. When the interviewer asks about Ms. Atwood’s intentions when writing a book, she answers honesty, that it is to “strive to write a good book, if that’s not the goal [and I’m paraphrasing here], then you’re not really a writer.”

I love the simplicity in that statement. It encapsulates both the ideal of writing and the essence of the goal, but at the same time it doesn’t belie how difficult the task most certainly is for novelists.

I’m trying to read On Beauty and not getting very far because it’s a kind of concentrate-hard book and I’m so tired and sleepy and drowsy that it’s impossible to follow the words on the page.

But how pathetic is it to want to go to bed, to sleep, at 7:34 PM?

I’m too tired even to watch TV.

Damn disease!