Clutch Cargo

I have a craving for winter

2004-01-14T22:44:00.000-08:00

This is easy for me, since I'm not in Boston where it hit fifteen below today. I'm craving a cold cold day with dry snow on the ground and a huge pot of thick coffee just waiting to be drunk with cold cream, and no one to answer to but the absent writers of the New York Times.

And one more thing....

2003-12-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

How come right after I publish, it never seems to appear in the "recently published" window?

And can't someone find something interesting besides the Fox Searchlight blog? For god's sake, is Blogger just another PR shill like every other site and publication? Stop the celebrity/Hollywood ass-kissing madness!

Wherefore art?

2003-12-09T22:35:00.000-08:00

It's hard enough feeling lost and stranded inside my own life and head, but with this blog, now I'm stranded in cyberspace, too. No one reads me. Well, I check in periodically and reread me, but I'm not sure that counts. Now, if I keep writing anyway, is that developing the creative habit? And if, against all my better judgment, I crave having someone read the inconsequential spurtings of my conscious and occasionally unconscious mind--what does that mean? If my whole obstacle to doing much of anything has been fear of having the results judged by outsiders, what does craving that judgment indicate? Am I changing, or simply vain? After all, as the wise Malena on "Average Joe" says, (and I paraphrase here) "Vanity is bad." Good thing she didn't go for the pretty boy...

Things my shrink taught me

2003-12-01T22:24:00.000-08:00

It's both embarassing and reassuring when the woman who is paid an inordinate amount to analyze your psyche reads your mind, twice in one 50 minute hour, one instance astute, the other completely trivial. First, she nails me for "making a list" of all the character flaws I possess that I feel I can directly attribute to my mother. Not only that, she already knows that it's growing longer by the day. Then she knows before I ask that I want the statement for last month, so I can submit it to my ever-dwindling insurance program to recoup some of her (exorbitant) fee. Does this mean that I am not only passing the buck, but am also absurdly predictable? Maybe that's my mother's fault, too...

`wer4ggtjvii

2003-11-29T16:11:00.000-08:00

my two year old is spreading two chenille blankets, one green, one red and gold, into a mat on the floor in front of the giant television--prone being the preferred position for watching "A Bug's Life" for the tenth time in as many days. This is what you do when you're a two year old with the flu and a strep infection and two exhausted parents who have lost the will to fight.

BTW, the two year old in question titled this post. In case you were wondering.

Giving thanks

2003-11-27T21:28:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like a truly awful Thanksgiving to remind you just how shallow you are, just how unable you are to be thankful for the things that are working and wonder-full in your life--NOT the sick husband, sick child, dirty house, cancelled Thanksgiving feast, meal delivered on wheels by friends, now congealing (the meal, not the friends) on the kitchen counter. If I were writing for some crappy mass market Parade magazine-esque rag, I would find some lesson of hope in the fact that in spite of just how self pitying I am feeling today, I actually have come to a higher realization about my privileged place in the universe of mankind....nope. Just pissed. I love Thanksgiving, and this one sucked. But not as badly as the one my senior year of college, where I was stuck in dank New Haven (where, as one wise man quipped, it is always winter, and never Christmas) dining at the most expensive restaurant in town with a boy who doted on me and who I despised as a result. I slept with him, and may well have dumped him the next day. Merry Christmas-shopping season, sucker. It's nice to realize that my "better self" hasn't gotten any better with the passage of all this time.

Overheard at the playground

2003-08-25T16:44:00.000-07:00

One mommy to another, commenting on the headline PEDOPHILE EXPRIEST STRANGLED IN BOSTON :

"How would you like your life's accomplishments reduced to the headline 'PEDOPHILE EXPRIEST STRANGLED IN BOSTON'"?

Well, gee, not very much, actually.

Proud to be an Arnoldian...where everything is free

2003-08-20T18:30:00.000-07:00

Not. And I quote, from the Governator--apparent:

'The public doesn't care about figures. What the people want to hear is are you willing to make the changes. Are you tough enough to go in there and provide leadership. That's what this is about'...

Riiiiight....

Lost memories

2003-08-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

My mother asked me a very specific question at dinner last night, about the "learning pods" (kind of study carrels as if they'd been designed by Buckminster Fuller) that were used in a school I attended for a few years, and I really couldn't remember much about them at all. Now, in my defense, I never actually got to use the pods; they were in classrooms for kids younger than I was when I matriculated to the school. But they were a big sellling point for the place, always featured in its promotional materials, tours, etc. This got me to thinking about how much of my experience appears to be lost in the haze of either time or too much chemical fun in my past--college, in particular, feels awfully lost. It made me think that a trivial journal of the events of one's day, and the feelings, might not be so trivial after all, at least not to the writer. I think I always thought my memories had to be deep enough (or at least pithy) to warrant public view. Of course, now we live in a culture where it seems that EVERYTHING merits display...

What will we think of next?

2003-08-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

As if it's not embarrassing enough to have W as our fearless leader, now those of us in California face the potential shame of the Terminator being elected governor via a completely ridiculous process. No wonder the rest of the country shakes its head in wonder at the goings-on here.

Bidden or unbidden, God will appear.

2003-08-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

Or so thought Carl Jung.

Or did he?

blah blah blah

2003-08-05T12:34:00.000-07:00

This is the problem with having a mechanism to write, and a poor ability to actually channel ideas into action. There's a lot of blah, blah, blah and no real real real.

Last night our eighty-something year old neighbor stopped by--she was sad after watching the movie "Frida" ("they had to cut off her toes") so we invited her in for a drink and some company, lent her a couple of movies we thought would make her laugh. She's becoming my reading buddy--she says all she can do anymore is read, so she reads just about everything. I'm delighted when I can actually recommend something she hasn't gotten to yet, as I did this weekend with The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which I loved. She's loaned us Remembering Kate, which is also pretty delicious, if a little sad. Turns out Kate was as lonely as she seemed as her life went on. And Scott Berg is a lovely writer, even if his relationship with his subject does become a little precious at times. In any case, Eve, who lives in Bette Davis' original Hollywood house (original not only because it was her first real home in Los Angeles, but also because she apparently built the EXACT SAME HOUSE three or four times) is the least sad, most vital person of any age--sharp as a tack and all those other overused saws fit her, full stop. She reminds me to be kinder to my own mother, and how rare it is for us to cross not only outside of our own racial and socioeconomic circles, but also outside of our age peer group. She's the kind of person who makes you feel that you are lucky that she takes the time to call you friend. And she's managed to write every single day for the last nineteen years; she began as a means of dealing with grief when her husband of almost 40 years died.

Does anybody really need to know that I dreamt about Clay Aiken?

2003-07-28T00:04:00.000-07:00

As if it's not bad enough that I Tivo'd every episode of AI last season, cried real tears during multiple episodes without so much as a cocktail to blame...last night I dreamt that Clay Aiken was my new boyfriend. We'll put aside the prosaic facts--I'm (happily) married, and white America's sweetheart Clay seems like his pendulum swings in a different direction--and just shudder at the pure awfulness of my unconscious expending energy and imagination on a shopping trip (for clothes!) with N.B.C. Whether I need to "care for my dreamlife" or not, I'm not sure this shameful episode can be revealed to my shrink. To the world via a blog, sure. But to someone whom I actually have to face? The fact that I rooted for Ru-Ben is little consolation.

Who died and made Paul Wolfowitz God?

2003-07-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

Good to know that Wolfy's sage and sane hand is on the reins of U.S. foreign policy...

Visit the link to read the latest Strangelovian utterings....

Why can't we do it in the road?

2003-07-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

That song just popped into my head. Lately, all the doing I do in the road is pushing Jojo in his chartreuse Starck car from Target. Brands are us.

I like the black spot of the Adbusters mavens. But I lack the balls to go plaster it all over Hollywood and Highland...and I like the Gap. I know it's wrong, but I just can't help myself.

2003-07-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

Is it weird to compulsively? obsessively? (both sound so...creepy) read an old friend's blog that you stumbled on to without contacting said old friend? I now am extremely up to date on the life of someone I knew well in high school (a good twenty years ago, sad to say) and progressively lost touch with...truth be told I think I did something in college to piss her off and then we stopped being friends, not in a particularly dramatic way, but stopped nonetheless...and now I've seen pictures of her, her husband, their dog, their vacations, and read her (very literate, very funny, no surprise) musings on everything from the knicks to botswana to pork stores. I've read it all. That's where the creepy compulsive part seems to come in... What say you, blog world? What's the etiquette here? Do I suck it up and send her an email, or continue my cyberspacial voyeurism?

2003-07-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

It could be worse.

You could be Gray Davis.

2003-06-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

I always hated the rigid guilt of Artist's Way 3 page a day rule, though in retrospect I can see its utility. Writers write. If I want to be one, I have to be one. That's pretty much it. Today has been fun, traumatic, lethargic--fun at the park with J-----, running into D---- and I----; traumatic after J's "gym" class when his left hand became wedged between the sliders of the elevator door in the parking garage; lethargic this morning when I felt the grey haze of -- what? Depression? Sloth? Both? --coming across as it's been doing lately. I have finally selected a shrink, and perhaps that and this will help clear it away. Structure is always my answer, and yet I always avoid it.

Stories have been coming to me piecemeal, but then I lose them. Right now, as I type, I cannot recall a single idea...one was from seeing a young Indian (Asian) woman walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, wearing chef's whites. I thought about a film about her, and she became the girl from Beckham....At least one came back.

I told Y--- about my idea for the Rwanda movie. I loved that idea, though I think in the last purge, I tossed the treatment I wrote about it, which is a shame. Maybe it's buried in the house somewhere. She really responded to it--maybe only as a way of mirroring back the pathetic bit of interest I finally seemed to be showing in anything at all. J---- L---- asked me last night what I was up to, or some such innocuous question....and I had no answer. My answer is "nothing", yet my days feel busy. What does that mean? I am not bored, but I sure feel boring.

2003-06-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

The last full dream I remember: I was staying in a cabin somewhere with J____ and J---- and his wife, though she looked nothing like the pictures I've seen of his wife. Her hair was overprocessed blond, and her skin had the crinkly texture of patent leather and the color of auto upholstery. We (J----- and I) swam through a river or lake, around a giant houseboat--I was only with J-----, not J----- or his kids, who weren't his kids but instead big boys, 10 or 12. At the end of the dream, when I told him that someday he'd want to seal off the rooms of his cabin to create private spaces for the kids (and kid-free spaces for him and his wife) he smiled and said I always knew everything about him.

2003-06-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

This is the beginning of what B calls caring for your dreamlife. It is also an attempt at writing, so that the ideas that come flitting into consciousness can persist.