Good and Bad

The good:

Happy happy birthday to two very special women: oakmouse and mam_adar!! May the coming year bring many blessings to you both!!


The bad:

I am still sick, sick enough to cancel my afternoon get-together with _storyteller_.

And my car still isn't out of the shop.

And I won't be able to go up to my sister's house this evening and get the next two seasons of Bones.


Blech.

An Auspicious Day Indeed

I just found out that it is also princesca's birthday!

Happy birthday, my friend!

Class Outline

When I cancelled my get-together with _storyteller_, I committed to finally getting my initial outline for my Pantheacon class written out and sent to him. After battling both the ongoing illness and my own avoidance fears, I finally did finish the outline and send it.

The insecure part of me looked at the outline and said, "But there's nothing there!"

The grown-up part of me replied, "It needs some fleshing out and development - yes, but there's more there than most people could come up with!"

Insecure Self is, of course, sure that there are actually a lot of people who could cover the same material effectively. Grown-up Self replies, "Perhaps, but I am the one with the invitation to teach in this venue, so it doesn't really matter what anyone else could or would do. It's my class, and I'll cover the topics I want to in the way I see fit." Since then, Insecure Self has been lying low.


Now I get to do the same thing for my book proposal -- which is an even bigger task. But I remind myself that I've written two well-received theses, and this is exactly the same process, with the same need to take it one step at a time and keep moving forward, even if each step is small. Trying to do it all at once will only result in paralysis.

Opening Sentences

I love this:

There were some days that deserved to be drowned at birth and everyone sent back to bed with a hot brandy, a box of chocolates, and a warm, energetic companion. Today was without question one of those days.


If I'd read this without attribution, I would have guessed it was by a_belletrist, but it's the opening lines of The Cipher, by Diana Pharaoh Francis.

Well *That* Didn't Help

I've been restless and edgy all evening with stray impulses I didn't have the energy to carry through on, and my mind running like a hamster wheel accomplishing nothing. So, with nothing else to do, I decided I would finally finish watching Dogville and then go quietly off to sleep.

Not a good plan.

Dogville is one of those slow-paced movies that lull you into false complacency (even if you know things are going to turn out badly) and raise the stakes by small but inexorable steps until the climax hits and shatters everything.

I haven't seen a film this disturbing in quite some time, and now I'm really not in the mood to go to bed. Particularly not alone. This is the kind of movie that makes you want to have someone you love to cuddle up with and remind you that the world is not an unremittingly cruel and petty place.

I can't even invite Wolfing to cuddle because she stayed at her dad's house tonight.

If you haven't seen the movie, and you appreciate a good drama, I highly recommend Dogville. Nicole Kidman gives a fabulous performance. The whole cast does, but she carries the piece. The style is unlike anything else I've seen on film, and while it seems false and distracting at first, it becomes part of the stark, surreal overall atmosphere of the action and language, and doesn't detract from the intensity of the events. But it's definitely an adult film. Not something I would watch with anyone younger than twenty.