Wow . . .wow . . .

I just noticed that on one of the sleazy late-night law firm commercials there's the following fine print at the bottom of the screen:

"Actors portraying clients are portrayed as clients".

Those are definately the lawyers I want drafting my contracts.

Who's scruffy-lookin'?

Lately, every conversation Nikki and I have ends up spiraling downward into why we hate Tom Cruise. It’s pretty amazing how it all leads back to that. His antics have been a sad experience for some; many people my age say he was their first celebrity crush when they were teens or pre-teens.

Being somewhat dorkier that most, I was never too interested in Tom Cruise. My first love was much more manly, looked great driving the Millenium Falcon, and could (and probably still can) stop the hearts of women everywhere when he tipped his Indiana Jones hat. I’m talking, of course, about the ever-sexy Harrison Ford.

(Okay, maybe “ever-sexy” is an exaggeration. I’m willing to overlook that stupid airplane movie with Anne Heche, but the earring kind of bugs me. Harrison, please, we get that you’re still hip – just take the earring out.)

I can remember being about twelve, watching the scene in Empire Strikes Back where Han kisses Leia (“Stop that – my hands are dirty”), and thinking “Wow. I needs to git me man like that”. Han was so confident and kind of cocky, and yet so sweet when he fell in love with Leia. He seemed like the absolute perfect man.

*Swoon.

There’s something about the Brad-Pitt-like, pretty boy male celebrities that just doesn’t do it for me. I think it has to do with the shaved chests: any man that would shave his chest hair and then grease himself up is just a little boy playing dress up in daddy’s clothes. (Obviously, I make an exception here for the Extremely Hairy. If you have an actual carpet on any part of your body, then the hair removal is acceptable.) All of the male celebrities that I see little girls eyeing (Ashton Kutcher, Brad Pitt, Justin Timberlake) seem more like overgrown boys than men. If I’m going to spend time ogling someone onscreen, they need to have some depth. They need to have a few wrinkles around the eyes, they need to have stubble that isn’t perfectly groomed and deliberate. And they can’t have little girly arms.

Another celebrity man that I find super-hot is Pierce Brosnan. Rowr. That’s a man with some depth, some chest hair, and a terrific accent.

Buried somewhere in this drivel is a call to the men of the world. I’ve noticed that a lot of you lack confidence – you seem confused about how to approach women, and spend a lot of time grooming yourselves. But none of this will do any good if you aren’t confident. A character in the South Park movie (who shall remain unnamed to preserve whatever shred of tact I have left) put it very well: “Chicks dig confidence. Just be yourself”.

Oh, and, um . . .don’t ask a girl on a date to a fast food restaurant. Ever.

Shall I share too much information?

In case anyone was interested, I'm pretty much just finishing up one of the busiest, most frustrating weeks I've ever had at work. I love my job, but when I get a project that is long, complicated, and really really nit-picky, I start to go a little insane. Poor Nikki has been swamped too. I think we'd been dealing with the stress pretty well until this week, when we realized that our "great idea" of taking our "woman pill" at the same time so we could help each other remember had a side effect: the resetting of womanly cycles so that they occur simultaneously. (I'm trying not to be too tacky here, but this is the best I can do. And I'm kind of a tacky person, as evidenced by Pinky the laptop bag). Anyway, today we discovered all kinds of fun problems involving the office's electrical system, and by about 3:00pm my hormones were going crazy and I had already threatened to cry at least four times. I'm making it sound really depressing, but it was actually kind of funny. (Well, it probably wasn't funny for Brian. He was probably hiding in the back room, wringing his hands and wondering what he'd done to deserve such crazy employees.)

I'm not going to complain about other frustrating things that happened, but I'll say this: IF THOU DOST TELL ME TO ARRIVE BY SIX IN ORDER TO SEE YOU, DO NOT LEAVE AT 5:30. I SHALL SEND THEE TO THE GALLOWS.

In other news, after a long and involved apartment search Matt and I decided to just stay where we are for now. We rearranged our bedroom as sort of a consolation prize, which was fun because I love arranging furniture.

We also went to Home Depo this week, a trip that secured my place in the Moron Hall of Fame. My finest moment went something like this:

R: Wow - look! I didn't know they sold tractors here!
M: Honey, those are just riding mowers.

And in case anyone was wondering, riding mowers do NOT having horns, but they should. Safety first, right?

You should feel shame if the panda part offends you . . .

The American media is becoming more and more like a Fellini movie. A few minutes ago I saw Geraldo Rivera, that fountain of wisdom, saying that Court TV’s coverage of the Michael Jackson verdict was sensational and unprofessional. “Hmmm . . . .” I thought to myself, “Didn’t Geraldo get kicked out of Iraq for accidentally broadcasting sensitive information?” So that’s okay then. (Not that I don’t think Court TV is sensational and unprofessional). And what’s with that mustache, Geraldo? Are you auditioning for the new Super Mario Brothers movie?

In addition, did you know that E! has been showing re-enactments of the trial every day?? I didn’t. That means there’s some lame actor who gets to put on his resume that he played Michael Jackson for four months. Weird.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought that the news was supposed to be insightful. I must have that wrong. You can throw an elephant at the news for weeks without hitting anything that’s not worthless drivel. (NPR, my dearest – you know that I don’t include you in this rant. I’m yours forever.)

I’m especially annoyed with all of the celebrity oriented news. And why do we ask celebrities questions about the lives of other celebrities? How relevant is Nicole Kidman’s opinion on whether Michael Jackson can salvage his career?

Here are Nine most annoying things I’ve been seeing too much of on the news:

9. Russell Crowe. So he threw a phone. Meh. *Shrugs* Naomi Campbell did that like ten years ago.
8. Brad Pitt’s alleged affair with Angelina Jolie. This would have ranked higher, but they’re so pretty that it mitigates the nonsense. Plus, you know, they’re trying to helping kids.
7. All of this Tom Delay mumbo jumbo. Just kick his ass to the curb and stop wasting tax dollars and American brain cells. Tom Delay is becoming like the bad boyfriend who beats you, but you just keep going back. And I’m the friend who’s fed up with you going back to him over and over again. Come ON, people. How many times does he have to throw us down the stairs before we break up with him?
6. My enduring disgust for Paris Hilton had waned, but now I find that she’s engaged to a man who’s also named Paris. That is ridiculous. I decree that spoiled children of privilege must have a new name, and I declare that name to be Minneapolis. We don’t need more Paris’s.
5. Partisanism.
4. Media coverage on the media.
3. Obviously, the Michael Jackson verdict. But specifically, the headlines announcing the verdict via a play on one of his songs (Examples: “He ‘beat it’”, “Free Man in the Mirror”)
2. If I see Tom Cruise jumping up and down like a four year old again, I swear I will vomit. WHY ARE THE TWO OF YOU TORTURING US WITH YOUR LUDICROUS AND DISTURBING RELATIONSHIP? I refuse to refer to this by the kvetchy media name. Just make you damn movies and go home. Find a girlfriend who’s not a giraffe, stop trying to convince me that Scientology isn’t weird, and STOP JUMPING UP AND DOWN LIKE A FOUR YEAR OLD.
1. Anything involving efforts to impregnate pandas. If they’re that reticent about having panda sex, maybe they’re supposed to go extinct.

Paradise Somethinged

One of my favorite teachers from undergrad was an English professor who taught a class on Milton. Even if I hadn’t liked Professor L and his class so much, I think he still would have been one of my most memorable professors. The semester after I took Professor L’s class he went on the lamb amidst varying and sensational rumors, and I think that now it would be fair to upgrade his status from “memorable” to “infamous”.

It was obvious that he was restless with being a professor. He definitely loved teaching, and was one of those people who had a gift for communication, but an increasingly massive set of administrative nonsense made it hard for him to breathe. One day Professor L made us laugh by telling us about an old friend of his, a bipolar but tenured history professor who used to throw rocks through the windows of the Liberal Arts Dean’s Office when he was annoyed with the university. He finished the story after our laughter had died down, by reminiscing about some of his old friend’s other quirks. Later he told us that the reason that particular professor no longer taught was due to an untimely and self-induced death, from a bullet to the head.

It was easy to see coincidences in the story of the history professor and in Professor L’s own life. Beyond Professor L’s disdain for the administration, one got small peeks into the reality that he was hindered by his own disease. Even before the semester when he failed to turn up for his classes people might have noticed, if they paid attention, that he was almost never without his plaid, innocuous looking coffee flask – even when it seemed unlikely that he’d be drinking coffee. And his students probably raised their eyebrows at the more-than-occasional cancelled class, given without real explanation.

One afternoon I saw Professor L. walking down the street near the university, carrying nothing but his plaid flask and a newspaper. He was wearing nondescript jeans that weren’t large enough to distract from his skinny legs and a striped, baggy t-shirt. The clothes looked as if he’d slept in them. His white hair, as always, was slicked back, and his goatee was scraggly. It occurred to me that if I didn’t know who he was, I might think he was homeless. He was – and still is, I’m sure – the type of person who’s casually described as a “character”, whose antics are recounted with amusement. But the antics were more than worth it if you got the chance to hear him teach.

I’d been a lover of English poetry for years when I took Professor L’s class, and had spent probably more time than can be considered healthy reading John Donne aloud to savor the rhythm of the words, or researching the compositions dates on Tennyson’s poems. But Professor L’s class opened the door of history through the amazing structural intricacies that Milton used to compose his works. Above all I realized that I could never truly appreciate Milton, nor could anyone else, that Milton was trapped by the peculiarities of time and circumstance. Or, maybe, that we were trapped. I can read English poetry with joy and “understand” it, even learn from it. And, now, I can delve deeper by examining the structure of the poetry and what that helps it to say. But I’ll never be able to read Lycidas and implicitly feel the urgency of a particular verse because of the fact that is has less syllables. I’ll never naturally understand that a verse is meant to impart strength because it has three lines instead of two.

There was a time when the Western world was ruled by theology and faith. Obviously, this had some setbacks, like bleeding people with leeches. But the horror of the superstition was almost matched by the beautiful interconnectedness of the imagined universe. Now we can analyze and scientifically explain, but the sense of connection is lost to society. Now we feel more disconnected than ever. I remember one class Professor L spoke about being disconnected as a society, and leaned forward to stare. “You think you really know anybody?” The room was silent, and the electricity of it made me shiver. The void between each person in the room felt like limitless space, dark and unpassable. And as much as I wanted to say yes, we can truly know each other, I understood what he meant. In the vastness of life we barely know ourselves, so knowing another person is like stumbling blindly around a huge, darkened building. The terror of being so vulnerable can be enough to stop your efforts, and even when you resolve to try you still have to fight the size and the darkness, with no guarantee that anyone will turn on the lights.

Milton himself knew something about darkness, and about faith. In about 1640, Milton felt ready to write the work of his life. But against the backdrop of political upheaval, Milton was asked by Cromwell to be an official pamphleteer for the Puritan government. Milton felt divided, and was aware that he couldn’t write his masterpiece and adequately support his political philosophy at the same time. He put poetry on hold and became a pamphleteer.

Writing of that kind was hard work. By 1651 the long hours by candelight had taken their toll, and Milton had become completely blind. Nine years later the monarchy was reinstated and Milton, now an enemy of the government, was arrested and eventually impoverished. While living off a friend’s charity in a small room, blind and poor, Milton took up his pen and began his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, the work that would come to define the modern view of Christian theology.

Professor L had the ability to make all of that real, to cross the void into Milton’s time and show his students the hidden corners of history and the unrecognized genius in Milton’s works. He recreated the world of interconnectedness, even though his reality was very different. Like Donne, he seemed to be straddling the divide between faith and rationalism, between isolation and understanding.

For awhile after Professor L stopped teaching, the university still had him classified as a member of the faculty. Now he seems to be erased from memory; no matter how many ways I tried to google his name, all I could find were old, brief documents that listed his name along with dozens of other UT professors. For all of the impact he made on the dozens of students who fought to take his class, he’s now so far away that even the internet can’t find him.

Sometimes isolation goes beyond having nothing to do on a Friday night. For some, it can be the crushing reality of being a single person, living in a particular place, during a time when the most people hope for in terms of connection is for someone to love them “for who they are”. For some isolation is the reality of human existence. I can empathize with feeling adrift in that vast space, but I can also say that I’ve had experiences that transcended the physical constructs that keep us isolated. Far from hard to reconcile, this is just the reality of being a spiritual being living in a physical world. I think the connections that seem to elusive are more tangible that we realize, and the fact that they’re hard to grasp is a reason to work hard, not a reason to despair. I hope that, no matter what Professor L is doing, he’s found a way through the sadness in his life. I hope he realizes that, no matter how trapped he may be just by virtue of who he is, there’s probably some student that he doesn’t even remember who’s looking him up on the internet, or flipping through old notes from class while cleaning out a closet, or looking up at the night sky and remembering Milton:

“When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall clime,

Then all this Earthy grosnes quit,

Attir'd with Stars, we shall for ever sit,

Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.”

It don't matter if you're black or white . . .

The rest of the pictures from the wedding can be viewed here.

Testing . . .Can I post Pictures??

I've got a bad feeling about this . . .

(Tomorrow I’ll post all about the wedding of the fabulous Lauren and Sarmad, complete with pictures. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for the delay.)

Matt and I finally got to see Revenge of the Sith, along with a theatre full of people who, like us, probably figured that everyone in the world had seen it by now and they could get good seats. We forgot to factor in the nerds who saw it opening night, and have been seeing it every few days since then. One such group of nerds had this conversation:

Nerd #1: Man, that was pretty cool seeing that wookiee army.

Nerd #2: Yeah, man, wookiees rock. But I think ewoks were the best.

Nerd #1: Oh, well, of course the ewoks are the best. I mean, definately the best of gungans and all of the other native tribes.

Native tribes, eh? Anyway, the movie was generally sort of not completely terrible, it kind of swung between being really engrossing and annoyingly transparent.

The part of the movie that most fascinated me was the way that the Jedi Council mishandled the whole Anakin situation. They seemed like a bunch of really distracted parents who were too busy to give their children the kind of attention they needed. When Anakin was all “Samuel L., Palpatine is a Sith!” and Samuel L. responded by basically saying “Be a good boy and go wait in your room.” I really wanted to reach into the screen and smack him. The Council knew that Anakin was powerful and they knew that he was potentially dangerous. AND, given that they can sort of read minds, they had to realize he was getting restless. So why didn’t they do anything about it?

And I know that there’s someone reading this who’s thinking that it was necessary for all of that to happen so that Anakin could become Darth, have Luke, and then restore order to the Force by killing the Emporer to save Luke. But it’s just as possible that the Council could have handled the situation better, and then Anakin would have restored order to the force by killing Palpatine instead of Samuel L. See that? Same result, less carnage. If only the Jedis had been a little more proactive.

In general, I’m very interested in watching other people parent. And one of the things I tend to notice is when there’s disconnect between what parents know of their children and reality. I admire parents who are aware of their children, who notice their needs and do what they can to address those needs under extremely individualized circumstances. For all practical purposes, the Jedis were parents to Anakin and the other pre-Jedi kids. They were completely responsible for their upbringing, and to think that they weren’t giving those kids individualized care is kind of interesting. First, I think we’ve all seen what can happen when parents have a child who’s “hard to handle” and treat him or her like all other kids: the kid doesn’t ever learn how to handle his or her special needs, doesn’t develop all that she/he could, and the parents have to spend astronomical amounts on therapy. Anakin kind of parallels this type of situation, and the Jedi Council is just like the parents who wait until it’s too late to deal with a challenging child.

Second, I find it interesting that the Jedi’s didn’t have essential child-raising skills, even though they were supposed to instill this whole moral code in the young Jedis. The Baha’i Faith is very clear on the fact that there’s no inherent virtue in eschewing a family life to serve God/some higher purpose. In fact, the Baha’i writings state that living the life of an ascetic is wrong, and that people should have families and serve God: the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and service is done through interaction with other human beings. I wonder what the Star Wars world would have looked like if Jedis were allowed to have relationships and families. It’s funny, because ultimately a key point of the six movies seems to be the importance of relationships. It’s the bond between Luke and Anakin that finally enables Anakin to kill the Emperor, and the three main characters in the last three movies are driven by emotion for each other much more than some righteous desire to do the right thing. Those family bonds might seem devastating from the Jedi Council perspective, but in the end those bonds are the strongest impetus people have to do what’s right.

(Although, it seemed like everybody in the movie knew that Anakin and Padme were together, and nobody seemed to care, so maybe the Jedis were actually just into free love.)

In addition to all of the above psychobabble, Natalie Portman’s hair was terrible. It was so bad that I found it distracting. And having Darth fall to his knees and yell “Nooooooo!” was the silliest thing I’ve ever seen on film.

Rowood v. Too Many Cars

I'd like to second Nikki's post about the hilarity that is watching depositions take place in our office. My favotire parts of the day were:

1. The fab white chocolate raspberry scones that Brian bought "for the guests" which Nikki and I shamelessly scarfed.

2. Watching Joe Corporate and his mentor at douchebags-r-us law firm enter the office wearing THE SAME OUTFIT AS IF THEY WERE THIRD GRADE GIRLS. Seriously guys - there is a world beyond pleated khakis.

3. Saying "where's Victor?" right as the elusive boy walked through the front door stating "I forgot to dress nice and had to go all the way home to change."

4. Having extremely animated, expletive-filled, but whispered conversations just outside the conference room.

Depositions make for an interesting, pastry-filled day.

In other news, Matt and I spent last weekend in Dallas for Lorraine's (sister-in-law) graduation. Everything was pretty jam-packed full of family time, but I did learn how to play a weird and neverending version of Rummy. And I came up with a really great daydream, where, when someone makes an unsolicited comment about my weight ("You're so skinny! You should eat more!"), I envision throwing a cream pie in their face and yelling "Why don't YOU eat more!".

Mmmm . . . cream pie . . .