Today, I discovered that Dolly Parton has a Twitter and Youtube account thanks to a retweet from Jason S. So, of course I had to check it out. I have a sometimes obsession with Dolly Parton. I like 9 to 5: The Musical and Steel Magnolias. I like the fact that she built Dollywood in her home area. Plus, anyone who made a career somewhat off of their breasts and is completely upfront about that is totally okay in my books.
I was looking at her Youtube page and she has a video blog. I watched the latest entry, and it was pretty standard fare. Her being Southern and wishing everyone a happy 4th of July and telling everyone that they can change the world and that 2010 is now officially halfway over. See, but what struck me about this article is that Dolly Parton looked old.
Not bad, mind you, but older. I always get struck by that when I see people that I don't get to see very often. I imagine that people, when I don't see them, pause. They're waiting for me to get back for their lives to continue. They don't age. Things don't break down. Everything is going to be okay and the same when I come back.
This is obviously not true. Things change. Entropy reigns. And as Tom Disch reminds us, "Things break down in different ways/We can't for that omit their praise."
I don't feel myself growing up or getting earlier. I think that I'm the same that I always have been, but I guess that I have grown up. Somehow, I became what I never thought I'd live long enough to be: an adult. And I'm having an adult life and adult problems. And things don't stop. The march of progress marches relentlessly forward.
And I like the hum of moving forward. But sometimes I want to grab at the images flashing by outside the window. And I can't. Because time marches on, and it truly is, as Tennessee Williams says, "the greatest distance between two points."
There's always tomorrow, but it never looked the same as the incomparable today or yesterday. It's a copy of a copy: similar but never the same.
Cleaning
Today is a holiday for the California State University system, so Rene has the day off. And since I'm treading the fine freelance line between self-employed and unemployed, I worked a little bit this morning and I'm going to spend the day with him. He's leaving for Hawai'i on Thursday, so I won't see him for almost two weeks. Anywho, after I got done writing one of the articles I did this morning, I looked around and had a little tiny freakout.
Enough is enough, I thought. It is time. Time to clean.
People who know me know that I'm not an extraordinarily clean person. I mean, I shower daily and wash my face and teeth, but that's about the extent of my grooming. And I take my philosophy on cleaning my apartment from Angels in America (badly paraphrased): This is messy, not dirty. Messy is papers and clothes strewn about. Messy is a pile of books about to topple over. Dirty is a plate with stuff growing on or food decomposing on the ground. Messy is fine. Dirty is not.
So, anywho, I was looking around Rene's room, and he is even messier than I am. So, I started cleaning. And, although I've never seen it, I'm told that it's a beautiful, somewhat scary sight to see me clean. I attack cleaning with the attitude of a bulimic with her eye on the prom: the more I purge, the closer I am to the prize. I just finished doing his desk and the corner it sits in and I have a trashbag full. And, to top it off, I dusted. Catie and Dot, please don't pass out.
My penchant for throwing things away comes from moving a lot as a child. If you don't want to haul it several hundred miles, throw it away. It's not worth keeping. But also (and this isn't true today), I love cleaning when I'm angry or stressed. It gives me an iota of control when I'm feeling helpless. Other times, though, a switch just gets hit in my head. And it's time.
Time to clean.
New Movies
For those of you who know me pretty well, you can probably count on one hand the number of times we've been to a movie theatre together. It's because I rarely go. In fact, the last movie I went and saw was Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. I saw it with Catie in February. Not only is that the last movie I saw (nearly four months ago now), but it is the only movie that I have seen in a theatre in Los Angeles.
It's not that I don't like movies. I actually love movies. But, I grew up in Tifton. It has one movie theatre that has six screens. It showed movies that would appeal to children, Southerners, and mainstream America. Thus, Rachel Getting Married was never shown there. Nor was Rent. Or Brokeback Mountain. Or I would say the majority of the Academy Award winners of the last decade. Because it wouldn't have sold tickets. And since I'm not a teen comedy kinda guy, I just didn't go.
Plus, there was another reason I didn't go to the movies: in a one Starbucks town like Tifton, the place to go to be seen when I was in school was the movie theatre. It was always packed on Friday and Saturday nights with every preppy kid or scene kid or anyone who needed to be seen from middle school to the point in high school when those kids moved on to house parties and cheap beer. Anyway, even though I was school friends with a lot of these people, I never felt like I belonged there. I didn't understand the main principle of belonging to a group: acting like you belong is 80%. If you get that far, you're practically in. But I didn't know that then, so I stayed away. Hung by myself. It was safer that way.
Anywho, this means that I always see movies at home. Which is great, because I can pause them, make them as loud as I want them to be, and walk away if I don't want to see it anymore. It's a good deal cheaper, and I get to see exactly what I want to see. In pretty much every category for me, watching a movie at home beats watching a movie at a theatre (did I mention that there are strangers in movie theatres? Gross.). Except one big one:
It's hard to talk about movies.
Not cinema. Or film. Talking about the concept is kind of universal if you've seen enough of the right kind of movies. But, I can't talk about popular movies. Because I don't see them in theatres when everybody else does, I'm behind the curve on it. And when I finally do see it, the movie is old news and nobody wants to talk it. Like, I watched Zombieland earlier tonight. I remember when everybody saw it for the first time and was talking about it. They were totally right; it was fantastic. But, my viewpoint is neither timely nor relevant right now. So, I'm just going to keep it to myself.
I do that a lot with movies I see by myself. But it's okay. It's got to be better than sitting through a lot of crap waiting to see something mildly interesting. And I think that Netflix and I will continue to get along famously.
It's not that I don't like movies. I actually love movies. But, I grew up in Tifton. It has one movie theatre that has six screens. It showed movies that would appeal to children, Southerners, and mainstream America. Thus, Rachel Getting Married was never shown there. Nor was Rent. Or Brokeback Mountain. Or I would say the majority of the Academy Award winners of the last decade. Because it wouldn't have sold tickets. And since I'm not a teen comedy kinda guy, I just didn't go.
Plus, there was another reason I didn't go to the movies: in a one Starbucks town like Tifton, the place to go to be seen when I was in school was the movie theatre. It was always packed on Friday and Saturday nights with every preppy kid or scene kid or anyone who needed to be seen from middle school to the point in high school when those kids moved on to house parties and cheap beer. Anyway, even though I was school friends with a lot of these people, I never felt like I belonged there. I didn't understand the main principle of belonging to a group: acting like you belong is 80%. If you get that far, you're practically in. But I didn't know that then, so I stayed away. Hung by myself. It was safer that way.
Anywho, this means that I always see movies at home. Which is great, because I can pause them, make them as loud as I want them to be, and walk away if I don't want to see it anymore. It's a good deal cheaper, and I get to see exactly what I want to see. In pretty much every category for me, watching a movie at home beats watching a movie at a theatre (did I mention that there are strangers in movie theatres? Gross.). Except one big one:
It's hard to talk about movies.
Not cinema. Or film. Talking about the concept is kind of universal if you've seen enough of the right kind of movies. But, I can't talk about popular movies. Because I don't see them in theatres when everybody else does, I'm behind the curve on it. And when I finally do see it, the movie is old news and nobody wants to talk it. Like, I watched Zombieland earlier tonight. I remember when everybody saw it for the first time and was talking about it. They were totally right; it was fantastic. But, my viewpoint is neither timely nor relevant right now. So, I'm just going to keep it to myself.
I do that a lot with movies I see by myself. But it's okay. It's got to be better than sitting through a lot of crap waiting to see something mildly interesting. And I think that Netflix and I will continue to get along famously.
Edit: I was so excited to go see The Last Airbender this weekend. Rene and I checked Rotten Tomatoes before going...it had an 8% positive rating. See, yet another reason not to go...I don't want to waste the time and money if the movie is just going to suck.
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