i'm feeling contemplative, i usually feel this way at some point in tulsa. i've just watched my nightly felicity and i've reread the last half of that great solaris review, because i wanted to recreate that feeling i got when i first read it. it worked a little, just thinking about people and how we live together. i'm about a quarter of the way through the book. there is a great deal of description, which i'm not used to and i have to fight to stay concentrating on the words and not trail off into this damn haunting line of that song: "it's the most wonderful time.. it's the most wonderful time... it's the most wonderful time... of the year". i'll forget about it and then later remember that i've forgotten something and conjure it up again to remind myself what i've forgotten.. it's maddening.

i feel so normal. i'm comfortable, in life. i feel like i don't have a great thing looming over me. i'm comfortable here, in tulsa, with these people, only a fraction of my family that i've been spending all of this time with basically because they have money and we've been going shopping and eating and movieing, and that's all comfortable. i know that i'll go home on tuesday and, after hopefully an amazing night of new years, resume normal work and school. i look forward to school, to my classes, i know i'll change my major soon and start along a career path, i know that i'll graduate in two and a half years and then get a real job and move out and maybe away and life will start all over again. and right now this all is not stressful. everything feels very matter-of-fact.

i shoveled the driveway with dad today. without heavy coat or gloves or hat or scarf, because although there was so much left over snow, it was still only about 45 in the shade and we were working hard and our blood was being heated. it felt great to be doing something with my hands. i feel i could tend a farm, i could live that life, work hard and rise early and take care of things, especially if it meant my livelihood and the livelihood of the animals i had. i don't understand the mood of this piece, it's not dry so much as grown-up. i feel grown-up. these people here toasted me the other night after dinner for being so great and taking care of everything while dad was gone. i paid bills and bought groceries and cooked and cleaned and called relatives and jail facilities and gave jordan rides and kept the devil at bay on the doorstep and talked to police and convinced them we were alright - but none of this feels like any grand thing to do. it's what you do. somewhere back there i stopped feeling like a child caught up in an adult's world. that's a strange revelation. i sat with dad at the soccer game last saturday, feeling like another soccer mom, and i told him i was suddenly fine with him dating again, i never was before, and that i knew most women wouldn't be interested because he doesn't have money to offer, and that most guys aren't interested because i don't have all of this physical attraction to offer, but that just means that whenever we find these people they'll be extraordinary, we just have to wait - and we talked about old souls and i laid out my anger about patti not giving us the $5000 but how i knew i had to let it go because there's no sense in harboring these resentments and i'm trying to keep gandhi in mind and not get bogged down and i have no idea where her mind's been this whole time and i will never know, that i am so biased and i have to keep this in mind.. i keep running into these things that are meant to show him i'm this very well-rounded adult, that he should be so proud, feel so comforted that i turned out the way i did, am still turning out, and i know he does. i sat on this couch a few feet away from me and he sat here and talked briefly about his dad and how he's never been supportive of my dad and he's just scared of being around him and being around all the financial problems, he doesn't want to face it, he's so let down that my dad didn't somehow make something of himself. and i sat and looked at him and saw how he was just somebody's kid, he has parent issues too, he never told me about them, that all he wants is to be a better father than his father was, and he has been. and i talked when i needed to, and didn't talk when i needed to, and i gave him advice, and he was nonjudgmental and just took it.
this is so strange, this new world. it's very quiet here, but you can still feel everything the same - like yesterday and sitting at the bar copying down recipes and hearing my grandmother talk to my aunt and cousin and seeing those three generations and hearing Miami Rhapsody on the tv above being carefree and funny and people cooking and people washing dishes and a dog sleeping at your feet, you just remember these little moments. and although i have so little in common with these people, and sometimes their political or religious views or the fact that they're in all-white sororities or love these banal little movies or do not appreciate interesting questions or morbid curiosity - makes you want to scream, i still feel that i can always come back here, that i will always come back here. and i'll change and they'll change, but i'll always be back here. like for so long i was waiting for some suicidal fling to come sweep me up and for life to end, and now i feel like i'll probably just settle down and live out my life, grow old, take all these things in stride. a lifetime is a long time, they say "you only live once", which may be true, but there is so much time in there for growth and mistakes and happiness and sadness, there's more than enough time. you see, tulsa always does something drastic to me.

oh yeah, dad's out, he's a free man. it was all of a sudden like on friday evening.. i'll tell the story some other time, in a hurry now.. look at me, i'm already desensitized. it's very good to have him for christmas. 30 days was a long time, but it's over now, and we're going to try to make sure it doesn't happen again. i can't believe i cracked and asked for prayers.. what a hypocritical move, i always hate people praying only when they want something, such bullshit.. oh blah, forgive me vast empty darkness.

well merry christmas, or happy holidays. i'd say "happy holidays" if it didn't sound so overtly PC. but no, this is the season of little baby jesus and celebrating one of the most popular religions on the face of the planet... second or third popular i think. and to celebrate our lord and savior i feel we should return to our theft of him.. what say? i don't have to be there, you guys can steal your own baby jesuses. baby jesi. or we can do it after new years and risk being caught a little more....i still want to, though my dad has thoroughly frightened me about going to jail, i figure i have a lot going for me since i don't have any prior offenses.. we'll see. haha. i want to start a thing where we steal them one year and return them mysteriously the following year, and when we take them we leave a little card, "you've been jesus-napped", like ace ventura.. and leave a little thank you card when you return them so they'll understand it was just a joke, and then it can start being a central florida tradition.. it can reach national proportions. i have big dreams. then, one day, years from now, there'll be the one white trash survivalist who just doesn't get the joke. he'll shoot some poor, defenseless jesus-napper with his semi-automatic assualt weapon and i'll be on oprah.. sigh.

tulsa, where i currently am, is covered in snow. there was no snow the day before we came, none whatsoever, and then at 11am, day of our arrival, it started falling like mad, they had 10 inches by 1, that's incredible. so our plane had to circle over the airport for half an hour waiting for the runway to be shovelled and the equipment to start working again, and then we ran out of fuel so we had to go to kansas city, mo to refuel and see if we'd be able to land there if we got back. finally, three hours late, we landed in tulsa, white christmas all around, so very excellent. the bare trees covered in snow are so beautiful, the sun is out this morning and it's gorgeous, the lake is halfway frozen over so the ducks and swans are walking around slipping and falling..lol.. we built a snowman yesterday, with tons of clothes on, i ended up getting hot and taking half of it off, it was so great. he has a cowboy hat on and a pine cone for a tail that looks like he's pooping. he is great.

now we're going to catch me if you can, so if you'll excuse me.. m.c. h.h.

waiting, still waiting, it could be any day now -


- this may be the most beautiful review of a movie i've ever read. this makes me want to be a critic a little, to write these kinds of amazing things down and still find intimacy with the reader like roger ebert has done here. this is his review of solaris, which he gave 3 1/2 stars:


Solaris" tells the story of a planet that reads minds, and obliges its visitors by devising and providing people they have lost, and miss. The Catch-22 is that the planet knows no more than its visitors know about these absent people. As the film opens, two astronauts have died in a space station circling the planet, and the survivors have sent back alarming messages. A psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is sent to the station, and when he awakens after his first night on board, his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), is in bed with him. Some time earlier on earth, she had committed suicide.

"She's not human," Kelvin is warned by Dr. Helen Gordon (Viola Davis), one of the surviving crew members. Kelvin knows this materialization cannot be his wife, yet is confronted with a person who seems palpably real, shares memories with him and is flesh and blood. The other survivor, the goofy Snow (Jeremy Davies), asks, "I wonder if they can get pregnant?"

This story originated with a Polish novel by Stanislaw Lem that is considered one of the major adornments of science fiction. It was made into a 1972 movie of the same name by the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky. Now Steven Soderbergh has retold it in the kind of smart film that has people arguing about it on their way out of the theater.

The movie needs science fiction to supply the planet and the space station, which furnish the premise and concentrate the action, but it is essentially a psychological drama. When Kelvin arrives on the space station, he finds the survivors seriously spooked. Soderbergh directs Jeremy Davies to escalate his usual style of tics and stutters, to the point where a word can hardly be uttered without his hands waving to evoke it from the air.

Even scarier is Gordon, the scientist played by Viola Davis, who has seen whatever catastrophe overtook the station and does not consider Kelvin part of the solution. In his gullibility will he believe his wife has somehow really been resurrected? And ... what does the planet want? Why does it do this? As a favor, or as a way of luring us into accepting manifestations of its own ego and need? Will the human race eventually be replaced by the Solaris version?

Clooney has successfully survived being named People magazine's sexiest man alive by deliberately choosing projects that ignore that image. His alliance with Soderbergh, both as an actor and co-producer, shows a taste for challenge. Here, as Kelvin, he is intelligent, withdrawn, sad, puzzled. Certain this seems to be his wife, and although he knows intellectually that she is not, still--to destroy her would be ... inhuman. The screenplay develops a painful paradox out of that reality.

The genius of Lem's underlying idea is that the duplicates, or replicants, or whatever we choose to call them, are self-conscious and seem to carry on with free will from the moment they are evoked by the planet. Rheya, for example, says, "I'm not the person I remember. I don't remember experiencing these things." And later, "I'm suicidal because that's how you remember me."

In other words, Kelvin gets back not his dead wife, but a being who incorporates all he knows about his dead wife, and nothing else, and starts over from there. She has no secrets because he did not know her secrets. If she is suicidal, it is because he thought she was. The deep irony here is that all of our relationships in the real world are exactly like that, even without the benefit of Solaris. We do not know the actual other person. What we know is the sum of everything we think we know about them. Even empathy is perhaps of no use; we think it helps us understand how other people feel, but maybe it only tells us how we would feel, if we were them.

At a time when many American movies pump up every fugitive emotion into a clanging assault on the audience, Soderbergh's "Solaris" is quiet and introspective. There are some shocks and surprises, but this is not "Alien." It is a workshop for a discussion of human identity. It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others--so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or "people."

When I saw Tarkovsky's original film, I felt absorbed in it, as if it were a sponge. It was slow, mysterious, confusing, and I have never forgotten it. Soderbergh's version is more clean and spare, more easily readable, but it pays full attention to the ideas and doesn't compromise. Tarkovsky was a genius, but one who demanded great patience from his audience as he ponderously marched toward his goals. The Soderbergh version is like the same story freed from the weight of Tarkovsky's solemnity. And it evokes one of the rarest of movie emotions, ironic regret.

"i'm through with love" is in my head - from the great woody allen movie, Everyone Says I Love You. i love it when actors who can't sing do it anyway. ..said adieu to love..i'll never fall again..

so i saw the fucking ring. ugh, my life has been hell since. it wasn't a bad movie, you're right, and it was pretty scary, and i didn't really realize how scary until i tried to go to sleep that night, and then the night after, which was last night. hopefully tonight i'll be able to shake the constant image of samara coming out of the tv screen and walking slowly towards me with all that fucking hair in front of her face. godammit. i actually wish i hadn't seen it, who needs this ungodly fear? i think of her behind me when i turn off the lights in the house and walk back to my room with the darkness behind me. i couldn't keep the shower curtain closed while i was in the bathroom because i kept thinking she was behind it. last night i tried listening to loud oldies music while falling asleep. there's nothing scary about loud oldies music. and the images still came in little flashes, godammit. i'm very tempted to leave the light on, but that will surely burn out the bulb by morning. dammit alan, what have you done to me? This you'll respond to.