Lawyerish

How Much Would You Wager That There's a Song With the Word "Wagon" In the Title?

People.  The Little House on the Prairie Musical lives and breathes.  It lives and breathes, my friends!  It has now opened at the Guthrie in Minneapolis (in/near which I believe SEVERAL of you reside {looking around pointedly}).  If it does well, it could be coming to Broadway in the next year.  It stars Melissa Gilbert as Ma and a bunch of other unknown people as everyone else (sadly, it appears that Patrick Swayze must have had to abandon the Pa role in favor of cancer treatments), and Rachel Portman did the score so I would think the music would be pretty good, or at least wouldn't make your ears bleed. 

Someone.  Anyone!  Please, PLEASE go see it and report back.  I need to know how it is.  I DO.  It has the potential to go in any number of directions, so it could be campy and awesomely awful or it could be heart-swellingly wholesome and nostalgic.  Either way, it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't be worth the price of admission.  (And I'm not a musical person at all -- but this is different; this is LITTLE HOUSE.  I am sure I would have a similar reaction if they made Breyer Horses: The Musical or Space Camp: The Musical.  Or You Were a Huge Geek and a Social Outcast: The Musical.)

I suspect that there will be no clown-masked rapists or heroin addicts in this adaptation, but I could be wrong.  I have NO recollection of either of those episodes, by the by, and I am so glad you all could enlighten me on what I missed.  I mean, REALLY?  What the EFF, Little House?  Either I blocked those episodes out, or by then I had thrown up my hands because they'd strayed so far from the books that I couldn't take it anymore.

Notably, as Stefanie pointed out, the TV series had the Ingalls living in Walnut Grove, which is not right for that period of their lives and anyway, when they lived in Walnut Grove they lived in a DUGOUT (although Walnut Grove has capitalized on the show's inaccuracy and now has a Laura Ingalls Wilder PAGEANT every year, which I will one day see, because I MUST -- come to think of it, there is totally a documentary here, OMG imagine the awesomeness).  However, we can all breathe a sigh of relief because the musical situates them in De Smet, where they belong.  Perhaps now I will stop waking up screaming in the night.

So.  I think that's about enough excitement for one day, don't you? 

The only other news I've got is that the other day, I saw a man shaving on the subway.  Yes, shaving.  Just raking a cheap plastic disposable razor over his face (no shaving cream or anything, not even a hot towel or some lotion), for all to see.  That was a first for me.  I've seen people clipping their nails (finger and toe, unfortunately) more times than I can count, but shaving was a new one.

You've got to love this city.  People find new ways to be crazy every day. 

My Precious Moments Day Planner Was Also Very Full

This weekend I paged through some of my old journals from high school, and aside from the cringe-inducing prose in every breathlessly composed entry, what struck me most about it was how BUSY I was back then.  I went to school all day, attended club meetings or did homework in the afternoons, then spent several hours in ballet classes and rehearsals and came home to finish off more homework before bed.  On the weekends, my parents drove me to Atlanta for more ballet classes, rehearsals and auditions, and oftentimes we'd add shopping and/or an evening of dinner and a ballet performance or movie on top of that -- and that was just Saturday.  Sundays were church and then still more hours upon hours of ballet and then Youth Group in the evenings. 

Amid all of that, I spent tons of time at Allison's house (and she at mine), went on youth retreats and ski trips and lock-ins, wrote countless letters to my friends from various camps and summer programs, babysat for three violently hyperactive boys, read everything within arm's reach, and devoted many hours to mooning over various boys, none of whom were aware that I existed. 

Just reading about it was exhausting.  What in the world am I DOING with my time now?  Granted, working takes significantly more energy and time than school ever did, if only for the sheer alertness and focus required -- and it's not like I'm running a drill press; I'm writing briefs, for crissake -- and as an adult-type person I have, like, a household to take care of, dinners to prepare and a dog to walk and that sort of thing, and I don't have an all-consuming hobby/passion like I did when I was a wispy ballerina, but STILL.  Even with just the time I'm saving by no longer having to obsess over whether someone will ask me to Homecoming, you'd think I could have written the Great American novel, piloted the Space Shuttle and solved global warming by now. 

It's odd to feel inadequate as compared with your teenage self, but in that sense, I do.  If I tried to do as much now as I did then, I would be dead within a week.  Or at least I would need to go convalesce somewhere for a while, being massaged with peppermint oil and fanned by loincloth-wearing Brad Pitt clones.  Did I simply have more energy back then?  More drive?  Why am I so lame now?  I guess the lack of a specific, burning desire to pursue some interest is the main thing (does watching So You Think You Can Dance count as an interest?  Because I am definitely driven to do that (Will!  You were robbed!  I mean, dude, why wouldn't people vote for him just to keep that torso around to gaze at?  COME ON)). 

Of course, I'll have lots more to do and think about and devote my energy to when Noelle is home -- not that she's a HOBBY, obviously, but I expect I'll be pretty passionate about motherhood (as dorky as that may sound).  Not that I'll lose or ignore my own interests, but I wouldn't be having a child if I didn't want to like, be with her and get to know her and teach her and read to her and play with her and observe the world from her eyes and SO ON.  

If we could just GET HER ALREADY then I could get going on that.  We heard last week that we are still on the same step as we were almost four weeks ago, even though by all accounts we figured we'd blow through that step in a week.  I...I didn't take it well.  It was not a good day. 

I'm better(ish) now, and I'm working on letting go of my attempt to have a vice-like grip on this process.  As much as I'd like to, I can't control any of it or conceive of how long any portion of it is going to take, and every time I've tried, I've been wrong.  At some point, it will happen, the big payoff, the best day of our lives, and boy howdy, will that be amazing.  I know that day has already been determined by a power much greater than I, and there's some reason that the timing will be whatever it is.  It's a lesson I've learned over and over again in the past couple of years, and I think it's finally sinking in. 

And once we're united with our daughter, I have no doubt that my life will be as full as I can imagine, so full even my teenage self would be impressed. 

Cool

My husband is having dinner elsewhere this evening, which can only mean one thing:  I am in complete control of the temperature.  As a couple, I'm sure we fit neatly into many Married People Cliches, but none so perfectly as the classic battle over the thermostat.  In classic gendered fashion, he likes it so cold that you start to panic when you're changing clothes or fresh out of the shower, the threat of death from exposure taking hold as your skin turns pallid and clammy; whereas I like it a reasonable temperature, one at which you don't really feel the air around you one way or the other -- you're just pleasantly there, and no ice particles are forming in your nostrils. 

If he were to come home right now, he would stand in the doorway, aghast, and shout, "WHY ISN'T THE AIR ON?  MY GOD, WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO?"  That's right.  It's, oh, about 85 outside, down from a high in the sultry 90s at midday, and I am sitting here with the window open and the ceiling fan on.  And I'm loving every minute of it.  Granted, I had the A/C on for a bit when I first walked in the door, because I was sweating like a farm animal in my tropical-weight wool suit, but once I got the temperature to a comfortable level, I turned it off, cracked the window and put on the overhead fan.  Ahhhhh.  No jet engine compressor sounds, no snap in the air, just a gentle breeze wafting the temperate air around me.

I think gazpacho helps -- it's like air conditioning from the inside out, and I had a heaping bowl for dinner, accompanied by a refreshing ginger ale/white cranberry juice mocktail.  I think you all need to make this gazpacho.  This recipe yields enough for two people to have a bowl's worth for about 3-4 nights straight (and it gets better by the day as the flavors...I don't know, coalesce in the fridge).  I like to serve it as a side dish to whatever we're having, or make it the main course with a salad or a small panini for a light summery dinner.  It's super easy:

Chop up 1 lb of ripe tomatoes.

Tear up about half to 3/4 of a loaf of French bread (the amount of bread you use dictates how thick/hearty the soup is -- I like to use maybe 2/3-ish of about a football-sized loaf; you can use sourdough, baguette, or a plain soft loaf).

Peel and chop a cucumber. 

Chop 1/2 of a red pepper and 1/2 of a yellow or orange pepper.

Throw everything in a large mixing bowl.

Sprinkle in some cumin (maybe 1/2 teaspoon or more) and minced garlic (don't be shy; I probably use 1 1/2 tablespoons), plus salt and pepper.

Pour 4 cups of water, 1 cup of olive oil and about 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar over everything, then give it a stir. 

Cover the bowl and let it sit for 30 minutes.   

Throw as much as you can in your blender (it takes two batches for me to blend it all) and put it on the "chop" setting; let it run until it looks soupy and the veggies are well-blended. 

Refrigerate for several hours before serving.  You can toss some ice cubes in before you serve it to add to the chill. 

_______________________________________

Make it now!  I command you.  It is delicious.  I wanted to bathe in it when I got home tonight. 

Finally, apropos of nothing, today as I was waiting for the subway I thought of that Little House episode when that crazy neighbor woman hides Laura in her basement because she thinks Laura is her dead daughter.  And every time she looks at Laura, she sees this hazy vision of her daughter, and she unbraids Laura's hair to make it more like the dead girl's.  Remember that?  That episode FREAKED me OUT.  It gave me nightmares.  LITTLE HOUSE.  It was extremely disturbing.  So was the one where Laura steals the music box from Nellie Olsen's house, and she dreams that she gets sent to jail and it goes all nightmarish with the distorted judge's voice and Laura crawling across the floor in rags with a tin cup.  That one messed me up, too.  I couldn't watch it or I would be unable to sleep for days.

Seriously, what was going ON with that show?  I mean, they basically disregarded the books entirely aside from the characters' names (hello, Pa did not even have a BEARD, which was an OUTRAGE of epic proportions), and then they went into these dark, frightening psychological plots sometimes and it was just ALL WRONG.  Wrong I say!  I feel like there should be some redress for this.  Some network should be required to make a series that is 100% loyal to the Little House books.  Can you imagine what Laura's progenitors thought of the show?  If *I* find it horrifying, I would think they would have been beyond incensed.

But maybe that's me.  And maybe they didn't take these things quite so seriously.  They probably did not have hand-sewn calico dresses and bonnets for re-enactment purposes, nor did they attend historically accurate living history camps. 

I...don't really know where I was going with that.  I do know that at least one scene in the books still haunts me -- not in a nightmare sort of way, but in a heartbreak kind of way.  It's when some people come to visit the Ingalls -- neighbors or something or other; I think it was in On the Banks of Plum Creek, but it might have been By the Shores of Silver Lake -- and they have this bratty little girl, and Laura lets the little girl play with her rag doll, and when the family is getting ready to leave the girl won't let Laura have the doll back, and everyone tells Laura to be a big girl and let her have the doll, and Laura is sad but she puts on a brave face and lets it go and then -- THEN! -- later that night she and Pa go out in the driving wind and rain/snow to collect wood or something, and there, in a deep puddle, is Laura's doll, discarded like so much trash, the dye from its red mouth bleeding onto its fabric face and one of its button eyes missing. 

I think that's one of the most tragic things I've ever read; just thinking about it makes my chest hurt.  But then, I did always become a little too attached to my dolls and stuffed animals. 

Carry on!

Drive

My first car was a 1990 Geo Prism, which I mentioned before in retelling a happy little story about how I was almost killed in it once by an oncoming train.  I inherited the car from my brother when I was in college and he moved to New York, joining the ranks of the carless city-dwellers.  It was a fairly bare-bones vehicle, with a manual shift and a faded cloth interior, but it got better gas mileage than most of today's hybrids and it never conked out on me, even with the brutal winters of the northern tundra and the long drives between Michigan and Georgia. 

My memories of the Geo are inextricably tied with those of college itself -- spontaneous trips to Meijer in the middle of the night to buy ice cream and Pull'N'Peel Twizzlers; pulling out of my driveway for a groggy early morning rowing session while the party at the fraternity next door raged on from the night before; stopping off with my teammates en route to a crew race to buy Peeps at a drug store, then laughing riotously as I pulled back onto the highway, the sugar high taking hold of us; summertime drives back to campus after a day of boating and kneeboarding on a lake, my friends asleep on each other's shoulders in the backseat. 

One of my college roommates had a decades-old Buick with a hood so rusted that it had to be hammered shut; another had a barge-sized Grandma car with a perpetually empty tank because she didn't like to keep money "tied up in gas."  Our cars were sources of constant amusement and good-natured ribbing, and the question of who would drive the carless roommates around, or who could borrow whose car, was always subject to negotiation (no one ever took my Geo, because most of my friends couldn't drive a standard and, anyway, my dad had given me strict instructions never, ever to let anyone borrow my car (ever!), which I dutifully followed).

Back in high school, I'd been one of the carless masses, relying on Allison and Sarah (and, more often than not, my mom) for transportation.  Allison drove her dad's 1968 VW Beetle, which lacked power steering -- or power anything; you could break an arm trying to get the window down -- and required a fair amount of urging to get up to highway speeds.  Still, it had its charms; you could always hear her coming thanks to the Woodstock-era muffler, and you had to respect a machine that had over a quarter of a million miles on it.  I can hear her clear as day yelling, "Come on, CAR!" as we took an especially precarious turn or tried to make it through a light before it changed. 

Those high school years after we all turned 16 were largely spent tooling around in Sarah's Volvo.  She had been blessed with a luxury automobile, the preppy red sedan of her dreams, and we all took full advantage of its heated leather seats and state-of-the-art sound system. 

It was the Volvo that we took out to her lake house in the summers to swim all day and scare the crap out of ourselves at night, up to Little Five Points in Atlanta to buy bootleg 10,000 Maniacs CDs, to the ER when I cut my hand trying to help her mom take the trash out, and around town, just riding with the windows down and "Blackbird" or "Two of Us" blasting from the speakers.  In college, Sarah emailed me with the news that she had been rear-ended at high speed and, while she was fine, the Volvo was no more.  It was strange to know I would never sit in it again; an era had somehow ended, and as it happened I'm not sure if we ever rode around town together after that, as we all scattered to grad school and jobs, our trips home less frequent and seldom overlapping.   

My mom's minivan from my high school years has its share of associations, too -- long treks to and from Atlanta for dance classes and auditions, tearful road trips home from ballet summer programs and the occasional steely teenage silence as I wondered when my life would finally cease being so dreadfully tedious and provincial (boy, I can't WAIT to have an adolescent daughter!).  That van had a hair-raising tendency to stall at the most inconvenient times, and when I was a novice driver, it seemed to have a vendetta against me; I would be in the middle of an intersection, making a left turn with three lanes of traffic poised to hurtle toward me at any moment, and the steering wheel would seize up, the car huffing to a stop as I frantically braked and tried repeatedly to get the engine back to life.  Oh, how I hated that van. 

All of this somehow came to mind because we took a Zipcar to a quasi-work-related thing outside the city this weekend, and the only car they had available was a BMW.  That car was extremely awesome to drive, I have to say.  Usually I'm happy to have the chance to get behind the wheel at all (how novel!  we could go anywhere we want, and no one is going to be sitting nearby clipping their toenails!), but this was especially fun because, well, it was a BMW.  I'm no brand whore, but that was a NICE car; it was smooth and quiet and comfy and very responsive.  And since we sat in standstill traffic for over an hour both ways, I had lots of time to contemplate these admittedly random memories and appreciate the fine craftsmanship of that car.   

While I don't know that we'll be buying a car anytime soon (the closest parking garage to us costs -- ahem -- $468 a month, and that's BEFORE the city's massive parking tax and, might I add, does not include the cost of the car itself), I sometimes like to think about what I might drive if we did have our own wheels.  The Honda CR-V seems to be a very popular choice among my friends, and it's certainly efficient and economical, ideal for the growing family.  For its high-ranked safety features and its beloved boxy shape, I remain drawn to the Volvo station wagon (especially the Cross-Country) -- for some reason, I always thought that's what I would drive, but then, I also thought I would live in Connecticut in a house with a white picket fence and prize-winning hydrangeas and my husband would have a family compound on Nantucket.  And then there's the Beemer, which might be rather conspicuous and not exactly a bargain, but very fun to drive.

All of this to ask, how about you?  What do you drive, and how do you like it?

Showered Again

We got back today from the long-awaited hometown baby shower weekend.  We were supposed to return yesterday, but the weather in Atlanta had other ideas, and after hours and hours of creeping delays, our flight was canceled.  We waited an eternity to retrieve my checked bag (you'd think they had never canceled a flight before), then spent the night at the Westin by the airport.  (We consoled ourselves by ordering burgers and fries via room service and watching "Baby Mama" on the on-demand entertainment system -- the burgers were good; the movie was not.  OH, and we caught the last hour of the Miss Universe pageant, broadcasting live from Vietnam -- woo! -- which was enough to see Miss USA bite it in the evening gown competition.  Sweet.) 

ANYway, the weekend was great with lots of family time, including a nice visit with my Granddad, who flew in from Florida for the occasion (he's going on ninety-two, and I swear he hasn't aged since I was born and has more energy than I do).  And the Old Skool Southern Shower, hosted by Allison and her mom, was every bit as fun and fabulous as I'd imagined it would be.

They'd set the table with fine silver and linen napkins and scattered framed photos of Noelle around, and each dish was labeled with a notecard bearing Noelle's monogram in a fancy script. 

The food was INCREDIBLE, y'all.  Allison and her mom had cooked, baked and prepped for days, and all that hard work sure did pay off.  The menu included:  Brie en croute with lingonberries; chicken salad on mini puff pastries; orange blossoms; Jordan almonds; shortbread cookies; Coca-Cola cake; and Tang dip with fresh fruit (I can't find a recipe online for this, but it's Tang, vanilla pudding, Cool Whip and pineapple juice -- I'd never had it before, but I can assure you, I will be making it in the future because it is unreal).  Also, I had a corsage, which was very pretty (tiny pink roses) and is currently being pressed for inclusion in my scrapbook.

The guests were mostly friends of my mom's, and it was such a delight to have them all together in one room.  There's a certain Steel Magnolias beauty parlor atmosphere to the proceedings when a bunch of our small-town Southern ladies get together, and it is extremely hilarious and awesome. You can be sure to hear some good gossip and at least once someone will say, "Bless her heart, she's doin' the best she can." 

I got so many amazing gifts -- classic books and soft blankies and dolls and smocked dresses and more (I'll have to take pictures of everything as I unpack it later this week) -- and the piece de resistance was a GIANT canvas tote filled with gifts from Allison and her mom, all things that Allison found useful when they were in China to meet Maggie! 

I wish there were something in this photo for scale, but rest assured, the bag is about the size of a ten-gallon drum.  Its contents included Hyland's teething tablets, disposable bibs, a portable placemat with a tray that catches stray food, Huggies wipes, a little sponge with a soap bar inside, baby toothpaste, a soft cotton blankie, and scented diaper baggies, plus a couple of things for home like a basket that goes in the dishwasher and keeps sippy cup and bottle parts organized.  Very ingenious.

For some reason, my Speedlite flash was not cooperating, but here's a slightly dusky shot of Allison and me, being all pleased with the successful party, Allison having gotten loads of compliments on her food, decor and adorable daughter, and me having just opened a massive pile of gifts: 

And here's a multi-generational mother-daughter photo-op:

When I was growing up there, I never thought I'd say this, but I sure do love my hometown. 

(More photos on Flickr).

Multiple Choice

Based on the following photo, do you think Noelle is:

(a)  saying, "Pbbbbt, enough of this wait -- bring me my Mommy and Daddy!";

(b)  preparing for early admission to Clown College;

(c)  a distant relation of Angelina Jolie (those lips!);

(d)  having a vivid psychedelic moment (that blanket!);

(e)  shrinking (it's not just me, right? -- she looks so teeny here, look at the wee little hand!  or maybe it's just all! that! fabric!);

(f)  taking the billowy/layered/mixed patterns look to another level (look for it in Paris this fall; it's all very avant garde);

(g)  just chillin' in her crib with her peeps, yo; and/or

(h)  contemplating the meaning of "Animal Music" (as noted on her suit...thingy; Allison's suggestion, by the way, is that "Animal Music" = toots -- hee!).

I love this girl.  She has so much personality, and that smooth baby skin is just crying out to be nuzzled (CHEEKS!).  Enjoy those fun outfits while you can, baby girl!  We'll be there soon!

By the Numbers

Our Fourth of July weekend, in brief:

Miles run:  8(ish) (four each on Friday and Saturday -- I'm not exactly burning up the pavement these days)

Amount of sweat produced:  Buckets (it was SO humid; we're having such a weird summer)

Ears of corn on the cob consumed (not while running (or sweating)):  1, the first of the season (with approximately 1 stick of butter and 1 pound of salt, yum)

Bowls of peanut butter brownie + Edy's Butterfinger Loaded ice cream consumed:  2 (the next time you make brownies, stir about a half cup or more of peanut butter into the batter and dump in some Reese's peanut butter chips, then dollop some Butterfinger Loaded on there when the brownies are still warm; I promise, you will never regret this)

Museums visited:  1 (the Met)

Pushy old people who stood directly in front of the paintings we wanted to see:  1,982 (approximate)

Clueless people who touched artwork in spite of "Do Not Touch" signs on every surface:  63 (approximate)

Movies watched:  1.7 (Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love" -- awesome; also the last part of "Chariots of Fire" and final few minutes of "Kill Bill Part II" on TV)

Naps taken:  2 (for some reason, I am unable to sit on the couch and read for any appreciable length of time; it inevitably turns into a nap)

Glasses of prosecco consumed at belated five-year anniversary dinner with B&C:  4 (maybe 5?  maybe one or two too many?)

Times I may or may not have loudly said the word "vasectomy" in a crowded restaurant (NOTE: this term in no way relates to anyone who was seated at our table, and I have no idea how it entered into the discussion at all):  5, possibly more

Fireworks celebrations watched on TV:  1.2 (caught the beginning of the Boston Pops after watching the weirdly awkward New York presentation, which ended with something of a whimper, didn't it?  Where was the big final push, the properly New York-scale spectacle of light?  Meh)

Time spent drooling over Roger Federer:  10-12 minutes (I only caught a few minutes of the match and then watched the coverage of the awards and such -- dude is HOT, and I love his uber-preppy white cable-knit cardigan {swoon})

Times I thought my left leg might fly off my body:  67 (I seem to be suffering from sciatica and/or piriformis inflammation -- I get this shooting pain from my, ah, rear area down to my toes that feels like it's going to fire my leg off in a random direction, especially when I've been sitting for a while.  Ow.) 

Hours spent sitting at my computer, working:  8+

I'm getting my butt handed to me at work this week, so I probably won't be around much for the next few days.  However, this coming weekend is our Old Skool Southern Baby Shower in my hometown, given by Allison and her mom, so that will be a good diversion, and I shall return with pictures and such.  Hooray!

Have a great week!

Movin' On Up

Well, every time I get all pouty and low and have wretched tear-filled breakdowns when I'm in the kitchen slicing pancetta, the universe resets itself or something and we get some good news.  As I noted a few days ago, we hadn't heard anything in a while and I was starting to feel like we'd stalled out somewhere in the twelve steps. 

Today, though, we got the happy news that we've moved on to Step 9!  Which means that our paperwork will soon be submitted to the visa unit for pre-approval (basically where they determine that our child is, indeed, an orphan in the legal sense and say that yes, we can bring her into the US).  Which means we're still weeks and weeks away from traveling and we have no idea how much time that approval will take, BUT! we're moving forward, and that's the important thing.  Movement - yes!  Having one less step ahead of us - yes!

As if that weren't enough, we also got our Travel Packet from our agency.  I guess Step 9 is the Travel Packet step, which I didn't realize, but hoo boy, did that give me a serious case of the OMGWOOHOOs!  It's got packing lists and a sample itinerary and details about the 5,000 more bits of paperwork we need to complete before, during and after our trip.  That is, our trip to bring our daughter home -- OMGWOOHOO! 

The Travel Packet also includes a list of Vietnamese phrases that may come in handy. 

They include (deep breath):  "I am your Mommy."

(Hanky!  I need a hanky over here!)

Also:  "We will never leave you."

(Hold me!)

I've started to imagine the moment we get the email (yes, it comes by email - such modern times, these) of our pre-approval (which will basically set off a chain of events that will result in our getting on a plane within a week or two, eeeep!), and it makes me so giddy I can hardly sit still.  (Of course I also imagine the moment when we see Noelle for the first time in person and hold her in our arms, but I'm a little cautious about thinking too much about that, because it's so monumental and dizzifying and HUGE and OMGICAN'TWAIT, and since we don't know WHEN it's going to happen it ends up making me feel all achy and eeeerrmmpphhhhh and a little wahhhh.)

At this point, without a miracle we won't meet Noelle before her first birthday; but I'm coming to be (sort of/not really/sort of) at peace with that, in part because I just have to, and in part because it's starting to feel more real that we actually WILL go and get her one day relatively soon, and it won't be SO long after her birthday (she turns eleven months this Sunday, le sigh).  I mean, I won't be jumping up and down to miss it, but in the foreseeable future, we'll have a date certain when we'll be going to get her, and we'll have lots and lots of birthdays to celebrate as a family every year thereafter.    

Queues and Random French Things

I need movie recommendations.  I checked my Netflix queue today, and I'm down to like five movies, most of them selections I'd been pushing down the list for years, knowing if they ever made it into our living room, they'd sit on the TV console for a few weeks only to be returned to the shipping facility, unwatched.  I perused the Movies You'll Heart section and the New Releases and added a couple of things, but for the most part was utterly uninspired.  So if you wouldn't mind letting me know some of the good stuff you've seen lately, I'd be much obliged. 

Incidentally, we watched "La Vie en Rose" last weekend, and it was pretty amazing.  It's beautifully shot and Marion Cotillard was phenomenal.  I usually find these musician biopics to be intolerably formulaic and heavy-handed, and maybe this  didn't seem to be either because it was French, which gives it an automatic artsy/sophisticated quality, but I think it truly went beyond the standard Hollywood fare in this genre.  She sure had one messed-up life, that Edith Piaf.  You think she's finally going to catch a break and some other terrible thing comes her way.  Man. 

Speaking of French films, if you're ever in the mood to have a good cry en francais, check out "Au Revoir Les Enfants" and "Le Grand Chemin."  We watched those in my French class in college, and I sat there with a bunch of disaffected frat boys -- who undoubtedly would have been texting each other if texting had been invented back then, but instead they stared glassy-eyed into the middle distance and occasionally jostled one another -- and bawled my eyes out.  After that semester, I stopped taking French because I'd finished my language requirement and didn't want to have class on Fridays anymore.  (Super lame.) 

We also read "Bonjour Tristesse" in that class.  I don't remember much about it except maybe something about a convertible driving around a mountain, perhaps resulting in a plummet to someone's death?  Or something?  (Or maybe I'm just thinking of "To Catch a Thief" and Grace Kelly's ultimate demise, which has nothing to do with anything, although those events took place in Monaco, which is sort of French-ish, anyhow.)  Anyway, it's some kind of trashola novel in the vein of Danielle Steele; I don't know why we didn't read Hugo or de Beauvoir or something a little more relevant or classic.  Of course, I read it in French, all diligent-like, and then I found out that everyone else in my class had found a bootlegged Xerox of an English version and read that instead.  (Super-duper lame.) 

This brings me to one of my greatest regrets in life:  not studying abroad in college.  My school was awash in study abroad programs, and I had every intention of spending at least a summer in Europe (I was deciding between an English lit course at Oxford or an art history program in Florence), but then I decided not to for easily the dumbest reason ever -- my boyfriend didn't want me to go.  AUGH.  Hello, nineteen-year-old self?  YOU ARE AN IDIOT.  (He wasn't some weirdo controlling dude or anything, I feel compelled to point out; he was just kind of boring, and I apparently let him drag me down into his boringness.)  I also blew it in law school, when I considered spending a summer in Paris studying international law, or a semester in Japan or Amsterdam, and again chose to stay put in favor of my relationship at the time.  Gergh. 

Now that I've gone on that frolic and detour, I will close by noting that, as I've been watching all the Olympic trials lately, I've been thinking about how unbearably stressful it must be to watch your kid compete in an elite-level sport.  Can you imagine having to sit up in the stands, all helpless and hand-wringy, and watch as your daughter launches herself onto the balance beam or as your son positions himself in the starting blocks to try to qualify for the freaking Olympic games, and you know how they want to win more than anything in their lives, and you know if they mess up even a tiny bit they could lose their shot at living out their dream, and you know you'll have to pick up the pieces if they don't make it?  Grah!  I get all bound up just watching the athletes as an objective observer; I think I'd end up gnawing my hand off and passing out if that were my kid out there.

As a bonus for getting through today's meandering entry:  Go here and be prepared to bust a gut.  (Via here -- also funny -- which I found thanks to Jamie.)