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Where am I?

June 26, 2008 by

Hullo my friends.

Sorry I’ve been non-comm since my last post.  We had a busy weekend, and I’ve had a busy week up until now (well, I’m still busy – but never to busy for you!  Yes, I mean YOU).

I’ve had some things shifting around in my professional life, and the upshot of that is that I’ve spent a large portion of the last 24 hours (or so it seems) working up an entirely new site.  It is definitely not a replacement for this site – this will still contain the oddments of my life: cute pet photos, knitting progress, and apoplectic rants about telephonic "service" providers.  What it is is a professional presence on the web.  So, if you’re interested in what I’m up to professionally and what my thoughts on being a freelancer are, you can find them here:

jillasmith.com

It’s brand-new and relatively unpopulated, but… thoughts?

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Made me laugh so hard I cried.

June 10, 2008 by

Take two utterly insane things, mash them up, and you have Wookies dancing.

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Oh, what a world, what a world

June 8, 2008 by

When I was growing up in New England winters, there was the temperature and then there was "wind chill."  Temperature was pretty much irrelevant.  Wind chill was the important number, since that was what you were going to experience when you walked out the door.

Fast forward to summertime in the DC area, where the humidity is tactile: a hot washcloth pressed over the nose and mouth, a dog’s hot breath in your ear, a damp velvet suit hugging your every move.  The humidity and heat combine to create the yang to wind chill’s yin – the heat index.

The heat index is on us, with expectations of heat experiences of over 100 degrees, and even with jogging in the morning before the full blast of summer, I tell you I am melting .

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There goes my baby, she knows how to rock and roll

June 4, 2008 by

Mom and I were talking about "our" words a while back.  It’s something Elizabeth Gilbert talks about in Eat Pray Love – if I recall correctly, she has a friend who believes that every city and every person has a word that describes them or sums them up.  It’s "their" word.  Mom asked me what my word was, and it just popped out:

"Okay."

Now, that may seem like a pretty lame word to be one’s all-encompassing, but anyone who’s ever heard me talk has heard this word many, many times out of me.  And it’s not because I’m overly accommodating (stop laughing, Ma, John, everyone else).  It just happens to be a word that I find infinitely flexible.  A lot has to do with intonation.

Bridging: "Hey Jill – here’s something you absolutely disagree with!"  "Um… okay.  So let’s think about this…"

Happiness: "Jill – something fun!"  "Okay!"

Processing:  "Jill – bad news."  "…Oh-kay …"

etc.

But it’s that last example I am talking about here.  I’m unemployed.  I’ve been unemployed for about a month now (I wanted to take some time before I talked about it here).  I was unemployed when I started this blog , back in 2004.  So we’ve come full circle, and not in a way I would have wanted.

Oh-kay .

However, so far so good – at least emotionally.  I’ve kept up with my running.  I’ve kept up with Tosh’s training.  I’ve kept going with the job search and the networking and the stuff that goes along with it.  I haven’t gotten too freaked out.  In fact, coming back from my run today, I was shuffling and dancing down the forest path near our house (yes positively jitterbugging – jazz hands may have been involved, I’m just saying).  Hey – you try to stay still when "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" comes onto your iPod.  Let me know how that works out for you.

I don’t think anyone saw me (except poor Tosh, who clearly knew in his doggy way that Mommy had completely lost her marbles).  And you know what?  If someone did, I don’t care.

OKAY!

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You know what there aren’t a lot of?

June 1, 2008 by

Female movie reviewers.

I admit to a certain fondness for reading movie reviews, especially for movies I may never see.  I’m an unabashed fan of Roger Ebert’s, and generally appreciate his insights.  That being said, however, I predicted that his first words on the "Sex and the City" movie would be something to the effect of, "I’m not the target market for this movie."

Bingo .

Curious, I scanned the Google roundup page for reviews of the movie.  It seems that there’s a definite gender split between the men and women – women mostly appreciating the movie for all the things the show brought us: witty dialogue, a return visit to characters we had grown to love, and a hefty dollop of high-fashion wish-fulfillment.  The men mostly found it shallow (that word shows up a lot) and admitted that since they hadn’t been viewers of the show, they weren’t privy to the back story.  I may be reading too much into the reviews I have read, but there seems to be a sense of unease in those writers – the sense that manliness has had to take its fingers out of its ears and stop singing, "Lalalalala – I don’t hear you!!" and listen to girly stuff that might… Do Something to them.  I don’t know what, exactly: make bits fall off?

Should I mention that I am the target market for this movie?  Need I mention that I have watched every episode of the series (and on afternoons, home with flu and feeling low, watched again) and enjoyed the series through its ups and downs, its storytelling strengths and weaknesses, the outfits I wouldn’t be caught dead in, and its nuanced and touching portrayals of female friendships?  I don’t know.  I do know the constant obsessions with shoes and labels always seemed to be more of a running joke in the series than anything else, and yet that is what is deemed "shallow" by so many critics.

So, let’s review.  Shoes/fashion: shallow.  Cars/guns/robots/spaceships: serious.  Besides, what is meant by the label "shallow"?  You could also possibly describe these same things as "light" or "entertaining."  But those are positive adjectives – ones that the reviewer might use to say, "Hey – go see it.  It’s fun!"  Instead, we get an adjective that says, "Save your money – this is unserious content, unworthy of your notice or money."

Shallow implies waste.  And waste implies guilt.  And woe be to you who enjoy such frivolity.

My friend Jacob has gone to town on the term "guilty pleasure" and excoriates it in a way that I have been chewing on ever since I first read it:

I hate that phrase "guilty pleasure" more than anything, because it’s a contradiction in terms and seems really self-hating and self-defeating to me, but more than that, I think the one thing you will always get crapped on for is honestly loving — much less rigorously reading — something that’s so heavily feminized, because to be blunt, we devalue women’s experience.

Yes.  Yes, we do.  Women will never be criticized for enjoying a "Die Hard" movie (heck, the first one has Alan Rickman in it – who am I to cavil at enjoying that?), but the term "chick flick" is a derogatory one, and not one a man wants to be associated with.  It’s a hoary cliche, and it’s frustrating.

So we’re back to the split: the ones who enjoy are women.  The ones who don’t are men.  And unfortunately, it seems that there are a lot more men who get paid to watch and opine than women (need I wait while you recover from your shock?).  Do the male reviewers have to like it?  Heck no – I don’t know if I will like it.  But the tediously predictable reasons for why they don’t like it is disturbing, and it saddens me.

As for me, I haven’t seen the movie yet (see here for why).  Will I?  Pass the popcorn.

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Some things you don’t outgrow

May 6, 2008 by

I used to have a rule: no serious horror movies.  Scary stuff would bubble away in the back of my head until it erupted – usually somewhere around 2 a.m. – and a mostly sleepless night would ensue while evil things scuttled around the corners of my brain.

Because the effects of horror movies were so bad, this has been my rule for years.  Having married The Guy Who Watches Made for Scifi Movies, I have since found out that cheesy, campy, or just plain bad horror doesn’t bother me any.  Which led me to a very bad mistake last night.  John watched "The Grudge " and I watched it with him, thinking that the bad juju from horror was something I had outgrown.

Um.  Right.  Tell that to the insectoid Japanese female with the staring eyes and the death-rattle who stalked me hourly from 2 to about 5 this morning.  Gah.

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All hands to the wheel

April 27, 2008 by

So, what would you do if your cute man, the fixer of household brokenness, the chef de cuisine , the guy who cheerfully accompanies you to Maryland Sheep and wool (next weekend! yippee!), the fellow with the big booming laugh you just adore – yeah, that guy – what would you say if he asked you, "So, want to spend three hours on a Saturday stuffing bags for a library conference?"

If you’re me, you say, "Sure."

And you don’t just say yes because you know it scores points with the guy who already asked you to marry him, the one who loves the cats as much as you do despite the fact that they mean he has to take prescription meds just to breathe properly, the one who has never once yet said, "Do you really need more yarn?"  Well, not just because of those things.  You do it because you love tasks that can be finished.  You love to be a cog in that "getting stuff done" machine that tends to whip up around big, intellectually undemanding, multi-volunteer projects.  As far as I’m concerned, these kinds of things are fun.  And in a world where too many tasks are constant, never-ending palavers with too many people having weird turf wars, it’s very cool just to show up and look around, see something that needs doing and just do it.

Yes, I may well be clinically insane.  And yes, once in a while there is a really annoying person who whines or moans or gets bossy and tries to manage everyone else or who decides to monopolize the worst job in the place the better to reach their inevitable martyrhood that much sooner (and more vocally).  But in this particular instance, there was nobody who did any of those things.  There was just a big hotel conference room with long tables and a sort of endlessly evolving assembly line of stuff going into conference bags and people figuring out different ways of getting everything that needed to get into the bag into the bag with as much cheerful efficiency as possible.

The conversations were funny and fractured – I learned little snippets and bits about the people who were working my assembly line (I ended up assembling little packages of advertising cards that put me at a mostly static point, while other volunteers shuttled up and down the rows of tables).  I learned that Len from New York is also an only child, has worked in three Catholic institutions, thinks that his work history is funny because he’s Jewish, and was a chemistry major in college.  I learned that Corey has an autistic child, lives in Michigan, used to travel a lot, and has an outrageous sense of humor and a larger-than-life personality.  The rhythmic to-ing and fro-ing, together with the short bursts of conversation, reminded me strongly of the way conversations during country dances are constructed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OeSKfEY3NE

And best of all?  I got to go home with the cute house-fixer, cat-lover, chef de cuisine and have steak for dinner and watch Battlestar Galactica .  I win.

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