Right now, I'm sitting at home, reeling from one more day of flight. My chamomile tea is making me see ghosts. It's midnight and I haven't slept in two days.

You tell me that this is going to be difficult. Now, I've spent enough time teaching seven year olds to juggle to know that difficult lessons must be fun, or they will not be learned. So this is going to be fun. Agreed. Fun is now our codeword for mind-breaking. It's okay. I came to you with gravel in my head.

Right now my chin hurts where I hit the concrete last week. I run my tongue of my chipped tooth and remind myself to get it fixed. I found a chip yesterday in the laundry. So bitty, insignificant, and the rift in my body feels so vast.

Sometimes our brains get so solid, so hard and fast. Mine got fractured, and pieces of yesterday float around like orphans. The old homes they broke off from are now smooth, -their rooms are demolished, or filled with fake christmas trees and ornaments- and they can't can't CAN'T fit back in. And my brain is changing now, into something that won't let me cry. Only leaks every so often.

Until you called on my tears.

The first time I cried on you, it was to mourn my past. You helped me grieve and you let me rain all over your big heart.

Today I chased you through the rocks. The ice melted off the walls of the chasm and I tried to catch, to drink the drops as they fell from temporary castles of solid water. I climbed over and under, slippy and cold, dry and sunkissed boulders.
I invaded your fortress and filled it with snow, but somehow it was warmer for it. Snow is an insulator, and maybe also it's a comfort that I brought my cold and low to you for melting. I'm free and easy with my peaches and sunshine, and liberally spread my dark and weird. I throw my fires and rage in every direction, but my sad and lonely is reserved for you. Some would call it a cheap deal, but I know you prefer it this way.

As you are the only one who gets to feel my rain.

The strangest customer of the day award goes to . . .

the schizophrenic old woman who had her prescriptions delivered, then answered the door with no shirt on . . . and no bra. Thank Cthulhu I was not the one delivering to her. And this isn't the first time she's done this. We used to have a one-legged diabetic old codger who would show the delivery person his "second leg." I guess that was his way of saying, "Thanks for the insulin!"


The dumbest customer of the day award goes to . . .

It wasn't a bad day today, other than scary sometimes-naked schizo lady and every fourth person having a new insurance card for the new year (of course, they never show it to us up front; that would save time and is thus batshit crazy). The dumbest thing was the type of call we get at least once each week: an elderly woman requesting we deliver "vitamins" to her. We carry about 300 different bottles of vitamins. Yet we get this vague request so often, we put a note in every customer's file listing every type of vitamin we've ever seen them buy from us.

So I pull up the lady's file and there are two vitamins listed. So I ask which vitamins she needs.

"The small ones," she replies.
"The Vitamin E?"
"No, I have enough of those."
"The Calcium?"
"No, I have enough of those," she scoffs now, as though I'm retarded for not knowing she has enough calcium. When I'm not counting pills, I'm a psychic investigator you know.
So now I have to guess what "small ones" she's talking about. "Do you need iron pills?"
"No."
"Niacin?"
"No!"
"Do you know the name of what you need?"
"I need small ones!"
"Glucosamine?"
"Is that like Centrum?"
"No. Did you need a multivitamin?"
"Yes! Small ones!"

Now I'm about to bang my head against the counter. She had decided to start taking a multivitamin, and I was supposed to just magically know she wanted the smallest multivitamin pills we had.

The sad thing is, we get calls like this all of the time. At least she was wearing clothes on the other end of that phone line . . . I think . . .

Oh God.

In response to someone telling me (during a discussion about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and my rejection of the genre-based flying fight scenes) that fantasy movies didn't have to make sense, and that they could freely disregard logic to invent conflict and etc etc...

...so just because something is fictional, it doesn't have to make sense? No, that disregards the first rule of writing fiction. Which is that it has to make more sense than reality in order to be believable. When we watch movies, we use a method called Willing Suspension of Disbelief that allows us to enjoy the fictive elements without rebelling at what our experience tells us is nonsense. It's nonsensical that a little boy would have magical powers and go to wizard school. We've been told our whole lives what a bunch of hooey that is. But Rowling is a good enough writer that she makes us believe in it, if only for the duration of the book or the movie. This doesn't excuse the plot or the characters from having to make sense. If she wants us to believe one thing, she needs to make sure we can believe everything else. Movie reviews don't start with, "Harry Potter sucks because magic isn't real and there's no Hogwart's." That's assumed, and unimportant.

The big reason Lord of the Rings is so successful is that it's sensitive to this issue. It goes to extreme lengths to make itself believable, and mostly succeeds (at least with western audiences, as that other guy mentioned). The method of the special effects is an example. Very, very little computer tomfoolery was used, because modern audiences know what it looks like and will immediately identify it as fake, which deflates our WSoD a little. They also were painstaking about making the costumes not only look good stylistically, but also wore them down and made them dirty and lived-in before filming. Gandalf's cloak REALLY looks like he's been wearing it for years of hardscrabble adventuring.

This stuff is important.

It was important, in the Alien movies, that Ripley wasn't wearing mascara and sexy underwear. It's important because she needs to be taken seriously as a real person, and as a real warrior. She's a magnificent character partly because of how she's written, and partly because of how she's presented. Not once do Cameron or Scot make her out to be the kind of "heroine" we have come to expect from science fiction movies. She's not a sex kitten (Leeloo), she's not a bitch (Princess Leia, although that wasn't really sci-fi), she's not stupid or hysterical (countless other films). She's just a regular person who got into the most nightmarish situations imaginable and managed to deal with it, but not without extreme sacrifice (conflict) and extreme damage to her person (character development). There are no long, lingering shots of her lithe body, or hackneyed shipboard romances. Because even though these devices are integral to the sci-fi genre, where women are classically ignored or marginalized, they're still stupid devices. And most importantly (and this is absolutely key), they're completely unnecesary. Just as flyropes were stupid and unnecessary in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Would Aliens have been more popular with the sixpack crowd (IE, the American Majority) if they had put Ms. Weaver through a complete glamour makeup prior to filming? Fuck yes. It would have been far and away more immediately and superficially popular than it was. The studio would have made a quick, large buck. The movie Galaxy Quest addresses the popularity of the female science fiction stereotype wonderfully, and with the same actress even. But it would have faded into the collective movie graveyard where the stupid, hackneyed, and empty movies go to await their DVD releases. Because such care was taken with crafting a frightening, smart, funny, and above all -real- situation in both movies, Alien and Aliens will always be appreciated as classic, influential, and meaningful; movies that we will gladly watch dozens of times and appreciate more each time. Aliens, especially. Pretty may draw a bigger crowd, but smart is what gets you immortality.

And that's not to say that Ripley and Vasquez (and Sarah from T2, while we're at it) aren't sexy as fuck. They are. But they don't know it (or at least don't think about it), and neither does the movie. In all these movies, these people are human beings before they're women, or men, or supermen. And that's the difference, right there. Scot and Cameron know that real is what we connect with, even when the characters are essentially fake, as with the replicants. Scott makes the replicants -truly- More Human Than Human, and that's what makes them so heartbreaking.

The people in CTHD were totally believable, and heartbreaking, and real and beautiful. Except when they were swinging around on their flyropes. Cool and stupid are not mutually exclusive, but for this particular film they just couldn't live in harmony in my head.

Those were days that sidestepped my mind's grasp,
Twisting soapslicked like bathing pets in the moments before rinsing,
Adamant and yowling defiance at the thought of being contained
In any neat plastic shell of understanding
So that I could not say and be sure
this was the day

The day after which other days would slink by,
Cowed and dripping, with their fierceness quelled
And howls of outrage reduced to mewlings.

So that, looking back, I could only see
That here, just here, the struggle stretched out for years before me,
And there, the battle, being won, was lost,
And nothing but memory retained
Of days that commanded full involvement
And repaid halfheartedness with claws.
- Childhood Recollections.

It seemed like a good day for a visit with Mnemosyne.

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