Home 2017 November

Month: November 2017

Remakes and Reboots and Flops, Oh My!

Like many, I have bemoaned the fact that Hollywood seems stuck in the past, refusing to look to the future. We need new ideas! We need new stories! I mean, who needs a Mad Max reboot? …actually, no. Forget that. I do. I need Furiosa in my soul. She gives me such fierce joy. But seriously. Ghostbusters? That movie was practically perfect! Why would you– Scratch that. Holtzmann is my happy place. Don’t touch. Mine. This is why Hollywood keeps doing it. Because we (or me, at least) keep buying! I loved Pacific Rim so much. But with that ending–I mean, come on. How are you going to make a sequel? Spoiler alert–they made a sequel. And it looks bada##. You can bet my butt will be in a theater seat the first week it comes out, grinning at John Boyega as Stacker Pentecost’s son and squealing delight when my adored Mako Mori comes onscreen. I thought Star Wars should have stopped at Return of the Jedi. As each prequel came out, I wished harder that they had just stopped at the original trilogy. But I had to see The Force Awakens, and now I love Rey, Finn, Poe–and you better believe there was some serious screaming at a certain point in the trailer for The Last Jedi, zomg… Thor Ragnarok…well, everyone probably knew I was going to see that. It has Loki in it! I probably would have skipped The Dark World but for Loki, but I’m hearing such…

Continue reading

I Write

Continuing with my theme of things I am thankful for, I want to talk about writing. I realized today, as I was contemplating what I am thankful for this year, that I am thankful for the gift of words. It’s not something I consciously think about much, because I have literally been writing my entire life. But it is a true gift, and I am thankful for it. I’ve always said that I wanted to touch people with my words, be it poetry or novels. And I have, because people have told me. When I was a member of Job’s Daughters, the youth group I was involved in from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty, I was promoted to the state chapter, which was a great honor. My job was to be a pen pal to the girls in Missouri (this was before the Internet. Wow, I am really showing my age!). So we wrote back and forth and sent each other stuff. For the big State convention, there was a contest to see who had the best depiction of their assigned state (and an essay). I made a cool map of Missouri and made it into a collage with all the stuff I got over the course of the year. And I wrote an awesome essay. Well, I won. And was asked to stand up in front of hundreds of people and read it. Apparently, I made some people cry. I had touched them that much.…

Continue reading

Adventures in Pencil

Hello! So, last month I talked about the drawing class I was taking. It’s over now, and I enjoyed it, though it wasn’t quite what I wanted, if such a thing even exists. But I thought I’d share the end results with you. Here’s our main project, the Escher hand: You can see the remains of the grid. And my “interesting” shading. I was much faster than everyone else (probably because I couldn’t be bothered to be accurate with my shading) so I finished this after three classes. The last class, one of the other people had also finished his drawing (he was working on it at home! lucky bastard has grown children who do not live at home) so he brought along a picture of some aspens he’d taken. We used the grid method on it again. This took me about 3/4 of the class. Notice, again, my lack of patience with a gazillion little details and the switch to being more stylistic than realistic. (Though I do like the end product.) And then, because I figured I should probably draw in drawing class, I found a photo of a grumpy owl on the Internet and started drawing that. (Without a grid, though.) Didn’t get terribly far, obviously, and haven’t worked on it since. I ran into another woman from the drawing class the day after the last class and she asked if I’d finished it yet. >_> My mother was thrilled that I was taking a drawing class…

Continue reading

Lessons in Letting Go

Last month, due to a file transfer glitch, I lost all my cell phone photos from the past year. I had taken a lot of pictures–maybe three or four hundred. I tried troubleshooting, but as far as I could tell, they were just gone, vanished into the ether between the phone and the computer. At first I was shaky and stunned. A whole year, gone. I don’t usually take pictures of people, so I didn’t lose precious baby photos or anything like that, but I love shooting day-to-day photos around my city, my garden, architecture, and far-flung locations when we travel. (We’d gone on one international vacation in that year. It was the only time we brought our full-scale digital camera. So I didn’t lose all evidence of our trip.) But by a few days later, I felt much calmer. It’s true that not all the photos were exactly gone. I’m on Instagram and post often, so many of the photos survived there, though only in a low-res, square format. It may also be true, as my spouse pointed out, that I took so many photos that no single one was particularly special to me. But I think something else is going on. Theory the first: I use photography as a form of mindfulness, to remind myself to look for moments of beauty in my not-particularly-beautiful urban life. It’s why I enjoy Instagram challenges, taking a photo roughly every day for a month. It’s a form of self-care. The value…

Continue reading