Movie plots

I was asleep in a motel room recently and I woke from such a perfect new movie plot.  It was unusual, but not too far-fetched.  There were plot twists and crises.  It had a mildly science fiction feel, but near future, so accessible for non-geek audiences.  I sat up and wrote down what now appears to be a poetic but rather hallucinogenic dream sequence that is entirely unusable as a screenplay.

Still, I had such a strong sense of purpose, such a passionate certainty that my little dream was about to morph into an award-winning film that rather than put the nail in that coffin, I e-filed it where I put all my writing ideas that have potential legs.  Since almost every one of these ideas comes to me immediately post-REM, this file is metaphorically bulging with bright hopes yet to be doused by the cold water of 9am.

I have no such illusions about last night's dream, though it was powerful and the emotions pull on me still.  I was knee-deep in water talking to a long lost high school friend when the sun went down and a storm came up.  He was on a fishing boat and one huge wave separated us.  I frantically swam backwards to catch up and by sheer force of will, landed us both on a nearby beach.

Ten yards ahead in the sand was an authentic thai restaurant.  My friend was local.  We began walking up the dirt path to the lean-to and I noticed that my swimsuit was dripping so I stepped to one side and began wringing it out.  Looking down I saw that I was watering their local garden with my swim wear.  Looking up, I saw my friend, nearly at the hut entrance, observing my behaviour with obvious horror.

He walked back to me and began steering me away from the building by the elbow.  "What are you doing?" I asked.  When he wouldn't answer I pulled away and said, "Look.  I know I'm an embarassing gringo here.  But that's who I am.  I assure you there's no place you can take me where you will be safe from my cultural slips and blundering faux pas.  I'm hungry.  We eat here.  We eat now."  I tugged his arm and reluctantly he followed me back to the shack on the beach, where I ordered, smiling as much as I could and trying not to step on/lean against or brush past anything that might be fragile or precarious.

The meal was delicious.

You'll poke your eye out! (with a pineapple)

Last night was short on sleep or dreams.  But something noteworthy did happen today - I poked myself in the eye with a pineapple, which is certainly a personal first.
 
The day did not have a particularly auspicious beginning.  I woke into a rather conventional existential panic: omg i'm not living up to my potential and i'm forty and what is the meaning of life the planet's going to shit and shouldn't i be doing something important or useful instead i'm boring and tired all the time and my iq points are dropping right and left maybe i'm supposed to have kids after all but it's too late and i used to be good at writing but now i don't know if i'm good at anything i'm always afraid my boss will decide i suck at my job and i'll become unemployablee and destitute unable to support even my cats and so die alone ETCETERA)

So I took a breath, gave myself a tough love pep talk and decided the weight of the world's problems and my neuroses could wait for another thirty minutes, since it was 6am and I had not managed to fall asleep till 1am.

The morning got busy with teaching duties, lab experiments, a meeting. At 1136am I was puzzling over data when I suddenly remembered a lunchtime team fitness event I was signed up for.  But it was in less than an hour, on another campus, and I had not brought any sweat-friendly clothes.  

I ran the six blocks to the carpark, hopped on the freeway, thanking several minor deities that off peak traffic in Seattle is not bad at all.  It took only 25 minutes to get from lab door to home.  I grabbed tights, hoodie, tennis shoes, and another frantic freeway interlude later, made it to the Pineapple Express start site with three minutes to spare.

My team of four donned leis and lugged pineapples through four stations dotted across campus, where we faux-swam, climbed stairs, lunged, crunched, and hopped around all in the name of fitness.  And on the very last rep of the very last exercise at the very last station, I bent over and poked myself in the eye with the leafy hairdo of my own pineapple.

It hurts to poke yourself in the eye with sharp foliage.  Naturally I wondered if I had made myself blind, scratched my cornea, given myself an infection with some menacing pineapple bacteria, or was about to discover that -  notwithstanding the fact that I eat pineapple mutliple times a week at the workplace salad bar without incident - I have a previously undetected and very severe allergy to pineapple leaves.

Since I don't trust eyewash stations, I got back in my car and took my reddening eye to Bartell drugs.  Three rinses with Bausch & Lomb Eye Relief and it still hurt but not as much and I managed to talk myself down from imminent blindness and imagined corneal surgeries.  Instead, I went back to work, pausing only for late lunch (pho) and much later a snack (soda machine). 

And work is where you will find me still, looking at worms under the microscope, furrowing my brow over cloning diagrams, and a little bit dreading the pop quiz I have to write for my students' 8am lab tomorrow.  But I have a bottle of saline and a bottle of Gatorade, which is enormous wealth by some standards.  So I should be content.

The Jews are boring

That was the phrase that woke me at 6:22 AM.

Actually, to provide some mitigating context, I woke up with a filmography of Katherine Heigl parading across my semi-conscious mind; the last item before the appearance of this world undissolved was "The Big Lebowski".  It turns out my semi-consciousness is neither reliable nor a big reader of the IMDB.  In 1998, it was Julianne Moore who played the beautiful female lead in yet another hilarious, "quirky",  and lucrative Hollywood blockbuster.  Katherine Heigl was probably not even old enough to drink at that time.

Anyway, it seems more important to address my semi-conscious mind's potential as a racist than its poor fact-checking abilities, so let us move on.  As I woke, the realization that Katherine Heigl was young and pretty and starring in a lot of movies - albeit it now turns out, NOT The Big Lebowski - struck my just aroused mind as infuriating.  I have nothing against lovely young starlets, but the formulaic nature of Hollywood films, its sexism, ageism, heterocentrism, and copy-cat-ism, all seemed, at the nubile hour of 6:22 AM to represent the very essence of the decay of Western civilization.

After another moment, I realized it's more like the bedrock of capitalism.  Sex sells.  Young women are considered sexier in America.  It's true that older actresses have lately been cast in more than just supporting roles ("As Good As It Gets" ironippropiately comes to mind), coincident with the terms MILF and Cougar.  However, as a nation, Hollywood is a far cry from, say, the BBC, or the French, for casting interesting-looking people of all ages in non-cookie-cutter roles.

(Incidentally, if anyone can define the age range of these terms referring to the sexual desirability of older women, please share your knowledge with the rest of us... I can't figure out where a 40 year old female scientist would fall on this spectrum and the lack of an appropriate label is very disconcerting.)

Where do the Jews come in?  I'm terribly embarrassed to say that once, many MANY years ago - possibly in 1998 - I overhead someone use a phrase along the lines of "the Jewish autocracy" when referring to the movers and shakers in the California movie industry.  It had something to do with the "ethnic" names attached to some of the prominent studios and influential movie executives.  It's not my fault I overhead this label, but I have to take responsibility for the concept lodging itself deep enough in my neural circuits that it could be coughed out of the synaptic recesses of my mind some twenty years later.

So while "The Big Lebowski" was being revealed as utterly lacking Katherine Heigl, I mourned for the Julianne Moores of this world, whose prospects for leading roles inversely correlate with their experience, and then for a film industry where a movie about a bowling alley bum is considered avant garde and finally, for the American public whose brains wither as we speak, in multiplexes across this great land.

Why can't we have genuinely creative movies?  Character actors?  Non-predictable plots?  The Jews, my mind said, frustrated and ill-advisedly, are BORING.

In the non-light of 6:52 AM (it's January in Seattle... even if it is dawn, I would have no idea, thanks to the 364/24/7 cloud cover that shields us all from overdosing on vitamin D or those of us with Celtic ancestry from losing that silvery shade of white that can be seen from space), my second thought was: "what a bizarrely racist statement" - so naturally I compounded the evil by blogging about it.

I amend my waking thoughts for political correctness and accuracy: the conservative, wealthy, largely white men who run Hollywood... are BORING.

PS Katherine Heigl was 20 in 1998 - not old enough to drink.  Take THAT anal fact-checkers of people who dream up stupid shit.  Also that makes her 32.  Not a 20-something starlet.  So good on you, Katherine Heigl, and all that makeup that allows the lens to believe you are still a dewy 20-something.  Poor Julianne Moore has to rely on botox.

PPS Hollywood insider malcontents speak up here: http://fadeinonline.com/articles/minority-report/

Cartoon burlesque

I was a nanny for Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, and he had a sister.  In the middle of the afternoon on a crisp fall day I was walking the sister across a street and she was killed by a hit and run driver. 

I went back to the house where Calvin lived with his dad – a 40-something, stocky, beer-drinking divorcee.  I gave them the terrible news and  it seemed to cause almost no reaction.  Calvin asked a few morbid questions and went to bed.  However the  entire next day he acted out and misbehaved, wouldn’t focus on lessons, threw tantrums. 

I was at dinner at a german pub with his father that night.  He told me over and over how amazed he was at my patience with his son.  I said I was astonished at how he was still able to trust someone who’d been in charge of his other child when she died.

And then I said, “Calvin is a cartoon character.  This behaviour is nothing new.  I nannied for him last year.  He didn’t have a sister that time around and no one was killed and he behaved exactly the same way, because that’s how he is drawn.”

Calvin’s father sat, thinking this over, but said nothing.

“It’s like burlesque,” I said.  You sit in the audience and you get teased up to a certain level but it never crosses that line.  Why?  Because if you go too far, you release the tension.  And without the tension, there’s no reason to watch.  This is no different. Calvin has to remain the same and never achieve catharsis.  Otherwise you will lose your audience.”

Calvin’s parent was now standing against the wall across from me, a tall, beautiful brunette in a grey hoodie, dark jeans, gorgeous understated boots.  She nodded again, our conversation over, and walked away.  I watched her from behind, took a breath and exhaled, “Damn. That is one hot mother.”  Beside me, a couple of the men perched on barstools echoed my appreciation.

Laaaa-ser and anesthetic

This, while somewhat surreal, is a true account.

Last night I drove 3h up to Vancouver to see my folks.

Actually, for full disclosure, I first drove 2.75h up to Delta, BC, a satellite city, in order to have a tall middle-aged French-Canadian woman smear gel on my skin and "boil" my hair shafts by zapping me with a laser.

Before beginning my virgin journey down laser hair removal road, the esthetician warned me of rare but alarming possible side effects including blistering, scabbing, and accidental depigmentation of the  skin.  Her postop instructions were to ice the area to bring down swelling, and to be patient while, for 1-2 weeks, the dying hair continues to "evacorate" - some combination I presume of evacuate and evaporate.

My fondest moment came when she asked me to gauge the pain from 1-10.  The sensation of the laser is a lot like being snapped with a rubber band - in ten places at once.  It's no worse than, and actually faster and less painful, than waxing.  "Low," I told her.

She smiled.  "You're a tough lady."

There is a compliment never before leveled at me.  I can think of umpteen contexts immediately where people I know are orders of magnitude tougher: on the soccer pitch, in the weight room, dealing with chronic illness, handling a break-up, after an ankle sprain, while receiving criticism... the list goes on.  Apparently where *I* shine is while lying on a disposable-paper-covered massage table, with a laser aimed at my furriest regions.

It's another fifteen minutes' drive to get to Richmond, a yet-closer-in suburb of Vancouver, at Frieda's B&B, my mother's favourite jumping-off point for Vancouver airport-based travels.

The evening was unexpectedly pleasant apart from the predictable tension while my mother sparred with the server at dinner.

"What can I get for you?"

"Do you have a senior's menu?" We had just spent ten minutes looking at the two laminated pages of the Hog Shack's specialties: ribs, fish and chips, burgers and deep-fried appetizers.  My mother insisted on this venue rather than the recommended Italian Posada's because it was a block closer to the car.  Until we arrived, the median age would not even have achieved 30something unless one left out the plentiful toddler datapoints.

"No, I'm sorry."

"Well," my mother flattened her lips, a gesture I suddenly realized I recognized - I had seen the toddlers here making it after being denied soda or a biscuit, right before they burst into wailing.  "I want something small.  Light."

"Have you seen our salads?" 

"I don't want salad." One of my mother's superpowers is to cast doubt in her fellow conversationalist's mental stability with otherwise simple statements.  It's all in the tone.  It's like being snapped in the face with a rubber band.  It's over before you halfway even realize it's happened.

"We don't have anything else that's small; you could just order something and only eat part of it."

While my father and I ordered, my mother pondered this dilemma, finally settling for a greek salad.

I used to hate going to anything but buffet restaurants, where there are no serving staff to disapprove of.  A major perk of visiting my parents as an adult is that I can usually manage to get in a whole glass of wine before ordering dinner.  It takes the sting out of my mother's rapid-fire commentary.

While we waited for the food to arrive, I was educated on which of my closest friends my mother considers rudest, on a scale of 1 to intolerable.  I ordered another glass of Pinot Gris and mentally raised it to my sister, who, though a year and a half younger, pioneered the prophylactic and palliative use of alcohol at family functions.  She's always been a trail-blazer. 

Murder mystery

I'm hosting a party, a reunion of sorts. Family and friends from all stages of the last four decades of my life are crowded into my living room.  The small white-washed space has a sliding glass door on one wall and a cafeteria style kitchen along another.  You can slide a tray across the aluminum surface, walk by the silent eye-level vapor shield, peer into the prep area unstaffed by white-clad, be-gloved food workers, and, despite the absence of french fries and lasagne, clearly make out the smell of deep frying oil and baking cheese.

Most people are coupled.  There are older couples like my aunt Lydia and uncle Mark - a retired mafia don and a stocky ex-beauty pageant winner (not in that order).  And younger: mostly friends from university or work.  Except Daniel, an off-duty police officer I met one night on the dance floor.  His wife Marisa is stunning in a simple maroon cocktail dress.  Then the occasional single. Me.  And my cousin Nancy - Mark and Lydia's only child.  

My uncle is drunk; his anecdotes have been getting louder with each passing beverage on the rocks.  It's so mathematically precise, I'm tempted to graph it.  X axis in whiskey units, Y axis in decibels.

He is pointing across the room at Lydia, the star of his latest embellished tale, and suddenly his anger surges, his fist becomes a pistol, and he shoots her.  Twice.  She goes down. 

Commotion, screaming.  People try to scatter and cower simultaneously.  Daniel vaults the plexiglass shield of the cafeteria, picks up a cleaver and hurls it Mark-ward.  It flies through the air in slow motion, exactly like a ninja movie throwing star, each rotation audibly snicking through the air before embedding itself in my uncle's right temple. 

The police must use time machines, they arrive so quickly.  Then I realize Daniel's presence here, even off the clock, might explain that instead of one or two, we have twelve responding officers, and an entire SWAT team of detectives picking through evidence and taking statements.

Lydia's condition looks ominous.  She is crumpled on the floor, a smear of blood across her ribcage.  But the bullet is lodged in her the right side and she is still breathing, just unconscious.  The paramedics tell me there is a good chance it missed vital organs though they won't know for sure till the doctors at the hospital examine her.  She will need X-rays.  Hydration.  Years of therapy.  She is whisked off in an ambulance, not the same one that carries away the body bag containing my uncle. 

The only other person needing medical attention is Nancy.  The right side of her face is covered in blood but after cleaning her off gently with a wet dish towel, I discover there is only a small wound on the top right side of her head, hidden almost entirely by her thick auburn hair.  One of my uncle's bullets must have gone wide.  Luckily the bullet only grazed her.  She is in shock.  I hand her off to the EMTs who dress her wound, cover her with a blanket and tell her she will heal just fine.  I almost laugh at the absurdity of the statement.

"I've got blood," says one of the detectives, as she snap-snap-snaps her police camera.  The team of detectives - only four people it turns out though they seem like a mob in my tiny living room - efficiently swarm and document evidence.  One of them slips on the generic ivory gloves common to law enforcement and cafeteria workers and heads into the kitchen to hunt for the missing bullet; he finds it, buried in the far wall.  On his way back, he stops to linger behind the counter, examining the surface for more clues.  I barely resist the urge to ask him if the special today is Sloppy Joes.

Thanks to Daniel, I'm allowed to sit in on the detectives' meeting.  They are working out why my uncle, now deceased, would want to kill his wife, still in a coma.  Neither the "vic" nor the "perp" can currently answer questions.  There are pictures of people and closeups of blood stains tacked onto a black marker timeline of events. 

The criminologist stands up and points to several pictures - blood-stained carpet from my aunt.  Bloody handprints on the coffee table where my cousin's wound was dressed.  Cleaver protruding from a forehead, also dripping blood.  "The blood sample from the perp does not match the victims," she says-

Well, duh, I am thinking, bristling at the notion that my family engages in incestuous marriages -

"There is another sample that matches the daughter, however." 

-and it sinks in that she is referring to the victims in plural, not possessive.  

During questioning, everyone's blood has been sampled.  The criminologist's professional mask cracks just a little as she meets my eyes, "Yours." 

It's the kind of match, she says, that you'd expect from a sibling.  A half-sibling, to be precise - a half-sibling on the father's side because the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA is NOT similar.

My father.  And Lydia.

And Nancy and me.

This is a lot to take in.

I sit down.

At that moment there is screaming from the morgue, which just happens to be next door.  A woman in a lab coat and face shield, gloves covered in blood, bursts through the french doors.  "He's alive," she shrieks.  "I was about to start the AUTOPSY.  Pulled the cleaver from his head and he MOVED."  Another minute and she would have been cutting open his abdomen with a scalpel.

We troop in through the doors to see my uncle, dead-skin grey and woozy but upright on the stainless steel slab.  It's not a homicide anymore, not even one perpetrated and the attempted murder charge he'll face no longer seems like such a mystery.

I head home puzzling over what I'll say to Lydia: I've got good news and bad news.  The good news is your father came back to zombie life seconds before becoming a science experiment.  The bad news...

Or: Good news: you have a sister!  Your homicidal father is not really your father!!

Characters that appear in this dream bear no resemblance to persons living or dead, besides myself.  The dream author also makes no claims of expertise in the fields of criminology or medicine, apart from what urban myths might be perpetuated by watching far too much ER and Law and Order.

Blind leading the blind

A blast shakes the bomb shelter.  Another, hard; dust rains from the ceiling.  Lights flicker, flicker, then zzzt just like that we’re in the dark. My boyfriend’s hand slips out from mine in all the commotion and I am alone, blind, scared.  

People swirl around me, talking, screaming, crying.  An eternity of being randomly jostled and bumped.  Finally, finally the emergency lights come back on.  People rush for the exit.  I fight to stand still in the stampede.  Where is he?

The overhead emergency lights are old, incandescent, a barely-remembered yellow.  Without the aggressive blue tinge of fluorescence, the world seems  transformed.  The corners harbor soft shadows. 

I’m trying to breathe, quell panic, when I spot him.  Maybe twenty feet away, near the exit, barely able to keep his feet in the streaming crowd.  Pale.  Shaken.  He visibly recoils at each touch as people stream by him. 

When his eyes meet mine I can feel his relief from where I’m standing.  “I SEE you,” he says, rushing towards me, and when I take his hand again, he is trembling.

Everyone is in black gauzy silhouette, he says. Why can he see only me?  He’s desperate to know, do I see the people in silhouette too?  Are we both dead?  Are they? Are we surrounded by ghosts, and us the only survivors? 

But no.  I see everyone just fine.   I tow him by the hand through the crowd, and he keeps his head down, shrinking into me, trying not to look directly at anyone else.

The bomb shelter is actually a tunnel, a labyrinth really, of underground hallways commonly used when the winters get cold.  I turn left, right, right, swimming upstream, away from the exits.  I am heading for my parents’ kitchen.

Ten long minutes later I emerge into a vaulted room.  A staircase winds in a lazy helix around the perimeter, and at each level opens onto a wide plateau where small groups of people are working on different parts of the cooking process.  My parents are at the very top; I can hear them arguing, something about cilantro and onions. 

Near the top of the stairs, I pause for breath, preparing myself to introduce Andrew to my parents.  We flew in from the coast last night; they’ve never met.  I look back and he’s standing a landing below me, speaking nervously to two dead goats propped against the wall, trying to make small talk.  Before I can correct him, I realize my parents have disappeared, headed down the back stairs to the basement.  Shit.

“They’re DEAD,” I hiss, and Andrew looks stricken.  “Not my PARENTS,” I say.  “Those are GOATS.”  I realize the world looks more different to him than I can imagine; it’s like he’s suddenly half-blind.  “Come here, I need you,” I say and as he reaches me I tug him toward the door at the far end of my parents’ landing.  If we hurry we can catch up to them.

Two steps down the stairs, my childhood fear of this basement journey kicks in.  It is five long steps down before you can feel the hanging metal switch that turns on the one ancient lightbulb.  I don’t understand why it’s not already on; my parents just went this way.  I reach forward, find it blind, pull.  Nothing.  I pull again.  The light clicks on, then flares and dies.  I inhale sharply, dig my fingers into Andrew’s arm. 

“Fuck,” I hiss.  “I fucking hate the dark.”  It’s weird, he tells me, but he can see everything.  He guides me through the blackness, helps me stumble down the thirty-seven stairs, while my heart beats nearly out of my chest.