"the funeral parlor of the gods"

Very funny story in Vanity Fair about Larry King as 'America's grief counselor'.

sage advice from robyn

She is quoting Charlie Brown: Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."

make believe, and not in a good way

This morning my office mate asked me about something she'd seen on PBS on Sunday night. It had been a crime story set in Sweden, but with English speaking actors. She was confused.

She said it was weird, and wondered if they just couldn't find Swedish actors. Then she said the entire thing looked like a continuity problem, meaning that the occasional appearances (in documents, on a newspaper) of the Swedish language looked like they had been included by mistake. And the premise is an odd one: Actors speak English, but live in a Swedish environment.

Oh, wait, that isn't odd at all. That's reality. The world is bilingual.

Anyway.

Dan lasted 20 minutes. I lasted 21 minutes. Either it wasn't very good, or I am Americanized now and that's why I couldn't handle the slower than molasses pace.

Rape seed fields were stunning, though.

intertextuality

Remember the scene in Finding Nemo where the fish trapped in the aquarium plan an escape? There is lots of swimming inside tubing, and the issue of getting past a filter.

Watch for that same scene when you see Star Trek.

one year later

It's a year ago this week since I started chemo. It was on a Tuesday, like today, and the date was April 22.

The day before I started treatment Babs came with me for a training session. A nurse told us about drugs, side effects, what to eat during the months of treatment, and what not to eat. It was pretty overwhelming.

Then the next day Dan came with me for the actual infusions. It wasn't 10% as bad as I thought it would be. It wasn't 10% as bad as he thought it would be either. When we were done I waited outside while he got the car. He told me later that he thought he'd have to carry me the few steps between the bench were I was sitting and the curb, but I got up and walked just like a normal person.

The only images of cancer patients that are available in popular culture come from after school specials, movies like Terms of Endearment, and the cover of National Enquirer. It's not helpful. Cancer is a horrible disease, but many people go through treatment living relatively normal lives. It's perfectly possible to have a relatively normal life while being treated for cancer. But that doesn't make for any dramatic endings of movies, or dramatic cover stories.

there aren't any european super heroes (did you ever think of that?)

I've seen a movie and a British TV series recently that kind of reminded me of each other.

First there was the Swedish film Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick). It tells the story of a working class Swedish woman in the early 20th century. Her 'everlasting moments' are the images she captures with her camera, and the movie shows clashes between creativity, poverty, and gender roles, in a changing society.

Then I watched the British TV series Cranford, which, similar to so many other British films and TV series (and novels), is set in the 1840s. It tells the stories of the people who make up a small village. The main theme is, again, the changing society; who stands to gain something from social change, who would loose.

Both stories put major emphasis on education. It is through education people achieve change in their lives, and education is what some of the young main characters in both stories long for, but are told they cannot have.

Probably because I live in the US, the stories struck me as extremely European. They show people living their lives within a societal structure, and they show the struggles that ensue when people feel limited by circumstance.

American popular fiction is not so much concerned with that. I think that is a pity. Because the limitations exist here too. We just don't talk about them as often.