The visit

Wednesday: Went to work. Mom made pies and got everything ready for Thanksgiving.
Thursday: Up at 7. Accidentally dumped all the torn-up bread for dressing into the laundry basket. Followed 5-second rule.
Friday: To San Diego to tour the U.S.S. Midway. Learned useful terms for future online 'zines: "Riding the Meatball" and "Pickle Switch," both of which have to do with landing a plane on a ship. We listened to an audiobook of Lake Wobegon Days there and back.
Saturday: Thrift shopping with Mom. H&E is very cool. I bought a book. Goodwill is overpriced but cleaner.
Sunday: Delivered unused-and-stuck-in-closet-for-months exercise bike to a friend. Mrs. Alls and Hossy* came to visit. Dad told stories. We went to look at Christmas lights at the Mission Inn in Riverside. Kettle korn!
Monday: Mom and Dad leave. Sigh. Back to work.

*Not their given names, but perhaps their "real" ones.

Holidays

My parents are in town, having driven from Montana to spend some time in sunny southern CA with their (less sunny, but just as dry) daughter. Yesterday we stocked up for T'giving dinner, and today, while the LAW and I are at work, Mom wanted to stay home and get things ready. I tell ya--having people travel for two days in order to make you a big dinner is something to be really thankful for. Thanks!

Did you miss the CFA protest last week?

1500 CSU faculty (yes, I was one of them) and their supporters from campuses statewide protested outside the CSU Board of Trustees meeting last week to pressure the administration into re-entering contract negotiation. Here's one of several news stories about the protest, and here's the California Faculty Association website. We've had an impasse declared and are going into mediation. Job actions to come?

Updates

• My poem "Dubbel zoet" was accepted for publication in The Adirondack Review. Whee! Here it is.
  
• I found the shooting location for my early-stage-of-development Wine film. Stay tuned for the debut of my Nika-liscious star.

Oh, yeah, and the LAW is home and I haven't broken any dental work for days!

My bachelor self.

So the Lovely AW(tm) is away at a conference, and I'm doing the usual shehun-as-bachelor things: staying up late playing video games, sleeping with the TV on (nothing like infomercials at 3 in the morning to give you interesting dreams), not taking my vitamins, and eating popcorn for dinner (and leftover popcorn for breakfast). Now really, before the LAW entered my life and made sense of the outside world for me, I was (mostly) capable of taking care of myself. Something's happened!

I don't think I'm just trying to show how pathetic I am when she's not around and thus encourage her not to go off gallivanting to Baltimore without me. But if I were trying to show that, yesterday's adventure would be ample proof: I broke a temporary cap eating leftover popcorn for lunch, swallowed the cap, and then had to hie myself off to the dentist 15 minutes before the office closed to get a new temporary. (p.s. Many thanks to Albert of Inland Dental Center and his artistry.)

I did spend a few minutes rooting around in the popcorn just in case the cap was hiding underneath a kernel, but no, really, I could feel it chewing its way down my esophagus.

Sigh. She comes home tomorrow.

Finally! An opinion on the hot topic of the 2006 Oscar race!

Okay, I finally saw Crash last night. I'd had the DVD from Netflix for three weeks and thought, well, if I ever want to get the next diskful of Smallville episodes, I'd better watch this thing. One of the reasons I'd wanted to see it was, of course, I'd wondered if the movie had really deserved the "Best Picture" Oscar that it got--by surprise--over Brokeback Mountain. Now my questions have been answered:
NO, IT DIDN'T. THIS MOVIE SUCKED.
(Did you hear me in the back row?)
I'm not saying that every queerish movie needs its Oscars--I mean, Transamerica isn't really all that--but ferchrissake, Brokeback Mountain had Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and Ang Lee and all these wonderfully talented people writing and directing (so that when the good acting started, we could appreciate it). Crash has good acting--a bit--but a script so crappy that it's like watching great actors having to rise above the play your seventh-grader wrote about racial stereotypes for her civics class.

Let's talk about gender here, too, and sexuality. Crash is a lovely antidote to any anxieties Straight Guys in Power(TM) might have about their "l'il straight guy." In Los Angeles, apparently, everybody (regardless of race and class) is straight. Vigorously straight, in the "man-on-top" sorta way. A notable example, from one of the central threads in the film: The couple that Officer Ryan pulls over and abuses? Woman had her head in her man's lap. For this offense, Officer Ryan "emasculates" the guy by feeling up his wife in front of him. The woman, later, tells her husband that she feels sorry for him because he didn't have the power to stop things. That's right, it's his tragedy (and she's only there to be the vehicle for both her husband's humiliation and, later in the film, Officer Ryan's "redemption" anyway).

Go ahead--you play. How many women in the movie have jobs and lives of their own? When they have jobs, how many of them are caretaking jobs, like "maid," or "junior partner who is there to watch the emotional struggle of her man," or "assistant to Brendan Fraser who has no lines of her own?"

Two final thoughts:
(1) It's nice that white straight liberals can assuage their guilt about racism/prejudice by voting for the movie that legitimates the class/gender/sexuality system that keeps them on top (more on this at AlterNet); and
(2) Of course, this all begs the question of whether the Academy Awards are ever really believable indicators of merit.

Okay, enough. I'm still on my first cup of coffee and I have to go get my annual mammygram. But go see Brokeback Mountain. Or see it again. It's really a good movie, even as good as the Proulx story that it's based on.

Where I'm from

Florence, Montana--Home of the Fighting Falcons!