Your Ex-Lover is Dead

Okay, yes, that is a song title and not a movie. It's a song that has taken on meaning in my life that I can't really explain here. At this moment in my life I am feeling a little (okay maybe a lot) bipolar about life. I have moments where I can see the possibilities that await me if I just let go of everything holding me back, if I take that leap I so desperately want to take. Then I have moments where I see the value in the life I've spent so long creating. My marriage, my children, my "things" that hold meaning and memory. I've had two really low moments, one at my mother's house and another at my own where I honestly felt like suicide was my only option. I could feel the panic rise in my chest and though I hardly cry anymore I was sobbing in seconds. It makes me feel incredibly selfish. My whole life up until this moment has always been selfish but now I am taking it to a whole other level. I am trying to live my life for me, despite having a husband despite having children and it's just one of those things you "can't" do. Everyone that I know hates me. Everyone thinks I am the worst person alive for what I am putting my family (the one I created) through. And yes, I am capable of understanding that I am doing a shitty thing. But at least there is hope in my life for the first time in years. It's fleeting and it's barely a spec on the radar but occasionally I see it and it fills me with joy. That perhaps there will be an end, that perhaps this life will get better for me eventually, somehow. And everyone keeps asking what I want, what do I want from all this, how do I feel. All I can say is right now, as things are, I am incredibly unhappy. I feel like I am being smothered by this life and I can't breathe most days. It's no ones fault but my own. So do I continue to gasp for air when I can and survive as things are or do I fight and claw and dig, hurting almost everyone I know so that I can stand in a wide open space and take a deep breath?

Peep World

Yeah, that movie is no good. Skip it. It's just the most recent thing I've seen, except Cinderella which I watched this morning, but do we really need a recap of Cinderella? I'm dealing with a lot of things. I guess so is everyone. For some reason I had a harder time with Klebold and Harris than I am now. Maybe because with them it was plotted and they took their time. Or maybe it was because I was their age, still in high school, and it felt close. But one could argue that now I'm a parent, and my kid is in elementary school and isn't that even closer? Maybe it was because part of me could empathize with K&H and no part of me can even begin to understand this man who killed basically babies. And I'm still kind of reeling from that baby dying at the zoo. I read a letter written by a Rabbi about the zoo incident and he said that when things like this happen we often don't understand how God could allow it and he said that God has no part in it. In a way that's a little bit of a cop out, but for someone like me who genuinely feels God has no part in most things if not everything I guess it makes sense. We want someone or something to blame for the bad in the world, but what if the bad and the good weren't really as black and white as we think? What if it isn't bad to follow through on the insanity in your brain like the man who went into the building where I used to work and shot up the lobby, killing the one surviving child of a couple who live half a mile from me. Maybe it's just a random act, and random can't be evil can it? And if good deeds are plotted and shared and bragged about doesn't that make them just a little bit bad? I'm anti killing anything. I could bring myself to understand a mercy killing, like when animals are suffering and it just makes sense to help them go faster, but I could never do it myself. I have had to say it was okay to kill dying hamsters before and it still haunts me. I held a guinea pig as it took it's last breath, but people, I can't imagine. And I'm very anti-gun. Once my father-in-law took out his gun to, I don't even remember why, show me? And I had to leave the room, I felt physically ill. I wanted to leave the house but I figured I couldn't explain myself if I had. I had a panic attack just being near one. Those things that can't be unseen or unremembered. I live in constant fear of my children dying. I have night terrors and that's just me on a normal-things-are-safe day. But when I heard about what had happened on Friday it didn't phase me. I wasn't the least bit afraid that my daughters were at school. And I guess that in itself scares me. That when I actually, maybe had a reason to be freaked out I wasn't. And oddly enough I just want it to go away. I don't want to hear about it anymore. I don't want to read about the teachers or the kids or the man or any of it. I want the news to move on in the way it often does. Maybe I want to pretend it never happened. When the zoo incident happened I read everything I could find and watched the news over and over and thought, man that could have been me. I had nightmares where it was me. But this, I'm just so completely detached. Is it shock? Is it some kind of self-preservation mechanism? It doesn't feel like it. I made cookies today, I watched Cinderella with my daughter, I went grocery shopping and wrapped Christmas presents. My life was so utterly normal and these parents, so very many of them, are just destroyed forever and I feel...nothing.

12 Angry Men

I have now had six (6!!!) students drop my class in the first week. What could I possibly be doing that is so wrong? People tell me things like well maybe a class they were waiting for opened up. Not for six people, there's no way. We've had one assignment. And yes most of them did crappy but it was a tiny-counts-almost-for-nothing assignment. And the one drop got the highest score in the class so what of that? I dread going into class for fear of losing even more of them. Perhaps if I just didn't have class at all next week I could keep the rest of them from leaving. Do they think I am an idiot? That I have absolutely nothing to teach them? I seriously just want to burst into tears every second that I am in the room with them. How can I do 15 more weeks of this? How? Should I ask that someone else take over the class? Should I quit?

Moneyball

If you haven't seen Moneyball you should. I am totally in love with Aaron Sorkin right now, especially "Newsroom" but I did enjoy the baseball movie in spite of Brad Pitt. I watch it whenever it is on. I'm excited to get back to school in 25 days mostly because I miss having conversations with adults. I love my kids but they don't make witty jokes or understand sarcasm and those are two essentials in my life. I will miss being home with the little one, she is a total joy in my life. She's always happy to see me, huge smiles, and cuddles up and falls asleep in my arms in seconds. I mean who doesn't want to be loved like that on a regular basis? Instead I have to subject her to daycare and the strange women there; nine hours away from me a day. I worry more for her than for me, but I worry for me as well. It is hard to be a working mom and not just because society hates you either way but because you hate yourself as well. If I stay home with them I am doing myself a disservice, messing with my emotional stability, waning in my intelligence, and in day care they can socialize and learn basic things from people trained to teach them. But I will still cry at work because part of me thinks I should be with my babies and I miss them terribly and instead have to deal with rotten bratty teenagers who just want an A for doing nothing. I know I am lucky to have had the time I did. Seven months with one and eight with the other, no one in the US gets that. In England and Canada sure but not here. So it's time to return to the workforce, fatter than ever with no clothes that fit, not even my shoes, more gray hair than people twice my age and zero self-confidence.

The Descendants

I loved this book. Apparently it was originally a short story that the author changed into a book, her very first book, and it was made into a movie. Talk about beginners luck. In the book, Scottie, the younger daughter, shows up wearing a "Mrs. Clooney" t-shirt and I wondered how in the world they would work that in the movie starring Mr. Clooney without breaking the fourth wall but they just didn't include it. I wish they would have included Scottie's last scene with her mother when she finally tells her goodbye. A whole hell of a lot of the movie was narrated. That surprised me. It stayed true to the format of the book but I thought the idea of bringing it to film was to do something different, show flashback scenes, show him fighting with his wife or his wife cheating on him or jeez, something. But that script stayed first person from start to finish. Why did the screenwriters win an oscar for this if they didn't really re-write anything? They just pulled paragraphs from the book and had George Clooney do some jogging. Was it a good movie? Sure, but it was a damn good story to begin with and if you don't change anything that's kind of hard to mess up.

House of Sand and Fog

I'm not going to write about this movie. It's fairly old and I read the book and after that feast of depression I wasn't going to put myself through the film. It was just on television today and reminded me of how terrible life can be and that I shouldn't complain about anything in my own life. The cool thing about the book is that both characters (the colonel and Kathy) have their flaws and both are really just doing their best, so you don't like them but you don't hate them either and you certainly can't pick sides. I wanted to stay on Kathy's side since it was her house and she really just was in a bad situation from the get go, but she didn't really do much to fix herself or her situation. But what is personal accountability worth these days? The world is instant gratification and selfishness. I am entering my fifth month of no work and all mommy-time. I'm doing better than I did after my first, mentally, much worse physically. I still don't fit in my regular clothing. My body just doesn't want to return to it's upright position. My back is killing me from carrying around all the extra weight and I can't even so much as go for a walk with my baby because she just screams her head off. If I lived on an empty street, fine, I can deal with her crying, but the looks I get from the neighbors (a lot of stay-at-home moms on the street) it a bit much. I could carry her but the wind on the hill where I live takes her breath away and gets into her ears and honestly hurts my back a lot more than pushing a stroller. So I try to do inside stuff, walk in circles, dance, clean, but it's not really helping. I hope I can get her to like walks over the summer, maybe she's just too cold. I really miss work. It was by far my favorite thing and that it's not even an option anymore depresses me. I keep hoping something will change on its own, I guess I'm a bit like Kathy that way, but I have to realize it won't. Still, it's hard to motivate myself to get out there and really sell myself to other schools when part of me doesn't want to leave my kid, I can't fit into anything that looks even remotely presentable, and I have zero time in which to job hunt. I wanted to paint the bathroom this week and honestly you'd think I was building a rocket ship with how difficult it has been. Try to paint a room five minutes at a time, see how far you get, how frustrated you get. I spend more time cleaning out brushes then I do painting. And I have to keep the door shut to keep the fumes from getting to the girls so I get massive headaches in a matter of minutes. It's no good. My old boss used to tell me I had a volcanic personality. He said he could tell when I was getting close to erupting and the days that followed an eruption. I can't say he's wrong. I do start to feel upset, shaky almost, when I've been letting things slide for too long, not standing up for myself, trying not to think about something that bothers me. And when I do let go it comes out all at once and my poor husband is usually the only one in the room (victim). I just wish there was a way for me to deal with things as they happened rather than let it all build up. Anyway I said all that to say this: I am feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, unhappy, and stressed even though very little in my life is bad in anyway. It makes me think I will always be this way, thinking it could be better, thinking I have it bad, instead of seeing the bright side of anything.

Adjustment Bureau

Matt Damon.

First off, I've seen professional dancers and if you are even remotely trying to tell me that Emily Blunt is going to be the greatest ballet dancer in the country than I have to call bullshit. The only time we see her "dance" she's just being passed from one male dancer to another in various versions of the fetal position. And as much as I hate to harp on a woman's weight because Emily is thin enough she isn't dancer thin. Dancer thin is ribs exposed, living on one coffee and a pack of smokes a day thin. Even Natalie Portman was pushing it in Black Swan and she was way smaller than Emily Blunt was.

Second, the way Matt and Emily kissed was weird. There was no chemistry between them. They came across as best buds forever than lovers or a couple that had been married for 50 years. Maybe they just didn't like each other for reals, or one of them had bad breath.

Third, I wanted them both to jump off the building at the end and they didn't so I was a little bummed.