Monday, January 3, 2011

Now I spend my days in ever increasingly complicated ways, convincing myself of the rightness of each word I say.

I'm getting old, you know.

I was sick last week, and continue to be. My girls caught it and got to spend the holiday under the weather. By the weekend I was operating at about 85% so I tried to let Leah sleep as much as she could to knock the illness out, while I took care of Harper. We had a great time because she seemed to have no intention of letting her illness dictate her mood. I hope she's always like that.

She has such personality. Her laugh is simply one of the best things in the universe.

One of the things that I found/find so endearing about her mother is that Leah would do things to make herself laugh and if other people thought it was funny, then great. Sometimes, I catch Harper doing that, and it breaks my heart in the best possible way.

Leah and I spend a large part of the weekend watching Friday Night Lights, the TV show. I put off watching it because, frankly, the premise doesn't attract me. But the show is undeniably good, and speaking as someone who grew up in "small town, TX," they really nailed it. A lot of the characters were hard for me to like because they remind me so much of specific people I grew up around. So far we're into season 3 and aside from a strange, writer's strike induced, season 2 ending, the show is consistently good.

Leah and I recently watched Easy A, that movie with Emma Stone. It provided a few chuckles but the more I reflect on it, the more I hate it. I don't know if there was a single believable character. Clearly, the writer has never been or met a teenager. I was especially annoyed by the Christian characters. Speaking as someone who was part of the overly self-righteous, pious club in high school; nobody acts remotely like that. Amanda Bynes seemed to be playing a caricature of Mandy Moore's character in Saved (which I think is a great film), rather than making an attempt at any relatability. One of the things that I think the writers of Friday Night Lights do extraordinarily well, is capture the role that religion plays in the lives of small town teenagers in Texas. It's such a consistent undercurrent in their culture. The kids are flamboyantly impassioned one day and conveniently detached from it the next, which is what high school religion is mostly like. Peaks and valleys.

Anyway, good writing is good, bad writing is bad.

I don't really have any big goals for this year. We're going to be releasing a new record, which I'm excited about. Shortly after, we hope to release another EP.
Other than that, I'm hoping to:
-watch my daughter grow
-continue adoring my wife
-keep off the 20 lbs I've lost
-live simply
-simply live
-etc.

Easy peasy.

2 comments:

  1. I actually really enjoyed Easy A. I thought it was a clever little farce, and while I totally understand what you have to say about Amanda Bynes' character, the sad truth is that she reminded me of someone I did go to high school with- someone who was that huge of a ridiculous drama queen and would go to ridiculous lengths to judge others and make sure they noticed her judging them. Now, the girl I knew wasn't particularly religious, so that wasn't part of her wacky-superior persona, but if she had been super christian, she would have been very similar to that character. The ridiculous rage-stapling is the exact kind of look-at-me BS this girl used to do.

    Maybe it's just because I hung out with the theatre kids in high school, but a lot of the kids in Easy A felt very familiar to me, just a little exaggerated. If anything it's the premise of Easy A that set off "no one behaves like that" alarms for me. At my school, at least, no one gave a crap who you were screwing unless they were already part of your social click, or there was some notable drama attached to it like cheating or something. But even then, news never traveled that fast through non-intersecting cliques at my school.

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