Conservative bias in my brother's government textbook

This weekend, my brother tried to pawn off on me his old government textbook from this last semester (not the one pictured), but of course I refused (wtf made him think I would want an old government textbook?). Later, he happened to mention that he didn’t want to keep it because it seemed to have a strong conservative bias. Now shocked and fascinated, I leapt over to him and the book, begging for an example where the bias was noticeable, as bias of any kind is blasphemous to the entire idea of a textbook.

The following are a few excerpts that exhibit this bias, which I was pretty surprised to find were as strong as my brother purported:

from “How a Bill is Passed”:

“First, a Democrat suggests something retarded. This idea, or bill, then goes to committee, where Republicans try to make it a little less retarded.”

from the glossary:

“Affirmative Action: something the Democrats came up with as a way to suck off their minority constituents.”

from “Prayer in School”

“This is a wonderful opportunity for children to express their faith in the Lord, but the Democrats, who worship Satan, have been trying to do away with this time-honored tradition, since whenever a prayer is uttered in their vicinity, they experience the sensation of acid having been thrown in their ears.”

I was, understandably, immensely offended and horrified that the school would allow such a textbook, so I’m thinking of writing them a letter in protest.

My "Show Us Your Trash Challenge" Results!

On Fake Plastic Fish, one of the life-greening blogs I’m addicted to, Beth, the blogger, threw down the gauntlet and ordered everyone to save their plastic for a week-—not a challenge to use less plastic than normal, but to gauge exactly what “normal” is for us at the moment.

In my smug hubris, after weeks of trimming away plastic in my life, I was sure that my pile of plastic after the end of the week would at least somewhat resemble Beth’s—-i.e. a few plastic windows from envelopes, maybe a random plastic bottle from pre-uber-green days—but I was shocked to find that I was compiling tons of random things.

But, of course, this is the whole point of this exercise: to realize what areas in particular we have left to improve on.


3 of those tiny coffee creamer things
I usually keep milk (that comes in a glass bottle) at work for my coffee—for environmental reasons but also because it tastes so much better—but I had run out the day before and gave into a craving.

“Inspected by” sticker
I just bought a Kleen Kanteen-type water bottle (which has a plastic lid and rubber padding on the bottom, btw), and this sticker was on the underside. At least the tag on it was made out of recycled paper, I guess.

Toilet paper wrapping
My roommate insists on getting this particular type of toilet paper—which isn’t made of recycled content—and which comes in a large wrapping of plastic, and within that huge thing of plastic, every 4 rolls are packaged in their own individual plastic wrappings. Sigh. When I went to get a new roll, I took the last of a set of four, and thus was left with the remaining plastic.

I suppose I could buy my own recycled, non-plastic toilet paper, and add that to the list of items we have two sets of around the house because of my green endeavors (e.g. she has liquid soap, I have bar soap).

Not depicted: straw
The old story, one which I had not yet encountered as my anti-plastic self, as I hardly ever go out on the town: I ordered a soda and totally didn’t see the bartender throw in the straw. I thought about returning it, but I was like, she’s probably gonna throw it out anyway, so I may as well take it. And then I forgot to take the straw for my stash. I’m clearly new at this saving plastic thing.

Milk cap
So, I drink a LOT of milk, due to my addictions to tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and cereal. I buy the kind that comes in a returnable glass bottle (the dairy reuses them!!), but they come with (of course) a plastic cap. I wonder, really, if the amount of plastic in that rather large cap is the same amount of plastic used for coating on a carton and the plastic tops cartons use these days.

I would drink homemade soymilk, almond milk or hemp milk instead—and actually, each of these is lovely in cereal—but they’re just wretched in tea and coffee. So until I get a cow, I suppose I could cut down on the amount of tea, coffee, and hot chocolate I drink, which aren’t very localtarian anyway. (No coffee plantations in Southern California? Oh.) That, however, is going to take a LOT more willpower than I needed for switching from paper towels to cloth. I wouldn’t mind, however, getting a hemp milk maker for cereal (if hemp seeds don’t come in plastic, rrr).

Bread bag
I’d gone without bread for a long time because I’d been on a more paleo-type diet for fitness reasons, but now that I’m going to swing more vegan for ecological reasons, I figure I should probably get back into bread, or else my diet may lack sufficient variety.

But with bread comes plastic—unless you make your own, of course. But I didn’t want to go through the trouble of getting a bread maker and making bread until I proved to myself that I was actually going to eat it. But I did (every day, actually), so I think I will get a bread-maker after all. So we can check this one off the list for the future.

5 Brush Picks
My dentist suggested these as an alternative to flossing, which I hate, and they work just as well. I’m using them until I run out and then switching to a metal, rubber-tipped gum stimulator, which works just as well.

Kashi cereal bag
I’ve started buying cereal in bulk at my local co-op (the “hippie store” as my brother calls it, haha), but late one night I was starving with nothing to eat. The hippie store is all the way across town, not to mention closed by that time, so I walked a block to the local Ralphs and bought my favorite cereal. I gotta stock up on the non-plastic hippie store stuff for such"emergencies".

Hydrogen peroxide mouthwash
Geez, this list keeps getting bigger and bigger!!! I bought this at the hippie store as a more natural alternative to regular mouthwash, but notice that it’s ALL plastic. I think I read somewhere that it's impossible to find hydrogen peroxide that comes in anything else.

I don’t even think I really need mouthwash, but hydrogen peroxide is also a more environmentally friendly alternative to bleach and antiseptics. So… should I count this as an excusable use of plastic?

Yogurt container
Ironically, I bought this so that I could make my own yogurt so I could eat yogurt without plastic. I guess you have to break a few eggs… Anyway, I should never have to buy a container of yogurt again… unless I’m unsuccessful in making yogurt that doesn’t suck….

Sunkist orange sticker
I did not buy this orange. My mom bought this orange, and it had a little sticker on it, as conventional oranges are wont to have.

Envelope window
While I returned the rest of my junk mail, this contained my absentee ballot for the California “special” election, and I couldn’t very well return that.

Not depticted: Plastic spoon
This came from a similar situation to that of the straw. I am hardly ever in this position: there was ice cream passed out at work at a birthday party, and before I realized what I was doing, I had reached for a plastic spoon.

Jam screw top
This was for the pb&j’s I made with the bread mentioned above. Most of this is metal, but I assume that there’s plastic under that there top. I know canning is the answer to this one, but that would only save some glass—not plastic, as even in canning, you’re supposed to toss the small circle tops (which have a ring of rubber on them) when you’re done with them.

However, reusing glass is always good, so I intend to getting into canning as soon as I can find a used canning machine…

Lactaid seal
I didn’t buy this myself, but I drank a lot of milk at my mom’s house, so I figured I was partially reponsible for it (I guess I should have taken the whole carton…). I would urge her to do some non-plastic alternative, but see the above milk dilemma…

Not depicted: Netflix seal cover thing and extra tyvek flap
If I were in any other industry but the entertainment industry, I’d be fine with canceling my Netflix subscription. But since I am, it’s like a duty to my career to watch as much as possible.

I will try to watch things more often on the internet or rent from the library or Blockbuster (although I think someone calculated that Netflix is actually more environmentally friendly than Blockbuster, in spite of the Tyvek), but sometimes Netflix is the literally only place you can find something.

Band-aid
I used this when I scratched a scab open. Is there such thing as non-plastic bandaids? Is the only alternative gauze wrappings? Will investigate.

Not depicted: Liter bottle of Squirt
I almost completely forgot this and did completely forget to save it for my pile o’ plastic (how convenient). My brother got it for me as a surprise, since I’d mentioned the week before that I loved Squirt. Yes, I drank the whole thing myself. Within an hour. :D


I’m not sure what the total weight of all this is, but I think it’s probably around 6oz. (I was only able to weigh my pile three-fourths into the week, which at the time clocked in at 3.5oz.) But I figure that even if I were a complete saint, I still would have had at least 1 or 2 ounces.

Here’s a useful breakdown for me, in order to figure out why these things happened:

Number of items used in the pursuit of cutting out plastic: 2
Unintentional: 4
Things to change: 5
(Seemingly) unavoidable: 5
Using up from pre-anti-plastic days: 1

As I mentioned, I sucked at this way more than I thought I would (no guilt, Beth! Just the truth!)—and I am now in awe of Beth’s weekly tallies, which typically weigh like 0.5 oz, but let’s look at how much plastic I WOULD have had—PER DAY!!—had I not gone through my my anti-plastic efforts:

-2 plastic wrappers from Balance bars
-plastic-coated hot chocolate packet (let’s not comment on my diet at the time, shall we…)
-plastic packet of coffee grounds
-plastic to-go container
-1 or 2 soda cans (Jesus, my diet was crap)

And this is just the stuff I remember. So I know for sure that I’ve greatly improved in the last couple months.

But as I am not yet at saintly status, I have my new to-do list cut out for me:
1. Try to find paper-wrapped recycled toilet paper
2. Remember to ask not to get a straw
3. Get a bread maker
4. See if I can get hemp seeds in anything other than plastic
5. Cut down on coffee, tea, and hot chocolate (ha!)
6. Stock up on non-perishable food from hippie store
7. Use the library more often for film rentals
8. Check out bandaid alternatives

I think it’d be really interesting to do this exercise again after having made all these changes to compare the difference...

My good deed for the year: saving sea turtles at the LA River

The other day I did probably one of the most goody-two-shoes things I’ve ever done: pick up litter. Voluntarily. Not to serve a community service sentence. Not with a volunteer group. Of my own volition, I grabbed a pair of gardening gloves and went out to the LA River near my house, where I knew that every branch of every tree on the banks would be flying our new national flag, the plastic bag.

Why? Why would I do such a ridiculous thing? I’d actually thought of doing so before just because it’s such a disgusting sight, but never did because it’d be like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. But as with most volunteer efforts, this one was inspired by a good ol’ tugging of the heart-strings. It wasn’t enough just to hear about the Pacific Garbage Patch, in spite of its being twice the size of Texas. It wasn’t enough to hear a blogger mourn over so many dead sea animals. No, it was the plight of one sea turtle that did it—of course, as human emotions are more attuned to the specific than swaths of statistics—the far too mockingly dubbed “Mae West” turtle, who had grown up with a plastic ring around its middle, and thus grew up accordingly contorted. And so a certain line of thinking kicked in—the one like that story about two people who come upon a shore covered in hundreds of beached starfish, and one of the guys tosses one of the starfish back into the water, and the other guy goes, well, that’s hardly making a difference; there are still hundreds of starfish that are gonna die, and the other guy goes, it made a difference to that starfish.

So down to the LA River I went.

The LA River is widely mocked as a concrete, mostly empty canal that epitomizes modern urban blight, particularly that of LA—like, it’s such a fake city that even its river is manmade and not even really a river BLAH BLAH BLAH. As with everything LA, I will defend its river as well—but that’s another blog entry. The part of the river that's close to my house actually looks like a real river: it’s wide and deep and its banks are covered in bushy trees—I suppose because it runs through the Balboa Lake (i.e. city park) area. It’s actually quite beautiful (if you don’t look closely at the water, which, yes, looks like brackish sludge). My favorite place along its course is under the bridge that Balboa Blvd. runs over. It has a cozy, child’s secret place feel to it. So that's where I went to start cleaning up the world.

Even along the way, I couldn’t help but stop and pick up some crap I spotted along the way, just dumped over the fence of the Balboa Lake area. And as I picked all this crap up—soda cups, ripped up Christian literature (interesting story behind that, I’d wager, but even that doesn’t justify its being littered), and, of course, plastic bags—I couldn’t help but become steadily more and more enraged. Did people seriously just chuck this stuff here? Or was it all from honest mistakes? Someone forgot to take their soda with them, someone dropped their papers, someone’s plastic bag blew away from their trashcan… This is the only explanation I can understand, because I seriously cannot fathom people just not giving a shit. Why would they wreck their own neighborhood? Do they figure “someone” will pick it up? How can they think that if there’s clearly old litter all over the place? As I was picking it up, several people passed by, and I wondered, if any of them were chronic litterers and if any of them even noticed, which reaction they had: a twinge of guilt over how they’ve contributed to such filth or a reinforcement of their belief that “someone” would pick their shit up. God, please tell me it was the former.

When I made it to ground zero, there were, indeed, plastic bags stuck in every branch. When it rains, anything and everything from the streets (that assholes have chucked there) flows into the river, the river swells, and when it stops raining, the water subsides and leaves all that crap all over the trees. Amazingly, however, I didn’t even make it to the trees. There was enough shit just on the ground. In fact, there were plastic bags EMBEDDED in the dirt. I’d see a scrap of plastic peeking out of the moist dirt, pull on it, then keep pulling and pulling until I had an entire plastic bag—one time even a whole sign like from Taco Bell or something.

There’s actually another reason I didn’t go near the trees, however: as I approached them, I noticed a tarp tied to a tree: clearly not the work of the rising or falling tide. Some homeless guy had set up camp in a little thicket, and I clearly wasn’t gonna go near that. And actually, as I pulled plastic bags out of the mud, I got mad at him: talk about not giving a shit about your own neighborhood; this guy lives here and he doesn’t bother picking up anything. I suppose that’s kind of a stupid thing to think about a guy who lives on a mudbank, but still. I actually think I passed him as I went home: I was carrying four filled mud-plastered bags down the sidewalk and this pretty grungy looking guy coming the other way clearly figured out what I’d been doing and said something like, “Good work, babe!” I was like, yeah, you’re welcome. Some of what I was carrying was probably his own trash.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I filled FOUR bags worth of crap. I’d actually only brought one plastic bag to fill, but I was able to fill it so quickly and I found so many intact plastic bags that I figured I’d just use them for more gathering.

As I did so, a couple people were working out on the bike path that runs under the bridge—seemed like a personal trainer and her trainee—and they were running back and forth in different ways, and I couldn’t help but think about my malaise about working out: if you think about it, it’s completely ridiculous to spend money on a gym membership to burn calories, where the gym expends god knows how much energy on electricity, A/C, etc., when you could save the earth that energy and use your own energy doing something actually productive. In a way, it’s completely bizarre that someone would hire someone else to clean their house or tend to their garden, and then go and work out in a gym. Is the gym really that much more fun??? I doubt it, with so many people always whining about how they either don’t want to go to the gym or how they never do. So I reflected (smugly, of course) on my secret reason for picking up shit at the river: I wanted to put my calories towards a worthwhile cause rather than running around in circles like the people on the bike path. My shoulders certainly got a workout as I trudged back home with the four muddy bags stuffed with at least a hundred pieces of trash: I had to stop like ten times from fatigue.

Even so, I bet if you'd taken before and after pictures, you'd barely notice a difference.

But as far as I’m concerned, I just saved a sea turtle.

On Kids and Old-Timey Days

In one of the episodes of Alvin and the Chipmunks (not every day I get to start a sentence with that) that I watched at the age of eight or so, the Chipettes are being babysat by this old lady they don’t like because she’s strict and not “hip” enough for them. Although the Chipettes bitch about having to be with her and revolt against her every command, they finally find a common bond through song: it turns out the old lady liked music in her day, too, and the Chipettes and the old lady give a bouncy rendition of “I Wanna be Loved By You.” Moral of the story: even old-timey things can be fun.

I remember even as a kid cringing a bit at the awkward schmaltziness of that episode, but that’s not what really strikes me about it. About ten years after seeing that episode, I watched Some Like It Hot for the first time and was astounded to find that contrary to what the Chipmunks episode implied—-that "I Wanna Be Loved By You" was a saccharine piece of shit--it was in fact a seduction barely appropriate for kids (especially with the blush-inducing, practically see-through dress she’s wearing), making it way more badass than the Chipettes could ever make it seem.

Of course, Marilyn Monroe could even make the Happy Birthday song sound raunchy, and I haven’t heard the Helen Kane version, but I bet it’s more in line with the Chipettes’ and is probably actually the version the old lady knew and loved. But that’s beside the point. The creators of that episode chose that particular song—-out of all songs they could have chosen—-to represent the old-timey days, and they chose one of the dorkiest songs ever (if the Helen Kane version is, in fact, as dorky and obnoxious as the Chipettes’ version), making the “old-fashioned things are fun!” message all the more sugar-coated and unconvincing.

The fact that it’s apparently necessary to sugar-coat the old days to make them seem “more entertaining” is clearly because most kids are resistant to anything created prior to their birth. My sister vehemently refused to watch black and white movies until she was about eighteen. My brother has actually insisted on wanting to only watch something made in the last ten years. I have never been able to understand this, having never been resistant to anything from any age (except the Middle Ages—-they sucked!). It wasn’t a matter of having been more disciplined or tolerant, or even convincing myself that old-timey things could be fun—-it’s that I don't see them as "old-timey". Yes, they were from long ago, but I just see them as different as opposed to quaint and laughable. Because as much as external things change, human nature never does (at least not yet, Isaac Asimov). Therefore, if Marilyn Monroe singing “I Wanna Be Loved By You” was sexy as hell in the 50’s, it’s still sexy as hell now.

How is this different from the moral of the Chipettes? It’s the difference between some idiot saying “LEARNING CAN BE FUN!!” and dressing up a math book with all sort of colors and shit, and saying, no, I like my learning straight up, please. Because in that case, it’s the learning itself that’s fun—-not that all the crap around it is fun in spite of the learning. To me, the idiot saying “Learning is fun” actually serves only to convince me that learning is not, in fact, fun, as if it “protests too much”. Of course, I say this having grown up on Sesame Street and Square 1 TV, whose sole purpose is edu-tainment, but I suppose the difference is that they’re actually effective: they bury the hidden intention to educate so deeply and so skillfully that it feels more like an entertaining show that happens to include educational things-—because why not? The whole world is educational, really. Here’s an example: that famous thing on Sesame Street where they “Brought to you by the letter G” or some other number or letter. Strangely enough, I totally didn’t get that it was a parody until just recently when I happened to randomly think of it, but even if a kid doesn’t get that it’s a parody, they know that many shows say “brought you you by”, and this particular show happens to be brought to you by letters and numbers instead of products (hence this is also an example of Sesame Street’s extraordinary double-layering of humor for both adults and children—-as well as the fact that it’s, mercifully, public instead of commercial television. God, Sesame Street rules!).

I had to confront the horror of “Learning can be fun” head on when I was teaching the SAT to high school students.

The director of the program twice told me that according to the surveys they gave the kids, the area of teaching I was most deficient in was motivating the kids to learn (although even in that I still got about 4 points out of 5). My attitude was like, motivating them to learn is their own damn responsibility! Which is of course exactly why I failed to motivate them. The director’s suggestion to me to solve this problem was to make the class more fun. And I was like, it’s the SAT—-it’s fun already! (Hahaha.) Apparently the director’s concept of fun was doing word games like hangman with the vocabulary words for that week. And I was like, a) how can hangman teach anyone vocab?? and b) that’s not fun. Apparently I was the only one who thought b), because the kids actually did seem to enjoy it the most out of everything else we did. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go through round after round of hangman (and other word games), bored out of my mind, and not because I was the teacher: I’m sure I would have felt the same way as a student, too.

As far as I can tell, by the time you get to the SAT, the time for fun is over. By that time, all you can do is really learn the test. It’s all the learning on the way to sixteen that can possibly afford to be fun, because fun takes time. I so badly wanted to take those kids to plays and get them listening to NPR and reading books on subjects they were interested in instead of random excerpts that were often snoresville even to me, but with a hundred vocab words a week to memorize and the test a semester away, we couldn’t afford to go the organic route, so hangman was all we had. (Not that learning a hundred vocab words a week is a great idea anyway or would really help you on the SAT. Surely there must be some pedogogical theory against it, like there is against cramming.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that most kids hate the old-timey days and learning, and that this completely baffles me. I once had an argument with a kid I was tutoring over the necessity of algebra: you know, the age-old crap about how “I’m going to be a rock star; I’ll never have any use for algebra,” and while I gave him the age-old answer of “you never know,” all I was really thinking was “why wouldn’t you want to learn it just for fun?” I know this seems really goody-two-shoes, but that's exactly the problem I'm talking about: because authority figures ram learning down kids' throats, actually genuinely being interested in something is seen as being "goody-two-shoes". And since when did kids do things based on practicality, anyway? I bet that kid played video games hours a day, which (unless he wanted to be a video game designer) was just as useless to his supposed future career as algebra.

But here’s what I wish I could have said—-to him and the kids in the SAT classes: curiosity is a sign of intelligence. You are not curious—-in fact, extremely INcurious. This is a syllogism. But since you don’t know what that is and have no desire to find out, I guess you’ll never know what I meant by that.

(By the way, this essay would not pass muster for the SAT graders.)

What I wish I learned in college—car accident fatality edition

A lot of people bag on their college education—-they’ve forgotten everything they learned, being able to analyze To the Lighthouse never helped them get a job, blah blah. Now I’m not going to that far. I actually think I’ve actually used my English degree in my chosen profession and even my day job—-and NO I’m not a teacher.

But there are a few aspects to real life that I felt woefully unprepared for upon graduation. For instance, there really, really, really should be a Health Insurance 101. And it should be a requirement. I also wish introductory classes to finance and economics had been a requirement, since there was no way I was going to take those classes of my own volition and take away time from my novel reading, and since I now feel completely lost in regards to economic issues and had to flounder around with my personal finances at square one.

But those aren’t the classes I want to discuss today. Today I would like to discuss the necessity of using education to prevent people from dying in car accidents. Or having them in the first place. And I’m not talking about some lame-ass DARE-type program (although I actually loved DARE, haha) where you see gory pictures of people in car crashes, although I’m sure that helps to an extent. No, I’m talking about evasive driving courses.

Oh sure, evasive driving courses exist, but they cost a shitload of money and no one takes them. And oh sure, you have to take driver’s ed, but that just teaches you how to drive, not how to evade a car coming right at you. At the same time, do you know what your likelihood of dying in an accident is? If you’re in your twenties, it’s the most likely way for you to die, higher than every single disease or other type of accident. Almost every time I get into my car, I feel like I’m stepping into a death trap. I should probably take public transportation more often.

Anyone ever heard of Jacqui Saburido? She’s one of those stories to scare you into never drinking and driving, since she was in a car hit head-on by a drunk driver. And maybe there’s nothing that could have prevented that, even with the most skillful driver at the wheel. But who knows: maybe if the driver had taken an evasive driving course, they would have known what to do and would have avoided the accident, or at least it may not have been as bad as it was (the driver and front seat passenger were killed instantly).

For that matter, I don’t see why colleges (or better, high schools) also don’t mandate courses in Krav Maga. That’s a mixed martial art form developed by the Israeli army that’s the only martial art I know of that actually takes guns into account, making it actually applicable to the modern world. It’s designed for last-resort situations where someone’s going to kill you whether you act or not. Doesn’t that seem like something you might want to know??

You know why they don’t already teach these courses? Other than lack of desire, it’s also, of course, lack of funds. Ritzy private schools, however, have no excuse.

No one wants to think about this stuff. Whenever we have to go to our office’s safety orientation, we kind of chuckle and roll our eyes. But in the middle of a fire, it’s not going to seem so funny. I sure would have like to have taken a “what to do if the ship sinks” course before getting on the Titanic. In light of disasters like that, such training doesn’t seem so quaint.

But it would also be a pain to take all those courses, wouldn’t it? All that time we’d be spending on evasive driving and Krav Maga is time away from what we really want spend our time (and money) on (like plasma screens and WoW). Fatal accidents and attacks happen just rarely enough that they don’t seem worth preparing for—-the same reason a lot of people in Los Angeles don’t bolt down their furniture in case of an earthquake. But we do have enough foresight to have health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, disability insurance—-although a lot of that is—-surprise!--mandated by the state, or else we’d never do it. So why not require training to minimize the risk of ever making a claim on our disability or life insurance in the first place? Who even knows how to do CPR?? (I don’t.)

That said, am I now gonna run out and take such courses? Hell no, I don’t have the time for that. But it sure would have been nice to have done it in college. If I had to.

Doubt--a review

I’m aware that I will seem completely biased against the movie since I saw the play first, but let me try to deny this bias: about a year after I saw the play, I read the screenplay, and was just as thoroughly riveted. The movie, however—greatly changed from the screenplay I’d read—was a massive disappointment.

Kenneth Turan is absolutely correct: John Patrick Shanley (or Scott Rudin?) was so busy trying to make the movie not seem like it was based on a play (not to speak of the fact that no one should ever let Shanley have a camera ever, ever again) that it ended up being merely weighted down by a bunch of miscellaneous, irrelevant things shoved in there (but OUTSIDE of the location where the play takes place, so that makes it a movie!). The worst crime of all that doing so committed was distracting you from the phenomenal speeches that held you transfixed even when it was just a guy standing in one place on a stage. Oh, but “movies” can’t be like that; that would be too boring for the stupid audiences. Really?? It worked for Dangerous Liaisons, for only one example. In that film, Glenn Close delivers a whole speech from a sofa while the camera merely pushes in on her. But Shanley didn’t trust his own damn words, and so completely destroyed the pull of, for instance, the priest’s first sermon, by cutting away to practically everything but the priest every two seconds. This is not MTV, Mr. Shanley. Teenagers are not going to see this movie anyway, so you may as well have plunked down the camera in front of the actors My Dinner with Andre style and let us focus on your beautiful, beautiful words.

Because of all the new, meaningless material, the movie had me sitting back thinking “get ON with it!” while the play (and the screenplay) was so taut that it had me on the edge of my seat practically every moment. It was enough to make me wish that instead of Shanley, in spite of being the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of the play, those adaptation masters Christopher Hampton and/or Stephen Frears had gotten their hands on it.

[By the way, the rest of this review really isn’t going to make sense if you haven’t already seen it.]

There’s another reason why the suspense was completely bereft from this incarnation. In the play, the scenes between the head nun and the priest are like watching a duel between master swordsmen. You’re contintually wondering: did he do it? Did he not do it? Is she really just overly suspicious? Or is her paranoia actually correct? However, Shanley, oddly, answers those questions for us, when those questions are the entire point!!! Guilt is written across Philip Seymour Hoffman’s face in practically every scene. Thus, instead of the question being “did he do it?” the question becomes “is she going to make him admit it?” which sort of detracts from the whole “doubt” theme, doesn’t it?! It may as well be called Certainty for all I can tell. The guy I saw on Broadway, on the other hand, was absolutely convincing in his denial, which greatly contributes to the gloriously frustrating question as to or whether he did it or not.

I wonder, actually, if casting PSH fed into the perception that he obviously did it. Although I was initially excited to see him in the role, halfway through I realized that casting him was a tremendous mistake: I’m sorry, he just LOOKS like a perv. And I’m not the only one who’s ever thought this! Think of all the times he’s played sketch characters, most notably in Happiness. The guy on Broadway, by contrast, was this beautiful, broad-shouldered, leading man type—the kind of guy a lawyer would point to in a courtroom and say to the jury, does THIS look like the face of a child molester? I’m not saying that means that all pervy-looking guys are child molesters, but just dramatically I think it helps reinforce the ambiguity. I’m also not saying the Broadway guy was a better ACTOR—I’m just saying that his type and the way he was directed made for a stronger contribution to the whole point of the play.

On the other hand, Amy Adams was a welcome presense compared to the god-awful Jena Malone on Broadway, Meryl Streep delivers a typical crazy Meryl Streep performance, and Viola Davis was rightly HIGHLY praised in both Ebert’s and Turan’s reviews. Turan calls her the heart of the movie, and she is so especially because she pulls at YOUR heart. Almost the moment you see her, you completely get the immense weight of what it is to be a mother wanting the most for her son and worried that he’ll never get it, and the rest of the scene only gets more and more unbearably heart-breaking. And I’m pretty sure I was NOT as affected by that role when I saw it on stage.

All in all, massively disappointing. I recommend that everyone see or read the stage play instead of seeing the movie, and while I initially had it on my Best Picture shortlist, it has now been bitterly struck from that highest of tiers.

How much I hate shopping

Everyone who knows me knows that I defy the stereotype that girls love shopping. I know, can you believe it? But to my mind, HOW could anyone POSSIBLY love shopping?!?!? Why the FUCK would I enjoy parting ways with my money that I took no small pains to earn for something that I might not end up liking in a few months, when instead I could be putting it in an account to earn 3% interest for things that actually might be important in the future (rent, car payments, etc.)??

I suppose this may seem to mean that I’m just naturally frugal, but I’m actually not the cutting-coupons type; I’m actually kind of bad at that sort of stuff. I suppose I just think it’s easier not to buy something than to have to take the trouble to buy it for less. And so I spend money on those things which I absolutely need to (e.g. gas), or things I try to resist but can’t help myself and buy it anyway (e.g. the occasional latte). I think this comes from when I was growing up, when we were so poor that I hardly ever got what I wanted (including violin lessons, which most (rich) parents would be thrilled for their child to actually want), and I suppose this got ingrained in me, along with contempt for all of consumer society (could that just be a way of sugaring the bitter pill of deprivation, thinking that it’s not that I CAN’T participate, but that I’m too ABOVE it to want to? Possibly, but if so, I don’t want to be disabused of that illusion.).

Anyway, the downturn in the economy has, not surprisingly, exacerbated this tendency, and there’s a specific example that has even me sort of horrified. So, I’ve had a job for the past month that requires “business” wear, which means wearing my only slightly bearable office-setting-appropriate heels. And every day I think about buying some comfortable flats, but every day I balk at the notion of plunking down any amount for shoes when my job is only temporary, I still have Christmas presents to get, and the economy could make my situation even lousier at any moment. Essentially, I’m trying not to spend money on anything I can actually resist, and even though I’m a girl, I find shoes and clothing of any kind eminently resistible (just ask anyone who’s seen my ridiculous array of drab outfits).

This may sound like I should just shut up and not get them, but meanwhile I can only hobble like a block in the heels I’m wearing. One of my ankles has started hurting. I don’t even know what bunions are, but I’m pretty sure I’m getting them. And this is where long-term and short-term thinking come in. Who knows: I could actually be slowly injuring myself with the shoes I have and end up paying more to a doctor than I would have if I had just bought some damn shoes. And yet I still adamantly refuse to.

It’s even more than just a refusal, actually: it’s almost a physical AVERSION to it.
I’ve tried. Recently, I walked into a shoe store, started looking around, and when the salesman asked if I needed help, I bolted. I suppose this is an issue for another blog entry, but I hate, HATE salespeople. They act as though merely your entering the store is a promise that you’ll buy something, and if you don’t, seem utterly offended. You haven’t noticed this? Then it’s probably just my proletarian projection of guilt. But it’s more than that: it’s that the whole process of making someone fetch shoes at your bidding reeks of the hierarchy of a capitalistic society.

I’m sorry for elaborating on such a seemingly banal circumstance, but I think it illustrates how far I’ll go these days to avoid shopping, in spite of my girlness. :P