this year's model student

i have a self-worth preservation ritual which involves forgetting the papers i had written after their submission to the professor. my final paper for the drama class mentions edward albee, existentialism, history, chromosomes, baby-talk, verb tenses. can't remember now what the paper was about.

when you're good to mommy

my mom has this thing with her skin which we all agree is more an eye problem than an actual skin problem. she keeps saying there are spots on her arms but we (tito, kaye, and i: all three of us) do not see anything there.

so she goes to a dermatologist. dr says she should take glutathione pills, for the antioxidant or whatever function i guess, as my mom already has very fair skin. she buys two bottles and decides after finishing one that it does not solve her skin thing. so guess who gets that second bottle.

hay, wish i could go home every month.

coolness and the literary imagination

so anne rice is serious about her catholic whatever. saw the new book; the back page was all about the surprising subtlety and simplicity of the book. those are two words you do not use to describe this writer.

i realized i was cooler back when i was an anne rice reader (and i had that book too, yikes). as soon as a new book hit the shelves i had it; well, that started with armand, i guess. now i'm stuck with books that were published at least twenty years ago. the gordimers and the greenes and the mishimas. nothing new now.

some person once laughed at me because i told her i read (past tense) the rice vampire books. i said i stopped reading them after the nth book because of this reason and that. should have told her at least i read the books, not their wikipedia summaries. i honestly think she reads just that.

i miss that self reading anne rice. young and stupid.

great beyond

sheriff ed tom bell: ..he killed a fourteen year-old girl. papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. said he'd be fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. said if i left him out there he'd kill somebody again. said he was goin' to hell. reckoned he's be there in about 15 minutes.

tommy lee jones is the philosopher in no country for old men. and it seems he remains just that: a mind that is able to make sense of the bleakness his universe, but is unable to do anything about it. one character even accuses him of "vanity" for thinking he can actually change anything at all.

the movie is about llewelyn moss, the josh brolin character, who comes across a drug deal gone wrong and decides to keep the money he finds there for himself. for moss, it is not about the choices one makes, but rather how one lives after those choices are already made. he spends no time imagining that other possibility without the bag of money. it's already there, already his. the question is how to stay alive.

and finally we cannot forget javier bardem: anton chigurh (moss thought the last name was "sugar"). chigurh escapes definition. one reason why bardem deserves (and would deserve) every award in the world (yes, awards, we all love them): a million actors can pull off a difficult role, a million of them can show a range of emotions without appearing have a torn cartilage, but only a few can tread in that dangerous territory of the seemingly simple and one-dimensional character, and those few manage to make robots and monsters and puppets (which in mediocre movies are fairly easy to understand) not only charming, but incomprehensible, unknowable, more-than-human and therefore beyond the human faculty for reason. chigurh could easily have been the terminator. well, he is not, never was.

no country for old men is comedy; it's the darkest you will ever see. you laugh and cover your mouth. even when alone, you look around to assure yourself no one saw you laughing.