Funny Business

The French Deliver Once Again

Yet another twisted movie from the french. You can never predict how they'll end!

Gille's Wife. This is even better than the movie where the guy sells their baby.

So, Gilles falls in love with his wife's hot younger sister Victorine while his wife is carrying Gille's spawn. Soon her husband starts sleeping with Victorine. The wife finds out and when the husband confides in his wife that he's in love with Victorine she just kind of accepts it and starts following Victorine to spy on her for the husband. ! She gets enmeshed in the affair and even kind of supports it.

Turns out Victorine gets engaged to someone else. The husband finds out and starts beating the stuffing out of Victorine for being a ho. ! The wife stands and watches the beatdown for a while, then stops Gilles from killing Victorine.

Later, when the wife confronts Victorine about the affair with Gilles, she just says, "You should have kept Gilles at home." Dag. That's cold!

Eventually Gilles falls out of love with Victorine and things go back to "normal." then one day, the wife just jumps out the attic window and kills herself. Huh. Take that, Disney!

Crypt Keepers

On Sunday I went to the Castle Island Association's Halloween event as the Castle Island fort. The fact that the association is run by the elderly gave the halloween event an extra frisson. No need to draw in frightening wrinkles--they were already there!!!! With the southie grannies standing next to the open coffins, all it would take was one tiny push...

Maybe my nose is out of joint because I went dressed as Pinocchio and you wouldn't believe how many violent comments were directed at my nose. The guy at the gate, who actually had a sword, offered to give my nose a "trim."

Annika not only asked me to take my nose off (embarrassed by me already? I thought she'd be at least 5 before that happened), but tried to rip it off several times. The magician razzed me with, "You shouldn't have lied." And a few yahoos in the fort, yelled, "put your nose back on!" Hey--you try to put your nose back on, when the adhesive it came with doesn't work, and the duct tape you doctored it with has started to come loose in the 75-degree October sunshine! No easy task.

Still the fort is way cool--I've always wanted to see the inside. Me and Annika put our hands out to touch the cool, old stone. You can see the cannons, and they have different rooms set up with cookies and juice, a storyteller, and a magician. There's a grassy courtyard in the middle with free popcorn and balloons handed out, picnic tables, face painting (shamrocks are popular), and tough southie kids cutting us in line.

And I don't want to think we're raising a junior narcissist, but Anni and I looked around and admired all the kids' costumes, from Strawberry Shortcake, to darth vader, to supergirl, to scooby doo, to a sullen Commando. I asked her what her favorite costume was, and she replied: "mine." (Maybe HER nose was out of joint because she wasn't the only Ariel there).

My Pilates Twin

So I've been a huge fan of pilates for the past decade: it gives you a dancer's body--long and lean--but is also a good mind/body exercise. It keeps your core strong, preventing back problems, and balances the sides of the body (one side is always stronger). And it's challenging enough to keep one interested. As with yoga, movement is synched with breathing. I was in pilates on thursday, when I heard the instructor, Tyler, refer to the "tri-state area."

I told him I coined that term too, and we laughed at ourselves. He thought he had invented the term too. Tri-state area is basically  the "trouble" area for many people: abs, butt, and thighs. So when another great instructor, Ama from Rock City Body, would ask what we wanted to cover in mat class, I always said: the tri-state area (and I always aimed to see daylight between my thighs as I worked, which would mean that my inner thighs were more toned and not squished together).

I also coined the term "guylates" to refer to the amazing men who dare to do pilates. (At the time we were trying to recruit more men to come to class.) And you read it here first!

Pesto Secret Ingredient--Plastic!

I got the fresh thai basil at Super 88. Fresh asiago cheese to give it a little bite. Got the healthy whole  grain spaghetti with 7 grams of fiber in it. Got the pine nuts. I still forgot to do what my friend's recipe calls for--adding some pasta water at the end. Instead, I added a bit of a black plastic spoon for flavor.

I was using our ancient blender. No, I don't have a food processor. The kitchen is the size of a broom closet. Anyway, the blender is an Osterizer, built in 1922 and as heavy as a sherman tank. When you turn it on low, it makes a shrieking sound that has dogs howling, accompanied  by a toasty scent of electrical wires frying. Yum!

In fairness to our upstairs neighbors, who I like very much, and since it was after 9 when I got the pesto going, since I had to watch Gossip Girl, I didn't turn the blender on high. That wail will bust an inner ear.

As I added the ingredients I then took my black plastic spoon and stuck it down into the basil leaves. The spoon flew up. There was a loud crack. And a little bite out of the spoon. But where was the plastic? Perhaps somewhere in the kitchen? I had a killer batch of bright green pesto done. I sifted through it and found the black shard. It matched the bite from the spoon perfectly. Finally, we could eat.

Cardboard Crackers are the best!

All the nutritionists want us to eat healthy crackers like Kavli and Wasa crisp. They are crunchy, but taste like cardboard. But because of their high fiber and protein content, they do prevent one (sometimes) from then overeating more, because you're full from eating essentially a cardboard sponge that then expands to fill all 8 feet of your lower intestine. Which can make one feel pretty full. Recently I discovered something thrilling--you can leave  them open for long periods of time and they taste the same. That's because cardboard doesn't degrade. So go ahead, eat all you want, you'll never even know if they're stale! Enjoy good health!

p.s. Dr. Steven Gullo recommends pairing these with a sliver of laughing cow lite cheese for what he calls a "thin pak" to take wherever you go. So you'll always be thin!

Symphony #11 in Meditation

The New England Conservatory purchased the spaces below Back Bay Yoga's meditation room, where I repair on Monday nights with our sangha for an hour.

The bathroom is to the right of the room. The room is in the back of the building, next to an alley. So last night's sitting went something like this:

la la LA la la la laaaaaaaaaa

piano  stops. piano starts. nope. mistake. starts again from the top. Was that an A flat? Let's begin again.

Dance class starts. Thump, thump, THUMP. Thumpity, tappity bump.

BEEEP!!!!!!!!!! [car in alley]

clink, clink [bottles being collected in alley]

Whooossshhhhhh! [toilet flushes]

ah, ha ha ha HAAAAAAAAA La la LAAAAAAAAAAAA...

beep, beep.

clinkety clank.

toilet tank.

flushhh, flushhhhhhhh

Distractions? what distractions?

I shifted positions on my cushion. My knee cracking provided a final, rather embarrassing, crescendo.

Don't read this if you're planning on seeing 'Rachel getting married.'

This sounded like a movie about a disturbed family so I thought I'd see how my family came across on the silver screen. I'm drawn to the dark side. French movies are especially perfect for this, and go way further than any american movie dares: they have better clothes, more full frontals, and more violent catfights. Happy endings? Jamais! (gallic shrug) They're full of superneurotic characters that have conversations about nothing (kind of like a french Seinfeld with all Georges). The kind of conversations I want to have for the rest of my life, preferably while seated in a cafe IN FRANCE drinking lattes.

Most recently I've been watching L'Enfant, a movie about a guy that sells his baby. The best part so far is the mother gets mad when he sells the baby; and when they get it back, he can't understand why she got so mad. Pourquoi? Just guessing: because he sold their newborn?

My mom has recently stated a preference for   "happy movies." May I suggest she stick with Disney and NOT go see Rachel Getting Married? Ann Hathaway was very good. The movie first loses mom points when we discover Ann is a recovering addict. Not happy! Major mom points are lost when we learn that Rachel, high on drugs, accidentally killed her brother while babysitting him. Un-mom! Points lost when Ann punches her mother (Debra Winger!), crashes someone else's benz, and  acts up on her sister's wedding day.  Oh, and a bunch of points lost because Ann doesn't fix herself up and has an ugly haircut in the movie. So about negative 1,000 mom points.

There was some great acting, but the whole premise of the movie was lame. I'm getting married, and even I am bored by movies about people getting married. Let me put it this way: they're just not interesting. Repeat after me: weddings are only fun for the two people getting hitched.

I can't abolish weddings, but I do recommend the entire predictable genre be wiped out, including: My Best Friend's Wedding, Runaway Bride (bride flees from man),  that Australian abba movie (unattractive girl manages to get married somehow), Wedding Crashers (isn't it amusing to crash other people's weddings?), Made of Honor (I'm going to win my girl back before another man marries her), 28 dresses (poor single girl FINALLY gets to be a bride), and any other wedding movie you can think of. At least Rachel getting married had real-life feelings, of course mixed with the glistening gazes and lingering looks typical of this genre.

Shoot, I can go to a family wedding and hear that exact same script as Rachel getting married at the reception for free! At least at family weddings I have the consolation of eating better food than dry popcorn.

Wompatuck Park faku

Fall wind

in the trees

a thousand leaves wave goodbye.

Could Maisie be helped by meditation?

Her little brain just spins, her world revolves, around, ball, fetch, ball, ball, ball, fetch, ball.

Meanwhile, a two thousand pound hunk of metal is tearing towards her and she is totally oblivious to it, her mind spinning, ball, get, ball. She still doesn't understand that a road is dangerous. She thinks ball. She doesn't see the fall leaves, other dogs, other people, the rain, the mud, the trail, the current, rattlesnakes, coyotes, broken glass. She is all ball. 

Maybe for a dog, that's enlightenment.

Sweet Victory

For some, victory is winning an oscar, closing a lucrative deal, or finishing a marathon. For me, it's finding a place. Any place. And last sunday, on my way to Watertown, I tasted sweet victory when I not only found my friend's house without crying, I was able to also successfully park my car.

I entered the house on a wave of adrenaline, because, of course, there had been many wrong turns. But how I have grown! I used to call my fiance from Route 1, on the way to a client meeting, in monsoon tears, almost unable to talk, choking out that I had missed my exit. I didn't know how to get back on the highway, and I was going to be (horror of horrors) late. Although I still can't read maps, and I'm convinced that GPS stands for Getting Plenty Stuck, I can now print out a turn-by-turn from mapquest, and I can sometimes even follow it. Of course, I'm usually tailed by aggro drivers as I haltingly search for, say, Pearl St. I'm usually serenaded by a chorus of beeps and honks, to which I respond with honks of my own, saying in honk-speak, "Hi! I see you! Thanks for noticing me! I love you too! And I feel very cheerful about your aggressive honking!"

This time, I got lost (what in the hell is a Nonantum???), and I got found. And I have only myself to thank.