Plans for 2011

1. learn to ride a motorcycle
2. visit my Bro-lo in Savannah
3. improve the garden I started last year
4. new roof for the house
5. spend a week in Vermont over the summer
6. foster a dog
7. return to Doe Camp with my mom
8. learn to play bass (for real this time)
9. think before I speak
10. attend the Mermaid Parade (for real this time)
11. cut my remaining student loan amount in half

Things I Do Not Like

1. crowded, delayed commuter trains
2. orange flavored candy (tic tacs, gummy bears, etc. I give the orange ones away)
3. putting the fitted sheet on the bed. I will commit murder if I do not have help with this.
4. red roses. They're too serious.
5. Incubus
6. when the TV is on all the time, or trying to talk when the TV is on
7. wet socks. If I step in the tiniest drip of water on the floor, I have to change socks.
8. ginger. I give it away at sushi places. (Though I love ginger ale.)
9. jelly beans and Skittles
10. Spiderman movies
11. vague answers to personal questions
12. my own indecisiveness
13. the circus. It depressed me when I was little and does so even more now.
14. raking. I'll shovel snow. I'll dig in the garden. I'd mow the lawn if Mike'd let me. But raking is the worst.
15. not knowing how to fix my car myself

Football Tickets

Him: I should go to church Sunday and beg for season tickets.
Me: It's "pray" not "beg for."
Him: Whatever, they both happen on your knees.

Yellow Gumballs

First paragraphs of the collection of short stories I came across today during lunch:

Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. That was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.

Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.

That first sentence especially is perfect. It allows for your imagination to go crazy. Did the gumballs fly out of poor Sheila? Did they fall from the sky?

Can the rest of the book possibly be as good?

The Suburbs

I've listened to the new Arcade Fire album, The Suburbs, practically every day since it came out earlier this month. It's good but not especially hummable -- after it ends it kind of evaporates from my brain.  I wasn't quite connecting.

I've got one of the songs stuck in my head now, though, after stumbling across Arcade Fire's ridiculously cool website. With a little help from the interwebs and your own memories of your childhood, it generates an interactive music video for one of the songs. Nothing puts a tune in your head like a little nostalgia. Give it a try. You'll be humming all day.

Dream Boy

While skimming the Netflix new releases last week a movie title jumped out at me: Dream Boy. I wondered if it was based on the very first gay-themed novel I ever bought, and indeed it was. I remember my teenage self skulking around a Barnes & Noble with that book in my hands, working up the courage to bring it up to the cashier. Justdoit, justdoit, just do it, I probably thought back then, and I'm sure the cashier asked, "Just this today?" and I would've thought, "Just this? Just this?? Lady, this is everything."

It's an odd book to make into a movie in 2010, though, because it is an old-school gay story, from back when no happy endings were allowed. The high-school-age protagonist, Nathan, finds refuge from a lifetime of horrible parental abuse in Roy, the lovely neighbor boy who takes him under his wing and into his hunky arms. Nathan is played by Stephan Bender, known to me only (but well) as young Clark Kent in Superman Returns. Finally getting a smooch from Roy should elicit the same bliss that he showed in Superman when he discovered he could fly, but unfortunately Bender basically cowers through the entirety of Dream Boy. Nathan wears a constant slouch, as though he's perpetually fearing a smack in the head -- a posture that would be appropriate for Clark Kent, but around Roy, you want Nathan to become Superman, and he never does. That's not to say the acting is bad -- Bender seems fully committed, and the love scenes are particularly touching because Nathan is so desperate for tenderness. But still, he's too cute to never flash us a smile.

Or maybe it works. Being old-school gay, this story cannot allow Nathan to be happy with Roy, or even to survive. So yes, at the end of the book and the movie Nathan does indeed get beaten to death by a classmate with the broken arm of a chair. And maybe it's because Nathan was cowering through the whole movie, as though he knew this was coming, that this final outcome is affecting enough to keep me thinking about it days later. Nathan never had a chance. 

The novel was published in 1995 and takes place, I think, in the 1970s, but the movie is set in a timeless neverwhere. Roy drives a 1930s pick-up, but other cars are more modern. There are no computers or cellphones, but the clothes are reasonably current. Even Roy and Nathan seem from opposing eras -- Nathan is scarred and scared, while Roy is well adjusted. The jumbled setting could represent a time like today, where maybe there's marriage equality on the coasts and a young actor can play gay without committing career suicide, but for some kids living their own lives in Kentucky or Louisiana (where this book is set), that hardly matters. Still, when those boys and girls are pacing around a Barnes & Noble in 2010, the book they finally hand to the cashier is at least much more likely to have a happy ending.