And then somehow getting their studios to press hard for an Oscar nomination.

My main problems are as follows: Why can’t these directors convey a “heavy” message without their stories crawling at a pace more languid than Cate Blanchett’s excruciating drawl?

I understand that there are tax breaks for filming in the Big Easy, and it’s somehow become patriotic to film down there. But not everything below the Mason Dixon Line moves like a cripple stuck in molasses . It is possible to tell a story set in the south without falling victim to plot torpor. (See: Hustle and Flow.)

Here’s the takeaway from Benjamin Button–the version that will save you almost 3 hours of precious existence: Life happens. Now you can skip the effects, which are supposed to be so riveting, and spend your money on Australia instead. Believe me, you’re better off for not having wasted 25 minutes at a Russian hotel for no reason.

Changeling: if I never see another skeleton on roller skates shed crocodile tears it’ll be too soon. Here’s the flick in a nutshell: Never, ever fuck with tha LAPD. Especially if you’re a woman.

Now, come on heavy-hitters: make me feel something, think something, AND plaster me to my seat. I don’t need an hour and a half of set-up to get me into the story. Really, I don’t. I’d much prefer to get in, get out, and leave with mascara streaming down my cheeks.

If there’s enough time for my makeup to dry again before the credits roll, you haven’t done your job.

Uh-oh.

I immediately started singing some made-up song, something along the lines of “Hello, bear, don’t eat me please,” and called to the dog. For the life of me, I couldn’t see a second set, though the human footprints ahead were pretty thick. Luckily, I couldn’t see the bear, either, though I made the executive decision to turn around as quickly as I could and get the hell out of the big guy’s backyard. “Leaving now, bear, please don’t eat me, la, la, la, la, la….”

I’ve seen lion tracks before, and actual mountain lions. But I’ve never in my life seen four prints the size of a small dinner plate, apiece. Somehow, seeing evidence of a gigantic (and, I imagined, man-eating) bear scared the crap out of me in a way a lion never could. I still have some sense of cougars as magical creatures. As if the lion I saw was there to protect me. No way could I ever think that about a refrigerator-sized bear. I would’ve been an appetizer.

In the back of my mind, I harbor a bigger fear than getting eaten by bears. I worry that my ability to spot animal tracks might mean the end to any chance of returning to an urban center of civilization.  I want to be a city girl, I am a city girl, and I am increasingly becoming country-fied.  I suppose I could view my Pocohontas skills as insurance that I return. Brooklyn woman spot bear tracks, Brooklyn woman leave woods and therefore live to return home to the mother ship.

Of course, I also have enough Brooklyn in me to plan a hike back up there over the weekend.

Maybe I’ll bring a camera and win some National Geographic contest. (A triptych: Here’s me. Here’s the bear. Here’s me losing my left leg to its oddly-powerful bite.) We’ll see what my blisters say. “Tempting fate, bear, la, la, la….”

Yes, there are indubitably more scientific explanations for the weather event, but this is my blog, and I’m sticking to my own brand of meteorology….

We lost some trees (read: gained some firewood) and had to track a couple garbage cans down the street. The wind kept it up all night long, raging against anything that dared stand in its way. My house dared, and it creaked with the effort all night long. A successful effort, it pleases me to report. 

By Thursday, the air was relatively still, again.

It felt, for all the world, like some despotic monster raging against the loss of a political dynasty.

Our first black President.

Damn. I’m crying again.

After a quarter of my life under the worst administration in history, I finally feel represented. As trite as it may be by now, I am hopeful. We have a leader who can speak well, decide his own policies, and offer a voice for people who never had one in America before.

At the risk of sounding just like every other wide-eyed liberal, I’ll stop here. And cry some more.

To start off with, there are no more than a half-dozen gastroenterologists in my insurance network. The only one within 200 miles of me doesn’t “do” office visits. You have to meet with his nurse practitioner. So I met with the nurse practitioner. She asked me maybe five questions about my medical history, then had me describe my symptoms. I did so. From that, she determined that I need an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, and biopsies of every digestive organ.

Really?

The nurse never took my temp, or blood pressure. I’d been running a fever all week. Now, I’m no medical professional, but wouldn’t that be important to suss out? Also, how can you prescribe the appropriate anaesthetic without determining if I have a heart condition?

I called the office the next day to find out how much this was going to cost me. The doctor’s fees alone were more than $3,000. Then I was told to expect separate bills from the surgical center, the anaesthesiologist, the lab and the pathologist. Five bills in all. It’s looking like at least an $8,000 fee. For the doctor’s CYA.

I cancelled the appointment yesterday. My own diagnostic skillls said it’s a gastro-racket. I can’t see throwing money at the problem without good odds of a diagnosis. 

So my belly is still funky, but my head and my heart are in tandem. And my wallet is eternally grateful.

It didn’t work in American Beauty and it doesn’t work here.

What amazes me most about this “technique” is not that a man best known for writing about masturbation would use it in the first place. Obviously, Roth is used to hooky premises. Rather, what really rankles is that the book been so well reviewed! Marcus Messner is a bore and an egotist. Yet another Zuckerman-esque mirror image of the author himself. What about this young man–aside from the fact that his life will be cut short (mercifully, for readers)–is supposed to draw me in? 

My criticisms have been met with interesting responses. I’ve been told the equivalent of “You’re not Jewish. You can’t understand.” Or “You won’t appreciate it without a penis.” Ah, so, with a circumcized penis I’d say it smacks of brilliance. Without the requisite reading “tool,” all I see in Roth’s books is bad writing.

I’d be tempted to let it go at that, if I hadn’t been so affected by another circumcized teen male in literature: Holden Caulfield. Now here’s an equally confused, sexually inexperienced, philosophically floundering, prideful kid. Yet he’s endearing. And the world surrounding him is worth wasting time on/in/around. Salinger may have dropped out of society, but he didn’t leave Philip Roth his crown.  

I’ll plow through the remaining pages of Roth I have left, all the while congratulating myself for taking it out of the library–heaven knows what I’d do with it on my shelf. (Speaking of which: any ideas on the choice of cover “art?” The Irish flag? Meaning what, exactly?) Once I’m done with this novel, though. I’m done with Roth in his whining entirety.

Sorry, Nathan Zuckerman, but life is too short for your trials and tribulations. Today may be the first day of the rest of my Roth-free life. A perfect day, in fact, for bananafish.

It seems that I’m spending too much time on networking sites, pretending it’s possible to go back in time. It’s addictive: seeking out posts, comments, feedback, sending out feelers, acting like it’s possible to circle the wagons again. The great lie, as I see it, is in pretending that everything old can be new again.  All the good old times? They’re all there! While any regrets, guilt, past harms, fears and idiocy are erased by the appearance of an acquaintance’s avatar on my profile.  If whatsisname agrees to be my virtual friend, then I couldn’t have done anything tooooo bad in my darker days. Right?

As soon as I type the facebook web address into my browser, I am at once in elementary school, junior high, high school, college, grad school, and every one of the (ahem) bakers’ dozen years since. I am every person I have been. For a few minutes, I can pretend that it’s possible to throw a party with past, present and future friends. And be witty, charming, and desirable to them all.

Mathematically, it’s a simple truth to assign the term connectedness to two objects. In Wyoming, I find it difficult to meet anyone worth having lunch with. Refreshing my web page won’t help me through the reality of being very much alone in my outspoken, flighty atheism in a hardworking, Christian ranching community. My paths cross with several people every day. I connect with no one.

But what do I know? The last math class I took was calc in high school. My checkbook isn’t exactly a paragon of mathematical precision. And heaven knows, I use a machine to perform every basic numerical function that isn’t the nine times table. (For that, I still use my hands.)  Maybe even math is harder than it seems. Maybe it’s hard to connect in any form.

When the clock clicks over to 5:00 and I’m still here, I will claim it as a major victory.

Seriously, some days I think intelligence ought to be treated like a disability. Just as the stalls are fitted with handrails for wheelchair-bound employees, desks should come with logic puzzles that must be solved correctly in order for you to log into your computer. Every half-hour another one will pop up–in varying degrees of difficulty. If you hire someone with a brain, you should be forced to feed it. Asking a smart person to perform a rote task is like putting the coffee all way to the back in the top cabinet and wondering why the man with no legs feels sleepy.

One day I won’t need to drive 25 miles to pretend I’m not weighing my career options as I stare out the window: homicide, suicide, death by cop…homicide, suicide, fuck it. I can do more than this. I already do–four or five nights a week, I get at least 2 blissful hours of writing time. To pretend that my gray matter matters.

’til then: I’ve got another 8 ounces of water waiting….

For months, the Wall Street Journal has been pushing their liberal election agenda. It feels odd to me to be so affected by a point of view that I honestly agree with. But the source is wrong. I think the WSJ should give equal coverage to the candidates. They don’t pretend to. Thoughout the campaign, the rare McCain article was nearly always accompanied by an unflattering picture. They’d shoot top-down, emphasizing his heavy jowls. The pictures they chose to print of Obama were shot straight-on, or from below.

I only had a few photography classes, but even I know this kingmaking technique.

Today’s article was the worst, however: an “expose” of John McCain’s slaveowning forefathers, and the line of African Americans descended from that plantation. Above the fold. How much more obvious does it get when you smear a candidate with slavery in the first election with an African American candidate on the opposing side?

It doesn’t change my vote. But it will doubtless influence others. Not what I consider the best journalistic ethics. Whatever happened to straight shooting and fact checking? I guess Murdoch’s influence is already in play….

My naysaying streak extends from small rebellions, such as “I’m going to wear jeans on Thursday not casual Friday” to “religion is silly.” I can take it even further, mercilessly criticizing those who have the gall to impose their sheepish beliefs on the populace. This is something I’ve gotten flak for recently, and while I invite anyone who feels “sick for two days” after reading my blog to kindly never log on again, it has also made me consider that maybe I could stand to be a tad more generous. After all, if Jesus Christ did return to earth, there’s no sense in my standing around making fun of the holes in his hands. “Who does this guy think he is? Hey, buddy, what’s with the Birkenstocks….”

I certainly am not proud to be an American, these days, but I have to say: I’m not willing to drop out and stop paying taxes, either. I like my libraries, my paved roads. My (lipservice?) freedom to worship what I will or won’t. Above all, I like that I can keep to myself–a right that I preserved by moving to the least populated state of the nation.

I wonder if the world’s financial markets would’ve been as hard hit if the rest of the developed world had chosen, instead of following the (U.S.A.) leader, to write their own economic rules. To break out from the fold–creating their own market models. As is, we have no safety in numbers at all, only a monster credit nightmare that may not go away in my lifetime.

While it’s a bit officious to justify my cutting sarcasm by saying “if we all walked to the beat of our own drums, none of this would’ve happened” it does seem to be a tiny bit true. Maybe I don’t need to cut so deeply, but honesty doesn’t always feel good. We’re broke and we’re getting broker. We’re religious and getting religious-er. Coincidence?

It’s my truth: cruel, neurotic and unpatriotic though it may be.