In memory of Suzanne

I was eleven years old when I met Suzanne. She was my sixth grade teacher, and I'm ashamed to say that my class was the reason she refused to ever teach sixth grade again.

We gave her so much grief, and she took it with the grace beyond the realm of mere mortals. No matter how bad things got, how bad her life went, she faced it with a relentless optimism she wore like a suit of armor – ready to wield a joke and flash that beautiful smile.

I never would have guessed then that that rocky start would be the start of a friendship that has lasted 15 years.

Suzanne taught me so much, which is fitting all things considered.

She taught me that musical theater was more than just Cats. And that Steven Sondheim is by far superior to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

She taught me that to cut in line at Disneyland all you needed was a wheelchair and a friend willing to push you around – I'll give you three guesses on who was pushing whom.

She introduced me to the wonders of Ray Bradbury, and for the next three years took me to the LA County Book Fair to meet him – where I lugged three hundred pounds of books on her behalf.

She taught me the value of a good book isn't in how how much it entertains you, but by how much it changes your world.

She found it impossible to walk by a bookstore. They pulled her in like a giant lodestone – and she was the magnet. And once there, I don't think I ever saw her buy anything for herself. It was always “here, you'll love this” or “I should get these for my students”.

Her generosity was limitless.

Suzanne introduced me to Auntie Mame, and I cannot count the number of times she turned to me and say in her most dramatic interpretation “Dahling! Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

Suzanne never starved.

She lived life in a way that made every moment seem precious. A Thursday wasn't two days before the weekend, it was a chance to see a 1950s movie at an LA cinema or go to the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

She was a role-model in the best sense of the word.

She taught me that love was finding that one person who loves you for everything that you are. Who isn't blind to your faults, and loves you not in spite of them, but because of them. I can say, without any equivocation, that one of the proudest things in my life is that I helped Suzanne reunite with Tom.

She did so much for me, I will take credit for what little I could do for her.

Suzanne also taught me how to stand up for myself, and that being a woman means finding the strength and confidence from within yourself to go on when life was hard.

And her life was hard. She was dealt more blows than any person should ever have had to deal with – but she faced them with that spirit and cheerfulness and an unwillingness to accept things just because someone told her to. Some people might call that stubbornness, I call it willpower . She fought for every inch and earned everything she had.

But Suzanne's real gift was that she really and truly believed that you could do anything, and more so than that, she would talk to you, listen to you - and in the end, you believed it to.

Her ability to inspire and motivate was astounding and unwavering – she would believe in you long after you had given up on yourself. She was always available for that three AM phone call because you felt your life was falling down around your ears.

And she could pick you up and put the pieces back together without ever breaking stride.

Suzanne gave every person she met their own set of wings, stamped with her bright smile as the seal of approval, and she never asked for anything in return, she'd just stand back and let you fly...

I just wish we didn't have to do it without her.

To explore in peace

In 1969 two men landed on the moon without full certainty that they would be able to take-off again. William Safire drafted the following in case Michael Collins was forced to abandon his two compatriots on the moon:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown

Moving

I have nothing pithy or entertaining to say about moving other than I wish it were over. Instead, have this -

*******************

Packing all of your belongings into a U-Haul and then transporting them across several states is nearly as stressful and futile as trying to run away from lava in swim fins.

(Go read the rest at Hyperbole and a Half)

Is he viscous?

We have a theory in my family that my mom's boyfriend is a Russian spy. We believe this because he gets simple words mixed up - like plate and bowl - that someone who learned English as a second language might struggle with.

Case in point...

Move On

A lot has changed in the last year since I wrote this.

But vengeance is not justice. They could hang Osama bin Laden on Ground Zero itself, resurrect him and do it over again a thousand times and it would still never be enough. My grief, our grief, is too strong, too close to be satisfied by something so trivial as revenge. I remember as well as anyone the bone-deep need for reprisal, but vengeance is not worthy of us. Not then and most certainly not now.

Back then I shared my own grief over September 11th simply as an American. I tried to be as calm and measured about it as possible. This year I'm not going to be - this year I'm going be whatever the opposite of that is.

It's time to move the fuck on.

On May 2nd, 2011 a group of American Navy SEALs shot bin Laden in the head. And for a little while it seemed the world was a better place. But quicker than anyone could have really imagined we got over it.

Every year, on September 11th, my television becomes an endless cycle of plane crashes and buildings falling. We've started two wars - twice as many American have been killed in those wars than died in the World Trade Centers*. Do you think, even for a moment, that May 2nd will receive the same treatment? I had to look that date up just now on Wikipedia, that's how little of an impact it made on me.

We can't keep this up forever, we can't stay mad - we can't wallow in out grief. It isn't healthy. If an individual did what we collectively have done as a nation every year they would be recommended to psychiatric care.

Do we forget? Never.

But can we please, for the love of god, move the fuck on?


*WTC Deaths: 2977; Deaths in Iraq/Afghanistan 6026

Date a Girl who Reads

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

-Rosemarie Urquico

Apollo 18

(I forgot to hit post on this back in Sept. My bad)

Holy shit people. At one point, with my feet in the seat and my hands over my ears I was squinting at the screen waiting for the bad thing I just knew was coming and realized that the thump-thump, thump-thump I was hearing wasn't onscreen, but my own goddamn heartbeat. My heart has not beat that hard for that long ever.

When the movie finished I think I was in legitimate medical shock. I was laughing hysterically and shaking. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.

Holy shit.

Best
Movie
EVER.

Like many of the movie that have come out the last few years, Apollo 18 claims to be a 'found' movie - cobbled together from footage rather than actually filmed. In some cases this can be ridiculous as the production values give away the secret, no matter how much shaky-cam you have. (I'm looking at you Cloverfield). In Apollo 18 the film is scratchy, the colors occasionally over-exposed - I could actually buy into the concept that this was footage from the 1970s.

And that's what makes this movie so scary. You know it's just a movie - you're not watching some special on the History Channel (which has lost all credibility so I wouldn't have been surprised if it was), but you can believe that you are. There's no soundtrack, and the cameras are either stationary on the lunar lander or the handheld ones from the astronauts.

The scariest moments come in snippets - not when things are jumping at you - which by and large they don't. This isn't really a loud noises and bloody movie. It's noticing things moving where they shouldn't be, details and minutiae that you as the viewer are privy too but the astronauts are not. You watch it build up, over and over and over again until you're wound so tight you feel like you might just burst. And the really awful part is?

It never lets up. By the time the credits rolled I was shaking. I started laughing at myself for being so shook up, which quickly took on the edge of hysteria.

Now okay, fine, I'm not a horror movie person so this movie might have been chock full of clichés (I hear it was) of the 'found movie' genre. But since I'm not a scary movie person, they were all new and intensely terrifying to me.

I don't want to ruin a moment, I don't want you to not see it because I say something that makes it sound stupid. Go to the theatre, go rent it, watch it in a darkened room and then go outside and take a good long look into the night sky.

And your doom.