Biting the bullet

School starts on Tuesday.

My third-year review file will be due toward the end of October.

I've been watching the new Doctor Who series with Christopher Eccleston. It's funny, charming, sweet, and just all around a lovely distraction.

My mom isn't well. Last week, some test results indicated that the chemo was working and the recent kidney scare was in the past. This week, her fever has returned and her appetite is pretty much non-existent; her doctors advised that she skip chemo until she's feeling better. She tells me she's been trying to eat broth and jello and anything that doesn't taste like anything. I leave next Friday for a (planned) quick weekend visit.

I'm trying to think of ways to feel less like pavement. Like I guess I could wear earrings and paint my toenails--pavement doesn't do either of those things. But I'm open to any and all suggestions. So suggestions please!

Hippopajamas

All thumbs 2--or--blah blah blah blah blah

I've been trying to rethink Pan's Labyrinth in terms of magic realism (as a genre) because, well, theorizing is (stupidly) safe. And when you're feeling non-theoretically vulnerable, a little bit of heady BS makes for a nice palliative.

While Pan's Labyrinth is not clearcut magic realism, it does exhibit one of the most consistent attributes found in magic realist texts: real and magic components collapse into each other to deconstruct and then obliterate meaning. Despite Ofelia's attempts to find solace from loss (of nation, father, mother) in Pan's magical world, that world of fantasy suffers from the same problems and is similarly traumatizing for her. In weaving these two worlds together (with Ofelia as the desperate thread), the film leaves us not with meaning, or redemption, or hope ... but simply painful experience. Most magic realist texts have loving and happy experience side by side with the painful--but, yeah, NOTHING in this one. (In that way, it resonates with that one chapter in Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, in which Clara is being tortured.) There is no light at the end of the tunnel ... and Ofelia's (or, really, it would the audience's at this point) ability to imagine that end place in which she can rest in peace (king, queen, and princess reunited) is understood as a ridiculously desperate gesture. And, in some ways, it is. But it is what it is. Loss is loss. And you don't handle it so much as cling to it because ... what else are you going to do when something can NEVER be again?

The problem here is that we usually associate that "clinging" with hope--in the movies we see, that is. We've grown accustomed, I think, to films with ambiguous endings; would I be going too far to say that perhaps ambivalent conclusions are the new Hollywood kiss? Ambivalent endings once meant that the film was challenging the status quo--challenging our expectations. But perhaps, now, ambiguity is itself status quo. We live our lives so quickly and haphazardly that we expect ambiguity in all its shades of grey. So much so that we've grown (or I've grown ...) suspicious of a film that ends with the Hollywood kiss--unsatisfied, unbelieving. Instead, it's the ambiguous ending that seems weirdly comfortable and hopeful--the ending in which we can imagine the possibility of future happiness without having to commit to it. These wishy-washy films--they're losing something for me. Perhaps I'm starting to question why I always cling to the hopeful side of things, despite the simultaneous promise of calamity. Or perhaps I've grown tired of being lazy--that I'd like a clear decision rather than to have several options open to me. But now I'm just rambling.

You could argue that there is ambiguity in Pan's Labyrinth, but I would probably disagree with you. If anything, the film is painfully and horribly in your face and unabashed about being so. And I think I've decided that I don't think that's a good or bad thing. It is what it is (though I would say something about why the female suffers and the male heir gets to survive--but that's all social commentary). Pan's Labyrinth leaves us clinging only to loss, loss, and more loss. Of course I'm not suggesting that all film should now follow suit and be as horribly brutal as Pan, but hey, maybe postmodernism's heyday is finally over. And that would be good.

In conclusion, thank god that I'll always have Mirrormask for when the Pan's Labyrinths get to be too much. Hooray for Mirrormask. You know what you get when you joggle the BA-NA-NAS?!!!

Oh and also--blah blah blah blah blah.

All thumbs

I really wish that someone had warned me that Pan's Labyrinth would not be a good movie for me to watch tonight.

A beautiful film. Definitely. Not a fantasy film, though. Realist to the core, when it comes down to it. And the reality it suggests is one of those that surprises you with your own reality in the harshest kind of way.

I don't know if anyone else had that experience or if it was just me and how I don't think my mom is doing too well right now. Earlier this evening, she asked me if I could come visit her sometime soon, just for a few days. How did she put it? To make her eyes and her ears and her thoughts light. I'm not sure what to do. I think I'm aiming for the first weekend after school starts (in September). Is that what I should do?

This apartment feels empty and my belly feels bloated.

Holy shit

I guess we do treat shit like it's holy. One must not speak of shit. One must not look directly at it. As for actually touching shit?--out of the question.

Unless, of course, there are circumstances in which you're forced to become rather intimate with your bowels and the movements thereof. One such circumstance is when your mom is dying from metastatic colon cancer and you've talked to your doctor about beginning early cancer screenings for your own colon. In other words, I, my friends, have entered the inner sanctum. Or is it rectum? The inner rectum sanctum.

Common wisdom dictates that you should have your first colonoscopy when you're ten years younger than your family member was when first diagnosed. My mom was first diagnosed when she was 55 ... which would mean my screenings should begin at 45. However, my doctor and I decided that, given that my mom was diagnosed somewhat later than ideal (are these things ever ideal?), I should have my first colonoscopy at age 40. Til then, we agreed that I might have yearly, get this, "fecal occult blood" tests done.

Nothing, NOTHING about a fecal occult blood test sounds good, right? Why, for instance, do they have to use the word "occult"? The test is designed to see if there is any blood hidden in your feces. But using "occult" (which I know means something different in medical lingo than in, erm, regular lingo) makes it sound like they're testing to see if you have haunted poop. Like it might start floating about of its own accord. Or start glowing. Or start spinning around really fast, talking like the devil. Something like Slimer, from Ghostbusters. Only brown instead of green. (Mr. Hankey was too obvious a reference so I decided to go old school, and, also, am I grossing you out yet?)

The fecal occult blood test is a take home test--only instead of giving you a booklet and test questions and the easy opportunity to cheat, you're given three paper sheets, three flat wooden sticks, and three slides. The idea is that you lay the paper down in the toilet before you have a bowel movement, "movement" onto the paper, and then use the sticks to collect a sample, which you'll then "smear" on the slide. Three times over three days. They make it sound easy ... but I don't know. There seem to be missing steps. Like how do you collect a sample without getting it wet? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you maintain your dignity in the process? (Oh right!--you let the world know by BLOGGING ABOUT IT.)

Oh and I guess you could cheat on the fecal occult blood test ... but, really, you can pick at your friends, you can pick at your shit, but you can't pick at your friends' shit.

This blogpost notwithstanding, I hear I'm really sexy and you should totally date me.

Hiking, hiking, hiking