shall we dance?

It's no coincidence that Christoph Waltz shares a name with a graceful, gliding dance that can be done while conducting affairs of state, acquiring a hostage, cracking a joke, sexing a bitch, and killing a man.

dinner and a

Gainful-ish employment is on the horizon for your fair heroine, and the specter of financial relief rises with the sun. And though I am, in fact, the most indebted person you will ever meet in this life and the next, all I can think about are all the movies I am finally going to get to see.

Harry Potter, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Jennifer's Body, Taking Woodstock, It Might Get Loud, I Sell The Dead...and you know what, I am so movie-theatre-movie-starved I'd even take a matinee of Bandslam at this point.

Going to the movies is one of my favorite things to do, and I haven't done it in months. I know this epic list of flicks is not going to get seen overnight, or perhaps even in the coming months. Still, the fata morgana is enough to get me through the next stretch of desert.

Man, real life problems right?

there's a little flier that says this at the school where I'm about to teach

Watch your thoughts, they
become words.
Watch your words, they
become actions.
Watch your actions, they
become habits.
Watch your habits, they
become character.
Watch your character, for it
becomes...
your destiny.

"Be kinder than necessary,
for everyone you meet
is fighting some kind of
battle."


The flier hangs in a line of baseball cards, under a display case of dreamcatchers.

For this reason and many, I am really looking forward to teaching at this school.

dodging bullets: a fun thing to do/say when your life doesn't consist of dodging real bullets.

If I can package the events and realizations going on in my life into an idiom or generally old-timey sounding saying, I'm going to do it. For better or worse, this is how it is. And boy have I been dodging bullets today. All week, even. Because you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Catch my drift?

I will break it down into non-nonsense terms. This has been a heavy-hitting bad news kind of week. No one is dead and no one is very ill, but the tides are turning kinda suckily for some of the people I love most, and like...me, a little bit. Laying-off of loved ones has taken place. Rejections have been doled out. Boner moves have been made by many, including me and the folks at GoogleMaps and the CTA Trip Planner.

I usually hate using the quaint phrase "everything happens for a reason." I'm all for finding a quarter in your jeans or happening upon a Whole Foods grand opening, but so much random shit is just bad. I don't want it holding high influence over the rest of my day, let alone life. I don't like letting things be, I don't like chalking one up to chance or "how it is." I need to know things. I need to make rain, and I would like the universe's aid in that enterprise.

Long story short, the random bad shit that is just happening...maybe there's reason to be yanked from it, forced free and trotted out like a show pony before being ridden into the Forests of Growth And Change. Losing out could provide an opportunity to not lose out again, or win something greater: understanding, a better job, organic produce...

Maybe sometimes all it takes is a pretty sucky run of it to recharge the waters before dumping them all over your opponents...In this case, the unseen forces that guide bad things towards good people, loss to those who deserve to keep what they have earned, and computer problems to those who need to print lesson plans to finally win gainful employment over.

I don't think everything happens for a reason. But there's a reason the saying doesn't go "when life gives you lemons, just look at the lemons for a while in disgust."