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I had a good week. Eleanor had a freakin' awesome week, considering. But I'm ending the week kinda down, and I think I know why:
Outside influences.
While the missus was at work today, I finally got around to the DVD we rented (at Em's request) of Slumdog Millionaire, she having warned us off making it the center of an evening's entertainment. Within about 10 nanoseconds, I could see why she felt that way, between the pop culture overdosing of the WWTBAM game show motif, the cophouse torture scenes, and the flashbacks to poverty and hatred all the way around- and all that just in the first half hour. THIS is what the Academy thought was the best effort of an entire year? (And this, after the equally troubling No Country for Old Men took home all the hardware the year before and the only slightly more uplifting tale of The Departed won top honors the year before that.)
Okay, so Harry Potter's not going to win anything significant. Neither is anything with a message of hope, friendship and a decent soundtrack. I just worry what will be the talk of the town in 2010 after a year which has all of us even more down than we were a year ago.
----
Then, an effort to uplift wound up jumbled-up and jivey. Last weekend's This American Life riffed on the old Edward R. Murrow series on "This I Believe," being reworked on NPR over the past several months, but since Ira couldn't bring himself to even one act on the main point of the exercise, he presented four stories on the flipped motif of "This I Used to Believe."
Closest to home and heart was one about faith: a dialog between a football coach and a grieving best friend of a recently deceased cancer victim taken far too young. The latter spontaneously contacted the former after he got publicity late last year for a genuine act of kindness in a genuinely unkind sport. The episode traced, and ultimately included, the words between the two of them, but as the coach retreated into Standard Fundie Bullshit rather than listening to the poor woman and telling her what she really needed to hear, I felt a large chunk of my own faith fading. I wanted to throttle this man for preaching when what his "convert" really needed was just plain compassion- the very kind he showed in the onfield incident which brought them together, where, thank God, his prosyletizing tendencies were limited by the First Amendment.
Then he went into some lighter fare involving some acid-washed pants, but my heart was still hurting.
----
Eleanor's home, the Mets won, we ended our first Warm Spring Day with a delectable dose of That Spring Rain Smell, and I'll be okay. I just wish the media would be a little more uplifting sometimes.
Outside influences.
While the missus was at work today, I finally got around to the DVD we rented (at Em's request) of Slumdog Millionaire, she having warned us off making it the center of an evening's entertainment. Within about 10 nanoseconds, I could see why she felt that way, between the pop culture overdosing of the WWTBAM game show motif, the cophouse torture scenes, and the flashbacks to poverty and hatred all the way around- and all that just in the first half hour. THIS is what the Academy thought was the best effort of an entire year? (And this, after the equally troubling No Country for Old Men took home all the hardware the year before and the only slightly more uplifting tale of The Departed won top honors the year before that.)
Okay, so Harry Potter's not going to win anything significant. Neither is anything with a message of hope, friendship and a decent soundtrack. I just worry what will be the talk of the town in 2010 after a year which has all of us even more down than we were a year ago.
----
Then, an effort to uplift wound up jumbled-up and jivey. Last weekend's This American Life riffed on the old Edward R. Murrow series on "This I Believe," being reworked on NPR over the past several months, but since Ira couldn't bring himself to even one act on the main point of the exercise, he presented four stories on the flipped motif of "This I Used to Believe."
Closest to home and heart was one about faith: a dialog between a football coach and a grieving best friend of a recently deceased cancer victim taken far too young. The latter spontaneously contacted the former after he got publicity late last year for a genuine act of kindness in a genuinely unkind sport. The episode traced, and ultimately included, the words between the two of them, but as the coach retreated into Standard Fundie Bullshit rather than listening to the poor woman and telling her what she really needed to hear, I felt a large chunk of my own faith fading. I wanted to throttle this man for preaching when what his "convert" really needed was just plain compassion- the very kind he showed in the onfield incident which brought them together, where, thank God, his prosyletizing tendencies were limited by the First Amendment.
Then he went into some lighter fare involving some acid-washed pants, but my heart was still hurting.
----
Eleanor's home, the Mets won, we ended our first Warm Spring Day with a delectable dose of That Spring Rain Smell, and I'll be okay. I just wish the media would be a little more uplifting sometimes.