Mountains Made Low

The time has come once again to update you on my New Year’s Resolutions. I can’t believe another month has already gone by since I posted the April update, as part of my mad rush to get to 30 posts in April — I’ve already confessed, of course, that I won’t get to 31 posts in May, so I’m fortunate that the one post per day, on average, on a monthly basis was not a resolution. Without further ado, then, the update:

#1 & #2: Still on the “so far, so good” front. It’s still involving a lot more bike than anything else these days (particularly since I’m not on campus every day anymore and don’t have as ready access to the gym). I’m actively contemplating equipping the house with weights, though, in an effort to keep #2 going strong (the pun was accidental, but I like it).

#3: Though for the first two resolutions “no change” is a good thing, I would really like to report a change here, at some point. Not that I’m in a hurry to break the resolution, because, well, that wouldn’t necessarily be good change, but to have to keep writing, month after month, “still going because I haven’t had the opportunity to break it”…. Well, you get the point.

#4: This one, though, is another where no news is good news. I haven’t really encountered all that much passive-aggressive behavior, and when I have, I’ve been really good at shrugging it off.

#5: Going very well. I’m way ahead on this one, now. No matter how you cut this one, I should be to 12.5 books read and reviewed on the year, at the end of May. I’m at 16. If I keep going at this pace for the rest of the year, I’ll be to 38 by the end of 2009. If I do that, maybe I’ll have to set my 2010 goal for 40.

#6: Not going quite so well. I fell behind on my movie watching this month. Don’t know quite how that happened, but I guess I shouldn’t really complain. This is the least important to me of my resolutions, in part because of the sedentary and passive nature of the activity (reading, per #5, may be sedentary, after all, but it’s not passive). But I am behind. I should be at 20.8 movies on the year, and I’m at 18. The particular joy of this resolution (and #5) is that I can fall behind for a while, and catch up — I won’t have broken it until I’m at fewer than 50 movies on December 31.

So that’s it. That’s where I stand in terms of my 2009 resolutions as of May 31.

Okay, a books post and a movie post with both works having definitely in the title? What’s up with that. Next one (on both scores) doesn’t, I promise.

Movie #18 (2009)

I like the story that writer/director Adam Brooks tells in Definitely, Maybe. Until the very end.

Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) is a man in his late 30s in the midst of a divorce, who prompted by his daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin), recounts the story of how he courted and married her mother. But Will’s young life was not an uncomplicated love story.

As a young man, Will moved to New York City to work on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, leaving his college sweetheart, Emily (Elizabeth Banks behind in Wisconsin, though she remains Bachelorette #1 in his story. He meets Emily’s friend Summer (Rachel Weisz) in New York, and, over time, becomes romantically involved with her. Further complicating this story is Bachelorette #3, April (Ilsa Fisher), with whom Will works on the Clinton campaign.

The story spans years. Will proposes to Emily, and is turned down. He becomes involved with Summer, though she, as a journalist, writes a story that ruins a later political campaign that Will is working on, after they have become engaged. April has, in the meantime, realized that she is in love with Will, and when his relationship with Summer ends, he realizes he’s in love with her, too, but they’re never single at the same time, though he does find the inscribed copy of Jane Eyre that April’s father gave her when she was a girl, that she had subsequently lost; he decides not to give it to her when he meets the man she’s living with — and he just holds onto it.

It turns out, as Maya figures out, that her mother, Sarah, is actually the woman whom Will calls Emily in his story. Summer, it turns out, is really named Natasha, but for some reason Will hasn’t changed April’s name. Maya, one smart little girl, realizes that her dad is still in love with April.

To this point, the point where will reveals that Emily is, in fact, Maya’s mother, and he tells her that she, Maya, is the true happy ending to his life’s lovestory, I enjoyed it. The element of mystery, the accurate depictions of love’s complications, and the fact that Will can see the joy that his daughter brings to his life as the most important thing all come together to make a fine story.

And that’s where this takes a turn. Because Brooks can’t leave well enough alone. He has Will take the inscribed copy of Jane Eyre to April’s workplace, where she berates him for holding onto it for so many years. Then Maya pushes Will to pursue April one step further and tell her the whole story. And it works.

Which, of course, undermines the message of Maya being Will’s personal happy ending. And that sort of made me ambivalent about the movie by the end.

But the story, until that point, was interesting and well-told. The acting was well enough done, and Breslin, as Maya, was particularly good, I thought. The bottom line, though, was that what I thought was going to be a non-traditional RomCom ending turned into a predictable one, which was a little disappointing.

Book #16 (2009)

After I finish this post, I’m taking a break from the Sookie books (Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries series) for a while, though I have three to go. I’m still enjoying them, but I may be in the process of ODing. Definitely Dead is #6 in the series, and there was one element of this book that put me off a little bit, which I’ll get to.

The title of this installment refers to the way in which vampires refer to their second deaths, because of course, each of them has already died once — a human death — and once they have died again as a vampire (through staking, burning, exposure to sunlight, or beheading) they are “definitely dead.” It also refers to the way in which, as the story unfolds, Sookie learns more and more about the supernatural world around her. She learns that this phrase is how vamps refer to their vampire deaths.

In this book, Sookie travels to New Orleans, for an audience with Sophie-Ann Leclerq, the vampire queen of Louisiana, and to close her cousin Hadley’s estate (Hadley was, briefly, a vampire, and the queen’s girlfriend). The cast of supporting characters is replete, as usual, with vampires, Werewolves, other weres, shifters, and witches. Sookie begins a relationship with Quinn, a weretiger. Her brother, Jason and his girlfriend Crystal (both werepanthers) express their intention to get married, and suffer a miscarriage. And in this book, Sookie learns some specifics about the existence of demons, and that she has some small measure of fairy blood, though this is probably unrelated to her “gift.”

The witches in the book include Hadley’s former landlady, Amelia Broadway, with whom Sookie establishes an easy friendship and who returns to Bon Temps with Sookie at the end of the book, feeling the need to get out of New Orleans for a bit.

The book closes with the outbreak of a vampire war between Louisiana and Arkansas. And that, along with bringing a powerful witch to Bon Temps and dating the very powerful weretiger, provide the plot hooks for the next novel.

Hadley’s death is the probably the most problematic part of this book, because it is introduced as a fact of Sookie’s life and has a great deal of backstory associated with it — backstory that is established in a short story published outside of the novels. I spent much of the book — the parts dealing with Hadley, Hadley and the queen, and Hadley’s estate — feeling like I’d missed something. I know that a one-off short story in another anthology that does something as drastic as killing the main character’s cousin has to be acknowledged in the on-going storyline, but I spent the first 100 or so pages convinced I’d skipped a book. Until I looked it up online.

So if you pick this one up, remember that you didn’t miss anything (presuming you’ve read books 1-5), at least as far as the novels go. Of course, the collection of Sookieverse short stories (published in other anthologies, for the most part), is due out in October.

But for me, for now, it was off-putting enough that I’m going to take a break. Well, that and I’ve got a list of recommended books to get to and my own desire to read the new Lisa Unger paperback. I really am Sookied out for the time being.

So it really doesn’t look like I’m going to make it to 31 posts in May. There must be something about May — May 2008 was the last time I didn’t make it to at least one post per day in a month. I can’t say for sure what it is about May, in general, but I can explain — at least a little bit — about this May.

I’ve been reading (and I’ll have at least one more post about books in May), and I’m still one post behind on movies, which I hope to remedy before the end of the month, as well. Also, there’ll be the monthly update on the New Year’s resolutions.

However, I’ve received feedback — back-channel commentary — that these posts aren’t exactly my forte. I have at least one reader who’d rather read about my day-to-day life, preferably coupled with profound insights about the world in general, based on my own experiences.

Demanding bunch, my readers.

Now there’s something to be said for the fact that I’m “on break” at the moment (spring semester ended early this month, and summer school starts on June 15), and I must, therefore be lacking in experiences to write about. There is that argument to be made; I’ve got to say, however, that I’m not going to make it.

Because it’s just not true. I actually have quite a bit going on right now. Believe it or not. I really do, but…

Most of what’s going on for me at the moment falls into one of two categories: Things I specifically do not write about (if you’ve been reading here a while, you know what those are), and things I do not feel comfortable writing about just yet — career- and work-related developments that will either be cause for celebration or cause for venting. I’m just not sure which yet.

So there you have it. There is stuff going on — really. And some of it you’ll find out about in the fullness of time (as will I). Some of it you won’t find out about explicitly, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

So I guess I’m stuck with saying that there’s just something about May.

I went to the Blossom Time Festival in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, yesterday.

I remember, when I was growing up, that I always looked forward to the 4th of July week festivities in Orrville, including, of course, the fireworks, but also the carnival. Orrville’s Independence Day carnival was an event on the go places and do things calendar of my childhood (and especially my teenage years, particularly 16+ when my friends and I could drive ourselves) that was pretty much matched only by the Wayne County Fair, every year in September. Of course, I knew that every county had a county fair (and I also knew that ours was the best), but I wasn’t particularly aware of other towns or villages having festivals, carnivals, or street fairs.

In the 15+ years since I graduated from high school, of course, these events have faded off my radar. I don’t plan around the fireworks and the fair the way I used to, in the same way that the annual trip to Cedar Point just doesn’t seem as important (I haven’t been since, I think, right after my junior year of high school). So I haven’t learned much about what other places do in this regard, either — though I do hear a lot from people all around me, seemingly wherever I go, about farmers’ markets. And I wonder about that sometimes, but not too much.

But like that Fourth of July event on my childhood calendar, I learned this weekend that Chagrin Falls has a spring time (Memorial Day weekend) festival every year. And yesterday, I had the opportunity to check it out. And it was fun. A lot like I remember the days that I remember from my childhood with the parade and the carnival.

All set, of course, in a much more picturesque locale than the event I keep comparing it to, complete with the village’s eponymous falls on the Chagrin River. Parade, carnival food, crowds, and a beautiful in-town setting — not to mention good company.

An enjoyable event, all told.

There are some very specific cases in culture and in life where words become actions — where by speaking the words we take, or commit to taking, the actions the words embody.

None of them is probably more evident than the simple sentence, “I quit.” Because in some instances, you’d best be 100% ready to back those words up — live them out — when you speak them: jobs, and to a lesser extent relationships, come readily to mind here.

Other times when we say “I quit,” we need to be ready to work at living them out — they don’t automatically become real (as in the case of immediate unemployment when they’re spoken in terms of a job), but they represent a goal, a plan, or a desire.

I thought that I’d let you all know here, today, that at the end of the semester, I spoke those words in a context wholly unrelated to work. And in terms of making good on them, it’s tough, and I haven’t been perfect yet, but so far it’s going well enough that I thought I’d mention it here.