Friday Night Light

I wish you were here with me now.

I wish you could see what I see.
Green.
Two cats lolling. Shooting me dirty looks when I hit the keys too hard and shake the chair.
The sun still doing its part to keep the sky blue and the clouds white, even as it dips below the treeline and prepares for rest. It's the most magical kind of light, I think. You probably do, too.

I wish you could hear what I hear.
Din.
The nothingness that is really something, really life just outside the city.
Strains of the season's first ice cream truck melody as it turns a corner somewhere nearby, and elicits the muscle memory our faces store from childhood -- perked ears, wide, bright eyes and a perfectly shaped "o" as our mouths suck in the air and let out the sound of happy surprise.
The birds calling to one another, making plans for the holiday weekend ahead. The whippoorwill, flirting with the cardinal, eyeing the sparrow.
Laughter and chatter and people happy to be around one another. Happy to be where they are. Happy to be here.

I wish you could feel what I feel.
At ease.
The peace, the calm, the promise of summer in the air.
Relaxed.
Restless too. Ready for what's next. Another city, another chapter. Another beer.

I wish you could breathe what I breathe.
Freshness.
The air is different here, really. It's crisp and it's perfumed and it makes you want more of it. I could tell you about the flowers that force your head back and your nostrils open, make you pull deeply in so the fragrance enters you physically, except I don't know the names of very many flowers.
Someone's grill, smoky and thick and meaty.

It's just a backyard. There are millions of them. They've all got windchimes and neighbors and porch swings and beer bottles. I like to think that right now, right this minute, they're all warm and cool at the same time. They all hold the secret to good times and good things to come, to summer soaking in and time slowing down. And they're all lit, just like this.

I wish you would want what I want, to be here, with me, now.

Year in (Book) Review: Bridget Jones's Diary

Okay, first things first: everyone must, from this sentence forward, read the rest of this book review in a British accent. It makes everything more fun, and if Renee Zellweger can do it, surely you can too. I will try to sprinkle in a few fun English words like "crikey" and "jolly." Actually I think crikey is Australian, so scratch that one.  Anyhoo...

Such high hopes for this one. I picked up the Helen Fielding phenomenon at the library last week (because that's a practical, exemplary and safe low-budget thing to do), thinking to myself that I'd really like to write a funny book that would become a funny movie and cast myself in it and just sit back and watch all my dreams come true. These are the ways I spend my days, for all curious. So I thought, again to myself, that perhaps it would behoove me to pick up a book that I wished I'd written that prompted a movie that I would have liked to be cast in. Enter Bridget, of course.

To preface, I thought this was one of the most perfect movies ever. It was superbly acted, hysterically funny, and made me feel better about my weight obsession, because, as the famous saying goes, weight obsession shared is weight obsession divided. Everyone knows a Bridget, loves her, pities her, exists as her in some small corner of their own life. I bloody well do. It was charming and poignant and exaggeratedly accurate.

And the book was... sort of those things. It's written as a diary (duh) so it's quick to read, full of shortcuts and abbreviations and observations that no one other than Bridget herself would actually say out loud. It's funny, but it doesn't pack the punch that the movie did. After a while, the shtick of the diary concept grows a little weary and what you're left with is a lot of clever turns of phrase and not much by way of an actual story. There's none of the drama of the Jones-Daniel-Darcy love triangle that is really the driving force of the film (although, funnily enough, both Hugh Grant and Colin Firth are mentioned in the book.) Her neuroticism is still sweet and lovable and laughable, but there never seems to be a point to it. Not that I need my grown-up stories to tie neatly together into some clear cut purpose with an Aesop ending, but when I'm several hundred pages in, even if I'm being entertained, I'd like there to be even the most trite of reasons for me to be there, to be reading along. (Ironic, I know, as the author of a blog entitled Note To Self which covers absolutely nothing of any significance, hardly ever. I'm working on it. And I'm not asking you to pay for it, either. Although this was a library book so technically I didn't pay for this book. Shit, and now I'm off point. I mean bollocks, now I'm off point.)

So, read it if you need something to make you laugh and not think at all and plan on zoning out for several paragraphs or pages at a time but want to still understand what's going on. Great beach book. Train book. Starts out strong, fizzles a bit, but if you love Bridget like I do, darlings, you'll be happy just to spend a little more time with her.

Year in (Book) Review:The Fig Eater

I finished this book a few weeks ago, and have been stalling all this time on writing the review. Even for a master procrastinator like me, that's a long time. And I finally figured out why: I just didn't like it that much, and revisiting it didn't sound fun.

The concept of The Fig Eater and of the author's inspiration behind writing it were really what grabbed my attention. I'm taking a writing class right now and so I'm really attuned to prompts and observations and happenings in the world, big and small, that could spark an idea for a story. Somehow (she doesn't explain) the author learned about an old Sigmund Freud case, widely acknowledged as one of the doctor's most resounding failures, and became intrigued by the teenage subject. His patient was a young woman he dubbed Dora; Freud analyzed and diagnosed her with hysteria in her late teens. Ms. Shields explains that she was fascinated by the little tidbits of information available on the case and the sordid stories surrounding the girl, and let her imagination form the early 20th century Viennese world in which she lived. And, in the case of the novel she loosely ties to the story, died. In fact, the character of Dora never actually appears alive in the story; instead, the author tells the stories of those who knew her and those who are exploring the strange circumstances around her death. (All made up by the author.)

Shields is an artist and editor by trade; this was her first novel. It had a really interesting style to it, but in the end I just couldn't enjoy it. Or in the beginning. Suspense and mystery books are fun when there's an underlying, almost tangible feeling of... well, suspense. As a reader, you're waiting for something ominous to happen, and if a writer is doing their job well you turn each page expecting and anticipating something bad or scary or jaw-dropping to happen. I gave Shields the benefit of the doubt through the first fifty or so pages, but after awhile I started to fear that the suspense was never really going to build, and nothing shocking was ever really going to happen. I was right. She creates a dark, kind of bleakly melancholy feel, but not a good kind. I'm not sure what a good kind of bleak melancholy would feel like, but I trust that it exists. Just not here.

Lots of potential, little delivery. Started off slowly, fizzled slowly, died slowly.