Thursday, July 20, 2006
Backbends with Butterfly Wings
Hayley's got a cold now from too many late nights and craziness on the weekend. Damn. I miss her. For some reason spending almost three days straight together and then not seeing her for a couple of days is frustrating.
She finally responded to my text. Hers said: "I had a great weekend, too!" That's very Hayley. It gets the point across with zero adornments.
I took that photo at left with her camera phone. Suffice it to say that a tire swing will never be the same in my mind ever again.
Maybe I'll bring her over some soup later. For inexplicable reasons my mom seems to have made some chicken soup last night or maybe this morning (who makes chicken soup in the middle of the night?), and when I stumbled into the bathroom at 8:00 am, still reeling from a dream in which I was a vampire slayer a la Buffy but suffered from really poor stake-handling, I all of a sudden smelled chicken noodle soup. It was weird, because my last thoughts before going to bed were about making soup for Hayley and what I could put in it. Are people reading my mind now? Because I like to think of my brain as having a fairly high electrified fence and a few Dobermans guarding it. Only the special and really, really tough people get in.
I'm reading Aimee & Jaguar, and it is a ridiculously good book. It's non-fiction set in Berlin in 1943, and it's the love story of a German housewife with four children and a Nazi-sympathizing husband and a Jewish woman living underground in the city. It's terribly romantic and also a really, really incredible story from a historical point of view. I've read a lot about the topic and even took a course on it, and at no point did I realise that there were Jews living in the German capital that late into the war who weren't actually physically in hiding. I'm also impressed with how open these women were about their relationship given that it was the 1940s and women were still expected to marry young and fulfill their social roles as wives and mothers. They wrote each other love letters and went out in public and had their photos taken together. I have to say I much admire their chutzpah.
I watched yet another Audrey Tautou movie last night called Happenstance. The French title is Le battement d'ailes du papillon (The Beating of a Butterfly's Wings), and it's entirely more fitting given that the film's about chaos theory. You know that idea in which a butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane in the South Pacific? Let me find a link. Here. The Buttefly Effect. It's a neat concept. The film was quite funny in parts and posed some fairly interesting ideas, and it was in French, which was great. Sadly we could only get it on VHS so we had to deal with the irritating subtitles. Ugh. The translations are always so deplorably bad.
But it did make me think a bit about the influence that my actions have on everyone else. It also throws my karma theory into a bit of disarray, because if good actions can just as easily create bad situations, then are they still intrinsically good? I dunno, but being good to people makes me feel better, so I'll continue with it.
This week is supposed to be a heat wave. My room is still cool and my little fan is pouring its tiny mechanical heart into keeping it that way, but once it hits 34 degrees, all bets are off. I'm thinking about going to the pool. I haven't been since I was a kid but it always looks like fun.
Have a nice day everyone.
-N
p.s. Hayley can also put her legs behind her head and that's just ridiculously hot.
