Spoilers suck

~ Christi

elysium-movie

I watched a movie with my in-laws this weekend. The movie was Elysium, with Matt Damon. Sci-fi with a tense, emotional plot. Good, but a bit predictable. Overall, you’d like it.

Now, watching with my in-laws is a different story. Geoff’s mom gets pretty emotional during movies. Within the first few minutes, she started up a chorus of “Mmm”s and “Oh”s. By the midway point, she was hiding under a blanket because of the violence. Near the end there was a minor twist that seemed obvious to me, but she clearly didn’t see it coming. “Oh my god!” she screamed when one character was stabbed, as if she had been hurt herself.

It was slightly amusing but distracting to watch with her. I kept thinking back to when I was a kid and my mom used to promise me that nothing on TV was real. “It’s all just pretend,” I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t. I actually felt way more sucked into the movie because of her reaction to it.

Then we had Geoff’s dad, the analyst, who about halfway through the movie announced the sequence of events leading up to the end. No, he’d never seen it before. But he totally called it. He was unaffected by the violence, not emotionally engaged with the plot at all. Cool and clear-headed—you should have seen him.

My in-laws have been married for a long time, 37 years this month. They are a great couple. Before this weekend though, I’ve often thought that they couldn’t be more different. They have different interests, different hobbies, different friends. They have completely different attitudes about most things. Watching the movie with them, it all clicked. They balance each other. One is emotional, the other intellectual. One is rational, the other irrational. Together, they complement each other. They fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and they experience life as a team.

Are all marriages like that? Does each person play a role, filling in for the other’s weaknesses, benefitting from their partner’s strengths? Is that how mine works? Maybe, but it’s more subtle than my in-laws’ relationship. I’d like to think that Geoff and I are a team, but we are also pretty good on our own.

I’m going to give this some more thought. And if you ever watch a movie with me, do not tell me how it ends. I hate that.

I Don't Like Mondays Blog Hop

How about ice cream?

~ Christi ~ 3 Comments

Let’s rendezvous
In a busy cafeteria
Call it business
You bring your delicacies, lay the table, pick my place
Bring them too, your cohorts and underlings
Introduce us
And I’ll bring a surprise

Thirty-three words, including bring in triplicate, for this weekend’s Trifextra.

My door is red

~ Christi

Did you know that Georgia O’Keefe chose her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico, because she liked a door in its courtyard? She saw the door, and she knew she needed to paint it despite the house being in ruins. It took her years to buy the home and renovate it, but she finally did. And she painted her door many times, in all sorts of different ways.

Georgia-O-Keeffe-xx-Patio-with-Black-Door-1955

I just finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Have you read it? I liked it. He talks about the phenomenon of snap decisions, how they work, and their strengths and weaknesses. He briefly explains that our minds have a “locked door” between the conscious and unconscious. All the mechanics of our snap decisions lie behind the locked door of our minds, which he says, we can’t ever really know.

Not being able to know my own mind feels infuriating. Gladwell writes about a tennis coach, blessed with the ability to predict whenever a player will double fault a serve, who lies awake at night trying to figure out why he knows what he knows. Isn’t that just so true? I want to know how my mind works. I want to open my locked door, don’t you?

GOdoor

In his conclusion, Gladwell writes, “the key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” Knowledge and understanding. Knowledge is an accessible set of facts, it’s what we find when we Google something, when we do our research. Understanding implies a relationship to that knowledge, a comprehension of it. Knowledge is easy to find, understanding takes time. Knowledge takes action, understanding takes patience.

GOdoor3

I’m thinking of Georgia O’Keefe painting her courtyard door over and over again. Was she trying to create the perfect door? No. She was giving her unconscious a place to express itself. She was seeing what her door could produce. It’s true that we can’t ever know the mechanics lying behind our locked doors. Even the most intensive psychotherapy only offers the opportunity to watch ourselves and see what we do. What actions arise from our unconscious? Is there a pattern to the output? In the absence of facts – of knowledge – understanding comes from watching the door and seeing what we can create from it.

GOreddoor

Her fall

~ Christi ~ 6 Comments

William_Blake

The smell of smoke lingered in the air. The cook fires were all lit, burning at intervals along the edges of the mass of creatures. Morsels of meat were up for grabs, roasting over suspended grates. That food would make some lucky one’s last meal. Spiced drinks warming in mugs added sweetness to the smoke.

The sky was just beginning to tinge with late afternoon pinks and blues, and Zanna’s heart sank. She had misjudged her new world. First impressions were tricky, she knew. She could still feel the calm anticipation within the queues, but it did not belong to her. She was still an outsider here, and she needed connections, alliances, to proceed.

Zanna jogged past a long-necked beast clothed only in creamy white fur. Llama, she thought. The name came to her from a past life. An owl perched on its shoulder. No, she thought. These creatures are not as they seem. However fantastic these beings would be elsewhere, here they are commonplace.

Suddenly her feet caught up on something and the ground came up to meet her. She hit hard and splayed out on the ground. Minutes passed and she felt something cool on her foot. A glance revealed the llama-like beast, pressing his snout to her skin. “Are you okay?” he seemed to ask as Zanna pushed herself up to sitting, but his eyes were wary.

She smiled to show that she was okay, although her ankle did hurt. Just then she noticed a book next to her, large, rippled, leather bound. It was well used. The book had tripped her up while she ran. Zanna tried to reach for it, gently tugging at the shawl that had become tangled around her. To her surprise, the scratchy wool had turned soft. In fact, the shawl was no longer a garment at all – somehow in her fall, the wool had changed to glossy feathers. She had been given a pair of wings.

Zanna sat on the chilled ground in the gathering dark, her strange companions clearly concerned about her. She could feel the steely resolve of her past, her human life, propping her up. Yet here she was weak, injured, and changed. She could smell the smoke in the air and she was hungry.

“Some food, please?” she asked the llama.

My submission to this week’s Speakeasy, based on William Blake’s painting The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy. Like it? Read the rest here.

I like to get messy too

~ Christi ~ 7 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFpe3Up9T_g

Anna has been hiding her dirty laundry.

Every morning lately she’s been melting down when it comes time to get dressed for school. “Mom, I can’t find any pants!” she yells, like I’m keeping them from her. Usually she finds some, never mind that they are too short and seasonally inappropriate – or on the third day of wear. The important thing is that she learns to fend for herself, right?

In the evening, while I’m watching reruns and folding laundry, everyone ends up with a stack of clean clothes. Except Anna. Without fail, her pile will have just a pair of socks and a t-shirt while everybody else’s clothes tower over me. Against my better judgment, I checked her closet last week – maybe she shoved her dirty things in there. But no, the closet was relatively clean. I should have worried, but I didn’t.

Anna has always been hopelessly, even hilariously, disorganized. When she was a toddler, she would fill every available tote bag with her toys and hang them all on her toy stroller, carting it all over the house. We used to call her the bag lady. Last winter, one of my new year’s resolutions was to help Anna learn to organize her toys. I bought her a bunch of cute little colorful bins, and made chalkboard labels for each one. She had so much fun labeling and organizing her toys. It worked great for about two weeks, and then we promptly forgot all about organizing. Honestly, I’m happy when the toys make it into any bin at all. I don’t mind if she makes a mess when she’s playing.

So this morning, I was trying to find a few more items to fill up my laundry basket. I wandered into her room, thinking that I would grab her pajamas from the floor. Then I noticed a bin on the floor by the window. It had a pair of dirty leggings in it, along with some doll clothes. So, I grabbed the leggings and peeked in another bin. It looked like it was full of trash. I pushed the trash aside and underneath I found a bunch of dirty nightgowns. Then I turned and noticed a gift bag, full of dirty t-shirts and even a piece of my jewelry!

Needless to say, I am really glad that I checked her bins. God only knows where all of her toys are. And I was just about to buy her some new pants.

 

Companion

~ Christi ~ 5 Comments

“She’s here,” Mikelo announced, sounding surprised. He made a three-quarter turn and swirled his cloak around himself. “I can feel her.” He held up his hand as if to demonstrate it. How often had he conjured up characters? Why shouldn’t one of them finally become real?

No one seemed to notice his excitement. They shuffled nearer and nearer to the priestesses, anxious to offer their responses to today’s question. They each could only imagine their own beginnings and endings. The poor limited beings, Mikelo thought. Nevertheless, he could feel her here, his girl-now-woman, new to this world, fresh from death. His story had given her new life, he knew it. Now he would find her, he alone could be her companion.

“Look for her,” he called, striding through the gradually shrinking mass of creatures. “A young woman alone and searching. She’s new here.” He got nods and murmurs in response but no shouts of recognition. “I need to help her,” he said.

Mikelo was much older than he looked; he was nearly 300 years old the last time he had consulted. Time had trained him to be patient. Yet here he found himself, his heart suddenly racing as he hunted for little more than a phantasm, dead certain that he and she had work to do together.

My contribution to Trifecta this week, including the third definition of the word companion: one that is closely connected to something similar. Like this? Read the rest of the story!

She searches

~ Christi

“I have to go,” Zanna said as she squeezed the old woman’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. Then she ran alongside the line, dodging the listless creatures queued for their judgments. She ran, her arms wrapped around her, holding her blue shawl close. The wind pushed her hair into her eyes making it hard for her to see. She quickly lost sight of the man’s black cape, and she slowed her pace to look for him amongst the lines. Instead she found herself face to face with a lovely girl with green skin and glowing silver eyes.

“Why are you running?” she asked Zanna in a surprisingly deep voice. “What are you after?”

“The caped man. I thought I saw him come this way,” Zanna answered, moving closer to the girl and joining her line. “Did you see him just now?” she whispered, not wanting anyone to overhear her.

“No, but I heard him nearby,” the green-faced girl answered. She was very young, Zanna noticed, much younger than she was. Her hair was a few shades greener than her face, and was tied back in an elaborate braid.

“Who is he?” Zanna whispered.

The girl looked surprised. “Mikelo, you mean?”

“Is that his name? The caped man?” Zanna answered urgently. She could feel the girl closing off, getting nervous.

“Yes, that’s him,” she took a step back and looked anxiously ahead at the row of priestesses in the distance. Her turn was still a long way off.

“It’s okay,” Zanna said. “I’m new here,” she tried to smile, looking into the girl’s amazing silver eyes, but the girl was fixed on the priestesses. It wasn’t working, the silver-eyed girl was lost. “Thanks,” Zanna murmured, and darted off up the line.

She quickly found a gap in the lines and turned, wandering past a group of lanky boys with lizard eyes. She shot them a smile as she passed. Zanna kept going, hoping to catch sight of the black cloak, the tall man – Mikelo – who knew his way around this world. As the gap widened into a path, she picked up her pace, resuming her run. She knew she was attracting attention, but she didn’t care. The air was cold and fresh and it felt right to keep moving.

Find the rest here.

What’s yours is mine

~ Christi ~ 4 Comments

So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I mentioned that Geoff might be getting fired? Well, it’s happening. Only, he’s getting laid off, with what will most likely be a big severance package. And – here’s the really funny part – he already has a new job. No kidding. He got the offer letter last week and he’s accepting it today. He even gets a big, fat signing bonus.

I know, I know. I sound awful. It’s not that I don’t feel lucky for this good fortune. I do. It’s not that I’m not happy for Geoff, because I am. Like I said before, he works hard. I’m glad that he has a great reputation that travels well. I’m excited for him for this new opportunity. Truly, I think everything will work out for the best for him.

But I’m jealous. I want what Geoff has. I want the recognition, the extra pay, the opportunity. I want an easy transition to my next phase of life. More than that, I want the necessity. Why would it be so much easier for me if I needed to do it for money?

Geoff did make me an offer yesterday. He promised to help out with the kids over the next few months before he starts the new job so I can work on my writing. He told me to take some of the extra money and hire a sitter during the day so I can write. He said something about being my benefactor. I’m thrilled and scared. Of course I’m taking him up on it.

Oh, and have I mentioned how much I love him?

Let’s play a game

~ Christi ~ 10 Comments

“Go commando today. Dare you!” she giggled.

“Alright,” I agreed.

“Will you send me a picture?” she asked. “Text it to me, while I’m at work, concentrating,” she raised her eyebrows and smirked cutely.

“What?” I asked.

“Come on, say yes,” she coaxed.

“What do I get?” I asked.

“You get to think about me every time your cock brushes your zipper,” she laughed. “What else do you want?”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Of course,” she stopped smiling, gave me a straight face.

What the hell, I’ll play her game. “Your panties.”

 

Forgive me for getting a little dirty for this week’s TrifeXXXtra submission. Did you know that November 15th is National Erotica Day? Go check out the rest of the submissions, I won’t tell.