If I can't get the wolf to eat the baby, it won't be for lack of trying.
Currently, I find myself without the use of a decent word processor (i.e. one that has a spellcheck option). Consequently, you should expect even more random letters thrown in here and there. Let's you and I just pretend it's not a result of my spelling and typing getting worse on a near-daily basis and is, instead, done for good measure. Besides, a few extra letters never killed anyone, with the possible exception of Oliver Cromwell, a story I won’t go into at the moment as it ends with a beheading and I’m in no mood for beheadings today.
None too recently, I happened upon a copy of the movie Mansfield Park. It’s a nice bit of a love story set in the very late 1700’s and very early 1800’s. The main character, Fanny Price, “An unabashed novel reader” as she describes herself, seems to be stricken with a horrible disease - the only side effect of which is an inclination to write. As such, the disease goes unnoticed by the characters in the movie and is never mentioned. The movie, based on a Jane Austin novel, is the sort that causes women to reach for their Kleenex to dab at their eyes in hopeless futility, as it would be similar to trying to dam a river using a kitchen sponge. I can only imagine what the theaters must have been like in the wake of this movie - the stench of a hundred and fifty women’s worth of estrogen, and the suppressed testosterone from the ten men who were dragged along, the floor coated with tissue that’s gone and gotten stuck to the soda that was spilled there before. The trash cans would have been buried fluffy pillows of white coated in saline and mucus.
Now, being a man (not that my being a man is a recent development, I just feel the need to, at this moment, distinguish myself from women who are shallow, fickle, mean and cry at movies) I should not in any way admit to liking the rags-to-not-rags tale of the young Miss Fanny Price. Yet, my readers demand Accuracy in All Media and have a voracious appetite for the Truth. This successfully indicates that my readers are as dumb as gravel, as I sprinkle white lies, well-intentioned half-truths and light-hearted rumors into my writing, even though I only do it to slightly tone down the black, bold-faced untruths I indiscriminately dispense in attempts to intentionally mislead people into doing terrible things. Today, however, is different. Today, the shining morality I usually am able to hide so very well is shining through its little bank vault in which I usually keep it, shredding apart any will I have to lie.
Thus, I feel compelled to tell you this; the movie which was brilliantly casted, directed, acted, and shot did manage to tug at one or two of what I like to call my heartstrings - the tiny wires that attach my heart to the machines that keep me alive despite my old age and decrepit body. However what the movie failed to do for the course of the entire main plot was make me cry. It couldn’t even succeed in making me misty-eyed, even slightly. After 110 minutes of a wonderful film, everything has wrapped up and all the appropriate people are appropriately happy and the credits start to roll. As an afterthought, the main character’s newly betrothed tells her hat he found someone who will not only fail to cure her disease, but encourage it to fester inside of her - he fund someone who agreed to publish her writing.
Then and only then, while the credits were rolling over that scene like a pickup truck over an armadillo, when most people were already leaving the theater, and when the people who rented it were reaching for their remotes, minds on where to get their take-out food for the night, did liquid fill my eyes and threaten to sill over. Miguel, the doctor who won’t let me turn off the machines and who adamantly refuses to pull out my heartstrings says that this little quirk speaks volumes about me. I immediately lied, and insisted that the only reason that I was crying was because I realized that I didn’t get any pudding with my lunch and that I really, really love pudding more than anything else in the world. Miguel gave me one of those “You can’t fool me” looks and told me to think about it.
I have. At great lengths. I have come to a conclusion about myself.
I’m a fucking pansy.
None too recently, I happened upon a copy of the movie Mansfield Park. It’s a nice bit of a love story set in the very late 1700’s and very early 1800’s. The main character, Fanny Price, “An unabashed novel reader” as she describes herself, seems to be stricken with a horrible disease - the only side effect of which is an inclination to write. As such, the disease goes unnoticed by the characters in the movie and is never mentioned. The movie, based on a Jane Austin novel, is the sort that causes women to reach for their Kleenex to dab at their eyes in hopeless futility, as it would be similar to trying to dam a river using a kitchen sponge. I can only imagine what the theaters must have been like in the wake of this movie - the stench of a hundred and fifty women’s worth of estrogen, and the suppressed testosterone from the ten men who were dragged along, the floor coated with tissue that’s gone and gotten stuck to the soda that was spilled there before. The trash cans would have been buried fluffy pillows of white coated in saline and mucus.
Now, being a man (not that my being a man is a recent development, I just feel the need to, at this moment, distinguish myself from women who are shallow, fickle, mean and cry at movies) I should not in any way admit to liking the rags-to-not-rags tale of the young Miss Fanny Price. Yet, my readers demand Accuracy in All Media and have a voracious appetite for the Truth. This successfully indicates that my readers are as dumb as gravel, as I sprinkle white lies, well-intentioned half-truths and light-hearted rumors into my writing, even though I only do it to slightly tone down the black, bold-faced untruths I indiscriminately dispense in attempts to intentionally mislead people into doing terrible things. Today, however, is different. Today, the shining morality I usually am able to hide so very well is shining through its little bank vault in which I usually keep it, shredding apart any will I have to lie.
Thus, I feel compelled to tell you this; the movie which was brilliantly casted, directed, acted, and shot did manage to tug at one or two of what I like to call my heartstrings - the tiny wires that attach my heart to the machines that keep me alive despite my old age and decrepit body. However what the movie failed to do for the course of the entire main plot was make me cry. It couldn’t even succeed in making me misty-eyed, even slightly. After 110 minutes of a wonderful film, everything has wrapped up and all the appropriate people are appropriately happy and the credits start to roll. As an afterthought, the main character’s newly betrothed tells her hat he found someone who will not only fail to cure her disease, but encourage it to fester inside of her - he fund someone who agreed to publish her writing.
Then and only then, while the credits were rolling over that scene like a pickup truck over an armadillo, when most people were already leaving the theater, and when the people who rented it were reaching for their remotes, minds on where to get their take-out food for the night, did liquid fill my eyes and threaten to sill over. Miguel, the doctor who won’t let me turn off the machines and who adamantly refuses to pull out my heartstrings says that this little quirk speaks volumes about me. I immediately lied, and insisted that the only reason that I was crying was because I realized that I didn’t get any pudding with my lunch and that I really, really love pudding more than anything else in the world. Miguel gave me one of those “You can’t fool me” looks and told me to think about it.
I have. At great lengths. I have come to a conclusion about myself.
I’m a fucking pansy.