September 06, 2004 - 12:40 PM

The More Things Stay the Same

There is a disappointment, isn't there, in returning home from a trip or a vacation full of new experiences and changes to see that nothing has changed while you were away. A house is no longer home, a town no longer a holiday haven; a sister gets married, a brother has settled into domesticity; friends are grown-up with grown-up jobs and responsibilites. The full emotional spectrum is traveled andsleep is lost; so much packed into one short week. Then, I come back, and it seems like, well, just another week has passed in L.A., and the status quo hasn't even been tested to see if it'll budge. Everyone I asked upon my return responded similarly to the question "So, what's going on, anything new?" One after another, a bored little "eh. not really."

I realize that it's unrealistic to expect huge changes to have occurred in the week that I was gone, but how can one not expect something after seeing how different things are elsewhere? The world turns and turns and everything moves except where you are. Only not. Because really, I'm only seeing these people out on the east coast maybe once every year or two years or five, and either they've had time to go through the changes anybody goes through, or I'm seeing them expressly at the time of a big step forward in their lives. So it only seems like, wow, look at all the shit that's going on with you guys; when I'm only just catching up on a handful of years in their probably mundane lives.

Thinking about it, things haven't changed as much as I thought they had. Despite Jen's best efforts, Phil can still be an immature jackass (in an endearing way, I guess); Soph and Gee are still Soph and Gee; Y is continuing on her journey to practicing Copyright Law; Mark has his little business venture which has been in the works for years in addition to teaching. Whitney is finding her way into motherhood at a natural pace, and my friend Tasha continues with her graduate studies in Music Therapy. All things at their own pace.

If anything, this probably is just a signal that I should keep in steadier contact with my friends and family who aren't within my immediate vicinity.

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Apologies to my regular readers (and to Soph) for going over a week between updates. I didn't have time to write anything up about your wedding, Soph, when I was in Boston, and then, as soon as I got back to L.A., I was put on a session that ran 15 hours each day, so I was pretty bushed. Then, Nick, LDBL, and Mer brought me along on a weekend of much fun (my third straight fabulous weekend) as we went to Manhattan Beach on Saturday and spent the evening in the area, drinking some drinks and eating some Italian food. We really did it up big, with Nick even gorging himself on 4 full courses (Anti Pasti, Pasta, Meat, and Dessert), a feat which astounded our server. You shoulda seen it. After we were all nearly finished with our entrees, I stopped the server and ordered the Tiramisu for dessert while Mer asked for the Chocolate Souffle. Finally, Nick, still polishing off his Rigatoni bolognese, asked for the Salmon. The server gaped and asked, "For here!?" Nick was all, "What? Bring it on, bitch," only nicer. Luckily, it took a little while for the kitchen to fire up the Salmon, so Nick had time to make room in his tummy for the second main course. What a trouper.

I couldn't stay awake for much of the rest of the night even though it hadn't past 9 PM. A long two weeks of minimal rest, lots of traveling, obscene work hours, the sapping powers of the sun, alcohol, and food coma did me in. When we got back to Nick and LDBL's apartment, I zonked out on their couch again and missed the first 20 minutes of The Wicker Man, a 1970's "horror" film that really isn't horror, although it has Christopher "Saruman/Dooku" Lee in it. I woke up just in time to see Britt Ekland (Mary Goodnight from James Bond's "The Man With the Golden Gun") prancing about in the nude seducing a man in the room next to hers while lipsynching to a strangely familiar song. I finally figured out what that song was yesterday by googling it. The title of it in the movie is "Willow's Song", and it's been covered recently by the Sneaker Pimps and by Autour de Lucie whose version, "Island" is the one with which I'm familiar. It seems that someone else had a similar experience to me, and you can check out the songs in MP3 form there.

Speaking of songs I know popping up in strange places, The Kinks' "Better Things" as covered by Fountains of Wayne is well-placed in the movie The Manchurian Candidate, providing an interesting juxtaposition to the action that is going while it plays underneath. I know the song better from Dar Williams' 1997 album "End of the Summer". Which, now that I think about it, I've absent-mindedly omitted from my "Bets of '97" list of albums. Also, in some of the TV promos for the Reese Witherspoon movie "Vanity Fair", music from Army of Darkness (starring our boy Bruce Campbell!) stirs up those feelings of period piece on horses. Bring on the Deadites.

Dead people, actually, finished off my weekend with the Corteen Crew. We four headed down to the California Science Museum to check out an exhibit on The Human Body and an IMax movie (produced, in part, by the Maryland Science Center). I found it to be pretty disturbing. Actual human bodies, donors who had been preserved via a plastinization process that prevents the organs and tissue from decaying or dessicating, splayed and sliced out in cases or on stands for families to walk around and ogle. Fascinating, clinical, and yet....ick. I was thanking God that I had not had any interest in becoming a Physician- it seemed that this was the kind of thing that would appeal to either med students or serial killers. If you saw the Jennifer Lopez/Vincent D'Onofrio movie "The Cell", you probably remember the part with the sliced up, still alive horse...that's what much of this exhibit was like. Not for the weak of stomach.

The IMax movie was better, less viscerally disturbing. It was a quickie primer on how the body works, skeletal, nervous, pulmonary, muscular, etc. systems; birth through old age, mostly encapsulated in the life of a pregnant woman, her husband, and their niece and nephew whom they are watching over in England. I didn't like the woman all that much, though. She seemed hoity-toity, full of herself, and over-consciously deliberate in her words, as if she was taking pains to come across as much more intelligent and in-tune with the universe than YOU are, while trying to keep her condescension to a minimum. Then again, it might have been her acting with an unforgiving script.

Now Listening To : Dresden Dolls-Dresden Dolls (not for everyone...strange beyond Tori Amos, and yet, oddly fun)
Random Thought : We'll get to my thoughts on Soph's wedding and other Boston affairs next.

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