New Year's Eve and it's hard to believe
another zodiac has gone around.

While you drank yourself high on hoping
and watched the ceiling spin from the ground.

Counting down from ten it's time
to make your annual prayer.

Secret santa in the sky
when will I get my share?

Then you tell yourself
what you want to hear.

Cause you have to believe.

This will be my year.

This will be my year...Semisonic


Go Ahead Punk: E-Mail Little Squaw @ squawpunch@hotmail.com

AIM: gimletgurl7 (Remember when she used to be here?)

Sunday, July 25, 2004

Why so quiet?

Thursday I was having some shooting pains in my side which I assumed where kidney related.

Then on Friday it became another kind of pain.

That evening (and by the time Gilly had managed to navigate the flooding roads and half our street was shut down), it became evident that I needed medication, as illustrated by the searing pain and the blood in my urine.

Thankfully my girl doctor called in a perscription for me.  Which then meant we needed to venture out into the flooded streets.

Oh the joys of bladder infections.

The bonus is that I don't appear to be allergic to the antibiotic (unusual for me being allergic to three major families of antibiotics).

The benefit of leaving the house was that we got to pick up a pizza and rent two movies, Thirteen and American Splendor.

I didn't go to Boston today (flying in and out wouldn't have made sense and would have dehydrated me further).

American Splendor - I am happy that we finally saw it.  I had intended to see it in the theater but it was only playing in a couple of houses in NYC.  We ended up missing that opportunity. 

It's a great movie.  I am surprised that nobody ever made the connection that American Splendor is basically a comic book version of a blog. 

Thirteen - UGH.   It's still clinging to me like a bad dream.  It's a very upsetting film.  First of all I thought that they were freshman in high school because I was 13 when I was a freshman.  The fact that they were only in seventh grade just made it even worse for me.  But because I am not feeling very chatty and would rather be knitting, I will only make a few comments.

The acting was amazing.  The fact that the whole film was based on Nikki Reed's experiences made it all the more haunting.  

A bit about Nikki...
Born January 17, 1988, screenwriter/actress Nikki Reed made an impressive Hollywood debut at the age of 14 when she co-starred opposite Oscar-winner Holly Hunter and fellow newcomer Evan Rachel Wood in the award-winning coming-of-age drama Thirteen. Reed co-wrote the script with director Catherine Hardwicke, who, at one point, had dated Reed's father. Said to be a semi-autobiographical account of her own life, Reed took on the role of Evie Zamora, a highly manipulative "It" girl whose lax attitudes toward drug abuse and sex, combined with a reprehensible family life, made for the downfall of good-girl Tracy (Wood).  ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

While I thought that Holly Hunter's character (the mom of good girl Tracy) had some very redeeming qualities, the fact that she was hell bent on being her daughter's friend was her first mistake.  What I found interesting is that I had a lot of friends with parents like that growing up.  Parents who were wild children of the late '70's and '80's.  No good ever became of their parents relaxed, I want to be my kid's friend parenting strategy.

For example...my mom wouldn't let me spend the night at one of my friend's houses because her mom was very young and a bit wild.  I never understood the problem until one day I stopped by early in the morning and we ended up taking a shortcut through her mom's room for some reason.  Imagine my surprise when we walked in on her mom in bed (with a legal yet much younger man than her) and his jocky shorts crumbled on the floor next to the bed.  Even then I felt there was something unpleasant about being put in that kind of situation as a kid.

Then another time a few years later, I was visiting her at her mom's current boyfriend's camp on the lake we would go to growing up.   For some reason her sister and I (her sister was a couple years younger than me)...well we ended up in a rowboat (without life jackets) and we paddled all the way across the lake and back again with nary an adult's intervention.  When my mom found out she was infuriated.  Needless to say I wasn't allowed to hang out with them much in the future.

A couple of years later her mom was in a truck (with the boyfriend who owned the camp) and  they had been drinking. He was driving too fast and the truck flipped over.  He escaped without a scratch but she was in a coma for quite sometime.  Though she came out of the coma, she's still severely brain damaged and confined to a wheel chair.

Holly Hunter's character reminded me of her.

I also found it all very similar to a book that I was reading about the other day.  A book which I'll read once I make it through the three on my coffee table , a book called "A Tribe Apart" by Patricia Hersch.

Hersch offers readers a fly-on-the-wall perspective as she spends three years hanging out with eight youths, submerging herself in their environment. They struggle with all the things you might remember or expect from the teen years: figuring out relationships, establishing friendships, determining what's cool and uncool, experiencing sexual attraction. But these teens--and, as Hersch asserts, the majority of teens in America today--have much, much more piled on their plates. Having been left to their own devices by a preoccupied, self-involved, and "hands-off" generation of parents, adolescents have had to figure out their own system of ethics, morals, and values, and rely on each other for advice on such profound topics as abuse, dysfunctional parents, and sex (with all its accompanying ramifications). Adolescents are indeed "a tribe apart," but not by choice--adult society abandons them long before they ever get the chance to rebel against it.
 
Now I am going to see what kind of fresh pain I can drumb up "making water".  ICK.
 

posted by JustKeepMum on 7:54 PM