Duct Tape, Severed Heads and Covered Bridges

So the rumpus has started without me, which is ten paces beyond awesome, but first a few squee-worthy things before I space out and forget to pass them along:

How MacGyver-licious is it that someone emailed me with a link for my blog readers to an article about using duct tape for, well, everything? And it wasn't spam! Yes, Amber, I will gladly link to your 100 Awesome Ways to Use Duct Tape in Your Dorm Room. What a win to craft a duct tape body to scare off intruders. Nothing screams "back off" more than a body with a severed head. And nothing says "I love you" more than a vinyl, fabric-re enforced pressure-sensitive rose. Even Mac could have scored on the ladies with that one. Da da da.

Speaking of MacGyver, someone else sent me a link to a retro shirt. Not content to merely show the t-shirt on a sour-faced model, an anatomically-correct cartoon lets the discerning buyer know exactly how their 36-C will reshape our hero.

I, apparently, am a Monday person with a sunnier disposition than a Friday person. What day are you? It all depends on your perception of time, according to the British Psychological Society, and could explain why time travelers seem so moody. At least the ones I know.

It's half-past-rumpus time. On to the topic at hand:

Do the best movies come from original screenplays or adapted movies?

I can think of only one example where the movie was infinitely better than the novel: The Bridges of Madison County. This is without a doubt, the exception. Yes, we could blame it on the pure testosterone Clint Eastwood brings to the gypsy-photography character or the sheer brilliance that is always Meryl Streep, but I think it's more a case of directors and actors filling in where simplicity left off. Reading Robert James Waller, I wasn't sitting in that beat-up old truck in a frog-strangling rainstorm, the turn indicator of Robert Kincaids's GMC barely visible through the glass. During the film, I could practically smell the groceries Francesca had just placed on the seat beside her. Maybe the music and the production set and the director's cut to Clint Eastwood's eyes as they stared in the rear view mirror conveyed what Waller failed to. Maybe it was just me, but even as a twenty-something I got all up into a romance only those who've lived life a bit should have identified with.

If you haven't weighed in, or even if you have, what are your favorite movies-from-books? Least favorite? And if we were to re-populate them with moody time travelers, would they be my favorites, too?

Symptoms of Discontent

Some days a cohesive thought just doesn't come. Some days I sit down to blog and find my words take me down winding, not entirely unexpected, gravel roads. Today is one of those days.

News is grim. Worry is prevalent. I wonder how self-absorbed I am when I'm preoccupied with word count and the family down the street is struggling to pay their next grocery bill. I justify the dalliance of fiction as a necessary commodity in hard times. An escape. To an extent, it is. I remember feeling the same way after September 11th. The fiction I write, not the slash-your-wrists-Oprah-pics, are stories about overcoming adversity. Hope and love. Who can't use more of that? But is it enough?

I lived in rural America for a time in the 90s. My generation's curse, the hunger for more and faster, was a rampant symptom of my discontent. I was a city girl on a crusade to inspire my students to so much more beyond owning the local Dairy King and driving combine harvesters someday. But after fifteen years of falling victim to theft twice, countless incidents of vandalism, city corruption and breathing in everyone else's pursuit of the fast lane, I think those students taught me more in return. How awful would it really be in the hard times forecasted ahead to live where I have the space to start a garden and have the option to walk to a store? Where fresh corn comes from a neighbor's acreage, not from a farmer's market I had to spend $2 in gas to get to. Where I might actually share a glass of lemonade with my neighbors instead of worrying about registered sex offender rumors. Is the reshaping of my values a product of media-fueled fear or a romanticized notion of how life should be? John Titor may have been a nutjob hoax, but is there not a grain of truth in everything? Maybe he represented more wish than inevitability.

Last weekend I went to see Gran Torino. I'd always respected Clint Eastwood, but he'd flown under my girly-not-of that-generation radar until his memorable performance in The Bridges of Madison County. After Gran Torino, he's pushed aside some of my previous top ten favorite actors and stepped firmly to the forefront. In a quiet, almost-vacant theater on the cusp of what probably amounts to the movie's final week at the box office, a powerful cinematic experience unfolded. Rarely do films leave me with a gift. This one left me with a golden ticket of perspective. The intolerance I had toward small town life manifests itself now into the frustration I have toward relatives who live by the same creed as Walt Kowalski, Eastwood's character. I've heard more racial slurs dropped at family gatherings than potato salad on the carpet. I'd dismissed them as the grizzled after-burn of a life lived without happiness. But in the two hours that unfolded during that film, I saw my own intolerance and was saddened. This movie resonates with so many because Kowalkski gives voice to everything we are afraid to say and think and do. He is a modern day hero of our discontent and an increasingly collective longing to return to the basics: family, honor, love.

I don't profess to know what's around the corner and there are still days when my Pollyanna-self struggles to see the glass half full. But if I didn't have an unyielding faith in the human spirit, I wouldn't strive to explore it through writing. Fiction reflects life. The most fertile inspiration is yet to come.

Next Week: The final countdown to THE 90,000 word, fifth draft END. Like a shower to present this babe to the world, I'll bring those horribly ugly first snapshots for everyone to lavish with disingenuous oohs and ahhs.