Thursday, September 15, 2016

Even More Random Thoughts - September Edition

What you say to your hairdresser:  “Don’t cut it too short.”  What your hairdresser hears:  “Do whatever you want.  I have no taste and know nothing about my own hair.”

The cleaning lady was at my house for four hours today.  I don’t think I have spent four hours cleaning in the past month.  And that’s probably why the cleaning lady was at my house for four hours today.

I actually had to buy ketchup recently.  Seriously, who runs out of ketchup?  Well, I didn’t run out, but I use it so rarely that mine expired.  By two months, which my BFF would insist makes it still quite usable, but I’m not taking any chances.  I can feel a “discussion” coming on over this subject, right, Jo?

How and who decided that we had to boil the water first and then put in the pasta but we can boil the water with eggs in the pot to hard boil them?  Tons of research must have been conducted to reach those conclusions.  See why I can’t sleep?  These matters of such grave importance keep me up and pondering.

You know you haven’t been cooking much if you have to dust off the stove.

The easiest way to spot lint (or glitter) on your floor is to unplug the vacuum cleaner and put it away.   The lint will suddenly appear, as though it has been hiding the entire time you cleaned and now is there to taunt you.

I don’t need an alarm clock anymore.  Either my leg cramps get me hopping out of bed or my need to hit the bathroom does the trick.  Ah, the joys of getting old.

No matter how much I walk or exercise, it seems I will never have any visible muscle definition.  I know I have calf muscles because I get cramps in them, but, unlike the legs on the other people I see out walking, mine are encased in layers of a protective fatty coating.  And as for a six-pack?  Well, that’s been buried for years.  Finding my six-pack would be like looking for Jimmy Hoffa in the Meadowlands.  Neither will ever be found.

There are so many gray-haired heads walking around this community that sometimes I feel like I am on the set of the movie “Cocoon.”

Almost everyone who walks for exercise in my active adult community would benefit from a stronger support bra, including me.  And that includes most of the men.

Whatever happened to lime flavor?  I love those green lollipops and LifeSavers from my youth, but most everything green these days seems to be watermelon-flavored.  Bring back lime!

Someone will have to explain to me why anyone would opt to be a urologist.  Or why we use the word “a” in front of urologist, despite the fact that it starts with a vowel and normally that means using “an” as the preceding word.

Which is the biggest lie? 
    1.  The technician/delivery truck will be there first thing in the morning.
    2.  The check is in the mail.
    3.  One size fits all.

The best way to spot an error – typographical, spelling or otherwise – in a document is to hit the SEND button.  Then it pops right out at you.

Have you ever considered that the words weird and wired are so similar?  Meditation and mediation, too.  During the recent mediation process, I turned to meditation when medication wasn’t working for me.

I could hand wash the dishes in less time than it takes me to load them into the dishwasher.

I don’t understand why I always had to spell out my street name when I lived on Joshua Drive, but no one ever asks me to spell my new street, Constitution Way.

I spent $8 on grapes in the supermarket today.  Next time, I’m just going to buy wine.

My washing machine was particularly agitated today.  It turned all my tops inside out.

I really don’t mind doing laundry, but if it could just fold itself when the dryer is done, I would be very happy.

When I have a sandwich, it must be cut diagonally.  I’m not sure why.

Panic sets in when I am down to my last 12 rolls of toilet paper, even if they are triple rolls, and especially if there is snow on the ground.  Really, Tina, you live alone.  How much toilet paper can you use and how fast?

How could I possibly break a fingernail in the shower?  It must have really been tough washing my hair!

I frequently pass a house with a sign in front that reads “Dinning room set for sale.”  The sign has been there for weeks, and I am secretly hoping that no one is buying that set as a protest to the egregious spelling error on the sign.

You would think that fly buzzing around my house would drop dead of fatigue by now, but he’s still racing around and uncatchable.

If the Russians can hack into the DNC’s computer systems, could they send someone to my house to fix up Windows 10, etc.?

I spent the morning of a rainy day reorganizing and cleaning my laundry room.  You know you hate to do stuff like this, but it sure feels great once it is done!  I even washed the washing machine.

I’m signed up with a market research company and occasionally do surveys for them, go to a focus group or shop in a store they require.  The pre-screen for today’s survey had this as the first question:  “Do you own a refrigerator?”  If you have a computer to take the survey, I think it is a safe bet you own a refrigerator.  But I know, they have to ask.  Strange.

When did “curate” become so popular?  Everything from the art in a museum to the bathroom collection at Home Depot is now “curated.”  If the word is combined with the equally overused “awesome,” I may just lose my mind.

“La la la la la la la” means “I love you.”  At least according to the Delfonics.

I have listened to Pandora’s Motown station so much that they have run out of Motown tunes.  I mean, I love the Four Season’s “Sherry Baby,” but it isn’t remotely a Motown song.

I have been 50 percent successful in my latest attempt to multitask.  I now know that I cannot walk and meditate.  I have enough trouble meditating while just sitting still.  (The mind is a terrible thing to wander.)  But I CAN walk and do my shoulder exercises at the same time.  Considering that I have trouble walking and chewing gum, that’s quite an accomplishment for me!

At the risk of kicking off a chorus of derision, I will admit (as anyone who knows me well already knows) that I am not an animal lover.  Feel free to love yours and others all you want, but that’s just not me.  The only pets I have are pet peeves.  I do not want your “don’t worry, he’s friendly” dog jumping on me or your otherwise standoffish cat rubbing up against my leg.  And I especially don’t want to take a walk while picking up dog poop  and carrying it around in a bag until the walk is over.  This probably explains why I don’t have kids, too.

And finally, I created quite a stir on Facebook this month with the admission that I had never eaten a taco.  People seemed outraged and suspicious that I had lived this long without ever having tried one and they demanded to know why.  The truth is that I have a sensitive stomach and have always avoided Mexican restaurants or other places where I imagine the food will be spicy.  And I don’t particularly enjoy corn-based hard shell/chip-like foods, such as tortilla chips, nachos, Fritos (which smell like feet to me) or even corn bread.  But my persuasive friend Heather took me to On the Border near the Douglass campus, where we enjoyed several margaritas and I sampled my first tacos.  Though Heather insisted I tackle the basic hard-shell taco with ground beef, I preferred the soft shell with brisket, which I would eat again in a minute.  And the world will rest easy knowing that I have had my first – and probably not my last – taco, at last.


























Thursday, September 1, 2016

Tina's August 2016 Movies

The fact that I saw even 10 movies in a month when I watched the Olympics nearly non-stop is a miracle, but here they are.  Numbering picks up from previous months.  Movies I had not seen previously are marked with an asterisk and the rating scale is 1-5 cans of tuna, with 5 the top score.
89.  Talullah* (2016) – This made-for-Netflix movie stars Ellen Page as Lou, a grifter living in her van with her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend.  When Lu is caught scrounging for food in a posh hotel, the woman she meets assumes she works there and dumps her baby girl on “Lou.”  Lou sees an opportunity to steal credit cards and take the obviously neglected baby for herself.  Penniless and with nowhere to go, she ends up on the doorstep of her ex’s mother (Allison Janney), a bitter woman whose divorce from her gay husband has yet to be finalized.  Lou tells her that the baby is her granddaughter, and the three women develop a strange bond, until the child’s actual mother (Tammy Blanchard) and the authorities come after her.  This is an odd little story and it ends in a metaphysical way that I didn’t quite get.  The acting is first-rate even if the story was a little off-kilter.  3½ cans.
90.  Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorfs* – If you know me at all, my lack of fashion style and knowledge is readily apparent.  So why would I watch a movie about the iconic NYC department store?  I love nearly any behind-the-scenes looks, and this documentary opens the doors of Bergdorf’s and shows you the designers, the fashion director, the personal shoppers and all kinds of people who have made this store THE place for important people to shop and for important designers to show.  From tales of John and Yoko’s buying 72 furs one holiday eve to the whirlwind that is fashion director Linda Fargo, it is clear that this is NOT Macy’s.  Designers would give their right arms to have their lines shown in the famous Bergdorf’s windows (and an amazing account of the holiday windows is included here).  For designer Michael Kors, serendipity led to his selection, when then boss-woman Polly Mellon saw his stuff and told him she wanted Bergdorf’s to sell his line – which he didn’t have at the time.  This is how legends are born!  The truth is, if you can make it to Bergdorf’s as a designer, you needn’t go anywhere else.  As for me, I fear going into a store where the sales people will look at me with the same disdain shown Julia Roberts on her Rodeo Drive shopping trip in “Pretty Woman” (until they found out paramour Richard Gere was footing the bill).  So I’ll stick to the movie, which I recommend to my shopping, fashionista friends.  4 cans.
91.  Bad Moms* (2016) – Lest you think my taste runs only to independent or documentary films, here is something considerably less esoteric – and way more fun!  Mila Kunis plays hyperactive, overachieving Mom Amy.  She brings home the bacon in the family – not that she would ever actually serve bacon -- makes the nutritious lunches, drives the kids to school and a myriad of activities -- and drives herself crazy.  She is married to a slacker dad whose Internet hobbies are merely self-satisfying, and any work-life balance doesn’t include an actual life for her.  One day she just loses it, teams up with a slacker Mom Carla (Kathyrn Hahn, playing the role Melissa McCarthy would have played if she hadn’t moved beyond second-banana status and into superstardom), and Kiki (Kristen Bell), the do-gooder Mom with 4 little ones and a thoughtless, demanding spouse.  They take on the PTA president and all-powerful, perfect supermom Christina Applegate, who is so important that she throws a campaign party that Martha Stewart herself shows up to cater.  This romp is just good, mostly-clean fun (with more than a few sexual references thrown in) and laugh-out-loud funny.  Sure, I wondered who was watching all those kids when the Moms were out gallivanting, but you can’t look at a movie like this with logic.  It is about Mom-power, girl-power, friendship among women and how nobody is perfect.  Best movie laughs I have had in a long time.  4 cans.
92.  The Only Thrill* (2005) – Actually, this movie was not much of a thrill.  The action takes place over decades, and sometimes it seemed like time was passing that slowly just watching it.  The always taciturn Sam Shepard is Wiley, proprietor of a clothing store in Texas.  He is married to a woman in a coma, and, while he doesn’t mind cheating on her with other women once in a while, he won’t dump her and marry someone else, like Carol (Diane Keaton, turning down the comedy here), the seamstress he hires who alters his life.  They spend every Wednesday together at the local movie theater and are clearly in love, but Wiley refuses to take the next step.  Meanwhile, her daughter (Diane Lane) and his son (Robert Patrick) also start seeing each other and, like his father, the son refuses to take the next logical step.  So what we have here is lifelong happiness unachieved.  The bonds of love are strong, despite the circumstances and trials, but will they ever be in the right place at the right time?  I’m not sure you’d want to stick around to see for yourself, although I did.  3 cans. 
93.  Florence Foster Jenkins* (2016) – In the “Meryl never disappoints” category, this latest effort has her playing real-life society matron Florence, whose largess supports the arts and allows her to gain a following for her singing. You and I – and anyone with functioning ears – would hear her caterwauling and immediately recognize a total dearth of musical talent, but Florence only hears herself as a mellifluous doyenne of the stage.  Her husband (Hugh Grant) supports her singing habit.  Theirs is a strange relationship.  He adores and coddles her, but sneaks out at night for romantic trysts with his girlfriend, which is generally OK with Florence.  The whole plot leads up to Florence’s Carnegie Hall debut performance, which actually did take place.  She is remarkably bad, bad beyond description, really, with truly awful costumes to match her dowager body.  Her loyal and somewhat frenzied accompanist is played by Simon Helberg, better known as Wolowitz from the TV sitcom “Big Bang Theory,” and he can really tickle the old ivories.  It’s hard to be this good at being this bad, but the wide-eyed innocence Streep brings to the role is full of poignancy.  There’s the old saying, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice!” but no amount of practice would make Florence a nightingale.  4 cans.
94.  Dance With Me* (1996) – If the hunky co-star of this movie, Chayanne, asked me to dance, I’d definitely drag my two left feet out there on the dance floor.  He plays a handyman who works for a dance studio that is owned by a man (Kris Kristofferson) who may or may not be his father.  One of the instructors, played by Vanessa Williams, is also a ballroom dance competitor, and the climactic scene shows her competing with her partner.  It sounds strange to say that one of my objections to this movie is that there was too much dancing.  Williams is excellent on the dance floor, and she and Chayanne spend much of the movie exchanging smoldering looks, but this movie made Dancing With the Stars seem like high drama (which it kind of is…).  Not much plot, but it had a nice beat.  2 cans and a pair of dancing shoes.
95.  The Danish Girl* (2015) – I somehow missed this highly-praised movie last year.  It is the story of Dutch artists Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander), who are young and very much in love.  And then Gerda encourages Einar to pose for her dressed as a woman, which forces him to reconcile feelings that he has repressed about actually being a woman.  The story is based on the real artists and what happens when Einar starts to live as Lily.  Vikander won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and her character is very supportive of her husband despite everyone’s changing roles.  Redmayne gives a strong performance as he subtly shifts his voice, his body language and his persona to become the woman who is trapped inside a male body.  If it weren’t for Leonardo DiCaprio’s star turn in “The Revenant,” Redmayne would probably have grabbed his second Oscar.  4 cans.
96.  An Officer and a Gentleman (1986) – Zack Mayo (Richard Gere) is neither of those two things for much of this movie, the tale of a young man who bucks authority even as her strives to become a naval aviator.  His unyielding drill instructor, Sgt. Foley (Louis Gossett Jr., who deservedly won an Oscar for his breakout performance) doesn’t think much of him at first and tries not only to break him and the others in his class, but he singles Mayo out for especially brutal treatment to get him to DOR (Dropped on Request).  Mayo manages to get through the brutal treatment with the support of Paula (Debra Winger, in one of the two best movies of her career – the other is one of my Top 5: “Terms of Endearment”), a local blue-collar woman who, with her friend, is seeking a good officer candidate of her own.  But Mayo, who was brought up by a reprobate Navy father and whose mother killed herself, has commitment issues.  Will he stick it out and get to flight school?  Can he commit to Paula, to whom he is immediately attracted?  If you have experienced this movie, you know that the last scene is one of the best last scenes EVER in a movie.  And if you haven’t, please go and watch this movie.  It is more than a love story, more than a story of surviving in a tough world.  It is about friendship and love and achieving goals.  4 cans and a jar of mayonnaise.
97.  About a Boy (2002) – Hugh Grant is at his handsomest and most charming as a career bachelor who firmly believes he is an island, a man in need of no one beyond women to “shag” once in a while.  Independently wealthy due to the wide exposure of a Christmas song written by his father, Will takes great pride in his ability to do absolutely nothing all day.  But when he decides to look for single moms to date, 12-year old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult) comes into his life along with his suicidal mother.  The kid keeps coming around, and eventually Will forms an attachment to the bullied pre-teen, and they each have something to teach each other.  Toni Collette plays the troubled mother in this heartwarming comedy.  And Will comes through just when you were ready to write him off.  “About a Boy” is about a man.  4 cans.
98.  The Big Chill (1983) – Before there was “Friends” on TV, these 30-somethings gather in the home of the only married couple among them for the funeral of one of their own.  Take a talented cast (Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, William Hurt, JoBeth Williams, Mary Kay Place, Tom Berenger and Jeff Goldblum), a wonderful script, a great soundtrack and you get the seminal 80s film about friendship and idealism gone astray amid the realities of life.  The once engaged social activists are now actors, doctors, pop culture journalists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and burnouts.  Missing from the old U of Michigan gang is Alex, the one with the promise, the one they come to celebrate, the one who committed suicide.  They lick their wounds, renew their friendships, express their shortcomings and regrets and vow to be ever more faithful to the people they loved so long ago.  I hadn’t seen this movie in a long time and I forgot how much I love it.  The soundtrack is one of my favorites, and I can never listen to “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” without picturing the dancing scene in the kitchen.  4½ cans.