Piano

I had to leave it.

:’(.

Dark Knight

Holy shit.

The Dark Knight, IMAX. An indescribably intense cinematic experience. When the first scene came up on the screen, my brother said, “It’s like being there, only with better vision.” And that was just the mechanics. The movie itself…holy shit.

I mean…dear Spatula, I just used profanity on a public forum, because there were no other words to describe my shock.

It was so completely good that I truly, honestly don’t want a sequel. Nothing could be added.

I could have slept in…

But noooo, I had to get to the airport early. For the record, I managed to not remember the plane’s departure time accurately–I remembered it as “nineish,” which is fairly different from nine forty when it comes to waking up at five thirty vs. six fifteen ante meridiem. (Guess which one I managed to do.)

Also, it occurred to me yesterday, on the receiving end of a quizzical look from someone, that I might in fact get fewer weird looks if I kept a lid on words like “comestible.” (For some reason, the word “food” wasn’t coming to me.)

Rant day

Today several rants were triggered. There was the ever-popular “WHY did Andrew Lloyd Webber let Gerard Butler sing attempt to sing the part of the Phantom? And WHYY THE SWORDFIGHT, AND THE WAY IT ENDED!?” Then there was the dust-gathering Faramir rant. And a lovely newish rant about a certain aspect of women’s lib that I’m too lazy to reproduce. Err. I really, really didn’t intend any double entendre by way of two possible structures of that sentence. No, there isn’t a pause where you’re imagining one.

Anyway, the big rant of the day was the “Imagine if people were treated like that” rant. The vegetarian-slanted one. It can get fairly icky and graphic, depending on variations in my temperament at the time of delivery. But I delivered it in a fairly new and inventive iteration, and with a passion that took even me by surprise.

I’ve been mentioning lately that I am, after thirteen years (god, has it been that long?!?), just now becoming an actual squeamish vegetarian.* It may be a side-effect of beliefs settling more firmly into patterns established by my behavior. Err…I’m hesitant to admit this, because it seems like the kind of thing that could be taken as signs of insanity by outside parties, but I’ve started to have a real confusion and a difficulty with the inconsistency between what things seem like in my head and the behavior that I see around me. It’s suddenly hard for me to comprehend how people eat flesh. It seems, in terms of behavioral tendencies, on par with the average German looking the other way from concentration camps in WWII. The way our culture–and our race–views and treats other sentient** creatures is beyond sick and deranged and into the territory of psychotic. (Would it be different if people were forced to see where their food came from?) Truly: no one notices, or cares. It’s hard for me to comprehend how that can be.

One of the arguments that is most likely to make people squirm is the one where you trot out intelligence and comprehension tests that show correlations between the minds of animals (pigs in particular, of course) and small human children. But the fact that that argument is so effective is very telling: the only way you get humans to connect with animals is to show how they are like us. It’s as though we have no respect for life unless we can imagine ourselves, personally, or our children, or nephews, or great-uncles, or bosom buddies, or whatever, in the place of that life.

What does that say about us?***

*As in, I start to feel queasy when I see a side of pork, or ground beef, or similarly mutilated corpses

**Ones that can feel pain, for those of you who have developed blind spots so that you can function

***Just so we’re clear: I don’t mean that in a “Gee, what does that say about all you dirty carnivores? But wait, I’d better prove that I’m holier than alla y’all, and include myself in a burst of saintly humility, while still leaving it clear to you that even if I’m pretending to be tarred by the same brush, I’m really just better than everyone.”^ I think the lesson here is clearly that I am likely passively participating in any number of atrocities daily, that I’m not perceiving clearly enough to consider and rail against/reject, etc., whether through cultural blindness or the kind of ignorance I could cure myself of if I had half a mind to.

^Also: I’m not defensive about sounding like I think I’m better than anyone. Really. And I’m not in denial about it either.

****Also: Chalice.