I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday.

Every day I get an automated e-mail from one of the coolest sites on the internet. Well, it’s cool if you’re a total nerd like me. The website is www.visualthesaurus.com/, and the e-mail sends me a word-of-the-day, every day. Something freakishly dorky I can count on. The word a couple of weeks ago was “nostalgia,” and ever since then I’ve been thinking about nostalgia, what it means to moi, and how much I love it.

Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as, “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” It can also mean “the state of being homesick,” but for the purpose of this post, I’d like to focus on the first definition. Because the second definition is stupid. Also, let me backtrack for a second. I love nostalgia and I hate the negative connotation of the first definition. Excessive? Sentimental? Whatever. As long as the yearning doesn’t interfere with the memories you’re making now which, let’s face it, are just going to induce more fits of nostalgia in the next decade, then nostalgia is a good, fun, beautiful thing. Looking to the past fondly and yearning to live those good moments over is a positive way to remember what you love about your life thus far.

But it can cause problems. Inevitably. You can spend too much time living in the past and quit looking to the future. Or you can be like me and create nostalgia for things that never even happened to you. You can become nostalgic by proxy because of film, books, music, etc. And damn it if I don’t do this in a major way. There are some movies that no matter how many times I watch and tell myself, “These aren’t your memories! That isn’t your life!” I empathize nostalgia with the characters and long for the feelings they feel. I equate those feelings with my life and search for my own memories. Or I create my own nostalgic moments in time based on watching these films and feeling nostalgic. It’s confusing, right?

It’s also quite interesting and I love the way watching nostalgic films makes me feel. Just another idiosyncratic thing about me. Number 17 of about 2,500. In order to celebrate my weirdness, here are five of my favorite films that make me feel an excess of nostalgia.

1) The Big Chill: I know that these characters come together because of a funeral, but it looks like so much fun. They’re hanging out, reminiscing about the past, trying to get pregnant or trying just to get laid. The whole time I watch this movie (and I’ve seen it at least a dozen times) about a group of best friends from college spending the weekend together in this old, Southern house, all I can think is, “Man, how much fun that must have been.”

2) Almost Famous: I want to be a fifteen-year-old reporter for Rolling Stone. I want to learn lessons about life and love on the road with a working band that’s making good. I want to make out with Penny Lane. Okay, that last one was just to make sure you’re still reading. But this movie drips with nostalgia (as most memoirs do), and I can’t help but covet young William Miller’s memories while watching this movie. Because being a teenager in California in the early 70s must have rocked.

3) Labyrinth: Um, who doesn’t want to run around a huge maze filled with crazy characters while looking for fine-as-hell David Bowie? Also, I saw this movie when I was eight-years-old at my grandfather’s house while eating garbanzo beans… Which is a weird memory, but this film will always remind me of that.

4) Kicking and Screaming: (The Baumbach movie, not that piece of shit with Will Ferrel and Mike Ditka.) Grover is a writer who has no idea what to do now that he’s graduated but he does know that he loves a woman and that he’s getting kind of sick of his friends. Um, did someone write a movie about me right after undergrad? My brother and I love to watch this movie at the end of a night of drinking. So whenever I watch it I think of that, too.

5) Five Easy Pieces: Robert Dupea is one of the most fascinating characters ever to appear on screen, and watching him drift through life on his own terms is both inspiring and heartbreaking. I’ll never forget the way I felt the first time I saw this movie, especially the final scene which I’m always debating the meaning of to myself. This movie makes me feel nostalgic for the times in life when I’ve been both sublimely happy and completely depressed.

Anyway, folks, there’s something for you to chew on. I’d love to hear about your favorite nostalgia-inspiring movies and why you find them so. Have a lovely Wednesday:)

Phew… I owe you one. Okay, a couple.

So I’ve been crazy busy and I have no excuses (besides that one). Work exploded all over the place, there was a little bit of travel, the house needed some improvements, fiction writing has been calling me, and well, it has just been too darn hot to do much else. Luckily, it’s cooling down here in the STL and life is cooling down with it. Here are some highlights from the last month:

1) Had a lovely weekend in Champaign with one of my oldest friends, Zephyr. He threw a wonderful Memorial Day bbq where the guy and I tried not to digress into political/religious conversation with total strangers. We were unsuccessful, as per usual. I chalk it up to being in a college town.

2) Extended weekend in Chicago. The guy had some conference to go to, so we headed to Chicago early in June for a Friday-Tuesday stint. We stayed downtown, we ate good food, we saw a Chicago Fire vs. Philadelphia Union football match, we met some friends at the Shedd Aquarium where we also met their new son (super cute), and I worked from a hotel room in a non-hooker way.

3) The Charlie scare of 2010: I took Charlemagne to the vet earlier this month and the doctor noticed that his gums were bleeding from the slightest touch. The vet then informed me that this could be a sign of a multitude of badness worst of which being feline leukemia and medium of which being an auto-immune disease which causes Charlie’s wee, fuzzy body to eat his teeth from the inside out. It turned out that Charlie’s gums are growing (instead of receding) with age and he’s just fine. It was touch-and-go there for a week, though. So much crying. Damn, I’m a baby!

4) Safety Town. I volunteered with children this month. For an entire week. And it wasn’t that bad. Aside from one of the darlings drowning my phone in the toilet (no worries thanks to the iphone 4 release!), it was actually fun. And the kids were cute even. Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to start breeding any time soon.

5) Visit to see the Gpa. Spent the weekend after hanging with young people hanging with slightly older ones. Lots of card playing. Good times.

6) I took my mom to see The Eagles (which was awesome), I bought a pair of those Reebok Easy Tones (which are super comfortable, though I’m not sure they work yet), we re-tiled the bathroom and had our air conditioner fixed, and the guy and I refinanced our mortgage.

Anyway, it’s been a crazy, packed month. And I just got done running and watching Soylent Green… It’s made from people, you know.

Zen and the art of driving

It’s time for me to come clean. I have a problem. I have seriously serious road rage. It is definitely one of the worst things about me, if not the worst thing about me. I cannot stand other drivers. Sure, some of you are okay I guess, but for the most part I hate sharing the road with a lot of the assholes out there. It’s gotten so bad that I actually have to practice yoga breathing while I’m behind the wheel or I will scare my passengers with my yelling. Which, I’ll admit, is pretty inappropriate. I swear like crazy;  I’m super-quick with the horn; my middle fingers come out of holsters, quick and strong; I’ve been known to roll down my windows and scream at people; and probably worst of all, if the offender happens to end up at the same destination as me, I have actually given them a stern talking-to face-to-face. Yes, I’m a crazy person. But all that’s behind me now.

I had a revelation today while driving. You see, our grip on the steering wheel is a lot like our grip on reality. If you drive like an inconsiderate asshole, you probably are one. How we drive says something about who we are as people. Behavior doesn’t just happen overnight and it isn’t just behavior. It comes from somewhere. It stems from somewhere. And no, I’m not just talking crazy, I have some examples.

1) The tailgater. The tailgater is way more important than you are. Or at least thinks he is. He doesn’t have time to sit behind you; he has far more important places to get to. Or hypothesis numero two: The tailgater is always late and trying to make up the time. So either he’s a narcissist or he’s irresponsible. Either way, sounds like an asshole to me.

2) The cutter-offer. Again, the person who cuts you off in traffic hates you. In fact, she probably hates everyone. She doesn’t give a shit that you’re driving nicely in your lane, paying attention to, of all things, the road. She needs to be in that lane, like yesterday, and she’s not going to take the time to look. The cutter-offer is that person you know who does things to hurt you without knowing they’ve hurt you. They’re just naturally mean and they can’t be bothered with pesky little things like your feelings.

3) The driver who can’t use his signals. Are you turning left or right? Who knows!? The driver who can’t use his signals is absent-minded at best or completely stupid at worst. It doesn’t take a college education to drive a car. If you can’t remember to turn on your signal to let others know which way you’re turning how can you be bothered with meeting deadlines, remembering birthdays, or even matching your shoes in the morning. Watch out for the driver who can’t use his signals; he’s about as thoughtful as a Ken doll.

4) The cell phone user. Seriously, you can’t wait to talk to someone until you reach your destination? You realize you’re driving a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds and can kill someone, right? The cell phone user is a dangerous sort. Unable to give her full attention to the road or the person she’s talking to, she proves that she is either a) affected with ADD, b) afraid of intimacy, or c) thinks she’s the center of the universe. I suppose the answer could be d) all of the above, as well. The cell phone user is one of those people who texts while she’s half listening to what you’re saying. If she had to look you in the eye without other distractions, she might just explode.

5) The worst sort of driver: the world police. Unfortunately, I fall into this category (see description of self above). Drivers like me try to change the bad driving they see with yelling that no one can hear, offensive gestures that don’t change anything (save for eliciting more offensive gestures), and stern-talking-tos that probably wouldn’t even work on misbehaving children. But for some reason, we keep thinking that if we can alert people to their bad behavior, we can change said behavior. Stay away from drivers like me; we are the textbook definition of crazy: repeating bad technique and thinking it will have a different result. And, let’s face it, we’re pretty narcissistic ourselves, thinking our way is better and all that.

So, anyway, I had a revelation today. I should just live and let live while I’m driving. Chances are, if people are driving like jerks they probably are jerks. And they’ve got problems enough as it is without my middle fingers getting in the way.

I love you, Mickey…

First of all, apologies are in order for missing my post earlier this week. Work is crazy. Sorry, friends.

Second of all, I’m having one of those weeks where I just look at my guy and I start swooning. I know, so much cheese, right? But it’s the truth! I think it’s stemmed from a drunk conversation after a rather excellent bar-b-q last weekend. We were talking about how we got together in the first place and how ever since it’s been us against “them.” Them meaning everyone else, I guess. Apparently, we’ve both always wanted a partner in love, but what we’ve really wanted is a partner in crime. Someone to be snide with, to make inappropriate comments to (quietly), and someone to commiserate with when we think that everything sucks. There is a great Patton Oswalt bit about how his phone remembers his previous texts, and when he goes to text his wife, “I love you,” the “I” is automatically followed by “hate” because he uses the phrase, “I hate xx” so much. The guy and I are just kind of like that. We pretty much hate everyone, but we pretty much love everyone, too. It’s complicated.

So anyway, this whole “us” versus “them” thing got me thinking about movies with a male-female protagonist duo, and then I realized that in almost every one of those films the duo is seriously demented. Which, I guess, is kind of perfect for us… Like in an alternative universe we’d be exactly like these characters: moody, homicidal, ironic, and totally in love. Here is my list of my favorite movies where the duo is so much in love they just have to kill everyone else. Okay, not exactly, but here goes anyway.

1) Bonnie and Clyde (1967): They’re young. They’re in love. They rob banks. Need I say more?

2) Badlands (1973): It’s 1959. She’s fifteen, he’s twenty-five. He kills her father, burns down her house, and they travel the midwest together. So romantic. Oh, he also kills a bunch of other people, too. She just watches, though, because she’s a lady.

3) Wild at Heart (1990): I’ve said it before: David Lynch is a genius, and this film is no exception. Sailor and Lula just want to be together, but they’re having the hardest time getting away from Lula’s mother’s gang of freaks she’s hired to bring her back (and to kill Sailor). This film features Willem Dafoe in his creepiest role ever. And that’s saying a lot.

4) True Romance (1993): This may be my favorite film of this genre. You can’t beat Christian Slater as Clarence the pimp-killing-kung-fu-movie-watching-Elvis-hallucinating-cocaine-dealing-would-be-badass and Patricia Arquette as Alabama the two-times-a-hooking-James-Gandolfini-ass-kicking-pie-eating-princess. Throw in some of the best dialogue ever written, a bit of popcorn, and you’ve got a great Friday night. 

5) Natural Born Killers (1994): Mickey and Mallory have a beautiful, broken love. And with an upbringing anywhere near what’s described in this film you can’t really blame them for being a little messed up. I also love the thick Southern accents butchered by the actors in this film, hence the title of this post.

So, if you and your partner are a two-person show, don’t feel weird about it. You’re in good, though slightly disturbed, company.

You can never hold back Spring cleaning

I am the worst when it comes to getting rid of stuff. I’ve been a packrat for as long as I can remember. I’m not like a hoarder or anything like that, but I do form sentimental attachments to the smallest of things. Example: I have every ticket stub to every concert, movie, or sporting event I’ve ever attended. The ones from my childhood my mom has in a scrapbook somewhere. (I think I come by this honestly.) I also have just about every card or letter I’ve ever received and some choice notes from grade school through high school. I still have a bag of cassette tapes somewhere including several from New Kids on the Block that I may never get rid of as they defined fourth grade like no other band possibly could. I love few things more than nostalgia, so I’ve held on to lots of stuff for far too long.

Anyway, I’ve decided that this Spring Cleaning season, I will rid mine and the guy’s lives of all the clutter. You see, I’m OCD enough that our house is crazy organized and super clean, but it’s full. of. stuff. I think I’m blowing the guy’s mind; we are finally sharing a closet. As in, we both have one half of the closet instead of me taking up three-quarters of it. Amazing, right? That only took two years. I’m keeping the motivation up; I’m just keep thinking about how much it will suck to move all this junk whenever we sell the house. I mean, do we really need twenty coffee mugs when only two of us live here? Do we really need a fondue pot that’s been sitting in the pantry unused for four years?

For all of you out there who are trying to clean out your homes to start this Spring out on the proverbial right foot, here’s a list of some films to keep the spirit alive. Okay, so some of them are kind of a stretch. Unfortunately there aren’t many films out there that make cleaning look appealing. Surprise, surprise.

1) Clean Slate: why not develop amnesia and just skip on the cleaning altogether? You’ll forget to remember that your house is filthy. This movie stars Dana Carvey; so you know it’s a piece of crap.

2)Cleaning Up!: this film follows a Finnish band who plays instruments made from household objects. Don’t want to part with all your stuff? Think about recycling it into something else like a sweet set of tin can drums.

3)Sunshine Cleaning: two sisters start a business cleaning up after crime scenes. Rest safe knowing your home isn’t that dirty.

4) Clean Freak: Some real inspiration for anyone who (like me) feels like your home isn’t clean unless you can eat of the floor. A lesson in how sometimes being too clean can be dangerous.

Or, you could just watch Mr. Mom for the sweet scenes with Michael Keaton and the vacuum. Still makes me laugh, though maybe it’s time to get rid of my VHS collection.

Oh, and it’s not super hard or anything, but 10,000 points go to whoever can name the artist whose song I’m quoting in the title of this post.