Author: DaniGirl

On Tuesday, the American Film Institute came out with their list of the top 100 movie quotes of all time. I read through them, and while there were a few smiles and nods and “Yah, I loved that movie” warm fuzzies, for the most part their choices left me kind of flat.

Where are the Monty Python quotes? (“Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”) Not a single John Hughes film? I think I could fill a top 50 list with just The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (“The world’s an imperfect place, sir. Screws fall out all the time.” Or, “It’s a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.”)

And nothing from A Christmas Story? I could go on for days on that one! (“Fra-gee-lay. That must be Italian.” Or, “My father worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium, a master.” Or, “He looks like a deranged Easter Bunny.”)

And while AFI did give the nod to Field of Dreams’s “If you build it, they will come”, they completely ignored the best baseball movie of all time: Bull Durham. Just a sampling:

“Yeah? From what I hear, you couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a fucking boat.”

“Don’t think; it can only hurt the ball club.”

“Well, he fucks like he pitches – sorta all over the place.”

“Man that ball got outta here in a hurry. I mean anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don’t you think?”

and of course:

“Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fibre, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”

And what of The Princess Bride, truly one of the most quotable films ever? Don’t remember the dialogue? It’s time to watch this classic again! At least check out the quotes page on IMDB.

I could go on for a while here. I think the problem is that what AFI calls a memorable quote I simply see as a tag line that everybody and his brother mimics and paraphrases. Anyone can get lucky and crank out a tag line – it takes talent to write a movie that people memorize verbatim.

Ever erudite and often ahead of the curve, Troy of Lowly Scribe came out with a great list of movie quotes a couple of days ago. He wondered what insights into a person’s psychological makeup you could glean from their list of favourite movie quotes. Frankly, I like his list better than AFI’s.

What say ye, citizens of blogdom? What’s your favourite movie quote? What makes it memorable?

How do you make decisions? Big decisions, I mean. It’s true, I have a lot of trouble with little decisions, like what to have for dinner every damn day (a blog for another day) and what to wear and whether to choose the Berrylicious or the Summer Bronze gloss.

But if I have trouble with minutia, I positively agonize over big decisions. I’ve found myself at a fork in my career path. Remember that competitive process I was talking about? Seems I did pretty well. So well, in fact, that I have two offers on the table, much to my shock and dismay. (I tell you, there’s just no pleasing some people!)

Down one road lies a change in direction, probably a new way of working, a shift out of my comfort zone… and a permanent increase in salary and responsibility. Plus the chance to work with someone I really like and admire, but with whom I have never worked before.

Down the other road lies more of what I’ve been doing for the last year or two, with a temporary increase in salary and responsibility (an acting assignment rather than a permanent offer, for those of you who speak government.) Also down this path is my current manager, mentor and substitute mother, easily the best person I have ever worked for and with.

I wasn’t expecting to be given the choice, and I have to admit that I didn’t handle the surprise well. I was a wreck yesterday and I’m not entirely sure why. It’s quite silly that I would be upset really. As one colleague said, “You don’t look very happy for a girl with the world at her feet.”

In the fresh light of morning, I think being caught off guard in having to make any choice at all was a part of my reaction. I’m not good with change at the best of times, but change that jumps out of the bushes and surprises you is worse. The fact that I had less than 24 hours to make my choice didn’t help matters, either.

The largest part, however, was the fact that after feeling overwhelmed and out of control for quite a while, I have just recently settled in again. Ever since my epic wail for help, I have been feeling (touch wood) ever so much better. Quite wonderful, in fact. And Shrek may say, “Change is good, Donkey,” but I’m not convinced I agree with him. 103rd thing about me: not good with change.

Sorry for the navel-gazing today. Still working through my decision, I guess. I have, in fact, made my decision, but I haven’t told anybody here yet. If you’re curious, let me know and I’ll talk about it some more another time.

So back to my original question: when big decisions are thrust upon you, how do you handle them? Do you ponder? (Yvonne, I’m nodding in your direction!) Do you leap? Do you consult? (I live my life by consultation. Did you know that just by virtue of stumbling by, you are a member of the Danigirl Board of Management?) Do you write long lists of pros and cons? Do you flip coins? And sure, tell me what you would do if you were me. I’m curious!

There’s a problem with blog.

GASP! No, you cry, say it ain’t so. A problem? With BLOG?

You see, I’m running out of things to talk about. Not here, of course. Good god knows I’ll pass off just about anything as a post these days. Don’t think I don’t have that whole ‘grocery list’ thing floating around in the back of my head just in case times get lean.

But I’ve suckered so many of my family and friends into coming here on a regular basis that I’ve run out of things to tell them in person. For example, I was having coffee with friends the other day:

Me: You should hear Simon saying ‘please’ these days… (settles into anecdote mode).
Friends: We know, we read about it.

Me: Oh yeah.
(awkward silence)

Me: So I read this really terrific book called the Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s about this guy…
Friends (interrupting): We know.

Me: Right. Um…
(more awkward silence)

Me: So, did I tell you about this really amazing nap I had out on the glider for about an hour and a half yesterday?
Friends: Hey! That wasn’t you, that was Marla!

Me (sheepishly): Oh, hey, really? I, um, got a little mixed up I guess. Well, nice seeing you guys again. I gotta run, I think I left the kettle on. Bye! (slinking out the door)

So I either need to find some new friends, or I need all my old friends to stop dropping by blog. Anybody know where I can get some new friends? (Damn, and it was such a lot of hard work cultivating the first batch!)

A few years ago, I spent a while talking to a psychologist trying to untangle some of the knots my ex-husband left behind, and one day she told me that after hearing so much about my childhood and how I felt about growing up, one of the best things I could do with my life was to raise a couple of kids the way my parents raised me. Is that not the most amazing compliment you can ever imagine?

In response to my 101 things post, Cooper from Been There – which is a really good blog, BTW – said, “What did your parents do right and why did you love your childhood (outside of school) so much? I want to know this so I can do that for my kids. Tell me!”

I had to think about this for a while, but I think the answer is that I always felt secure. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was loved: by my parents, two sets of grandparents, even my pesty younger brother. Unconditional love builds a safety net so that you have the courage to stretch yourself out a little bit, to try new things, to be brave, knowing that if you don’t quite make it, there will be someone there to catch you, or at least pick you up and dust you off and work out some of the dents in your ego before sending you off to try again.

Also, my parents worked fairly hard at preserving my innocence. Ignorance truly is bliss. While I could tell you in graphic detail where babies came from for as long as I can remember, I had no idea that for the first years of my life my parents barely had two nickles to rub together. My granny used to buy clothes for me, because my folks just couldn’t afford it. I had no idea until I was much older. And while I was reading the newspaper daily starting when I was in elementary school, and we watched the news every night, somehow I managed to stay completely sheltered of the cruelties of the world for most of my childhood.

It helps, too, that my parents were very much in love, and I can’t recall a single instance of them fighting, truly fighting, in front of us. Conversely, I wonder if this is where my fear of conflict comes from (hey, make that 102 things about me – I don’t think I mentioned I have a deeply entrenched fear of conflict and hate fighting of any kind) and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to see that people can fight and resolve a situation rather than just not seeing the fighting in the first place.

One thing that makes me a little bit sad that my boys won’t have the freedom I had, because I have so many happy memories of just taking off and wandering around the neighbourhood when I was just five or six or seven years old, or playing hide and seek with the neighbourhood gang until it was too dark to see. It makes me a little sad that they will grow up in such a different kind of world than I did. I used to walk to school and back again every day by myself at the age of four – can you imagine that happening today?

What do you guys think? What makes for a happy childhood? What will you do that your parents did, or what will you desperately hope you will never do?

We have one of those oversized inflatable kiddie pools in our backyard. It’s 12 feet across, and the water is maybe 26 inches deep. I got it last year at the end of July as a birthday present from my men, and I think the temperatures were nice enough to swim maybe four or five times the rest of that summer.

Through the winter, we debated on whether to put it up again this year. It was, frankly, a heck of a lot of bother and wasted space considering the amount of enjoyment we got out of it. One of the major impediments to my enjoyment was that my darling Tristan pooped in the pool around day five that we had it up, and no amount of chlorine ever convinced me the water was clean again.

We finally decided that putting the pool up again this year would be less work than filling in the 12′ crop circle in the back yard. I’m so glad we did! We’ve had an early summer heat wave for the last two weekends, and temperatures have topped out around 30 degrees before the humidity. Factor in the humidity and we’re warm enough to be our own sun. And sweaty enough to fill our own saltwater lake.

We’ve gotten more than our money’s worth so far this season. We’ve been in swimming each day on the weekends and on my Mondays off. A couple of days it was hot enough to go in twice. The only problem is, we’re a dirty lot. We’re sweaty, we’ve got sunscreen glommed on us, and we have to walk through the grass to get into the pool, grass which loves to go for a swim with us.

It probably doesn’t help that I got a great deal on a sand and water table at a garage sale last Saturday, and somehow we managed to buy the kind of sand that has a mind of its own and hides in cracks and crevices, using sunscreen as glue, only disengaging itself from the boys when they are in the middle of the living room — or in the pool.

You see, I’ve become a little bit obsessed about keeping the pool clean. I’ve never had a pool before, so this whole routine is new to me. I feel like a scientist with my little box of chemicals and test strips. I run the filter regularly, setting the oven timer so I don’t leave it on all night (or for an entire week, as happened last summer.) I even have a bunch of pool care Web sites bookmarked, where I learned the wonders of baking soda for Ph balance.

But what I really love to do is skim the pool. I could skim the pool for hours. There is something oddly satisfying about working my way down the flotsam chain from drowned wasps to grass blades to dandilion fuzz to sand grains to particles so small I have to squint to see them. There is a meditational zen in scudding my skimmer into a settled pile of sediment and scooping up the debris, sweeping it through the water and slapping it out onto the lawn. Move over two inches and repeat. Move over two inches and repeat. I could pass an entire afternoon ensuring the water is as clean and clear as anything that flows from a Swiss spring.

And this summer, I’ve realized that the optimum place to stand is not at the edge of the pool, but in the middle of the pool. The water only comes up to the middle of my thigh, a few inches under the cuff of my shorts, but it’s surprisingly refreshing. Bright sun, warm air and tepid poolwater – the summer trifecta.

Now if only I could get half as interested in picking up the avalanche of toys that are taking over my living room. Or de-crumming the kitchen. Or maybe even putting away the folded laundry. What is it about outdoor chores that makes them so much less tedious than indoor chores?

My adorable 16 and 1/2 month old Simon has developed a bit of an annoying quirk of late. He’s on the cusp of being verbal, but doesn’t have access to enough words to clearly communicate his desires. And the boy has a lot of desires, which he feels passionately about.

For a while, when he saw something he wanted, like a banana, his soother or my hairbrush, he’d grunt meaningfully and reach toward the object of his attention. Then he realized if he screeched while gesturing significantly toward something, we were much more highly motivated to satiate his needs. At first it was grunt-gesture-pause-screech, then he dropped the time-consuming and generally unsuccessful grunt-gesture-pause and instead jumped straight to the eardrum-splitting screech.

Apparently, we were very accomodating in responding to his glass-shattering screech, because he began to employ it as a regular communication tool. Tristan took my toy – SCREECH! Please pass me that sippy cup – SCREECH! Look, the dog has a tail – SCREECH! I’m sitting in my highchair and there’s no food in front of me – SCREECH! I’ve just stuffed the last scrap of food into my face and I’m still hungry oh my god will there never be food in my life again if only I could reach that plate full of food right there in front of mommy before I starve – SCREECH!!

You get the picture.

It was getting a little tiresome, I am not afraid to admit. I explained to Beloved that it was just a phase, that as soon as he had words he would use those to communicate. We just had to put up with it for a little while. Beloved regarded me suspiciously and asked if I had somehow mated with an eagle, since Simon’s screeches sound remarkably like the starving baby eaglets on the National Geographic channel.

But this weekend, my incredibly brilliant mother changed all that. She taught Simon to say “Please.” Every time he screeched for something, she would pick it up, show it to him and say, “Please.” Within minutes, Simon was saying the most adorable version of “Pless” to ever grace the English language.

Damn, mothers really are smart. Even when you’re a mother, you realize that there is a hierarchy of mothers, and you might as well not even try because you’ll never be as clever as your mother.

So now, Simon walks around the house gesculating and hollering “PLESS” at the top of his lungs. You’ve never heard the word please imbued with so much emotion. My favourite was Simon in his highchair yesterday at lunchtime, waiting impatiently for another serving of apples pieces to be cut up. He balled up his little fists and bellowed “PLESS!” so loud his eyeballs bulged.

Who knew please could be a four letter word?

I tried, I really did. I wanted it to work out.

I’m sorry, weight watchers, but it’s just not working out between us.

It’s not you, it’s me. Much as I have suspected all my life, I’m just not a diet kind of girl.

Four weeks into the programme, and I’m still up a pound from my starting weight. Ironically, the only week I totally blew through the point ceiling, my first week, was the week I lost two pounds. Ever since, I’ve been gaining. Go figure. And that’s not even using the extra 5 points a day I am theoretically entitled to as a nursing mother. Nursing only once per day, mind you, but still.

Plus, I’ve ended up exactly where I never wanted to be – obsessing about food. That’s exactly the thing that I most wanted to avoid. When I found myself pouting in the kitchen one evening after dinner, miserable because I wanted to eat two oreos and a glass of milk but berating myself over the points, I knew I was in a place I didn’t want to be.

I’ve decided to see someone else. I’ve signed up for a gym membership, which is what I wanted to do in the first place. I used to work out all the time before the boys came along. So I looked at my schedule, at my life, and figured if I have room enough to read a 500 page book in seven days, I have 45 minutes two or three times a week to work out.

To all of you who have been so sweet and supportive and encouraging in the past month, thank you! I hope you will stick around and continue to offer cheers and moral support, because I still have 10 or 15 lbs to lose, and I’m still planning on using blog to keep myself accountable. I’m just not going to do it via dieting.

(And since you’ve been so sweet, here’s a little secret: if you send an e-mail to WW online and tell you are a nursing mother and you would like them to please adjust your points because you heard from a friend you are entitled to extra points, they will cancel your membership with a full refund within two hours, don’t call us we’ll call you. Oh gosh golly, what a shame. Man, they are terrified of nursing mothers. You’d think I’d told them I had the plague. Thanks to Kaykota for sharing your experience on this frontier!)

Cooper, I hope you have better luck than me with WW. Sharon, good luck to you too and keep up the good work! Anna and twinmom, thank you so much for your encouragement. And to my now TWO secret weight loss buddies, please feel free to show me up and do so much better with WW than I did. Did I miss anyone? I’m grateful to all of you…