Reading: Straight Man

Moving: walk in the park

Learning: again, how many children's books there are left to read

Watching: clearer skies and mountains

Invisible Library contributions: In Richard Russo's Straight Man, William Henry Deveraux writes Off the Road. In Scott Corbett's Captain Butcher's Body (a thriller for kids that I bought from Apple Cart Books in West Henrietta, New York, through Bibliofind.com solely because I remembered that there is a book and wanted to contribute it), Marshall Watkins writes Ghosts of the New England Coast

8 August 2000: Twelve Monkeys

I watched "Twelve Monkeys" last night, one of the few movies we own. This was the first time I'd seen it since I saw "The Sixth Sense," so it was the first time I noticed that Bruce Willis says, after the scene in the abandoned theatre, "All I see are dead people." I just searched my archives, and though I didn't find it I'm sure I've mentioned this before: my theory on movie contradictions.

• Bruce Willis says, in a 1996 movie in which his character's (sur)name is Cole, "All I see are dead people," and in a 1999 movie, it's his character's patient, a child named Cole, who sees dead people.
• Kevin Costner says, in 1988's "Bull Durham," that he believes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. In "JFK," he was investigating the probability that Oswald didn't.
• In circa 1986's "Platoon, someone says of Willem Dafoe's character, "Who does he think he is, Jesus fucking Christ?" In 1988, Willem Dafoe plays Jesus Christ.

This leads me to my other problems with "Twelve Monkeys." Terry Gilliam is brilliant, as "Brazil" and "The Fisher King" clearly attest, but this movie is flawed:

• The second time Bruce Willis is sent to 1996, it is with the knowledge of a voicemail Madeline Stowe will send yet later in 1996. Of another voicemail recorded on a 1996 phone number, however, he has no knowledge--even though that is the message that would give all the information anyone needs. If they can't recover the message until someone leaves it on a journey made from their time, then how did they recover Madeleine Stowe's before Willis's third journey?
• If two weeks' incubation elapsed between release and evident symptoms (as is indicated in Cole's debriefing before his third trip), and the Twelve Monkeys' release of the animals and the madman's release of the virus happened on the same day, then that's two weeks before anyone knew anything was wrong for the zoo animals--particularly the big dangerous ones like the grizzly bear and lion we see at the very beginning of the film--to be recaptured.

Terry Gilliam is a genius still, though. I love that Madeleine Stowe knows Bruce Willis too. I love the parallels between 1996 and 2020 equipment and procedure. I love the cartoon nightmare that is yet its own thing, despite Gilliam's creating a cartoon nightmare in "Brazil," "Fisher King," and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

• Which is another thing! Terry Gilliam directed "Baron" and then directed "Twelve Monkeys" with Bruce Willis and then Bruce Willis appeared in a movie in which a woman (and her offspring, obviously) suffer from Munchausen by Proxy syndrome!

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I've been meaning to do this for a while--that is, I'll think of something that I should put on my list, and then I don't make the list because it's a mean petty thing to do. Today I remembered. I scampered out at 11 today because I thought it was about time I ate (I hadn't eaten since Saturday night). I went to the Delectable Egg and had whole wheat toast and a large glass of orange juice. The waitress asked, "Small or large?" and I asked whether it was real or not. She told me it was fresh-squeezed so of course I got a large. Because acid must be such a great thing for me at this point in my digestive history. It wasn't. The toast was really good, though, and came to my table piping hot, and I tipped extravagantly. I gave her two bucks on a six dollar tab, because I am incapable of tipping less than two (I am capable of tipping less than 33%). What's a dollar? Walking back to the office I passed a man at the bus stop with the little oxygen stroller parked at his knee. He was smoking. So three things for my list:

• Orange juice that's not yummy fresh-squeezed
• People not tipping well
• People smoking while on oxygen
• Later in the day, I remembered this one: people going through a stack of photographs one by one, putting down each photograph face up, such that the stack winds up backwards. Is face down too hard? Do you worry about scratching the print? If so, put each photograph behind the stack
• Round-tipped tweezers. What's the point? You can't get a grip on anything with them
• As always, panty-hose
• Jet-skis. Loud, polluting, obnoxious, completely pointless. In the same vein,
• Snow-mobiles for touring. Get snowshoes! Loud, polluting, obnoxious, and pointless, except where used as transportation or rescue, fr'instance on a ski mountain, which leads us to
• Downhill skiing. But I still do it. I'm one determined chick

When RDC got home last week I showed him my new bracelet. He approved, and Saturday morning I presented him with it and my wrist. He has few marital duties, but they are definite:

• zip my dresses
• fasten my jewelry
• brush my hair
• keep track of and pluck the one hair that grows through the scar on the underside of my chin

I don't hold him to the first two all the time because I can zip my own dresses and fasten my own necklaces. I ask him for help with zippers sometimes, flirtatiously, but not often. And this is the first bracelet I've owned in years with any clasp at all. So he fumbled with the clasp and eventually fastened the bracelet around my wrist. My arm still stuck out parallel to the floor. "You left out a step." Realizing what the step must be, he kissed my wrist. Good boy.

Friday night, going to Le Central, I wore my hair down because DMB likes it down. I wore the two silver barrettes I bought with my bracelet to keep it out of my face, but they kept sliding out and finally I abandoned them. I asked DMB how she kept her hair out of her face when it was as long as mine. "I ate my hair a lot," she told me. Squicky. She continued, telling JJT and me that RDC used to brush her hair all the time when he was a little boy.

I said nothing; I didn't need to: RDC did for me: "Man, I'm in trouble now." Brushing my hair is something that doesn't happen enough, if you ask me. DMB pointed out she used to pay RDC a nickel a hair-brushing and a nickel a backrub. The day I have to pay my husband a nickel a hair-brushing is the day I get divorced. I don't hate my hair (often). I don't have it long just because the man wants it long. RDC has made it clear he would rather I be happy than have long hair, if ever a choice between the two must be made. But just as he was glad to paint the bedroom lavender because I've always wanted a lavender bedroom, so am I glad to have my hair long since it makes him happy.

(And I know a paint color isn't as much of a lifestyle choice as long hair. I'm not talking degree of effort; I'm talking taking pleasure in doing something for someone else.)

However, I'd be a lot happier with its length if we both enjoyed it more. I can't sleep or fuck with it loose; it's strangling. That still leaves a lot of sensual leeway, though.

Talk about strangling, though. I started growing my hair in August of 1990. From when I left UConn in late December of 1990 to May of 1991, I lived in my mother's house, not at school, thus without a pool, and therefore I swam not at all. In mid May of 1991, a bunch of PLT's friends and he and I went to Walden Pond. I splashed in happily, dove, swam underwater as far as I could, and surfaced in a crawl, ready to breathe to my left. I could not breathe! No air was getting in my mouth! That was the closest I ever came to panicking in the water. Only for a terrifying instant, though, until I realized the problem. I ducked back underwater and came up face first, so the water would pull my hair away from my nose and mouth. I panted in relief. In those five months my hair had grown enough that I had to restrain it swimming, in order to breathe.

(Which is why, in the summer of 1992, I asked a long-haired woman in a pond with me how she managed breathing. She said her hair didn't get in her way. DMB alleges her hair was never a problem for her either. I either have incorrigible hair or it's too used to braids and doesn't know how to behave loose, OR this woman was more bathing than swimming such that breathing wasn't an issue AND in the early '70s when DMB had long hair, so did everyone else and no one noticed what a pain it is.)

Anyway. Speaking of panicking in the water. My mother's perpetual reason for me not to go swimming alone was that I might get a cramp and drown. That's what she would say when she was feeling practical. Otherwise I might get raped and murdered, since Old Lyme is such a hotbed of violent crime. I never understood the correlation between cramping and drowning, myself. So anyway I meant to write her after my last swim in Congress Park, the mile I did before picking up RDC at DIA that Friday night. I finally, seventeen years after starting swimming alone (although this was hardly alone), swimming with a goal or destination instead of just bathing to cool off, got a cramp in my foot. And, tragically unable to satisfy her (always such a disapointment), I didn't die. I didn't even stop swimming. I was three laps from completing a mile, and damn it I was going to finish that mile. I did those last three laps lopsided, to be sure, like Louis swimming after Sam slit his foot to enable him to play trumpet better, but swim them I did, 3/16 of a mile, more than enough to get to shore from any point in my lake. I ended up not writing about this to her. Discretion being the better part of valor and all.

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Speaking of that latest Congress Park adventure, I was an anarchist earlier that swim. When I showed up at 5:25, ten minutes after opening, no one was yet swimming. I dreaded puke again, but at least there were swimmers waiting around the deck. I paid and went in, only to discover that there was no lifeguard. Anyone putting a toe in was yelled at. Ten minutes late and no sign yet, no word. I wanted the Congress Park people to tell me straight out if a guard wouldn't show--had he called, was he dead?--so that I could take my two bucks and go to Cook in time to get some distance in, but the teenagers behind the desk--blonde, green-eyed, lithe beauties without a manner in their snide heads--would only say "any minute now" with no further reason for me to believe the reassurance. I went back into the pool area, told my fellow non-swimmers the non-status, and one man said, "Well, what are they going to do? Arrest us all?" and slid into the water. Exactly. We all followed suit--we were all lap swimmers, it wasn't as if we were a bunch of seven-year-olds fated to get entangled in the filter grid and drown--and we all swam. Several laps--this is a 50 meter pool--later, I spotted a guard on the stand. Civil disobedience. It felt good.