All Rileyed Up

Earlier today, I came across the book Imagine a Night by Sarah L. Thomson and illustrated by Rob Gonsalves.

While the cover gave me the slight heebie jeebies, the rest of the book is visually stunning, filled with illusory, surreal images that remind you of the many possibilities the imagination has to offer when given the chance.

Coincidentally, when I visited Maternal Spark today, Heather referenced her love of Dr. Seuss and Oh, The Thinks You Can Think, and asked as her Monday’s Muse that readers take the time to ponder.

At the moment, I’m thinking about those Rob Gonsalves images and pondering an essay in Literary Mama, Motherwriter by Barbara G.S. Hagerty, about her coming to terms with her identities as a mother and a writer. About her love of writing, she wrote:

“What’s so mesmerizing about spending the whole day in a room alone, with just the company of words? It’s the limitless, unpredictable meander of the imagination, the infinity of possibilities, the surprises delivered from various regions of the brain: memory, hunch, and inspiration.”

I love that phrase, the unpredictable meander of the imagination. Indeed, I find that to be my favorite aspect of writing – the journey from what I intended to write to what I actually wrote. I love the feeling in the middle of a freewrite when the story takes over for itself and I think to myself, whoa…

I didn’t see that coming.

Maybe the reason I like the unexpected twists and turns of bringing a story idea to fruition is because I love the unexpected twists and turns of life itself. My mother once me that I’m her unpredictable child. You just never know what I’ll come up with next. And for those of you who know me, you know this fact about me couldn’t be more apparent right now.

See, I’m in the middle of a huge change. It’s so huge I still can’t grasp it enough to write about it. From the outside perspective, I’m moving, I’m starting a new career, and I’m going back to school. When I delve a little deeper, though, I’m nervous, I’m excited, I’m scared, I’m confused, I’m unsure, I’m completely sure, and then some. So in order to be manageable with all these different emotions vying for attention within me, I have to take a step back and look to the bits of wisdom I’ve learned from others. I have to let my mind wander… let it bask in the anticipation of the unexpected.

See this and other Rob Gonsalves pictures here.

While I hate to promote gender profiling, let me just say I am a total woman when it comes to car maintenance. I understand that the transmission, carburetor, and engine are all things that are important to driving, but know no more than that. I can pour oil in my car, know how to use a tire gauge, and am aware of the function of jumper cables, but can’t remember which clips go where.

This particular lack of knowledge turned out to be a problem one time in a library parking lot when a woman asked if I had jumper cables. I said yes, and then I pulled my car up next to hers only to learn that she did not know how to use them either, and so we asked a gentleman entering the library if he could help us out and he responded, “I know how to use jumper cables but I won’t help you because I don’t want to get sued if anything goes wrong.”

Yup. That’s what he said.

Really, dude, if that’s your answer, please just say “I don’t know” next time and avoid the bad ju ju I sent you. Our good Samaritan arrived in the form of a tattooed, bandana-wearing dude exiting the parole building next door to the library (why they chose to situate the parole office and the library next door to one another is beyond me…). He was friendly and helpful and took care of the problem in no time without any concern over me suing him. The experience made me much more open to parolees.

But back to the story at hand. I know very little about cars. Which is why I am so very proud of this fact: I changed my car’s headlight.

Subaru cars require a couple special steps to change a bulb and I didn’t want to mess it up but I also didn’t want to cough up $60 at the Subaru dealership. My friend the mechanic told me I could bring it in to his shop and he’d charge me the cost of the bulb.
Well, it turns out he didn’t have the bulb in stock so he gave me the model and told me to get it at Kragen and he’d install it for me, and I asked him if he could just show me how to do it. So he did. And I remembered. A real triumph. Seriously. Got a headlight that needs changing? I’m your gal.

Chris Tucker sings “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” in Rush Hour 2:

Chris Tucker introduces Michael before a show:

I saw Persepolis not too long ago, but it’s been on my mind lately with all this news footage of Iran. Persepolis is a French animated film about the life of Marjane Satrapi. She wrote Persepolis as an autobiographical graphic novel, and it was made into a film in 2007. While it is a story about a woman growing up in Iran, it’s also a coming-of-age story, about identity, how we start off learning about the identities other people assign to us and how we ultimately learn to define ourselves based on what we stand for.

(warning: spoilers ahead) What I admire so much about this movie is how subtly it depicts hard subjects like politically motivated crimes against humanity, rape, murder, and the mistreatment of women. You laugh when Marjane mouths off to the teachers at school but the laughs sort of dry up when her mother admonishes her, and you find out what they do to virgins before they execute them. It’s entertaining when Marjane bargains with street urchins selling bootleg tapes of Iron Maiden, but less so when loud music brings the police to a co-ed party and results in a guy preferring to jump from one building rooftop to another lest he get caught. Then there’s the bread swan, the quirky gift to Marjane from her beloved Uncle Anoosh, who is thrown in prison and executed.

When Marjane moves to Vienna at the behest of her parents, she sees a different way of life, one she’s not sure is even better despite its lack of the atmosphere of war. It’s a moment that really puts things into perspective, her choice to return to Iran. Of course, everyone knows you can never go back. She returns to a life that is no longer what it used to be, even if her mom is making her favorite breakfast just like she used to. Marjane ultimately leaves Iran again, leaving you reflective as the closing credits come on: does life ever have complete resolution? Or is life, ultimately, about moving on, continuing, enduring? As God points out in the movie, “Yeah, yeah, the struggle goes on.”

I don’t exactly recall when I first started reading Mary-LUE, though I knew I’d like her as soon as I visited her blog and saw in her a fellow Douglas Adams fan.

Over the past couple years, we’ve read each other’s blogs, I lived vicariously through her grad school studies, and at some point, we became friends on Facebook. After spotting a status update that she was attending some classes at Saddleback College, I mentioned it was close to me, and next thing you know, I was looking forward to my very first blogger meet up (and it turns out, hers as well).

We agreed on the Ruby’s Diner at the Shops at Mission Viejo. It was a strong possibility I’d be bringing the kids and Ruby’s is a wonderfully distracting restaurant, in part due to the toy train that rides above our heads and the kids menus that fold into machines (often classic cars, with the occasional vintage military aircrafts or boat).

In the end all, the kids wound up staying with a friend while I met with Mary-LUE, giving us the opportunity to have a nice long conversation so enjoyable that I lost track of the time and had to call my friend who was watching my kids. Over burgers and a milkshake, we talked about reading, our good husbands, children and child-rearing, our mutual disdain for Babywise, our mutual interest in one day meeting Beck, and the hows and whys of our respective blogs.

We parted ways by taking a photograph with Miss Ruby herself, who is tossing her head back so cavalierly as if to say “In my day, we didn’t have blogs, but I bet I’d have written a great one!”:

It occurred to me once I was driving home, though, that we never did get around to discussing Douglas Adams.

How improbable.

I was at a friend’s house jonesing for a movie to watch and gave me these two movies: Little Women and Eight Below.

We may exaggerate, but we’re still better than Little Women.

This is a movie that is about an 8-dog sled team (six Huskies and two Malamutes, all gorgeous) who are abandoned in Antarctica during one of the worst winters ever. Their owner, upset over the abandonment, spends the next half a year or so figuring out a way to get back to Antarctica to find his precious dogs – whether they will be alive or he will have to bury them, he knows not, but he must find out, with a little help from his friends – the romantic interest, the comic relief (the American Pie guy), and a scientist who was saved by the dogs while on expedition (he fell through the ice and one of the dogs tread upon broken ice to rope him and then the dogs together pulled him out of the water — very cool scene).

Now, this is a Disney movie, so we already know there is a happy ending. There are sad moments, of course, and not all the beautiful doggies make it (two, to be exact), but otherwise, we get to see them live life on their own in Antarctica, a March of the Dogs if you will. They hunt birds, they play in the southern lights, they look out for one another, they follow their leader. It’s like watching a Jack London story come to life, only much better than when Disney actually did bring a Jack London story to life:

Book? There’s a book?

The dogs also battle a leopard seal, though with better luck than penguins. The scene was scary enough to give The Boy nightmares about a leopard seal attacking, so be warned (SPOILER): the leopard seal shows up by surprise when Max finds the dead whale. Other than that, everyone in the family really liked this movie. Unfortunately, I can never let a good thing run its course, and had to go and look up the “inspired by a true story” part of the movie and RUIN ALL THE FUN. The true story is that in 1958, a Japanese expedition left their team of fifteen dogs in Antarctica. Two of them lived. Depressing story of thirteen dead dogs or inspirational tale about the survival of two? You can decide by watching the Japanese 1983 film, Nankyoku Monogatari:

Good for them. Bad for the other dogs.

1. I really do love handmade gifts. Mother’s Day was magical this year.

2. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The Boy is more apt to listen to his teacher than to me, so when he doesn’t listen to me, I drop a hint that I might send an email to his teacher.

3. Baking is a helpful thing to know about. There are a gazillion reasons to celebrate something at school, and all of them are increased in spirit by the presence of home-baked goods.

4. Nothing in life is free, not even a public education. Be prepared to participate in fundraisers, donate to jog-a-thons and jump-a-thons, buy food at certain restaurants on certain days, and bid on gift baskets. Or, at the very least, be prepared to read flyers asking you to do all these things.

5. Email is grand. No more waiting on call backs from the teacher.

6. Stuffed animals are alive. Tacky the Penguin came to visit one day, and is even his own picture in the class photo.

7. Cowboy Boots are an acceptable accessory for any and every outfit.

8. Twenty minutes of reading every day. A luxury everyone should have.

9. Phonemes? Morphemes? Allophones?

10. A ride to the zoo takes twice as long on a school bus.

11. A walk around the zoo takes twice as long with a group of Kindergartners.

12. The monkeys at the zoo are twice as active when confronted with a group of Kindergartners.

13. Every age is a fun age to sing “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper.

(More lists of thirteen here.)

These are the cakes the school provided at The Boy’s Kindergarten graduation. Cute, aren’t they?

In case you are looking for some summer reads…

Before You Were Here, Mi Amor by Samantha R. Vamos and illustrated by Santiago Cohen

A mother and father tell their third child about how they prepared for the child’s arrival. Very cute illustrations, not to mention some skilled people (the father carved the rocking chair himself). Lots of Spanish words thrown in and a glossary at the end in case you weren’t able to determine the definition from the context. The kids liked hearing me read it aloud with my gringo (gringa?) accent, especially the word barriguita (tummy).

The Day Leo Said I HATE YOU! By Robie H. Harris and illustrated by Molly Bang

Mommy keeps saying no, drives son to scream “I hate you!” They talk it out and realize they have a shared hate for broccoli instead. More jokes ensue. I’m not really sure why we need help spreading the hate of broccoli, but an otherwise fun book for the kids. Really fun illustrations with lots of bright colors and this absolutely hilarious line: “No yelling MOMMY SALAMI while I’m on the phone!”

The Girl Who Wanted to Dance by Amy Ehrlich and illustrated by Rebecca Walsh

Motherless girl with a silent Father loves her Granny. Granny dies. Father becomes more silent. Girl observes travelling dancers and tries to join them. Dances the tarantella. Learns a surprise about her mother. This story may be too advanced for my kids – too many words and not enough pictures. Their attention wandered, and pretty much after the death of Granny (on the fourth page of text), The Boy just kept asking “Why did Granny die?” Also, when it’s about dancing and involves a girl named Clara, I just find myself expecting to hear the Waltz of the Flowers.

Mr. Mosquito Put on His Tuxedo by Barbara Olenyik Morrow and illustrated by Ponder Goembel

Mosquito attends insect ball. Bear threatens to ruin the fun. Mosquito calls upon his kin to annoy bear to the point that he runs away. The ball is saved. Huzzah!

Um.

Hmmm…

Fun rhymes. Although my kids don’t know what incognito means and Mr. Mosquito in a Tuxedo’s request for a chilled glass of blood is a tad unnerving.

On to more reading…