Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The Subjectivity of Light


...got an ice cream cake for my mom’s birthday...the woman taking the order said that’s wonderful when I asked her to write Happy 85th on it...apparently, even in a youth-obsessed society, there comes a point when over the hill becomes a compliment...an acknowledgment that the hills someone’s traveling are distant and hard enough to get to that fear of getting old is finally trumped by something closer to awe...

...when caught in a storm, a point comes, after much resistance and angst, when it’s all okay...after some period of hoping it’ll stop, dreading the consequences of wetness, eyes hunting desperately for shelter...clothes become saturated, water pours down through every crease, entering every orifice...resistance dawns that you can’t get any wetter...and there’s no more reason to worry about the rain...

...went to see the new Woody Allen flick, Midnight in Paris...in which Owen Wilson, playing the neurotic, wise cracking, Woody Allen character, goes in and out of time warps in Paris, interacting with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Gertude Stein, and falling in love with a woman who both isn’t his fiancée and died years ago...at one point, he meets Salvador Dali, who introduces him to his friends Luis Buñuel and Man Ray...who, hearing about his "crazy" predicament, says it makes perfect sense to me...to which our befuddled protagonist replies yeah, but you guys are surrealists...

7 comments:

Daisy Deadhead said...

Great Woody line. :) you made my day, or he did, or you both did!

word verification: statines (?) (state + saltines = something Ayn Rand probably wouldn't like)

bereweber said...

Dr. Jay,

congratulations to your mom, indeed! 85 sounds great, thankfully i am not obsessed with youth, but with keeping alive :)

ahhh, i like Woody so much, although, i have had my disappointments with him too, Match Point was his last really good film, The Dark Tall Stranger or something like that, was really bad... but this Paris one, thank you, sounds promising!

sukipoet said...

what a sweet son you are. happy birthday to your mom.

wondered about that movie. it sounds like back to the future not that i saw that movie.

hmm, methinks i have been resisting the rain. thanks for the metaphor.

the walking man said...

I never could see much point in fighting the inevitable. The rain won't melt me because I know I am not crystalline in substance.

Good for you mom. May she have 20 more ice cream cakes come her way!

WR said...

Perhaps the ability to stop worrying is the breath before taking action...?


Happy Birthday to your Mom. Pretty darned nice way to remember her special day. :)

earthtoholly said...

Happy Birthday to your mom, drjay! I bet that she loved the ice cream cake, more than say...yoga duds?

I'm taking the rain storm literally here...it's always welcome while on the bike, and I've been hoping for the promised afternoon storms for days now, but nothing. This heat and humidity are just awful!

Laura said...

"...an acknowledgment that the hills someone’s traveling are distant and hard enough to get to that fear of getting old is finally trumped by something closer to awe..." LOVED this Dr Jay...actually I enjoyed the whole post...quite rich!

I'm looking forward to seeing this movie, I've heard good things about it.