graceland's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dissecting myself I don't think I've ever written so much. I just can't stop myself. Mind you, it's free association writing. The worst kind. Written babble...and yet I continue. From this page, you would think I am some heartsick girly girl. And Mr. Sullivan, you would be wrong. In real life people frequently remark on how little the things in life seem to faze me. How I am the strongest woman they know. They wouldn't say that if they read this journal. Nor the one before it. I am a carefully projected halogram of the cool girl. Stick your hand out though, it may just pass through me. We are not what we seem, are we? None of us. How is it that whenever I can't sleep, either "The Hours" or "Sylvia" are on to further demonize me? It's like a sick game that cable programmers must play. I wonder if they check the papers in the morning, to see who bled under the razor of late night programming. The Hours. I saw it in the theater with friends, something I rarely do. I almost never get to the movies in the theater, although I love it. I wonder why that is? Possibly the 2 hour commitment, not that I've ever walked out of a movie. I really can't say. So I saw it with friends and afterward we were giddy reaching the fresh air outside, leaving the melancholy of the story behind us in that dank, popcorn smelling bomb shelter. Laughing, everyone agreed that I am Virginia Wolfe. Running from one place to another, fleeing from myself and thinking that change of scene will change everything. "You always think the grass is greener, Grace," they teased. And perhaps they are right. I certainly run to change things that are the easiest to change. In "Sylvia," I recognize our shared ability to drawn out my own demons. To push and manipulate life and people so that my worst expectations come true. I make them happen, simply by the power of their suggestion and I can almost never prevent myself from suggesting them. It's simply beyond understanding why I can't make myself win at bingo. I digress. The Hours. I see so much of my mother in Julianne Moore's character that it is nearly unbearable for me to watch. Frequently, I turn the channel during her scenes. I can't even mute it, because it's not much what she says, but what she doesn't say that breaks me. She is infinitely amazing in that role. Sometimes you'll hear someone remark that you can be more alone with a person that you are emotionally disconnected with that you would be by yourself. That's sometimes how I feel about my mom. Half inhuman to me, half perfection, she resides in my mind as some sort of disdained deity. I remember my mother being always around but not really there. She spoke like Laura Brown in the film, slow, feminine, breathy. Disconnected. Like she was always speaking from somewhere else. Often she didn't speak. She sewed, all the time. Intently. And she read, in silence, or with the radio on. Very much being there, but not there. I remember feeling a genuine surprise when I said goodbye to her the first day of college and I saw a tear in her eye. I can't remember another time before that, when she showed an emotion. People like that scare me and yet I see that I am now one of them. Or was. I'm getting better. I'm a hugger now. Before I recognized my mother in the film, I urged her several times to see "The Hours." Her answer was always the same. "When I go to a movie, I want to see something uplifting, something funny. Life comes with enough tough times without paying to watch them on film." My mother tears up frequently now. Crying at almost nothing. I thought that it was menopause but now I am starting think of her as a personification of Mt. St Helen. Her emotional gases have fused and fissioned for so long that the pressure is steaming them out of her in small outbursts. I wonder if she will explode. And like Mt. St Helen's, I have a pulsing desire to watch that. Not in a bad way, in an intellectual way. In a studious way. To learn from it. I guess no one ever really knows someone but she sometimes fascinates me, in the same way I'd like to watch my own autopsy. 10:31 p.m. - 2004-10-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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