Category Archives: meta

This is a movie review– of sorts.  It’s also some­what sur­real– Magritte’s Treach­ery of Images, except instead of this not being a blog post or a movie review, ceci n’est pas ma vie, my life.  At least it’s not the life that I want.

I’ve got about five drafts of this post started, all put­ter­ing out.  Much like my life, I sup­pose– I start things and don’t fin­ish.  I’m sick of it, I feel like a fail­ure, a whiner, a list of neg­a­tive terms and ideas that I only par­tially am, because I still have won­der­ful fam­ily and friends who check in on me and haven’t yet given up.  I would like to feel philo­soph­i­cal about jour­neys and path­ways aban­doned, but right now I see roads past and a murky map with no clear direc­tions ahead.

Ceci n’est pas une bonne vie.

The sur­re­al­ist metaphor, the invo­ca­tion of Magritte is inten­tional, because like the paint­ing, the Treach­ery of Words is that while yes, they explain and can rep­re­sent, they’re still cho­sen, only part of the pic­ture.  The words only por­tray what the author chooses.  (More or less– we’ll worry about my sub­con­scious later.  I tell my shrink that a lot.  Note to self.  Call my shrink.  Explore whether and how to re-start med­ica­tions.  Start a new blog post on that.)

So there are a lot of things I could write here and go on at length about, though as I’ve said, my attempts to write this before have just meant blog silence.  Instead, I’ll just post the first fits and starts of a num­ber of these, and per­haps later when this imper­fect, unfin­ished, sur­real mess is posted, per­haps I can come back and feel like one of them (all of them, any of them) are worth fin­ish­ing.  Here goes– I’ve put them in bold for, well, not your read­ing plea­sure, but for sheer melodramatics.

The thing about not being able to go to work any­more, about not being able to stand the idea of it, about not being able to stop the cold prick­les and numb­ness that cover your chest, your neck, your arms, mak­ing your breath ragged and your face sweaty– well, aside from the need­ing to find some­thing dif­fer­ent to do, they tend to think you shouldn’t come back. (Also, writ­ing in the sec­ond per­son can be pre­ten­tious.  Or angsty.  But my blog name starts with bipo­lar, and for now, I’m indulging  the crazy.)

When I chose the blog han­dle bipo­lar­lawyer­cook, I chose it mostly because the words flowed best that way.  It’s taken me a while to real­ize that while I can add all the descrip­tors on after the “B” word that I want– writer, wife, shitty friend, avid reader, hider-from-life– bipo­lar comes first for a rea­son.  It is a defin­ing thing, one I don’t like at all, and ignor­ing that means that it tends to whack you in the back of the head and make your life mis­er­able until you admit it.  Bipo­lar comes first.  I hate it, but it doesn’t change one damned thing.

My mother-in-law passed in mid-July in her sleep, at home, hav­ing recently taken much joy in her new grand­son and hav­ing spent time with fam­ily laugh­ing and enjoy­ing her­self.  It was a good death, after a some­times hard life and the eclips­ing prob­lems of old age start­ing to catch up with her.  It was a good death, and she’d been happy in the time right before.  It doesn’t change the feel­ings her chil­dren and I feel of should have done more, should have talked more, should have spent more time, should have thought more. If you’re won­der­ing if you feel that way about some­one in your life, well, you will. I miss her.  I wish I had called her more on my own, just to talk, whether or not her kids were around.  I won­der if she knew that I loved her as much as I do.  I look at her din­ing room table, now in my house, look at the multi-colored pyrex bowls and butcher block of hers now in my kitchen, and hope I can fill them up with enough food to feed to her chil­dren and in-laws and grand­son that some­how she’ll know.  She liked my cook­ing, I know that.  She always seemed glad for the left­overs, and hap­pily took left­over desserts that I’d made.  For all that I write and effuse and angst all over this screen here, I don’t say “I love you” aloud very often.  I hope that she knew that’s what the choco­late cakes and the pork roasts all meant.

I’ve said it before, I’ll undoubt­edly say it again, and what I’ll say next is some­thing that scares the ever-living shit out of me.  I don’t know where the line between self-pity, tak­ing care of myself, and work­ing too hard is until I’m already past it and the panic’s set in. The panic makes my occa­sion­ally bril­liant, insight­ful, witty fine mind turn into a murky place where I play hide and seek with myself, duck­ing into rooms full of dis­trac­tions that mean I don’t have to face the fear of not just admit­ting that I’ve fucked up again and have to start new all over, once more–it’s per­pet­ual, the fear of when is it going to hap­pen again and the fear/knowledge/worry that it’s not a line I’ll ever rec­og­nize until I’ve already crossed it.

Scor­pios, of which I am one, are sup­posed to be pas­sion­ate, inci­sive, cre­ative, intense.  They’re ruled by the planet (ex-planet, and boy is that a metaphor for my sense of being right now) Pluto, named after the god of the under­world, and if that’s not a metaphor for my base ten­dency to brood despite glim­mers of rhetor­i­cal wit and keen sar­casm (not to men­tion mean park­ing skills) then I don’t know what is. See, Pluto has an erratic orbit, can take for­ever (21 years, though some­times less depend­ing on what stars are ascen­dant, from 13 to 25 years) to orbit the sun only once.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia’s Plan­ets in Astrol­ogy Entry, “Astro­log­i­cally Pluto is called “the great renewer”, and is con­sid­ered to rep­re­sent the part of a per­son that destroys in order to renew, through bring­ing buried, but intense, needs and dri­ves to the sur­face and express­ing them, even at the expense of the exist­ing order. A com­monly used key­word for Pluto is “trans­for­ma­tion”. It is asso­ci­ated with power and per­sonal mas­tery and the need to co-operate and share with another, if each is not to be destroyed. Pluto gov­erns big busi­ness and wealth, min­ing, surgery and detec­tive work, and any enter­prise which involves dig­ging under the sur­face to bring the truth to light.”

Oh, but I wish the last part were true, that there is renewal from the ruins of (self-) destruc­tion.  It’s funny, because the other word that’s been on my mind is “Mer­cu­r­ial,” about which Mer­riam Web­ster says this:

• Main Entry: ¹mer·cu·ri·al
• Pro­nun­ci­a­tion: \(ˌ)mər–ˈkyu̇r-ē-əl\
• Func­tion: adjec­tive
• Date: 14th century

1 : of, relat­ing to, or born under the planet Mer­cury
2 : hav­ing qual­i­ties of elo­quence, inge­nu­ity, or thievish­ness attrib­uted to the god Mer­cury or to the influ­ence of the planet Mer­cury
3 : char­ac­ter­ized by rapid and unpre­dictable change­able­ness of mood <a mer­cu­r­ial tem­per>
4 : of, relat­ing to, con­tain­ing, or caused by mer­cury

I don’t like this def­i­n­i­tion, though I’m wor­ried it’s apt.  I don’t like think­ing I steal people’s time and atten­tion and don’t give any­thing back.  I want to be pre­dictable, because lord knows there was lit­tle of that when I was younger.  One of the lit­tle birth­day cards I have kick­ing around with infor­ma­tion about Scor­pios says that we detest inter­fer­ence, and that is so very right, even exclud­ing the ACOA con­trol freak ten­den­cies I lay­ered on top of that like poor-laid shel­lac that bub­bles and yel­lows and sti­fles until I have to rip it all off vio­lently, though vio­lence for me is also passive-aggression, such as oh, say, just stop­ping going to work.  Not that I would know any­thing about that.

The short answer to what I did in my non-summer vaca­tion?  I hid in my house and found new cor­ners of the inter­net where I could pre­tend things were com­fort­able.  When my mother-in-law passed and we went over to her place most every day to start clean­ing her house, it was ter­ri­ble and hard and I hated myself because all I could think half the time was “It’s eas­ier to clean some­one else’s mess than my own, and I’m glad to have some­thing to do.” I was tired at the end of the day because I wasn’t used to talk­ing to any­one but my hus­band every day.  And now I have the estate to help pro­bate, and while it may be the only/last legal thing that I do aside from sim­ple wills for my fam­ily and friends, and I can fin­ish this and do a good job.  My mother in law was a per­fec­tion­ist– she deserves noth­ing less.

Our dear friend L. became ill and needed surgery, which took longer than expected because her con­di­tion was pretty damned seri­ous.  I insisted (heavy-handedly, but hey, we Scor­pios are pas­sion­ate folks con­cerned of our own right­ness) that she stay with us because she’s sus­cep­ti­ble to the drugs and I was wor­ried about her being at home alone.  I did a lot of cook­ing– some­thing I was glad for– and cleaned the back room (not very well, but the piles were all at least away from the bed)– and again had a hard time with the idea of talk­ing to some­one and hav­ing nor­mal human con­ver­sa­tions, not just the ones in my head.  I retreated more than once to my ham­mock, the one my dear Bet­ter Half bought for me, and gen­er­ally behaved like a cow­ard, hid­ing and read­ing and writ­ing things I haven’t yet posted (though a few snip­pets have made their way in) and gen­er­ally hat­ing the fact that life shouldn’t be so hard, espe­cially keep­ing a dear and ill friend decent com­pany. I hope that she knows that the soba noo­dles with snap peas and my ques­tions about whether she wanted some toast or some fruit or had gone to the bath­room meant I love you and worry about you. (And now she does, because she reads this.  Yeah.  Talk about indi­rect conversation.)

So yeah, now, here’s the movie review.  Still with me?  Bless you.

L. and I went to see Julie and Julia and yes, yes, yes you should see it.  I will throw in Joyce qua Molly Bloom’s “yes i said yes i will yes” because it’s not only apt in its sur­real elo­quence, in its way in which syn­tax and gram­mar is for peo­ple with more time and a less insis­tent need to express now now now. yes i said yes i will yes you should see this movie.

There’s the level on which this movie review is a movie review, or a rep­re­sen­ta­tion thereof (Oui, bon soir, Mon­sieur Magritte, com­ment allez vous, je m’apelle bipo­lar­lawyer­cook, nee Erika), and that’s this.  Meryl is mar­velous, Stan­ley stu­pen­dous, and the Child romance is one for the ages, one in which the ques­tion of whether Paul loved Julia and vice versa like Calvin loved Alice is a resound-unto-the-hills mighty yes.  A bar­baric yawp of a yes, really.  The Julia part of the film is a mas­ter­piece, a Mas­ter­ing the Art of the Period Film if you’ll for­give the hor­ri­ble pun as much as you’ve for­given my mer­cu­r­ial ways too many times to keep count.  The cos­tumes (there’s a green dress when Julia’s sister’s in town (played by the FABULOUS Jane Lynch of Glee and Christo­pher Guest film fame) that’s just fab­u­lous) and the sets, the color palette in con­trast with the Julie part of the film, the ban­ter, the feel– if you’ve been to Paris and ached for its beauty, for the sense that it’s its own place out of time, then YES.  The screen­play, too– the inter­weav­ing of the two wom­ens’ sto­ries, res­o­nant and yet not heavy-handed– was just per­fect.  And as Meryl said in her Char­lie Rose inter­view with Nora Ephron (and thank you to L. for point­ing this out), this is the Julia of My Life in France, but it’s also the Julia of tele­vi­sion, the one in our heads and our hearts, and oh, joie de vivre means noth­ing until you’ve seen Meryl Be Julia.  Because she Is and she Does and she Will and a thou­sand mil­lion Molly Blooms would say Yes to the woman on screen remind­ing us that tall, awk­ward, not pretty women are bril­liant and beau­ti­ful and beloved and capa­ble of being all those things, always, even if it takes eight years to get pub­lished and a moun­tain of onions in a small Paris kitchen.

But the Julie part of the movie, this is where the already-veering-into-Aesopian-fable movie review becomes painful and meta.  Because I read the book and you should too, whether you like Julie Pow­ell or not.  To be hon­est, like many movie and book review­ers, I some­times find her annoy­ing on page and on screen, and I’ve found some of her sub­se­quent writ­ing to be forced or painful or some­thing.  Or some­thing being the key.  It’s not so much sym­pa­thy as a sense of my own pathos that I have for Ms. Pow­ell– it hurts like lemon juice on thou­sands of paper­cuts, and I cringed as I looked at the screen.  In the end, though, I love her, because she is Real, not or some­thing at all.

I’ve writ­ten a few times in meta-fictional sto­ries I’m just now, here, post­ing the links to (see supra, i.e., shiny men­tal dis­trac­tions while I hide from real­ity via my TV show and movie fan­fic­tion writ­ing habit) that fic­tion is a mir­ror through which we con­front truths that are too painful head-on, as well as a lens through which we project all our desires, because I don’t care what a lit­er­a­ture fan or scholar you are, we’re all Mary Sues in the end, and you know what, here– I’m embar­rassed by the fan­fic­tion and yet not, because as weird and inces­tu­ous and stalk­ery as the mere con­cept seems, I dare­say some of the stuff I wrote is pretty damned good, the crazi­ness, smu­ti­ness, slashi­ness, self-indulgence all notwith­stand­ing.  But back to that or some­thing.  The or some­thing is the reflec­tion I see and cringe from, the reflec­tion of the sad, mixed-up woman with plenty of rea­sons to be happy who is nonethe­less mis­er­able and wants a magic fairy in the form of Julia Child (or a blog, or a book con­tract, or a win­ning lot­tery ticket, oh wait, that’s a Mary Sue bit right there at the end, see how that hap­pens?) to come along and Make Every­thing Better.

So yes– I did have the urge to sob hys­ter­i­cally at what a mess my life is dur­ing the movie, but I sup­pressed myself to a few snif­fles and a wiped eye or three.  I’m a Scor­pio Adult Child Manic Depres­sive and maybe a few other things– I can stave off a break­down and be brave until I push my way through writ­ing this blog post and hop­ing that the wash of saline over my key­board doesn’t do per­ma­nent dam­age.  I started a blog.  I started a blog because I hoped it might save my life.  It hasn’t, because I stopped writ­ing it, stopped cook­ing, stopped tak­ing phone calls, stopped going to work.  Stopped.  But I’m breath­ing.  And start­ing again.

There’s a part in the film where Julie’s mak­ing a chicken stuffed with cream cheese and other fat­ten­ing good­ies, and she drops it and the fill­ing spills all over the floor.  With a stran­gled scream of dis­gust, Julie starts scoop­ing the fill­ing back inside, mak­ing even more of a mess– and then the scene cuts to an oppor­tune phone call her hus­band takes.  When the cam­era returns to our angsty blog hero­ine, she’s sprawled out on the floor in an atti­tude of defeat, and it takes coax­ing from her so-patient-husband (despite his insis­tence he’s not a saint and a few angry out­bursts they have, includ­ing one night he spends at the office rather than home, he is a saint, and yes, there’s a par­al­lel here to my hus­band, because he is a saint even if he’ll deny that he is and say he doesn’t deserve me, of all incred­i­ble ironies) to get her up off the floor to answer the phone.  She does, and then she keeps going.  It all turns out well in the end, despite burnt boeuf bournignon and self-absorption and –pity and more food than is good for her waist­line– although Amy Adams can­not play chunky like Meryl plays tall, but Meryl is Meryl and that’s all there is to say except, well, maybe I wish I was Meryl right now.  Except that I don’t, not really, I just wish I was a bet­ter myself, a song­wor­thy myself that sounds not like a dirge but a carol.

So here is where the movie review is a self-imposed ass-kicking, an attempt to stop hid­ing and post the actual, real fic­tion I’ve writ­ten and come out and play nice with vir­tual and real friends, an attempt to say yes i said yes i will yes and answer the ques­tion of whether I’m going to get on with my life and not so much pre­tend that the past hasn’t hap­pened as deter­mine to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this time and hope that it works.

Do I con­tra­dict myself?
Very well then I con­tra­dict myself,
(I am large, I con­tain multitudes.)

I am off to chop onions a la Brave Won­der­ful Julia, even if she’s just the one in my head (and really, there are lots of oth­ers in there and she’s a far bet­ter role model than most) in a small-ish Boston kitchen on my mother-in-law’s butcher block.  I mean this lit­er­ally and metaphor­i­cally.  As Peter Mayle once said, the year began with lunch, and I drooled at the bruschetta they showed in the movie when Julie first decides she will Write A Blog Change Her Life Do Some­thing.  I’m hop­ing there’s a bar­baric yawp, an I cel­e­brate myself, and sing myself soon, and that the answer remains yes.

yes is said yes i will yes, in answer to my self-imposed question.

This is not a movie review.  It’s not even a call to my own arms, wrapped around myself, rock­ing (out of the cra­dle and I can never go back, end­lessly rock­ing, because too much Whit­man is never enough and if he didn’t need edit­ing, then nei­ther do I, at least not today) as I say It’s going to be fine, because I don’t know if it will.  It’s a blog post.  It’s a con­fes­sion that I’m fucked-up and ashamed and scared to all hell and that god­damnit, I’m going to say yes again any­way.  It’s a to-do list of things to do for tomor­row, ad infini­tum.

Say yes, even if bipo­lar comes first.  Wait­ress or book­store clerk or essay and short fic­tion writer, maybe some­day some­one will pub­lish me or give me a lot­tery ticket next, along with the cook, prob­a­bly not so much with the lawyer.

Do you think there’s a domain name called yesbipolaryeslawyeryescookyeseverythingspossibleyes.net?  I’ll put it on my list of new things to do.  For now, I’ve accom­plished today’s, because the ques­tion was “Will you hit publish?”

You’re read­ing the answer.

P.S.  I have one thing to feel brave about.  In one scene in the movie, Julia bisects her first liv­ing lob­ster as her voice nar­rates a let­ter to her friend Avis de Voto.  She says, “And also, I am appar­ently fear­less,” with a cut to the lob­ster mas­sacre in pur­suit of the del­i­cacy Homard a l’Americaine, which yes, I have made.  It’s deli­cious, well worth the mur­der of inno­cent lob­sters.  I squeed and eeewed more once I was done with the crus­tacean vivi­sec­tion than I like to imag­ine The Julia ever did, but the fact remains– I still did it.