Poem for Friday

Keepsake
By Viggo Mortensen

Still unused,
the letter opener
she got on her birthday
has become tarnished.
It lies on the sill,
next to a seashell
she found in Florida
before moving west.
Before becoming a writer.
Before becoming a mother.
Her son wants to use it
as a dagger,
to wield it savagely
against monsters and bad guys
that come streaming out
from the toy-cluttered corners
of his room,
but he can't reach it yet.

--------

Shut up, I'm allowed to be in the mood for that poem. I think it was the seashell and the fact that my son too has monsters and bad guys in the toy-cluttered corners of his room. I have my mermaid-handle athame hidden because I can only imagine how it might get used if found at the wrong moment.

Had a quiet morning and afternoon before going out for Middle Eastern food in Georgetown with my husband prior to the going to the movies. Returned some phone calls, made some appointments, wrote an entertaining article about the ongoing war between Linlithgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen to be the Official Future Birthplace of Montgomery Scott and a more depressing one about the implosion of Decipher, Inc. More and more these days I am glad Trek is a job and not a fandom, though every week I feel the original series pulling me back in, making me forget all that came after.

And speaking of reliving fandoms in a state of blissful purity, I must report that Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World holds up to memory as very few things do. This was my eighth viewing on a big screen, and I can't even guess how many times I've watched it in widescreen on DVD and in fullscreen when it just happened to be on HBO when the TV got turned on. Once again there were little things I've noticed that I never noticed before, big things that moved me just as much this time as before...I fell in love with Russell's Jack Aubrey all over again even though I broke up with Russell over the telephone incident (*snerk*) and even though I had fallen in love with Jack in the books, who is somewhat different from Russell's, and with O'Brian's Stephen, who is even more different from Paul Bettany's.

I have some bad associations with M&C as well as good ones. In many ways the people I met there were the most volatile of any fandom I've ever been in, though maybe it's just that it's such a small online fandom compared to Star Trek, LOTR and HP so it's easier to keep running into the same issues over and over, from the ones who believe nobody has any business writing fan fiction or having an opinion without having read 40 volumes of Napoleonic history to the ones who are convinced that their personal interpretation of the Aubrey/Maturin relationship is the only correct one and everyone else is in denial or deluded. I did most of my talking about and writing about M&C with someone with whom I am no longer in touch, and on the rare occasions when I look back on the fic I wrote, I scarcely even recognize it as mine. And I've learned a huge amount since that first viewing about ships and naval warfare and the historical figures upon whom these people were based.

All that said, I watched the movie completely engrossed in it and forgetting all extraneous associations, positive and negative, just being awed again at what a damn good, satisfying, well-made film it is. It was introduced by a staff member from the AFI Silver Theatre (that's the American Film Institute's venue in Silver Spring, around the corner from the Borders where we went to the Harry Potter party with Jennifer Cutting's Ocean Orchestra), a guy who had apparently met Peter Weir and either knew things I'd never read or at least sounded like he did. *g* I also had the lovely surprise of running into at the theater, whom I have known since before LiveJournal; I believe that the last time I saw her in person, we were seeing The Majestic, so it's been a ridiculously long time and even predates my falling back into the slash fold. I probably scared her with the intensity of my geekery but what the hell, she's known me long enough to expect it!

Then we drove home along the (smelly) C&O Canal listening to My Hand, My Heart because I needed to hear Russell singing "I Miss My Mind," the song that incorporates the Boccherini from the movie (my younger son calls this "the Broken Weenie," hence the Crowe melody is "the Broken Weenie song"). And I discovered that the photos I snapped with my Palm's low-tech camera out the front window as we drove past the building where we got married actually came out tolerably:


This is the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street in the heart of Georgetown. That red brick building with the white upper levels used to be a restaurant called Pisces. was one of my bridesmaids., Hee, nostalgia trip.

Am very, very behind on comments, e-mail, etc. but I have made a dent in putting tags on my entries. Please forgive me, shall be much better once school starts!