Saturday, December 02, 2006

Poem for Saturday


My Heart is Lame
By Charlotte Mew


My heart is lame with running after yours so fast
            Such a long way,
Shall we walk slowly home, looking at all the things we passed
            Perhaps to-day?

Home down the quiet evening roads under the quiet skies,
            Not saying much,
You for a moment giving me your eyes
            When you could bear my touch.

But not to-morrow. This has taken all my breath;
            Then, though you look the same,
There may be something lovelier in Love's face in death
As your heart sees it, running back the way we came;
            My heart is lame.

--------


Things that were good Friday: 74 freakin' degrees the first day of December. Expected ferocious winds never arrived. Morning did not suck as thoroughly as I was expecting. Had to be five minutes from hubby's office, so persuaded him to take me out for Indian food. Managed to choke out review of "The Mark of Gideon", though basically did not have one nice word to say about it. Discovered to my surprise that despite my overall disappointment with The Return of the King, unexpectedly hearing "Into the West" can still make me cry so hard that I have to pull the car over so I don't hit something. Still have a great deal of awful crap to deal with that is going to rear its head next week and may knock me for another, even worse, loop, but am getting better at Just Not Thinking About It. And look, I had gay porn on my deck!


I glanced out the window and look what I saw Jack and Stephen doing!


They were embarrassed for a minute when they realized I was watching, perhaps worried about Article XXIX.


But soon enough, Stephen had ceased to worry about it.


He was in the mood for something more aggressive!


And he tried to top!


Jack apparently was hoping to get his nether parts examined by the doctor.


But one whiff and Stephen had had enough, apparently!


Though a few minutes later they were right back where they started, sniffing each other.


The above was all shot via telephoto without flash through glass, so sorry about the distortion and the blur!

: Can't Not
1. Are you complicated?
Not nearly as much as I used to like to think I was. *snickers*
2. Do you retaliate? Sometimes in the moment, particularly if someone is hitting below the belt. I don't retaliate long-term, though I occasionally think about how I would if I did.
3. Last person to hug you? My husband. Unless the cat who had her head in my lap counts.
4. Your latest complaint: We really, really do not want to go there.
5. Who was the bully on your playground? Her name was Debbie and our mothers are still friends.


Had dinner with my parents, mostly discussed geneaology because Ancestry.com had free trial memberships last month and I tracked down my father's grandfather's immigration records, but could not track down stuff on my mother's family, which I suspected had to do with the fact that every single one of her grandfather's eight brothers spelled the last name slightly differently when they arrived from Eastern Europe. (We're still trying to figure out if we're related to the big family of the same last name, not because we care whether we're descended from King David or Rashi but because it would be really neat to find out we're connected to all these other people and the shtetl seems to have been in the right region for the relation.)

Then we watched our usual Friday night television, though Battlestar Galactica will not be that for long, in part because Sci-Fi is moving it to Sundays and in part because tonight's episode bored and annoyed me just as much as the first season...more, even, because I'd really been enjoying it for awhile. Doctor Who, however, only continues to get better, and "The Satan Pit" rocks on so many levels even though it really made me think of an inverse Star Trek V: The Voyage Home, with a black hole instead of the center of the galaxy and the Devil instead of God and the Doctor instead of Kirk but what can you do. *g*

As usual, Rose made the episode for me more than the Doctor...I loved that she begged him to tell her there was no such thing as Satan, but then, faced with both evidence that there was a Satan and the likelihood of never seeing the Doctor again, she just pulled it together and went about insisting that they all use their brains to save themselves. Despite how much younger Tennant is than Eccleston, the Tenth Doctor seems so much darker to me than the Ninth; he's very nearly suicidal at moments here, talking about being tempted to jump and thinking he should retreat from that, and it makes me unhappy, because Rose is so thoroughly full of life and life-affirming even when she's about to fall into a black hole. But I adored his philosophical discussions with the Beast ("Which Beast? The universe has been busy since you've been gone") and his insistence that the Devil is what you bring with you, not anything outside. He can accept a Beast from outside the universe, but not from before the universe, which doesn't fit his own personal belief system, though he adds wryly, "So that's why I keep traveling, to be proved wrong."

I was surprised he didn't have more to say about the consequences of creating a race of intelligent, obedient slaves, and he seems so unconcerned about the destruction of the Ood when the planet went down, which rather horrified me. But he does very nearly tell Ida to tell Rose he loves her, and although not everyone lives here the way they did in "The Doctor Dances" (there's a bit too much gleefulness at Toby's death, too, despite the relief of beating the Beast), I was so happy that Ida and Zack and Danny made it because they're the ones we've really been made to care about. So many great lines in the endgame: "The devil is an idea; an idea is hard to kill." "Go to Hell." "Gravity, schmavity." "I beat it, that's good enough for me." "If I believe in just one thing, I believe in her."

I wish Adama would say something like that, instead of the schlocky Janewayesque "I must be above it all" tripe. So much in the episode reminded me of everything I hated about late-season Voyager, from the gratuitous tsunkatse sequences (I don't care if boxing is a "real" sport and tsunkatse is a made-up sci-fi one, they're both painfully gratuitous and I could almost accept it more easily on a network trying to publicize the WWE. The condensed relationships just came across as trite, which made me relieved in a way that they didn't actually try to work with the couples in a way that made sense -- I thought living with a psychotic abusive Cylon had damaged Starbuck, but she was totally fucked in the head before that ever happened! And Adama is a coward, and Roslin is much too content to mother people. I'm very glad I didn't give myself time to get attached, because if I'd been a Roslin-Adama shipper all along instead of by proxy, I'd be hissing mad.


Long lines at the Sackler Gallery for the rare Bible exhibit bum me out as I really want to see it, but it won't be this weekend anyway as it's my mother-in-law's birthday. We are planning to go to the Science Center in Baltimore, and afterwards to watch the Parade of Lighted Boats!

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