Sunday, March 13, 2016

Poem for Sunday, Snowpiercer, Baltimore Ships

A Nearly Perfect Morning
By Jessica Greenbaum

It was a nearly perfect morning—bucolic, pastoral—
so I found myself cataloguing my past humiliations.
Really, there was no reason for it! I might as well have
looked for an ant hill to lie down on in a meadow
of goldenrod. I can’t explain it but perhaps I thought
that with the rising sun as my witness, with the catbirds
crows, and whizzing hummingbirds my soundtrack
that I could ameliorate them, neutralize their charges
against me by holding them up to the woods now in wait
for the light to balance on their individual leaves, on
the absorbing vastness of my fortune. The concentric rings
of the spider web have the wiry shine of guitar strings
there’s been so little wind it seems the trees have not
yet shook themselves awake, but we are moving around
this light at such a pace that by now the sun is nested
in the crook of two thin branches that could not hold
anything else. I was barely up to the third count
against my integrity when the whole lake turned white
but I decided it was not aghast, just trying to erase.

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We had a pretty quiet Saturday until evening, since Adam's childhood best friend is in town visiting his parents, so Adam took the car to go out with him and we weren't sure of their timing. I did thrilling things like dyeing my hair, folding laundry, and watching the miserable end of the Maryland-Michigan State basketball game before we went to meet the Wigles for an early dinner, since their Daniel was going to Blast at Churchill and didn't have a lot of timel. We ate at Blaze Pizza, then the boys ran away to shop and we hung out with the Wigles to talk about trips we want to take to Europe.

When we got home, we watched Snowpiercer because I saw a bunch of reviews saying it was a brilliant allegory of the decline of capitalism (and also it has Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton). We found it pretty heavy-handed and not entirely consistent, but I like the train-as-society theme and the cast made what could have been really clumsy lines work. Then Cheryl told me that NBC was rerunning an old SNL episode hosted by RDJ, so we put that on, and now that the new episode is on I know it's not just my imagination that the current cast is really good -- much better than the '90s casts! Baltimore ships:


















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