We are Good

The film Once is being performed as a Broadway musical.  I re-watched it this month---it's an Irish film and according to sparkly shamrocks everywhere this is an Irish month---and was led back to the haunting and beautiful music that came from Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard.  Together, they were part of  The Swell Season.   Apart, they are doing different things musically.  Her first song in this recording gave me the chills.  It's titled We Are Good.

Mardi Gras

While eating King Cake---of which I still don't fully understand the origin or meaning, but it's delicious, therefor tradition----my family and I talked of Lents passed.  I told my daughter how some people use Lent to give up something, while others focus on doing something new, creating a new habit.  I was leaning toward doing something new, until she threw a challenge down: peanut butter, she said.  "You should give up peanut butter."


I thought of how I have it every day, at least once a day.  And how I see peanut butter as entirely neutral.  Not good, not bad.  My use is moderate and therefor it needs no adjustment.  I decided, on the basis of experiment rather than sacrifice, to take the challenge.  That because I have it every day and because it is neutral, and because I felt a little kick-up of "I don't want to", I'll give up peanut butter, just to see. 


She came up with what she wanted to give up, which was school, and then she came up with a more viable thing to give up, and then we talked about how on Easter, we could dive into that which we'd spent time without. 


I wondered aloud how I'd feel about peanut butter after going 40 days without.  "Maybe I won't even like it anymore," I said.  "Maybe my tastes will change and peanut butter won't be so interesting to me." 


"Yeah," she said.  "Like instead of peanut butter, you might like tater tots." 


Now I'm curious to see if an absence of peanut butter will translate into a love of tater tots.  Only one way to find out.

A Hard Rain Is Coming

In an interview with George Saunders, the interviewer asks if Saunders ever tried to write more conventionally:


 "I had about three or four years of this, where nothing was really working for me. This was my Hemingway-if-Hemingway-had-never-been-to-a-war-and-was-working-as-a-tech-writer-and-was-actually-sort-of-a-wimp phase. All these stories had titles like “In Parking Lot K,” “A Hard Rain Is Coming” or “In the Employee Cafeteria, Across from Employee Relations.” It was about the time our second daughter was born, and I was getting a little desperate for some power. In that desperate mode, all of my South Side of Chicago impulses came back, and I started simply trying to be funny."


As good as "In Parking Lot K" sounds, I'm glad he failed at writing conventionally.