I'm fighting a sinus infection...a la mode. De stijl. Le nouvelle vague...no...le old skool. Le new skool. That is to say...no antibiotics, just liquids and hoping/praying it goes away. I lost my voice yesterday...tis mostly gone still, except for some choruses of Johnny Cash. I am exhausted, it is a fight! I am almost to the point of preparing myself for a Nyquil night. Would do almost anything, including knocking head with cast iron skillet, for some uninterrupted sleep. Those coughs, you know, those coughs that come from deep down in the tar pits.

Last night I awoke shivering, muscles clenched from a fever-induced nightmare that was so detailed and intelligent that I couldn't sleep after, even with a dose of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was a trip!!! I absolutely hate awful torture-porn films, but this 'film' was so clever and detailed and seamless/impenetrable...my protesting subconscious couldn't make a dent. It *was* all...de stijl. Neo-plasicistic, somehow. Molded body parts and careful layers of meaning and stuff. Kinda AI. It is frightening when the part of your brain that can come up with the horrible detailed atmosphere/happenings are so smart. Wish I had recorded it more.

I am sick because I was traveling, and because I was traveling I missed the fact that Sydney Pollack died. SYDNEY POLLACK!!!!!!!! I have written about him a lot here...partly due to an obsession with his worst(-directed) films, which are really alluring. But I think I might have loved him most as an actor. I loved the kind of emotional space he took up, his complete believability, his humor, his adultness. He always made movies better for me. I saw the little interRIPstitial on TCM last night about him and just started bawling.

Someone in my family wrote the school play with him in high school. He talked a lot about growing up marginalized and alone as a Jew in South Bend, IN (where my mom's family is from) and it sounds as if it was a pretty sad childhood. The one bright spot, apparently, though, was high HS drama teacher, who showed him the way out. I think it's my Aunt M. who wrote the play with him...I have accordingly pumped her for details. I wonder if I did before and forgot.

The day after I got home from trip this guy showed up on my doorstep (announcing himself as "Spiro Agnew" to the doorman) with chicken soup and his usual easy-going self. It was great to see him. HALLO DAVID...the sweetness of old friends is very sweet indeed.

Lost parrot tells veterinarian his address.

I'm drunk on the phrasing of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald after being fairly well steeped in their singing the last few days for easy, obvious reasons. What does it mean, that they did what they did, I ask all addle-pated and tipsy? That they were doing with they did with language--then--that it happened at all? Where did it take us? Seems suddenly miraculous that it should exist at all.

It's important to heavily promote the food products you enjoy.

HALLO! Froehlicher Samstag, internet denizens.

"Woody Allen talks of Spain, threesomes at Cannes" reads one of Yahoo's fantastic headlines today, ever-bizarre they. I know I'm not the only person who thought of Don Giovanni readin that. Madamina, il catalogo è questo!!!

(My fav Yahoo headline last month? "Despite Conan O'Brien's successor and [Gary] Coleman's divorce, Tom Cruise will return to "Oprah." Despite? Huh?)

nekkidsentiment: Skip and I've been having important, fun, crucial phone conversations for 20 years of our life. A few months shy of 20 years, officially, in fact. This one clocked in at a usual 1-1/2 hrs and ended on my side, as if often does (can't speak for her), with one little big idea I wouldn't have gotten to without the conversation prior. This time it was the fact that although the tyranny and confusion of Western romantic ideals suck (what else can you talk about when the Sexo en la ciudad movie is about to come out, Pretty Woman is on cable), we don't have anything to replace it yet. And we don't. I do love my Skip, tho. Her blog will be up n running again soon; keep an eye out on the blogroll.

Domestic news: I am happy to note that the muse has alighted again. I am sorry, however, to announce that it's in the form of bad erotic poetry. I feel the urge to name the muse, though. I think I will call her...Ericajongia Harlequenia Freelancia Dorkia Malorkia von Literary Cliche und Hyperbole. And buy her some clothes.

I am 41. There is a big surge of us women who are between the ages of (say) shopping without too much irony at Forever 21 and not being surprised or shocked at getting AARP mailings. But suddenly the nomenclature is....really off. Are we all MILFs? Why must it be...MILF? So wrong, so inaccurate, so many ways. Cougars? Am I a cougar? Why is an enormous section of the female population suddenly so ill-defined that these inaccurate labels stick? I find myself lazily reaching for the terms and that's so bad! Part of the meaning they carry defines what's unusual about our generation, though...that's part of the problem, why they continue. Most of my friends (in some variation) aren't mothers, are hot by conventional standards, do date younger men. What we are, though..I dunno. A lot. Catchphrases. Sound bites. Oh my. Weird to experience the wrong ones flirting with permanence.

I continue to find the breathless Ellen marriage talk -- on one cynical hollywoodbabylon level -- completely ridiculous. Let's see...a high-powered Hollywood celebrity has involved themself with (yet another) blonde (and increasingly) younger actress. OH MY GOD STOP THE PRESSES. I find it funny that due to the phase we're still in with accepting LBGT relationships that Ellens' get all sanctified. Or Melissa Etheridge's. Hello...oldest story in Hollywood. Reminds me of the stuff the old butler says in the Rock Hudson sequences in Further Tales of the City.

Upcoming essay: buying clothes as a large woman when you can NEVER TRY ANYTHING ON FIRST. Imagine if you could never try anything on before you buy it. Imagine how you'd feel after a solid five years of it.

Love from the land of constant up-building--

Grave apologies for a lack of bloggity-bloggity recently. The demands of--what one lazily wants to call "real life," only that really isn't it; it's more...life--have gotten in the way of providing nicely discreet little lumps to write about because really this is that kind of blog. Lumps and bumps. If it were a regular journal I could jump in and not worry about where I'd end up, how personal it would be. But anyhow, here I am. And a happy Mother's Day to you all, eh? Especially my own.

1) America really wants Whitney back. We have an awful lot invested in her being a good girl, in the illusion that her marriage was a brief mistake and all about his bad self. Why is that? I honestly think it sometimes has to do with her willowy figure. If her figure were anything else -- pudgy or short-waisted or fat or short or what -- that people SEEM TO -- can lazily -- associate with tacky or ghetto or lower middle class or something -- I think it'd be different. I know this sounds kooky, but I think it's true. I think they think they know something about her by how she wears evening gowns. Well, and by the kind of music she was shepherded into singing early in her career.

2) I am both really glad and really sad I got to experience Nicholas Cage early in his career in my formative movie-watching years... There was so much that was great: Valley Girl, Peggy Sue, Moonstruck. Weird and neato and great. And then he took such a turn...a U-turn, a cosmos-spinning turn into horridly self-aware and smug and non-acting and winking at the camera (I personally think he jumped the shark in the promos for 8MM, but really it was before even that). I saw Peggy Sue Got Married for the first time in a while this weekend, and I forgot how deliciously bizarre and good some of that performance was.

3) My turn to say the obvious: What the hell kind of state is this country in? Rice rationed, gas dear, bronze stolen from headstones, no jobs, foreclosures, bankruptcies, inflation...I keep feeling like it's Germany pre-1933. I worry. And then I don't.

4) Finally saw Little Miss Sunshine. Meh. Eh. Eh. The only thing I really want to say: as a seasoned traveler in a VW van, may I note that there is no way anybody could have heard anything, much less what was being said, in that car. Those fuckers are loud, it's like riding in a tin can.

5) I owe very much a review of Disfigured (thank you MA) but I still haven't been able to get through it. Need to grow up and deal with it but be prepared for a Tontstant Weader type of review of 3 pissed-off words. Can't stand it so far.

6) Congrats to HB and MG on the new house! Just sayin :)

More soon, I swear. Love to everyone.