Wuthering Mountain

Brokeback Mountain would have been lovely and emotionally cathartic if edited down to 45 minutes. As it is, Wuthering Heights it ain’t. It bored me senseless. I cried when he sniffed the shirt, though. How come the way they smell always sticks to the shirt collars like that? Why do the backs of their necks smell so . . . damn . . . good when you love them?

I really liked the Shipping News, loved it even, to the degree that I refused to see the movie. And I thought, since Brokeback Mountain was beautiful despite being so fucking boring, the original short story by the same author would be a nice thing to read. Then I read her Guardian rant. Look at this beauty of a sentence:

"The prize, as expected, went to Philip Seymour Hoff-man for his brilliant portrayal of Capote, but in the months preceding the awards thing, there has been little discussion of acting styles and various approaches to character development by this year's nominees."

Also she uses the metaphor ‘yeasty ferment’ for something which has nothing to do with alchohol or infections, and she uses ‘lighted’ as a past participle - not strictly wrong but makes me want to vomit nonetheless.

Maybe she was just too pissy to read over what she wrote? Please?

Onwards and upwards. So I remember talking to someone awhile ago , someone whose opinion I've essentially worshipped my entire life (so let's call him Magnum P.I.), about online dating. I said it was a lousy idea because the artificiality of the forum wouldn't let you get to know someone the way I believed you need to for something really nice to come about. Magnum contradicted me. I'm not much of a one for being contradicted and I had been oh-so-sure of what I was talking about, but the reality of Magnum having that belief made me revise my entire outlook on online dating in seconds, from 'that shit can't work' to 'that shit probably works for people in thier thirties'.

Last night the same sort of radical overhaul of an opinion happened in analysis. We did an imaginal exercise involving being seven years old, and it worked. Not just, it felt nice, it felt liberating, it felt helpful - it worked. And now I'm going to be very impatient with people who are skeptical about such exercises, although two days ago I would have been skeptical myself. So this is probably the last time I write here about what goes on in analysis, because now there's too much room for emotion in terms of how I deal with people's reactions. But just to let you know . . . that shit works.

Not much other news. Miss B is coming this evening, haven't even seen her in years, that should be nice, we have reservations at a nice little Italian place. The weather is good enough for my cat to go outside hunting again, and I'm in a cracking fine mood. Good news seems to be coming from many quarters, for many people. I love spring.