Monday, January 09, 2006

7 X 7 (for Rob)

Seven Things to do before I die:

1) Move back to the Midwest;
2) Publish my book manuscript;
3) Visit Barcelona;
4) Establish a scholarship fund for first-generation college students, named for my mother;
5) Wean myself from clutter;
6) Make peace with my own shortcomings; and
7) Accept my own mortality.



Seven Things I cannot do:

1) Put my own needs first;
2) Keep the squirrels from eating my tulip bulbs;
3) Establish a writing routine;
4) Teach without extensive preparation;
5) Get out of debt;
6) Stop worrying about the future;
7) Get the drywall back on my bathroom walls (7 months and counting...this is related to numbers 4, 5 and 6.)


Seven Things that attract me to blogging:

1) I learn new stories;
2) I have a venue for telling my own stories (aid to memory);
3) It's a form that lends itself to the writing blurt, which is about all I have time for these days;
4) I've met (virtually) incredible people that I'd be too shy to meet otherwise;
5) It's the teaching journal I've always thought I should keep;
6) I am astonished by the kindness afloat -- it's a tonic of courage in hard times; and
7) Having my say and listening to you have yours is the most politically radical thing that
I can be doing right now.

Seven Things I say most often:

1) I love you.
2) Enough of that for right now.
3 & 4) Dammit. Shit. (tied)
5) In a minute.
6) Hey, babe, could you....
7) No.


Seven Books That I Love:

1) Refuge (Terry Tempest Williams)
2) If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)
3) Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
4) A Place on Earth (Wendell Berry)
5) Anything by John McPhee
6) Soul by Soul (Walter Johnson)
7) Vicious (Jon Coleman)
(Ok, so I became a history nerd for the last two...)

Seven Movies That I Watch Over and Over (or would if I had the time):

1) Wings of Desire
2) My Man Godfrey
3) American in Paris
4) Roman Holiday
5) Singles
6) Raiders of the Lost Ark
7) A River Runs Through It

Tag -- you're it. If you haven't done this one and have the time, it's an interesting one. (I found it a lot more difficult
to do than I expected -- I need to actually read more of what I like and less of what I "need to" for my job.)

4 comments:

Rob Helpy-Chalk said...

I so love Wings of Desire. Paris, Texas, too. I can't figure out why so many of Winders' other movies are so bad, including the sequel to Wings of Desire.

bridgett said...

Yes, Paris, Texas is another movie that I love. Haven't seen it in years. I have a longstanding passion for the plays of Sam Shepard (wrote one of my honors theses on themes of hunger, absence, and incoherence in his early work) so I'd locate your answer in the heft of the screenplays Winders worked with in the 1980s. Maybe, too, he just ran out of things he needed to say even as it got a lot easier (institutionally speaking) to say something.

I also think that I am not as capable of the Big Wow experience any more as I used to be. I used to read books and feel like a struck bell...I felt inhabited, used up by a powerful film. That aesthetic transformation of my self doesn't happen any more with human productions. So as a viewer of his later work, I can compare it not only intellectually but also I remember just how emotionally and spiritually affected I was at the moment of my first encounter with Wings of Desire...by all measures, it's going to fall short. Middle adulthood has been, for me, a little like going gradually deaf. I can still hear stuff in the midrange, but the highs and lows are noticeably diminished.

jo(e) said...

I also love the book Refuge. And I especially love John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid.

Rob Helpy-Chalk said...

I can still hear stuff in the midrange, but the highs and lows are noticeably diminished.

I think there is a lot to be said for being on a more even keel. The highs and lows of youth were really starting to wear on me.