Rainy Randutiae for a Sunday
- As I'd hoped, a number of friends emailed me with suggestions of superhero role models for girls. So many, in fact, that I'm going to have to set aside some time to organize it all before I post it – but it will be forthcoming. Unfortunately, most of the suggestions were for teen readers and older, which leaves the youngest girls waiting, but it was encouraging. Many, many thanks to those of you who reached out :o)
- I'm listening to Peter Gabriel's more recent album Up – one of his darker albums. I love these lyrics, from "Darkness," which is a song that reminds me of early Peter Gabriel (the self-titled albums), mainly in the way he balances silence and sweetness with crashing noise – this sentence has gotten ridiculous, but here are the lyrics I love: "I have my fears / but they do not have me."
- I've gotten a few of my friends to start using Siri to dictate on their iPhones. (If you have an iPhone and there is a little microphone symbol on your keyboard, you can do this, too.) This means that now I get to enjoy other people's dictation frustrations. Recently, from codename: Cordelia: "So it looks like my phone can do FaceTime? Not sure though – I pressed FaceTime on your contact and it started raining. I have no idea what that means though. Actually, it did not start raining, though that would have been quite an omen." And from a friend who was giving me some personal advice: "Of course none of this is a moral issue or anything – I'm just thinking in terms of what would be most thanks traducing. Actually, thanks inducing is what I meant. Angst inducing!! My god, I'm beginning to think Siri doesn't have an exit stencil bone in her body. OMG! She can't even say exit stencil!"
- While I'm at xoJane, I like Lesley Kinzel's article, "Dirty Dancing Is a Subversive Masterpiece and Here are Four Reasons Why." Probably the most touching moment for me in this movie, which I can recite practically from heart, is when Baby confronts her father after All the Stuff has happened. She tells him that she's sorry she lied to him – but he lied to her, too. "You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break," she says. "But you meant everyone who was like you. You told me you wanted me to change the world, to make it better. But you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard.... I'm sorry I let you down. I'm so sorry, Daddy. But you let me down too." They're both crying, and you can tell that he (played by the magnificent Jerry Orbach) is listening, and hearing what she's saying. Perhaps because I also have a father who listens and hears, I have always loved the father/daughter relationship in this movie. *sniff* Oh, and just so you don't get the wrong idea about my father, if he had ever suggested to young me that being rich or having social status mattered, I would've bundled him into the car and taken him to the hospital, convinced he'd developed a brain tumor.
