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Saturday, August 30, 2003 ( 3:28 PM ) Girl Detective Baby news Ha! If I thought writing two blogs was difficult when I was pregnant, I can barely write one now that there's a newborn here. G. Grod and I have a son. He was born a week ago Wednesday at 8:02 a.m. after 32 long hours of labor. He weighed 7 lbs. 12 oz, and even more at his pediatrician appointment last week, so things are going well. Aside from complete and utter life upheaval and lack of sleep, that is. If you're interested, there are more details at my other blog, Mama Duck, though so far I'm hardly able to update regularly. | Sunday, August 17, 2003 ( 6:23 PM ) Girl Detective I don't believe the Gigli is the worst movie ever, despite what many critics say. Mind you, I'm not going out to see it, either, but that's only because I try not to see mediocre movies. I am convinced, as a reader of reviews (just like that guy in Metropolitan, the only difference being that I actually read/see things that receive good ones), that Gigli is not without merit. It doesn't have a lot, I'm sure, but I feel fairly confident that the negative uproar about this movie has more to do with the backlash against its two stars than with the movie itself. It's all about the schadenfreude, that marvelous German word that means taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Remember Ishtar? That movie got panned as well. Not because it was terrible, because it wasn't, but because it wasn't very good and because it cost WAAAY too much (at the time). Titanic was a backlash waiting to happen--overlong, over budget and with a godzilla-ego'd director, yet it managed to beat the odds. Not so, Gigli. See, Ben and Jen aren't a very likable couple. She's a diva, for all her "Jenny from the Block" posturings, and he doesn't seem to rate high on the personality meter. Both came from less than affluent backgrounds, yet are now living the Hollywood high life of multiple houses and luxuries. They're not harming puppies or children, but they're not making friends with the average joe, either. So when they made a not-very-good film, the critics and public spoke. And while the overt text is that the film is vile, the subtext is where it's at, and that says that folks aren't impressed. So, rather than participating in the critical evisceration of Gigli, why not rent other movies the duo has done that don't suck, and are even good? Out of Sight, with Lopez and George Clooney, is one of my favorite movies of recent years. And Daredevil, with Affleck, is one of the best comic adaptation movies ever made, in spite of its heavy-handed reliance on Catholic miracle tropes. (Can you tell I've been reading some academic prose lately? The vocabulary creeps in, like kudzu.) Nearly every time I recommended it to someone, they'd say, "Oh, I don't like Ben Affleck." and I'd respond, "Yeah, well, neither do I but it's still a damn good movie." | Monday, August 11, 2003 ( 7:36 PM ) Girl Detective I love to read way more than the average person does. My life has been a continuous cycle of buying more books than I'll ever have time to read, and then selling them to a used bookstore when a brief flash of reality hits. In elementary school, I would bring my book to recess and read while the other kids played. I try never to be caught without reading material, just in case--my book, a magazine, or the Sherlock Holmes stories on my PDA. Yet there is one reading behavior that I just don't get. As I walk to work, I often see people who are walking up the street, reading a book. They glance up periodically, especially when they get to intersections. But they're walking and reading. And while I'm all for indulging one's passion for reading, I think the line needs to be drawn. When walking, one should walk, when reading, one should read. I do often eat and read at the same time, but I feel guilty, because I feel I'm doing a disservice to both beloved activities. What's even more baffling are the reading choices of these single-minded individuals. The books are most often mass-market paperbacks by prolific romance or mystery writers, who are not usually known for their profound truths. As I've said, I just don't get it. | Sunday, August 10, 2003 ( 9:12 PM ) Girl Detective Diets I went on my first diet in seventh grade. I'd been having headaches after gym class that my pediatrician eventually surmised were due to stress and low self-esteem. My mom and I talked to someone--a neighbor, our dentist's wife, perhaps, just one of those small-town connections--about the Shaklee diet. It featured powdered packages of soup or beverage that one was to consume three times a day at first, then two times, with a proper meal for dinner. Over the next few years, I tried several diets: The Scarsdale Diet, the three-day grapefruit diet, the Rotation Diet, Dr. Abravanel's Body-Type diet. I bought Dexatrim from Drug Emporium. Sometime in my twenties, I stopped dieting and just let myself be, which was at about a size 12 and near the top of the healthy weight chart at the doctors. I exercised sporadically. It was just three years ago, though, that my body began to change. I started to practice yoga regularly, and added swimming during the summer months. I changed my diet as well, first cutting out most processed foods, then eventually making a switch to a gluten-free diet (which is no wheat, so no pizza, pasta, cookies, most cereals--most of the things that had been dietary staples for me.) And over the course of about two years, I lost about 25 pounds. I did it without consciously trying to lose weight--I just was exercising more and regularly, plus eating better, though not less. It was with some interest, then, that I read an article from April's Vogue comparing different diet regimes. They'd asked three writers to tackle three of the longest-standing diets: Atkins (high protein, low carbs), Ornish (low fat, whole grains, fruits and veggies) and Weight Watchers (anything goes, in moderation). Each of the writers had some success on the various programs. Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue's food critic in residence, wrote about his experience with Atkins. True to form, his take was pretentious and occasionally amusing and informative. I had to roll my eyes at someone who willfully misunderstood the diet to include scotch and macadamia nuts. He had only moderate success, while Linda Lee, who wrote on Ornish, did rather better. It was in the piece on Weight Watchers by Shirley Lord, though, that I found a short paragraph that I thought summed up things quite well. "Kelly Brownell, Ph.D., a psychologist at Yale University concurred [that] Weight Watchers 'is a solid program'...[adding]'what we really need is a study that matches people to the right diet, but so far we don't have one." A while back a healthcare practitioner recommended Eat Right for Your Type by D' Adamo to me. I read it, thought it sounded as if it had some merit, adopted some of its recommendations (like the juice of half a lemon in a glass of water every morning for Type As) and mostly forgot about it. Until I started having problems with heartburn in my pregnancy. Then I took another look, took some more recommendations and saw a dramatic improvement in my heartburn. Am I on the bandwagon? No. I continue to be wary of diets given both my history as well as Brownell's observation--I don't think there's one regime that suits everyone. I've had some good results from the Eat Right program, so I give it some credence, but not slavish devotion. | Sunday, August 03, 2003 ( 9:00 PM ) Girl Detective The best-laid plans... I decided to take time off from writing this weblog as my due date approached and as tasks piled up at work and home in preparation for the imminent arrival. I thought that keeping up with just the pregnancy diary at Mama Duck would give me much needed time to work on editing my novel. Of course, that's not quite how things worked. Since I stopped writing here at Girl Detective, I have had more time. That extra time, however, has not resulted in more editing of my novel. I've read several books and watched many movies. In fact my husband G. Grod and I are caught up on our Netflix movies--we have watched all we have, after sitting on them for weeks. An aside about Netflix: one of the great things about Netflix is that whenever a movie occurs to you that you'd like to see, you can visit the site and slap it on your list. The upside is that you never have to have that horrible, being in the video store and not remembering what movie you really wanted to see yesterday kind of feeling. (Sorry for the lack of hyphens. You can parse it if you try; I know you can.) The downside, though, is that the list tends to become engorged with "should" films as opposed to "really want to see" films. So we'd end up with films that had gotten OK reviews and were over 2 hours and 15 minutes long, and they'd sit, and sit, and either we'd finally watch them out of guilt, I'd tell my husband he had to watch them since I no longer cared, or we'd send them back unwatched. An aside on movies over 2 hours and 15 minutes: directors should have to apply for this status--it shouldn't be granted to any schmoe behind the camera. And silly throwaway comedies, such as Shanghai Noon and the American Pie movies, should not be much over 90 minutes, so those should have time limits to apply for as well. I feel the same way about books. Anything over 500 pages should have a damn good reason for being over 500 pages. It shouldn't be just that the author got so famous that editors won't touch the thing anymore. And I'm not just speaking about J.K. Rowling, but it's why I've never read Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. I'm just not sure it needs to be that long. Back to Netflix: the system Grod and I came up with is to go through the list and remove any obvious "should" movies (Apocalypse Now Redux was one for me--perhaps I'll want to watch it more when I'm not gestating) and to pick out the ten movies that you'd happily see RIGHT NOW. We cleaned up our list and, as I mentioned, we're caught up. Also, it helped to develop a ratio of something like 4 shorter, sillier movies to one longer/more complex one. Best recent movies we've seen? Two of the longer, more complex ones: The Conversation with Gene Hackman, and Devil's Backbone, a Spanish horror flick. Also, we watched Enemy of the State after The Conversation, after the recommendation of my friend Michael, and the older movies makes watching the newer one much better. It doesn't elevate the Bruckheimer film beyond it's limitations, which are numerous, but it does give it a helpful patina of reflected class. As you can see, I've missed writing here. There are things that I notice, and things that I feel the urge to write on, that don't fit in the pregnancy diary. So I'll be posting occasionally here, as mood strikes. What I found, though, is that blogging begets writing/editing rather than freeing up time for it. So for now, I'll try to do both. We'll see. | |
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