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December 22, 2004

Birthday clothes

Lovely Villahermosa. At least that's what I hear. I've never been there, but I'm sure it's great. I just don't know if I'll ever be ever to shower there if I happen to visit that town. What if I accidently drop my towel and flash my imaginary husband. Though we're legally wed in my imaginary world, I guess that still makes me an immoral person, and I and the peeping Tom who catches me will go to jail.

Such is life in a small town of Villahermosa, México

December 19, 2004

Late twenties

So what's the big deal? This is the big deal. I'm officially 27 today, and I'm still a brat. ;-)

December 15, 2004

Hello, anyone home??

I swear I haven't forgotten this thing. I'm in a rut, or maybe not. There are things to write about, but I guess I just don't have the heart to be even the slightest bit sarcastic about it. This will change.

It could be a few things. I turn 27 on Sunday. I'm entering my late twenties, and I still feel like a loser. I'm not a loser, right? I'm better than them, right?

I've been accused of being a stupid liberal. Hehe, really?

I've turned into a knitting freak. I'm amused.

December 5, 2004

The Blower's Daughter

In interviews Mike Nichols said he needed to use beautiful people for the movie Closer because they aren't nice. No one will want to see a movie with ugly people doing mean things to each other in the name of love, because frankly that's what this movie is about. The reality is Closer is a brutal yet frank portrayal of relationships and infidelities, and the consequences arise from such tresspasses. The movie wouldn't be as successful without the four "beautiful" actors because they were amazing.

Closer isn't a movie for everyone. It's a pessimistic movie fitting for the antiromantic. These people say the most hurtful things to each other. This dialogue is fresh, and demeaning. Every word stings. By the end there is no happily ever after because you really can't feel sorry for these characters. Each and every one of them is in their own way to blame for the end of their relationships. They sought love so desperately, yet in so doing they slapped each other in the face.

As for the acting, well Clive Owen gets my vote for an Oscar nomination, though they all deserve to be nominated. His Larry is so sleazy, and yet he's so emotional. I'm an Owen fan, but I do believe that's the first time I've been blown away by him. Not since the BMW and Croupier films.

What an amazing movie.

Banned Books

When it comes to community standards of what's decent and what isn't, I always find it interesting when I come across a list like this that tells me that all these books have been banned. Such a downer for free speech really. I wonder what's next.

Bold the ones you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you've read selections from:

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights

#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli - loved this!
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker

#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne

#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - unfortunately
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce

#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell - the book is way better than the movie.
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant - ack!!
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau

#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh - in spanish
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius

#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle - double ack!!
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - great and chilling book.
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Taken from steph