days 19-20: thoughts on loneliness/the frontier

I got an email from Scott Brown today. He thanked me for my email about the education system and assured me that he understood the important role that public schools play. That's all well and good, but I didn't email Senator Brown about the education system. Doing my duty as an involved citizen I emailed (and called his office) on Thursday asking him to sign the "Dear Colleague" letter circulated by Jack Reed (D-RI) and Olympia Snow (R-ME) in support of federal funding for libraries. I sympathize with the fact that the man is busy, but he needs some new interns. If you're going to send a form letter, at least make it relevant. In case you're interested (and from Mass) Senator Kerry signed the letter.


Yesterday was Dan Hadley's 30th birthday. I met some friends at Life Alive to celebrate. They serve weird organic/fusion food and it's a favorite among friends. I have mixed feelings about it, but they do an amazing wrap (called The Child) that I always get: peanut butter, jelly, banana, dried fruit, and granola in a wrap. It comes sans granola but I always request it. After birthday with Dan I was supposed to meet Rhonda and Claire to watch a movie with the young women in our ward. I planned to bike over but in the ensuing rain I flaked out. I probably should have gotten a ride but my heart wasn't in it.


At Outstitute today (a special women's Outstitute because no boys showed up) I was telling the ladies that my median emotional level is lower since Quinn left. That's not really an excuse to shrug off my obligations, but it is what it is. My choice of media today didn't really lift my spirits. I finished watching Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (beautiful story about two people who don't end up together), read more of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (sad, power struggle about a wife of a miner who's unfulfilled in her marriage), and started reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (the autobiographical account of the year her husband died). 

The boy on the cover is named Thomas. Photo taken in 2005.

Wong Kar Wai. Photo taken in September 2008.

I did read one interesting book not related to loneliness: Richard Renaldi's Fall River Boys. The photo book has been sitting on our coffee table since Quinn left, but I've never looked at it. Fall River, Massachusetts is most notable for being the town where Lizzie Borden murdered her parents. Most of the photographs are portraits of young boys from Fall River taken between 2001-2008. While the photographs were interesting, what I really liked was the introduction. Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, wrote a fascinating intro on Lizzie Borden, dead-end towns, and what it means to be American. He suggests that Lizzie captured our collective imagination (and was remembered, beyond the rhyme) because she was the "good girl who couldn't take it anymore," the Victorian spinster who "broke under the pressure of that most insidious of ongoing tortures, small-town respectability." Looking at pictures of these young men on the cusp of becoming he speculates about whether they'll escape and wonders if where they're going will be any better than where they've been. 


This was my favorite part:


"Any of them could get on a bus and go somewhere, anywhere, though some would undoubtedly do so at considerable cost: abandoning lifelong friends, sick parents, even families of their own. If you take the journey, you will die out of one life and be born into another. There may be no more quintessentially American story than that."