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Showing posts from May 18, 2014

Girl, Interrupted

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Man, I watched Girl, Interrupted last night and the remainder this morning. Mental health and the true story of a young woman who spent a year of her life in an upscale Psych Ward during the 1960's were the backbone of the story. It was harrowing, humorous, and downright heebie-jeebie. Think One Who Flew Over A Cuckoo's Nest gone female.   A. Jolie plays a narcissistic hell-raiser just a little too well. She is not the main character but might as well have been because the story needs her scalding and accusative voice in order to be told.   Mental health is like boxing a shadow. The shadow is real and ominous but it is difficult to find the angles to move the fight for health forward. Archimedes might have been able to move the world if he had a place to stand but such footing is fleeting in the realm of soul healing. That which is of the world cannot cure the world. I think the movie ultimately affirms the powerful antidote of Truth as the key to progressive healing.

Dandelion Wine & The Wonder of Words

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I had some free time the last three days or so thus I read Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. I was intoxicated by the glasses full of sentences. Drank it up with relish and left with a deep regret that it is all gone. A great book ends like an empty bottle yet the taste lingers on and on in the mouth of my mind. I have always had a love affair with words. Yet, becoming an English teacher was never a goal which would seem like an appropriate path for a word aficionado. Not for me. I found the classroom like a cage, lashing my words to bars of punctuation and spelling and eating the gruel of grammar. There is a time to scrub the prose and poetry but first get a body of work of words down. Even worse, being a Librarian and ordering children to spit out their gum. That was from back in the day and not the current reality. I suppose words just are ideas, a way to label something wonderful. Maybe like Adam naming the animals at Creation. I am going to be teaching a course next year i