Always here to bring you the local reaction to the latest news, here’s an interview with a random passer-by.
Starring Meg Ryan
Throughout dinner I watched as the two swapped stories about their romantic interests and misadventures in love. He flip-flopped between humor and sincerity, complaining about the myriad flaws of women, then becoming suddenly candid about his inability to work up enough courage to ask his current interest out. Her rapid-fire jokes about the persistent but unfit suitors she unwittingly recruited and all the various shortcomings of the Loser Ex contrasted sharply with the pause-inducing, gaze-averting admissions she would slip into conversation about the pervasive influence her former lover still held in her life. I watched as both shared and made light of their foibles, ridiculed potential matches suggested by their friends and played the defeatist with their current interests, self-image and romantic prospects in general. I saw them laugh together, smile in synchrony, become gravely serious at all the right parts and become so similar and complementary in response and character until my continuous, satisfied smile prompted them to ask me what was so funny. “Why don’t you date each other?” I replied. “You guys could be the plot to a Meg Ryan movie: girl and guy complain about love, try to help each other get find dates and get their love-lives back on track with disastrous results, until at the absolute bottom they discover amid tears and arguing that they were looking at their soulmate all along. Perfect rom-com plotline,” I said, prompting them to look at me, each other and then me again with such comically overwrought looks of revulsion that there could no longer be any doubt that these two were indeed perfect for each other.
[Posted for Dave because his site is down.]
Columbia in detail
This is a very good article detailing what happened in the shuttle’s minutes before disintegrating over Texas.
A World Away
I don’t know what kind of relationship other people have with their grandparents. My relationship with them involves a good chunk of awe and a healthy serving of respect. I don’t know how many people do this, but it’s something I do pretty much every weekend now. It’s something I used to do all the time when they lived with us. I imagine that’s part of why they like me so much. I sit down with them and I listen. They’ve lived for times longer than I have and they’ve seen and experienced more things in their life than I think I’ll ever will. It’s amazing the wealth of stories and experience you can get out of them from just listening to them for a few hours a week.
It amazes me, when I think about their life and the people, places, and things they’ve seen. They’ve experienced magnificent wealth and luxury; a life of privilege even the wealthiest in the America wouldn’t understand. They’ve also experienced the most trying of hardships; so poor they had to make their own soap. They’ve seen hand carts, horse-drawn wagons, cars, airplanes, and rockets to the moon. They’ve fought barbarians, Japanese, Communists, Pirates, and Small Pox. They’ve spoken Mandarin, Fu Zhou Hua, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and English. They’ve lived in a magnificent estate that make southern plantations look cheap, in the mountains hiding from patrolling invading armies, in bustling urban centers like Hong Kong and New York, and in the suburbs of America. They’ve lived through Typhoons, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Earthquakes. Guns, wolves, mines, and bombs. They’ve been through all of this and every day they wake up, walk down stairs, do some exercises, and prepare for a new day of cooking and spending time with their children and grandchildren.
A family member, who I’ve never seen, who I know only through the stories my grandparents tell, who’s from a life a world away from me that I couldn’t begin to understand, died today of natural causes. Yet, somehow, it makes me very sad.
