In truth, I haven’t watched it since it was out in the theaters.  Watching the movie 13 years later was an interesting experience.  Time and perspective have a way of changing your ability to empathize with characters.

When I was 12, I thought Rose was the most courageous and terrific person.  I thought she had every right to try to escape her nefarious fiance (who seemed really mean to me) and that her choosing to stay on the ship with Jack was wonderfully brave.

Now, I can’t help but view her decisions from the perspective of someone slightly older than her.  When she left her fiance for Jack, I couldn’t help but want to caution her that that might not be the smartest decision ever.  She had no way of knowing that this carefree drifter wouldn’t just dump her after their one-night stand!

How’d she know he wouldn’t just say to her while they were getting dressed, “Yeah, I’ll call you,” and then she’d have ruined an engagement and possibly contracted VD!  There’s nothing romantic about VD.

Also, I would love to know how she would’ve done with being a poor girl.  Living in the upper crust of society may seem like a chore, but I wonder whether she would’ve found working 20 hour days as a laundress more fulfilling?  Also, would she have stayed so entranced with Jack’s carefree drifter lifestyle if she was constantly working to support them while he smoked and drew people in parks?

These considerations nonetheless, I still thoroughly enjoyed the movie.  Time has not diminished the skillful telling of that tale, and I continue to be impressed by the attention to detail and devotion to the subject matter.

I did have a giggly moment at the end of the movie though.  You know how at the end, Rose is all old and she dies in her bed and then returns to the Titanic in the afterlife?  Everyone she knew is there and applauding her, and then she comes up the staircase to meet Jack and they kiss and it’s all so very romantic.

Well, I was wondering what that would translate to in the narrative of my life and realized that in all likelihood I’d probably meet Wes at the Red Robin where we met.  I’d walk in the big brass and glass doors, and everyone would be clapping.  Wes would be standing at the host stand with his back to me, and then he’d turn around and kiss me and the Red Robin bird would flap his wings and we’d all go have clucks and fries or something.

Actually, that sounds pretty awesome.

I found this book by reading through the pamphlets and magazines my OB-GYN’s office sent me home with after my 8 week appointment.  This book was on their recommended list of reads, so I grabbed it from the library and promptly fell in love.

It’s the memoir of a pioneer in modern midwifery.  Peggy Vincent, the author, started out as an obstetrical nurse who jumped ship to midwifery because she disliked the medical profession’s widespread opinion that a normal birth is a posthumous diagnosis.

She believed, and still does, that all is normal until it’s not, and the fewer interventions the better (barring obvious complications, emergencies, breech babies, etc.).

She describes details about many of the births she was a part of, and reading all these stories about normal, everyday women who were able to bring their babies into the world naturally inspired the heck out of me.  These women were just like me, many of them first-time moms, and they were all able to do it.  This, of course, meant that I would be able to do it too.

The single-most encouraging thing I ever heard when I was pregnant, and I clung to this idea like a baby spider monkey, was something Peggy said.  I can’t convey it word-for-word, because I don’t have the book with me, but I’ll paraphrase.  She mused in her book,

“Of all the thousands of births I’ve been a part of, I’ve never had to take a mom to the hospital because of unmanageable pain.”

As a first-time mom with no idea what to expect from labor, this was immensely encouraging to me.  It gave me confidence that I could do natural childbirth, and truly confidence is half of that particular battle.  Knowing, in the midst of contractions, that you can do it, that your body is functioning perfectly, well, that’s the difference between being in labor and suffering.  But that’s just my opinion.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  Even if you don’t plan a natural childbirth, it’s just a lot of fun to read all these incredible birth stories and learn a little about the history of modern midwifery in the U.S.

We ate brunch outside at the Cheesecake Factory and we spent a whole solid hour and a half doing so.  We languished.  We luxuriated.  We ate with both hands.

After that, we strolled around in the sunshine.  We stumbled across a local arts festival, and spent an hour perusing the booths.  Some people are seriously talented, you guys.  One of our favorite artists combined different kinds of wood in alternating patterns to make large multi-hued sculptures that made it look like the two trees had chosen to twine together to form shapes like 16th notes, treble clefs, and others.

We also found an artist who painted brilliantly-colored abstract paintings accessorized by tiny little stick figures dashed off in black.  The effect was enchanting, and I found myself wishing I had a few extra thousand dollars lying around with which to purchase armloads of his paintings.

I would’ve taken pictures to share, but they all had pretty stringent NO PICTURES ALLOWED policies and I was loathe to get on the wrong side of a well-aimed painter’s pallet.

After the arts festival, we took in a showing of Inception.  We’d heard from numerous friends that the movie was mind-blowing, and thought it sounded like fun.  After all, it kind of seems like Leonardo DiCaprio can do no wrong lately.

I wasn’t disappointed.  I tried not to go into the theatre expecting sheer brilliance, because that’s a one-way ticket to failure, but I was expecting something pretty good.  And it was.

I thought the acting was deft, the visual effects mesmerizing, and the pacing suitable.  My only quibble with the movie is with the storyline, because I feel like the storyline is almost too insignificant to carry the heft of the intellectual implications and spectacular visuals.  But really, that’s a very small quibble indeed, because it never got in the way of my ability to enjoy the movie.

So there you have it.  I’m refreshed, relaxed, and as ready as I’m going to be for this week, which culminates in a gigantic party I’m throwing for Wes’ 30th birthday.  There will be fresh mini donuts (I found a local vendor who’s going to come out and make fresh mini donuts), a pinata (which Wes will hit with a samurai sword), and tons of BBQ food.

If posting is a bit light this week, that’s why.  Rest assured, though, I’ll be back next week with pictures!

She recently published a book (this is not her first book by a long shot, but the other ones are out of print or else technical manuals most people wouldn’t want to read {no offense mom, but technical manuals are not for public consumption}) and I just thought I’d share the book with all y’all.

It’s called The Protected and you can read more about it here.  I finished the book a couple weeks ago and it’s a lot of fun.  It cracked the top ten bestsellers at her publisher’s last month, which is a big deal.  I think book 2 is also due to come out soon, so keep an eye out for that!

Such is my love/hate relationship with Dan Brown.  The author of The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and a few others.

I’ve been reading Dan Brown’s novels since I was in high school.  I own three of his books, actually.  His earlier work had a fun way of interspersing interesting facts with the story, so I always felt like I walked away from the book having learned something (I also felt this way when I was on my Tom Clancy kick awhile back).

I finished his new book, The Lost Symbol, this weekend and I have to say…I’m disappointed.  The story was a ton of fun, and I learned a lot about Washington D.C. and the Freemasons, but he should have stopped writing that book about 30 pages before he did.

The story wraps up, and then he goes on for another 30 pages with his personal religious views and how the established religious authorities have got it all wrong.  He quotes the Bible numerous times, but only ridiculously out of context, and the whole thing ends up just being really obnoxious.

I know a lot of Christians rose up in outrage over the things Dan Brown wrote about in The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.  To be honest, I was never one of them because I didn’t really know enough at the time to know whether or not I should be outraged.  I just enjoyed the stories.

Either I know more now, or he’s getting increasingly ham-handed with his attempts to stir controversy, but the ending of The Lost Symbol just annoyed me.  It’s fine if he doesn’t agree with Christianity, or want to be a Christian.  I’m not about to brow-beat anyone for disagreeing with me.

But, he takes it too far when he quotes the Bible out of context so egregiously that I wonder if he even understands what he’s doing.  For him to try to put Jesus on a par with Buddha or Mohammad is laughable because Jesus left no room for Himself to be anything other than the Son of God.  He’s either the Messiah or He’s a lunatic, but there’s no way He was just some wise dude who left us a good example like so many other wise dudes.

Dan Brown is just so silly when he says the religious establishment has gotten the teachings of the Bible all wrong by asserting that their way is the only way to get to Heaven.  When Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the father except through me” He isn’t being coy.  He’s laying it out on the table, and there’s really no way to misunderstand that.

So this may be the end of the line for me.  If Dan Brown wants to write stories, I will read them.  If he’s going to keep getting up on increasingly larger soap boxes in an attempt to convince me that we are all gods, well, no thank you very much.  This mere human isn’t buying what he’s selling.

I’ll be honest, I never really understood Birthing from Within.  I’d seen it recommended a million times over as the number-one-must-read-book-on-natural-childbirth, so it was actually the first one I checked out after I got my positive pregnancy test.

Then I opened it up and…I didn’t get it.  It was very focused on visualization of the birth.  My hopes for the birth, my vision of what it would feel like emotionally, that kind of thing.  It had activities in each chapter that required me to draw pictures of what I felt about birth and that is so not me it’s not even funny.

I was that kid in daycare who, during arts and crafts time, did the bare minimum creative output required so I could go back to reading books or pretending to be a horse running through the field (don’t laugh, it was actually a lot of fun, and since I didn’t have a real horse it was the best I could do).  I don’t really do drawing, my stick figures are so grotesque my four year old niece once remarked that she was proud of my good effort but that my drawing looked nothing like a human being.

For this book to expect me to express myself through drawing was laughable to begin with.  But then it took it a step further by asking me to sit and spend time contemplating what my hopes for the birth were, and imagine how I might feel.  How I visualized birth.

I’d never had a baby before, so for me to try to sit down and figure out how it might make me feel was completely unrealistic.  I have a fantastic imagination, but this was pushing it.  There’s no way I could have ever imagined reaching a point in my labor where time ceased to exist, where the gap between contractions would stretch for years, where I would cease to exist completely while the contraction hit me like a lightning strike.  I had no way of conceptualizing the incredible feeling of pushing Aidan’s head out, when it felt like I was literally giving birth to a planet.

As a childbirth newb, I was looking for boots-on-the-ground information about what labor would be like, what to expect, how to prepare.  This book was asking me to get in touch with the emotions surrounding birth, but I didn’t have any yet so I didn’t find it particularly helpful.

I discussed the book with one of my midwives once, and she nodded and said the book seemed most helpful to moms who had already had babies and were maybe recovering from a traumatic first birth experience.  This makes sense to me.  If my first birth had been traumatic, I could easily see wanting to sift through those emotions before embarking on my next labor adventure.

So, I thought I’d share some of the books I’ve read recently.  Some of the best books I’ve ever read were recommendations from other people, so I thought I’d throw my opinionated hat into the ring too.

When I was preparing to bring Aidan into the world, I started searching out natural birthing resources.  Everyone raved about “The Business of Being Born“, so I watched that.  It didn’t really float my boat, seeing as how it was literally steeped in bias and near-dogma, so I thought I’d back the truck up and instead of looking into why I should do natural childbirth (because everyone’s got their own hang-ups about labor and the only hang-ups that really matter are your own) I’d look into how it works.

I’ve always loved learning, and I tend to cope better with things when I understand how they work, so I figured that would be a good place to start.  Away to the library I went, and I returned with The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Natural Childbirth.  I liked the title and figured I’d give it a shot.

I’m so glad I did.  This book was fabulous!  Don’t let the title fool you into thinking it’ll be formulaic and disingenuous, it’s well-written, it explains the whole process in an accessible way (even when you’ve got pregnancy hormones clouding your brain), and it steers pretty clear of trying to influence you about why you should labor naturally.

What I particularly enjoyed about this book was how it explained the role of hormones during labor.  Once I was able to grasp how labor worked, it really helped put into context the various coping methods I’d heard about.  It’s all well and good to hear about how important it is to stay relaxed during labor, but what made the difference for me was learning about how oxytocin (the hormone the makes your uterus contract) is counteracted by adrenaline (the hormone that’s released when you’re tense or afraid).

The end of the book was a little soft for me, all about the first moments with the baby and how special that time is (I kinda missed out on that, thanks to heavy bleeding and stitches, so maybe I’m just bitter?) but the first 3/4 of the book were immensely helpful.

I could see this book being helpful even if you aren’t planning a natural childbirth, especially if you’re the kind of person who feels more comfortable and confident when you’re well educated about what’s going to be happening.

So there’s my two cents.  More to come soon!

Our Netflix queue was getting a bit bare, so I started adding movies I knew we enjoyed to it to ensure that we wouldn’t run out of quality entertainment.  Some of the movies I added:

• Love Actually
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• The Proposal
• Mr. & Mrs. Smith
• The Day After Tomorrow
• 2012
• Gamer

Now, Wes considers the top four movies on that list to be chick flicks, even though Mr. & Mrs. Smith is most definitely not a chick flick because it has guns in it.  When the fourth so-called chick flick arrived, Wes started getting ever-so-slightly annoyed.  After all, he is not a chick, and can be relied upon to consistently ruin a perfectly good cry by making sarcastic jokes during emotionally charged scenes.

Then, the two disaster movies arrived.  I love The Day After Tomorrow, while Wes merely thinks it’s tolerable. He chafes at thinly veiled environmental propaganda.  2012, we both agreed, was a phenomenal waste of time.  I love me a good disaster movie, but it has to be at least somewhat plausible or I just plain stop caring.

The last movie to arrive before Wes completely lost all faith in my Netflix queue ordering abilities was Gamer.  I do not recommend this movie.  I’d read the synopsis and thought it sounded interesting, but we made it about a quarter through the movie before turning it off in disgust.  It is a foul film, and deeply unsettling, and not worthy of anyone’s time.

That last movie was the nail in my movie-picking coffin.  Now I’m consigned to watching Miami Vice (the show, not the movie {a show I couldn’t be less interested in watching}), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (vapid, annoying, campy, though Wes assures me the second season is better than the first), and JAG (I already know it won’t be as good as NCIS, so why bother?).

Marriage means sharing the Netflix queue, even if it means watching things you have no interest in.  Le sigh.  The chick flick marathon was good while it lasted…

No thanks.

Then, I went to college.  College changed things, the most dramatic changes being that I was now a good three hours’ drive away from Wes the majority of the time and I was watching more TV than I ever had before.  I was ready to try this show he was so excited about.  Every week, Wes and I would commandeer a TV (him at his house, I in my dorm room) and watch the program while on the phone with each other.  Mind you, this entailed a solid hour of cell phone call, none of it spent talking.  We watched the show together from opposite sides of the state, and it was something we looked forward to every week.

As you can see, this show’s been with us for a long time.  Seven years, in fact.  A lot has changed in our relationship during this show.  We’ve broken up, gotten back together, gotten engaged and then married; we’ve gone from living with parents to living on our own; this show’s seen me through high school, college, and now worker-bee-dom.  I know I butchered the syntax of that sentence, but I hope you get what I’m trying to convey.  This show meant a lot to us.  We kind of grew up with these characters, and while we despised virtually every decision they made, we watched and we hoped for the best outcome because there was a connection there.

The last season, which we just finished almost a year behind everyone else because that’s how we roll, was a dismal finish for us.  Both Wes and I were horrified by how the show writers chose to leave it.  The last episode in particular was perhaps the most hurtful of all.  The show writers left a few loose story threads dangling, they chose an abhorrent and upsetting end for some, and left the main character’s fate maddeningly ambiguous.  I don’t think it’s artsy to leave readers/viewers guessing, I think its downright inconsiderate.

I’m not saying the acting wasn’t superb, or that the story ended in a way that I would consider inconsistent with the other seasons.  It’s just that after everything these show writers have put us through, watching characters we liked die too soon while watching the evil ones flourish and take others down with them, to leave it on such a vague and unsettling tone was a slap in the face.  As much as I used to love this show, I honestly wish I’d never started watching it.  Not well played, not well played at all.

I really hope they don’t muck this one up.  Goodness knows they butchered Heroes, and Lost was terrific until the plot grew more convoluted than the synapse bundles of an Alzheimer’s patient.  Bones was lame for the first season but the second season was terrific.  The third season is bizarre, however, and contains one of the most awful and unwelcome plot twists ever conceived in Hollywood.  So, I guess Bones joins the list too, though with only one redeeming season to its name.

It just seems like so many shows start out mind-blowingly good, but then as time wears on (and producers approve more seasons) writers start pulling desperate plot lines out of their you-know-whats to manufacture suspense/interest/drama. 

On the other end of the spectrum is Firefly, which was a-freaking-mazing and didn’t even get the courtesy of a full season.  Why they cancelled that show is beyond me, when it was so clearly a pinnacle of TV writing excellence.  It just goes to show you: Don’t get attached, because you never know if your parents will let you keep it.

Anyway, Dexter.  Is very very good.  The show is about a sociopath who was rescued from a traumatic childhood by a caring man who recognized the boy was a sociopath and drilled into his head a moral code to live by.  The show is about his constant struggle to master his urges by following this code.

As a psych student, I can tell you it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of a sociopath.  I’m not an expert (I focused my studies much more on depression) but from what I learned in my four years at an institute of higher learning it’s a decent representation.  If you’re lacking in shows with which to bide your time, and you don’t happen to mind gore, then I highly recommend you take a slice of this pie.  It’s good, and excellent when served with ice cream.