Thinking Everything is All Right

The Oscars: Could Tilda Swinton look more like Conan O'Brien?

I often rail against annual awards because they contain an inextricable fallacy: too much depends on the year, so great movies can go unrecognized and bad ones can win because of their competition. But when I actually get to watch the Oscars, I remember how freaking fun it is! There are so many movies I want to see, or want even more badly to see, after tonight. It feeds my starry-eyed admiration of artists, and if it doesn't, I get to criticize their dresses.

My favorite moments from this year:
-Helen Mirren poetically presenting Best Actor. May I be like her when I'm her age.
-The song from Once winning over three from Enchanted.
-The writer of said song getting a second chance to give thanks after she got cut off.
-Jon Stewart existing.
-TV Guide Channel's red carpet coverage, specifically the hairdo analysis done by white marks on the screen like in football.
-Those adorable freres Coen pulling simultaneously on their earlobes. Watch a tandem interview and note how they have the same mannerisms at the same time. And they're not even twins!
-Marion Cotillard thanking life.

Prom 2.0!
My friend published a novel, and her book release party was a prom. I got a kiss on my gloved hand, a "Rachel's my favorite person in the world," a flurry of variations on "You look nice," and a nice warm feeling all evening. The book's sequel is scheduled to come out in February 2009, so we're already planning for the next prom!

On the way there, another friend brought up the song "Yakkity Yak," and I said it brought back memories; my dad used to sing it to me, "That and--oh, what was the other one? I can't think of it..." My friend jumped in with "Splish Splash," phrased not as a question but as an answer. Shockingly, that was exactly the song I meant! I'd definitely never told her that. She said those songs are universal, sung by all dads to all daughters, but I'm not so sure. I think it explains a lot about why we get along so well.


My last few weekends have been characterized by natural unplanned movement from one activity to the next: walking to shopping to slacklining to dancing downtown, for example. I relish that picaresque episodic quality in a day, the sense that I'm really living and loving every minute of it in the most cliche but deeply right way. The quality of my company is sometimes hard to believe, it's so high. The extent to which I'm a raging extrovert is becoming laughably clear. I'll let Walt Whitman say what I'm feeling:

"I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well."