"www.killandiemacdowell.com" is still up for grabs

if i couldn't act
and my face was all squinchy,
would i be famous?


has andie macdowell ever not been absolutely terrible in any movie? has she ever not completely sucked the air out of a role, if not an entire film? her nature, to quote the shins, bears a vacuum, into which all color and emotion is inevitably drawn. and yet she continues to be cast, and not just in puff pieces and rubbish but in what might otherwise be truly excellent works. i have no idea how or why it happens, only that it does, over and over and over. let's run through a few of them.

1. four weddings and a funeral. brilliant! gorgeous! right up until the very end, that is, when andie, who has been ruining everything for everyone for the past two hours, not only keeps charles from realizing that he should just give in and fall deeply in love with fiona but also fails to die horribly in a plane/car/train wreck. after not dying she punishes us with one of the flattest, cheesiest, most poorly delivered lines in all of movie history: "is it still raining? i hadn't noticed." AAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how did this scene make the final cut? what the hell were they thinking?

2. short cuts. this movie is more or less about how at least half of every couple is the devil; i saw it because tom waits is in it and my roommate is in love with tom waits. andie's character is, as one would expect, utterly without personality and therefore impossible to pity or sympathize with, even when her only child dies of a head injury after being hit by a car. he most likely would not have died if she had taken him to a hospital instead of letting him fall asleep, and so her suffering should be immense, should take up entire acres of space: no. nothing, not even in what should be her character's emotional climax, when she confronts . . . well, it's a long story, blah blah blah, but she gets right up in lyle lovett's face and shouts/whines, "my son is dead! he is dead!" i thought i'd kill myself laughing, it was so ridiculously limp.

3. groundhog day. bill murray is way too good for her. i shouldn't have to justify this.

and there's green card, and the object of beauty, and i'm sure a million things that i haven't suffered through. the point i'm making is, it's time for someone to stand up and tell her that she is quite pretty, but she is devoid of talent, and she is hereby banned for life from all theatrical or motion picture productions. i'll do it myself if the rest of you will have my back.

i guess that's all i had to say today. about three feet of snow have fallen here in the past twenty-four hours, and i've got a touch of the cabin fever. stay warm, folks, and don't be afraid to embrace your rage.

it's six degrees outside. six. great.

rathergood viking kitten
Originally uploaded by juniper pearl.

forty-eight percent
of my body is needed
to make the rest move.



i'm trying to change that number.

this (see picture) is what i felt like after my second cup of coffee this morning. so i decided to wear the high heels after all, and i set off into the ten-degree day to meet my fate. my fate, it would seem, is to be painfully cold for hours and hours while almost but not quite arguing with a college boy about why every writer who makes up a word and inserts it into an unintelligible sentence is not the next james joyce. in the end we agreed that he should start his own publishing house, call it "obscure and obfuscated incorporated," and, somewhere down the line, when he had news of his bankruptcy to report, call me for his quiet but firm "i told you so."

no, that's a lie. we didn't agree to that. i just decided it inside of my own head and didn't speak to him about it again. because, well, because even a mighty kitten is still a kitten. and besides, it was only the second time we'd ever spoken. i'll have plenty of time to prove myself later on.

and here's the second thing i decided, marching home ever so fiercely in my high fierce heels: i'm going to buy some absinthe. it's going to be good absinthe, french or swiss, and it's going to cost me a lot of money. i'm not concerned about that because money isn't good for anything but spending, and i'm going to die anyway, so i may as well get drunk, and if i'm going to get drunk i may as well do it with a quality spirit. and that's that.

clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp.

i'm not all that graceful in my heels. and it's now six degrees and i can't quite feel the better part of my body, particularly my feet, so that doesn't help.

or maybe it does. extreme cold is painful, and pain is centering, it pulls all of you into one location, one moment. so when you are in such cold and it hurts, and all of you moves into the hurt and then out of it at once into wherever you are headed next, you get to that next place in a very different state of mind than you might have otherwise. you get there whole, and you get there either utterly defeated or utterly

ready. it isn't true that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. but it doesn't have to. it only has to make you braver. it has to make you ready.

clomp clomp clomp clomp

happy inevitable passing of time.

if you can't beat them,
stab them, or try poison. what?
that's how it goes, right?





my country has spent something like two hundred billion dollars on a vague and underhanded "regime change" but couldn't spare more than $35 million on the 1.8 million people in need of assistance after the tsunami. actually, they aren't sure, now that they've promised it, that they'll even be able to offer that. i don't know how funds are allotted or what other nations have been able to provide. i do know that $35 million is slightly less than one-fifth of oprah winfrey's annual salary.

i can't envision 1.8 million people. i have no idea what that crowd looks like, how much space it occupies. can you imagine them? can you now also accept that each person in that crowd is homeless and starving? this is an isolated tragedy that is currently holding our attention, but there are places in the world where this crowd is the norm, the standard population. and then there are places like america, where lousy actresses like cameron diaz make $20 million per film. what does she do with that money? what could she possibly do with it? at my current rate of pay it would take me 741 years to make that much money, and i already have everything that i need and then some. i suppose i would enjoy a bit more free time, but that's the sort of selfish desire a person like me might entertain, having never lost my home and my entire family in an unforeseen flash flood.

i can't imagine it. you can't imagine it. none of us can, and so we don't think about it, but that's not the way to deal with things. you should think about nothing but that unimaginable thing until it's all you understand, and then try and go back to wanting what you had wanted before. when it doesn't work, when you can't remember why you wanted those things, you'll be at the beginning of getting it right.

i, myself, am not doing nearly enough thinking these days. but i'm sick to death of my life, of the dullness and smallness of it, of the pettiness and navel-gazing and irrelevant tantrums that i am constantly indulging in or bearing witness to. our days, for the most part, are not made up of important things. i don't know your life, you might be doing something beautiful, but mine is a mute parade of thoughtless machination, and i absolutely despise it.

on new year's eve i was at home alone, because that was where i had chosen to be. i gathered up everything that was connected to my past but not my present, and i put it in a plastic bag. at midnight i took the bag outside, threw it in the trash, came back in, washed my hands. i haven't made any resolutions. what are we celebrating on new year's, anyway? the potential of the coming one, or our relief at the end of the last one? because i didn't think to myself, "everything will be different this time"; i thought, "well, at least that's done with."

but again, i'm just prattling on about me. back to someone else:

we promised 1.8 million people approximately $17.50 each to help them rebuild their lives from nothing. and that, vows the president, is only the beginning.

i've never been a starry-eyed optimist, but come on. i thought we were better than this.