Erin Watches Movies

In March, I read The Big Short, and over the past weekend, I finally watched the movie version on Netflix. 

It’s a very good film. Although it's no secret I’m a big Christian Bale fan, and I really enjoyed his performance as Dr. Michael Burry, I thought Steve Carell’s performance was the best. (I did appreciate how Bale was framed so that the left side of his face was de-emphasized to help create the illusion that he had a glass eye, like the real Michael Burry. Good cinnamon tography.)

I didn’t realize it while I was watching it, but later when Tit Elingtin watched the movie at my suggestion, I noticed Tracy Letts in the cast list. As you may recall, I heard his name in “HardcoverBound 2,” first thought he was a female and probably quite feminist playwright, and then thought to associate him with the films Bug and August: Osage County. 

Tracy Letts has a small role in The Big Short. It makes sense. He’s a theatre kid, writing plays and acting in movies. Also, his mother was the writer Billie Letts, who wrote Where the Heart Is. It was turned into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd. (I saw it in the movie theater with my friend Jamie in 2000.) Judd, who was in Bug, has thus appeared in films by two different Lettses. 

I didn't read this.

But I digress. In trying to find out a little more about Letts’ acting career, I found upon a photo of Letts with Rebecca Hall and Michael C. Hall (no relation to one another). The Halls and Letts are involved in a film called Christine, scheduled to be released in October (next month).

I recently saw Michael C. Hall in Kill Your Darlings, the drama in which Daniel Radcliffe played Allen Ginsberg. I loved that movie. David Cross was adorable as Ginsberg’s poet father, Dane DeHaan* is dreamy even though Lucien Carr was a shit boyfriend to Allen (repressed much?), and Radcliffe is now my second-favorite movie Ginsberg after James Franco. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the Norman Reedus/Keifer Sutherland/Courtney Love film Beat, with my sweet sweet baby Kyle Secor as David Kammerer, Carr’s creepy stalker. The Kammerer character in KYD is much better written and sympathetic, and Hall does an excellent job playing him.

Rebecca Hall, of course, played the long-suffering wife of Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) in The Prestige. It’s one of my favorite movies, and I’m not the only fan. The Simpsons had its season premiere this past weekend. Mr. Burns re-instated a vaudeville-like stage show like he remembered from his childhood, including a magic act performed by twins Sherri and Terri that referenced The Prestige.

I DID read Christopher Priest's novel - after I saw the movie

I’ve also been watching Rebecca Hall as Edwardian narcissist Sylvia Tietjens, opposite Benedict Cumberbatch, in Parade’s End. She will play the title character in Christine.

Christine is Christine Chubbuck, a real person whom I read about in He Who Shall Remain Shameless. 

Sylvia Tietjens isn’t a very sympathetic character. One tends to feel more sympathy for husband Christopher, who is desperately in love with spunky suffragist Ms. Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens, a young Australian who played Myrtle Wilson’s sister in The Great Gatsby), but too old-fashioned to divorce Sylvia. I'm on episode 2 of the 4-part miniseries, and so far the most scandalous thing Christopher and Valentine have done is get lost in the fog and stay out together all night…sitting next to each other. Just sitting, physical contact at an absolute minimum. It’s like the opposite of Jane Eyre. Where Edward Fairfax Rochester was not concerned enough about pursuing the woman he loved while in a bad marriage, Christopher Tietjens was probably too concerned. Lots of unresolved longing and surreptitious eye contact ensue.

Christine Chubbuck, conversely, is a very sympathetic character. Life dealt her a hand so much worse than she deserved. Her severe depression cost her her life. Live on television. We can't see the actual footage, thank Something, but we will see a dramatized version. 

*I saw him in the trailer for Tulip Fever while waiting for Love and Friendship (a Jane Austen adaptation) to start in the movie theater. I want to see that. Christine might be too sad, even though I'm sure Rebecca Hall's acting will be great. Let's see Tulip Fever instead. As of this writing, its release is planned for February 2017. 

No, I did not read this book.

Why You Should Watch ’11.22.63’ on Hulu

First, a confession: I’ve never read a Stephen King book. Not a one. I’ve read a short story from the Salem’s Lot universe in a vampire anthology, and I’ve read an excerpt from On Writing. I did not read 11.22.63. I didn’t even pay much attention to the Under the Dome miniseries when it was on, although I have seen Misery more than once.

I wanted to watch 11.22.63 because the gal one cube over from me at the Day Job recommended it. I soon discovered there are many reasons to watch this Hulu miniseries, reasons that make it much better than Under the Dome.

1. James Franco. I enumerated the reasons I appreciate the older Franco brother one Hanukkah night. He’s still my favorite film Allen Ginsberg. (Yeah, I still haven’t seen Kill Your Darlings. I’m behind on my writer biopics.) He may be one of my people, one of the bi/pans, but that remains undetermined. He’s definitely a cute Jewish boy with curly hair, though.

In this miniseries, he plays a high school English teacher. He does so convincingly. I think James Franco might actually make a good English teacher in real life. He would be a distraction to the students who like boys, but still.

2. Lucy Fry is Marina Oswald. You may remember Lucy Fry as the Moroi princess Lissa Dragomir in the Vampire Academy movie. Here she plays the physically and emotionally abused wife of Lee Harvey Oswald. She warms to the advances of historically fictitious character Bill Turcotte, played by the lovely young English actor George MacKay, a Kentucky farm boy enlisted as a helper by Franco’s character Jake. Sadly, Bill and Marina are not destined for the happy ending that Lissa and Christian Ozera enjoy.

I read in a Goodreads discussion group that the character Bill did not appear in the book, but was added for the miniseries.

3. The plot is genuinely intriguing. It has a wrinkle in time – a magical closet that takes a person back to a specific date in 1960, and no matter how long they stay, only two minutes have passed in the modern world. Diner owner Al, losing a battle with cancer, recruits Jake to use the portal to go back in time and follow Lee Harvey Oswald to determine if Oswald is, in fact, the sole killer responsible for the murder of President Kennedy. If he is sure of Oswald’s guilt, Jake is supposed to kill Oswald so that the president lives and, Al hopes, the Vietnam War will end much, much sooner than it did historically.

4. Al is played by Chris Cooper. I enumerated in the In Cold Blood post the film projects that make Cooper such an important character actor. It helps that he kissed Kevin Spacey. I mean, I don’t know if it helps his career, but it helps me, personally. It’s not a positive example of lgbtq+ media representation, but in the 1990s, we were lucky to see same-sex kisses on the big screen at all.

5. Speaking of kisses, this Stephen King-derived material is surprisingly romantic. Bill/Marina is only the secondary romantic plot; Jake finds love in the past with Sadie Dunhill (Sarah Gadon, the heroine of Dracula Untold), a librarian. Of course, as Al warns Jake, if you push against the past, the past pushes back. Jake’s pursuit of Oswald places Sadie in grave danger, causing Jake to wonder if his true mission is to live a long, happy life with Sadie, and the president be damned.

6. Sadie’s favorite book is From Here to Eternity. When Jake first lays eyes on Sadie, she’s sitting on a park bench, reading From Here to Eternity. The dust jacket photo of James Jones appears prominently in the scene. The two discuss the book, mentioning that the book is better than the movie. (It is. It is much, much better. And the movie’s still great.) Later, when Jake thinks all is lost, he hallucinates or imagines Sadie sitting on a bench in a bus depot, reading From Here to Eternity.

All 8 parts have now been released, so if you have access, check it out. It’s science fiction, and there’s a touch of Kingly horror, and there’s even a touch of a dystopian present, but don’t feel bound by any one genre. It’s much more interesting stuff than Under the Dome, although maybe not quite as spectacular as The Shining.

Let's Talk About the Veronica Mars Movie for a Moment. (Spoilers)

Don't forget, you can still enter Christine Edwards' Captured in Croatia book giveaway through May 18.

Kristen Bell as Veronica in 2007. Public domain image by Tom Bell. 

Now, about this movie version of Veronica Mars. You may remember my quiet "Squee!" of anticipation while watching the trailer before Vampire Academy started. Oh, Veronica, how I’ve missed you. I may not have paid this series any attention when it originally aired, but I sure got into it on DVD.

By the end of the third season, I became a LoVe (Logan-Veronica) shipper. Hard. Nothing against Piz, but in my mind, Logan Echolls and Veronica Mars should have ended up together. Did I get what I wanted? Well, we'll see. But first, some of the highlights:

Jason Dohring. Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore

* Jason Dohring’s little butt is adorable. In an early scene, he has on some light-colored pants, and really wow. His butt looks good in all the pants, though, really.

* Why is Keith Mars still single? He’s such a catch. He's a total DILF.

Enrico Colantoni. Creative Commons image by Emily L

I'm a little sad that he's all alone in the same cruddy apartment he used to share with Veronica, only now Veronica is miles away from Neptune, California. Can't Keith Mars get remarried?

*Wallace and Mac look great. Especially Mac. I kinda miss the blue highlights in her hair, but she did have a super-cute hairstyle in this.

Mac Mackenzie is played by Tina Majorino. She had a minor role as the vampire Molly on True Blood in 2012 (she strapped stakes to Eric and Bill's chests), and you may also remember her from P!nk's video "Perfect."

*Cute cameo by Kristen Bell's real-life husband, Dax Shepard.

By the way, if you haven't seen Bell and Shepard in When in Rome, you should see it. It's a cute romantic comedy in which the goddess Venus is a background character.

*Extra-cute cameo by James Franco. He's seen trying on skinny jeans and trying to think of words that rhyme with orange.

*I may never forget the mental image of 50 Cent baking lemon cakes while singing “Afternoon Delight.”

Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson. Creative Commons image by Alex Const

*Veronica, when she overhears a character refer to her as a "nosy bitch," responds (to herself), "It’s called curiosity!" You tell 'em, V.

And then all my Veronica-Logan feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeels. As the movie opens, Veronica is dating Piz. They haven't been seeing each other steadily since college. In fact, the movie takes place nine years after Veronica transferred from her Neptune college to - they had to go to an Ivy League law school, but I forget which one. They reconnected years after their college fling.

Alas, Veronica and Piz are not to be. He breaks up with her because she can't seem to stay away from Logan. Logan is accused of murder in this movie. It seems rather obvious he's not guilty (although Logan is far from innocent), and Veronica believes in him all along. The victim is one of their Neptune High classmates, who's become a pop star. Logan was her ex-boyfriend. They'd broken up because of her drug abuse, but he stopped by to see her one night and found her dead in her bathtub, electrocuted.

Veronica has become a lawyer, and she feels compelled to defend Logan. After she and Piz break up, Veronica feels compelled to sleep with Logan again. I guess she's forgiven him for past scuzzy behavior?

But they don't stay together. He goes back to his naval career (!). LoVe feels...still unresolved.

Can we Kickstarter the sequel now or what? I want more.

P.S. Thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday today!

"Bitches in Bookshops" Creators Return with "Hardcover Bound 2"

As you may recall from this post, I adore the Jay-Z/Kanye West parody song "Bitches in Bookshops" so much, I devoted an entire Pinterest board to it. Now, just in time for National Library Week (April 13-19, 2014), the creators of that literary masterpiece are back with another Kanye-based piece of inspired parody filmmaking, "Hardcover Bound 2."

You remember Kanye's video "Bound 2," right? In which the rapper and his gorgeous fiancee Kim Kardashian (Kimye for short) canoodled on the back of a motorcycle?





And then Seth Rogen and James Franco - straight guys* and platonic BFFs - re-created the video scene-for-scene, including the make-out session?





And Ellen DeGeneres and her gorgeous wife Portia di Rossi made a parody "Bound 2"-themed winter holiday card?





Well, now the video has fallen into the hands of LaShea Delaney and Annabelle Quezada, and the result is bookish perfection.

Here are the lyrics, which you can find here.

Your eyes, get tired…
From readin’, a good book
On a Saturday night
From readin’ a good book
So just grab your good book
And put on your glasses
On a Saturday night
Readin’, your - aw huh honey

All that other media lame and you know it now
Stackin papers with some glue then ya press it down
Bound
Bound

Met my book club on a Wednesday
Brave New World put me in a frenzy
Were Orwell and Bradbury friendly?
Assigned 1984, but read it already!

Reading Jung for my grad dissertation
Then Freud’s Dream Interpretations
Essays on sex aberrations
Fill the page with mad annotations
Fight Club was a rad adaptation
Palahniuk gives me heart palpitations!

How you gonna be loud at my station-
Makin noise around all these librarians?! Uhh!
This bestseller shit
This that Alchemist, Giver, Old Yeller shit
This that Harper Lee and Scarlet Letter shit
Got a first edition straight off of Alibris

Your eyes, get tired…
From readin’, a good book
On a Saturday night
From readin’ your - aw huh honey

Open up and press pause on The Book Thief
The book’s usually better than the movie.
Bound
Bound

I read Sylvia Plath in the bath
Confederacy of Dunces when I want to laugh
In Cold Blood without even blinking
I mean damn what was Capote-pote-pote pote thinking

Ey, you remember watchu first read
Okay, I don’t remember what I first read
Prob’ly, it was Dr. Seuss, eh?
Silverstein- or Maurice Sendak

Realist magic- Borges and Murakami
Toni Morrison, Allende, Salman Rushdie
Perusin’ Malthusian theory,
Edgar Allan Poe when I feel like something eerie

They ask me what’s next on my reading list-
Ever start a book that you can’t finish?!
Caryl Churchill and Tracy Letts, I  
Think I’ll make time for Samuel Beckett
Books can help you overcome lotsa things
You know, I know,
Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Your eyes, get tired…
From readin’, a good book
On a Saturday night
From readin’ a good book
So just grab your good book (Reeeeaaaaaaadin')
And put on your glasses
On a Saturday night
Readin’, your good book.
Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooks….

*Update December 2014 - I'm not actually sure James Franco is a straight guy. He doesn't seem to want a label - which is cool, because people aren't products on the store shelves that have to be labeled. He's said he's not gay, but he may yet be one of my people, the bi/pans, or at least heteroflexible. Not that there's anything wrong with being straight.

The Hanukkah Hotness, Night 5: Mila Kunis

Happy December! I hope you're having a lovely winter holiday season so far, whether or not you're observing Hanukkah.

A lot of people don't even realize Mila Kunis is Jewish. My dad thought she was Latina, and keep in mind, my dad is married to an ethnic Jewish woman. But she's from a Ukrainian Jewish family, born in what at the time was the USSR. Her parents tried to raise her as a religious Jew as much as they could in the Soviet Union, where religion was severely repressed.



I'm gonna be brutally honest here: Mila Kunis is here more because I think she's absolutely gorgeous than because I like a whole bunch of the work she's done. Like most people, I remember her mainly from That '70s Show on Fox. It's not one of my all-time favorite shows.



It is, however, kind of fun to imagine that Kunis' character Jackie Burkhart is a more grown-up version of spoiled young Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Kunis played Rachel, the flirtatious hotel receptionist, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall with Jason Segel. Okay, I kinda love that movie. She co-starred with Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits, which I found neither very funny nor very romantic.



She was in Oz the Great and Powerful (as a witch) with fellow Hanukkah hottie James Franco. I haven't seen it yet, although I'm guessing my 7-year-old niece has. For a while, she walked around handing everyone notes written on Oz the Great and Powerful stationery from the dollar store, and she suggested we pretend there was an evil witch with flying monkeys, flying dinosaurs, and flying maids and butlers. (The irony is that her father, my brother, was terrified of the flying monkeys as a child and used to hide behind the couch during selected parts of The Wizard of Oz.)



I also remember Kunis from The Book of Eli, a not-particularly-good post-apocalyptic thing with Denzel Washington. She played a small role in the Tina Fey comedy Date Night (again with James Franco, playing characters named Whippit and Taste).



Her next project after that was Black Swan, which is my favorite of her movies. Here she starred opposite fellow Hanukkah hottie (tomorrow) Natalie Portman. (Winona Ryder plays a small role in it as well.)



Jewish women: our relationship with black eyeliner goes back to ancient Egypt.

The Hanukkah Hotness, Night 3: The Franco Brothers

Tonight's Hanukkah Hotties are a 2-fer, like the Gyllenhaal sibs: James and Dave Franco. The Francos have a father of Spanish and Portuguese descent, and their mother is the Jewish one. James is the older of the native Californian brothers.



The first time I noticed James Franco was in Spider-Man (2002). He's in all three of the Spiderman films that star Tobey Maguire. I'm not a big fan of the first two, but I do have a certain affection for the third, as I wrote about in "Spiderman's Aunt May is a Goddess."

Lately, you may have seen him and Seth Rogan in "Bound 3," a frame-for-frame remake of Kimye's (Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's) "Bound 2."

By far my favorite James Franco project, though, is Howl, in which he plays Allen Ginsberg (like yesterday's Hanukkah Hottie, Daniel Radcliffe). His other literary projects have included the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally popular Eat, Pray, Love (book review here by Mal at Lazy Boleyn blog) and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

The latter caused a bit of a flap in September 2013 when a tie-in edition of the classic was released with Franco's face on the cover.

This inspired Minh Le to postulate what might happen if Franco's face were on ALL the book covers.









Okay, so maybe James Franco isn't William Faulkner or Allen Ginsberg, but he does write. As Goodreads will tell you, he's written Actors Anonymous, A California Childhood, and more. He also wrote a foreword to Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Hermann Hesse (translated into English from the German by Damion Searls).



Some scoff at his Renaissance-man literary pretentions, but I think it's rather sexy.



Bonus: James rates his own page in Color Me Swoon, a coloring book for big girls.

Note last year's Hanukkah Hottie Joseph Gordon-Levitt to the left of Channing Tatum on the cover. I may have bought this for myself earlier this month at Barnes and Noble.

Dave is a bit less well-known than his big brother, but he's in one movie I particularly like: Warm Bodies. Unfortunately, his character gets eaten by a zombie. But Dave is still fun to look at.



I couldn't find a picture of him reading, though.



So, which Franco is your favorite Franco?

Movie Opinion: Peter Parker's Aunt May Is a Goddess

Author's Note: This was originally published at The Erotic Woman in June 2007. Its relevance will become clear later today. 

First, a confession: When I was three years old, I carried a Spiderman doll around with me everywhere I went.  When I ate, Spidey had to sit at the table with me.  The little Spidey outfit came off, and when I took a bath, Spiderman had to take one, too.

     I haven’t had much interest in Spiderman since then.  He seemed to fall outside my girly world.  I didn’t plan on seeing the first film, and did so only thanks to the enthusiasm of my comic-book-crazed younger brother.  I was a bit more willing to sit down and watch the second one, if only because of Alfred Molina.  (I’ve had a slight crush on him ever since watching him try to seduce his wife by eating yogurt on the sitcom Ladies’ Man.  Chocolat only sealed the deal.)  To get me to the theater to see Spiderman 3 once again took the intervention of my brother.

     Spiderman 3 was directed by Sam Raimi and written by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent.  The plot involves Peter Parker/Spiderman (Tobey Maguire) deciding to ask his girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), to marry him.  Naturally, obstacles of the supervillainish variety stand in his way: there’s the thief who killed Parker’s Uncle Ben, Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), whose body has somehow become made out of sand; and an alien symbiote that takes the form of a black suit.  The black suit first makes Parker do bad things, then changes hands and makes Parker’s rival Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) do bad things.  Oh, and Parker’s best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco) sometimes mistakenly believes that Parker killed his father, and tries to kill Parker. 

     Throughout all this chaos, one figure remains the wise, stable moral authority.  She is the archetypal crone, the goddess of wisdom.  That figure is Peter Parker’s Aunt May.

Played by Rosemary Harris, she is (or should be) the face of elderly feminine beauty, with her flawless skin and pretty hazel eyes.   She gives Parker two important clues as his makes his way through the maze of his life.  First, she tells him that if he wants to get married, he has to be willing to put his wife before himself.  Again and again, we watch Parker do stupid, selfish things to his girlfriend Mary Jane.  His plans to propose in a French restaurant come at a woefully bad time.  He kisses another woman in front of her.   He turns down her offer of help in a fit of anger.  Only at the end of the film does he master Aunt May’s lesson of respect for marriage.

     Parker does the same stupid, selfish things to his “best friend” Harry Osborn.  When Osborn loses his memory, Parker withholds the truth.  Later, under the influence of the black suit, which makes him more aggressive, Parker delights in attacking and seriously wounding Osborn.  We watch as Aunt May’s truth about marriage stretches to include friendship:  to be a friend, Parker must learn to put his friend first.

     When Parker reports (wrongly) that the man who killed Aunt May’s husband Ben has been killed by Spiderman, he expects Aunt May to be happy, or at least to feel relieved.  She doesn’t.  Instead, she dispenses her second clue to the maze: revenge is destructive.  “Spiderman doesn’t kill,” she says.  Power is to be used to protect the innocent, not to punish the guilty. 

      With these insights, Aunt May Parker fits either of these definitions of the crone:

     “ As the crone, the woman represents the Goddess of wisdom and prophecy . . . [and] contribute[s] invaluable insight and the perspective of age.” (Naomi R. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods)

     “ . . . The modern female elder is often a beautiful, savvy woman who uses the knowledge she has gained through the years, and the inherent spiritual wisdom of interrelatedness that continues to grow throughout the years, to impart values that support and encourage the growth of others and the preservation of life.” (Joan Borysenko, A Woman’s Book of Life)

     That’s a strikingly powerful female image for a movie aimed at adolescent boys.  Now, to be fair, the message of friendship, not revenge, is also repeated by the film’s male elder, Osborn’s man-servant Bernard (John Paxton).  And in the voice-over narration in one of the final scenes, Parker states that Osborn, not Aunt May, taught him which moral values to uphold.  Parker is wrong.  Aunt May is the film’s preacher, its priestess, its crone-goddess of wisdom.

     Another message of Spiderman 3 is that stereotypical male behavior is wrong.  The black suit  turns Parker into a walking male stereotype.  It makes him use the extra power it gives him to bully ever other male who crosses his path.  Whenever a strange woman crosses his path, he does a smarmy, repellent kind of mating dance for her.  He blatantly uses his flirtations with other women to hurt Mary Jane’s feelings.  And in the midst of all his aggressive and sexual energy, Parker shoves Mary Jane to the ground.  The audience’s sympathy resides with Mary Jane; throughout none of this has Parker been presented as anything but a jerk.  Spiderman 3's moral path is clearly a feminine one.  The right thing for Parker to do is to behave according to the rules of the goddess, Aunt May.

     Although it was written by three men and aimed at adolescent males, there is more to Spiderman 3 than Kirsten Dunst playing the damsel in distress while the male characters get all the good lines.  The film places value on female elder wisdom, respect for marriage, and friendship.   

     There are only two things that I would have done differently, had I been one of the film’s writers.  First, I would have given speaking roles to some of the African-American actresses in the film.  Several of these actresses are noticeable, especially in the flirty-black-suit-Parker scenes.  But their roles are simply that: to be noticed.   To be used as human props, rather than individuals.  This disturbing media trend should have ended a long time ago.

     Second, I would have written in more male nudity.  Sure, we get to see the well-built James Franco in his underwear.  But is the underwear really necessary?  And the scene with Peter Parker in the shower could have used a floor-to-ceiling tracking shot.  Tobey Maguire’s not the most traditionally pretty guy ever to grace the screen in a superhero suit, and that’s what I like about him.  He’s like one of the real-guy guys you see in the pages of Sweet Action*.  Surely someone could have convinced Tobey Maguire to bare all for his art.

     My childhood Spidey would take off his clothes for me.

Full sources of works cited:

Goldenberg, Naomi R.  Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1979.  Page 98.

*An erotic magazine for women, now defunct. Currently, the most popular uses of the name Sweet Action seem to refer to a craft beer, an ice cream shop, or a comedy podcast. So don't confuse the one thing with any of those others. 

Borysenko, Joan.  A Woman’s Book of Life: The Biology, Psychology, and Spirituality of the Feminine Life Cycle.  New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.  Page 7.

Oh How Pinteresting Wednesday: Black and White

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, but I have been in home hemodialysis training with my husband. It's going well. He's been on dialysis a week and a half and already feels better/has more energy. Yesterday I got to practice poking needles into a dummy arm, in preparation for when I'll have to cannulate him. It's a little scary. But it's okay. 

While I'm away, let's hook up with The Vintage Apple for the once-monthly OHP! Wednesday. 

This is what happens when we can't wait for J.K. Rowling's latest project to come to fruition. 

This is what happens when we put James Franco on all the book covers.