I saw I am Sam tonight. It wasn't as schlocky as I thought it would be. The previews made me think the movie was going to be tearjerker and who wants to sit through that. But, since Sean Penn was nominated for Best Actor for this movie, I made myself watch it. Penn's performance was very studied and controlled. You can see his brain thinking away, trying to figure out his next move. But other than that, his performance was stunning. His physical gestures, Sam's way of walking, the way he held open his mouth all the time was rivetting. I liked the fact that he played the character of Sam without judgment and the movie filmed Sam that way. The director could have easily made the audience feel sympathetic to the Sam character, but it's not that easy. Sam is retarded and you get to feel the embarrassment and shame that his mental handicap causes the pepole around him. But Sam is not to be pitied or glorified. He's just retarded and like most people, just trying to get by in ths world with a kid.

The filmmakers really made the social services people come off like the cruel heartless liberals that the right wing media says there are. Those social services people were drawn so one-dimensional and just plain mean and nasty.

I'm not sure if Sean will win. I still have yet to see Ali and Training Day. Ali is no longer in theatres even though Will Smith was nominated for an oscar. I'm thinking it might be Denzel Washington as the winner only because he did get overlooked for his performance on The Hurricane. But Sean Penn, I don't know. His character work was flawless, controlled and very complete.

I thought I was doing so well on my candida killing diet, but I made the mistake of eating bacon today and the yeasties totally love it and started multiplying again. I totally forgot I cannot eat smoked or processed meats. This is the first time I had a yeastie reaction so this is good. I also had regular coffee instead of decaf and I don't know if the caffiene was a contributing factor to my yeastie breakout.

I just have to be more vigilant. I read the website again for the woman who's on the same program I am and her yeasties came out after 20 days. I'm only on day 15 but I don't know how far back eating bacon set me. The woman with the website said it took her 40 days to clear out her yeasties. When I went I went to the doctor he said I had dropped from severe to moderate, a good 10 point drop. I just have to keep dong this.

The woman with candida website also stayed on the eating program for 3.5 months. I might just do that too, which means I'll be eating this way till the middle of June. Going off sugar has really changed my tastebuds. Things just don't taste the same anymore. Sometime I crave sweet things but I drink herb tea with artificial sweetener and that seems to help.

I just want my yeasties to go away permanently, so I guess I'll have to be as strict as I can with this plan.

I saw In the Bedroom today. I did not expect the ending it had, which is good. I like to be surprised in a movie. Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson were very good, although their performances weren't Oscar winner quality. I think the Oscar should go to Halle Berry, although I have yet to see Iris. Halle Berry played against type, cried and did the hysterical woman thing alot and Oscar voters like those kinds of performances. Sissy Spacek's performance was almost the same type of she played in Affliction with Nick Nolte. I still remember Tom Wilkinson from that bizarre movie The Governess with Minnie Driver. I liked him much better in this role, although that performance was very good. He was so creepy in that movie.

I also Black Hawk Down and totally loved it. I will definitely have to buy the DVD for this movie. It was so realistic in it portrayal of war. One of my favorite scenes was when one of the soldiers looks down and see's a man's hand on the ground and just picks it up and puts it his pocket. That was so cool because to me that scene is the reality of war. I also liked all that blood just gushing out like that, again very realistic.

Black Hawk Down was another feast for the eyes with all those beautiful young male Hollywood actors. I liked that it was an international cast with lots of Americans, Brits and Aussies playing the soldiers. Ewan McGregor did a great American accent. Jason Isaacs' American accent wasn't that great but everybody else's was terrific. The beautiful elf price, Legolas, Orlando Bloom, was in this movie and he played an american quite well.

As everyone else has said in reviews, you cannot help but be reminded of the US soldiers in Afghanistan, while watching this movie. Our boys out there fighting for our country and they're also so young too. I get mixed feelings when watching a war movie. I hate war and I don't endorse war, although for 9/11 I made an exception. I couldn't help but get caught up in this movie about US soldiers but half way through, one part of me said it was disgusting to even be watching and cheering these soldier on in their failed mission in Somalia. I got the same reaction watching Top Gun, another movie I loved. The peace loving part of me freaks out that I'm cheering on soldiers.

But it's hard to be hate soldiers, especially after 9/11, because they're people out there protecting my country's interests and dying in conflict. I don't hate soldiers, I just hate war. I hate that we have wars and I just wish the world could find peaceful solutions to its problems.

I found a website that talks about why the Somalia mission failed. I was watching the movie and I even thought the tacticals were all wrong. The people planning the mission did not even take into consideration that there might be hostile forces trying to shoot them down. And god, they went out in the middle of the day in attack formation like that wasn't the big tip off that they were coming. There was no backup plan in case something went wrong. They just went it, arrogant as all hell, thinking the Somalis were just going to roll over the play dead.

These guys were supposed to be rangers and delta forces, elite troops, but their tacticals were so bad. Maybe I've been watching too many episodes of La Femme Nikita, where every mission was meticulously planned with backup and contigency plans in case something went wrong, but even I didn't watch that show I still would have had a backup plan. The guy planning the mission had none of that. Then they didn't even tell the Pakistani General they were going in, so they could have even more backup in case something did go wrong.

There's an adobe acrobat file I found on what went wrong on that mission in Somalia that inspired Black Hawk Down. I'll have to read it to see what a military expert thought. Still, Black Hawk down was a fantastic movie and it made me realize that my country's soldiers deserve alot of my respect for the role that they play in the country's defense forces. I don't like war, but it's a necessary evil and I'm honored that there are young men willing to die for my country.

Mercedes must be really not be doing well since they have so many commercials on the radio. I hate those Mercedes commercials. You know these companies pay alot of money to advertisers to come up with advertising campaigns and all those ad companies can come up with are those stupid ads. It makes me think that anyone who would buy a mercedes is a total idiot or a gold digging materialistic freak.

Then next worse ads are those Pacific Bell DSL commercials. God, they're just really dumb. It's always some guy who can't control the guy next door from using their DSL line. Like one kind of idiot lets the guy next door take over their DSL line? In the commercial on TV, the guy is always in their house. It's very weird! I think the message of those commercials came from the fact that people can build wireless networks and it's an attack against people who have wireless networks. Businesses like SBC Pacific Bell obviously hate the whole wireless network idea.

I wonder if people actually buy these products based on these commercials. It's having the opposite affect on me, but that's just me and I don't have normal reactions to anything. I wonder.

I just finished reading a book of essays on Venice by Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1987. Venice is a city that I've always wanted to visit, if I ever get married again I'm determined to honeymoon there, and I was keen to find out what he had to say about it.

One of his essays is about the autonomy of the eye. Brodsky suggests that the eye is "the most autonomous of our organs ... the eye keeps registering reality even when there is no apparent reason for doing this ... Why? ... because the environment is hostile and eyesight is the instrument of adjustment to an environment which remains hostile no matter how well you have adjusted to it."

It's an interesting way to look at the function of your eye, but I wonder if it's true. Brodsky then goes onto say that "the eye has an appetite for beauty and art because it's looking for safety ... beauty is solace, since beauty is safe ... when the eye fails to find beauty -- alias solace -- it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to percieve virtue in ugliness".

Brodsky's essay on beauty made me think about this book I read by Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, a book from the point of view of one of Cinderella's ugly stepsisters. I wonder what it's like to be ugly. I mean, not that I think I'm that beautiful, but too many men's and women's appreciative glances over the years have told me that I'm not ugly either. God, what is it like to not have people look at you with appreciation in their eyes. That must be such a trip.

If people have thought me ugly, it's only been a few. I'm not a knock out anything, I'm cute, maybe even pretty sometimes, but definitely not ugly. And if Brodsky is right that the eyes seek out beauty, does this mean that ugly people aren't sought out by people's eyes?

I had a roommate in college, who was a total math genius, but not very pretty. She wasn't ugly really, just kind of big and homel. She told me once, while I was complainng about my life, that I should feel lucky because I never had to work at having men notice me. Not that having men notice me has added anything significant to my life, but I'm sure I would have a differen opinion if men didn't notice me.

And beauty is such a fleeting thing to me anyway. Something or someone can appear beautiful depending on my mood, my emotional state, what side of the bed I got up on, how much or how little sleep I had that night and in a bar, how much I've had to drink. And my own standards for male beauty are so different than most women. All the men that the media and Hollywood tell me I'm supposed to panting over, just aren't that attractive to me.

I've had saved for years a Far Side comic where this monster guy is coming through a door on one side. On the other side, are a bunch of women. All of the women have the thought of 'Ugly' in their head except for one, she has heart in her head. The caption of the comic says 'Someone for Everyone'. I wrote my name on the woman with the heart because that's me.

Sometimes when I see a really great looking guy, say in like a seminar, I don't even talk to him, especially when I noticed that every woman in the room has made some excuse to talk to him. God, with that kind of competition who needs the stress, so I just avoid those popular types altogether and don't even bother to talk to them. Most of the time, these hoties guys are so arrogant and jerkish anyway, because they know they can just walk into a room and have the choice of any woman in it.

Of course, there's always an exception. I saw a guy like that in a seminar I was taking and I was dying to talk to him, because the man was just drop dead gorgeous. But I wasn't the only one who noticed the guy's beauty, because I saw him get hit on by every woman in the room except me. I was bummed to because this guy was exceptionally fine, but it was way to stressful, so I drove thoughts of him out of my mind.

Much to my surprise, while I was attending a one day seminar given by the same company who ran the other seminar we were both in, Mr Drop Dead Gorgeous ends up sitting next to me. It freaked me out so much because I'd been dying to talk to him for week and there he was, a breath away.

He turned out be such a nice guy and we actually became quite good friends after that. He turned out to not really my type but he was so cute. If we were back in the south and that holiday, Sadie Hawkins Day, came up where you could ask a guy to marry you, I'd ask this guy. Nice, sweet, smart and cute, what a dynamite combo! Plus, he was always tanned and I'm very partial to a man with a tan. Never mind, that he's not my type, I'm very flexible when it comes to pretty men.

I wonder what that guy is doing now. He spent some part of the year as a ski instructor/bum and I got the distinct impression that financially, he was well taken care of. We lost touch a few years ago, but I often think of him since he seemed so damned perfect to me. Talk about beauty. I know I would never grow tired looking at that guy's mug through the years.