Musings on the O Brother Where art Thou Soundtrack

I'm in a better mood today, thank God. I woke up with a scratchy throat, and when I spat out the mucous was yellowish. Still, I don't think I have the flu because when I get to work it disappears.

I'm listening to the 2001 Grammy Record of the Year, the 'O Brother, Where art Thou?" soundtrack, which I bought several months ago. I must have been a hillbilly chick in a former life because I totally love this kind of music. It's either that or it's all those episodes of that country music show Hee Haw that I watched as a child. I have vague memories of Minnie Pearl with her hat with the price tag hanging off the brim and Buck Owens and lots of hay bales and horses.

The movie itself was so fun. I made the mistake of watching it in Marin County instead of SF. I spent the whole time laughing during the movie and if I had been in SF, there would be other people laughing. In Marin, it was so silent you could hear a pin drop. I have to watch movies in SF, because here I have the same sense of humor as most of the people in the audience. It's the not same outside the city proper.

I noticed this phenomenon when I watched Shakespeare in Love in SF and then in Redwood City, which is on the Peninsula. In the SF viewing, you could hardly hear the movie because people were laughing at every other line. In Redwood City, the movie maybe got three laughs.

Whoever did the cinematography for O Brother is a genius. The colours were lush and it made the south look so beautiful. Woody Allen did the same thing with NYC with Bullets over Broadway and Broadway Danny Rose. NYC looked so unbelievable stunning in those two movies. If you didn't know anything about NYC, you might even feel inclined to move there because it was so clean and pretty. I haven't been to NYC since 1991 and friends tell me Guiliani cleaned it up and made it look like NYC Disneyland for the tourists. I find that hard to believe, but I'll reserve judgement till I see it for myself. NYC is such an old city, that unless they built new buildings, I don't see how they can make it look brand spanking new.

The funniest part of O Brother was when the KKK was dancing. I don't know what it was about that scene that was funny, but I just burst out laughing. I thought the Coen brothers made an interesting political statement about the South and our two political parties. The Democrats sold the South out, selling their new deal politics, when they were just as bad and sometimes even worse than the republican southerners. Alot of longtime southern democrats, including democratic blacks became republicans because of what the democratic party did, and who can blame them?

I'm starting on a new eating program to go along with my fungal and parasite cleanse. This new way of eating is supposed to starve the yeasties and the parasites so they never come back. I have to go off sugar of any kind, including fruit and anything that has mold in it like peanut butter. I found this new eating prgram on the Net from a woman who was taking the same parasite killing formula I am. She dropped five sizes in about three months.

I don't even care if I lose that much weight, I just want these evil fungals and parasites out of my body. My stupid parasites are so ungrateful. They had such a good deal, you know, living in my body. They had all the junk food they could eat. I 'm a total chocaholic, so they got all the sugar they wanted. But they had to go and spoil it and ruin my health. Now, I'm determined to be rid of them.

I was reading more about candida die-off reactions on the Net today, and I found out that the candida yeasties make you crave food that they want to eat. I was totally craving peanut butter last night and the candida love peanut butter. Those stupid green fungal parasites are controlling my life and it makes me mad. No one controls me, especially my eating. I refuse to be controlled by a green mold living inside of my pancreas and stomach lining.

I refused to let myself be controlled by speed, and then by alcohol and I'm sure as hell not going to let fbombing green parasitic molds control my life. God, it's like so rude for those little critters to try to control me, the host. I was so damned mad today. I vowed to root their butts out of my system. I'm going to break my addiction to sugar and carbos. I should be able to do this. I've had far worse addictions than sugar and carbos.

Take for instance speed. In my wild youth, I never felt comfortable unless I had 30 hits of speed on my at all times. Why 30 hits? I never knew, but I had to have 30 hits of pharmaceutical grade speed on me at all times. But when I crashed and got sick for a month and couldn't hold a teacup without shaking, I gave up speed.

I did the same thing with my ciggiliciouses. Okay, when I'm with my friend who smokes, I have a ciggie, but only then. It's not like I'm buying a pack on my own. I only smoke ciggies when I'm with very close friends who smoke or when I get too wasted at a party. And it's conditioning and habit, not addiction.

I also gave up booze, another abused substance of mine. Greg used to talk about how it wasn't good that after a fun drinking weekend, we'd both get moody, nasty and had violent headaches by Wednesdays, not to mention major anxiety fits. And I was okay with that for a long time. I could avoid the three day anxieity attacks as long as I kept my blood alcohol levels up. If you've ever wondered why your friends are sometimes so moody and crank? Well, it's because they're off their schedules and not keeping their levels up. If you're going to drink heavily, you've got to do it intelligently and keep your blood alcohol level at an even keel. If you do that, you don't get moody, you don't get cranky and best of all you don't get those scary anxiety attacks. So what if I couldn't go more than three days without a drink? At least it was still three days and not one day. I have standards. I was never a binge drinker. I drank socially all the time, that's all. And besides, Greg and I used to joke about gettng our reservations ready for our stay at Betty Ford, so it wasn't like I didn't know I was a closet alcoholic.

I only I gave up booze was because I didn't want to be beholden to that brown liquid in a glass bottle. I didn't like thinking that a liquid in a brown bottle had that much control over my life. And my anxieity attacks were so happening so often, I had to give it up. I was at a point, where I was so afraid to leave my house. I mean, who wants to live like that, right? So I gave booze up slowly and now I can go forever without a drink and not care. Having to drive to work helped too I must admit. I just hated driving hungover in that bad south 280/101 traffic every morning.

So if I can give up speed (still my favorite stimulant after all these years), ciggiliciouses and booze, I can certainly give up sugar and carbos for 40 days or however long it takes to get rid of my evil ungrateful candida yeasties.

I got very excited last night thinking I was going to start my new writing schedule, but isn't it always the case that just when you make new plans to change your life something gets in the way.

I went to the gym to workout and it was so hard and I was so tired. Instead of my usual 45 minutes, I only could complete 30 minutes. Then I went to Rainbow Grocery to pick up a few things and then went home. As soon as I entered through the door, it was like a starving spirit entered into me and I was ravenous. I ate a handful of almonds and then some dried apricots, then handfuls of mixed nuts. After all those snacks, I was still starving. I remembered I had a cooked chicken in the fridge and so I ate a few pieces of that and I was still so very hungry. I made a dinner of spaghetti with mushrooms, and it wasn't only until I finished dinner that I realized I had stuffed myself to death.

My stomach felt so distended and my head had started to throb and I felt depressed. I lit a few candles, turned of the lights and put on Mozart's Requiem for the Dead. I lay down wondering what in hell was wrong with me. I fell asleep and woke up with the sniffles. I finally went to bed and when I woke up with morning with a scratchy throat and more sniffles.

I was contemplating whether to call in sick at work, but decided I would just tough it out. Remarkably, my sniffles died down as soon as I got to the office, so I was relieved that I probably didn't pick up the flu. I started a new cleansing program on Saturday to rid my body of a fungal and parasite infection, that my holistic healer had diagnosed. Of course, he forgot to tell me that when you try to kill your fungals and parasites, you get a die-off reaction.

The little critters's bodies get deposited into your blood stream and your immune system becomes so overwhelmed that you get flu like symptoms. The die-off reaction also leaves you feeling tired and out of sorts and some people have reported feelings of depression. Great! Well, this explains what happened to me in the last 24 hours.

God, I hate feeling sick and tired and depressed. I don't mind feeling sick or tired or depressed, but not all three at once. It's like someone telling you your mother died or something.

I love cleansing routines. I think it's better to have the stuff come out of your body than to live inside of you, but the cleanse always leaves me feeling worse before I get better. I asked my holistic healer what a fungal infection was and he said to think of a fruit turning green. Tthat's what my insides look like. Lovely image isn't it? Now I'm starting to have a makings of really bad headache. There's nothing like toxins flooding through your body and giving a killer headache.

I think I'll take a bath as soon as I get home and soak in those expensive crystal salts I bought from I spa I went to last year. I"m afraid to eat because eating seems makes the die-off reactions worse, but I know if I don't eat I get nauseous. I can't win on this one, can I? I really wanted to finish Crazy Eddie before February ends but at this rate, I don't think it's going to happen. I hate this, I totally hate this.

My holistic healer told me 70% of my health problems will be solved once I get rid of my fungals and parasites. I hope he's right. I hope this painful die-off reaction that I'm experiencing does something for my general health because it's not doing a thing for my mood or my writing.

Here's some material for my baseball story. Jim Rome is saying that there is a news report from this year's baseball spring training camps, where managers are saying that the athletes are showing up at camp overweight. Rome said there's no reason for baseball players showing up fat at spring training because baseball is so competitive now. Then he said, "What is spring baseball training camp? A fat farm for baseball players?" How funny!

I want Jim, my baseball player, to be kind of overweight like that short stop from the NY Yankees who played for them in the 2000 season and fell over his feet in game 5 between the NY Yanks and the Oakland A's. Wish I could remember the guy's name, but I'm really bad with names.

Then there was talk last year in the local papers here that the reason Livan Hernandez, the SF Giants pitcher, was having a bad year was because his father was dying. I should have a scene where Jim, baseball player, is having a bad media day because he's playing so badly and the media asking him if his bad playing is due to his father's illness.

I love The Jungle. Jim was playing all the recent sports meltdowns, the Mike Tyson meltdown, the Jim Mora meltdown, some other hockey guy meltdown, etc. It's fascinating when players and coaches melt down in front of the media. Don't they know it's going to get replayed over and over again on sport talk radio shows all over the country? I think I want my baseball player guy to have a melt down in front of the media. Oliver Stone had media scenes in his football player movie Any Given Sunday, which I totally loved by the way.

Well, I guess there's nothing like good old fashioned dramarama in life to get the creative juices flowing. I wrote up my pitch for my baseball story and I even have a working title "Playing Catch with Dad". It's an updated "Field of Dreams" story with the estranged son wanting redemption with the dying father, only this time the Kevin Costner character is a smack talking major league baseball player, irish catholic boy who grew up in the Sunset district of San Francisco, went to SI and went to Stanford insteadl of Cal Berkeley.

In the shower this morning, I decided that the middle of my movie plot wasn't dramatic enough, not enough high stakes in my game, so I upped the stakes and have him come to Pac Bell at mid season before the trade deadlines. He's been playing badly for his team and the team's manager tells him that he either gets his act together or they going to trade him, send him down to minors or worse release him out of his contract. The team has a three game series with the SF Giants and towards the end of the movie, we see him in the third game with his last time at bat at Pac Bell Park. Either he hits a homerun and helps the team or he gets traded or loses his job. I love it. It's so melodramatic.

In the meantime, you have the dying father in the story and the son who's goal is to make peace with the father. You have the younger brother, who was ignored in favor of the star baseball playing son. He didn't even go to SI, he went to Riordan because he wasn't as smart. The brother is a construction worker, who plays on the softball team for a local sunset bar. Baseball playing son pays for the upkeep of the father and mother but never sees them. It's the younger brother who actually takes care of the mother and father. Then there's the baseball player's son who he's starting to have an estranged relationship with. In the beginning of the movie, the son wants to play catch with baseball playing dad but he's too busy and stressed out.

Is this a Lifetime Television for Men story or what? Hallmark? I love my baseball story. It's so interesting to me. It's the sins of the father passed down to the son story, because baseball player's dad was minor leaguer who never made it to the show. It's family dysfunctionalism handed down from father to son. It's the prodigal son theme, with the two sons, but turned on its head, because the prodigal son has all the money and supports the family. It's the generational friction theme with the father and son clashing about why they play baseball. And finally it's the parent and child theme, where the child must deal with with a parent who's dying.

I love my baseball story, it's so interesting to me. How do I make this work? How do I make it interesting and not boring? How do I, as a female, write a story about a middle aged professional major league baseball player and make it believable? My writing group suggested to me that I was interested in writing this story because I needed to resolve my own feelings about my dad, who died in the early 90's. I think they're right. In this story, I could say all the things I never said to my dad before he died. I'm very resolved about the dad thing, but I know I still have guilt for not being there to say my peace with him.

I don't know. I won't find out till I write this story and I'm very interesting in writing this story now. How do I make this work? I'm also dying to now write the ending for my Crazy Eddie story. I'm on a creative roll and I have to take advantage of the energy created by my traumarama crush on cute screenwriting guy from class.

God, I hope I'm not one of those writers who have to have dramarama to write. But I feel so creative right now! It's great! It's a miracle! I love when I can come up with an ending that I really like and that satisfies me. Endings that I really like are the hardest things for me to create in a story. But I love my baseball story ending. I want the dad to flatline while the son is talking. How great is that? It's just like life. Just when you think you've turned a corner, something happens, somebody flatlines. How realistic is that? I love it. I love when endings reflect real life. And it's not depressing, because the last shot will be baseball player guy and his son playing catch in the backyard after the funeral.

It's like my crush on cute screenwriting guy. Just when I thought I was turning a corner in my life and I finally found a cute guy I was attracted to, I blow it, freak out and lose my opportunity for love. But then what happens next, I get my creative spirit back, something that's been lost or dead since November. So my ending isn't depressing either.

I had this whole thing typed out and I accidently hit the sign out button and I lost it. Maybe no one was supposed to read what I wrote.

My crush on the cute screenwriting guy is over. Must have been hormonal thing or something. I don't know. I just know it's gone and when I looked at him today, he just wasn't as cute as I thought. Such a relief too, because I hate distractions like this when I'm in a writing class.

I think I'm going to write a screenplay on my idea for a baseball story. It's my third screenplay idea, but I think this is finally the one I want to work on for class. The baseball story has Pac Bell park in it a symbol and metaphor. Pac Bell Park was built in downtown SF to revitalize that part of SF. My baseball player will find his love of baseball again and remember how it was his father who taught him how to love the game, a father who is now dying and with whom he's had a difficult relationship with since he was 18 years old.

I got the ending tonight on the way home from screenwriting class. I've been struggling for a way to write the ending to my baseball story, struggling for a year on how to end this story without being sentimental, happy and sappy. I'm going to let my baseball player find his redemption and forgiveness with his father, but then the father is going to die right afterwards. I love this ending, it's so bittersweet and so realistic to me. I don't want a celebratory redemption. I want redemption, but I want my redemption to be empty and lonely, like too much too little too late. To me, that's how redemption happens in the real world. It's not a happy fairytale Oprah ending. It's painful and it hurts and the hurt is from deep inside you, so deep you don't even know where it comes from. It's primal hurt, caveman and brutish and painful, very painful.

Maybe I had to have this atraction to this guy so I could have all this traumarama, dramarama in my life, to get me in the mood to come up with this great bittersweet ending for my baseball story. And if that was the purpose of cute screenwriting guy in my life, then so be it. I can't knock the inspiration for a bittersweet ending that I really, really like.

I saw in preview ACT's new play, Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward. It's a good play, some fun special effects but not their best. One of the main characters had a nightgown on with a beautiful silver and lavender floor length robe, which I totall loved. The english accents were okay, although the main male character spoke in some odd accent that definitely wasn't Britt. He was in Athol Fugard's Master Harold and the Boys at ACT last year, and his accent then and the one in this play sounded identical. Guess my friend is right. Some people can do accents and some just can't.

I read an article in the program about the Spiritualist church. Is this a coincidence or what? I watched the movie "The Verdict" with someone from my screenwriting class today, so we could do our homework together. We started talking and then she started talking about the spiritualist church that she attends in SF. What a trip! She said the service is just like John Edward's Crossing Over.

Crossing Over was Amy's favorite show. I wonder if my friend Amy who died in October is trying to contact me. God! Amy used to watch that show every day while she was at home recovering from chemo therapy. She made me watch it with ther one night, since she knew I'd never seen it. She became obsessed with John Edwards and wanted to go see him. He was supposed to be in the Bay Area last year and she asked me if I wanted to go. I said sure. Butwhen she called, the event was sold out.

I miss Amy. She was the only friend I had outside of my writing group, who supported me in my writing. With Amy, I could talk freely about my writing goals and dreams and she would always listen and be so encouraging. I could tell her about my story ideas and she would listen and she even agreed to comment on one of my stories. She was so loving in her critiques and her comments. I couldn't have asked for a better supporter for my writing life. Amy even understood my hopelesly romantic love for Brian and Ellis and my subsequent struggles with them afterwards. The loss of her friendship has left me feeling so alone.

I feel like one of the desperate people you read about who use mediums to contact their loved ones. But it's just too coincidental that I find the spiritualist church connection now and it's similarity to Crossing Over, Amy's favorite show. I feel like I need to go to one of their Sunday services to see if Amy will try to contact me. I never got a chance to properly say goodbye to her. By the time I was able to see her, the brain tumor had turned her brain to mush and she was in an Alzheimer's dementia haze. Amy, my work friend who usd to earn six figures from doing IT consulting work, couldn't even remember what she'd said from one minute to the next. I tried to say goodbye, but how much can you really say goodbye to someone, if you're not even sure they remember who the hell you really are?

And what could I say? I'm sorry I wasn't there for you that last time she you called in August, when I told you 'chin up, everything will work out." I'm sorry that I didn't heed my intuition and call you because I was selfish and didn't want hear about your depression because of your health and work one more time. I didn't know you were breaking down. I didn't know you were fighting for you life. I didn't know that your inoperable brain tumor had start to grow rapidly again and was turning your brain into spoiled swiss cheese. I didn't know that you had stopped eating because you were so depressed. I didn't know and yet somehow I did know, but I just couldn't, just plainly and honestly didn't want to deal with any of it.

That maybe a part of me knew that one of these days you'd give up, because that was your modus operandi, you give up, you walk out, every time, out of every job, out of friendships, out of everything and even your own life. I wanted you to fight, to live longer, but I knew you were tired. Tired of fighting, tired of stressing over your health and your finances. And I'm sorry but I just can't see how anyone can give up. But you did and it freaks me out, because I wonder that there will ever come a time when I'll want to give up again. My attempts at giving up my own life have never worked out and I've just let learnt to let it go because it's never worked out, but the urge never ever goes away.

Is it different on the other side? Are you happy? Are you free? Do you miss life? Do you miss me? Is this you're way of trying to contact me? To tell me you're okay. To tell me that you're happy. To tell me that it's all going to be okay and everything is going to work out. To tell me that forgive me not wanting to call you in August. To tell me that you forgive me. To tell me that I'm going to find another really close friend who totally supports in my writing life the way you did. To not worry because I'll find that wonderful man who's a cross between Brian and Ellis and that I'll have that bouncing baby boy you saw in my future when you read my tarot cards.

I still don't know if I'll go to the spiritualist church. What if nothing happens? What if something does? I've never liked the idea of people channeling spirits, how do they know they're not channeling evil spirits? I know I'll have to resolve my own feelings about this issue for me to attend a spiritualist service. But if it gives me the chance to hear from Amy again, then it will be worth it. I miss her, her friendship and her support for my writing life.

I've been feeling bad for the last two hours that I've had such evil thoughts about a guy I don't even know. He read a few poems and I have such judgments about him based on his poetry, his voice and the way he looked and dressed. I'm doing the thing that I hate so much, judging people on first impression. I hate when people do it to me so I try not to do to other people. It's such bad karma. And what a waste of my precious energy to talk about some guy that barely registered in my mind.

I guess it's only because it's issue of the day because two members of my writing group find him attractive and I just don't get why. My intution, which is usually right, tells me he's a bitter person, full of ego and full of himself. He also strikes me as the kind of guy who has issues with women, lots of them. But I guess because he wrote a poem about his relationship, which he prefaced by saying it was a relationship poem, not a good relationship, not a happy relationship, not a relationship that I fondly look back at with love, but just a "relationship poem". Everyone in the room laughed knowingly, because what was unsaid was this relationship was a bad one and everyone knows about those kinds of "relationships". I think what impressed most of the women there, everyone except me that is, was the poem was about his girlfriend. You could practically here the silent "ooohhhh's and aaahhhs" in the room thought of by all the women in the room. Poetry boy is writing about his girlfirend, how sensitive, and how sweet, how anti frat boy. Never mind that the poem is a sarcastic tome to how many women he though his girlfriend had slept with before him and how this fact was slowly eating away at his heart and soul.

But then again, I don't know. I think I was the only woman in the room who felt how insincere and bitter the poem was and what do I know about poetry anyway? I can just read people's vibes pretty darn well since I'm supposed to be clairsentient, able to feel things in my body, and claircognizant, what most people call gut instinct. And my gut instinct is screaming 'freak, freak, danger, danger' in a screechingly loud voice. I think poetry boy writes poems like that to get laid. But give the guy credit right? It snared two of my friends into his tired act. God, one of them seems a little miffed because he acted like he didn't want to have sex with her. I love my friends, but are they that blind and dumb?

Whatever. But then on the way home from grocery shopping tonight, I got so depressed. I hate being different from other women. But it's always been this way for me and I don't know why. My spiritual healer says it has something to do with the fact that I'm this elf-human thing and that I will never feel like ever fit it anywhere. And she's right. I just don't fit ib, especially in an artsy fartsy crowd. But damn! I took that crazy enneagram test and I tested at 4, I'm an artist. Of all people, I'm supposed to be artsy farsty as hell. In fact, I'm supposed to be able to out artsy fartsy anybody. What gives? Maybe it's that damned 5 wing, which is the intellectual. My stupid damn intellectual side won't let me fool myself that way and put on airs and that too cool for TV and too trendy for the average person attitude.

It's an elf girl's life to always feel left out of any crowd. But like any good elf girl, I know the best thing to do to get me out of my depression. Shopping. I stopped by a mall on the way hom. I went to the GNC first, and bought this new mineral which is supposed to help me not feel cold. I freeze at temperatures less than 80 degrees, which is not a good thing is you live in a city where the average year round temperature is 60 degrees. I didn't even blink an eye at paying $22 for a bottle of 30 pills. Hey, if helps me to stop from being cold all the time, it's worth it.

Then I went Macy's to look for my favorite pair of jeans. I found the pair I usually buy and there was another pair in a lighter colour for $13, my lucky number, so of course, I had to buy them. When do you ever see jeans for $13. It had to be a good sign. Then I went to Borders and bought a book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a german christian philosopher whom I really like. Bonhoeffer was one of the few christians who fought against the Nazis and was later imprisoned and killed by them for his beliefs. He's an interesting philosopher to me because of his willingness to speak up against what was so obviously wrong.

But I was happy for only a little while before the depression came rolling in like the fog. I wonder if I just need to start writing my stories again. I've been too busy, too tired and too lazy this month to write and not writing seems to have put me off kilter, made me feel out of balance, moody and unable to sleep. I hate this feeling. And I feel crabby as hell too, so crabby that I'm having evil, nasty and bitter thoughts about a poetry man that I don't even know.

It's late now but I'm going to stay up and crank 1,000 words out. I know once I get back into my creative space, I'll feel happier and not think such bad thoughts. Or at least if I do, the bad thoughts won't linger like a bad hangover but flit across my mind gently and quickly like a young doe in flight.