2001-03-30 - 986008082

On the internal soundtrack: "When I'm Sixty-Four", Beatles

MIL arrives today!

I'm very excited. We get her all to ourselves until Wednesday. She's worn out from a busy winter full of guests (hazard of living in South Florida) and I'm hoping to pamper her a bit. At the very least, she won't be cooking.

On Saturday I'm hoping we'll go to Restaurant Nora. I know it sounds very crunchy, and I have plenty of questions about whether organic food is the Good to standard food's Evil, but remember MIL can't eat any animal fats. A restaurant like this is likely to be extremely accommodating in that regard.

BTW, in case I didn't make this clear, in the previous entry I was NOT trying to make the case that depression can be "cured" by changing the way people think. I'm well aware that in most cases of true clinical depression, there is a physical/chemical deficiency that can only be remedied using medication. I also am wholeheartedly in support of using medication in such cases and dislike implications that a person shouldn't "need" it. It bothers me that the stigma of mental illness discourages people from getting the help that's available.

That said, what I am very interested in is the middle ground. The interaction between the mind and the body. I'm interested in knowing how much conscious alteration of thought can affect chemicals in the body, and vice versa. This interest of mine extends beyond mental illness into, uh, physical illness? In particular, things such as the placebo effect, the effect of positive thinking on the severity and duration of illness, stuff like that. Maybe I'll get to those another day.

So I nearly had a heart attack yesterday when either Stacey or her sister-in-law (long story short, Stacey uses the SIL's account sometimes) sent me a chain-letter forward that basically said this:

Person A didn't send this to enough people and her fiance got hit by an 18-wheeler and died.

Person B didn't send this quickly enough and was killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver.

Person C sent it to the requisite 10 people in the requisite hour and won the lottery and his long-lost love and lived happily ever after.

Those are just the reasons why you have to forward it. Below that is the actual forward itself, which is reasonable enough. It's about how you should never take the people you love for granted and should always be sure to tell them you love them, don't put off visiting them, etc.

Now, I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment. But the dire threats in the beginning made my blood pressure go through the roof. That's just fucking sick. Who thinks this stuff up?! Jesus.

Poindexter says we should tell Stacey that since we never send her forwards on, she is basically wishing bad luck on us by sending them. I may do just that.

When Poindexter IM'd that he was leaving the office, I told him to DRIVE VERY VERY CAREFULLY. He laughed.

Don't misunderstand me: I don't think that he's going to get run over because I didn't send the forward to anyone. It's just that the forward reminds me of existing fears I have of losing people close to me. I'm a paranoid little girl.

One time in the park when I was a kid, I caught a toad. I showed it to my grandmother, who told me I was going to get warts. I said "That's an old wives' tale."

About a week later, I saw something on my hand and worried that it was a wart. I showed it to my mom, who laughed at me and said, "I thought you said it was an old wives' tale!" I do. I didn't think I got a wart from the toad, I just thought I got a wart.

It wasn't a wart, anyway. Or maybe it was. I don't remember. It's gone now.

Two nights ago, in some discussion we were having, I asked Poindexter why he didn't read my journal more often. He said that mainly it's because he already knows what goes into it. He says he's more interested in it as a memory book five years from now, when he can look back and see what we were up to and what his wife was obsessing about at the time.

Makes sense. But I pointed out to him that I just like reading what he writes. I said, "If you had a journal, I'd be like, 'Didja update yet?'" He said, "Yeah, but you're addicted to journals. It's not my thing."

I'm a little obsessive about this sort of thing, though. If I'm interested in a person and how they think, I want to read what they write about it. I want to see how they describe it, what funny comments they make, what details they include, what details they leave out. I'm always asking Poindexter to forward to me the catching-up e-mails he sends to mutual friends of ours. Sometimes when I know he's discussing our weekend activities at work, I'll make him tell me the story the same way he told it to the people there.

What it boils down to, I guess, is that I'm endlessly fascinated with HOW a story is told. The story itself is almost secondary. This is true in the movies and television, too -- I don't care if I know all the plot details beforehand; I'll still watch a movie or show and enjoy seeing the excution. The nearest analogy I can think of is the idea of giving a script or play to 5 different directors and getting five very different results. I mean, jeez, look at Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" versus Romeo+Juliet. It's the same plot and the same dialogue, but two very different movies.

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