After drooling over the film’s trailers for the months it was in the theater, my wife and I finally rented 500 Days of Summer with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Based on the film’s popularity and the tidbits publicized about the plotline, I wouldn’t be giving anything away by spoiling that it’s about the guy losing the girl and not getting her back. I will, however, give other things away, so if you’ve stumbled onto this page via Google and haven’t seen the film, go ahead and stop reading.
The film presents itself with an undertone of conflict as to the nature of fate. The female love interest, Summer, doesn’t believe love exists or that she has found or will ever experience love while the male protagonist, Tom, believes that the idea of a soulmate is not only possible but can be laced with destiny.
In keeping with the aforementioned storyline, Summer decides after getting closer to Tom than she has anyone else before him, she does not want to be with Tom anymore. After his depressed weeks of emotional churning over the loss of what he believed was his “one true love”, Tom runs into Summer in a train car on the way to a mutual friend’s wedding.
Summer is visibly warm to the poor guy during the wedding reception, dropping inside jokes from their relationship, dancing with him to Etta James’ “At Last”, the most romantic of songs. Toward the end of the night she invites him to a party at her place, to which he shows up to find her sporting a large engagement ring.
Further depressed weeks of emotional churning find Summer successfully married when she shows up to Tom’s favorite spot in the city and backhandedly gives him “closure” on their relationship. He explains that having been burned, he no longer believes in fate or love. She explains that she now believes in fate and love, just not with him.
While the switch in positions was foreseeable when it became evident that Tom was not going to ever win back the object of his undying affection, the film in hindsight was less about the overt struggle over the idea of fate and love through apparent love and loss, and more about the underlying exercise in exploring the unbridled depths of a girl’s selfishness.
At the height of his inner turmoil, Tom has a conversation with his younger sister Rachel, during which she puts the idea in his mind that perhaps Summer wasn’t really “the one”. This is news to both Tom and the film’s viewers, as Summer in some respects has been so far portrayed without flaw.
Tom begins a memory montage of the previous months, taking the viewer through each previously lived-through scenario from a different perspective, one filled with warning signs and perhaps more reality-based than his prior fantasy-laden rollercoaster ride. To Tom, the memories are laced with indicators that she may not have liked him as much as he believes she had, that maybe it wasn’t the fated love he believed it to be. To the viewer, the memories are laced with signs that Summer has been as toxic as a waste dump. She is what gentlemen refer to as a “tar baby”, once the surface is penetrated, there is no chance of ever being extracted from complete, hopeless submission.
Tom’s interactions with Summer began innocently, he initiated light conversation right up until the point that a friend let it slip to her that Tom liked her. From that point on, she initiated all interactions and escalations. She kissed him unprompted in the copy room, she undressed in his bed, she pulled him into the Adult section of the video store, she told him her deepest darkest secrets. When he angered at her seeming lack of outspoken commitment, she showed up at his apartment in the middle of a rainy night. She expressed every action indicative of physical and emotional intimacy, all the while refusing to outwardly admit she was even dating him. She drove the proverbial bus, and took Tom for a ride.
She also initiated the breakup of this mind game of a relationship, going her own way free to find someone else to pretend not to date. When Tom ran into her at the aforementioned wedding, she couldn’t help herself but to see if there is still any fertile soil in which to plant, stringing him along emotionally for an evening while she not only had no intention of making her actions amount to anything, but was also about to get engaged to someone else.
Her visit to Tom’s favorite spot in the city, during which she bestowed on him the “I now believe in fate, just not with you” conversation, ended up in even more manipulation, as she placed her hand on his for a long, dramatic moment before she got up to leave. Even as a married woman, she couldn’t resist riding him around one last time. It was ultimately the height of both selfishness and inappropriateness. Tom clued in to this a bit, he made a passing comment during the conversation that she “gets to do whatever she wants.”
By the end of the film, Tom begins the first of an open-ended number of days with his new love interest Autumn, with whom he strikes up a conversation waiting for a job interview to begin, and who coincidentally shares the same love for Tom’s favorite spot in the city. The audience can presumably stand up and cheer due to Tom’s renewed belief in fate, and the credits can roll as the film has upheld the existence of the classic religion of America, the Church of Romantic Love. This viewer stood up and cheered for a different reason. I suspect Tom didn’t even realize how lucky he was to rid himself of the sick and twisted Summer and her selfish, manipulative grasp.
Though it has been days since I’ve watched this film, I can still taste my disdain for the Summer character in the back of my mouth. It would normally appear that I didn’t care for the film and its unpleasant storyline. On the contrary, I felt this film was fantastic. The writers, directors, and cast succeeded in the most important aspect of film making: they created a character that they developed enough to cause me to have an exceedingly strong emotion toward that character. To create a piece of art that evokes emotion at all is, to me, a success, and this film’s storyline and characters will be memorable for some time to come.
Last Tuesday, E decided it was time for L to undertake the rite of passage every child embarks on during the first memorable Christmas holiday of their lives. It was time to meet Santa.
She dolled up L in his proper little dress shirt and bow tie, and let him run around the bedroom while she got ready to bring him down to Santa’s Workshop.
Unfortunately, L didn’t realize that when he continues to pull the caps off the toilet screws in the bathroom, each “NO” will get progressively louder, and will be eventually followed by a smack on the hand. He crumpled into a little pile on the bathroom floor to show how horrible and dreadful it was to be reprimanded.
I did not go down to see Santa with them, so unfortunately all I received are two pieces of information secondhand: Everyone loved L and his bowtie, and L hated, hated, hated Santa.
It took us all of four seconds after the artificial tree debacle to pendulum swing all the way back to wanting a real tree. E said she knew of a tree lot near our house, so last night we packed up the car and headed over there.
After walking around and taking in that fantastic tree smell for awhile, we took a walk through their tacky “Spray-Snow Winter Wonderland” room just for giggles.
We always have a a huge crisis of conscience when buying a real tree in Texas. Being New Yorkers, our dead parents would spin in their graves if they knew we spent more than $50 on a tree. So we walked past the $300 six foot trees up front, and asked for their Charlie Brown section. We’ve had luck doing that previously, I’m always surprised what constitutes a “reject” tree in some people’s minds.
As we turned the corner to Budget Row, we were greeted by some of the tallest, most full and beautiful trees on the lot, for a fraction of the price of the others. We asked the lot guy what could possibly be wrong with these and he said, “A lot of people don’t like them because the needles are stiff.” Anyone who has hung an ornament on a Christmas tree knows that stiffer needles keep the hooks on better, so we laughed and shelled out a comparatively miniscule amount of money. The total price wound up being 35% of what we paid for the fake the week before.
When we got home and got the tree in the house, I grabbed the Sawzall and lopped off a few of the bottom branches to give me enough trunk to get it into the base.
Though we can’t know for certain what L thinks about the tree until he starts talking, we’d like to think that the smile on his face last night meant that he knew this tree was super fantastic and the other one sucked big ass balls. After he touched it a few times and stared at it, we’re certain the “stiff needles” will probably be one deterrent to him mucking with the tree.
Then, as quickly as the day passed, it was suddenly time for bed.
Last weekend began our quest for a Christmas tree. E and I have both used real trees for quite some time now, including the last few years while we’ve been together. This year, for the sake of everyone’s allergies, we decided to purchase the first fake (excuse me, “artificial”) tree either of us have had since the 1980s.
After combing through websites and sale circulars, I found that Garden Ridge was having a 50% reduction in price on all their artificial trees, including their unlit models. We decided to go with an unlit tree simply due to the amount of lights we already have in the attic, we figured we could save a bit of money foregoing the prelit option.
It being a particularly quiet Sunday evening at our local neighborhood Garden Ridge, we turned L loose from the shopping cart and photographed some of the mayhem.
After having our newly purchased “reality challenged” Christmas tree sit in its box in our front room for nearly a week, I decided to clear some space and assemble the thing. I got out the base and unfurled the bottom layer.
I thought I was imagining things, but to me the bottom layer looked like complete shit. I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, and assemble the rest of the tree.
I slid each layer into the top of the previous one, and by the time I popped the top crown into the second-highest layer, I had a 7 1/2 foot tall towering piece of garbage. I tried again to think that maybe I was just misjudging the thing. It was obvious that each branch piece consisted of a bunch of wired twig pieces that needed to be spread way out to fill in all the blank space. L by then had long been asleep so, going against my desire to throw it off the front porch, I took a small nap before he woke up.
As L and I woke up, E arrived home. She strolled through the front door, looked up and said, “What the fuck? Please tell me our Christmas tree doesn’t look like that.”
I gave her the bad news and then, to check whether I was crazy, asked her what she thought about the whole “spreading out the twig pieces” deal. She agreed it was obvious that needed to be done. But the more we looked at this poor bastard tree, the more we realized there was just not enough spreading out that could be done to even remotely make Olive Oyl here look like something resembling a standard Christmas pine.
After letting Liam walk around this horrible piece of shit and completely ruining the first glimpse he’ll have in his life of what a Christmas tree looks like, we packed it back up in the box and found the receipt. I hope he’s not yet old enough to form a solid memory of what we did to his tree, I felt like a zookeeper who removed a baby squirrel from its mother and instead let it imprint on a pelican.
Needless to say we’ll be exploring other options.
L started daycare a month ago, and was sick within two days. Since then he’s been ill twice more, each time with bilateral ear infections, vomiting, and enough dripping mucus to flypaper the kitchen at a fast food joint. This afternoon, daycare called and (big shocker) he had a 103.5 fever, was hoarse and congested.
The poor munchkin has been asleep since we got home from the pediatrician. Alternating Children’s Tylenol and Motrin has brought his fever down to a high-normal 99.1, but he’s still miserable and tired.
I suppose this is how it goes. So begins the rite of passage children embark on when beginning their exposure to other children. We can either embrace it, or buy extra steel wool to scrub him with on his way into his car seat. Either way, it will last as long as it lasts.
When we first met, I took E to the site of an old rave warehouse I was involved in during the late 1990s. We walked around and checked out the grounds, and aside from the sticker still on the door there was no record of anything taking place.
We walked around a bit, and found ourselves down on the other side of the block, where an eerie orange glow surrounded what appeared to be an old mosque. I took some photos, which I keep unretouched.
I had to run out for some food at lunch today, and found myself down in that part of town. I had my camera with me, and decided to stop over for a quick look at what it looks like now. I stopped at the warehouse first, the sticker is still on the door and everything looks almost identical to how it looked over three years ago.
Of course, I wandered down the street to see what had become of the mosque. It was pretty dilapidated, some portions of the buildings were crumbling, and on the building in the second photo the entire roof and side wall had caved in. I would have reproduced the photos identically, but I didn’t expect to be over that way and hadn’t looked at the old photos in awhile.
E and I originally referred to the first series of photos as the “Beirut photos”, not knowing anything about the history of the buildings. In a later conversation with my friend Wes, he related that the owner of the warehouse also owned the rest of the block including the mosque, and it was part of a film set. He sent me this article and this article.
As an aside, I also wanted to shoot some photos of an underpass, which is part of the route taken to get to the warehouse. I crept along the fence separating the top of the road from a truck yard, until I arrived at the top of the cross bridge and was staring at a set of steep stairs descending down to a walkway in the belly of the whizzing traffic lanes. I hopped down a few steps and saw some homeless people slipping in and out of the shadows of the pitch black walkway, and thought better of bringing my brand new camera down into what could end up a bad situation for both parties. At that point I realized that most of what I think is worth photographing exists in bad neighborhoods, and that I should probably stick to taking zebra pics at the zoo.
It’s been great messing with the new camera since it’s arrived in the post. With help and recommendations from friends, I was able to start shooting all manually, and have been pleased with the results. I scored a manual focus non-metering 50mm f/1.8 prime lens from the 1970s on eBay for $26, and shooting photos with that has been a lot of fun. With everything set manually, it’s been a hell of a lot easier to get non-blurry photos of L and the animals.
It’s been a little over a month since I’ve last posted, and with good reason, everything’s gotten hectic.
E was brought on board at a great job, which means L went into daycare. Though he is benefiting greatly from socializing with other kiddos, it’s still extremely difficult to leave him in anyone else’s care after being by his side every day for a little over a year.
Having someone else deal with his allergies has always been a big worry, he’s very sensitive to a wide variety of food ingredients. The first day he was in daycare, despite us bringing particular things to eat and stressing the importance of his diet, he somehow wound up with a cheese cracker and a subsequent rash on his face. We luckily equipped them with Benadryl and a dosing chart, so he wound up okay. It was, however, enough to freak us both out and make us second guess everything.
He’s become a very, very happy little guy. He’s accumulated a medium sized arsenal of toys, and runs around the house with a few of them causing mayhem and destruction. He’s figured out how to open the latches on the dog food container, the result of which should be self-explanatory (as should the need for heavy items on top of the dog food container from then on). Since the day he entered daycare, we’ve taken to bathing him every night to get the cooties off, and he loves every second of it.
We’ve tossed around the idea of having him sit for some portraits recently, and just can’t bring ourselves to do it. Though it would be great to have a nice photo or two of him, as hardcore DIY people we can’t justify spending a few hundred dollars per sitting for a one-off. We decided it would be better to take what we would spend on a photographer, and buy a DSLR camera. We got a deal on a Nikon D40 that we simply could not pass up. This way, we won’t just have a photographer’s perfect photo of him once a year or less, we’ll have great photos of him frequently throughout his whole early life.
We headed down to Austin for Halloween, as our friend got married to his longtime girlfriend on Halloween night. I was asked to be in the wedding party, an invitation I was honored to accept.
L and E spent a lot of time in the hotel room, L unfortunately came down with an ear infection right as the trip kicked off. We arrived in Austin at 2am Thursday night, and our first night was spent consoling a screaming child followed by a 7am trip to Walgreen’s to buy a cool mist humidifier.
Within twelve hours of a visit to a pediatric association’s evening doctor group, L’s penicillin kicked in and the difference was like night and day. By the next afternoon, he was dressed up in his little skeleton sweatsuit, running around the hotel room.
The wedding was absolutely gorgeous, the venue was way up on a hill overlooking a valley, the view of the entirety of Austin was breathtaking. I got to sneak a photo of our friend spending his last few moments as a bachelor deep in reflection and contemplation.
We met some great people, L enjoyed dropping it down on the dancefloor with the ladies, and our trip home was thankfully quick and uneventful. We cleaned the house thoroughly before we left for L’s party, so we were greeted on our arrival by a clean bed with soft clean sheets.
As I said, from this point on, we finished the rest of the kitchen in less than 48 hours. I was able to fit the door casings, do the rest of the cabinets and countertops, wire the range vent hood, and lay the thresholds at the edge of the door frames.
There are a few things left to do, like replace the ugly teal ceiling fan, original to the house. IKEA was also out of stock on the large doors needed for the stove side cabinet, so we’re going without for a few weeks. On the big bare wall above the sink, we will most likely do some open shelving.
We simply snapped some iPhone photos and uploaded them to Flickr, mainly because we are burnt out. We rushed and rushed to get this whole thing done by the time L’s birthday party rolled around. Now, I don’t want to turn another screw, take another photo, wire another fixture, or even look at the resultant mess of tools and scrap wood in the garage for at least a few weeks. The ceiling fan will get to have its last hurrah.
Overall, we’re quite thrilled so far.
