Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Babel, Wake Up Call Part 2.

So I was writing about how Zoe woke me up, and I thought it was the sweetest thing in the world...

Well, last night after having this dream whereby all my teeth were loose and barely hanging on, I woke up to intense pain and realized that my gums were really hurting up a storm. So I took some Tylenol and went back to bed. At around ten, Zoe came up and climbed up onto the bed next to me, and starting jumping around. I was awake, but just really out of it. Then I heard her open the Nintendo DS, turn on Sudoku (my wife plays it. It confuses me too much.) and frantically tapping the screen as if she was trying to bring it to life. When I turned to tell her to be more gentle, she sneezed on my face, showering me with her love.

Ah, to be a Dad.

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I spent most of today just hanging out with the fam, going to Walmart and Ranch 99, which is an Asian supermarket that's close to Kent. During the trip, I was telling my wife about my former employer and her current one, who had in the past really come out against Walmart's unfair treatment of its employees, trying to take away their medical, forcing them to work without overtime pay, and so forth. Well, our Union is now fighting with the company because the company is trying to do just that. Take away premium pay for holidays and graveyard shifts, chip away a bunch of other benefits that they've been critical of Walmart doing. In the end, it's always the employee that loses.

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Yesterday, feeling a disconnection between myself and Alex, I spent a few hours just having some father son time with him. We hit the Sweet Factory and he got to have 2 gummi boneheads (skulls, but my kids call them boneheads.), a gummi snake, and gummi fish. We went to Borders and looked at a book about bugs, a pop-up monster book, and then we went to a strip club for his first lapdance. Well, no, but I was trying awful hard to connect with the boy.

My penny analysis was that because I am an introverted individual as he is, we don't usually reach out to communicate with each other. Zoe reaches out to me and I respond, but Alex keeps to himself a lot of times, and when he does reach out, it comes out as playing or physical activity, which I don't do as much as I should. I love my boy, and I really like to talk to him, but he's not quite as vocal as I'd like him to be. He does a lot of yapping and smiling, which is sweet, but sometimes I do wish he'd just say something to me instead of yelping for attention. My wife actually feels the same about Zoe, a sense of disconnect. So, it's going to be something that we'll try to do more often, to pair up and spend more time with the children we don't usually pair up with.

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Okay, so we finally watched Babel tonight, and man - the tone of it, the storytelling - if I could even induce half of the tone of Babel into my script, I'd be elated. It has the same kind of structure, the span is a little more restricted, but more or less the same non-linear/everything is connected sort of way.

At the end I took a stab at the ending, which remains vague and has incited a lot speculation about what it was about. If you have seen the movie and would like to read about my take on it, click here.

I thought it was wonderfully written, and just great acting all around. After seeing this and United 93, and my bias toward the Departed, I wished the race would've turned out differently.

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Been thinking about making a photobook from Lulu.com. They have pretty good prices, but I can't seem to think of a theme for the photobook. I'm leaning toward, "Things that make me smile."

And then try not to overpower it with photos of the kids.

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