Author Archives: Mary Ann

love at 56

Oh, okay, I’m really almost 57. You’d think I’d have learned something about love by now. Well, I guess I have, but I think I’ve gone about it the hard way. And when it comes to love,  I’m a very slow learner. Plus I need lots of repetition. If it’s true that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes, I’ve got a whole Encyclopedia of Brittanica worth of learning.

Valentine’s Day approaches. It’s of those holidays designed to make people feel miserable for lacking what we assume everyone else has more and better of than we do. Like New Year’s Eve, it’s it’s often a painful, and sometimes public, status check on how we’re faring in the love department.

In ironic celebration of the season for romantic love, I’ll confess here that that a very important love relationship in my life seems to be irreparably broken. (No, this is not about you, Mr. World Revolves Around Me.)

Even at this age, lessons in love can feel like a crack across the kneecaps and put you in a not showered or dressed for days kinda funk. I guess the universe really wants me to pay attention this time.

It is heartbreaking, soul-crunching actually, when the veil lifts, and I see we were not what I thought we were. Wished? Pretended? Fooled myself into believing? Sometimes we want something so much, we create a mirage for fulfillment. Can’t blame the other guy when I’m the mirage-maker. I think I’ve got that lesson down now. Maybe.

As always, it’s all my fault. (Not really, but that’s what I will tell myself. As always.)  I am grateful for lessons and for resilience, even though I could do with fewer reasons for either.

100 movies in a year

“That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” —Steve Martin in Grand Canyon

There was an unusual number of great movies last year. Many critics had trouble reducing their favorites down to 10 for their end of the year  best lists.  I may have seen more movies last year than i have ever seen in any other, and that’s saying a lot.

There is probably no thread longer or more consistent in my life than my love of movies. I got to thinking that it  would be fun to create a life-long movie list of everything I have ever seen. Well, that idea, like many of my ideas, was so daunting it would never be done. So it morphed into the smaller idea of keeping a journal on the movies I see this year. And that idea, because my ideas like to be big, grew to setting a goal to see 100 movies this year—and keeping the journal.

And so it goes. I am on schedule, having seen 10 movies already this year. Since i make the rules, movies i see in full on TV count, and so do rented movies. Yayyy for Netflix!

The journal is light—just a few notes and perhaps a picture for each movie, although I am altering the datebook I am using for the journal in other movie-related ways with quotes and pictures and collages. At this point it looks kind of messy, but I intend to force myself to leave it that way and carry on, rather than start over and try to make it perfect. Perfectionism so often stops me from finishing things.

I may write about the movies I see in more detail in this blog, and I’ve created a 100 movies page where I’ll list the movies as I see them.

first post

This is the first post in the blog. Will the blog be abandoned—just like many of my ideas are abandoned? I have way too many ideas and not nearly enough persistence. One idea, ironically, is to create a blog to list abandoned blogs. Have you ever noticed how many one or two post blogs are out there? I have.

Perhaps this website will help me make something from all the bits and pieces of ideas churning in my head. Let’s hope it becomes more than a bone yard. I hereby declare myself an addict of what creative genius (and potty mouth) Ze Frank would call Brain Crack: