hollywood is making a movie based on the tale most near and dear to my heart.

yeah, it's called troy.

and get this. brad pitt is playing achilles. okay. maybe i can live with that. maybe. seriously, god? i know i don't believe in you per se, but i'm still going to thank you for not allowing russell crowe to be cast in this film.

the only thing worse than more overwrought russell-wars would be casting gwyneth as briseis, helen, andromache, cassandra. i could totally see them making her andromache. so far the script seems to be on the right track. achilles is a miserable fuck. check. hektor is far more likable and honorable than achilles. check. but, um, what is this shit? :

And in one of Benioff's better touches, he actually constructs a plausible motive for what always seemed like a giant hole in the original myth - why the hell didn't the Trojans simply send Helen back? The answer here is that Agamemnon and the Greeks are more interested in Troy's wealth and control of shipping lanes than in getting Helen back.

excuse me? excuse me? there was no hole in the original myth, thanks. paris judged a "miss most beautiful archaic goddess" contest betwixt hera, athena, and aphrodite. hera promised him power, athena victory in war, and aphrodite? aphrodite promised him top-shelf poon. that would be helen. so guess what? he got her. and did not give her back.

apparently this random dude is playing my most ancient and sacred love, hektor. so far i'm not impressed.

here is my ideal cast list.

achilles = reluctant fucking greek hero. i know i have no choice in the matter, but i would sooner see tom cruise playing achilles. seriously. actually, let brad play achilles and let tom play

patroclus = achilles' boytoy. so tom will be achilles' lover/fighter, and they will reprise their chemistry from "interview with the vampire."
so, achilles = brad, patroclus = tom. and brad is only allowed to play achilles if he busts out his famous crying/pouting face.

agamemnon = evil greek king/warlord. i find agamemnon inherently unlikable, like everyone else in the world, but nick nolte is still too ugly. so i don't know.

ajax = badass greek warrior. needs to be a big, strong, ruthless motherfucker. doesn't need to say much. vincent. d'onofrio.

odysseus = crafty man. also dark. but not armand assante. needs to be cleverish. also funny. damn. i don't know.

paris = a totally bitchy sexy fop. jude law, baby.

hektor = actually, maybe this should be vincent d'onofrio. or benicio del toro. because i want to bang both of them and hektor is my One True Love.

helen = helen was not blonde and skinny, although i bet hollywood will cast her that way. in my version, helen would be someone beautiful and dark-haired with a fair amount of self-loathing. so, nicole kidman? honey? dye your hair brown, cause this is so all you.

briseis = is allowed to be a sucky overly-dramatique actress who gets off on being tragique, like mena suvari.

cassandra = i'd like to see a crazy bitch like juliette lewis or parker posey do cassandra justice. especially parker. but they'll probably cast fucking julia roberts, or some annoying julliard type.

andromache = if it can't be me, it has to be cate blanchett. although she might be too noble to get properly hysterical.

hecuba = i still dig twitchy katherine hepburn as hecuba. maybe she could reprise her role in the horrific "the trojan women" specifically for this movie? oh, what's that? she's too old? okay. just please, please, god, save us from susan sarandon. i cannot deal with an overly-worthy hecuba, thanks. i'd even settle for jessica lange.

priam = trojan patriarch. jeremy irons? too creaky? am i just going for sex again? okay, gene hackman. oh, what's that? i have a crush on him too? yeah. i don't know. i have to seriously iron out this cast.

i am bored with my site and i don't know how to fix it. actually, i am too lazy to even think about changing it. so there. i've admitted it. i'm lazy. and i hate looking at this. anyone wanna redesign my site for me? ha ha.

i have been tutoring a lot lately. i have a. to thank for this, as he put in the good word and that's basically why i was hired. the money is excellent, the hours are getting better and better, and i believe i have a lead on a part-time secretarial job in my town. 20-25 hours a week. during the day. this would be perfect for me. because i need money. and i need to be busy. as always. like, now.

since i'm not feeling up to telling you about how my ex-boyfriend spent three weeks on my roof, or how much i miss my little brother, or various other exploits, i will tell you something interesting about my students:

hardly any of them know what the fuck a minnow is.

yeah. minnow. as in fish. as in, go to any river, lake, or brook, and, hey! see those shiny squirmy tiny things flitting around right underneath the water? yeah. minnows. aren't they like, the pigeons of freshwater? i mean, they're everywhere.

so i discovered this because, being a verbal tutor and all, i go through these analogy-strategy-building exercises with my students. one of the exercises consists of paired words. just like on the actual test. only there are no choices to pair them off with, as the object is to develop relationship sentences. so they will get into the habit for the actual analogies.

example.

ALBUM::PHOTOGRAPH

an ALBUM is a place to store PHOTOGRAPHS.

simple enough, right? but here's the thing. one of the examples is MINNOW::FISH and none of my kids know what a fucking MINNOW is. they're all, "a minnow is a place where fish live?" or, "a minnow is a group of fish?"

and i'm all, JESUS. were you never a child? no, i tell them, resisting the urge to shake them -- no, those are NOT tadpoles. they were NEVER tadpoles. they were ALWAYS minnows. and minnows are not baby frogs. they do not start out as fish and grow into amphibians.

seriously. you wouldn't believe it.

the best part is, the only kids who have known so far what a minnow is have been the kids who scored in the four hundred range on their verbal. why is this? i don't rightly know. maybe it's the CTB's way of trying to even the scales -- so all the white trash, hip-high rubber-boot-wearin', hangin' out in the dirty brook behind mama's shack kids can know something that the rich kids don't. you know, even out the score on all the questions that assume knowledge of tennis scoring and various appropriate golf clubs with a question about minnows.

you know, minnows? the shiny little buggers right under the surface of the lake? yeah, those.

no, seriously. they're not tadpoles.

and unfortunately none of the kids i tutor are poor. they all pay $95/hr to be tutored privately, by me. yeah, me. it's the funniest joke ever, and i'm in on it. i keep expecting to be Found Out, but all my teacher friends claim this is just how it is. you never get over being respected by youngins. especially ones who are only seven or eight years younger than you and apparently grew up indoors, chained to their N-64 and internet porn or whatever it is kids like these days.

nothing is sacred.
and i'm okay with that.

i ran over a little kid's shoe today.
only after did i think about the tiny severed foot
maybe still left inside.

it's okay you're so smug,
it doesn't apply to me until i let it.
(although that hasn't stopped you from trying.)

maybe i have let it apply to me a little bit
which is a lot more than it should have.
you aren't cast as the martyr, darling.
it's too late to switch parts.

we're only getting pettier,
clawing each other down.
you send out your army of puppets to die.
you know they won't last against me.

you and i could never be together.
there aren't enough sacrificial lambs.
there will never be enough blood
at our ankles to satisfy us both.

at toys 'r' us, i browsed the lincoln logs, legos, barbie dolls, and, by the register, those magnets with names on them. there were three spellings of brittany (brittany, britney, brittney) and four of megan (megan, meghin, meghan, meagan) but not one of mine (there was mary and maria, but it's not the same).

i have taken to reading shakespeare's sonnets again:

In loving thee thou know'st I am forsworn,
But thou art twice forsworn, to me love swearing;
In act thy bed-vow broke, and new faith torn,
In vowing new hate after new love bearing:
But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjured most;
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,
And all my honest faith in thee is lost:
For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see;
For I have sworn thee fair; more perjured eye,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie!

152. happy stuff, right?

shakespeare has a point, though.

My love is as a fever longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

147. don't go giving fools too much credit, even if it breaks your heart not to.

i'm not going to lie and pretend i have a good reason for not writing here lately. to be honest, i just don't think of this as a Safe Space anymore and i am sick of self-censorship. i have been focusing my energies on other things, things that have nothing to do with people other than myself and yes, i have been spending a lot of time overdiagnosing myself with various psychological disorders and writing fantastical bullshit that makes no sense at all.

which is okay. i can't say i'm entirely happy, but i'm not totally hopeless and miserable. perhaps it is venus in scorpio, as the horoscopes have been saying. i don't know what it is. but my sense of hope or lack thereof is not completely tethered to a black hole. i know i am capable of mastering my fate to some degree, i know it is simply a matter of what i want.

The Valley Girl version of “like” is classified by linguists as a “discourse particle,” along with “um,” “well,” “oh” and the like.

Unlike mere fillers, however, “like” has the ability to change the meaning of a sentence, according to Siegel’s research, which builds on the findings of at least two other studies of the word.

For example, “like” can be a hedge, when the speaker is not quite sure what he or she is about to say is accurate. (Example: “He has, like, six sisters.”)

Siegel and other linguists have identified a variety of other uses for “like”: a substitute for “said”; a way to introduce an exaggeration (“He’s, like, 150 years old.”); and, yes, a filler when the speaker is casting about for just the right words.

Virtutem Forma Decorat

saw an interesting documentary on one of leonardo da vinci's paintings tonight. his first formal portrait, of the florentine lady ginevra di benci. at the time of her sitting, ginevra was a renaissance maiden in the upper part of her teens, freshly married to a man twice her age, luigi niccolini. niccolini did not come from a family as educated or wealthy as that of his young bride, the daughter of a banker.

although it shirks convention in other elements -- (leonardo's fingerprints are evident as a method of blurring and smudging between colors, the subject stares at the viewer rather than the more demure three-quarter portrait popular in italian portraiture, the fact that it is a psychological view of the sitter than merely a representational likeness of her) -- ginevra's portrait was widely believed to be a portrait commissioned upon her betrothal to niccolini. this was the conventional and accepted reason at the time for such a portrait to be commissioned: to demonstrate immemorial the prize of a hot, young, pure bride the groom has scored.

ginevra's purity is optioned out to viewers in the form of the juniper bushes that surround her head. her name is close to the italian word for "juniper" (ginepro) and renaissance viewers associated the plant with purity and virginity. this is a clever pun on the part of the painter to demonstrate ginevra's purity and virtue.

niccolini and ginevra never had children and she was often quite ill. what a happy marriage. still, this does not undermine the possibilty that the portrait was commissioned by her husband. the following information, however, does so. ginerva was having an accepted "platonic affair" with another man, the ambassador from venice with ciceronian beliefs, bernardo bembo. bembo was also married, but it is now clear that this portrait was likely commissioned by art lover bembo to express his "platonic love" for his non-bride.

on the reverse of the ginevra panel is an ornamental wreath with a slogan written across a banner in its center. the translation of these latin words are "beauty adorns virtue," believed to be ginevra's motto and certainly the renaissance feminine ideal. the wreath is decorated with a sprig of juniper (representing ginevra) intertwined with bembo's signature plant, the laurel. even more fascinating is the fact that x-rays have revealed another slogan beneath ginevra's -- the words "virtue and honor", which was bembo's motto, hidden underneath layers of paint.

i love renaissance drama.

also, i must visit ginevra sometime, for she lives at the national gallery of art in dc.