the groundhog day project

Don't read this. Day 989, so close to 1000 entries and after a depressing day punctuated by comedy (watching the end of the final season of Seinfeld ) and obsessing about finding the original version of a particular source for my master's thesis when I could just quote it indirectly, it occurs to me that 1000 is a nice round number and rounds numbers are great ends. Not that everyday me wants to finish doing this. Unless I could justify going back to writing fiction each day, I am lately again of a mind that I need these words each night to get by. It's that kind of day. And Punch-Drunk Love is on, the abrupt car accident just happened followed by the inexplicable dropping off of the... whatever kind of organ that is. Meanwhile, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler, twisting his usual comedy tendencies into a rather disturbed sort of drama) has discovered that he can get a whole lot of frequent flyer miles by buying a bunch of cheap products, and then he's met Lena Leonard (Em...

I never got to the point I wanted to make yesterday . It's difficult, really, to demonstrate how Into the Wild doesn't (quite) romanticize Chris McCandless' adventure just by looking at how he leaves his parents and his sister behind. His parents are not portrayed as good people that we might care about when they hurt. We can objectively understand that they are in pain, but we just might not care (even if the film does make the effort of framing the film with the parents in pain, Billie in the opening scene, Walt just before the ending. And, Carine--she tells us that she understands her brother's choice to leave. In reality, she explicitly knew that he was going to separate himself from their parents, though she didn't know what he was going to do. In her book, she shares a letter he sent her, which included this: "I'm going to completely knock them out of my life... I'm going to divorce them as my parents." What I think really serves to de-ro...

( Yesterday 's entry was quite short, missing a whole middle and barely having an introduction or conclusion. The basic explanation is a) I had no idea how mentally exhausted I was as the spring quarter came to an end yesterday evening and b) add to that a night out with some fellow grad students, some drinks and a 2+ hour movie to watch at about half past midnight. I managed, but only barely. The copy of The Magnificent Seven that I've got turned out to be a rather bad copy, with a stretched image and messed up sound, so put all that together and while I've seen the film before, probably seen the sequels, and watched the tv series back in 1998, not to mention having seen The Seven Samurai --I know what the film is about but I was not following it too well last night. It was all I could do to stay awake. The good news: spring quarter ended--even turned in today the grades for the classes I was teaching, and that means I have completed all of my coursework for grad school...

Yesterday was about, well, bookmarks left behinds, articles left uncited... stuff I won't get to, stuff I don't need to get to, maybe even stuff I shouldn't get to. There's an imaginary Groundhog Day Project entry that didn't happen once upon a time that is at or near the top of that list. I wrote a poem, so the story goes, while under the influence of something stronger than this water I am drinking right now. You can read that poem, if you like, on my website . The thing is, there were more lines written that day, as I turned on Groundhog Day . Those lines follow: words have different meaning for each of us i want to save them all anyway is it a trick of the light or a trick of the haze? sundown growing brighter dogs eating from a baby’s bowl the earth tries to drop me and the blindness falls away skip moments and everything is funny like watching “ rabbits ” every direction is the right one (impact out groundhog day to nuclear war ) feeling ocd and ...

There's a great line in John Crawford's " Groundhog Day and Judaism - follow-up and answers "; guy says, "So, anyhoo... Bill Murray inspires mystery. The kind of mystery that people build academic courses around." Or blogs, I would add. Crawford also quotes Kuczynski ("Groundhog Almighty" which I've mentioned before): Some theologians see much less Buddhism in the story than Judaism. Dr. Niles Goldstein, rabbi of the New Shul congregation in Greenwich Village and author of "Lost Souls: Finding Hope in the Heart of Darkness" (Bell Tower, 2002), said he finds Jewish resonance in the fact that Mr. Murray's character is rewarded by being returned to earth to perform more mitzvahs — good deeds — rather than gaining a place in heaven, which is the Christian reward, or achieving nirvana, the Buddhist reward. He has not used the movie as an allegory for his congregation, he said, but he might now. "The movie tells us, as Judaism d...

This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down. The Tao Te Ching has an interesting take on water (not the answer to the riddle above, by the way). Water is compared to the highest good. The translation I own has this to say about water: The goodness of water is that it benefits the ten thousand creatures [taken as all living things]; yet itself does not scramble, but is content with the places that all men disdain. It is this that makes water so near to the Way. Water doesn’t try to stay on top. It gives in to gravity and, in doing so, is one of the most powerful things around, eroding mountains and forming great canyons. Not to necessarily personify things, but water is patient. Water has nothing but time on its hands. Phil Connors, similarly, has nothing but time on his hands. It becomes his only asset outside his mind. Sure he’s got that nice coat that Haro...