the groundhog day project

(A note before this gets perhaps a little philosophical... Was it my sister Brooke who once commented in regards to an early Groundhog Day Project entry that I had a self-help book in me? I've toyed with writing a sort of self-helpy, memoiry book out of that first year of the blog. I even wrote a good chunk of what might have been the first chapter last fall. But, I don't know if I believe it anymore, myself--that there's a self-help book in me. Or maybe I don't want there to be... That wasn't the note. The note is this: I didn't really plan out this month of feminist and/or female-centric films. I immediately had an idea of a few movies I had to include-- Thelma & Louise , 9 to 5 , 10 Things I Hate about You --for a little obviousness and a little variety. And, I wasn't sure what movie should come last, like the coda to the rest. What movie would tie things together before I returned to Groundhog Day again for a day then moved onto some new month I ...

In class tonight, we were talking about finding a story. Like, you're producing a news story and you're in a situation and you need to know the main elements of the scene, but the story... the story has to be found. And, I got sidetracked in my head. I thought about one of my unpublished novels, possibly the best one of the bunch. It's called Clubhouse Blues . It began as my third attempt at a new storytelling format--a serialized story put online one chapter at a time. It was set in the same small California town as two of my previous novels-- Seeing Her Naked  and Twice Into the Same River . Each of these was built around children and/or teens trying to, you know, figure out life. Seeing Her Naked had run for ten chapters, building an audience as I emailed out chapters as I wrote them. Each chapter was written in one sitting, about one a week. The night I wrote the last chapter was, up until that point, about the most painful night of my life. I was writing on a comput...

This entry will be short, probably. First night with a new movie, I want to watch it before I really write about it. Plus, if you need a lot of words, read yesterday’s entry again. I’ve only ever seen The Mirror Has Two Faces once all the way through. One of my sisters loves it, and made me watch it. I didn’t die. Of course, to be fair, I think I’ve said before I will watch most any movie at least once. But, sometimes I see a film because of someone else, something I wouldn’t have seen otherwise... Hell, sometimes I do things I wouldn’t do if not for someone else. That’s life. That’s married life, especially. That last line wasn’t supposed to sound negative. In fact, it’s probably far more positive than negative. Being in a relationship, being married—you do plenty of stuff that single people probably wouldn’t be bothered with. The Mirror Has Two Faces presents marriage like an obstacle to... not love, exactly, but certainly romance. Marriage is often presented as the culminat...

“Everybody dies sooner or later. Don’t worry about your death. Worry about your life. Take charge of your life for as long as it lasts.” – Littlefinger, Games of Thrones Inevitably, a) yes, everyone’s going to die and b) even scoundrels like Littlefinger get something right. There was, at least once, a day in which “saying that ‘ Groundhog Day demonstrates the wonder of living each moment as a totally new event’ seem[ed] both trite and tired.” There was a day once when Groundhog Day was a brand new thing for me, sitting in a dark movie theater. I knew Bill Murray from the likes of Meatballs and Stripes and Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II and Caddyshack and Scrooged and Little Shop of Horrors and What About Bob? — (That last one, for example, I watched at the house of a girl I had a thing for in high school. She was two years older than and one year ahead of me. We’d gone out once, saw Scent of a Woman . Then, she invited me over to her house and we watched What About B...

Today’s reason to repeat a day forever: to play games, lots of games. Life would be so very boring without them. Tonight, My kids and I played three games. The four of us played Zombie Dice , then Munchkin (but Hayley had to opt out part way through that game to work on a paper for school), then finally the Game of Life . Even Phil Connors realizes games are something worth putting effort into, as you can see in this deleted scene: My character’s name when the game began was something Hispanic—I can’t remember what because he got lost on his second turn and hit his head in a fall in the mountains and came down from the mountains calling himself The Man From the Mountain and he had three furry wives he found in a cave. They were named Dorene, Lorene and Morene. They had one daughter—Symphony—and adopted a son called Clever Boy who was caught burglarizing their lovely little home: Saer, playing as Maria… Johnson or Jackson, won the game. She had too many kids for her one car but p...

On the one hand, I've got nothing in particular to write about tonight. Phil has just figured out that he can take advantage of the time loop on my TV, and just punched Ned. I got back from hanging out at a speech tournament less than an hour ago (and it's 11:21 PM right now), and I've been out most of the day. (I wasn't judging, and didn't snag any sheet of impromptu topics, either, so I won't be connecting Groundhog Day to a bunch of random quotations.) On the other hand, I've been meaning to get back to critiquing Benesh and I've still got a handful of Groundhog Day -related articles nearby that I could write about or in response to. In particular, the manila folder that holds articles I haven't stuck in one of my Groundhog Day Project binders, is open to " Seeing the Shadow " by Dairyu Michael Wenger Sensei. It's a Buddhist piece. I was thinking about writing about the Buddhist take on Groundhog Day again. I didn't end up...

The following is a segment from an informative speech I did a few years back regarding the the Pirahã (pee-duh-hon) (you can read the entire text here ): They have no phatic communication— hello , goodbye , thank you , I’m sorry . Daniel Everett [in his book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes ] suggests these phrases "don’t express or elicit new information about the world" and are thus hardly as useful as actions could be in expressing the same sentiment. The closest they have to what we might call a greeting translates as "I have arrived." Thank you would be "transaction acknowledged." They prefer action over words and experience over ideas… …and this brings us to our second point, two concepts specific to the Pirahã, first xibipíio [roughly pronounced ih-bih-pee-ee-oh], experiential liminality . Translated roughly as "going into or out of the limits of experience," xibipíio can be equally applied (as noun or verb) to a man going out of si...