The tree said, “I wish I could be a different kind of tree.”
Well, this sure is overdue. I’m going to make it a lightening post, and hopefully this will get me back in the swing of it. My life’s been fairly uneventful. Over winter break I saw Juno. I thought it was pretty amazing. The writing was extremely intelligent, the acting was good, as was the directing and costuming, and the soundtrack (which I downloaded immediately) was one of the best I’d heard in quite a while. My local newspaper’s film critic gave it a bad review because she claimed that it “confused” the already complicated and unfortunate situation of teen pregnancy by depicting it in a way that in no manner resembles the actual experience. While I agree that teen pregnancy is undoubtedly nothing like the movie, I feel that the critic was letting personal moral standards interfere with her disinterested evaluation of the film.
For Christmas I got, among other things, and incredibly nice pair of headphones (which I am now using to listen to Sgt. Pepper’s). I feel kind of bad because they must have been very expensive, but they are absolutely amazing for just about anything–low frequencies are excellent, high ones shine, classical music is beautiful, and rock songs reveal details I didn’t know where there before. For my birthday, my family bought me a wollemi pine through National Geographic. It may not seem like a big deal to get a two-year-old pine tree for a gift, but this is no ordinary tree. The Wollemia nobilis has been thought to be extinct for thousands of years. Then, in 1994 an intrepid explorer found fewer than 100 mature trees in the wild growing in a valley outside of Sydney, Australia. Since then, a preservation effort has been underway, part of which is selling young trees to reduce the chance that an unfortunate accident could wipe out the species. Anyway, it’s an incredible plant. You should check out the official page for the distribution company or the Wikipedia page.
Hopefully more regular updates this coming month…
