Posted 4:51 PM by Blah blah

For all of you who tell me you don't know how to flirt or gave it up a long time ago, check out this Oxford SIRC Guide to Flirting.

From Ellen: The Top 12 Things Uttered by Yoda While Making Love.

Open Your Eyes

I watched Vanilla Sky this weekend and I, despite the fact that most people don't seem to like it, identified with the movie on a bunch of levels. I like it. I like Tom Cruise too and what he tries to do. Vanilla Sky is like a clash of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive with Christopher Nolan's Memento, mashed with director Cameron Crowe's Rolling Stones perspective and his wife Nancy Wilson's funky, Hindi-sounding music. Except for the lousy ending, I LIKE IT. It's a remake of then 24-year-old Alejandro Amenábar's Spanish film, Abre los Ojos...abre los Ojos...open your eyes, Raymond.

Penelope Cruz's sweet character reminds me of people I have gone out with before, people I tend to be attracted to. Like Cruz is a dancer (here and in real life), N was artistic and paints watercolors. Small breasts, graceful dancer's figure, pixie-like enthusiasm and life. Check...check...my buying patterns come to the surface. It is not my only pattern, but it is a clear one. Well, if you've been reading this journal long enough, you'll know I wrote about my buying habits a while back. Find them if you can.

Other girls' and boys' buying habits: girlboy. It's meant for reading and chuckling over, vs. reading and making "action items." Here's how "girlboy" got started.

Why do I keep turning to this journal? I just heard something, nodded wholeheartedly at something. I lift my head...no one is there. I speak to a person. He scratches his ear and does not listen. I see lots of patterns. Spider webs. I am bursting to tell you, to trace the connections between the vertices for you. The webs of this site spin their strands into the web of my mind. I have untangled a part of it and tried to neatly---to simply---lay it here for you. Gift-wrapped webbing. Boy would Peter Parker be heehawing at that one.

Quote from In Search of History, memoirs by writer and reporter Theodore H. White:
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If men made history, he would seek them out. This thought had lasted for years...the thought that leadership is a quest of men seeking to find themselves and that in so seeking, they shape the lives of other people....He knew it was insufficient to explain politics. Identities in politics, he now realized, were connected far more to ideas than to ego, to id, or to glands. At the core of every great political identity lay an idea---an idea imposed on the leader from his past, which the leader absorbed, changed and then imposed on the others outside....He had discarded those boyhood teachings very early. He had later learned that money counted. That guns counted. That power counted. But the idea that ideas counted, that ideas were the beginning of all politics, was now, when he was sixty, pressing his thinking back to this adolescence. The men he had since reported in politics were all of them vessels of ideas....Whether is was Mao and Chou, or Nixon and Haldeman, or Kennedy and McNamara, or de Gaulle and Monnet,...their cruelties and nobilities, their creations and tragedies, flowed far more certainly from what was in their minds...

You could separate people out into the large and the small, he thought, by whether their identities came from their own ideas or from the ideas of others. Most ordinary people lived their lives in boxes, as bees did in cells. It did not matter how the boxes were labeled: President, Vice President,..."butcher, baker, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief," the box shaped their identity. But the box was an idea. Sir Robert Peel had put London policemen on patrol one hundred fifty years ago and the "bobbies" in London or "cops" in New York now lived in the box invented by Sir Robert Peel....When a pilot awoke in the morning, he could go to the air strip feeling that he was the hottest pilot in the whole air force---but he was only a creature of Billy Mitchell's idea....

All ordinary people below the eye level of public recognition were either captives or descendents of ideas....what a man did was what he was, and what you did, whether you knew it or not, fell to you from other men's ideas. Only a very, very rich man, or a farmer, could escape from this system of boxes. The very rich could escape because wealth itself shelters or buys identity. The very, very rich could become the greatest collectors of Picassos, Tang horses, rare books, stamps, stables, needlepoint, old coins or, simply, girls. They could exempt themselves from reality. And farmers, too, could escape from other men's ideas: A farmer made his own life in the fields; the weather, the market, the quality of his labor and devotion, connected him to another, primitive human condition which was not disturbed by ideas. Or---perhaps?---not even a farmer could escape.