Mari Ness - January 1st, 2008

Having been woken by quarreling ducks and a needy cat, I am celebrating with fine Decadent Cherry Chocolate coffee and waiting for this supposed cold front to arrive. (The current temperature of 79 degrees does not precisely have a cold front feel to it.)

Hope the New Year is marvelous for all of you, and brings plenty of decadent drinks your way.

Since I didn't do a year end summary post, I'll do a few confessions instead:

1. Long nails scare me.

2. Even now, years later, I still can't break out of Breakout. Sad, isn't it? We didn't have an Atari, but our neighbours did, and I spent long painful moments trying to breakout and destroy every single brick in my way. I think there's some moral illustrative lesson to this, but I don't want to dwell on it.

3. Long nails on me especially scare me.

4. I have a gingerbread house kit in the house, and I'm not afraid to use it.

5. I keep my nails short – aggressively short. Some of this is because I have to type rapidly for a living and for pleasure, a pursuit that long nails can interfere with. Still, I've seen some woman use their long deep red nails or elaborately sculpted purple nails to type with, so that alone isn't it.

6. It's the clicking, I think. I trained for years to be a pianist before discovering I wasn't any good at it, working with piano teachers who had a horror of hearing "click click" on the keyboards in between notes. A computer keyboard, of course, clicks anyway, and the sounds of nails would just vanish there. And I don't play the piano – or the keyboard – that often anymore.

5. Or maybe it's because even now I can't quite rid myself of those childhood voices that like to enter my head and say now irrelevant things: "Keep your nails short! No clicking!"

6. "Click, click!"

7. But the secret truth is that part of me always wanted long nails, those deep red nails that vampires take such pride in. So I went and picked up some of those press-on nails, more than once, just for fun. Disaster. They weren't fun. They kept falling off, no matter what the press-on nail people say, leaving my real nails vaguely sticky and ugly, and leaving me terrified that I was dropping nails every which way. And have you ever tried to meet a new person with only three fake nails on your right hand? It just doesn't go well.

8. When I've tried to grow my nails long, it never works: they're weak to begin with, so they break, and in any case, they start making me nervous before they get too long, and I find myself filing and filing.

9. I spent some significant time today buffing my nails. (I originally typed that "buffying" my nails. I will now spend several hours wondering what that meant.)

10. The reason I didn't bother with a year end summary this year is that although it's easy, more than easy, to see our lives blocked out by calendar year after calendar year after calendar year, something I do myself all the time ("1997 and 2006 were really really awful years," the big things, the big changes, usually come in the middle of the year – and sometimes, the big major changes slip right into you with some unnoticed incident, some chance statement made by a friend, or a sudden email. That certainly happened to me this year.

11. Also, I once resolved to always make New Year's resolutions, and then I didn't keep that resolution.

12. And a second reason is that I'm notoriously bad at predicting the future: at the end of 2004 I said cheerfully that whatever happened, the 2005 hurricane season could not be as bad as the 2004 one, and at the beginning of 2006, thankful to see the stress of 2005 go, I said, trying to be cheerful, that 2006 could not be as bad as 2005. In early 2007 I just hoped I could hang on. As it turned out, 2007 was a better year than 2005 and 2006, leading me to slip right back into that trap of defining lives by years. And darn it, I think I just summarized the year, even though I said I wouldn't.

13. I've spent most of the day sleeping and reading. I needed this, desperately: last week and the weekend left me utterly wiped, and driving home yesterday had its interesting moments saved by Starbucks. It's been a very good day, all told, with good books and a lot of excellent leftover cheese and crackers and cookies and two very lazy cats, and yet now, I'm feeling guilty for not writing much.

14. I'm a bit jealous of people that have managed to achieve six figure scores in Space Invaders, because they've accomplished something utterly frivolous and useless in their spare time.

So I finally got around to watching Sweeney Todd. Alas, the chief thing that disturbed me about the film was our audience, and by audience I mean the three young children sitting directly behind us, who were constantly kicking my friend's chair and ( spoilery comments ).

Otherwise, I felt curiously unengaged by the movie. It's well crafted: the cinematography, the costumes, the sets, all up to what you'd expect from a Tim Burton movie; it's well cast, for the most part (and watch for the uncredited Anthony Stewart Head cameo), Johnny Depp is marvelously entirely mad, Helena Bonham Carter delightfully freakish, displaying an excellent sense of comic timing; the singing is for the most part pretty good, and yet – and yet. It might well have been the distraction of the audience, or that I had problems connecting to or feeling much sympathy for the two young lovers of the story. (My chief unsympathetic response was that the film illustrates just why falling in love with somebody just because said somebody happens to be sitting in a window singing at birds is just not a good idea.) Or that – truthfully – I found several moments of the film, despite the violence, despite the subject matter, curiously dull. (Burton has never learned to pace his movies well.) But I'll note that several other people loved this film, and have given it excellent reviews, so don't take my word for it.