Icky!

So I decided to clean up a bit last night. Actually, a lot. Having cagexxx over for the past few days, we've accumulated a bunch of OJ boxes--not to say these are the worst, not when we've got just as many 2L of Diet Pepsi in the recycling, just that it's the straw that breaks me into finally taking out garbage and recycling (you know, after the tower on the can looks perilously close to toppling).

While I was at it, I figured I'd scoop the kitty litters, since no one had in a while. I started to sift clumps when I noticed that the clump of litter-caked poo was still moving even after all the dry litter had run through the scoop.

Long story short: THERE WERE MAGGOTS IN THE LITTER

So gross. I immediately dumped all the litter in both boxes because if the one was a crawling nightmare of HORROR, the other probably couldn't be too far behind. cagexxx and David K (whom I've not seen in soooo long) were kind enough to actually take the shit down to the basement. I dunno that I could have even risked dragging that heavy-ass bag of litter and having it spill open. I would have just screamed and screamed and screamed.

Trinity? SHE DOES NOT LIKE MAGGOTS. She does not, precious. She does not like creepy, crawly, squishy, slimy bugs. Never have. Give me a fly, and I'll sooner kiss it than hold a jar that has its little worm babies in it. Seriously. This is all to do, methinks, with the time that my friend got a turtle, and her aunt (who has a farm), scooped her out a bunch of mealworms into a jar from a container (filled with kitty litter, funnily enough) she kept in her fridge in order to feed the new pet. This "friend" being who she was at the time, gave me the open jar (no lid! NO LID!!!) to hold on the car ride back while she cooed over her turtle and otherwise generally ignored me. I was fine until the little stiff bugs started to wriggle around. Only the fact that I froze before I freaked out kept me from throwing the jar out of my lap. NO ONE TOLD ME THEY WERE STILL ALIVE!!! WHY DIDN'T ANYONE SAY THEY WERE ALIVE AND JUST FROZEN!?!?!

And, of course, there was the time I got back from a tennis lesson and felt something scratchy on my neck and I reached to itch it and came back with something squishy WHICH WAS ONLY HALF OF AN ENORMOUS GREEN CREEPY CRAWLY OF SOME KIND THAT WAS STILL MOVING OMG WHY THE FUCK DO THESE THINGS FIND ME!?!?!

::pant pant wheeze wheeze::

I guess I can just count myself "lucky" that I found the bugs before they hatched into flies. Because I'm not happy about the four-five-twenty buzzing around our apartment now (nor do I care for their ability to avoid the fly paper I've strung up EVERYWHERE). If one third of those maggots had turned into flies, we'd have had an infestation that would be incompatible with sanity.

Hear me roar:

...with mighty anger at even the possibility of this law being considered, let alone discussed, thought over, or--HEAVEN FORBID--passed. Someone from Ohio: please reassure me that your state is not so fundamentally misogynist that this looks like a good idea to anyone. ( More thoughts. )

...with mighty joy: Anna Quindlen sings it like it is. Of all the things I don'tmiss about my fairly useless subscription to Newsweek, her column isn't one of them. They were often the best thing in the whole magazine. And this new tactic against the policies of considering women as either gullible fools to a woman or less-than-man beings of similar genetic make-up? DYNAMITE.

So, let's hear it anti-choicers: Just how much jail time does a low-down, dirty, child-murdering woman deserve when abortion is a crime? Worm your way out of that, you sons of dogs (yeah, you wish bitches).

The Bridge

I forgot to mention in the last post how violently I want to have Anna Quindlen's babies, but I hope that was understood. All good? Fine, then let us procede onto more serious things.

And I ain't kidding about how serious a thing The Bridge was all about. If you missed mention of this last year, the loss is yours. I've watched plenty of documentaries in the past few months, and this one probably disturbed me the most. I cried harder at Deliver Us From Evil, but this one spoke to me more because it involves a familiar place and a universal feeling.

The Bridge documents a year in the life of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and the twenty-four people who killed themselves by jumping off of it in that year. ( With footage of the suicides (warning: disturbing stuff and some spoilers, too, I suppose) )

If there was controversy over this film, I missed it, but it's easy to see why this seems like morbid, ghoulish entertainment. There are few, if any, sections dedicated to moralizing about suicide and how awful it is. A lot of the people interviewed were very angry and hurt by their loved ones' decisions, but many were eerily understanding of it. The people who do this are not cry-for-help people. These are people who've threatened, maybe tried before, but who've moved past the point of being believed which is exactly how they "succeed" in jumping off the bridge. On the other hand, nothing is at all entertaining as watching people die on film. It really emphasizes--for me--how very pathetic Hollywood or any fictional movie death has ever been. It's upsetting as all get out, but so necessary to see.

Why the Golden Gate? Is the question of the film, since they can't answer for the individuals, even with the words of relatives and loved ones to give clues. I think the friend of the suicide you follow throughout the film (and who "completes" at the end for a climax in a way that is not anything like as cheap as that sounds, I promise) said it best: "There's a kind of false romance about the bridge."

I think she's exactly right. The bright color of the Golden Gate stands out against the pasty colors of the low houses and wet-and-dry scrubland of San Francisco over which it towers. The architecture is old enough to be exotic, but familiar enough not to be mustily historical. It has the promise of when it was built, of a future only on the up, up, up. Rising out of the mist, it's familiar, friendly sight at the same time that it's an imposing, domineering giant. Jumping off it, you hope to marr its perfection but also to merge with it, I imagine. The grandeur of such a gesture does translate to the non-suicidal.

I have walked across that bridge at least three or four times in my life, and it never gets old. It's just beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I always feel like laughing on that bridge, which might explain my inappropriate reaction to the first suicide I saw off of it in the movie. It really does sweep you up.

I highly recommend The Bridge, by the by. It's not wall-to-wall depressing as it might seem. The most brilliant thing in the world is watching a photographer struggle with the same incredulous reaction as you, the viewer, as he photographs a girl out on the ledge and moves past the lethargy, the inherent, "Surely not!" reaction we all have to being confronted with someone who wants to die when we, ourselves, are in the prime of our lives, to reach out and pull her back. Bawled like mad at that.