I’m tired.

this will come as a surprise to most of you, but I actually saw The Golden Compass tonight.

I know, I know, the guy’s an atheist and the books are about killing God or something — let’s not get into how it doesn’t make that much sense to write a book about killing God if you don’t actually believe there is a God… since you can’t kill something that doesn’t exist.

at any rate, I saw the movie. and it was better than I expected it to be. it’s not getting great reviews, but it’s not an awful film — to be perfectly honest, I liked it better than “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,” but that’s probably only because I read the Chronicles of Narnia 56 million times growing up and thought the film interpretation would cause C.S. Lewis some heartburn, were he alive to see it. anyway. not awful. not great. regarding the whole religion thing, there definitely parallels that can be drawn and ideas that can be extrapolated from the outlines in the film, but there’s no strong underlying message.

I think it’s kind of funny that fantasy movies are okay with conservative Christians when all of the elements of it are morally aligned with the “Christian world view.” The Lord of The Rings might have some weird stuff, but it’s about a battle between good and evil! there are witches and such in The Chronicles of Narnia, but the whole thing is an allegory for the death and resurrection of Christ, so no problem there. but since The Golden Compass was written by an atheist, and the storyline’s not a clearly delineated battle of good vs. evil, it makes us a tad uncomfortable.

bottom line, not significant enough to protest, even if the books are about “killing God.”

—

I’m having trouble sleeping. it’s not for lack of trying.

this has happened to me before. there was a time when I went to sleep every night by reading until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

it seems that there are things I don’t want to think about. but I do think about them. or, to avoid thinking about them, I think about 50 million other things, and all this thinking going on makes sleeping basically impossible. I think I need to devise a new system for not thinking about these things. or maybe I could just deal with my problems. but who does that?

I’m turning inward a bit. kind of halfway, maybe. not badly enough to have realized it before this weekend; badly enough that I’m having trouble sleeping. I’m not quite sure what to do, but something’s got to give.

a book recommendation.

I don’t often read best-sellers. I don’t follow the New York Times list, and frequently I read classic literature. there’s just a ton that I haven’t read, and I figure I can’t go wrong with the old stuff. most of the time.

but I kept hearing about this book — The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. this person had read it, and that person had read it, and it was really good, and it was on the Times best-seller list, etc. when my brother accidentally left it at our house, I figured I might as well read it.

it’s the best book I’ve read in a long time. it’s an incredibly sad story, grotesque in some parts, heart-wrenching — but completely amazing. very well written. and I didn’t realize it until I was finished, but he managed to throw a few major plot twists in that I didn’t expect; I’m the kind of person who’s always guessing how mystery novels will end. they were unexpected but they still fit realistically within the storyline. and overall the book just made me think. and I like that.

read it; you won’t be sorry.

“I get to be Rita Onnie-Connie!”

my sister and I used to watch The Lawrence Welk Show.

we were kind of obsessed, actually; it would come on PBS on Saturday nights at 8, and we watched religiously. we were fascinated by the way Lawrence Welk popped his cheek to sound like a champagne bottle in the opening song, amused by the oboe player who would shut his eyes and raise his eyebrows during his solo. we loved the tap dance routines; we thought Jo Ann Castle was awesome — kind of strange, but awesome. on occasion we pretended to be The Lennon Sisters, or we would sing duets and pretend that we were on the show.

keep in mind that we had expansive imaginations. we could pretend almost anything, and we did… including but not limited to being lost at sea (a blanket canopy over our bunk beds was the ship, our carpet was the sea, linkin logs– as sausage –were our food, our stuffed animals were our companions).

but usually when we played that we were on the show, we wanted to be soloists — and there were basically two girls to choose from. one was Norma Zimmer, an older but still pleasant soprano, also known as The Champagne Lady. (I’m not really sure why that was her title, it just was.) but the one we really wanted to be? Rita Onnie-Connie. she was slender, sultry, hispanic. she had long and, at a later date, Farrah Fawcett-ish hair, which I was too young to recognize as passe. and, of course, she wore pretty clothes.

when Hannah and I would play, as soon as the idea of Lawrence Welk was agreed upon we would try to beat each other to blurting out “I get to be Rita Onnie-Connie!” she was, you know, everything we wanted to be… Rita.

or so I thought. as I was reminiscing about this this morning, remembering how I used to sing into my hairbrush and imagine myself with feathered hair, I began to wonder if Rita Onnie-Connie was on YouTube. how funny would it be to take a little stroll down memory lane? then came the realization that I didn’t really know how to spell her name — sure, we had always pronounced it ‘Onnie-Connie,’ but it’s not like that could possibly be the way it was spelled. so I did what I do when I know google won’t work: wiki. on the Lawrence Welk Show wikipedia page I quickly scanned the list of performers for ‘Rita.’ there wasn’t one. I began to actually read the list and before long I found “Anacani, singer (1973-1982).”

so I did some searching. her name? Anacani Maria Consuelo y Castillo Lopez Cantor Montoya. I thought, “well, maybe her name was so long they left off the sur-names and started calling her Maria Anacani.” Maria, Rita, easily confused in the mind of a 5-year-old, right? thanks to YouTube, I know that I’m wrong. for the most part, they just called her Anacani. I was beginning to wonder how on earth I ever got ‘Rita’ fixed in my mind as her first name, and then I discovered the reason: Lawrence Welk himself.

[just the first twenty seconds are sufficient to understand why, if you don't want to subject yourself to further viewing; or you could keep going and see the heights to which I aspired.]

seniorita Anacani. I guess I was 5, too busy dancing to pay attention, and so unfamiliar with Spanish that I didn’t realize what he was saying.

and after that long and deeply revealing entry, I’m off to bed… with the credits song for the Lawrence Welk Show rolling in my head.