blueberry

with hmc out of town, it’s up to me to bear the load and participate in family activities.

not my family, that is. my family consists of my mom and my dad, who are safely esconced in diamond bar and know good enough to leave me alone. i’ve got them trained, bless their heart, to expect nothing more than a phone call once every couple of weeks or so.

ah, but wait, i’m married now, right? so that means that hmc’s family is now also my family, so now my family includes parents who want to do stuff all the time. or as dooce would say, ALL THE TIME.

being a veteran of avoiding this type of responsibility, i usually follow a strict but simple methodology of evading these activities:

1. screen your calls
   thank goodness for caller id. and lord knows, if it says “no caller info”, then that sucker’s going to voice mail. if it’s heidi klum calling to tell me that she’s got gwyneth and she wants to have some sort of kinky three way, she better not have caller id block on, because otherwise i’ll just have to hear about it later.
   
2. call back later
   whatever you do, don’t call back right away. that just shows that you’re a. responsive and eager to be a good child, and b. have nothing better to do, or obviously no plans that they can’t try and guilt you out of cancelling.
   
3. always have plans
   you don’t have to be specific, in fact, being as vague as possible is always best. after you’ve heard what they want to do, you can just say, “oh, i’ve actually got plans this afternoon.” this is much better than, “oh, i’ve got to buy kilt fabric from 3-4,” because then they can suddenly decide that they also want to buy fabric, or move their event to 5-6 just so they can see you. this is what you don’t want.

however, hmc, obviously not having been raised in an asian family, is still pitifully affected by guilt since she hasn’t been exposed to the real thing and built up a proper resistance. it’s like growing up in a cave all your life, as opposed to being reared near the equator on a mountain. she’s lacking guilt melanin.

thus whenever she’s in lost angels, a lot of her time is spent doing “family activities,” with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

“foolish, foolish!” i say. and this is the point where she gives me the stare, and that is the point where i shut up.

today, her parents called out of the blue, for some obvious activity. do i follow the method? or do i take the call, since hmc is still in new york, and i know that she’ll just feel guilty in absentia?

i take the bullet.

as it turns out, they just called to see if i wanted to see a movie at the sf indie film festival. besides, they movie they wanted to see was the one that i actually had picked out to see last week, and was planning to see until the whole thought of it fell out of my head.

fact of the matter is that the whole festival fell out of my head, and i forgot entirely that it was going on. i supposed this means that work really is keeping me busy nowadays. or it’s early onset alzheimer’s.

we went to see the screening of blueberry, which is perhaps described as a psychedelic western. loosely based on a comic by french master moebius, it mixes a western plot with shamanistic journeys. it’s certainly the most pro-iowasca western i’ve ever seen.

it does also have a companion film, other worlds, about amazon shamen, which kounen filmed while doing research for this film. the trippy parts are halfway between 2001: a space odyssey and unfortunately, lawnmower man, due to the cg-slithery things. although it didn’t look anywhere that bad, nor did it have jeff fahey or pierce brosnan in it.

what it did have was juliette lewis, who was 1. singing and 2. completely naked in different parts of the movie.

i’ll leave it to you to determine which one of those is good and bad.