My Australian Boyfriend Is Dead

I must have talked about Heath Ledger a lot after I saw "10 Things I Hate About You," because when "The Patriot" came out, Jonathan said to me, "Hey, your Australian boyfriend is in it." Normally, I'm pretty unaffected by celebrity goings-on. I mean, I like to see what they're wearing, what projects they're working on, and who they're dating, but I'm not all that interested in their details. So, I'm surprised at how much I'm thinking about him today after learning of his death yesterday. He was so young. He wasn't obviously crazy. He rarely made headlines except for when he was actually in a movie he was promoting. He was really talented. I am really looking forward to seeing him as the Joker, and I'm sad I won't get to enjoy his performance in any more movies. I'm sad for the people who actually knew and cared about him. His daughter won't remember him. My fellow grad students and I wrote a screenplay last summer with him in mind. Who's going to play Troilus now?

You Know You're Hormonal When...

You bawl watching Jane Austen's "Persuasion" on PBS. Especially when you don't cry at movies. Especially romantic ones. Seriously - and I didn't even just cry at the end. I cried DURING. I just feel so sorry for poor Anne, although the actress played her a little bit whiny.

I have to say Rupert Penry-Jones was a great Capt. Wentworth. His face when he found out Anne wasn't really engaged to Mr. Elliott - perfect. I can't wait to see "Northanger Abbey" next week.

More Application Frustration

So, I just got e-mails from both SMU and NYU that they haven't received certain supporting documents. I have confirmation that both of those schools were sent, and in some cases, even received those documents. Thank God I got delivery confirmation on everything I mailed. That still doesn't mean they won't make me resend it, but at least I know it's THEIR fault and not mine. Someone needs to come up with a better way of keeping all of the application elements together. I haven't had a single one go smoothly yet. These schools have been doing this for years! You'd think they'd have the system down.

Wii Sleep

A few nights after we got the Wii, I woke up to the noise of my husband knocking a glass of water off his bedside table. It turns out he was playing Wii Tennis in his sleep. Then, last night, he rolled over in bed, put his arm over me and said, "If you want, I can take that remote from you." Puzzled, I asked, "What remote?" "The Wiimote," he replied. "Are you asleep?" I asked. At that, he rolled back over in a huff and didn't talk anymore. When I confronted him about it this morning, he had no memory of it. I guess a certain amount of sleep deprivation and subconscious infiltration is just the price we have to pay for hours of fun.

MS Word Forms

So, I'm very into family history right now, and I'm reorganizing all of my files. For about a year, I've been working with family group sheets that I have to print out and manually enter the data. I've looked all over the internet for free interactive forms that will let me type into the form and print it out, but I've had no luck. So, last night Jonathan suggested I just make my own. He tried to get me to use this fancy dancy Microsoft program that actually is a great program, but which didn't let me do what I wanted. After a couple of hours of trying and failing with different programs, I gave up and just decided to use Word. Little did I know, Word had exactly what I was looking for. I made my own family group sheet form complete with check boxes and - get this - drop down menus. No kidding. It's pretty awesome. If you're into that kind of thing. Which I clearly am. Sooooooo dorky. But insanely proud of myself.

The cleaning ladies broke my grandmother's vase. This is the 3rd time they have broken something, and I tried to fire them, but I got talked into giving them one more chance.

Part of me feels guilty for being mad. It's a luxury to have someone else clean your house, and if I don't want anything to get broken, I should just do it myself and be careful. Of course accidents happen. But I made the lady show me what happened, and what happened was pure carelessness.

This vase and a conch shell were the only things I asked for from my grandmother's house after she died. They both lived in her bathroom, and at one time the nails on this vase were painted. With nail polish. Hilarious. I know it's ugly and tacky, but it was hers, and I remember her every single time I look at it. And now it's broken and I'm sad.

I might re-break it and see if I can't get more pieces to fit so there aren't two huge gaping holes in the thumb, and maybe I can get the rim to not be crooked. I'm sad that I might throw it away someday now. I really want to keep it.

I forgot to take a picture of it all in pieces, so I just have a picture of the glued-together version.

High School Dreams

I have these recurring dreams that there was some mistake with my grades from high school, and I have to back because I never fulfilled my P.E. requirement. So, I'm 30 years old wandering around my high school trying to find my locker, and I'm lost and end up being late or missing class entirely.

I had one of these dreams last night. There are different variations on it - sometimes I make it to class, and all the other girls make fun of me, or I find my locker, but I can't remember the combination. Last night I was in some torrid high school love affair, and I was trying to avoid the other people involved.

I don't know why I have these dreams, but I get them pretty frequently. I think it just goes to show how important my teenage years were to my development. They were nice years, but also traumatic, and I think that's why my psyche defaults to them. I've never tried to analyze these dreams - maybe because I have them so often, I either disregard them as silly stress dreams, or maybe I'm too scared of what my brain is trying to tell me about myself.