Monday, Apr. 04, 2005 - 11:13 a.m.
Driving home from work last Friday, I was stopped behind four cars at a stop sign. Amazing the things you notice when you have time to stop and look.
On my left there was a church built in 1740. On both sides of the road just past this church was a very old fence, bulit with stone pillars every couple feet connected together with rusting metal rods. And I noticed that while the fence ran over a large area, there were at least three different houses on the land. So, right when I was starting to wonder if it had all once been one property, I spotted the sign at the side of the road. One of those historic landmark signs that have all the information you can't read from your car. It said at the top "Washington's Emcampment."
And driving home, on winding roads, there are tons of old houses, obviously built in a time when you horse-shoed your own horses and the road wound the easiest path through the trees.
It seems like I've been working my way to more history. From Michigan to Tennessee to New York. I'm moving backward from the way the country moved. From the coast to the south and then north (and west). I am now in one of the oldest parts of the country
But what I love about New York is that you can feel that age. There's something, some sense of tradition, but it's spiked with the brand new. This is also an area where a great many things start in this country - where people come to start them. And it's one of the main places immigrants move to (unfortunately I can't find an article I once read that listed the top five immigration ares - however, my quick search hoping to find it found a disturbing amount of anti-immigration websites).
It's amazing and wonderful to live in a place like this (but I've lost my train of thought so I don't have a coherent ending for this thread of thought).
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The pope has died. He's been in office (is that what you call it?) all of my life. But I'm not catholic so he hasn't really affected me personally. However, I'm reading that he did some historic things (like apologizing for the errors of the church in the last 2000 years and visiting a synagogue in Rome). I've heard some people talking over the tragedy of his death. But my thoughts are, he was 84 and he was ill...and if you are Catholic especially shouldn't you believe that the gates were held open for him when he got to heaven?
Now I'm curious about the criteria for chosing a new pope. And also, how much power he actually has.
And, no matter what, I can't help but find the images of his dead body laid out for viewing kind of creepy. This is a part of the death process I just don't personally understand.
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I've been to several offices through this temp job. And aside from the first one, I've worked in places where there is no one remotely similar to me in age. So, I'm beginning to wonder, where are all the young people working?
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Saw "Sin City." I won't say it's perfect. It probably should have been shorter, although I'm not sure what I would cut out. There are some issues I have with the stories in general, but to be fair, I had those same issues with the comics (let's talk about the lack of strong females that aren't bitchy- and maybe just maybe wear clothes, and the Hartigan issue I have*). But all in all, worth seeing. It's fun in a crazy, violent, can't-be-real kind of way. And it's nice to see something different in the look of a film.
*In the film, he's an old man when he saves an 11 year old girl. Years later, when she's 19, she's in love with him. It's arguable if he loves her back in a fatherly or romantic way. And that's my issue. I'm ok with her thinking she's in love with him. If someone saves you when you're 11 and you grow up thinking of him and making him, in your mind, whatever you want him to be - your own personal superhero, you will probably see that as love. However, it came across to me that he was in love with her back, and that was icky to me. My friends thought that he was maybe just loved her in a fatherly way and was trying to get her to go by pretending. That would be ok. But it needed to be a little more clear, to keep from being disgusting. Because (there are people that would think that was perfectly alloweable, but) an old man or woman for that matter having romantic interest in a guy or gal that he/she formed a relationship with when the guy/girl was a child, is gross!
