love and relationships

My Dead Husband’s Goatee on Brad Pitt’s Face


Very odd to see Will’s goatee dangling off the end of Brad Pitt’s chin. This is the time of year when Will shaved away the winter beard and went back to his goatee. He hated clean shaven because he had a round baby face. Whiskers aged him and he liked that.

His goatee was long. No dreads back in jutted off his chin to become this soft bushy brush that I would twirl my fingers through. Pitt’s looks rather thin and old man in comparison despite the fact that Will’s was beginning to gray a bit too.

My MIL hated that goatee.

“Why don’t you tell him to trim it at least,” she would say to me, but he would just grin and reply for me,

“She loves it the way it is,” and then he would smile at me like we were two children in cahoots.

The celeb mags debate the sexiness of this style and why on earth Pitt’s wife puts up with it, but I can attest – as I have married two bearded men now – that the appeal is in the man more than the grizzle. Only some men can pull off this look.

My Life as a Knight


You Are a Knight
You are very unusual and even a bit eccentric. No one can really figure you out easily.
Because you’re not predictable, people behave irrationally around you. They may feel threatened by your presence, or they may underestimate you completely.

You do best when you’re close to the action. You don’t move quickly, so you need to be near the center of things if you want to make a difference.
You tend to act quickly, and decisively. In fact, you are often the first person to make a move.

Actually, this makes total sense. One of the things that made me an effective teacher was the fact that children had a hard time reading me. This tended to make them docile in the long run because they only thing they knew for sure was that doing what I wanted ensured a peaceful co-existence  and that going against me would result in something unpleasant.

I found this game via my husband. It proclaimed him “king” which should surprise no one who knows even the tiniest thing about him. One thing it mentioned was that many people depend on him and would be doomed should he “go down”. There are several people I can think of for whom this would be true but ultimately, they would simply become my responsibility, so it would be okay. Not as okay as they would be with him. I have a shorter fuse and am less willing/able in some cases to fix things. I am not one of the doomed and I find that sad on one hand and reassuring on the other.

A Revolutionary Road


We spent most of Saturday scouring Edmonton for cross-country skiing gear. After a particularly fruitless stretch (it’s very late in the season and stores are picked thin), we stopped at the Chapters across from Camper’s Village on Whitemud to use the washroom and grab tea and snacks. As I waited for the barista to finish up, I caught sight of a middle-aged couple sitting at a nearby table. He read the paper and she thumbed through a book, reading sections of it out loud to him. They didn’t make eye contact and if I hadn’t been sure she was reading to him, I would have wondered why two strangers were sitting together in a coffee shop.

The book? The Idiots Guide to Surviving Divorce.

Rob and I watched two dvd’s this past week. Revolutionary Road with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and a French-Canadian film from 1986 titled The Decline of the American Empire. On the surface, they have nothing in common. The first found its base in a 1961 book of the same name. It’s considered to be one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th Century. Written several years before Betty Freidan’s feminist treatise, it clearly calls out the hollow existence of suburban 1950’s American. While I don’t think the author intended for it to be a feminist novel, the movie clearly sees it that way. The second movie supposedly derives from a book of the same name that one of the main characters wrote. All the characters save two teach at an unidentified university. The film spends most of its time going back and forth between the four men and the four women who have been acquainted, intimately, with each other for a long time. The decline in question concerns male/female relationships and the discussions are driven by sex. Sexual infidelity to be more precise.

Interestingly, both films deal with couples who don’t know their partners, make wildly inaccurate assumptions about each other and feel incredibly entitled to put their own needs ahead of the success of their relationships.

The French film, though billed as a comedy, makes a viewer feel embarrassed for the characters more than anything else. Revolutionary Road, however, made me cry.

Winslet’s character commits suicide in the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie. She performs an early second trimester abortion on herself in the master bath using what appeared to be a douchebag and a pointy piece of hard rubber. She does this with full knowledge of the danger, and the film makes it clear she expects to die. Though she is portrayed as a bit flighty and prone to hysterics, all I saw was a woman who’d made choices for her life thinking they would turn out differently in spite of the fact that her choices really only lead in the direction of where she ends up.  I understood her frustration. I just couldn’t fathom such a willful denial of the obvious – she had options. Options that would have been socially ostracizing for her given the time period, but she had them. She wanted life to be different without sacrifice or great effort on her part.

I felt sorry for DiCaprio’s character. Rob didn’t. The character floated through life on charm and half-assing, rising to challenges on whims really only to see those brief moments of effort be rewarded out of proportion. None of that is off the mark, and the film doesn’t give much background for the couple. We don’t know how they got from A to B, just that they did. It seemed to me though that his apathy was driven by her need for them to be more special than the suburban crowd.

They viewed suburbia as a trap. The people around them as complacent and willing accomplices to their enslavement. They saw the hopelessness and the pointlessness. They were wise and better than that.

Maybe. But perception is all. We live primarily in a moment that changes with every moment that passes. The impermanence should liberate us. Inspire. Instead these two look back constantly at a moment in time when anything was supposedly possible and they choose to walk the road that led them to where they were. It didn’t occur to either that they might be “trapped” because they were too lazy or frightened or both to take the roads. Or that one life is really as good as another if you decide to make it so.

Anyway, it made me cry. I understand her longing for freedom. To be just her and to answer to no one’s dreams but her own. I remembered me in my little house in Valley Junction before Rob and before Will. Just me. Sometimes I do miss that house. But, it was lonely. Loneliness so deep that I can still feel the echo. Even in widowhood I was not so profoundly alone, and I am grateful that I will never experience that again in my life. I can’t imagine someone longing for that.