This is a quasi-meme. If you have Netflix, go to your queue and look in the “Genre” column for documentaries. Pick 5 and post them. It’s okay if you post less than 5, but not more, so we can keep things tidy! Personally I have a lot more than 5, I love documentaries. That’s why I’m forcing this meme upon you - so I can see what documentaries I might have missed and would want to add to my queue. If you don’t have Netflix, find 5 and post them. You can post as a comment to this entry, or as an entry in your own journal.

Here’s my 5:

• Helvetica
• My Kid Could Paint That
• Tupperware!: American Experience
• Southern Comfort
• 30 Years of National Geographic Specials

IMDb says that if I enjoyed “Sweet Nothing in My Ear” I will enjoy “Sound and Fury” - well, that’s pretty accurate, because the former is basically a fictionalized version of the latter. Yup, the old CI debate again, this time starring Marlee Matlin and Jeff Daniels.
Thoughts:

• It showed that some deaf people are very opposed to implants but didn’t really do a good job of explaining why. The deaf grandfather was obviously a strong supporter of deaf culture but they didn’t really say why he was against implants at all.
• Jeff Daniels did a better job signing than I was expecting. Plenty of flaws, obviously, but he was more fluid than I had anticipated, less stilted than I feared.
• They got the same guy who plays the interpreter on the L Word to play an interpreter in the courtroom on this movie. Marlee’s doing? Hmmm.
• They used voiceover instead of subtitles to explain what the signing was saying. Yuck! Somebody on the IMDb message board said they preferred that because it conveyed the emotions better. That makes sense if you’re a blind person watching the movie, but otherwise, can’t you see the facial expressions? Do you really need to hear someone to know how they feel?!
• Deanne Bray was in it! That surprised me. Phyllis Frelich was smashing as always. Is Shoshannah Stern only playing CI/oral characters now? Who was the grandfather? I couldn’t recognize him.
• Good discussion about the movie at Cochlear Implant Online here.
• I missed most of the “you were born hearing” discussion because the station interrupted for a tornado warning…for somewhere that is at LEAST two hours away. Come on guys, your signal isn’t that strong that they’re watching you out there! They broke in again a little later but I forget what part that was.

I always like watching Marlee Matlin but this movie wasn’t very good.

Today I did practically nothing except fly a lot. I did get to see Enchanted without having to subject any loved ones to it; it was nowhere near as good as I’d heard or even as good as I’d hoped. (Hey, I wonder what we’re flying over, there’s weird areas of green light! We’re descending into Sacramento as I write this.). Anyway, the highlight of the movie for me was Susan Sarandon. She was smokin’ while in human form, and devilishly entertaining when she was a dragon. Oh, and I spilled yogurt all over myself during my brief layover in Chicago. Slick, huh? Man, I forget what else I was going to say. I’m just writing this because I can’t turn on my connection, I’m tired of reading about sao braphet song for a while (that’s part of my paper on transgender children), it turns out my iPod has no battery charge, and one can only lose so many rounds of BrickBreaker before one gives up. I’ve been playing DopeWars too, but the interface sucks. So I’m writing this entry instead. Oh, here comes the turbulence they warned us about. Writing this entry is good for practicing character entry on my Blackberry, too - I’m already quite fast, but the keys are much closer together than on my Sidekick 3 so I fatfinger them more often. I keep typing m’s as n’s. Hey, this turbulence is pretty turbulent! Kinda fun, since I’m not really worried about safety…it feels like it should be scary but I know we’re fine. My ears have been doing okay so far; after January’s descent into Washington I have been worried each time I take off and land. (Just in case I never mentioned that, what happened in January was I couldn’t pop my ears, and I was in so much pain I was crying. Thank goodness for reassuring flight attendants.). So even though I’ve landed and taken off - let’s see - 11 times since then, I still wonder each time if it’s going to hurt. The audiologists at Gallaudet told me not to be surprised if that does happen again though. Oh that reminds me - I got to chat with somebody while waiting at the gate at National. Suddenly somebody sat down next to me with a Sorenson VRS backpack! Turns out he’s an audiology grad student at Gallaudet, and his girlfriend is deaf so he actually (gasp!) knows sign. Not many audiologists do, oddly enough. Same with speech therapists…there are a lot of people who work directly with people with hearing loss every day, but they don’t sign. I don’t get it, myself. Man, are we there yet? When I started writing this they had just announced we’d probably be on the ground in about 30 mins, it sure feels like it’s been that long already. I haven’t gotten to stretch at all since we left Chicago…when flying with a friend or family member you can invade their personal space for a moment to stretch, but I wouldn’t do that to a stranger. Oh hey, flight attendants prepare for landing please, guess we are almost there - I gotta turn this off now!

Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken is on TV, it’s the 1991 movie about the old Atlantic City diving horses and the girl who was blinded during a dive. I was 10 when the movie came out, and I loved horses, so I loved this movie! But I haven’t seen it in at least a dozen years. It just happens to be on one of the 87,000 channels my in-laws get (Encore Drama, to be specific) so I’m watching it now. I went looking for information about the diving horses, and I came upon this page about them.

I was quite surprised to see a mention of “Petticoat Discipline Quarterly” in the article. I looked up at the URL, and to my surprise, I was on the Petticoat Discipline Quarterly site! I’ve heard of petticoat discipline before, and it doesn’t bother me at all, I just don’t get why the page about diving horses was on a petticoat discipline site!

I have spent most of tonight downloading movies to put on my iPod for the trip to Los Angeles next week. So far I have Gayniggers from Outer Space, Freaks, Sex Madness, I Am Legend, The ABC’s of Sex Education for Trainable Persons, Rashomon (which may not be watchable on the iPod, depends how the subtitles come out), and Death of a President. I did most of my packing today, so I am reasonably close to ready; we have to be ready by Tuesday night because our flight is at some horrible hour like 7:30am - but hey, we’ll get in at 9:30am, and head straight to Disneyland!

I just watched the movie Maxed Out, which is about the overwhelming debt a majority of Americans live under today. It was a disturbing movie, partly because three suicides are discussed, as are two people who are suicidal but haven’t done the deed yet, all because they’re in debt. People kill themselves over being in debt. How fucking awful is that? The movie is basically a Michael Moore-style exposé, kind of like Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me.

I want to open up the comments here to talk about debt. Are you in debt? What type of debt do you have? What steps have you taken to reduce your debt? Have you ever filed for bankruptcy? If you’re not in debt, how have you avoided it? What advice do you have for those who don’t yet have a credit history and would like to keep a clean one? Nobody is required to comment, but if you feel like sharing, please do. I’m curious to see what other real people have to say.

I’m writing this blog post by email, but I don’t think it’s going to work so I’ll end up posting it later. Today was soooo laid back, it was excellent. We watched Candyman and The Omen, which I’d never seen before; last night we watched Stephen King’s It which I hadn’t seen before either. I had to do a little bit of homework today; I finally figured out that Word’s comments are equivalent to OpenOffice’s notes and I was able to revise my paper according to the teacher’s instructions. Other than that I have taken it pretty easy…we are over at my in-laws right now having wine and watching Dexter. It’s a little confusing because we don’t get this channel normally, so we have no idea what’s going on…but my mother-in-law likes it, so watching it we are.

• I just watched Hackers again for the first time in many years. It’s becoming more tolerable to watch as time goes on - back then, it was ridiculous. Now, it’s cute.
• Video games are fun. I haven’t played Driv3r in quite some time, and it’s fun to just tool around and rack up wanted points.
• I am reading Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father for English class and I think I will end up voting for the guy in the primaries.

Right now I’m watching 49 Up which is part of the series Up that began in 1964, filming children at age 7 and then every seven years thereafter.

I love this kind of thing - basically experimenting on children to see how we all grow. And I think I would have loved to be selected for something like this, to see myself grow and change. And yet several of the subjects have said that they don’t like the intrusion into their lives, they wish the filmmaker wouldn’t bring up old painful subjects, and so on. I guess the experience of watching this is very different than the experience of being filmed for it. I do wonder how the children were selected, and at what point they were allowed to give their own consent - probably at age 7 their parents put them in it, but were they told at 14 that they could choose for themselves, or did that not happen until they were 21? Why, if they didn’t like it, have they continued to be in it up to age 49? How many kids were in it originally that have dropped out? Have any of them died? Perhaps I’l learn about this by the end of the movie.

We were supposed to go to a Buffy singalong tonight, but my brilliant sister-in-law didn’t go to buy the tickets until Thursday night, and of course they were sold out. So we’re going to see the Harry Potter movie instead. I also finally redesigned my Sidekick 3 skin; the first one came out really bad and satisfaction is guaranteed so I wrote to them, mailed back the bad one, and got a coupon for a free replacement. The front is going to look like this now.

Also, we went to the Original Pancake House today and had yummy pancakes - I got Chocolate Chip and A got buckwheat with pecans. I had never been to the Falls Church location; tikva and I went to the Rockville one a couple of times. I took some Alli before the pancakes; I’m giving it a try. A’s been using it for a little while but I am not sure if I will want to do it forever.