Quick Update

In case anyone is wondering, yes, I'll still out there. Or, as the Jeff Bridges character says in Crazy Heart, which I watched on Netflix recently, "out there in it."

I loved that moment in the film. Bad Blake is making a call from a phone booth (!) by the side of the road in the middle of the desert, nothing but dry land and fierce yellow sunlight all around him, oh, and of course that 1978 Chevy truck that he drives, his totem, parked crazily askew while he spells out for the directory-assistance operator the name of the woman he is courting . (Blake is a bare-bones kind of guy, and barely hanging on--he would not own a cell phone.) When the character played by Maggie Gyllenhall, Jean, answers the telephone and hears his voice, she is silent at first, and you think, what's going on. Then you hear her voice, and it's all there--delight and disbelief and relief and longing. She didn't think she'd ever hear from him again, and now here he is, calling, and he's not a good kind of guy to be with, but she wants to be with him anyway. They talk for a bit, and he tells her he wants to come see her, and then she says, stalling, "Where are you?" He answers with overelaborate casualness, evasive, distancing but also truthful, "Oh, out there in it." Of course, she can't see where he literally is, but the movie viewer can, so there's a bit of visual humor there: he's out there in it, all right, but "it" is a whole big stretch of emptiness. But then there's that other meaning, which slips into place for the viewer a second later, he's out there trying to make a living, trying to keep going, putting one foot in front of the other. "En la lucha," as they say in Spanish.

I liked the movie, but found it very sad. Other people, from the reviews I read, found it comic, or uplifting, or about redemption, but I was left with more of a feeling of loss about what gets sacrificed to alcoholism. I won't say anything more (like, about the ending) in case anyone reading this has not seen it yet and wants to. I do recommend it.

What else? Despite starting out this blog post by identifying with an over-the-hill has-been country singer addicted to cigarettes and alcohol, I would say things are going okay. I was in Toronto for a conference for five days and had a great time connecting with my Latin American and Puerto Rican friends (it was a conference on Latin American studies) and being immersed in Spanish for awhile. Now I am back and working at my various jobs (well, two of them) and helping take care of my father--went with him for a doctor's visit Tuesday, which was something of a saga. I am also working on a writing project, a paper that I will present at a conference in my actual field next month--I am pleased to be doing that. And trying to get some sleep here and there . . . .

You know, in it.