Friday night, a synopsis in 4 acts, with discussion and notes.

Act 1: In which Sarah Louise remembers why tonight she needs to be somewhere. It's an ex-boyfriend night. Max invited me last year to the Light Up Night at this thing in the North Hills, where he played piano for a bunch of children singing Christmas songs. The following Monday, he broke up with me. So tonight, driving past all those lights, I knew, yes, this is why I'm driving to Oakmont to a film discussion group.

Act 2: I get lost. (NO, Kiki, I am not asking Santa for a GPS.)

Act 3: I show up maybe a minute late and am instantly labeled an outsider. I was the youngest person there, but I know for a fact that the next youngest person was only two years older.

Act 4: We watch the movie. And I attended my first film discussion. It wasn't quite what I thought it would be, but it was talking about a movie. The movie: Smart People, with Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid.

So here's what I thought: when the son plays on the wheelchair in the beginning, it's mirrored later when the brother of the father plays on the grocery cart in the warehouse store. And when the Ellen Page character quotes Cosmo, it is straight out of Sex and the City (it takes half the total time you dated someone to get over them) in a movie starring Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie, from Sex and the City). And, for the record, I dated Tony for less than six months. It took twenty one years to get over him. So if that is half the total time I dated him, someone's math is really messed up. (Well, I'm messed up too, but I'm much better than I was.)

What I think about my life, the evening: Right now I am showing up. I don't know what I want, but I know I want something that has to do with showing up. I love movies, so talking about them with some Presbyterians seems like a fine thing to do every other Friday. And maybe I'll make some friends. But for now, I'm showing up. Because showing up helps clarify in my mind that crying on the way home meant something. I have a lot of waiting going on in my life right now, and some of that waiting (for Christmas, to hear about a job, for the pizza in the oven to be ready) is completely out of my control. (I can't change the calendar, force a job, and I don't want to eat frozen pizza that is actually still frozen.) But there are other kinds of waiting that require me to swim out to the ship that hasn't come in. And I'm not even sure what THAT means. I'm talking nonsense, you can see that? I'm blog-writing my way through this, which means there is a subtext that I would write about if this weren't being broadcast to the world wide web. I'm confused, so I'll be confusing. How's that for an answer to your unspoken question, "What the heck is she talking about?"

I think I need to cash in my change and go to the movies. Too bad I have to wait till February for "He's Just Not That Into You."

I'm turning the TV back on and finishing watching this episode of SATC. It's the one where Carrie dates an alcoholic who becomes addicted to her. It is so nice to know I'm not the only one that is a mess and doesn't know what she wants.

Sayonara, baby!

More about why I adore Carrie and her friends...

They are very literate. Only today, whilst reading an article in the NYT, I came across the phrase, "Four legs good, two legs bad." Since high school was AGES ago, and I don't really remember reading Animal Farm as much as remembering that I did read it, I didn't realize this was yet another literary allusion. (Carrie says "two legs good, four legs bad" in the episode "Sex and the Country" which also has allusions to Old MacDonald has a farm ("e-i-e-i-o.")

Of course, now that I've started, my brain has stalled.

Oh, right. So in the Season Two finale, when Natasha and Big get engaged, Carrie and friends wax eloquently about the movie "The Way We Were," which I had never seen, but have now. I see now how the episode sort of mirrored the movie, but the episode is better than the movie, although I've been told that I needed to see the movie when I was 25. Which brings up a thought about SATC in general. I have friends in their twenties who don't like the show. And friends in their twenties who adore it. Then I have friends of varying ages who don't care if they ever see the show. Personally, I think you should be at least 32 before you watch it, you need to have a little bitterness that comes with the third decade.

That said, I don't think everyone should watch it, or that everyone will like it. I watch it because the characters are smart, I can relate to being thirtysomething and single, and I like the theme music. (I have it as the ring tone for my phone.) As a woman who made a few or more mistakes in my early years (oh, did I stop?) I commiserate with Carrie & Co. As they say, let she who has no sin throw the first stone.

When I was in my senior year of high school, something changed. All of a sudden, I stopped being Miss Goody Two Shoes. My two best friends had boyfriends and were losing their virginities, and I read books like My Mother/My Self and devoured copies of Cosmopolitan. I worried about how it would be, dating when you had to think about whose place to spend the night. Second semester, I had my first "boyfriend" who was an absolute jerk and in many ways I am still recovering.

Then I went off to college. When I found Jesus (I know that sounds dorky, but maybe a little bit less dorky than "born again") my freshman year, I thought, "phew! I won't have to think about that again" and put sex in a "after I'm married" compartment. And five years later, I started dating men. (I only had unrequited crushes in college.) And Pandora's box opened up and I was making decisions about whose place to spend the night. I'm not proud of those years, and my heart is broken in places that are mending, even now.

But watching SATC helps me to see that there are reasons you break up with a guy besides, "you're not a Christian, so I can't keep dating you." (Yes, I actually said those words, to at least two men.) What I couldn't see was that I was actually breaking up with them because they weren't respecting me, but I didn't have the words to say that. In the two quasi-healthy relationships I had where I did the breaking up, I was able to say, "This isn't working" or "You're drinking again, so I'm out of here." But until I watched SATC, I felt like no one understood my story. I had two kinds of friends: Christians (who had either not had indiscretions or didn't talk about them) and non-Christians who were experimenting like crazy. And I felt caught in the middle--I felt I'd done enough experimenting but I didn't feel like my Christian friends would understand, and I certainly didn't want to encourage my non-Christian friends in their experimentation, but at the same time not judge them (or have them judge me). Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.

I remember, my freshman year of college, walking back to Carlow after Cornerstone (the college Christian fellowship group I attended) with two girls. The guest speakers were a married couple. The guy had "sowed his oats" before getting married and I think maybe the girl had not. We all sang "Summer Nights" from the movie Grease and the couple used the song to show the difference between how men and women look at romance, love, and sex. We'll call the two girls I was walking home with Jill and Jackie.

Jill to Jackie: "I would never want to marry a man that wasn't a virgin when we got married." Jackie to Jill: "Yeah."

And there it was. Two more people I couldn't talk to about sex.

********

My brain is so tangled and mangled -- this is the last day of Summer Reading, we have a Storytelling Festival going on too, and so I'm sticking out my tongue at my inner English teacher and ending here, with no real conclusion. I'm too busy these days to come back and work on this more.

xo,

SL

How I stimulated the economy...

SATC complete set is currently half off until supplies run out (until June 2) at Borders. So the first $150 of my stimulus check went to Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha. I've started watching episodes in English first and Spanish after. It's fascinating to see which things don't translate and which do. Some things actually come out better in Spanish...Like Mr. Big saying that Carrie's apartment is "Lindo."

Gonna read some more Helen Clay Frick bio and then GO PENS!