sour death ball sunday

sick-ville, canada. population: 1.

it seems to me that the cold from copenhagen (the one i thought i’d narrowly escaped) has finally caught up to me. i woke up with a closed throat and limbs unwilling to cooperate. since then, i have been utterly useless: lofting around in bed, catching up on planet money (the only reason why i know anything about toxic assets!) and PBS documentaries i am too ashamed to disclose here.

but i digress. here is a short film that never fails to amuse me. i first came across this clip while watching wholpin dvds with my friend torstein in norway. wholpin dvds, by the way, are an accurate description of what i deem The Perfect Present (just f.y.i.).

without further ado, i give you, the sour death balls:

a didion sunday

today, this article posted by kyle reminded me of joan didion and her illuminating prose.

in search of the link of that essay i read a while ago, i entered “didion” into my gmail search box, and found an old email i had sent to a friend with the following quote:

“… Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts…. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds….”

i am in love with you, joan didion.

more thoughts to come when i am not watching football on tv while applying to jobs. jobjobjobjobjobs.