Miles Levin got cancer when he [...]]]> I was sent an advance copy of The Miles Levin Story for reviewing, so I lit a fire last night and sat on the couch to look through some reading matter, and I started to read the book. I didn’t stop until I finished it early this morning.

Miles Levin got cancer when he was sixteen and died when he was eighteen. While his friends were going off to college and starting the next phase of their lives, Miles was ending his and trying to find a way to do it without malice toward the thing that was taking his future away. And he did it. Look, it’s not an easy read. At least it wasn’t for me. As I read, I was looking for symptoms that someone I love might have. I was disquieted to know that he dies in the end, and that cancer is a part of each of our lives in some way or other. If you are the least bit human, you hope you are in the percentage that doesn’t get it, even though doctors now say that if you live long enough, you will at some point.

But I digress.

Miles has some powerful messages for those of us who search for true meaning, for something that just might mean there is a point to being here.

“What you will one day realize is that death is not something to fear, it is only something which one must come to understand… On a personal level, it doesn’t look to be an unpleasant experience. It’s pretty neutral as far as I’m concerned. There is a primordial terror of The Great Unknown, all instincts pitted against it, but these primitive feelings can be transcended. See, things only matter in context… In the silent contextlessness, everything is alright. Because there is never going to be enough time to do everything you want to do, but the time I’ve had  has been time enough – time enough to make the world a better place for having been here, I like to think, if only in limited circles.”

His theme throughout is that he was sort of a guy just getting through, always late to life’s events and duties, and not really doing much of anything. Then cancer delivered its blows, one by one, and each day mattered more and more. By writing his blog, he was able to accomplish something, to be somebody. He felt that if he hadn’t had it, he might have just lived for decades always ten minutes late, leaving nothing behind that mattered. It sounds so fake when I write it, so insincere (could anyone be that good?), but as you labor through the book and his pain and pleasure, you can see that he really did have the epiphany of life that we all search within our souls to find. He found his purpose in being here. He was okay with leaving.

Look, I don’t mean to imply that Miles was a saint—he wasn’t, and he didn’t want to die. “I am doing fine because I refvse to do otherwise. That much is mine. Attempts to extinguish my fire thus far have only intensified it.” Fight. Fight. Fight.

My mother died of cancer this year. I’m still facing it. This book really helped me come to a peaceful terms with the insidious disease that took her. I urge you to get it, read it, and pass it on. It’s more than a journey of death; it’s a celebration of life, and it’s guidebook that teaches you not to fear the end that comes to us all.

“Before cancer, I was a nobody. A nice guy, perhaps, but I didn’t have my act together at all, and perhaps never would. Then my hour came, and you have assured me with your words, tears, and prayers that I have delivered. In showing me that I have changed many of you profoundly, you have done for me all that I could ever want or need.”

I am fifty-eight years old. I have been making resolutions since I was in college—or maybe even since high school; I can’t really remember. The truth is, I have never successfully kept a resolution in [...]]]> Another year, another resolution to break. The question is do you get through 24 hours, or not so much?

I am fifty-eight years old. I have been making resolutions since I was in college—or maybe even since high school; I can’t really remember. The truth is, I have never successfully kept a resolution in the forty-odd years I have been making them. Each year, however, I am confident when I head off to bed on the 31st (I rarely make it to midnight), that this is the year that my resolve will kick in, and all things will come together to make the perfect year. I am not a stupid person, but after forty years of failure, one might wonder why I still approach each new year’s resolution with the confidence of someone who is used to success?

So this year I read an article about New Year’s resolutions. The author says she doesn’t make resolutions, but instead puts forth a guide word for her year. Like Faith, or Hope, or Charity (just kidding). It made sense to me. No firm commitment to things I will not do, but rather a general statement that I can review at the end of the year and see how I did.

Then I sent my cousin a nice e-mail wishing her all the things she wished for in the new year. Instead of the “thank you very much” I had expected from her, she responded with, “I don’t wish for things. I provide myself with intentions for the year.” I pressed her to explain, and her definition of “intentions” seemed markedly like wishes to me, but I refuse to waste my time arguing semantics.

But she had a point. Intention. What is your intention for the New Year?

So, here is it. My intention for the new year is to live with a plan of excellence. My friend Claire does everything with excellence. She came and decorated my house for Christmas one year and you would have thought it was her most important gig of the the year. If you go to her house for dinner,she spares no effort; everything is carefully thought out and prepared. Whatever she does, she attacks it with vigor, striving for the excellence she is known for.

I probably have a spotty reputation when it comes to excellence. If you need me, I am filled with excellence. I will leave no stone unturned, and no storm will keep me away. But if I invite you over for dinner, I might call you up an hour before you are due to arrive to tell you that we are moving it to a restaurant because I just didn’t quite get it together today. If you want me to read something and comment, I am excellent. My clients get my best; my co-workers, not so much.

I really hated having to write that last paragraph, but we all know I strive toward Oprahism, and therefore I must look myself squarely in the eye and be authentic in my assessment of myself.

Here are the elements I need to focus on to make this the year of excellence for myself.

1. I will not over-commit. If you ask me to do something, I am going to respond that I will get back to you. This is to ensure that I don’t have the “disease to please.” This is the disease that would cause me to say yes when I mean no, and then fail to give you my best.

2. I will take my time. No more rushing when I sear salmon so that white stuff comes out. I recently saw an episode of Top Chef on which they said that this is the fish’s way of screaming that the heat is up too high and you should have started to cook it sooner.

3. I will establish ironclad rules to live by in order to become a more disciplined person, and in this way I will live a life of excellence. For example, I will make my bed as soon as I get out of it, even if I need to hurry to the bathroom. This will ensure that it is made well every day. Excellence clearly begins with bed-making. You can make your bed as though you are having someone in it for the first time ever, or you can make it like you know it’s just you, alone yet again, and no one but you will see it. Well, men be damned, my bed is going to look fabulous with puffed pillows every day, so I can see the excellence with which I have made it when I walk into the room at night. Yep, it’s the new me.

So, regardless of whether your resolutions are already historical fiction, or you are joining me in striving toward an intention for the year, I wish you the best in this new year. May you be filled with your own sense of excellence in all that you strive to accomplish.

Best Song

No question on this one. Someone Like You by Adele.

With lyrics like regrets and mistakes, they are memories made, there is nothing more to be said. The only issue with this song is that they [...]]]> It’s Best of time again, and here are my best of choices from this past year.

Best Song

No question on this one. Someone Like You by Adele.

With lyrics like regrets and mistakes, they are memories made, there is nothing more to be said. The only issue with this song is that they are playing it too much. They did that to Celine Dion’s song for Titanic and I wanted to shoot myself every time it came on the radio.

Chris Martin (the fabulous Gwenyth’s husband), said in a 60 Minutes interview that he is very competitive and strives to do new things always. He said he wished he’d written Someone Like You, and when he heard it for the first time, he stayed up all night trying to write something amazing.

Best Movie

I think I’m going with Win Win this year. Maybe I’m choosing it because no one else has picked it, and I think it’s being overlooked when it should be celebrated.

Opening dialog between mother and child.

“Mommy, where is Daddy?”

“He’s running.”

“From what?”

And, I love the vulnerability of the good and bad in our main character. I have been cheated by someone close, and I think this movie helped me to see that desperate people do desperate things that are not within the realm of who they are inside themselves. Great flick.

Best Quote

I am going to give you a few. The first is not substantial enough to carry the category, but I loved it.

“Rick Perry is a candidate for Republicans who thought that George W. Bush was too cerebral.”

Paul Begala, Democratic strategist, on Rick Perry’s potential entry into the 2012 presidential field.

“Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” 

The last words of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs were reported by his sister Mona Simpson in her eulogy.

And, last but not least,

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.”

2012 Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren

Best TV Show

I know, I know. I can hear you now. “Christine, you are showing your shallow side,” but I loved Pan Am. I fear they aren’t renewing it, but I loved it. I loved the strong women bucking systems that we girls (I was under ten years old back then) didn’t even know existed. I love the way they didn’t let the chauvinists enter their own psyche. I loved the glamour. Cuba. Italy. Come on. It was fabulous, and if you didn’t watch it, find it and watch it now.

Best Tweet

I’m so tired of Oprah already. The woman truly thinks she’s God! Today she’s at Barnes & Noble signing copies of the Bible.

Joan Rivers

Best Book

Catherine the Great, by Robert Massie. It’s a tantalizing portrait and I read it well into the night a number of nights in a row to not miss a word. Read it. I wish they would use books like this in history classes instead of teaching history in a war to war series. Note to history teachers.

That’s it for this year’s best of.

Happy New Year Freesia Lane readers. I hope all good things come your way this year.

My Week with Marilyn is a must-see. [...]]]> Well, hello Michelle Williams. Wow. Kudos to you for sure, for you are totally mesmerizing as Marilyn Monroe—or frankly, as anyone at all. No one can take their eyes off you when you are on the screen. You are more bewitching than Marilyn was by many percentage points.

My Week with Marilyn is a must-see. It’s a one-week snippet of Marilyn’s life, and it shows us her genius at manipulation and her vulnerability as a woman whose soul others can’t see through her beauty. Lastly, it shows us how three extremely powerful players were all at the mercy of one very unstable Marilyn.

At one point, the young Colin Clark says to Marilyn, “The trouble is that Laurence [Olivier] is a respected stage actor who wants to be a star and you are a star who wants to be a respected actor, and somehow you are getting in each other’s way.” I thought that was oh-so-true. Being both is almost an oxymoron for a stage actor, by virtue of the fact that there is an intellectual approach to stage acting, and to aspire to the ‘sell-out’ of stardom that means you are anything but a serious actor.

Everyone is brilliant in the film. The filming is brilliant. It’s all done with such effortless genius that you do not realize until after you have left how many layers there were to the plot. Marilyn’s brand-new marriage to Arthur Miller was already on the rocks. Marilyn was a struggling actress, unable to see the world’s admiration for her talent as anything other than adoration of her physical beauty. Laurence struggles to be taken seriously as a director and fails due to his inability to motivate and control Marilyn. Vivien Leigh’s adjustment to old age is an issue that women in film still face.

But mostly it’s about Marilyn and her young man, whom she lures into her web with no real intention for their affair to be anything other than an interlude. Colin doesn’t tell us about the rest of his life, but I fear he was never any good for any other woman after falling for Marilyn, who was only toying with him.

I have thought a lot about how she studied method acting during the filming of a movie about a showgirl who falls in love with a young prince. “Hmmm,” said I to myself. “That makes total sense. She could practice her acting with poor, unsuspecting Colin and get it right in front of the camera later.” In other words, the Colin and Marilyn story parrots the story Marilyn was filming on the screen.

I think she used everyone around her. She was smarter than a fox, and her stupid “poor me” routine littered both sides of the Atlantic the bodies of her victims.

Michelle, this is the role of your lifetime, and we are all grateful that they saw it in you and brought you in to do it. It would not have been such a powerful movie without you.

“You can’t take a job in Texas,” I said firmly.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a lawless country. Didn’t you see The Thin Blue Line?”

The Thin Blue Line, for those of you who [...]]]> I was at lunch with some friends today, and one of them said she had been offered a job in Texas.

“You can’t take a job in Texas,” I said firmly.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a lawless country. Didn’t you see The Thin Blue Line?”

The Thin Blue Line, for those of you who don’t go back as far as 1988, was a documentary film that terrified me and the rest of America. It showed a man wrongly convicted of a murder in Dallas by a seriously corrupt justice system. There is corruption everywhere you go, but it is not as systemic in other places as it is in Dallas. The sheer randomness of the arrest of someone who was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time—and then found himself on death row—made me promise myself that I would stay out of Texas, and that if I did need to go there, I certainly would not be renting a car.

And then there is the pride they take in leading the nation in executions. What is it about Texas that it breeds figures like Judge Sharon Keller? Judge Keller refused to allow a last-minute appeal to be filed by attorneys trying to save the life of a client who was scheduled to die that night because, in her words, “We close at 5:00.” Coincidentally, this was on the same day the Supreme Court decided to hear a landmark case on the constitutionality of lethal injection

We move right along to the beef issue. While I have never considered vegetarianism for more than five minutes (between one breakfast and lunch five years ago), I reserve the right to change my mind if I want to. I’ve heard it’s an unwritten law in Texas that you must order meat with every meal, including beer at the bar. Seriously, I heard that.

In case I haven’t swayed you, let’s look at the cheerleading issue. If you happen to give birth to a girl in Texas, and she happens to be pretty and athletic enough to try out for cheerleading, she runs the risk of being killed by her best friend’s mother, who can’t bear the thought of her little Buffy not making the squad because your Debbie Lou is better than her. So the odds of early teenage death for girls is much higher in Texas than in the rest of the country.

So my friend—who, shockingly, wasn’t swayed by any of the above—decided on her own that she wasn’t moving there.

“It’s the weather,” she said calmly. “It snows in the winter and it’s 110 degrees in the summer. Who wants to live with that kind of weather swing?”

I reminded myself that it didn’t matter why she finally decided not to go. It’s just important that she not go.

Oh, one more thing. Isn’t George Bush from Texas? I’m just saying.