A Better Ending for Sparks' The Notebook

            I put in the Netflix DVD of The Notebook, which I'd put in my queue after hearing Dana and Karl mention it on recommended movies.  I watched it more or less while peeling vegetables and roasting eggplant.

          We're made to suspect that the Gena Rowland-looking woman with Alzheimer's (played by Gena Rowland) is Allie grown older, so the question is who is the man called "Duke." who's faithfully coming to read to her every day from The Notebook.  Is it Noah, the man who won her heart by harassing her on the ferris wheel at the opening of the movie and later wrote her 365 letters she never saw, or is it Lon, the man she became engaged to and also loved but who didn't make her feel the way Noah made her feel?  We go from seeing the Rowland-Duke (James Gardner) couple to returning to the past for the various stages of Allie's love life.  We also see another woman in the arms of Noah, who treats her with coolness and never tries to comfort her when she feels unloved.  This is Martha Shaw.  There's a scene in which Martha and Allie meet and then Martha says goodbye to Noah, who stands there showing no emotion and not even suggesting, "You'll meet a wonderful guy who will love you."  There's also a scene in which Allie tells her fiance Lon Hammond that she loves him, but she's still in love with Noah.  Lon still loves her and wants to marry her.  Then, as the music swells,  we see Allie going back to Lon and the house he built for her.

            So Duke says that he's Noah, and Gena Rowlands is Allie, but we know it's not true.  At first we suspect that Noah is Lon replacing the memory Allie lost of their marriage with the marriage Allie sacrificed when she married Lon instead of Noah.  Even though she didn't wind up with Noah in reality, she can wind up remembering that she did.

            That's not bad.

            But the truth is that Gena Rowland is Martha, and Duke is Lon.  They wound up together after being rejected by their first love interests, and his loyalty to her as she goes deeper into dementia is the proof of the enduring depth, height,bredth of their love, which would never have been had Allie married Lon and Noah married Martha.  

As for Allie and Noah, we suspect that they were disappointed, disillusioned, and divorced after five years of marriage.  

The News and Me

I spend at least an hour and usually two hours reading the newspaper every day, which gets my brain into the spin cycle.  Not spin as in PR work.  Spin as in going, getting fueled and getting in gear.  So...just as an example, let's take today's Chronicle.  (I spent only one hour on the news because I have the 600-page Un avion sans elle to finish, and even though it's a bit phony, it's engaging, and we may be discussing it --rather than our objections to it--on April 15.)

First there was what Leah Garchik (subject of last night's dream) related about Pope Francis and the homeless--an item provided by Frank Viviano:  Police are told to leave them in peace.  "Francis has ordered his almsgivers to distribute sleeping bags, and has installed showers for the homeless (not like those from St. Mary's sprinkler system) under the St. Peter's Square colonnade.  Hair-cuts are offered as well as lanundry services; clean clothes are distributed.  And on Wednesdays, when the pope has general audiences, many of the homoelss pass out prayer books."  I fear that some of our homeless would not want to help out.  I liked Caille Milner's column describing how much more St. Mary's is doing for the homeless than the rest of us are.  I really don't know WHAT should be done.  I know that Oxfam says the 1% will own more than half of the world by 2016, and that's reason to be plagued by doubt.  But that's doubt, not certainty or even clarity.

So then I read about a wonderful 93-year-old woman who "unites religions to do good," nominated as Visonary of the Year.  Among her many causes has been the homeless, and she's the co-founder of the winter  homeless shelter system.  She could shame me if I had a great sense of shame.  And I feel sad for my mother, who wanted so badly to do good, and died with Alzheimer's.  This makes me want to write about Mother rather than to do good myself!

I see a report on young female activists profiled by Sam Whiting, who once interviewed me and wrote me up as a fake indoor person.  (That was January 2006, and I could have been so much more honest if I'd left out the mess of papers to respond to encircling me.  Instead I'm in the corner of my study sitting demurely with my hands in my lap.)  Anyway, I look at these young women, two of whom are in dresses showing knees and all of whom are wearing very high heels, and I'm aware that nto all the world wears sensible shoes and avoids eating meat.  (The meat bit may seem like a disconnect, but it's connected to my world view.  I often feel that meat-eating is a barbaric rite of the past cultures only to be awakened to the fact that only 4% of the American population is vegetarian, and Americans define themselves at "meateaters."  Only in India, which has more vegetarians than the rest of the world combined,  is my worldview true.  There 40% of the world is Indian.)

Miss Manners is asked "How to talk to the dying" and I think of Pam Anesi, who wanted to read crime novels, and Andrea, who wanted to play Pictionary and just have a good time.  I also think of Jeanne, whose brother has stage 4 cancer,  and want to ask her how her brother's doing.  Dear Abby advisese a man who defends himself AS a man by saying that ihe'd served eitht years in the Army with four deployments between Iraq and Afghanistand and been twice wounded.  Does he have to be interested in sports too?  I wish a real man didn't have to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.  I wish "real men" didn't wage wars that are the ultimate crime according to the Geneva Accords.

I want to write to Javier about Pope Francis and "Why homeowners aren't cashing in" because after April he'll be selling the house in Millbrae.

I want to tell Jonathan about the Middlemarch opera Joshua Kosman has written up twice, focusig on Dorothea Brooke and the demise of her "utopian dreams for the re-engineering of society."  I don't like opera, but I'm tempted to listen, as I did to the 25 CDs of George Elliot's novel before a strand of it was made into an opera.

I'll send Linda Michael Bauer's review of Mourad Lahlou's new restaurant, named Mourad, because she once worked with him on some committee in Marin, when he had the Ksbah there or was abotu to begin it in 1996.  The review is one that oozes wishing the new restaurant was better and wanting to be both honest and supportive--very different from the critic in Chef--or the drama critic in Birdman.

Then there's "Ravages of mystery goo:  Resources target only oil, fuel spils" and the bill by two senataors to offer financial support to other gooiness.

Greece "Debt bail out revives claims from Nazi era" when, in 1943, thousands of Jews had to pay for their own transport to Poland's death camps.

Richard III has been given the burial he was denied 530 years ago after his bones were found in 2012 under a parking lot and long after he, the last Plantagenet King, was killed in battle by Hnery Turdo in 1485.  I think of our Shakespeare group.

The Prime minister who led Singapore ito the Modern Age, Lee Kuan Yew, made me wonder about the caning in that country and the law against chewing gum.  If that were Afghanistan, where we need to present a de-humanizing picture of the people, it would be attributed to the extremisim of  the Taliban.

And the sea all at Ocean Beach is being mended.

Explaining the Loss of the Civic Center to Those Who Care

(Because I can't access my San Francisco CCSF Connection blog!)

I'm privileged to have an ongoing correspondence with former City College students who have become friends over the years.  I call us the Anminiroti for Annie in France, Minako in Japan, Nicole in the USA, Rosa in Spain, and me, Tina, right here and trying to explain what's happening at City College, a school that meant and still means a lot to these  former students in other parts of the world. 

Back in the year 2000 we found out that Annie, who always dressed like a Parisian model, got her clothes not in Paris Boutiques but at  the Good Will Thrift Shop in San Francisco, so I related the report of the severed body parts found at Good Will South of Market, suggesting that this served as a metaphor for the plight of the Civic Center Campus.   This was  after Civic Center Teachers were told on a Friday afternoon, January 9, that they would not be teaching the following Monday because their school  was closing for earthquake retrofitting.  The students didn't learn about this until Monday, January 12, when they showed up for the classes scheduled there and  were met by teachers trying to explain the situation.  At first these students, who are learning English and need very clear explanations, were told that the classes would be held at 33 Gough,  where the administrative offices of City College are located.  That turned out not to be the case.  Instead the following month they were sent to the Chinatown/NorthBeach and Mission centers. 

The Anminiroti are more privileged than many, but four of the five are teachers  and very concerned about the widening gap between the haves and have-nots.  As Heather Knight reported last summer, citing a report from the Human Services Agency, San Francisco now compares to Rwanda in terms of the disparity in incomes.   The Tenderloin is an area NOT made up of the most privileged in that spectram. 

Now Steve Rubinstein is reporting on the missing prosthetic limbs!  The man whose prosthetic leg was found  turned out to be a victim of thieves pushing his  wheelchair to an area where they could rob him of everything he had of value.  They later tossed his prosthetic leg. 

Do you see what I mean by metaphoric?

(Actually, the first word that came to my mind was metamorphic, and that might work too.)

I'm not antagonistic towards administrators.  .  In fact, I've always felt sorry for them  and wouldn't take their job no matter how high the pay.  But I feel agony-bordering-on-antagonism over this closure of the Civic Center Campus and the way it was handled, so only by creating a new word can I express how I feel:  Very agonistic  

 Since the accreditation of City College was threatened by the ACCJC in 2012, I've attended a lot of rallies and board meetings, but one that stands out in my mind is the one in October 2012 that went on until 1:30 in the morning.  Faculty and staff had to wait until midnight to be heard, and then they were told they would have one minute each to speak. 

            http://fog.ccsf.edu/~mantonic/HTMLPractice/BOT_Excerpts_102512_3.html