Life...

I got a bit creative this morning... was at work with nothing to do... well nothing to do once I had put the car seat in the car. Yep it's all in place now, even the car seat, permanently in the car!

anyway in my spare time and vaguely creative mood, i decided I would write a song, here's the effort:

Life.

(Ch) Life – it’s a one way street
You’ve got to: give, love, pray, dance, run,
Fly, jump, sleep, eat, dream, become
What you want to be
What you were meant to be
Because life, is a one way street

A young girl, cries out for her milk
She toddles around, takes in the world,
If mum and dad could give her,
All the love she needs to feed her
She’ll dance across this stage of life,
But there’s no encore (Get it right!) (CH)

A boy of 10, with a leaden heart:
Work or play? what to say?
Promise to take, or break?
Or make the same old sorry mistake?
Decides on one – will never be there again
As his character takes shape his soul starts to sing

Br: With a lighter heart
And a stronger beat
With a greater rhythm
Down a one-way street (Ch)

An old man with a shovel in his hand,
Pushes it into the dirt, looks down upon his life’s complete work
This woman raised his family,
Right here at his side
And as he throws the dirt upon the grave
A tear escapes from the corner of his eye (he knows) (Ch)

Movies anyone?

Ok, on a slightly less serious note now...

Mez and I arrived in Nottingham in March 06 knowing almost no-one. Actually there wasn't an almost about it, we didn't know anyone at all. So we decided to go see a movie on one of our first nights here... managed to find a central cty cinema complex and balked at the price (about 5-6 quid each), but then noticed you could get unlimited cards - for 11 quid a month, which then gave you unlimited access to movies for the month. Being movie likers, we signed ourselves up and have been regulars at the cinema for just over a year now... I've been judiciously saving the wee tag things to write a blog when we cancelled the cards (which we are about to do due to our impending arrival - cant take a newborn to the movies really).

Overall it has been a positive experience, we've seen loads of good movies, but having unlimited access means we've sometimes seen things we wouldn't have paid to see (and regretted the couple of hours of wasted life spent in the cinema)... anyway, below is our tally for the year:
(not necessarily in order of when we saw them, though the later ones are)...
V is for Vendetta
Eight Below
Inside Man
Ige Age 2
Tristan + Isolde
Junebug
Failure to Launch
Mission Impossible (II or III - whichever was last released!)
Take the Lead
She's The Man
X-Men - the last stand
Fanaa - Destroyed in Love
Secuestro Express
Poseidon
The Wild
Thank you for smoking
An Unfinished Life
My Super Ex-Girlfriend
The Fast and The Furious (Tokyo Drift)
An Inconvenient Truth
Fearless
The Break Up
Pirates of The Carribean - Dead Man's Chest
The Lakehouse
Over The Hedge
Prime
Volver
Cars
Miami Vice
The Da Vinci Code
The Devil Wears Prada
You, Me & Dupree
The Guardian
Children Of Men
Little Miss Sunshine
The Departed
Click
The History Boys
The Last King Of Scotland
Casino Royale
The Holiday
Happy Feet
De Ja Vu
The Last Kiss
Flags Of My Fathers
Letters From Iwo Jima
Apocalypto
It's a Boy Girl thing
Rocky Balboa
Bobby
Blood Diamond
Epic movie
Because I Said So
Curse of the Golden Flower
Amazing Grace
Fracture
The Painted Veil
Zodiac
Pirates Of The Carribean - At Worlds End
Weding Daze
Oceans 13

Grand total of 61 movies - would have cost us 366 pounds each, rather than the 154 each we've actually paid, so I consider that a win for us.

So The Meznmo Film awards for the past 12 months are as follows:
Best Comedy: probably Prime. Cos it had Uma in it. I like Uma.
Best Action Film: A tough category between Casino Royale, Blood Diamond and the Departed... I'd go for Casino Royale though.
Best Fighting Film: Rocky Balboa (The Asian Ones had no story line)
Coolest idea: V is for Vendetta
Best Chick Flick: Failure to Launch
Biggest Impact: An Inconvenient Truth (I think loads of people other than us were impacted by this film)
Best Kids Film: tough one again, between Happy Feet, Ice Age 2 and Cars, will have to go with Happy Feet though

Worst Film: Children Of Men (a Definate waste of a couple of hours of my life)
Biggest Let Down: The Da Vinci Code (what was all the fuss about?)
Most Depressing: The Last King Of Scotland (man Idi Amin aka the butcher of Uganda, was an Arse - the worst side of human nature painfully displayed)

Loads of great entertainment though. We might take a rest from the movies for a while though - fair enough I reckon having averaged more than one a week for the last year!

Stay Cool whatever you're up to,
Ryan

Light and Darkness...

A couple of thoughts this evening.

I think people in general have a great sense of Justice... Look at some of the key TV shows - medical drama's where more often than not, people get better, miracle cures on ER and House, a bad lawyers learning moral lessons and doing the right thing on Boston Legal and Shark, People banding together to support each other in Lost, Police catching the bad guys on CSI, NCIS and Sleeper cell, Keifer Sutherland saving the world in 24, I could go on, But you get the idea, and no i don't watch all those shows... just some of them.

So my original thought was why is it that all of these shows focus a lot on the bad side of humanity... but then I realised that though that is part of the allure that makes shows like that watchable (entertaining), the reason people watch again and again is because at the end of the episodes, the right things happen (most of the time) and this satisifies our sense of justice. Not many people want the bad guy to get away with it, or the sick man to die. Interesting.

So then I was thinking about the metaphor of light and darkness... light presumably being metaphorical for all things good, and there are emotions that go with that there too - happiness, peace, love, a lightness, joy even. Darkness comes to mean all that is bad etc with associated emotions of despair, fear, hatred, and confusion.

And through my mind came a couple of things, one a story i remember a guy telling once. He opened his closet to get something out and stopped dead in his tracks. open door, close door, open door, close door, etc etc. What he noticed was that darkness never came out and overtook the light, the light always overtook the darkness. This may sound simplistic, or even trivial, but applied to that metaphor it becomes more striking.

Interestingly also for physics geeks, darkness is not really anything at all, simply an absence of light, one could apply such logic also to the metaphor of earlier...

So my real thought, perhaps vaguely original, was on wandering up the stairs to bed the other night... it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps we, perhaps I, have a unhealthy obsession with light. (I turned out the light) And i realised, that when the lights aren't on it's only initially that I fail to see, then my eyes adjust. That clever creator gave us rods as well as cones, (bits in your eyes that process light) so we can see even with the tiniest fraction of light... And sometimes when the lights go out we see things we havent before, perhaps it's things within ourselves, perhaps its things (literal things) that stand out all the more when there isn't light flooding them and bombarding our senses with a million and one images. Darkness is not necessarily to be feared but perhaps can sometimes be embraced and experienced for what it is, and what it shows us.

Ah if only I could do justice to all the thoughts that pass between my ears!