Excellence #1: Tilda Swinton

I'm starting a new series about excellent people, places, ideas, things, and other nouns deserving of that adjective. So, to kick it off: Tilda Swinton is an excellent human being. (That's me with her the other week--thanks to Photoshop my privacy freakitude is protected by the overlay of me-as-maiko from last June in Kyoto).

Tilda Swinton is 5'11", and she was wearing interesting caramel-colored, elfishly-pointed boots with multi-hued, very sculptural wooden stack heels at least three inches high. She had to crouch down to put her arm around me (which she did spontaneously--I didn't ask her to--out of innate human warmth). The woman is statuesque, and/or I'm exceedingly small. But I'm going off on a tangent here.

Apparently two of her oldest friends live in the same city I do, which is why she was here. They put on a Q&A with her, which only maybe fifty people came to (is everyone else in this town insane?). That, plus the fact she was flanked by her friends and obviously enjoying their company, made the whole thing feel very relaxed and intimate. She just sat up there having a conversation with the audience and her friends for about an hour.

And here's why she's excellent: she's unpretentious, extremely intelligent, 100% bullshit-free, and possessed of a wonderfully understated sense of humor (e.g., of the movie Caravaggio, she said the budget was so tiny she bought her costumes herself, and "I actually spent more on costumes... for that film... than I was paid!"). She's lived an adventurous life, taking off to random foreign countries in search of people willing to contribute a few dollars (or rubles, francs, etc.) for her and her friends to make a movie, and improbably, against all odds, she's pulled it off. And when people went up after the Q&A to talk with her, she seemed not at all bothered about requests for autographs and the like. She was genuinely friendly, not in the smiley American sense, but in the sense that she actually listened to people and responded with whatever was (as far as I could tell) her genuine response. She looked at even the most ordinary strangers with a sort of mercurial, birdlike curiosity and paid attention to what they did and said. I've never met another famous person who was so there, so alive to the people and things around her.

She kept asking me why I had a Scottish accent. It took me two days to figure out the answer, which is that, having spent an hour listening to three different British accents (her and her friends) and various American ones (the audience), my syntax and inflection went British but my accent didn't quite make it: with slightly warped vowels and audible R's, it sounded vaguely Edinburgh.

I shared my theory that they should've cast her as Legolas Greenleaf, the main elf in Lord of the Rings, and she said, "Ooh, I can't talk about that, I haven't seen it. But I feel quite elfish." Yes indeed. Once you meet her, you can't help but believe in elves.

The Art of Procrastination

Activities that indicate there is something else I need to be doing:

(1) Posting on this blog. I have eight short stories to read and one to write before 10AM tomorrow morning. Doesn't "elective" mean you get to decide whether to do the work or not? No?

(2) Sending out a flurry of emails. Note to people who got lots of emails from me in the week preceding my March 14 Asian Contract Law exam: please understand, I am not just using you to procrastinate. Out of all the people I could've sent flurries of email to, I chose you.

(3) Exploring the outer reaches of neurology and alternative healthcare web sites. Temporal lobe epilepsy questions? Speculation on the link between omega-3s and ADHD? Mad cow disease conspiracy theories? Consider me your "go-to person" on these and many other fascinating issues. Today's health-related story: a team of scientists using the latest research protocols has demonstrated the truth of the hypothesis whereby if Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. CNN has more.

(4) Making minor improvements to the immediate physical environment. When I shared an apartment in France with the wonderful Beate, my German best friend of the butter-colored hair and the Ph.D. in neuroscience, we had exams during the same week, which meant we could procrastinate by giving each other makeovers. Now, if one of us mentions that we have an exam/ paper/ article/ conference to prepare for/etc., the proper response is, "Oh, you must look beautiful. And your apartment must be so clean!"

(5) Taking online personality tests. Readers have assailed me with questions... well, no they haven't... but here are the answers anyway: I am either an INFJ or an INFP, depending which version of Myers-Briggs I take and when I take it (once INFP, all other times INFJ, and INFJ makes a lot more sense). In the Star Wars version of Myers-Briggs, I am Yoda. Yes! I pity the poor Lando Calrissians. In Tolkein's Middle Earth, I am equal parts (81%) Arwen Evenstar and Eowyn, with Samwise, Gandalf, and Aragorn rounding out the top five. Rats. All those characters are cool, but I was hoping Gandalf would be #1. Maybe I should take the test again. Or... maybe I should write that story? And read those eight stories? Or maybe I should go make some more toast. Yeah. Toast.

• True story: I once took a complicated, half-hour-long online IQ test that ranked your "intelligences" (verbal, visual, mathematical, etc.) from strongest to weakest. (The fact that I bothered taking this test indicates that I must have had an exam or paper due the next day). It included "time management" as a type of intelligence, and in that, I scored as... I forget the exact number, but it boiled down to profoundly retarded. Not being satisfied with what one little online test had to say about my skills in that area, I proceeded to prove the point by spending another three hours taking online intelligence tests and looking up information on time management, which I duly bookmarked and then never looked at again.

Create Reality... Or It Will Be Created For You

Today's post is an object lesson in how malleable reality is. First, some context: in middle school gym class, I was known as "Butterball." This nickname was shouted by groups of classmates, mostly boys, as I ran laps, played kickball, or approached other people for any reason. It was meant as a comment on my chubbiness, and the chubbiness was due, I long assumed, to the fact that I reached my adult weight (110 lbs) before reaching my adult height.

Then this past Christmas, at my mom's house, I started organizing her photo albums for her. They have never been in any kind of order in my lifetime: photos lived in shoeboxes, in plastic bags, in piles stuffed between the unused pages of photo albums that we had bought with the intention, never realized, of organizing the family photo collection. But finally, at Christmas, I put the 1960s, 70s and 80s each in their own album in basically chronological order.

Can you tell what's coming next? Yes: there are hundreds of photos of me between the ages of 9 and 15, because my brother and I got crappy (i.e. suitable for rambunctious kids) little cameras for Christmas 1979, and we got a Polaroid when I was 12. I am depicted in Flashdance clothes, horrifying preppy outfits, and a comprehensive range of bad haircuts (poodle perm, anyone? Blue hair? Actually, the blue hair was kind of cool). But there is not a single photo in which I look chubby. In other words, I was not chubby in middle school. It's no surprise that people called me Butterball for no reason, since many kids that age are just evil. (I know they're only evil because they're insecure, but the fact remains that they're evil). The surprise is that for more than twenty years I believed them, despite having had mirrors and photos to tell me otherwise. This belief was like a post-hypnotic suggestion induced by peer pressure.

I now invite all my readers (maybe "both" is a better word... I doubt this blog is heavily trafficked) to discard whatever beliefs you may have that are your personal equivalent of thinking you were chubby in middle school. Those beliefs might be just plain wrong. As Tom Robbins says, "It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

Bus Portraits #2 and #3: Blind Rock Star; Tungsten Man

On the bus I take to law school, in a certain part of town, sometimes a blind man gets on who is so gorgeous you'd think he was a rock star, if it weren't for the guide dog. He looks like a cross between a young Michael Stipe and Andy LeMaster from Now It's Overhead. His labrador retriever is fat, kindly, protective. His wrap-around blind-guy shades only accentuate the rock star look. He sometimes smiles to himself in a way that suggests his thoughts are complicated and entertaining. It strikes me as so strange for someone to be gorgeous but literally unable to see the fact for himself, and unable to notice other people appreciating it.

Tungsten Man looked about eighty the last time I saw him. He's exceedingly thin, wiry, African American. He wears a nicely-cut three-piece suit and a hat (straw in summer, felt in winter); he carries a cane, and not because he needs it--he walks just fine--so I have to assume he carries it for style. He speaks in an antique southern accent like William Faulkner's (sound recording here), and the first time I saw him, he stopped me as I walked past on the bus and asked, "Excuse me, miss! Do you know who Crispus Attucks was?" Um, an African American guy, I said; something to do with the Revolutionary War, I think? "Yes!" said Tungsten Man, nodding approval. "The first man to die in that war!" He spent the bus ride asking similar questions to little ghetto kids riding with their mothers, trying to improve their knowledge of their own history, and sniffing in disapproval when they acted rude or boisterous, when they used bad English, when they failed to appreciate the importance of what he was imparting. Then he shared with me dire predictions about the growing power of China in the world economy: the key is tungsten, he explained. Through tungsten, China will control the world. This mineral is essential for dozens of critical industries: steel, alloys, and electronics galore... "And," he said, "apart from China, which has magnificent deposits of it, there is a shortage of tungsten... in this world!"