I am Henry VIII I am

I just finished watching The Tudors series on Showtime, the first season. My overall impression improved with each episode.

In the beginning my opinion was so-so. The first few shows seemed to rely heavily on near-pornographic sex scenes and young, beautiful, tan??? actors with plucked eyebrows and closely cropped facial hair. I thought it a cheap bone to throw given how ridiculously interesting and dramatic the subject matter was. Henry VIII was a magnificent clusterfuck; the court life alone was riveting, even without all the beheadings.

I stayed with the series because I was gripped by history. I even went online and read up on the Tudors to better understand it all. I vaguely remember my teachers trying to tell me about this reign in history class, but it was taught with such dry boringosity (today's word! AAAHHHHHHHHH!!! *ring bells* *lights flicker*) that I feel rather effing cheated that I didn't better absorb this story.

Actually, once Henry's whorebag sister Mary Rose died, with her lip injections and Hollywood Tan, the series really picked up. It's like the writers came off their make it sexy and flashy just to get past the first five episodes so we secure funding and then can make it a real work of art contract. Damn, it got enjoyable.

The supporting actors were fantastic. They more than made up for the leading man and lady's ridiculous affected English accents. And if either of them are native Brits, their speech coach needs to ease off the hallucinogenics.

Overall, the entire series was well acted except for my questionable criticisms on the characters of Henry and Anne Boleyn. I thought the actor Henry Cavill (Duke of Suffolk) would have made a better Henry VIII, actually. He was more suited to the role. He is one I'll be watching and following, for sure. Despite being burdened with the most beautiful male faces I have beheld in this life time, Henry's actually a damnably good actor, dramatic, funny, and easy going, and made the evolvement of his role's character actually believable.

Ohhhh, Henryyyy.....


















Wait here's another one...























oh just one more...........





What was I talking about again?

Oh right. The Tudors. The one artistic aspect I don't quite understand is how in the first few episodes the men have these shorn heads like they stepped off a college Lacrosse bus for a state championship game. With each progressive episode, their hair grew out as both the characters and the writing matured on the show.

By the end, the writing had finally burned up its adolescent buzz of soaring CGI castles, opulent excesses of wardrobe and jewelry, and overacting-for-the-pilot that brought a bit too much 21st century into the 16th century background. The writing turned lean, mature, dramatic, with well timed reaction shots and the elimination of some of the more frivolous dialogue that made me think an "O no you DIDN'T!" was constantly about to be sprung.

I'm glad the season burned off the excess glitz and let the story come alive by itself. The second to last episode with the charges of high treason, the torture, and the executions was expertly done. I thought that was by far the best written, acted, directed and episode of the season. Even better than Anne's death - which I lamented in the beginning of the season, and was rooting for by the end :)

I highly recommend this series. And can't wait for next year ;)

Travel Writing

I've been writing again, even snippets here and there if I'm traveling or just busy. And busy I am, with an impending move into a new apartment and impending hellacious travel schedule. But all things will settle with the cool hands of autumn.

I was poking through my Treo recently and found a few descriptive notes I jotted down in various airports. People watching has become a fun new habit while I'm by myself. Boy, do I enjoy sitting alone with my iPod and watching people walk around, snipe at each other, hug, kiss, avoid, look awkward, stuff bad food in their mouth, look rumpled and exhausted, losing their patience, holding on to their patience. I get to be a participating observer. You'd think with my Irish and Italian blood I'd be aggravated and fuming all the time at the long bouts of waiting, but I seem to find it interesting.

While I'm watching this life happen around me, the writer in me is stimulated, waking up from her daytime sleep. I start seeing phrases forming around people as they breathe in and out, as they exist in front of me. My palms itch to curve over a keyboard, to stare at a blank screen of unwritten possibility...so in the event I am unable to drag out the laptop, I write the following tidbits on my Treo notepad:

The smell of the jetway reminds me of the gasoline-and-generator smell of crude, small-town carnivals.

The man's deep-set eyes are framed by querying eyebrows, drawn perpetually together and upwards as if earnestly perplexed and dismayed. He looks like a puppy hearing "No" for the second time.

This old guy is shuffling along the aisle, stooped and genial. His thin neck pokes out of his humped collar like a happy, but tickled, geratric turtle. His wife is taller than he by a good half a foot, all elegant angles and silver grace. They must be foreign, they look way too contented for the States. (turns out they were German)

I have no clue what I'm going to do with these, but I like the exercise of describing people.

Impatience

According to Eckhart Tolle, impatience is the hallmark of unhappiness. Unhappiness, of course, is the root of addictive behavior. If you were happy, why on earth would you stick needles in your arms, eat until you hurt, spend until you were not only broke but behind on rent? No happy people need that; they are genetically averse to such self-loathing.

There is a super morbidly obese woman in my office who I think of every time I hear the word Impatient. She is a walking punctuation mark to Tolle's assertion. I used to hate her. Today, I understand her.

I never hated Janice (let's call her Janice) because she was fat, although fat was not adequate a word to describe her. Much like the waking world of chairs, restaurant booths, airplane seatbelts, "fat" does not fit her. She is obese. Soberingly obese. Obese enough to halt laughter in people's throats. Obese enough to make even a mean kid feel real concern at the immediate threat to her health, not to mention her quality of life. I wince internally when I am near her.

I couldn't hate her for being in such a sorry state.

I hated her because of her impatience with everyone. Even herself. Always hiding. Always glossing over. Always moving too damn fast.

As if knowing her appearance illicits sympathy and pity, Janice's personality has blossomed sickly into a self-preserving tornado of charisma that destroys, obfuscates, confuses and tricks anyone or any situation that crosses her path. Nobody knows what she is really like, what she is really doing. The ranges of opinions on her character are staggering from a group of such educated people. But it's the same self-preserving tornado that whipped up the eating frenzy and protected the real Janice in layers of hardened, packed adipose. It is a survival mechanism deep inside her that knows that bleach will clean anything. It will also kill every living thing it comes into contact with. It reminds me of the cloud of dust around Pigpen's character; hers is a miasma of double talk, half truths, and lies worthy of any 1980's Enron trader.

Oh, how I hated her personality.

Hate, though, is a wasteful emotion. It is not productive unless you are my apartment, in which case, I turn to cleaning furiously. It's not a meditative cleaning, it's combative with jagged energy, occasionally relieved by my remembering to unclench my jaw. It was threatening to overtake me as I found myself unclenching my jaw during the work day, specifically when she was in the office.

Sensing the impending destruction of my inner harmony and organ function, I managed - by the grace of The Spaghetti Monster - to get out from her dictatorship, where she could no longer change my business strategy on a whim, forcing a "do over" every three months in our sales organization. She could no longer send me out as a cliche, food-obsessed overweight person, buy birthday cakes for the "office" or bring back FOR her, her lunch. And now that I'm out of the center of the storm, I have nothing but pity for her.

She is impatient in all matters of business, cagey as a subordinate and unfortunately for her subordinates, awarded with an upper management position that leaves roughly twenty people victim to whatever side of the ship she’s leaning towards, causing a nervous, unsure, awkward stampede from her underlings. She avoids process. She argues. She maneuvers, manipulates, changes her mind every thirty seconds, and denies whatever crazy law she’d put into place a week before. There’s a saying around here: Don’t like what Janice is suggesting? Wait a week. She’ll forget.

She drew me into her office and asked me all about the Band. She compliments me often, making me cringe back inside with the weird light in her eye that is anything but happy for my success. She found a doctor insane enough to perform the surgery given her weight, stints in her heart, blood thinning medication, and two months post-chemotherapeutic condition. When she heard she would have to attend two information/group sessions, it blew apart.

“I’m not doing that,” she said, aggravated, flapping her hands dismissively. They reminded me of skittish doves. “I’m too busy.”

Too busy to save her own life.

She’s smoking again.

Janice is overwhelmingly unhappy. I could wish the Lap Band on her, I could wish the Bypass on her, I could even wish Death on her, anything to relieve her throbbing open-woundedness that reminds me so excruciatingly of me, five years ago. But since I've actually attempted to become more aware of the world, the righteous anger has fluttered down from the air. She's not a monster. She's not tragic or misunderstood, either.

She is only asleep.

She is closing her eyes and turning away, building her stories, repeating them to herself until she almost believes it's not as bad as it really is. Oh, but it is. Two heart attacks, one breast cancer, and ongoing pizza/cheese fries/sneaking cigarettes later, her time is ticking at best.

This is the end of the movie for her. Will she keep hiding? Will she take responsibility? Will she save her self as the timer ticks down to zero?

I just don't know. I think she's going to be one of the ones that has to come back and do it all over again.

Wake up, dammit. It's time to get up.