weekend of sick dog, Maryland, movie

[fflo]

Dog barfed today, and her other-end digestive troubles continue, off and on.  Might take her to the vet soon if she doesn't get over it on her own, quick.  Meanwhile I keep an especially vigilant eye on what she's up to (eating).

Yesterday I was behind a car with a style of Maryland license plate I hadn't seen before:

When I lived in Kansas I pretty much never saw a Maryland plate.  Same with Georgia.  I rarely saw one on either of the big contiguous-48 drive-abouts I did, either, for that matter, once I was two or three states away from home.  Made me think Marylanders never go much of anywhere, at least with their cars.  But Ann Arbor has some Marylanders in it.  I probably see the car of one every few months, at least.  When I do, I start singing a cheesy promotional song about the state from back when I lived there:  "Maryland you are/Beautiful, you are/Maryland, you're taking my breath away....."  Bad song.  But whatcha gonna do.

I'm probably from Kansas, if I'm from somewhere, but I feel like I'm from Maryland.  I lived there from age 10 to age 35 or 37 or something.  I lived in it in different parts and different ways.  I was first sorta on my own there.  It's strange for me to think how far away that world is to me, and how gone.  I was thinking about that a lot yesterday.

At night I saw Lady Bird, which was good.  I'd heard it's a fresh version of a not-fresh genre, the coming-of-age film, but it's a bigger film than a slice-of-transition niche thing like that.  And it has heart.  Plus it's well made.  It does film things well, and efficiently without skimping or being choppy.  There were a lotta moments I liked, but maybe my favorite was a Maryland reminder it offered me.   (Small spoiler follows; just skip the rest of this paragraph to skip it.)  Mom sez to daughter at emotional moment in car:  wanna do our favorite Sunday thing?  Daughter sez yes and we get ready to be shown what that thing is.  Cut to a brief sequence of shots of them at open houses for houses they could never afford.  Once in the '80s my mother visited me in Baltimore, and---her idea---we spontano-dropped-into an open house for a $450,000 house, which is probably worth twice or thrice that now, in Roland Park.  This was unlike my mother in more than one way.  And I loved it.  I remember her asking the real estate person, as we stood on some big smooth wood floor, "Full basement?"  Yes, it had a full basement.  Then mom said something about good, she likes a full basement, which nearly cracked me up, with her full basement *maybe* the square footage of the kitchen we were in.

One thing the Lady Bird character does that I would like to do better:  she experiences her experiences and then experiences her next experiences.  I mean, I do that, of course, but she does it better.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I'll probably get Ladybird from the library when it's out on DVD, so I didn't read your spoiler.

Did you hear that NPR story about the generic cheesy promotional song? Same tune, and almost identical lyrics for something like 50 cities (and maybe states) around North America.

And now I'm earwormed with an old cheesy promotional song for Kalamazoo ("yes there really is a Kalamazoo") that included a pair of lines that rhymed "you" with "you," and another cheesy promotional song for Michigan ("say yes to Michigan"). I find myself wondering how many cheesy promotional songs used *those* same melodies.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, I did hear that NPR story. Funny.