I don't like many modern love stories, but I do like the old ones. I watched Sabrina tonight and took pause at this conversation between the Larabee brothers:

But you've got all the money in the world!

What's money got to do with it? If making money were all there was to business, it'd hardly be worthwhile going to the office. Money is a by-product.

Then what's the main objective? Power?

Bah, that's become a dirty word.

Well then, what's the urge? You're going into plastics now; what will that prove?

Prove? Nothing much. A new product has been found, something of use to the world, so a new industry moves into an undeveloped area, factories go up, machines are brought in, harbors are dug, and you're in business. It's purely coincidental, of course, that people who never saw a dime before suddenly have a dollar, and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their teeth fixed and their faces washed.

That's so Reardon-esque that it made me swoon.

And I wonder...does the 1995 remake have the same speech? I may have to watch someday to find out.

Why do I doubt it though...

Posted by: Sarah at 04:29 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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[Cross-posted at SpouseBUZZ]

AWTM has the distinction at SpouseBUZZ, like it or not, of being our resident go-to person on reintegration. And I personally always felt fine letting her have that title, because I didn't really grok her experience. I always assumed that her discomfort with reintegration came from the fact that she had babies while her husband was gone, so they went from being just a couple to being a family. Or I thought it was because her husband came back changed. Or that they were having a hard time getting back in sync as a family when he got home. Since I had not experienced any of those things, I never fully understood AWTM's trepidation about reintegration.

But I wrote before that deployments are like snowflakes. I was talking about my soldier in that case, but I am starting to see that deployments can feel very different from the homefront too.

My husband's first deployment was harder on him than this one has been: tougher mission, less amenities, more danger, longer deployment time. He was out in the thick of things and had some difficult experiences. During that deployment, my life was relatively straightforward. Nothing big happened to me that year, so our focus was on my husband and how he would react coming home.

This time around has been the reverse. My husband's job is easier -- safer, shorter, and relatively cushy -- but my life has been tumultuous. I have gone through some pretty heavy emotional growth in the past eight months. And all of a sudden, we're single digit midgets...and I am starting to think that this reintegration will play out differently.

AWTM called me the other day and asked me how I was doing. I didn't even fully realize that I was so apprehensive until she began to drag it out of me. And then she told me something that I know will be part of my vocabulary for the rest of my life. She told me about an interview with Mike Myers in which he talks about how hard it was to lose his father:

I've always felt I was given these emotional casino chips which had no value until I went home and told my dad about things. My father was like my spiritual cash window. I would tell him about stuff, just to hear his reaction.

AWTM said that she and I and people like us need a "spiritual cash window." We need someone to vent to, to rehash every detail of our day with, to take note of every ebb and flow of our emotional cycle. We need someone to cash our chips in to. And for both of us, that person is our husband. So when our husbands are gone, we stockpile our emotional casino chips.

I seem to have a lot of emotional chips from this deployment.

I have started to realize this past week that I am afraid of overwhelming my husband when he gets home. I am afraid that when he walks in that door, I am going to unload on him like a firehose. I'm afraid I won't be able to pace myself...because I have over seven months of chips in my hands that I am going to dump on him at once.

And I've realized that I am also sad that he hasn't been here for me to cash my chips in to on a daily basis. He hasn't seen me grow moment by moment. He is going to get the insane recap version at the end, where I have to explain every detail of everything that has happened to me lately.

And how do you do that? How do you explain what you were feeling six months ago and still make it relevant? How do you tell someone that, while you are no longer feeling stressed about X, Y, or Z, you used to feel stressed about it and therefore would still like to cash it in?

Poor husband.

My husband does not have emotional casino chips. The last time he was gone, the majority of the fighting and danger he faced happened at the beginning of his deployment. By the time he got home eight months later, that was old news to him. That was over and done with. He didn't need to cash it in. And I remember feeling a tad hurt that he didn't need to do this, like what did he need me for if I wasn't his spiritual cash window? I didn't understand how he could've had these enormous life experiences -- to include watching a man die -- and not need to cash it in.

I just never knew how to put that feeling into words.

I have always known I am this kind of person, but it took AWTM acknowledging it and giving it a name for me to realize how important it is to me and how hesitant I feel about our reintegration this time around.

Because, boy, do I have chips that need cashing.

And all of a sudden, I understood what AWTM has been talking about for years. It clicked for me, and I realized that it wasn't just having her husband underfoot in the house, or that he had a daughter he had never met, or that he might be jumpy or less patient. It was that she held these chips too and didn't know how to cash them in.

I didn't realize that she was this type of person too, and I think we both felt some relief talking about it on the phone and realizing that we're not the only one who holds these emotional chips.

Heck, Mike Myers does too. Maybe he should read SpouseBUZZ...

Posted by: Sarah at 02:25 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Wow.
What Girls Want: A series of vampire novels illuminates the complexities of female adolescent desire

This almost makes me want to read Twilight. Almost.
It also makes me realize why I can't: I am no longer thirteen.

I have been thinking about being thirteen a lot lately.

I have been thinking about sitting on the sofa with a boy watching Pink Floyd's The Wall and thinking that after the movie was over, I would tell him I love him. And I did. And he smiled.

Three years later, he was dead. And I replay that night in my head, the delicious memory of feeling so grown-up and alive.

And that love, that love I felt for those illustrious three, it is nothing like the love I have for my husband. It was impetuous and consuming. It spawned poetry and diary entries. That was love with my heart. I am glad I experienced it; I am also glad I don't experience it any longer. It is an exhausting love.

But I have been thinking about it a lot lately and feeling nostalgic. That article gave me some insight into why.

And now I understand the Twilight craze.

Posted by: Sarah at 10:32 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 I read all four Twilight books and saw the movie. You've met my #2 kid - I'm sure you can figure out why there was an interest in those in my house! I pretend the series stopped at book 3, and the movie is over 2 hours of horrific teen angst I'll never get back. Edward's (the main vampire character) eyebrows are truly so horrific and distracting that I couldn't so much as eat popcorn. Anyway, with all honesty I can say that lately teen fiction has been more interesting and refreshing than adult fiction has been. I have to read the stuff before my kids do (yes, I have set some books off limits until they are older) - and although the words in some of the books are smaller and don't use as many words from the SAT list, the plots are truly entertaining and unique on some of them. SOME of them. Sarah, I can seriously say you'd probably really like the Lemony Snicket books. Even AFG - reader of nothing but books about war and weapons and fighting of some sort - liked the Lemony Snicket books.

Posted by: airforcewife at December 04, 2008 03:58 PM (Fb2PC)

2 I dunno - I might prefer the pre-teen angst to the overdone s-e-x in the adult vampire stories (think Anita Blake novels). And reading to determine if a book was appropriate for my nephew led me to absorb the whole Harry Potter series with relish. However, I have no desire to ever read another bodice-ripping Harlequin type romance. Is that weird?

Posted by: Barb at December 04, 2008 04:32 PM (p+dnl)

3 You don't have to be thirteen to read Twilight. I agree with the above comment though- I also pretend that book 3 is the end of the series, lol.

Posted by: Kasey at December 12, 2008 08:25 AM (tttDj)

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Nothing to do but cut and run, huh? What else? What about the old American social custom of self-defense? If the police don't defend us, maybe we ought to do it ourselves.
We're not pioneers anymore, Dad.
What are we, Jack?
What do you mean?
I mean, if we're not pioneers, what have we become? What do you call people who, when they're faced with a condition of fear, do nothing about it, they just run and hide?
Civilized?
No.

I watched Death Wish tonight. This scene reminded me of something I read yesterday about Mumbai:

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."

If being civilized means that we let barbarians destroy everything we hold sacred, then count me out.

The last time I wrote about vigilantism, Amritas left this comment:

Is there a correlation between vigilante fantasy entertainment and an increasingly criminal-coddling society? (The rise of the Death Wish movies after the 60s might indicate that the answer is yes.) I don't think there was anything 'cool' about frontier justice 'back in the day'; it was a harsh fact of life. But nowadays such justice has turned into escapism and the reality is that people want to deny responsibility.

How much easier things would be if a Batman would come along and take care of the War on Terror for us. If someone else could take care of the barbarians at the gates. If someone else could go and fight the dragons.

If we could sit and watch from the sidelines while someone else polices the world.

But thank heavens there are some people in this world who are not sidelines people. From the imdb page on Death Wish:

After finishing The Stone Killer (1973), Charles Bronson and Michael Winner wanted to make another film together, and were discussing further projects. "What do we do next?" asked Bronson. "The best script I've got is 'Death Wish'. It's about a man whose wife and daughter are mugged and he goes out and shoots muggers," said Winner. "I'd like to do that," Bronson said. "The film?" asked Winner. Bronson replied, "No . . . shoot muggers."

Posted by: Sarah at 03:30 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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1 Call me shallow, silly, and uncouth, but I admit to being terribly disappointed that the "world police" link didn't take me to a video clip from Team America, preferably one in which part of France explodes. However, there were lots of good thoughts here (with links to more), so I will get over it. Sig

Posted by: Sig at December 01, 2008 06:47 PM (ikRCN)

2 "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." but more importantly, "an armed society is a polite society." Would an attack like this be possible in the United States? In every large metro area, handguns are almost universally outlawed. Even as a holder of a CCW permit in PA, I cannot Carry in Philadelphia. So the answer, could it happen here, is "Hell, I'm surprised it hasn't... yet."

Posted by: Chuck Z at December 01, 2008 07:07 PM (q4psF)

3 The title makes me wonder if the West has a death wish. Certainly not all of it does. Sarah and her readers are on the side of life. But I'm not so sure about a lot of others ... Chuck Z, I'm surprised Mumbai-type attacks haven't happened here either. Even if Philadelphians and other big city dwellers were armed, our doors are still wide open. And I wonder if guns really deter jihadis who are willing to die. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for civilians shooting jihadis. I think guns do deter cowardly criminals. And I'm not afraid of CCW permit holders. As Toren wrote, ... statistics from the Department of Justice and the FBI show that concealed carry permit holders nationwide are almost 50% less likely to kill someone. Sarah wrote: If being civilized means that we let barbarians destroy everything we hold sacred, then count me out. This reminds me of something I just read yesterday: Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil? - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged Why do leftists defend reactionary jihadis who oppose feminism and gay rights - who should be "evil" in their eyes? Is it because they believe in the "anti-morality" that Rand described? Thanks to Sarah for quoting me. The hunger for vigilante fantasies persists, judging from the recent Punisher: War Zone movie ads on TV. The Punisher was a minor comic book character in 1973 who became a Marvel superstar a decade later, in the age of Bernhard Goetz: a modernized, gun-toting, maskless Batman. It occurred to me tonight that many Batman fans are probably - and ironically pro-gun control and left-wing. They dream of a vigilante but they prefer the State in real life. Professional comics writer James Hudnall pointed out that "a lot of people in comics" are leftists. In my experience, that includes a lot of creators as well as fans. Will they miss Bruce Wayne after he "dies"? (Pointless "killings" followed by predictable resurrections are commonplace in modern antiheroic American comic books.)

Posted by: Amritas at December 01, 2008 09:19 PM (zc9j7)

4 And, of course, the guns that are being railed against in the gun control lobby as causing crime and mayhem are generally illegally gotten to start with. So, like, further laws are going to affect them, right? Sheesh. And it's not just guns, either. If a criminal breaks into your house and your dog bites the ever-lovin' crap out of them. Even damages them severely for their illegal foray into your house... You lose your dog. They will put your dog to sleep for protecting your house against a criminal. I have to check into the rules everywhere we go because Ike is banned and subject to special penalties for being "vicious." But the penalties are truly ridiculous for all dogs. And that is for them defending their home. Somewhere along the way, society got the idea that life is supposed to be "safe" when life has never been "safe". So those who follow the rules get victimized by those who would never follow the rules to begin with.

Posted by: airforcewife at December 02, 2008 04:30 AM (Fb2PC)

5 What WOULD we do? We have guns in our house, most are locked tightly in a safe, but the air pellet gun to scare the squirrels and wild hogs that come through are at hand. Would they scare an intruder? I don't know. Would we have time to get the 22, again I don't know. As for vigilantes, is does seem necessary sometimes, but there is a fine line between vigilantism and anarchy. It is a definable line, but thin. I do not feel as unsafe as I did last week. We went to Mexico for the holiday weekend. My son and his wife are cavers, they go there all the time. They go in through a safe little town, stay on the back roads mainly and stay in small, extremely friendly towns and villages. We saw NO violence, no unfriendly gangs of teenage boys, or otherwise indications of any anger directed towards us or anyone else. We did visit the larger city of Saltillo, it is very crowded and we went through some parts that looked very different, but everyone was friendly. And then I come home and read of massacres in Tiajuana. If you stay away from the druglord parts of the border it seems safe. One reason I feel safer is we missed what surely must have been the round the clock coverage of Mumbai, it was on the Mexican news but we watched that only briefly. And if makes me wonder if round the clock coverage doesn't feed violence.

Posted by: Ruth H at December 02, 2008 04:56 AM (4eLhB)

6 airforcewife, And, of course, the guns that are being railed against in the gun control lobby as causing crime and mayhem are generally illegally gotten to start with. So, like, further laws are going to affect them, right? I don't think that's the real purpose of gun control laws. Our society is concerned with appearances. Get (not "earn") that A, even if you have to cheat. Promote peace through disarming the law-abiding. The only consequence that "matters" is looking like a saint ... but by whose standard? Other consequences don't matter to the anointed who live in gated communities. They claim to be egalitarian but they think "lesser" people who can't afford their sheltered existence "deserve" what happens to them. Dogs die for defending their homes? Madness! I thought I've heard about something similar in the UK, but I couldn't quickly Google any examples. So those who follow the rules get victimized by those who would never follow the rules to begin with. That sadly sums up our situation.

Posted by: kevin at December 02, 2008 07:50 AM (+nV09)

7 Mu.nu hates me. Amritas' comment reminded me of another vigilante-style film that came out recently, and one that I particularly liked: Iron Man. Kevin is right about the purpose of gun control laws. It's all about politicians seeming to be doing something about gun violence, even if the proposed ban would likely increase the chance of law-abiding citizens to be injured or killed due to their inability to protect themselves from those who carry guns illegally. Seattle had an incident this last spring where a gun discharged in its ankle holster during a scuffle at a music festival. The owner had a permit, but should not have (previous history of mental instability and drug addiction), and now the mayor is using the incident, as well as a couple of more recent gang shootings, to try and pass a gun "rule" about banning all guns (even with a CC permit) on city property. The proposed rule has been declared illegal because it would preempt state law regarding gun regulation, but the mayor is trying to push it through anyway. The hearing is being held this month. Oddly enough, it's the LA Times that has the best and most thorough story, rather than any of the local papers.

Posted by: Leofwende at December 02, 2008 09:05 AM (jAos7)

8 Amritas -- This is the same philosophy that made Obama say that he supported raising the capital gains tax despite the evidence that shows that the government will take in less revenue because it's an issue of "fairness." It's about looking like he's being fair, at to detriment of everyone.

Posted by: Sarah at December 02, 2008 09:32 AM (TWet1)

9 RuthH, I don't think 24 hour news coverage feeds violence, it just makes us feel less safe. And the less safe we feel, the more we demand that "Someone must do something!" And usually that something is more laws that criminals won't follow anyway but that keep law abiding citizens from protecting themselves. There is a thin line between vigilantism and anarchy, sure. But why is protecting yourself vigilantism? Vigilantism is pro-active. Protecting yourself is defensive. I've had tough looking guys cross the street when I'm out walking my dog (you know, the dog that Sarah's Charlie physically maimed during a visit?) because he LOOKS mean. And I do know for a fact that he can be mean. But he won't attack unless someone is threatening me or our home. That is not vigilantism, that is defense.

Posted by: airforcewife at December 02, 2008 11:15 AM (Fb2PC)

10 Leofwende, mu.nu hates me too. Join the club. It seems kevin has gone sane for once. Thanks for the Seattle anecdote. One benefit of the Internet is the ability to learn about what's going on beyond the local and national level through the MSM filter. the mayor is trying to push it through anyway What a moral man, putting principle before the law. The criminals who will remain armed will be so grateful. airforcewife, Thanks for explaining how media hysteria fuels the expansion of state power. It doesn't help that misfortune is profitable. I confess, I ignored TV news for years until 9/11 had me glued for a week. This principle also applies on a less epic scale. A single murder can be dragged out seemingly ad infinitum while other more important news is ignored. Is such coverage really a public service, or is it sensationalism? Is relentless negativity driving the public away from the MSM, or is the rise of the Internet more relevant than televised content? Vigilantism is pro-active. Protecting yourself is defensive. I.e., reactive. I won't confuse your dog with a lynch mob. you know, the dog that Sarah's Charlie physically maimed during a visit? Now you've got me scared of Charlie!

Posted by: Amritas at December 02, 2008 03:31 PM (zc9j7)

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