::(un)ziiiiiiip::

Stranger than Fiction, with Will Farrell, Emma Thompson and Maggie Gyllenhaal. As much as I went into this movie somewhat determined to dislike it for various relatively shallow reasons, I ended up unwillingly liking it, in the end. Which was something of an interesting sticking point, to give extra meaning to that meaningless phrase (in the end). Gyllenhaal and Thompson were in their usual fine form (and I have to wonder whether a hospital scene was darkly humorously referencing the film Wit, in regards to Thompson), and Farrell and Queen Latifah surprised the hell out of me. The cinematography and pacing were wonderful, on top of all that, accenting the fantasy-but-mundane-but-not film-world. And, it's kind of fun to narrate one's own life, for an exercise in stepping back from one's own perspective. Though, it occurs to me, hell, what if someone was reviewing my life?

I guess I better add some more nudity.

-from Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart, an interesting tangent-explanation of idea of karma:
'At the level of physical life, if one looks at an oak tree, one can see “oak tree” manifesting in several stages of life’s patterns. In one stage of the oak tree pattern, an oak tree exists as an acorn; at a subsequent stage it exists as a sapling; in another stage, as a large tree; and in yet another, as the green acorn growing on that large tree. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a definitive “oak tree.” There is only the oak tree pattern through which certain elements follow the cyclical law of karma: a particular arrangement of water, minerals, and the energy of sunlight that changes if from acorn to sapling to large tree over and over again.'

-this might be for Penguin, but damn if these didn't make me smile nostalgically; I remember them from some of my favorite scifi-romance novels (just I did just use that phrase, and yes, I know no one has any idea what I'm talking about)