I still think of them. People I knew, people I had known since we were children in school together, people who were friends of my parents, who died in a burning, crumbling tower one September morning while I was asleep in a hotel room in Canada.

Which isn’t to say that I think about them very often anymore, but sometimes I do. Mostly when I visit home or I talk to my mother and she tells me how things are where I grew up, how things have changed, what happened after. Or today, when I opened up the New York Times and read a review of a book about the place I grew up, the people I grew up with, what’s happened to them since. I thought I would be just fine reading it after two years, but suddenly I was crying and an hour later my throat still feels tight and my eyes are stinging.

I feel badly even expressing this much sometimes, because I know that being from a commuter area outside New York is nothing like being from New York, especially when I don’t even live in that area anymore. I lost people, but they were people I had once known or people I knew vaguely, not family members or close friends. I don’t want to be a big emotional vampire drama queen about the whole thing, so I don’t talk about it much, and when I see that skyline I don’t say a word to anyone I’m with even though it feels like a kick in the stomach every time. I don’t want to co-opt anyone else’s hurt.

I just want to say that I still think about them. I still remember. And I’m still waiting for it to stop hurting so much.

I swear I have no intention of becoming Current Events Commentary Girl. That’s just not my thing. I kind of wish it were, because I am embarrassed at how little I sometimes know about what’s going on in the world. Or how if I do know about something, chances are that I know just enough to sound like an idiot when I talk about it. So I will never be Current Events Commentary Girl. But yesterday the 9/11 anniversary was weighing on my mind, and today it’s Paul Hill. Although really Paul Hill has been weighing on some part of my mind for the last week or so, since I read his execution was coming up.

I remember I first became aware of Paul Hill around this time in 2000, when I was at the film festival in Toronto and saw a documentary called Soldiers in the Army of God. The Army of God is one of the most extremist anti-abortion groups, the ones who get involved in shootings and bombings and anthrax mailings and disseminating information on where people who work in clinics live and can be harassed and killed. Paul Hill had pretty strong ties to these people, and was a personal hero to a lot of them. He was interviewed at several points during the documentary, and he was sort of blank-looking, and genial in a creepy way as he talked about how he’d planned and carried out the killing of a doctor and an escort, and how he hoped to inspire others. It was really chilling. Then I sort of forgot about him for a few years, until I started seeing news articles last week about his impending execution. And it was chilling all over again in a whole new way, because when these articles talk about how he’s going to be seen as a martyr and how this may inspire new waves of clinic violence — that’s me they’re talking about, now.

Not that my little clinic would be a likely target for anyone, as it’s just not located well for an attack and our regular protestors are fairly calm. But it’s certainly not out of the question either. I do think about that almost every time I get ready to go downtown and do my rotation at the clinic. I can’t think about it while I’m there because I would never get done what I’m there to do. I’m there to make a possibly difficult decision as easy as possible on the women who have to make it, and I have to be confident and reassuring and cheerful and helpful, not anxious and wondering whether today is the day one of the crazies decides to take a shot at one of our doctors or nurses. So once I get there, I don’t worry about it anymore. But I think about it on Saturday mornings when the alarm goes off, just for a minute, and it’s scary.

I’ve had a couple of people ask me if I’m going to stop for a while, but I didn’t have to give it any serious thought. You don’t really get into this kind of thing if you’re only willing to do it when it’s safe, because it’s never really entirely safe. There are a lot of very intelligent, educated, reasonable people who oppose abortion, but there are also a lot of dangerous crazies and you never know when one of them is going to think God wants you blown away.

There aren’t many things I would die for. I have my beliefs about a lot of things and they’re strong, but they’re not that strong. There’s just the three things. I would die for my little sister. I would die for my mother. And if it were my turn, I would die at my clinic on any given Saturday. But I would certainly prefer not to die protecting my legal rights, and I would prefer no one else die protecting my legal rights, and I am a little worried about what might be coming.

And on another, different yet equally depressing note, I’m a little disapointed in myself for feeling a bit happy that that man is no longer breathing. I am absolutely anti-death-penalty in every possible situation, and I don’t think it’s right that he was executed. But nonetheless, whatever my rational side thinks about all that, some part of me is just happy he’s dead.

How’s that for a terribly depressing entry? I promise I will write something cheerful tomorrow to leave you guys with before I vanish for my vacation. If nothing else, I’ll put up cute kitty pictures or something, just so my poor web page isn’t sitting here all death-obsessed for the next week and a half.

Man. I totally bailed on that promise to update with something cheerful and full of warm fuzzies before I went on vacation, didn’t I? I had such good intentions, too. At any rate, vacation is over and I am now back at work. Which is partly a sad thing because I had a lovely time and saw lots of great movies and had fun with Blake and Amy and Delphine and generally enjoyed Toronto, but partly a good thing because it is lovely to have my cats back and sleep in my own bed. Plus the last couple of days, apart from the occasional torrential downpour, have been lovely cool sunny fall weather, which is the best kind of weather as far as I’m concerned. It’s still a little summery for my taste but I think in another couple of weeks it will be the perfect time of year for me.

Meanwhile, I took a notebook with me to Toronto and wrote about all the movies I was seeing, but I don’t actually have the notebook with me right now. And I did want to write at least a quick “Hi! I’m not dead!” journal entry if only to bump the depressing death entry off the front page. So that’s pretty much what this is. Just a quick “Hi! I’m here! I didn’t get SARS despite the dire warnings I received at the airport going to and from Toronto!” sort of thing. Lots of movie-related rambling to follow over the next week or so, depending on how long it takes me to type up the Toronto notebook and whether anything else interesting happens in the meanwhile to write about.

Joel left a comment on my movie list: I don’t recognize many of those names. How were the Linklater and von Trier films? Anything that was particularly notable? I started to respond but realized it was becoming a monster reponse, so I’m making it its own entry, starting here:

Yeah, most of them were new names to me too. There weren’t as many big-name directors as there have been the last couple of years, really. And some of the ones that there were, I wasn’t interested in. (Although there was a new Jane Campion film I’m excited about, we just couldn’t get to see it.) I’ll post more comprehensive reviews at some point, but to answer your specific questions…

1) Len and I were both really disappointed in the Linklater, although I think he was more so. It was funny. Very funny in a few places. But while Jack Black can be a great secondary actor (see: Jesus’ Son), I’ve decided that he should not be allowed to play leads. Or at least, not without a director who’s willing to put his/her foot down and rein in the most repetitive of Jack’s shtick. Because a whole movie of “Hey! I’m Jack Black! Watch me do my wacky dance!” gets really old. Especially since the “a teacher and his students inspire each other” storyline is rather hard to make fresh and interesting. I won’t say don’t see it, but I’ll say that it’s a rental, or a dollar movie on campus.

2) I have an ongoing love-hate thing with Lars von Trier. Really like a couple of his earlier films and loathe the more recent ones I’ve seen. (Yes, including and especially Dancer in the Dark, which I realize is heresy to most people I know and perhaps that includes you.) So Len dragged me to this one kicking and screaming, and I finally gave in because the premise was pretty interesting. I guess you’d call it a documentary. Lars gets together with his mentor, Jorgen Leth, to talk about a short film Jorgen made decades ago that’s been a big inspiration for Lars. They somehow agree that Jorgen will remake this short film five times, each time with a different set of restrictions on style, content, technique, etc. imposed by Lars. And then the movie just follows their meetings and the various re-interpretations of the original film. It’s actually pretty interesting and extremely funny in places, and I wound up being glad I saw it. But it did nothing to change my opinion of Lars von Trier as a pretentious little jerk. Now I just think he’s an entertaining pretentious little jerk. This one I wouldn’t recommend to everyone, but I think you might like it.

Other notable ones for me… The Errol Morris one was excellent, but then I am a total Errol Morris junkie and was all star-struck at sitting four rows away from him. It’s a documentary nominally about Robert McNamara, but in the process it manages to be a really interesting commentary on America’s war posturing in general, and indirectly on what’s going on right now between America and the rest of the world. It wouldn’t usually have been my sort of thing, but see above re: Errol Morris Junkie. I wound up thinking it was excellent and thought-provoking, plus educational for me since I don’t know as much as I should about that era of American history.

O homem do ano (Man of the Year) wound up being another standout for me even though it was just one we picked up on a whim because we had an open spot in our schedule on that day and a couple of extra tickets to use up. It’s a Portuguese-language film but I can’t remember for sure what country it’s made in. Anyway, it’s a very black comedy about a man who almost accidentally stumbles into being an assassin. And it’s got a pig. Murder, and a pig. What’s not to love? It’s always hard to tell with the smaller films, especially the foreign ones, whether they’ll get distribution deals and ever make it off the festival circuit. But if this one does, I’d recommend it generally, and to you specifically. (But I’ll warn people because I wish I’d known because ever since I read Where the Red Fern Grows I need warnings on this kind of thing: There is one scene where A Bad Thing Happens To An Animal. Consider yourselves warned.)

On the Corner also snuck in under my radar. When I start picking out festival movies, I make a mental note of drug movies for the schedule because I know Len can never see enough drug movies, but I rarely expect to do more than mildly enjoy them myself. Every so often I get surprised, though. Last year it was Never Get Outta the Boat (which I still haven’t heard anything about since, but do recommend if it ever gets released.) This year it was this one. It’s a movie about a boy who comes to Vancouver to find his sister, who’s making her money for crack through prostitution. Pretty typical storyline, but very well made and astonishingly well acted. The female lead’s performance was completely riveting, and I would highly recommend the film for that alone. I also heard a lot of talk about the importance of several of the leads being played by Native people, but I don’t really know anything about the representation of Native Canadians in film, so I think I’d better stay away from that. I just mention it as a sidenote because that aspect of the film was getting a lot of buzz.

Those were the real standouts for me, I think. Hollywood North was pure silly fun about the Canadian film industry in the late seventies. Probably not for anyone who’s going to get oversensitive about jabs at the stereotypical Southern brand of bombastic American love-it-or-leave-it patriotism, but I suspect not many of those people are reading this anyway. And I’ll note for the Buffy and Queer as Folk fans in the audience that Fab Filippo cracked me the hell up repeatedly.

I also was pretty gripped by The Corporation, a documentary examining the role and history of the corporation in American society. But no matter how important I think it is to inform people about a lot of the societal and environmental abuse being perpetrated by corporations, the damn thing was three hours long and that’s just about the upper range of my tolerance for movies with no intermission. So I wound up getting pretty squirmy in places. Recommended for people really interested in or curious about environmental and societal issues, but only if you’ve got a good attention span or if they trim the monster down a bit before its widespread release.

And wow, that got really long. At least it covered the movies I had the most to say about, so another one or two entries about the rest of the films ought to about cover my festival reporting. But I think I’m temporarily worn out on movie ranting. Now aren’t you glad you asked, Joel?

I am cranky. Monumentally cranky. Unprecedentedly cranky. Not even for any good reason. Just a combination of hormonal fluctuations and my damn cats being incredibly annoying since they’re still adjusting to a new feeding regimen and think I’m starving them.

Oh, and sleep deprivation because Schroedinger has suddenly regained his kittenhood habit of climbing up onto the pillow next to my head, purring madly into my ear, and then grabbing hold of my cartilage piercings with his teeth and trying to pull them out. Fortunately, my ears are pretty sturdy and those piercings are long-since healed (even the one I had done with a piercing gun because I was an idiot), so it doesn’t really hurt. It’s just absolutely impossible to sleep through. The good news is, it’s still better than the trick he had as a kitten, which was officially the most awful way a cat can possibly wake you up. He would climb up on my chest, purr into my face for a moment, and then bite my eyeballs through my closed eyelids. Very gently, fortunately, more of a gentle pressure than an all-out chomp. But I lived in fear that someday he would really bite down and wind up biting into my eyeball and blinding me. Creepiest. Behavior. Ever.

While this is less creepy, it still wakes me up earlier than I want to wake up. Which, on top of wacky hormones and worry about a friend of my sister’s who ran away from home a few days ago and is squatting somewhere in NYC, has me in a deeply cranky mood. There is a little black raincloud over my head everywhere I go. Yesterday I wore my Grumpy Bear socks in honor of the raincloud thinking it might cheer me up, but instead I just got blisters. Yet another petty-yet-disproportionately-annoying reason to be cranky. All of which is by way of explaining why I haven’t had much to say for the last few days — it would just have been several days of exactly this sort of whining, and I think just this one fit of whining is enough.

On the plus side, I’m having fun watching the fundraising totals go up at Howard Dean’s weblog during this big last-day-of-the-fundraising-quarter thing they have going on. It’s nice to be feeling a tiny spark of optimism about politics in this country. Plus, he’s the first candidate who’s ever inspired me to donate to his campaign, so it’s kind of cool to look at these gigantic sums of money and know that a tiny fraction of it came from me to support someone I believe in. I feel all involved in the process. It’s pretty great.