The Mirror is...Empty

The recently released Kiefer Sutherland vehicle, Mirrors, is not worth your time and money. Don't even bother renting it on DVD.

The good parts can be summarized in terms of Kieferlishousness: Kiefer; Kiefer's whisper; Kiefer in wet jeans; and Kiefer saying, "Dammit!" I suppose some might also like it for the on-display cleavage of the unknown co-star, Paula Patton, in a low-cut and/or wet t-shirt.

Her cleavage has promise. Her acting? Jury's still out. She might have sucked because the lines she had to say were so bad.

Oh, and I'll also give the movie credit for a creeptastic setting, in the fire-damaged department store with mannequins that add atmospheric trepidation.

The bad parts: everything else.

Mirrors starts with suspense, horror, and enough gore to make me cover my eyes. Then we meet Kiefer, a suspended cop sleeping on his sister's couch. He's taking medication, he's got stubble, and he's sad. I immediately wanted to cuddle with him.

Director Alexandre Aja establishes that Amy Smart is Kief's sister by having him call her "sis." Who does that? And then he re-establishes it 20 minutes later by having Amy remind Kiefer, with her hands pressed to the side of his face like a lover, that she's his little sister. "You can talk to me," she pleads with him, "I'm your little sister." Um, yeah. We got it the first time.

Much of the dialogue follows this format--awkward, unlikely interchanges that are supposed to help us know the characters better but in fact only serve to remind us that the characters have not been developed sufficiently to be knowable. Especially the dialogue between Kiefer and his estranged wife, the pulchritudinous Paula Patton, was apparently lifted straight from a romance novel book jacket.

Even the music was cliche: A high piano note plinked deliberately--plink, plink, plink--then gradually faster--plink-plink-plink-plink--when Director Aja wanted us to feel increasing tension.

The mirrors in Mirrors reflect enough gore and horror to more than earn the R-rating. Amy Smart's gruesome self-dismemberment clinched it: what Aja lacked in actual story, he'd make up in shock and cheap "boo!"s. (I doubt if I punctuated that right. Please don't report me to the punctuation police.)

There's a twist at the end that makes me think that the movie contains the germ of a good idea--but I was left going, "Huh?" I'm pretty sure that's not what the story-teller was going for.

Even when a movie is bad, something good can come out of it. Sometimes that good is a clever review. I did not read any reviews before seeing Mirrors (I should have; I learned my lesson), but I read a bunch on Rotten Tomatoes afterward. My favorite line is this one, from Peter Sobczynski of EFilmCritic.com:

"...while watching it won't necessarily lead to seven years of bad luck, it does make for a fairly aggravating 110 minutes."

Consider yourself warned.

Surreal Babysitting Adventures, Part III

Start with Surreal Babysitting Adventures, Part I and Part II, if you want the context.

One day, I was upstairs in my home office, working away. The Babysitter Who Shall Not Be Named (BWSNBN) was downstairs with the kids, doing a pretty good job of keeping them away from me and keeping the noise level down to a dull roar. That's all I ask, really. I'm no hard-ass.

BWSNBN--let's call her BW for typing and reading ease--comes upstairs with an urgent question. "Um, E. Peevie, do you have any air freshener?"

Well, as a matter of fact, I did not have air freshener. But I suspected that there had been a Number Two situation that was filling the downstairs atmosphere with noxious fumes.

"Light a match, BW," I suggested. "That always takes care of the problem for me."

Baaaaaaaaaaaaad idea.

About 20 minutes later I came downstairs, and I smelled a bit of a smoky smell. "BW," I asked, "Are you cooking something?"

"Nope," she replied.

"Did you burn something earlier? I smell smoke," I insisted. I headed toward the kitchen, but she still denied cooking anything. Approaching the kitchen, I could still smell smoke--but from a different direction. I turned and looked down the hallway, and saw ribbons of smoke curling out of the bathroom.

I ran down the hall and stopped at the bathroom door. "HOLY SHIT!" I hollered, even though three children and one impressionable babysitter were within earshot. "Shit! Fire!" A bonfire was burning on top of the toilet tank, with flames blistering the paint three feet up the wall and immolating the wicker basket of hairbrushes and TP.

My shocking language and the promise of dramatic and fiery excitement immediately brought all the kids running toward the bathroom--except for the smart one, A. Peevie, who went screaming for the front door, in the opposite direction. That boy might struggle with his math facts, but math facts won't drag you out of a burning house.

Meanwhile, I ran for the kitchen and filled up a pitcher with water. (It never even occurred to me to grab the fire extinguisher in easy reach on the counter.) I ran back to the bathroom and shooed M. Peevie and the sitter away from the door. C. Peevie had boldly turned on the tap and was futilely splashing water from the sink onto the flames, but I shooed him away as well.

When I dumped the entire pitcher of water on the conflagration, black smoke billowed up to the ceiling and the basket blaze slightly abated. Flames still crawled up the blackening wall from the charred hand towel, so I filled the pitcher in the tub and splashed the fire again. I grabbed the end of the still-burning towel and a tiny corner of the still-burning basket, tossed them into the sink and extinguished the rest of the stubborn flames.

Once I was confident that the danger from the fire was over, I remembered that A. Peevie was probably curled up in a fetal position on the front lawn, so I went to find him. I passed the BWSNBN, sobbing in the living room, and headed out the front door. I found A. Peevie waiting for me safely on the sidewalk, trembling like an addict two days into rehab. He didn't stop shaking for two hours, poor baby.

Inside, I put my arms around the sitter, who was also shaking and still sobbing. "It's OK, BW," I said, "Everything's OK now."

"I set your HOUSE on FIRE!" she sobbed. "On FIRE!"

"I know, sweetheart," I said. It's amazing how easily I could forgive setting my house on fire, but to this day cannot let go of too-crisp brownies and wet dishes in the cabinet. There is something wrong with me. "But it's OK now. The fire's out and everybody's safe. No harm done."

"I'm so sorry," BW said shakily, "I'm so sorry. I will never light another candle ever again in my life."

Aahhh. That's what happened. She lit a candle and set it on the back of the john, and the flame caught the hand towel.

"It's OK, BW," I repeated. "I've almost burned my own house down with candles many a time." I pointed to the block glass window alcove, with two circular singe-marks from un-watched candles. "See! We had only been in the house about two weeks when I almost burned it down!"

Eventually, everyone settled down and stopped shaking and blubbering. We cleaned up the mess in the bathroom, threw out the burned towel and the singed basket of melted stuff, and everything went back to "normal." Which, as we all know, is relative.

"I don't want you to pay me for today!" BW hilariously insisted; and I told her we were going to forget the whole thing, and didn't need to tell anyone about it. She told her parents anyway, and they offered to paint my bathroom.

But I declined. The wall doesn't look that bad, and if you tilt your head and squint a little, the partially-wiped-off-black-gunk kind of takes the shape of a menacing face--a little artistic reminder to all of us to be careful with candles.

And to be grateful for every single day without a house fire.

I am Jonah

I am Jonah.

My pastors have been preaching on Jonah, and every single week I leave church thinking, "I am Jonah. I am just like him."

Jonah gets a bad rap because, well, he's an idiot. Just like me.

First, he runs away from God. Dumbass. You can't run away from God, Jonah. You can act like God can't see you, can't hear you, can't find you--but duh! Of course he can. He can find you on the ship to Tarshish when you're supposed to be traveling to Nineveh. He can also find you when you're holed up in your bedroom with an open bottle of wine and a high-def TV. And he can find you when you're just minding your own business, trying to be a good person, but deep down beginning to realize that that's not good enough. (Hello, Roseanne?)

Of course God can find you--and the truly amazing thing is, he's actually coming after you. He'll stir up the sea until your shipmates threaten to throw you overboard. Or he'll allow a different kind of storm in your life--maybe cancer, maybe a sick child, maybe unemployment or a really horrible boss, depression, or a million other storms that, if you're smart, will make you remember that God wants you, or wants you back.

He's waiting for you to look up and say, Um, God? Can I get a hand, here?

He's also waiting for you to remember who and what you are. You are Jonah, the guy God called to do a really important job, like preach to the Ninevites, or raise a child, or be an honest cop, a loving spouse, a generous friend, a talented musician, or a million other callings that, if you're smart, will make you remember that God is the one who gave you that calling and is going to help you follow it.

He's waiting for you to look up and say, God? Thanks. And help, please.

God is also waiting for you to remember that you are not God. You do not get to decide what justice looks like. You do not get to point to other people and say, Smite them, God! They are bad, bad people because they worship idols, or take drugs, or fail to live up to your own exceptionally high standards of housekeeping.

But that's what Jonah did, Reverend Moses Butcher told us today at church. He became annoyed at God because he wanted to see justice done to those sinners of Nineveh--just like I become annoyed at the sinners around me, who don't parent like I think they should, or don't obey me as promptly as I want them to, or have the right opinion about social justice issues.

I am such a Jonah.

Jonah was miserable. "It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry...Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me for it is better for me to die than to live" (Jonah 4:1, 3). Why was he miserable? Because he was waiting for the fireworks of God's destruction of Nineveh. He wanted Nineveh to pay for their sins; he wanted justice.

But, Reverend Butcher pointed out, Jonah's notion of justice does not look anything like God's justice. God is (thank God!) "a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster" (Jonah 4:2). Jonah wants people to pay for their sin; God wants people to repent, and be brought back into relationship with Him.

Like Jonah, I often want people to pay. I want to hear them say, "I was wrong, I am a worm." I want them to pay if they've wronged me, or someone I love. This is how I often deal with Mr. Peevie, with my kids, with my co-workers--not to mention the stranger who has just cut me off in the street.

But wouldn't it be better if Jonah and I, and all of us, were more like God, slow to anger, and willing to wait and work for reconciliation and redemption? God said to Jonah, "Should I not pity Nineveh?"

I am always telling my kids that retaliation is never the answer. But, boy it sure is an instinctive reaction. On Saturday, a bigger boy was sitting on his bike near M. Peevie, who was minding her own business playing with a skip-ball (one of those ankle-jump-rope things), and as he moved his bike to get past her, he said in a tough-guy voice, "If that thing hits my bike, you're gonna pay."

After a decade of telling my kids, "Retaliation is never the answer," I wanted to get up and knock that little boy right off his bike. This is my instinct--not to gently help him understand that bullying and threatening a smaller person is wrong, but to hurt him for trying to intimidate my baby girl.

I am Jonah. But I want instead to be like Jesus, the literal epitome of God's mercy. That's my prayer.

I picked up the images from Biblical Art on the WWW.

Dr. Peevie on Healthy Boundaries

Everywhere I go, I see/hear/read about people having trouble with boundaries. It seems that for many people personal boundaries end up trampled in the dirt under the feet of other people's expectations. A lot of times setting a personal boundary means saying "no." And almost always, not setting appropriate personal boundaries brings unnecessary feelings of responsibility, stress, and guilt.

Feelings of responsibility, stress, and guilt are important in all relationships; and when they come from appropriate situations, they help us remember to treat people with kindness and respect--just the way we want to be treated.

But when those feelings arise from inappropriate situations, or a lack of appropriate and healthy boundaries, they are not helpful. They hurt our relationships, and they hurt our own emotional and mental health.

Before I go any further in our boundaries workshop, let me first acknowledge that I am just as emotionally unhealthy as the next person, and frequently moreso. I'm often depressed, moody, and hot-tempered. I am sometimes a martyr, and sometimes I'm just plain selfish and lazy. There's a whole bunch more, but I'm starting to feel bad about myself now, so I'll leave it at that. You get my point.

But boundaries, for some reason, I get. Maybe it's because my best friend is a therapist.

I was reading a blog written by a mom who was uncomfortable telling her child not to do something that other nearby parents were letting their kids do--because she didn't want the other parents to think she was judging them.

Call me rude or insensitive, but I would have no problem at all saying, "M. Peevie, do not climb that tree,' even if the other parents within earshot were letting their kids climb it. So the other parent thinks I'm too strict? Don't care. So the other parent thinks I'm judging her? Unfortunate, but not my problem. (I might actually be judging her, but not out loud.)


I am especially particular about boundaries in the parenting arena. I do not want other people parenting my children unless I or Mr. Peevie have turned over direct or implied responsibility. For example, if we're at your house, and you see my toddler approaching your irreplaceable collection of Lladro sculptures, I totally understand that you might want to step in front of her and redirect her. (Of course, an even better option might be to ask me to redirect her--but sometimes a situation calls for urgent action!)

But if I'm at the grocery store with my hand on the back of my child who is standing up in the cart, I do not appreciate the pimply grocery clerk telling my child to sit down because he might get hurt. I will be responsible for protecting him, thank you very much, person-who-is-making-minimum-wage-and-is-not-even-close-to-getting-laid-let-alone-becoming-a-parent. If you absolutely must insist that the child be seated in the cart, then please direct your instructions to me, but NOT to my child.

Here's another example: My friend Josephine helped her SIL plan and execute her wedding, and she was telling us about all the stress she had felt during the process. A lot of the stress was caused by the bride not being willing or able to make decisions, and as the wedding approached, major items on the plan-your-perfect-wedding checklist remained unchecked. Like the music at the reception, for example. And the flowers.

I felt bad for my friend because she had experienced such a stressful time. But at the same time, I did not really understand why she felt so much stress about a wedding that was not her own. Her SIL was making choices (or NOT making choices) that would have an impact on her own wedding, and the outcome was not only out of Josephine's control, but also not her responsibility. I understood that she wanted to help her SIL--but I could not understand desiring to help someone so much that their own negligence would cause me to feel stress.

So I said this to Josephine, and asked her why she felt so much stress. She said, "Because I care about my SIL, and I wanted her to have a really great wedding." OK--I get that. But again, isn't it possible to care for someone and want the best for them, but also to step back and let them bear the responsibility for their own choices?

In other words, under those circumstances, aren't you making a choice to feel stress about something that is out of your control? And why would you make that choice? Why would you choose to add unnecessary stress to your life?

One place where I'm not as good at setting boundaries as I'd like to be is with my parents. For some reason, I often let them suck me into arguments about theology or politics, and those discussions sometimes leave me feeling beat up. A person should be able to express opinions without being emotionally filleted--but in my family, if you step outside of certain lines, you better be wearing body armor.

I know I'm simplifying things a bit too much. But let's have a conversation about boundaries. Are you good at setting them? Have you set boundaries that people don't seem to get, or constantly try to erode? Do you worry too much about other people's feelings, at the expense of your own mental health?

Surreal Babysitting Adventures, Part II

In case you missed it, here's the first installment of Surreal Babysitting Adventures.

If I knew that K-Nut would be in charge of dinner, I'd do my best to make sure that she had a ready-made, simple-to-prepare dinner solution. But without fail, my plans failed.

One time, I got out all the fixings for sloppy joes: ground beef, buns, a canned sloppy joe sauce, and frozen corn. I even got out the right pan to use to cook the ground beef. I thought it was fool-proof. This was a woman who had somehow raised one child to adulthood, and a bunch more were well on their way to surviving childhood with no obvious long-term effects from food poisoning. They seemed relatively normal and healthy--so I figured she'd be capable of making and serving one batch of sloppy joe to my kids without anyone ending up in the ER.

Well, as Mr. Peevie and I were getting ready to leave, K-Nut started making dinner. She flipped the ground beef into the pan and started browning it. Moments later, however, I was grossed out when she opened the can of sloppy joe sauce, dumped it right on the raw beef and started stirring it around.

Who makes sloppy joes this way? Who in this hemisphere does not know (or can't read the instructions on the side of the can telling you) that you must brown the ground beef first, pour off the fat, and then dump the sloppy joe mix in? Not only were they in danger of eating raw meat--because how would you actually know when the meat was browned when it was already coated with tomato sauce--but they'd also be eating an extra 1500 calories in straight lard.

I was flummoxed.

I hurried to the kitchen, one shoe on and one in my hand. "K-Nut," I said, "I've never seen anyone make sloppy joe this way."

"Oh, I've never made it before," she said. "I just figured that you put the sauce in with the meat and then cook it."

"Generally, it's a good idea to brown the meat first," I said gently--on the outside; but on the inside, I was thinking a) have you never cooked with ground beef before? No matter what you're making--shepherd's pie, spaghetti sauce, chili mac--you brown, drain, and then mix; and b) did it occur to you to read the instructions? I'm just sayin. My insides are frequently bitchier than my outsides.

"It's going to be harder to tell if the meat is done with the sauce already mixed in," I added, "So just make sure you cook it really, really thoroughly."

"How have your kids survived for so long if this is how you cook for them?" I desperately wanted to ask, but refrained.

We shook our heads at many other clueless choices that K-Nut made as a babysitter as well. She'd leave the window shades up when she put the kids to bed--even when it was still light outside. She'd put them to bed fully clothed, without having them change into PJs. We learned to leave specific instructions about what they could and could not eat, because otherwise, they'd scam her into letting them have an entire carton of ice cream or a whole bag of cookies.

"Oh," they tell her, all innocent-like, "my mom lets us have 10 cookies for dessert all the time." And she'd believe them.

One time, we came home well past bedtime, and found A. Peevie awake and playing on the floor of his bedroom. "Um, K-Nut," I said, "How come A. Peevie is still up?"

"Oh, he said he wanted to sleep on the floor, so I told him he could," she said. "I didn't think you'd mind."

Well, what I did mind was that my child was still awake two hours after his bedtime because my space cadet babysitter made some creative bedtime decisions.

By now you're thinking, why in the name of all things holy did we continue to use this babysitter? Well, we'd call her to see if one of her daughters could sit, and often they could, but when they couldn't, K-Nut would show up in their place.

But also, part of me was wondering: Is it me? Am I just too rigid? Am I the strange one here? Eventually, Mr. Peevie and I decided it was just too stressful to have her over and be wondering the whole time we were out what surreal babysitting stories we'd be telling the next day.

Also, our kids got older, and our need for babysitting diminished dramatically. Unfortunately, this did not happen until AFTER the bathroom caught fire.

Stay tuned for the next episode of Surreal Babysitting Adventures.

Two Down, One to Go

I breathed a sigh of relief this week when two out of three Peevies started school again. Finally. (I'm singing a different tune now than I did when I wrote this post!)

They had been jumping up and down on my last nerve with their constant bickering, and all I wanted to do was drink wine and watch Prison Break reruns and catch up on the episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I had missed the first time around.

(Hey, that sounds like I'm a teensy bit depressed. Hmmm. Time to call the high-priced empathist, I mean therapist. Can you actually be depressed when you're already on anti-depressants? Eeeeeenyway...)

Even though I was thrilled to drop the Peeve-monsters off at second and fifth grade, I was also a bit moophy. (Moofy? Moophie? Whatever. You know what I mean, right? like the kind of sad when you make a little sad sound like, "Mooph," and make a little sad frownie face. At my growing up house, we always called that "moophy." I don't actually know if there's an actual word for it, but as you may already know, I do love neologisms.)

The PTL sponsored a back-to-school event that they called "The Boo Hoo/Yahoo Breakfast" (yay, Andrea!) which I think perfectly captures my conflictedness. Because, hello? My baby is in SECOND GRADE? and my angsty-boy is in FIFTH GRADE? I am not even ready for all this growing up.

I did finally break down and buy school supplies just in the nick of time. I dropped $190 on that trip to Tar-Zhay, but it was all worth it when I watched A. Peevie's Face of Pure Delight as he was sorting through his pens and folders and spiral notebooks.

Every day for three weeks leading up to this point, he'd voiced his dread about school starting. "I do NOT want to go back to school, Mom," he said.

"Can you homeschool me, Mom?" he asked, and I told him if I did, one of us would be dead or maimed by the end of the first week.

"Why do we have to go to school anyway? School's dumb. Lots of smart people didn't go to school. Einstein didn't go all the way through school," he pointed out.

But on this day, as he looked through his pile of supplies and checked off items from his supply list, he was happily anticipating the start of fifth grade. "I can't wait for school to start!" A. Peevie said cheerfully.

On the morning of the first day, he was up bright and early, dressed, and in his right mind--and still cheerful about seeing his school friends again. "Can we get there early?" he asked. Silly boy. What, does he think he woke up belonging to a different family or something? I'll settle for being on time, which we were. Barely. A one-time only event. Not a guarantee of future performance.

But day two, he woke up grumpy. I opened his door and called his name gently. "A. Peevie," I said, "Time to rise and shine! Time for school!"

"No!" he yelled. "I do NOT want to go to school." He flung himself deep under his covers as though being unseen would automatically transplant him into a different no-school dimension.

And we had a repeat performance on the third day. "Growl!" he growled. "Grumble, grrrr, ROAR! I hate school! I'm NOT GOING."

Sigh. Only 177 more of these mornings to go until summer! Blissful, happy, sleeping-in summer, with no fights about getting up to get ready for school.

Wait...what? What just happened there?

Surreal Babysitting Adventures, Part I

We've been fortunate to have, for the most part, babysitters who love our children, who make wise decisions while caring for them, who rarely lose them and who almost never give them overdoses of OTC drugs.

In fact, one of our sitters, my dear friend Roseanne, has this motto: "No bleeding and no choking on my watch!" So far, the kids have cooperated, even the one taking a blood-thinner. She's also really, really good at turning their tears and whining into giggles and tickle-fights. Every single time she walks into the house, the kids run to her--even the teenager--and give her a big hug.

But we have also had our share--some might say more than our share!--of babysitting stories that you will swear I made up. But I didn't.

One of our babysitters--let's call her K-Nut--was apparently raised by wolves. She's a book-bright woman who did normal everyday things--like make dinner, do laundry, or wash dishes--in such incomprehensible ways that she appeared to be totally unfamiliar with the strange ways of the people in this flat land of Chi-Kah-Goh. (And BTW, I didn't ask her to do those extra things--she just did them. Until I asked her to please stop.)

She'd wash dishes--God knows, there were always plenty in the sink, and she'd head straight there when she walked in the door, but I wasn't offended, because I will never object when someone wants to wash my dishes--wash them, and put them straight from the sink to the cabinet. Dripping wet. I am not even kidding. More than once I pulled a plate from the cabinet, plopped a slice of bread on it to make a sandwich--and did a double-take when I realized that the bread was all-of-a-sudden soaking wet.

She'd wash my kitchen counters--I think she was morally offended by my low housekeeping standards--and leave puddles of water deep enough to stock with game fish. K-Nut must have had an aversion to drying things, because sometimes I'd come home and find my laundry washed, dried, and folded in neat piles on the bed--but the folded clothes wouldn't actually be dry. They'd be more wet than damp, and had to be tossed back into the dryer to finish the job.

See what I mean? Raised by wolves. Or aliens, on a different planet. The planet "What The Hell Is She Thinking?"

K-Nut was raising a mob of children with a complete dearth of cooking know-how and common sense. Knowing this, I'd try to make things easy on her by preparing a crock-pot meal that she'd just have to serve at dinner time. Easy-peasy, right? Not so much.

One time I had crock-potted a delicious pot roast, complete with potatoes, carrots and onions; I turned it on, and left written instructions for when it would be done and what time to serve it. Later than evening when I asked the kids how dinner was, they said, "Great! But the blueberry pancakes were a little burned."

[It was like a surrealism joke: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two: One to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools. HA! Thank you, thank you, enjoy the veal, we'll be here all week.]

Blueberry pancakes? "What happened to the pot roast," I asked, mystified. It seems that K-Nut had served the pot roast and vegetables, along with blueberry pancakes (burned) and blueberry muffins. On the same plate. The burned-on pancake pan was still soaking in the sink, so I knew that my jokester kids were not scamming me.

See? I told you you'd think I was making it up.

K-Nut was sweet and gentle with my kids, which I always appreciated. They loved it when she came over, because she'd always make brownies with them. Unfortunately, she never got them quite right. They were frequently wafer thin and crispy.

"K-Nut," I said, "This brownie mix calls for a smaller pan. If you use the loaf pan, your brownies will be the right thickness."

"OK," K-Nut agreed, and added redundantly, "I'm not a very good cook."

"K," I teased, "You don't have to be a good cook. You just have to be able to read the instructions on the box."

She laughed, but the joke was on me. The next time she made brownies they were double-thick and raw in the middle.

"K-Nut, what happened to the brownies?" I asked her.

"Well, I used the loaf pan that you told me to use, but the brownies didn't get cooked in the middle," she said.

She had made two boxes of brownie mix, doubling the volume of batter--but she used the same size pan that was recommended for one box. Because that's the pan I told her to use.

More surreal babysitting adventures to come. Stay tuned.