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This one was one of those very emotional ones that leaves a mark on you, whether or not it makes sense.

First, a portion of what might be a different dream or what might have been how this one started, but probably accounted for part of the heightened emotions of the dream(s). I was walking a crowded corridor and I heard O's voice up ahead, so I slowed. I saw her and some friends talking about something they did last night (I could hear it all clearly, and I even remember thinking, "It's been longer since I've heard her voice than I realized," but I don't remember now what she was saying), so I casually, not urgently or anything, ducked around a pillar and kept walking, figuring we'd just miss each other. (The pillars and walls of this corridor were a sort of orange sherbet color; the light coming in was a vaguely underwater green. So I definitely dream in color.)

But she had different plans this time, and ducked around the other way, loudly declaring, "Let's stop pretending we didn't just see each other, okay, Travis?" Sheepishly I reemerged and we did a sort of "hey how are ya" mini-wave and fake-smile. I remember the thought, "This isn't nearly as bad as it used to be, because I'm finally moving on, seeing other people." (This is true, I've had the same thought in real life: it's never been that I desperately want to go back, but I haven't been able to let go of my feelings of guilt or shame for leaving and the fact that I've been single for approaching three years hasn't really made the move easy to justify. I digress.) Anyway we didn't catch up or anything, and it still made me feel sort of sad, knowing we'd never be friends, seeing how little I knew about her or recognized who she was anymore, but it wasn't as day-shattering as other encounters had been.

And then, things shifted into the "real dream" I remember:

I can't remember now why, or if there was a why, but I lost a couple years of my life, like a black-out. The next thing I knew, I was living in a small house -- or was it a large apartment? -- just me and Spacecat (now grown) and my three year-old son Andy. Andy Boom Ezell was his name. Toeheaded, blue-eyed, precocious kid. My son! I didn't know his mother, who she was or where she went. No memory of her at all.

My extended family was over, playing some board game, various uncles and my father and brother. We got into a very heated thing about the lighting of my place, how it was apparently too low and in people's eyes, so they insisted we turn it off, play by the scant light coming in the windows. But that was way too dark for me, I could only see my cards if I put them directly into the sun light, scattered all over the table wherever the light fell, and my father and I got into some kind of fight over this. Nobody would back down about the lights while we played. Eventually everybody scrapped the game, frustrated and angry. I mean really angry, like this mattered a lot.

I went into the bathroom to find something and saw little Andy standing right on the heating vent, being rubbed against by our two cats (Spacecat and a second cat, a little guy -- Detective Inspector, maybe?). I rubbed on his tummy too, lovingly, because the vent made him so warm. "You're a clever boy, aren't ya?" I said to him. "If you stand on the vent everybody loves you." He smiled proudly and nodded. I picked him up and carried him back into the main room to tell my family how cute and smart my boy was being. They all awwww'd appropriately.

Someone, my dad or my uncle, asked to see a picture of his mother, and I was instantly grateful. (It was one of those dream moments where I'd been thinking, "Surely her picture must be somewhere in the house" and then lo, that became the next step in dream action.) Andy took me by the hand into his room and we looked around. On the way we passed, of all things, a daguerreotype of the family, together. Me, little Andy Boom, and his mother -- crimped 80s-style platinum hair almost silver, very young, eyes widely spaced, flat mouth, petite Jewish nose. I can picture this face (and Andy Boom's) perfectly, which is super strange. I asked him if that was her, and although I knew it was he said no. I rationalized in the dream he didn't like the silver-tinted version of us.

So he led me to his room and showed me his photo of her, a little younger and happier, same wideset eyes (boldly blue like his, of course; the little elves who construct my dreams have great script supervisor and casting departments). It felt so weird, like a Twilight Zone or Star Trek kind of feeling, not to remember this person in the slightest. We were obviously happy at some point, probably in love. Was she dead? Did she leave us? I had no idea. What was her name? I didn't know.

It was just me, two cats, and little Andy Boom.

I woke up very emotionally affected, kind of strange and vulnerable -- I missed my son and my life very badly, and felt bad for fighting with my family, and wondered where Andy's mother had gone and how I could just forget about her as entirely as that.

Been out of work sick, this is the second day in a row now. I have big weekend plans I don't want to miss, so I have to get better. Woke up gross, put on some soundtrack music on the iPhone and just laid there, trying to get back to sleep. I guess it worked.

...because then I was sitting in a booth in a bar with Liz and some weird guy we didn't know and a girl I wanted to be my girlfriend (just a vague, non-specific girl). Gradually I became aware that the weird guy was either Liz's boyfriend or soon to be so. I was looking stuff up on my phone -- I think I was playing the music that was playing in real life on it -- and the weird guy started asking Liz about "that purple crystal statue in Russia's Tianenmen Square*. Who is it a statue of?" She said, "You know, I've been there a million times and I never thought to look." I think they were trying to impress each other with that "I've been to strange places and know strange things" kind of thing. But my phone was out, so I Googled it. I remember typing russia purple statue square into my phone. I remember mistyping statue a couple of different ways.

By the time I got an answer though (I forgot now who it was; Napoleon? Someone I didn't expect it to be) Liz and the dude were laying horizontally in the booth making out. The Girl I Wanted To Be My Girlfriend was, for some reason, also on that side of the booth, and we gave each other a "you've got to be kidding me" look.

There's more. It's lost now. I'm staying home from work again. Sucks. On the plus side, I guess I get to watch the episode of Lost that wasn't on iTunes before I went to bed last night. But I really, really need to get healthy by the weekend, so mostly I'm going to be lying in bed today, eating soup and Emergen-C packets.

* Style question: do I need to add "[sic]" to factual errors in my dreams?

It's rare I have to straight-up rescind an opinion, but here I go.

I'm not too proud to admit it: I spoke without thinking. I certainly never meant to suggest that Bigelow isn't a great and worthy director, or that The Hurt Locker is anything but a great film. Although I stand by the statement that I can name a handful of much better films from 2009, that's true every year: the Best Picture award never actually goes to the best picture. And I certainly don't begrudge Hurt Locker the way I do movies like Crash or Slumdog Millionaire.

From Ms. Early, tieittothetree:

...frankly, I feel like the Academy often leans towards stories with lots of feminine, emotional pathos (THE BLIND SIDE, PRECIOUS, TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, etc). I'm not at all worried that the Academy isn't recognizing "unmasculine viewpoints."

That's a very valid point, and one I realized half-assedly after posting. Maybe the whole Landmark/Milestone thing felt off to me because of this. For the many things I could fault the Academy for, over-machoism isn't one of them. In fact, actually, under-machoism is much more their weakness (where was the win for Scorsese's early masterpieces like Raging Bull? for example).

The truth is -- and this is where I really fucked up by posting the previous thought (which I refuse to pull even though I maybe regret) -- is that I resent the idea of some absolute gender spectrum we have to use to gauge stories, and yet I reacted with a distinctly and ridiculously bipartisan approach. It's like I'm tired of whining democrats and so I declared myself republican when I meant to declare myself independent. Oops.

I hate overly macho films and overly femmy films just about equally. I guess if really pressed, all things being equal I might be less interested in the overly feminine ones, since they're less likely to speak to something I can relate to. What with being a boy. Robin Bougie's right to call bullshit. For what it's worth, I kind of thought I was saying what he gets at -- films shouldn't ever call attention to themselves for the typecast or race/gender/sexuality of the filmmaker. If you tell me it's a movie for men, or a movie for women, or a movie for blacks, or a movie for gays, I will instantly be less inclined to see it.

Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron both make films that are often a little too sweaty and masculine for my tastes, and I think I just lashed out at what I saw as irony that a lady won for a film so unladylike. Everybody is right: I'm glad it wasn't a lady making another ladylike film, or a dude making another for-dudes picture. I'd prefer a less one-or-the-other film, but it's certainly more interesting to aim for the other extreme than to make a gender-stereotypical story. No question.

I pay so little attention to the Oscars that it's easy not to think about the types of films that win. And I'm kind of bored/done with the whole landmark/milestone thing. Used to be I couldn't look at the internet without seeing Avatar news. Now I can't look at it without seeing how earthshattering it is that a lady director won an Oscar. And I knee-jerked.

And so: the dumbest thing I could do if I hate the black-or-white man-or-woman way of viewing films is to just jump on the other side and start shouting. Which is apparently what I did. Sorry, internet.

In writing this I had another thought, though, more to the core of the issue for me (which, stupidly, I didn't address at all in my original post, ha). (It is, however, something I noted immediately after the ceremony, on Twitter. Why didn't I just keep my mouth shut after that?) The problem isn't that woman directors aren't winning enough awards; the problem is there aren't enough woman directors. In all of Hollywood, 1 in 82 is probably about the right ratio for lady directors to dudes, so for 1 in 82 Oscars to go to a lady -- that seems about right, statistically. What we need is a more diverse filmmaker base to choose from, not more affirmative action in our accolade-giving.

We seem to have a decent equilibrium of women-to-men when it comes to writing music, or novels, or to painting (we do have a deficit of women writing & directing plays, but that's not my battle today) -- why can't we get more of them behind a camera, writing or directing film? I take issue with the Milestone status of her award only because I feel people speak like we've had a breakthrough. We haven't had a breakthrough. We'll have a breakthrough when there are a third as many women as men making films, let alone half.

There. That's the real thorn in my side. That and bipartisan gender-views on film, though apparently it's easier to fall into that than I realized.

Okay. I'm still an ass, but at least I'm an ass who can back up when he's misspoke.

/rant.

A probably-not-very-controversial thought:

Kathryn Bigelow winning Best Director at this year's Oscars is about the smallest triumph for women directors they could possibly ask for, because the only person in all of Hollywood making more macho/masculine films than Bigelow is Michael Bay. Say what you want about quality, Avatar is actually *slightly* more feminine a story than The Hurt Locker. And that's saying something. There's no question which is a better film between the two (although honestly, I could name five films off the top of my head that were better than both, and one of those was also directed by a woman). I'm just saying, there's something ironic in giving the very first Best Director award to a woman with the most aggressively masculine oeuvre.

Had, for example, Sofia Coppola won for Lost in Translation (a film I fear might not age well; I'm afraid I've grown up and it hasn't) -- that might be a triumph for women directors. Or, of course, Campion for The Piano. Or Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, or any other lady-filmmaker who makes films that feel like unique, maybe even unmasculine viewpoints. I respect Kathryn Bigelow quite a lot -- Hurt Locker is very good, and I love Strange Days -- but it feels like she's telling the exact same stories a man would, gender-typically speaking. So part of me feels like we're rewarding her not for being the best director of the year, but for proving she can hang with the boys.

Giving her an Oscar is great, and deserved, but saying this strikes a blow for ladies everywhere is like saying Quentin Tarantino is a feminist because he writes macho assholes and then casts Uma Thurman. (Strong female lead ≠ Bruce Willis with tits. No offense, Bruce Willis.)

Unrelated gibberish: two new morning songs. The other morning, They Might Be Giants' "Shadow Government" and this morning, Spoon's "Merchant of Soul." Neither of which I hear very often.

Here's a quick sketch of Naruto as a girl. I dunno why I like gender swapping characters it's just a fun challenge I guess. Also just your the real geeks out there, yes that is a poisoned toad drooling on a kunai knife.... So far I'm up to book 32 so don't go spoiling anything for me.

In other news we've had some great reviews for birdsong! One is on the Monkey on my back site the other being a very daper review on the Forbidden Planet Blog. Oh and a third I just found here! So don't forget you can pick up a copy here! Don't worry if it's sold out we have to keep re-listing to fill demand :)

Also if any one wants the inks of the naruto pic they're only 25 quid just email me at chamonkee@aol.com

Also new Two Mustaches podcast:

408b - 2010 Winter Olympics Coverage
This episode was completely done by Josh and Matt. Kyle and Dexter Conner helped out. Alvaro and Alex had nothing to do with this episode. I want to make that clear. Nothing to do with it. Nothing.

And I made a new rap song about Books. Here it is: Booksmart it mentions this guy preachertom:

Look how tubby cute my cat is. Lately she's been obsessed with windows. Cats have trends. Right now, looking at the street is her thing.

Usually when I wake up in the morning with some song stuck in my head, it's something I've heard at least in the last say, six months. This morning? "Big Time," by Pete Gabriel. I don't know if I've heard that song in six years. I mean, probably. Almost certainly. But not memorably. And yet, there it was, in my skull. (Edited to add: The last time I knowingly heard it was about eight months ago I watched Spaceballs with my brother.)

Took another couple of photos at the mall today. Been going to the mall; makes me write. Public space nobody's going to kick me out of, no internet or "fun" distractions, mall-grade cafeteria-food lunch. Starbucks iced tea on the first floor. Ice skaters to watch when I get bored. And looking around at all the people... well, I'm not going to lie to you. Rarely do I feel so 99th percentile as when I visit the mall.

Plus, today I splurged and bought Paris, Texas on Blu-ray. So sue me.

Oh, also -- I didn't get any pictures but: today at the mall, I learned that cosplay is a real thing, a thing that real people do. I assumed it was something just done for conventions or LARPing. But unless a high school girls' anime fest and/or LARP session was taking its break in the food court, these people are just out there. (And I mean that on so many levels.) More entertaining than looking at underage girls in pink wigs, bunny ears, frilly petticoats and thigh socks, though? Watching other people stare. Anyway, good for them. I wish there'd been people that outgoing and geeky when and where I went to high school.

Wait. I think I mean that. I can't decide.

Travis, the self-hating nerd.