HATE MY ENGAGEMENT RING

Hate: A Romance: A Novel

In a controversial first novel that took the French literary world by storm and won the Prix de Flore, Tristan Garcia uses sex, friendships, and love affairs to show what happens to people when political ideals–Marxism, gay rights, sexual liberation, nationalism–come to an end. As Elizabeth Levallois, a cultural journalist, looks back on this decade and on the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in Paris, a drama unfolds–one in which love turns to hate and fidelity turns to betrayal, in both affairs of the heart and politics.

With great verve and ingenuity, Garcia lays claim to an era that promised freedom as never before, and he paints an indelible, sharp, but sympathetic portrait of intellectuals lost in the age of MTV.

funny story about this horrible picture…
about 10 pm the other night, while walking the beautiful grounds at canyon ranch, i noticed this guy in a hole about 6 inches to the right of the sidewalk.

it was bigger than my hand (and for a 5’4" woman i have hands roughly the size of baseball mitts) and who knew they lived in freaking holes!?!?!? i then did the thing any transplanted new-england girl with a formidable fear of spiders would do: ran screaming to my car, locked the doors and drove away with haste,shaking and muttering things like "big hairy ass f*cking spider" over and over again until the rivers of cold sweat pouring down my back began to abate slightly and rational thought returned to my terror-numbed brain.

unfortunately, not good thougt… i realized that , as a new england girl, this was the first time i had ever seen a tarantula that wasn’t encased in lucite and in an airport gift shop. i began to feel shallow for not taking a moment to observe and appreciate the awsome beauty of my unique desert surrounding and to lament the missed opportunity to take a picture to document this exciting event that was kind of becoming incrementally funnier with each mile being rapidly put between myself and the site of the encounter.

flash forward to the next night: i am leaving work, everpresent point-and-shoot already in hand. i scan the dirt to either side of the sidewalk like i was looking for a lost engagement ring (now that i know they live in holes, i realize they could be everywhere; they could even live together in holes like tiny giant freaking tarantula roommates ordering pizza and splitting the cable bill). i am excited. i am horrified. my heart is beating like bad techno and i really, really think i might puke …and i see it.

same hole: about 6 inches from the sidewalk, about 6 feet from the employee parking lot (actually not far from where the bobcat, or whatever it is, lives by the employee parking lot). i stand about 2 feet from the hole, and kind of off to the side in case it has bad peripheral vision or it just might think i was hanging out waiting for a bus or meeting a friend. i zoom a in a little, but not too much- it is night time and dark and i don’t want things to get too "noisy"because it is a very important picture; me documenting wildlife and facing my fears and all, so i snap the picture, the flash goes off…

…and i learn that tarantulas jump. five f*cking feet in the air! this thing was eye-level (EYE-LEVEL) to me in the freaking AIR! i did not see where it landed; i was screaming and running out to the parking lot.

it took a minute to shake and cry and brush my hands all over myself to remove imaginary spiders while hopping up and down outside my locked jeep. it took a minute to realize that there was no way i could stick my hand in my bag to rummage for my keys, pry the camera out of my frozen fingers and dump my bag out onto the hood to find the keys so there was no blind sticking of my hand anywhere potentially harboring a giant hitchhiking tarantula. it didn’t take long to decide that nothing in my bag, except the located keys, was worth waiting around to see if spiders keep jumping for so i was in the jeep, doors locked and gunning it out of the gate shaking and crying, rocking back and forth slightly and muttering something about jumping deamon spiders in no time.

anyway; here is my spider picture. they live in holes, they jump and if i made a spider gesture with my hand to indicate a giant freaking hairy jumping tarantula this spider was bigger than that. no lie. i lived to tell about it even though they hate having their pictures taken.

It’s been 4 years since Greg and I tied the knot and there are some things that I’m beginning to resent because my wedding was not what I expected. Isn’t it just weird?. Our first year I didn’t care, but I guess I’m inevitably getting more immature as I grow older.

I always pictured my wedding in a black and red polka dot dress, wearing my heart shaped glasses. My prince charmless wearing a polka dot tie, I don’t care about the rest of the outfit. I imagined hearts and lips everywhere. All my female guests would have to be wearing hats or something with hearts. My cake would be a giant heart with a figurine of me and my groom resting on a heart like a Jeff Koons and Cicciolina type of representation. Ideally I would’ve danced to Barry White instead of the cheesy walts. Or Aerosmith, not to I don’t want to miss a thing. I’d dance to Crazy maybe… but Can’t get enough of you by Barry White always seemed so hot and perfect for later… if you know what I mean.
I would have pasta for everyone to eat until they can’t eat anything else. I’d have french fries too… People would dance to Barry Manilow, and other 70s classics, 80s, and some 90s and maybe…. some Gaga… I don’t know if I’d go past 1999 in terms of music for the reception. Then later…the rest is a low budget soft porn.

This doesn’t require a super sweet 16 budget. I hope I can eventually do it. My wedding was pretty traditional. It was a girl’s dream wedding, just not my wedding. A carriage, white dress, hot groom, beautiful pictures, and the DJ even played Ricky Martin while having dinner. You can imagine that was when the Bridezilla inside of me came out and I said THIS IS IT, TURN THE MUSIC OFF, I EFFING HATE RICKY MARTIN. PLAY THE MUSIC I REQUESTED. There was no thousand songs list to be found. So I had to see how everybody danced reggaeton. Then I went to sleep. That was it. Everyone had a blast though. But it wasn’t my day. My wedding was never really about me.

Yeah, so that concludes the story of today and why I hate weddings.
Oh, and I recently discovered that I’m a material girl, I wouldn’t mind getting a diamond ring 🙂 I’ve been thinking about getting myself an engagement ring when I get my Bachelors, I hope by then I love myself enough to get engaged.

When he was just twenty-nine years old, Mathieu Kassovitz took the international film world by storm with La haine (Hate), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically in the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly whiling away their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz, Hubert, and Said—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentments at their social marginalization slowly simmering until they reach a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.

It’s easy to see why La Haine had such an explosive effect when it was released in France; its potent portrait of racial discord and life in the housing projects outside of Paris is at odds with France’s egalitarian vision of itself. This impact wouldn’t have lasted, however, were the movie purely a political statement; fortunately, it’s a riveting journey that follows three unemployed young men (Said Taghmaoui, Hubert Kounde, and Vincent Cassel) as they wander and try to decide what to do with the gun that one of them has found. This simple scenario results in a remarkably complex examination of race, class, violence, and the abuse of power in modern society, yet never feels preachy or forced. Hugely influenced by American directors like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee (particularly Do the Right Thing), La Haine riffs through different styles and techniques, yet the movie feels organic and whole, driven by a genuinely passionate point of view. Dynamic, reckless, sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle (and sometimes both; in one scene, Hubert and Said have been picked up by the police, who torture them for kicks. But watching the abuse is a rookie cop whose face quietly ripples with dismay, helplessness, and resignation), this is a must-see.
As is usual with Criterion releases, the extra features are excellent, including an in-depth but accessible documentary about the housing projects and riots that inspired the film, retrospective material on the making of the movie, behind-the-scenes horseplay, intriguing deleted scenes (with brief but revealing explanations about the deletion from director Mathieu Kassovitz), and a wonderfully articulate introduction by Jodie Foster, who championed the film upon its release and distributed it through her production company. The audio commentary by Kassovitz, who’s fluent in English, is circumspect and thoughtful, with flashes of sardonic humor. Kassovitz’s directing career has turned decidedly less political (his more recent movies include The Crimson Rivers and Gothika), but his perspective on La Haine and its inspirations remains sharp and lucid. –Bret Fetzer