bye bye twitter. i can’t say i’ll miss you. 

Sunday night I found myself very bored. I had just finished my second freelance project and had nothing left to do. My brain was foggy from all the computer work and I felt creatively empty, so writing was out of the question. I watched TV for a bit, but wasn’t interested in anything. I had seen the nominations for Silver Linings Playbook and decided to read the book before I went to see the movie. 

The book:

It took me three and a half hours to read the entirety of Silver Linings Playbook. It’s a wonderful story about a man who’s mother rescues him from an insane asylum under the notion that he will be able to get better at home easier than if he stayed in the hospital. Pat Peoples is a disillusioned narrator with an adversity to Kenny G. All at once the reader begins to see that the way Pat sees the world is not correct. He has lost time and is confused when his loved ones tell him so. He thinks he’s going through ‘apart time’ with his wife and that his family is keeping her away. He thinks they can get through apart time and if he looks for the silver linings in life he’ll be able to get her back in the end. Pat thinks life is like a movie. Every movie has a happy ending somehow. He keeps referencing how his life is like the part of the movie where the main character changes himself and gets the girl, or how the main character nearly gives up but tries one ounce harder and gets the girl. People are afraid of him. He’s afraid of himself. His therapist Cliff becomes a great friend and confidant for him. Love and the lack of speaking about it is a huge theme in the book. Pat has a terrible relationship with his father who can only seem to speak to him about the Eagles past, present, and future. Very early on Pat is introduced to a woman named Tiffany, a widow who lost her husband. They form this strange bond where, from Pat’s perspective, it seems as if Tiffany is stalking him, but he sort of enjoys it. 

What I loved about the book is that the author learns what is really going on from the snippets they hear from the people around Pat, and from Pat as he begins to remember what he did. You go on this ride with him and it makes you root for him in a way of missed in books I’ve read recently. He is super flawed. At some points you think, “Oh my god how is going to get himself out of this?” and “Why the hell would his mother take him out?” But then you see a small piece of him, a breadcrumb, that wasn’t there before and you realize he’s fixing himself by telling you the story. It was a very personal read. Like he was sitting in my room and I was watching this change occur. It’s been a long time since I’ve been drawn into a book like that. 

The movie:

After reading the book I knew I had to see the movie. I was intrigued to see how the director used the words and how Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence portrayed the characters. Lawrence is much younger than the character Tiffany is in the book. The writers change Pat’s name, which may seem trivial but I really thought Peoples worked for the character. They also removed the time distortion and made it so that only a few months had actually gone by instead of Pat believing it had been a few months when really it had been years. They shortened the letter passages to just one instead of a few. They didn’t do the montage scene that’s in the book, which really was a huge reason I wanted to see the movie. And they changed the father son relationship and the dance. Those last two changes were huge for me. In the book, the relationship between Pat Sr. and Pat Jr. is a lousy one. No one can speak and Pat Jr. longs for a conversation from his father. And the dance! Oh the dance in the book was magic. You could see it through the words. They are just amazing. In the movie, while it’s fun to watch, it’s heartbreakingly different. They aren’t good at it and it’s sort of a light part of the movie, whereas in the book it was a very heavy, meaningful scene. 

That being said…the movie superb. Books are always better then movies. There’s not enough time in a movie to convey what we feel when we read a book. But the cast of the film did something, they took the words and gave them life, even if they weren’t the same words as the book. On its own, without the book for reference, I understand why it was nominated. Lawrence was incredible. She played crazy so well. You could see the changes I read about occur on screen. I loved both of them, separately but equal. 

freelance project number two…done

i just pulled teeth to get nic to try chocolate cheerios. he was all “no! i don’t want it. i hate it!!!” finally he takes one bite and goes, “i like it!” 

no shit son

one sip of wine and my head’s cloudy

Oldest and youngest have strep. We had Jewish penicillin and grilled cheese for lunch. Ice cream for dessert. Dinatopia marathon with the oldest while lil man naps. Can’t wait to hear the middle child complain about being healthy when he gets home from school.

omg lush bath is…lush! i had the day off because my strep is still technically contagious, so i decided to take a bath with my new lush products. everyone was at work. i ran a tub dropped a father christmas bath bomb in and watched the water turn a weird green sea color (tubs blue so i really have no idea what color the water should be). it smelled heavenly. i used snowflake soap, sink or float shampoo, lavender conditioner, ocean spray scrub. what an awesome experience. my worst fear is that mixing the different smells would make me smell funky - especially since the shampoo has a weird bacon smell. but no! no it was amazing. my skin feels awesome and smells extraordinary. 

go to lush. go forth and buy lots. your purse will not mind, i promise. 

strep throat sucks. prednisone sucks. augmentin sucks. finishing freelance from your bed while all you wanna do is sleep, sucks. 

I bought so much stuff from Lush in fourty-eight hours. Went to the one in Chestnut Hill Mall and scooped:
- Ocean Spray body and face scrub
- Tea tree toner
- Three bath bombs to woo winter bones
The whole time I was there the woman kept asking if I wanted any cleanser. I said no cause my mother is a dermatologist and I get tons of samples for free but my face is so sensitive I stick to cetaphil. When I got in the car I was glancing in the mirror and saw I had three giant volcanoes growing in a straight line. No wonder they asked about cleanser. So I went back yesterday with Nicholas and purchased:
- Grease lightning
- Mask of magnanimity
- Two more bath bombs - one is father Christmas and the other is slumber something
- I also got a slice of snowflake soap and this lavender something, as well as a free scoop of rub rub, and
- party bath bomb
- norther lights soap
- sink or float solid shampoo
- jasmine solid conditioner
- and for the little man who came as an accomplice, well he scored a Rocketeer bath bomb and a rocket bubble wand.

This addiction is also why I am forced to work tonight with a fever. Mama needs money.