I have had a thought. Stand back.

If you do much blog reading, you’ve probably noticed people making negative remarks about their popularity and the size of their readership. “All three of my readers,” “I’m not one of the popular kids,” etc. It’s sometimes expressed as self-deprecation, or sometimes as sad wonderings about what’s wrong with them and why no one likes them, or sometimes as confessions of jealousy.

And you might think it would be just the bloggers who have only a few readers, but it’s also bloggers who have dozens but wonder why other bloggers have hundreds, and bloggers who have hundreds but wonder why other bloggers have thousands, and bloggers who have thousands but wonder why other bloggers have hundreds of thousands. It’s hard to comment on such posts. What can be said other than, “It’s not your fault per se: it’s because your blog, for whatever reason, lacks the kind of mass appeal you (and pretty much everyone else) are hoping to have”?

I have thought of a different way to think of this situation. I think the blogger/blogging relationship can be thought of like the actor/acting relationship.

There are actors I love who choose projects I can’t stand: even if I love love love a particular actor, I’m not going to watch him in a weekly zombie drama. I can want to be SISTERS with a particular actor, and yet I’m not going to watch her in that stupid movie.

And there are actors I think I can’t stand, but I’d like them tremendously if I knew them in person. I don’t like their WORK, but I’d like THEM if their work wasn’t my only way of knowing them. But their work IS my only way of knowing them.

And there are actors I think I love, but I’d cringe and try to get away from them if I knew them in person. I love their WORK, but if I knew them I’d want to cry from the wringing disappointment of who they really are. But…I DO only know their work, so I love them.

Bloggers and their blogs are a comparable situation. There are bloggers we love, who take blogging jobs we’re not interested in reading. There are bloggers we think we love, but if knew them (not just met them: some bloggers, like some actors, can be “on” in short-term meeting situations) we wouldn’t love them anymore, because what we love is not them but their BLOGS. There are people we know and love in person, but we can barely stand to skim their blogs. And there are bloggers we think we can’t stand, but it’s really that we don’t want to read their writing and/or what they choose to write about—which is quite a different thing from not liking THE PEOPLE. (Of course we might also dislike the people, if we knew them. What I mean is that the blog alone is not sufficient information for a conclusion.)

I think the feeling has been that if the blog is liked, the person is liked—and that therefore if the blog is not liked, the person is not liked. “Why don’t people like my blog?” becomes “Why don’t people like me?” Thinking of it in a different way (i.e., that the blog is the person’s work/hobby, just as acting can be a person’s work/hobby) does not automatically solve the problem: most bloggers, like most actors, would of course still prefer that their work be admired, and by as large an audience as possible. But rejection of the work/blog doesn’t have to be interpreted as rejection of the person.

Some hobbies (acting, blogging) require an audience. Some (writing in a journal, running, scrapbooking, stamp-collecting) don’t. Some (art, music, dance) can go either way, depending on what the person participating in the hobby wants. The audience can’t be forced into existence (or complained into existence, or wanted into existence), so the trick is to find the natural fits. There are some things we like to do, and other people like to watch us do them. Yay! There are some things we like to do, and no audience is required. Yay! There are some things we like to do, and no one wants to watch us but we don’t mind and we can happily do them without an audience. Yay!

And then there is the category of things we like to do, but only if we have an audience of a certain size—and our audience is not large enough, and so we’re miserable and it makes us feel rejected and unliked. Non-yay. I think those are good hobbies to eliminate, to leave more room to focus on the others. (This is why I no longer model, act, sing for an audience, or try out for football.)

My aunt was visiting and we were having a wonderful time talking and eating hot fudge sundaes and admiring the things she and my mom bought on shopping trips, so it was a really fun week and now my mom and I have post-holiday-blues-like feelings. I’ve been consoling myself with hour upon hour of a game called Sonny, and I REALLY cannot explain to you why I am playing it. I mean, I CAN: it was Henry’s fault, because he was DESPERATE to play it but couldn’t figure it out, and so I started helping, and then somehow it was two hours later and I’d been playing a SHOOTING game all that time.

I don’t think of myself as LIKING shooting games, but Paul tells me it’s because I think of them all as being First-Person Shooter games, which I hate because I hate scared-anticipation and I hate being startled and I don’t think quickly. When in fact some games are Turn-Taking games like Sonny, where you can take your time and figure out your move, and then when you’re all set you say go, and then it waits patiently for your next move. Plus, it’s not gory or gross. Still, there’s no getting around the part where I’m aiming guns, shooting them, and saying “DARN it!” when they don’t do enough damage.

As soon as Rob got home, Henry and I made HIM play it TOO, because we kept getting really stuck and not knowing what was going on (now we have a Striker’s Helm, but how do we get it out of our inventory so we can use it? and what’s a “helm” when we are not steering any ships?), and we needed someone else to play it so we could ask questions. Now Rob, Paul, Henry, and I are ALL hooked on it.

Speaking of out of character, I also watched and loved an action movie: Red (Netflix link). We watched it with my aunt one evening, and I was all “I don’t know about this,” but then I LOVED it. Bruce Willis plays this totally charming, deadly ex-CIA agent. I’m pretty sure the director just had him look at the camera with a wry, amused, affectionate, sidelong-glance tough-guy expression, and put a green screen behind him so he could put that expression in every single scene, and I think I speak for all the ladies in our group when I say IT WORKED.

There was plenty of shooting and action, but nothing gory. And although it got a little scary at the peak of the action, MOST of the action was broken up with humor. And almost all the characters were, like, baby boomers coming out of retirement to kick some mid-thirties next-generation butt, so this is a good movie to watch with your parents. And Helen Mirren is in it, and Morgan Freeman, and John Malkovich playing on the funny/endearing end of his creepy/scary/crazy spectrum. Plus there’s Karl Urban for the ladies who prefer a man in his 30s, though it was Bruce Willis who had all three of us looking up his age on Wikipedia to see if it was creepy for us to like him. AND, the female romantic interest is Mary-Louise Parker, who is only a decade younger than Bruce Willis and only LOOKS young enough to be his daughter, so that’s kind of awesome too!

And I’m reading Divergent, but in my last reading session something icky and scary happened to one of the characters, and now I feel nervous that that’s going to escalate.

Yesterday Rob and I had an argument in the car that went extremely well but was nevertheless very unpleasant. He wanted to discuss his theories that no one should be “against” anyone else, and that no one should make any laws that affect anyone else, and that if you can’t prove something is untrue you have to treat it exactly as if it’s true. I discussed these topics with him for over 30 minutes and didn’t lose my cool AT ALL, even when I was making good/calm points and asking good/calm questions, and all he was doing was repeating his few points over and over in an increasingly upset voice and implying he considered me too stupid to follow the obvious logic.

So I should have gone home feeling good about my performance in this first of what will be many, many chances to exercise patience and restraint and the kindness that comes from having a more developed frontal lobe. One of my big worries about the teenage years is that I will lose my temper in a near-constant fashion, because I really do hate Immature Philosophizing—and I DIDN’T lose my temper. But instead of feeling cheered by this, I went home feeling logy and full of ennui. Because it turns out that even when I handled a discussion very well, I STILL hate Immature Philosophizing and having arguments with people. I felt so weary at the idea of the years and years of it I have ahead of me as the kids grow up.

I also felt logy/ennui/weary at the idea that they might not outgrow the ideas I consider immature. It is upsetting that there is so little I can do to control the children’s brains so that they will grow up thinking thoughts I agree with. I already knew this was the case going in to this project, but it’s bad for morale to be imagining what life could be like when he comes home with his family for Christmas and is still talking this way. Maybe all five of the kids will sit around talking about how much better the world would be if they ran it, and how stupid Paul and I are for not agreeing with them. Then we’ll all sit around grimly unwrapping our presents and feeling dissatisfied with each other.

Also, he’s outgrowing his pants so I went to my bins to get the next size up and found there WAS NO NEXT SIZE UP. I was going to have to buy him MEN’S sizes. Then I found that actually it’s only The Children’s Place that doesn’t have size 16, but Old Navy and Target still do, so we have one more size to go. But after THAT, it’s the MEN’S department!

In this post I am going to tell you what I think the ending of Inception is (discussed without spoilers in this post) and WHY it’s that way, and so perhaps it goes without saying that this post will be RIFE with spoilers. There won’t be anything else in the post: just that one subject. This is the part where you should leave if you don’t want to read spoilers about Inception.

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SPOILER LINE! SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!
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Here is the ending I demand that you believe: Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) is back in reality. He successfully completed his dream mission, Saito followed through with his promise, and Dom goes home to his kids.

Here are the reasons this is true:

1. Because Dom makes it clear again and again in the movie that he is not interested in living in dreams. He has to do a lot of work to convince his wife to leave Limbo, but he is determined to convince her of it—even though they were very happy there. When she wants to go back and live in dreams again, he doesn’t want to—even to try to save her life. He tells Mal in his final Limbo scene that her dream self is an insufficient shadow of his real wife, and that that’s not good enough for him. He doesn’t want to interact and live with his DREAM children: he’s had many opportunities to live permanently in Limbo and recreate his wife/kids there—but he wants ONLY his REAL children. It would be inconsistent with everything we know about him for him to suddenly say “I don’t even CARE if this is reality or not, I’m so happy!” He might feel that way for a short time, but not permanently. They’d be shadows of his real children, and not good enough—and he’d be remembering that his own dream happiness wasn’t solving reality for his real children who were still waiting, parentless.

2. Because Lynn linked in the comments section to this Inception FAQ, and there are assorted mentions of the writer and actors believing that Dom IS home in the end. If MICHAEL CAINE thinks Dom is home to reality in the end, then DOM IS HOME TO REALITY IN THE END.

3. Because if he’s not home to reality in the end, the movie isn’t over. See #1: Dom is not interested in living in a dream. So if this is some wonderful dream, he’ll soon figure that out and then he’ll have to start a new quest to get home. There would need to be Inception II. (This would be the only situation in which I would go with the “It’s still just a dream” ending: if it will lead to a sequel in which he tries again to get back to reality.)

4. Because the spinning top at the end is the perfect dramatic/non-sappy end to the movie. Fading out on Leonardo DiCaprio hugging small children would have been okay, but kind of sappy after all the shooting, and it would have left us all in the theater feeling a little awkward with each other. I can just SEE someone working on the movie saying “Oh my god, you know what would be AWESOME?” and everyone else going “WHOA. YES.”

5. Because if he’s not home to reality in the end, I hate the whole world and everyone in it, and especially everyone who makes movies.

I just finished Inception (Netflix link), and I loved it.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I know I’m not literally the last person to see it, so I’m not going to do any spoilers, but I wish I could because I want to hear what you thought about the ending, by which I mean I want to convince you that I am right about it. And I would like to say also that I hate it when there is uncertainty about the ending. Would it have killed them to make it clear? Because I know I know what happened, because it is the only possible satisfying ending, but I want THEM to know I know, and to admit THEY know too, and not for them to tease me like we all might not know and/or as if “not knowing” = “deep and meaningful.” I KNOW WHAT I KNOW.

Anyway. Netflix thought I would like it 3.2 stars, but I gave it one of my very rare 5-star ratings. To get 5 stars from me, I have to love it AND it has to make me think “WHAT just happened to my BRAIN?” I can see why Netflix couldn’t predict my rating: there was a LOT of shooting in it, and I dislike shooting. But it wasn’t the kind of shooting that distresses me (i.e., in war movies where young men are cut down in slow motion to sad opera music, or anything where it’s scary and/or gory), so I didn’t mind it much, though I did turn the volume way down. It also helped that I watched it while exercising, not only because I could burn off the adrenaline/stress as it accumulated, but also because that means I watched it in four chunks and could process each chunk for awhile before moving on to the next.

Man. I cried so hard at the end I gave myself a headache. If you watch it, remember: there is no uncertainty about the ending, because there is only one possible ending.

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Speaking of reviewing stuff, I finished The Leftovers.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Here are the things I didn’t like:

1. I couldn’t tell the guys apart. Their names and their personalities seemed mostly the same, and very bland. I had to figure them out from context: oh yeah, this is the dad, because here’s house/breakfast; oh yeah, this is one of the guys in that group, because here’s bottle/kissing; oh yeah, this is the son because here’s that girl.

2. I’m trying not to give anything away, but there is a ritual in a cult, and the ritual would have worked perfectly well without a certain relationship element. Tying it to the relationship made it sadistic and mind-gamey, which made no sense. Definitely it made the plot more thrilling—but it SEEMED like an element to make the plot more thrilling, as opposed to seeming like it fit.

3. At the end, I didn’t feel like I’d been given enough information about the characters to get a feeling for how things were going to go. It’s not that I needed every plotline finished (though I do enjoy that), it’s that everything was still swinging wildly back and forth for everyone (and for the whole disappearance plot itself) and then the end just snipped it closed randomly, like the book wasn’t going the way the author thought it would and now he was sick of it and wanted to be done with it. I felt like I knew what was going to happen with a couple of the characters (one was probably going to be okay; another was probably not), but the others could have gone any direction. And yet I felt like the last scene was meant to imply a sort of resolution.

4. I would have enjoyed more talk about the disappearance itself. What percentage of the population, for example? Or perhaps I missed that part. I’m always nervous I’ll criticize something and it’ll turn out I was just dim and missed a page or something. And was not one single person an actual eyewitness to the disappearance of so much of humanity? We heard two eyewitness stories, and neither one actually witnessed anything with their eyes. I would have preferred a more Stephen King-like approach for this section: more glorying in the surprising horror.

Just OVERALL, I felt like the book fell flat. It felt like reading the second book in a six-book series.

Today is the day to wear purple to visually demonstrate that you think that gay teenagers shouldn’t be bullied or beaten up (non-gay teenagers shouldn’t be beaten up or bullied either, but the emphasis here is on what motivates the bullying/beatings), and to show overall support for those teenagers. Problem: finding purple shirts, particularly for those of us who didn’t hear about this in time to clearance-shop. Elizabeth and I had no trouble, though my purple shirt was in the laundry so that caused a scramble. Rob had a purple plaid shirt he coincidentally chose last year on clearance, so I snipped the tag off of it and he wore it. But the three younger boys—none of them had purple shirts.

I was not panicked about this, because it is pretty clear that just because WEARING a purple shirt is meant to show support for a cause, NOT wearing the purple shirt doesn’t mean THE OPPOSITE. It can mean “supporting the cause, but not owning a purple shirt.” Or it can mean “supporting the cause, but didn’t know about this because it was so poorly publicized.” Or it can mean “supporting the cause, but forgot when I got dressed.” Or it can mean “supporting the cause but thinking it’s stupid to show support for any cause in any way except by personally becoming a research scientist who personally solves the problem.” Or it can mean “supporting the cause, but not choosing to demonstrate it via clothing.” Still: I DID want to demonstrate it via clothing, and I was hoping the kids could too—especially with all the kids old enough this year to understand about bullying being wrong (Henry would like me to clarify that anti-bullying does not apply to white blood cells, which are allowed to bully and ostracize germs).

Fortunately, all three boys had shirts that contained at least a suggestion of being rainbow-striped. For example, Edward had a shirt striped in red, yellow, blue, and green. It’s not RAINBOW-rainbow, and it’s not purple, but I think there’s room to interpret it as participation in this event—or at least not as active non-participation. If I was out today and saw a sea of people wearing purple and a few people wearing rainbowish stripes, I’d assume we were all on the same wave-length, intention-wise.

(I also changed the blog color for today, in case you read this in a reader and so have not yet been freaked out by it.)

I have been very busy and flustered this morning, because I got an email from Zazzle that holiday cards are 50% off today and through October 20th (code is CARD4HOLIDAY) [edit: new sale is 60% off through November 4th with code UPTOSIXTYOFF], or 75% off if you order more than 75 (code is JOY2THEWORLD) [this one I don’t know if it has a new code/expiration, but I don’t think so] and I’ve been meaning since LAST Christmas to update the Holiday Card Scoring System card (it ties in to this post), so that I’d be poised to order more for THIS year as soon as a deal like this came along. LAST year I made the “Swistle’s Holiday Card Scoring System” card—but then when I ordered some, I realized it didn’t really make any sense to have my name on there. So on the new version I’ve taken that out. (The old version is still in the shop, so don’t get confused.) Here’s the new version:

Swistle “Holiday Card Scoring System” Holiday Card by Swistle

The inside says “Happy/Merry Holidays,” and between the word Merry and the word Holidays is a list of holidays. I went back and forth on whether to include Eid, because it’s not always at the same time of year as the others—but then I thought, really, I’ve already got things kind of messy by having the “pre-Dec 1st” and “post-Dec 25th” part in the rules (hmm, I wonder which holiday Swistle herself celebrates!), and leaving it out might look like exclusion for reasons other than timing, so perhaps this is a time when inclusiveness can be prioritized over making sense accuracy.

I ordered some myself, and because I bought more than 75, I got them for 76 cents each including the shipping, which I’d say is PRETTY ROCKING considering they’re $2.95 each without the sale.

And I’m posting it in case you are still looking for holiday cards for this year, because I think we all have some people on our card list who could stand to review the rules.

• Watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Netflix link) for the first time. I had NO IDEA what the plot was (I’d expected it to take place mostly in a restaurant), but it seemed like the sort of cultural literacy I should acquire. I think of it as being mostly famous for Holly Golightly’s fashion style, and I’d say that is what I most enjoyed about the movie. I didn’t feel any romantic chemistry between the stars (they seemed like good friends who had to force themselves to kiss) or any hope for their future romantic relationship (as with As Good as It Gets ((Netflix link)), I thought a far better plot resolution would have been for the stars to form a non-romantic family unit), but I did weep openly over the cat storyline. The portrayal of the upstairs neighbor is embarrassing but historically interesting. I loved the clerk at Tiffany’s.

• Ordering another 3-pound box of Russell Stover Bloopers. It went SO WELL last time and, like a gambler, either success or failure makes me feel even more intrigued. Will the next box be as good? or will it be a TOTAL BUST? It’s due to arrive Thursday. It is fun to have something to anticipate.

• Starting Divergent, which I’m trying ONLY because of all the talk on Twitter. For Twittercultural literacy. The cover doesn’t look like my kind of book at all, and I think of young-adult stuff as not my thing either, so I let it sit on the library pile for two weeks. I kept finishing a book and taking another book from underneath it. But this morning I sighed and thought I’d just get it over with—and 5 pages in, I was hooked enough that I had to rip myself away from it.

And now I have to STOP reading it, because writing the above paragraph reminded me to renew it because it’s due tomorrow, and I noticed The Leftovers was also due tomorrow so I tried to renew that one too but I couldn’t because it’s on hold for someone else. So I need to read THAT, and THEN I can go back to Divergent. The Leftovers is another one I have been putting off reading, because I’m still not sure if I liked Little Children (that’s weird: the one I read had goldfish crackers as the cover art, but the one I just linked to has cookies; I wonder if Pepperidge Farm complained?), and because fiction that involves a religious plot element can be dicey: sometimes it’s helpful and thought-provoking, sometimes it’s good for recreational anger, sometimes it’s just kind of tiring and upsetting.

• Painting my nails with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in 130 Blue Me Away.

It is difficult to get a photo of fingernail polish that looks good and represents the color accurately. But this is a polish that looks exactly the same on the nails as it looks in the bottle, so if you pick up the bottle you will know what it looks like.

When I posted about the frustration of not knowing what to send to soldiers, jennie w. commented that there was a site called Any Soldier, where people could find actual lists from actual soldiers. I clicked over there and I am a little dazzled. For someone who likes to send care packages but gets anxious about overdoing it and/or sending someone a bunch of stuff they don’t need/want, this is like some sort of heaven.

I think this ties in beautifully with Doing My Best‘s Crappy Day Presents idea (see the upper-right of her blog for more about CDPs, with examples), and it’s another outlet for those of us who love to do things like that. It is extremely fun for me to buy things for people, especially when I can find those things on clearance (GOOD things, not cheap ugly things—but at 1/4th the price). Looking through the lists of soldier wish lists, my heart was pounding. They need twin-sized sheets, and I OFTEN find twin-sized sheets on 75% off—and in fact, I have several sets still in their packages for when the current sets wear out, and so have had to pass by many a nice clearance. And they want things like snack foods, and I often see those on clearance. And vitamins, and I sometimes see those on clearance. And really, I now see the clearance sections in a WHOLE NEW LIGHT. I’d been thinking, “Oh, that’s such a great deal on cute stationery, I wish I didn’t already have more than I can ever use,” and “Oooo, gum on clearance, but that’s not the flavor Paul likes,” and “Wow, all those DVDs for only $5 each, but I use Netflix now.” BUT I CAN BUY THEM FOR THE SOLDIERS.

And I subscribe to People magazine, and there are GIRL SOLDIERS WHO LIKE PEOPLE MAGAZINE. In fact, you can send a package specifically to “any FEMALE soldier” if it seems more fun to put together a package of nice shampoo and tampons and hair elastics and People magazines and Maeve Binchy paperbacks from the library 25-cent book sale, instead of a box of SpongeBob DVDs and car magazines and Speed Stick.

And I can just buy an item here (box of caffeinated fruit-flavored water enhancer, $2) and an item there (set of twin sheets on 75% off, $6.24), and set them aside until I have enough for a box. I think one of the best parts is knowing that if something in the box is something that’s needed by the recipient, they can definitely find someone else who will want it.

It’s hard to CHOOSE someone, though. There are SO MANY. SuperJules and I were wishing we had more filter options: you can already sort by service branch, where the unit is from, number of women/men—but we’d like to be able to sort in other ways. I’d like to be able to search for specific items, so that I could find areas that specifically want books, or specifically want People magazines, or whatever. Jules wants to be able to double-filter, so that we can find, for example, a larger team that has received fewer packages. I’d also like to be able to sort by pitifullness, so that I can give priority to the lone female asking for hair elastics and wishing the base store had pads instead of only tampons, and ignore the group looking for a mini-fridge for their PlayStation area. Just clicking through one request link after another is overwhelming, and makes it feel like it’s not even worth it to send a single-drop box into the need-ocean.

By the way, the USPS has free flat-rate boxes for this, and I lovvvvvvve flat-rate boxes. I can get a little squirrely about mailing stuff, otherwise. But with a flat-rate box, you just fill it up and you know exactly how much it will cost to mail. And it’s pretty amazing to be able to mail a box across the world for $12.95. It’s not like $12.95 is pocket change, but I can come up with it now and then—and it’s nothing like the cost it would be if it weren’t APO/FPO: I once mailed a very small package to Norway and it was so much money I nearly blacked out, something like $30 to mail a baby outfit and a rattle.

I’m a little nervous about the customs forms, though. I don’t know how to do those, and new things make me fearful and avoidant. I will hope that the fun of mailing the first box will motivate me to plow through that experience, and after that I will know just what to do and won’t have to fret about it anymore.

Whenever I donate blood, there is a nice wide range of other people also giving blood. But last night was a particularly good mix, the kind that a writer might well take liberties in INVENTING, just to make a story about the milk of human kindness a little more touching. But no, these were my actual companions:

1. A goth girl, late teens, looking like she wanted everyone to know this did NOT mean she cared about HUMANITY or anything, she was JUST trying to increase her PALLOR.

2. The classic cheerful, loud, tall, balding, beer-bellied, beer-logo-baseball-cap wearin’ man, also wearin’, I am not even kidding, a United States flag shirt where the entire shirt was made of flag design. With light-wash jeans and high-top sneakers.

3. A petite churchy Midwestern-type lady in slacks and a turtleneck and a little blazer all in appropriate dark neutrals, sitting with very good posture and ankles crossed, using reading glasses to study the book she was holding up right in front of her face to avoid curving her neck down.

Oh, it is SO TEMPTING to make this list EVEN BETTER. Like, I could add a guy in a suit and tie, right? And another guy from a messy trade—a painter, maybe, or a car mechanic, with paint/oil all over his clothes. And then I could add a party-type woman, and perhaps a geeky high school boy. Or at the very least I could add a necklace worn over the petite woman’s turtleneck.

But I will refrain from embellishing. Those three people who were actually there, plus me as the “plump make-up-less mother-type in jeans and a not entirely clean t-shirt and sporty mary janes” made a FINE tear-eliciting, we’re-all-in-this-together assortment. More would just be pushing it.