For Lack of Something True to Say: 500 Days of Summer

On Not Flying to Hawaii

I could be the waitress
in the airport restaurant
full of tired cigarette smoke and unseeing tourists.
I could turn into the never-noticed landscape
hanging identically in all the booths
or the customer behind the Chronicle
who has been giving advice
about stock portfolios for forty years. I could be his mortal weariness,
his discarded sports section, his smoldering ashtray.

I could be the 70-year-old woman who has never seen Hawaii,
touching her red lipstick and sprayed hair.
I could enter the linen dress
that poofs around her body like a bridesmaid,
or become her gay son
sitting opposite her, stirring another sugar
into his coffee for lack of something true to say.
I could be the reincarnated soul of the composer
of the Muzak that plays relentlessly overhead,
or the factory worker who wove this fake Oriental carpet,
or the hushed shoes of the busboy.

But I don't want to be the life of anything in this pitstop.
I want to go to Hawaii, the wet, hot
impossible place in my heart that knows just what it desires.
I want money, I want candy.
I want sweet ukelele music and birds who drop from the sky.
I want to be the volcano who lavishes
her boiling rock soup love on everyone,
and I want to be the lover
of volcanos, who loves best what burns her as it flows.

Alison Luterman

27.12.09

500 Days of Summer

I don’t think that this movie received the credit that it deserves. I saw it previewed several times, but never heard much about it past that. My mom asked for it for Christmas and I was glad to buy it for her. We watched it the other night and I fell in love. Rarely does a movie come along that speaks to what life is really like.

Typically there are the silly fairy tale love stories that allow us to believe in unrealistic love. Like if you really do get the chance to speak to the guy again, meeting in the street with a coffee in hand, that he will confess that he has always loved you and never meant to let you go. Nope, doesn’t happen that way to most of us. This movie is a testament to how it is for the rest of us. We fall in love, think that FINALLY, we have “the one", the one to take us out of the horrible dating market of cheesy pickup lines and unclassy dates involving a quick jump from a moving car to save yourself from an obligatory kiss.

This movie is a testament to finding that love and losing it. Of course, you want it to end happily with the guy and the girl in love, but instead, it just doesn’t. It ends the way that life ends, with one of them being forced to heal a heart.

Oh, and the soundtrack is beautiful!!! Regina Spektor, The Smiths, Hall and Oates, Feist. This is going to be a gotta have.

1 comment:

Nina said...: Oh gosh! I love this movie too!; October 24, 2010 at 5:30 PM