Rebecca needs more pens to put between her toes.

[rebecca_in_blue]

I took a nap yesterday after the meeting, and damn, for some reason, taking naps in the middle of the day gives me the freakiest-ass dreams.

The closest cemetery to our apartment is very small and very old. The graves there date back to the 1860's, and I doubt if there are any more recent than the 1920's. But unlike other old cemeteries in the city, this one hasn't been well-preserved. It's never mowed, so the grass is wild and very high in places. Lots of the graves are cracked or broken. It's on a corner in a residential neighborhood, but no one ever visits it, and driving past it, you probably wouldn't notice it's a cemtery at all, because the chain-link fence surrounding it is so overgrown that it's almost impossible to see through.

The only part of the fence that isn't overgrown is the gate. But Friday evening, I was riding past on my bike and saw that the gate too had become hidden under the ivy and weeds. It made me think of that TV show Life After People (which I've never seen but have heard good things about from Sally), about how the earth, if left to its own devices, will take back everything and eventually erase all signs of human life. It's like that was happening to this cemetery. It made me so mad, for some reason. I mean, there are about a hundred people buried in that cemetery, so some must still have descendants in the area. Why doesn't anybody ever come to visit it? Why doesn't anybody care? I went inside and started ripping up the weeds and tearing down the ivy until the gateway was clear again. I got a splinter in my hand that stung like a bitch. Then I came home and watched Ponette. I was in the mood for it.

When Sara wants me to shut up, she asks me a question about a child actress, because she knows I'll get quiet and think. Once she asked me who I thought was the best child actress of the 1990's. If you define best by how many people heard of you and how much money you made, the decade probably goes to Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. But if you define best in terms of pure, raw talent, the decade goes to Victoire. Those who would give it to anybody else (say, Anna Paquin, who was a good actress of the decade) are those who haven't seen Ponette. I think what makes that film so powerful it's that it's so real. It's not scripted, the way virtually all other movies are. I think we've gotten so used to that that we don't even notice it anymore. But when have you ever heard anybody talk in real life the way people do in movies? And it's so personal. That's the other important thing about it. The way Ponette perceives the world is, on a deeper level, the way we all perceive the world, or used to. I don't think Victoire and Doillon can ever be praised highly enough for it.