Sun King

Summer has officially begun: I have three mosquito bites on my face. I hadn't noticed any bugs except for the odd ant or box elder (there didn't seem to be any in Italy) until Friday night at Gloria's birthday party; usually I get attacked at Midway Village, but I've managed to stay far away from that place this year. But they seem to be out in full force now.

Gloria's annual party is kind of a mark of summer, too, come to think of it. I enjoyed seeing a lot of people that I hadn't really talked to since school let out, like Ellen and Sonya and Stephanie and Patrick and James Stout (this kid from my bio class), as well as all of Gloria's friends from Guilford that I've gotten to know, like Candace and Sarah and Kelsey. Gloria has a pool, but it was pretty cold that night, so most people didn't go swimming. I was glad for the excuse; I've never really liked "swimming" (or, more accurately, hanging out in the pool while people bash each other over the heads with foam noodles). A big group of kids, mostly from Auburn, played Ultimate Frisbee; I wandered aimlessly up and down the field, mainly trying to figure out who was on my team. My morale wasn't helped by Andrew Pipathsouk saying to Joe as we prepared to play after picking teams, "Looks like it's just you and me," or something to that effect. Thanks a lot (even if it's true)! Anyway, after that game broke up, I mainly wandered around talking to various groups of people, mostly Ellen and Sonya.

On Saturday we went over to my grandma's house for a pre-Fourth of July-slash-birthday party (my dad, cousin, and grandma all have birthdays in the same week or so). My dad had made a little slide show with our vacation pictures, so we had to look at that. I could tell most of my relatives were pretty bored. "Looking at slides" is kind of a family joke; apparently my grandparents have hundreds of slides from their various vacations through the years. My cousins, who are in their mid-twenties, were playing "Magic," that card game that all boys somehow seem to be familiar with and fond of. (Well, maybe not all boys, but all the ones I know, the same ones who foam at the mouth when they talk about Halo 2.) Another family tradition is this special birthday cake, German chocolate pound cake. I don't think anyone in my family really likes it; it's just what we have for every birthday, and everyone eats it dutifully, probably to make my grandma happy.

Yesterday after church I watched Little Women, the movie with Winona Ryder and Susan Sarandon. I used to love that movie when I was younger, and I still like it a lot, although it seems more contrived now, the dialogue stiff. There's also a fair number of references that I never understood before, like the fact that the March family lives in Concord; the girls go skating on Walden Pond (as in Thoreau's famous work), and Jo mentions that her parents are part of the Transcendentalist movement. It's kind of like the other day when I was looking through an old book of Far Side cartoons. There are so many things that I never understood before, pop culture, biology, and history references that before I either didn't even catch or kind of skimmed over, not really caring. Now that I do understand them, the cartoons are so much funnier and more interesting. I guess that's a good thing, although I kind of feel like I've lost my innocence, as with the time when I discovered that a favorite old Peter, Paul, and Mary song was about a gay couple dying from AIDS.

I hesitate to make any comments about the whole Tom Cruise thing, since I'm sure anyone reading this is already sick of hearing about the guy (the worst for me was when our paper had a little article entitled "Cruise-Holmes Update," like it's a daily thing now). The only thing I have to say is this: how could any supposedly reasonable, at least moderately educated person subscribe to Scientology? I have a measure of respect for Kabbalah (another big trend for celebrities), which at least as its roots in ancient Jewish mysticism, but Scientology was invented by a science fiction writer from the Fifties. Here's what they believe, as near as I can figure: people have alien past lives because of "Xenu, the galactic tyrant," and now must cleanse themselves. Examples of these past lives listed on Wikipedia include "being run over by a Martian bishop driving a steamroller" and "being transformed into an intergalactic walrus which perished after falling out of a flying saucer." And people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta and Kirstie Alley are running around solemnly professing their faith in this thing. I think that L. Ron Hubbard just made it up so he could get all these people to follow him blindly and then sit back and laugh at them.

I have a confession to make: I really want the new Backstreet Boys CD, Never Gone. All right, so no one over the age of eleven admits to actually liking the Backstreet Boys, or else they embarrassedly mention that they used to when they were young and didn't know any better; the boy bands were very "lite pop," but when I hear an old Backstreet Boys or N*Sync song, I realize that they are quite catchy. That's not a measure of fine music, but I'm still really interested to hear what this new CD sounds like. Who knows? Maybe it could become cool now to like the Backstreet Boys, in a kind of nostalgic, anti-poseur-ish way.