Archive for October 2004

My friend Eric recently blew through town on his way to the field for the Kerry campaign. We got a rare few days with him and in celebration of his presence I cooked a rack of lamb. Here’s my cooking diary from those days.

Warning: I’m going to include spoilers to the movies Marnie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Butterfly Effect in this entry.

“Our ‘mistakes’ become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.”
-Ellen Goodman

Without really trying, Sarah and I had the above-named film festival for the past week. “Marnie” had been sitting in our Netfix pile on our tv for months, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” was brought over by my sister after she rented it from Blockbuster, and “Butterfly Effect” was bought off the satellite dish when I realized I had missed it in theaters.

In all three movies the main characters experience a trauma in their past and are unable to come to terms with it. Believing their lives would be better without these experiences, they each relate to their past in flawed ways and ultimately realize that your past, including mistakes and accidents, are a key part of who you are, and can’t be edited for improvement even if you wanted to.