Sweetbitter

An overwhelming number of my favorite people bundled into a single track:

"Bittersweet" sort of embodies how I'm feeling about a few things right now. Snow. My family. Life... and its lack of talking animals and epic clashes of good vs. evil. The usual.

It snowed so bad today that it took us at least half an hour to make it home from Marshall's (it should've been half that), and when we got to the road that my street branches off of, there were some guys pushing cars up the little slope because none of them could make it up. So far at least eight inches of cold, white fairy dust have collected on the tree branches and wrought iron furniture outside.

I am starting to see some of the reasons adults dislike snow. Aside from the perilous roads, there's the issue of shoveling. I don't think I'd mind so much except we have a long, gravel driveway and, oh yeah, I have spaghetti for arm muscles. There's nothing like manual labor to make you resent one of nature's most beautiful mood swings.

For now, though, I'm hunkering down in my chilly little cave of a bedroom after watching two of my favorite movies with two of my favorite people. Horton Hears a Who, if you haven't seen it, is SO not "just for kids." It's got drugs - I mean, fuzzy dandelions - and emo kids in it. Really, with those factors, you can't go wrong.

After that we watched Prince Caspian. I adore fantasy movies like that, but I felt really bad for my sister because she couldn't understand why a little girl coming back to a magical world where trees and animals used to be her friends would try to talk to a bear. I said she just needed to read more fantasy books and use her imagination a little, which for some reason made her kind of mad at me.

Then, when the movie ended, I got all melancholy as I always do at the end of fantasy movies and said to my mom, "I always hate when the adventure has to end and everything has to go back to normal." She looked at me the way she used to when she wanted to talk me out of believing in fairies in sixth grade and said, "Fantasy isn't real, darling."

Well, yeah, but are you saying you don't get sucked into the story? Are you saying you don't suspend your disbelief and start to believe lions really talk? How can you not want that to be real? Le sigh. Apparently I am the only one in this household with a taste for high fantasy. Tragic.

But I am trying to highlight the sweet. Snow is magical. I can't wait to go walking in the fresh, clean, black and white world tomorrow. I should buy film and take pictures. We have storytellers to make up for the things that are impossible in real life, and hey, real life isn't so bad, anyway. In fact, right now it's kind of...

Sweet.