Oscars, linkage, and a poem

I enjoyed watching the Oscars even though I don't think I've seen any of the movies this year. I absolutely love that everyone is going on about Helen Mirren being sexy, because a) she IS and b) it's just nice to hear that about a woman who actually isn't trying to look like she is still twenty-four. Loved Jada Pinkett Smith's dress. Totally agree with whichever online article I read this morning that said Cameron Diaz looked like she was wearing a giant business envelope. SASE, anyone? Ellen: Great hair, but something around the eye makeup looked weird. Got a kick out of seeing Melissa Etheridge winning herself a little gold dude (I heard that backstage she said Oscar would be the only naked man allowed in her bedroom!) and how much Tammy was beaming from her seat as Melissa made her thank-yous. I'd put the DVR on pause while I went downstairs to futz with laundry, so when Celine Dion came on I was able to fast-forward right on past her. DVRs rule.

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Linkage:

Meetings make us dumber, study shows (I knew it!)

An Estimate of the Number of Shakespeare's Atoms in a Living Human Being (I don't understand any of this math, but it's awesome anyway)

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I ordered this book, and when it came I opened directly to this poem. I keep coming back to it and reading it again instead of starting in on the rest of the book (though I'll do that soon). Enjoy:

The Story Attaches Itself to Us

like the seed of some plant. Its small hooks catch
the cuff of our thought as it walks across
a field. We may not see it or notice
that we are telling some part of it
in telling another story. The story
of Jonah is never about the whale,
who must have been startled one day
to find a two-legged fish in its belly.
So it is, Anangagjuak, you told how
you came upon the body of your wife
lying with her arms reached out, whether
toward you or the life that, though it slowed down,
could no longer wait for her, is not known.
She died looking for you in a storm
as you were hunting, and the snow
buried and preserved her for the day
when you and the others would again
be hunting, when like a dying walrus,
a noise would rise out of your body
at the sight of her on the ground, a noise
you did not know could live there. So I tell
the story of what lives secretly inside us
or comes to be there for no known reason,
and waits only for the day when we
open our mouths in its presence,
and out it comes, alive and chastened,
returned miraculously to the world,
while we turn flukes upward and dive.

--Roger Mitchell
from Half/Mask (University of Akron Press, 2007)