I'm on winter break from the College and went to see Cody Diablo's new film, "Young Adult" while in Dallas. (Very few indie films make it to Conway, AR.) Diablo wrote the screenplay for "Juno" for which she won an Oscar.

Diablo's protagonist, Mavis Geary, is just a year older then I am now, at 37. She lives in urban Minneapolis, where she freelances as a ghost writer for YA novels, while subsisting on a diet of Diet Coke and junk food - thus the title "Young Adult." Her series has been canceled and Mavis is in the last stages of writing the final book of the series - none of which bear her name on the front cover. She is sullen, angry, misguided and more then a little mean - unaware of her own emotions and intentions and controlled by her desire to avoid pain and more closely examining her life. She boozes it up with an old high school classmate that she wouldn't give the time of day to back in their teens, in a constant attempt to medicate her feelings and inability to connect. Her inability to understand her own needs, or the needs of any others, is central to the narrative. She leaves a trail of wrecked relationships behind her in Mercury, Minnesota, her hometown, and comes close to uncovering the source of her own deepest regret and wounding, only to turn her back on the past.

The story is set to a most excellent soundtrack of Teenage Fan Club, The Lemon Heads, and of course, seminal Minnesota rockband The Replacements.

Lately, the BF has been thinking of how to give her page an infusion, which leads me to revisiting this online space.

My interest in technology took a detour this summer and fall. I appreciate the new and emerging forms of communication and connection, but when things like your husband telling you he has (skin) cancer with a frowny face via text message happen, the interest in technology as a mode of communication quickly goes out the door. Thankfully, the husband recovered and we are mostly recovered at the Makura No Soshi, though the death switch may have been permanently flipped.

Death occupies my thoughts a fair amount on the heels of the Xmas holiday. We had a conversation with the brother-in-law about planning for end-of-life for my in-laws, though they are currently healthy. As I walked into the kitchen one morning during our stay in Dallas, my mother-in-law blurted out a secret hiding location for a treasured stash of jewelry. I had just woken up and took a minute to connect the dots between pouring a glass of water and projecting into the future of real estate agents and estate settlement.