I'm a member of the Diehard-is-a-Christmas-movie club.
We fight to survive when there are loved ones who care about whether we make it back alive. *Trauma alert, I get into some personal history in this post. **Please don't tell the cops on me :-).
The wife in the Die Hard movie series starring Bruce Willis is named Holly. I rest my case. It’s a Christmas movie. ;-)
Action-Adventure fans need some feel-good endings too.
I binge movie watched again yesterday, after finishing the pudding post that was on my writing task To-Do list.
Background info - this is me confessing to slipping into a couple days of “crack” addiction again. Step away from the escapist entertainment. Or maybe I needed it as an infusion of life.
Sadly, Bruce Willis is suffering from Fronto-Temporal dementia now - aphasia, not saying the words you meant to say is a symptom. He had a stutter and became an actor because he learned that what he memorized as a script, he wouldn’t stutter while saying.
(*Note that I can’t feel very terribly sorry for Hollywood actors/actresses because they are likely somewhat connected to the child trafficking or were at least keeping their mouths shut about it in order to keep working. Demi Moore does seem connected to the mess based on my observations over the recent years and she was interviewed in other articles as his earlier life first wife.)
His daughter, Tallulah, one of three children from the first marriage with Demi noticed his dementia initially as vague personality changes and seeming hearing loss - which likely was a result from all the noise of making explosive movies according to her story:
““It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness, which the family chalked up to Hollywood hearing loss: ‘Speak up! ‘Die Hard’ messed with Dad’s ears,’” she wrote. “Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally. He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me.”
As Tallulah Willis faced her own health struggles, which included diagnoses of borderline personality, ADHD and anorexia nervosa, she realized her dad was "quietly struggling," too.
“All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet,” she said.” (today.com)
It’s not easy being green, having to spend each day the color of the leaves…
- Kermit the Frog
We have to be uniquely ourselves and working through to see that is a lesson of life.
I cut myself off from escapist fiction reading and stepped away from Netflix as it was hard to turn off at times. I switched to reading non-fiction as it was easier for me to put down.
Creative flow…. somehow ten days of my life disappeared while I was working on the bulk of the Squirrel Appreciation activity book.
Background - The squirrel book is in dedication to my father who was not an easy person to love or tolerate as he was a bit Asperger’s in his social skills and ability to say extremely mean things on a regular basis. We love and honor our parents though, because… just because…. it isn’t easy being green, the color of the leaves. It isn’t easy being a parent or knowing whether to push a little harder or to give a little more slack.
My dad loves wilderness and wildlife and would prompt me to refill the birdfeeder as soon as it was empty, BUT he also warned me not to feed the squirrels. I am stubborn and so is he, but on that point, I did learn he was correct. The squirrels climbing on the bird feeder was an engineering challenge for him to try to prevent them and they always figured out how to get on the bird feeder anyway. I got them some hazelnuts in the shell and learned that dad was 100% correct. Do not feed the squirrels because they are actually pesky rodents that will attack your picture windows when their hazelnuts ran out.
I stopped feeding the squirrels. They aren’t cute when they are attacking your windows. They get some of the birdseed and lots of hickory nuts. So, I try to feed the soil. The trees benefit from calcium and magnesium rich fertilizers and nitrogen.
Binge watching movie reviews:
Genevieve - 1953 movie about a classic car race in the UK. My parents did drive in road rallies for fun as young adults. The movie was a funny recap of what wives and girlfriends have to put up with when their guy has a car tinkering hobby - and that they do put up with it and even participate in it, because they see how important it is to their man, and they want their man to be happy. (Youtube) My parents did road rallies for fun when they were young. My dad was a fan of sports cars, and my mom fell for the cute guy with a fancy car and loved going for rides. He read poetry to her. Parents are so weird… or adorable. My younger sister told me my mom had a specific tree in the backyard at which she would throw a dozen eggs when mad at him. He could be infuriating. They both could be scary at times. It isn’t easy being a kid or a parent.
Dancer (2016) - a documentary about the Ukrainian ballet superstar, Sergei Polunin. (Youtube)
There are LOTS of modern movies that I haven’t seen because I stopped watching movies. ‘Dancer’ is a documentary about a real male ballet dancer from Ukraine, Sergei Polunin, who is seriously exceptional if not familiar with ballet, but he had some downs in part due to the relationship difficulties caused by what the family had to go through to fund his training as a ballet dancer. They all had to split up to work in different locations.
The demands of elite athleticism were also physically draining for Sergei. (*And are for all elite ballet dancers - grueling is not a hard enough word for what ballet dancers do and starting from very early childhood.) Sergei would get bored with dancing the same ballets over and over again once he reached the level of principal dancer of a major company. Facts of life… doing something until you reach a peak is fun and exciting, then continuing to do that over and over and over again because you have a lot of fans who can’t all squeeze in the theater at the same time gets tedious. An artistic temperament might not handle the tedium well.
The story does have an upbeat or less down ending. He made it through some emotionally difficult stuff and made up with his parents by the end. Gorgeous dancing. **Bad boy partier who admired P. Diddy and got a bunch of tattoos even though ballet is a visual arts industry, and he quit the principal dancer position after just 3 years which led to being blacklisted by the Western ballet industry and so he ended up dancing in Russia for a while. He later made a solo dance video to the pop song Take Me To Church and that video went viral and inspired so many other dancers that he was reinspired to continue ballet instead of quitting. Having your performance viewable by millions on Youtube makes it easier to please a large fan base.
The body, at peak fitness, demands daily exercise or you stiffen up and lose fitness quickly. He talks about feeling trapped a bit by the demands of his body to keep stretching, keep working, stopping for even a day leads to stiff muscles and a sore back.
Just four days of not exercising causes a loss of fitness. (Brave AI summary) At my peak earlier adult fitness my mother scolded me a bit for spending an hour and a half a day on aerobic dance exercise. How could I take that much time for myself when I had kids? I remember a complainy type of quote or article about Demi Moore and her demanding five hours of fitness training per day and I was thinking that it would be nice to have that much time to focus on fitness.
Sergei also reminded me of the fun of dancing though - “levitating” - he likes the feeling of hovering in mid-air momentarily during high G spins. Yes, yes, yes. Spinning is so much fun. As a teen I purposely asked to take ballet classes in hopes of becoming less klutzy. I did learn how to fall more gracefully… being klutzy at times is part of the ADHD is what I eventually learned about myself. I also learned how to do the ballet spins (not in toe shoes) - pirouettes, the graceful arms and other ballet positions, but I wasn’t super strong or super thin and only took a couple beginner classes.
Learning how to dribble the basketball is a start though. I danced freeform rock-n-roll throughout my adult years, whether I was overweight or thin. Strong and thin gets better speed though, and feeling the high G of spinning is a blast.
The Dancer documentary was inspiring and it was helpful to have the reminder that exercise hurts but that not exercising also hurts and is more disabling over time. I haven’t been taking good care of myself lately and haven’t really been sharing updates about my not-health either and am not sure if I should apologize to my readers or followers. Having a community care about you is not something I grew up knowing. But I should take better care of myself and have been trying again and I have learned there are people who care whether I take care of myself or not.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
- Dylan Thomas (poetryfoundation.org)
We want our loved ones to try, to try to stick it out, to try to take care of themselves, and to try to stay with us.
As a caregiver, or mother/wife/selfless woman, we are trained to care for others more than to take care of ourselves. My father countered that message for me a bit - I was very rebellious about their rules and one of the rules was that “The car doesn’t move unless the seat belts are fastened.” I hated feeling trapped and as an adult I didn’t wear my seat belt but my dad tried to convince me once I was driving my kids around that as the pilot of the ship, I had to not lose control of the car, and the seat belt is what helps you to stay in control of the car. I had survived a roll-over crash without a seat belt and with my brand-new baby in the car and she didn’t have her ‘seat-belt’ on either. A miracle? My athleticism?
I had fallen asleep at the wheel, we were moving north and I was following a U-haul in our car with the baby. It was mesmerizing and I was tired. I woke up feeling the gravel at the edge of the highway and she was in the front seat in a car seat next to me where I could touch her rather than in the backseat. I grabbed her and curved my body around hers as we tumbled a couple times, log rolling in the car. It felt like being in a blender as there was an ice chest in the back seat with condiments from the old kitchen, so I was tossing around with bottles of ketchup and mustard in the air too. The car landed on its side and my husband had seen the swerve and did a U-Turn on the highway in the U-Haul - all of our stuff in it got a bit blendered too.
Told the police we had been buckled up (it was the law). I was bruised a bit by tumbling around the car, but the baby was fine. A miracle. Personally, I don’t think she would have survived or not unscathed, if she had been buckled up with little straps at each side of her neck. *The statute of limitations on a Click-It Ticket is probably up by now.
Not something I would recommend as good parenting though, but I Die Hard. I don’t go down without a fight or without flipping it into a somersault (that is how to fall gracefully, roll into the fall - or a home base belly slide, protect the wrists, they break easy). I broke my toe earlier this year, falling in a total slide into Home Base fall while holding my new laptop. I managed to not break the laptop - so while it was a total wipeout for me, I still had the moves of falling gracefully. Die Hard - it is training that becomes instinctual - body memory.
Breaking my toe did slow me down, I had been stressing myself out with too many goals and online courses. A trip to the ER a week later was then followed by sudden hair loss and I must admit that I miss my hair. I ran out of my Cheerful Juice mix and still need to make more.
June 25th… time flies when you broke your toe and your hair is falling out…. my blogging is my diary of sorts. I still think I should make Cheerful Juice mix as a product for sale. It was helping and then I ran out and have been procrastinating on making more even though I bought more of the ingredients. “It’s not easy being green,” it’s not easy accepting your differences and working with them.
Knowing how to take better care of myself, and actually doing it, are two different things. Social connections give us motivation to not go gently into the good night - to die hard, to fight the good fight and get home again.
(5) A Good Day to Die Hard - 2013 movie I had missed. (Youtube, has a paywall) It’s not easy being a father, or a son or daughter. This segment of the Die Hard series takes us into the next generation, what was it like having your dad never home? Where does that leave you later in life? Bitter? Angry? Extremely tough and cold?
(1) Die Hard - 1988, (Youtube, has a paywall) Not bad when your 1988 ‘classic’ movie still has a paywall. The baby that survived was born in 1988. She’s a lawyer now. Never in my wildest dreams would I have expected to have a lawyer in my family.
(2) Die Hard 2: Die Harder - 1990, (Youtube, free with ads) *also set at Christmas time, this was a Christmas series. You don’t name the wife Holly for no particular reason… but setting an explosive action movie at Christmas was probably a new thing at that time.
(3) Die Hard with a Vengeance - 1995, He cracks a Sam Spade “Just the Fax” cop joke with a receptionist. (Youtube, free with ads)
(4) Live Free or Die Hard - 2007, (Youtube, unrated version, has a paywall)
A review of the series, The Strange History of the Die Hard Movies, (denofgeek.com) We like John McClane because he is a tough guy, but unlike other action heroes of the era, he feels pain. He bleeds, he has issues, he gets tired.
The Nutcracker Ballet was a standard part of my childhood Christmas. My dad would watch it on TV and he took us to live performances of it twice when we were kids. Once in a big city, Chicago I think.
Dancer (2016) - a documentary about the Ukrainian ballet superstar, Sergei Polunin. (Youtube) *I notice there are a couple more recent documentary type films about Sergai too, so let the bingefest continue…or back away you crack addict. **Note I am not a crack or cocaine user, I am just using it as a metaphor for the difficulty of addictive behavior patterns. Recognizing your weaknesses is the first step towards increasing your strength in that area.
Is it Christmas without watching the Nutcracker Ballet?
As a kid I had an unusual exposure to TV sports. My dad liked watching the athletes, but he disliked the sports announcers. He didn’t care which team won or lost. He watched basketball or golf or baseball or football… with the sound off. So, for me growing up, ballet was just better than football. They had better costumes, better music, more of a story… they were athletes without any annoying announcers.
*I didn’t start wearing a seat-belt regularly until after having a breakthrough in therapy about my early childhood trauma. I had been still fighting my parents decades later and finally was able to stop and see that parenting isn’t easy. It is the hardest job in the world. They tried.
My dad would read The Christmas Carol out loud to us at Christmas time too. Traditions are yours to make, or to not bother with. What will your choice be? To Die Hard? Stick it out? Maintain some healthy routines? or fall into negative patterns?
Disclaimer: This information is being provided for educational or entertainment purposes within the guidelines of Fair Use and is not intended to provide individual health care guidance.