I now have a new-found compassion for people with big bellies. As mine grows, I’m discovering that simple tasks I used to do without noticing them have become onerous. Wearing socks and tying shoe-laces are endeavors that have been sacrificed. Getting out of the beach recliner is an adventure. Painting toe-nails produces results that are reminiscent of Pollock’s paintings. Dropping things (which is something I do about once an hour) has become a very problematic habit.

And I’m only in the 6th month.

If a person is shipwrecked and ends up on a deserted island, s/he needs to build 3 houses in order to feel human and acquire an identity.

House #1 will be the place for the shipwreck to live.
House #2 will be the church or the club (depending on whether the shipwrecked person is religious) that s/he will visit it every Sunday or Saturday.

And what purpose will House #3 serve?

I watched the movie last night, and it did not disappoint. Aside from the powerful special effects that are strange but not annoying, the makers of the movie also offer their own reading of the great novel. Their reading seems to be that the narrator, Nick Carraway, is gay and hopelessly in love with Gatsby.

In order to support this reading, they change the plot in a variety of major ways. Nick’s semi-affair with Jordan is erased completely, Nick spends the better half of a decade after Gatsby’s death mourning his passing because – and this is an insistent motif- Carraway will never meet anybody as special as Gatsby ever again, both Nick and Gatsby are portrayed in a way that deprives them of all sexuality (which in the mainstream US entertainment is the most common way of hinting at homosexuality), etc. This is not my reading of the novel (enter “Great Gatsby” into the blog’s search engine to see mine) but I found it interesting.

The only real problem I saw in the movie was that the actors are a little too long in the tooth for their parts. Dicaprio works very hard to portray a much younger man and he isn’t half-bad but you can’t erase a 40-year-old face, body, and body language no matter how hard you try. Or at least not with DiCaprio’s degree of acting giftedness. The actress playing Daisy is not only very weak, but also has this extremely wrinkly neck that made all scenes where she was trying to portray youthful naivete quite clumsy.

Toby Maguire, the actor who plays Nick Carraway, has been forever typecast. A group of 50-year-old women in the audience yelled “Spiderman!” the moment he appeared on the screen. The actor didn’t help the viewers forget his most famous part as he kept adopting Spiderman’s trademark poses and facial expressions. The homoeroticism of the Spiderman series played into the queer reading of The Great Gatsby offered in the movie perfectly.

Overall, the movie is highly entertaining, a lot more comedic than the original novel, and curiously filmed. I recommend it as a good summer movie-going experience.

A blogger writes:

But this post about a bit of the book got me thinking about career risk-taking and being male, and the things I’ve gotten away with in my career that a woman probably wouldn’t, or at least would likely be effectively trained out of doing both by culture and having more responsibilities.

Sorry, my friend, but no. My sister left a very well-paying position with a huge company and refused another very well-paying position with another huge company and started a business of her own completely out of nothing. She had zero savings, an infant, and a partner in  company that was about to go broke and lay everybody off. And the business has become a huge success since then.

This is  only a gender issue to the extent that many women don’t feel the need to take risks because there are male partners to take the risks for them. There is no greater career killer than having a parent, a spouse, a trust fund, or a rich uncle about to kick the bucket as a financial cushion. And there is no greater career maker than having nothing and nobody standing between you and indigence.