Spiritwick

I had a whole hour to myself today, and I was shocked in that time to discover that I have had a fairly driving principle throughout my life.  Before I get to that though, let me back up.  In elementary school, I had a recurring nightmare.  It somehow epitomized my worst fear at the time even though it was clear to me even then that others would invalidate how traumatic it was for me if I told them.  The dream took place in the hallway of the Christian school that I attended, a place where I spent many hours in reality as my parents were both teachers and principals in the school.  In this dream, my mom would be standing in the hallway with a group of other teachers having a conversation.  Meanwhile, I would be running in terror for the hallway had filled with every evil character I knew from any story or movie. At both ends of this hallway were doors that exited to the outside, thus it was possible to run in a loop through this hallway, outside, and back t...

When I was a young child, my sister's favorite movie was "White Nights" starring the famous ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.  At least once a year, she'd pull that VHS cassette out of the cabinet to re-watch the movie. For those of you who never had a Baryshnikov-infatuated older sister with whom to watch the movie repeatedly, the basic plot of this 1980s movie is that a Soviet ballet dancer (played by Baryshnikov) who has defected gets stuck back in the Soviet Union after his flight has to make an emergency landing in Siberia.  The Soviets want him to dance for their country again. (This is obviously because he's a freaking brilliant dancer...seriously, if you've never seen the man dance, go youtube him. If he'd lived in Ancient Greece, I'm pretty sure someone would have declared him to be some dancing demigod. Anyways...) The ballet-dancing, former defector wants to escape again.  It's a tense movie with some brilliant dancing thrown in.  Back ...