Fame and Fortune

:::written around 9am on Wednesday:::

The potted plant I keep on my desk at work just got whisked away for a photo shoot next door at the Documentation Centre. Funnily enough, this sort of thing happens to me more often than you'd think: I apparently accessorize very well, because people approach me for my stuff every so often and ask me if I'd mind them borrowing it for a little while for a recording/photo/whatever.

I've had the sound of my skates recorded (they were filming on Mount Royal, the girl skater had gone home, and they belatedly realized the sound was wonky), my dog photographed, my desk photographed (when I was at Bell Mobility), and now my potted plant is going to be featured in a bank document.

I think my plant is well set on the paths of glory. Who knows? Maybe it'll be in "Good Housekeeping" next, or "Better Homes and Gardens." Maybe I'll be its agent and make my fortune that way.

"Chim-chiminey chim-chimeney chim-chim-cheree…"

Rainy days make me think of Mary Poppins. It rains throughout the film, except in that one scene when they travel into the chalk drawing on the sidewalk. Mary Poppins is the kind of film I would watch when it was raining outside, or when I was sick, or both. We didn't own it, so I have no idea how I managed to watch it so often. I think it's just such a popular movie that it played on television a good deal when I was younger.

I watched Mary Poppins when I was just starting to suspect that things didn't work quite the same way in stories as they did in real life. Watching the children snap their fingers and have their rooms clean themselves, or float up to the ceiling because they were laughing too hard, or having a robin land on Mary's finger and sing (the robin is dreadfully fake, but I couldn't see that at the time)… well, it made me wish I could do that too. It didn't make me believe in the magic, but it made me want it desperately.

In spite of my constant disappointment that I couldn't fly or travel into pictures, I loved Mary Poppins. I grew up in a world that was at once very similar to hers and yet very different. My world was real, and it had parents and rules and the laws of physics to control it, but in my world just as in hers children were allowed to be children, and I understood and appreciated the message. My parents didn't mind when I came home covered in mud and cuts and scrapes, and they didn't expect me to be quiet all day long. Home was not meant to be run with bank-like clockwork precision. That the children's father wanted this was clearly wrong, and the film was as much about his learning that lesson as it was about making the world what you wanted of it.

Mary Poppins had no time at all to waste consulting the laws of reality. If she needed her umbrella to fly, then it would fly. If she needed a chalk drawing to come to life, then it did. If she wanted a bag of holding, then a bag of holding she got. Her world was very simple: whatever she wanted, she got, simply by wanting it.

I suppose Mary Poppins might well be my very first encounter with the "Get up and kill" philosophy embraced by t!.