I know. You expect me to write some long screed about the elections last Tuesday.
Here’s what I’ve got to say:
The most important thing that happened, the real and long term downside of Tuesday’s elections for Democrats, was not in the headlines. Flipping the U.S. House of Representatives was a cake baked about February or March ’09 and even though it was worse than I expected, it wasn’t completely unexpected. The thing that will leave a mark is a story that was back by the classifieds and not at all on the front page. Republicans “flipped” about 680 state legislative seats and that’s what’s gonna be the real bad news for people who think like me. The next state legislature in all the states will do redistricting off the 2010 census. And, states in the Midwest will lose congressmen and states in the south will gain. We saw in Texas a couple of years ago when Tom Delay was still “The Hammer” that this is a very hardball political process. Democratic voters will be disenfranchised by the gerrymandering that necessarily goes with redistricting. The fact that the Republicans elected to all those legislative seats are as nutball as Christine O’Donnell and/or Sharron Angle (both of whom were defeated) really doesn’t amount to much. The fact that they are partisan to the core will matter and for the next decade, it will be that much more difficult for a Democrat, even a conservative one, to get elected to Congress. That’s the election result that will really leave a mark because it has the greatest long-term effect.

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One of the things I like about being a bachelor is that I like to watch movies, I get on “jags” and I don’t have to explain or share or compromise or worry about keeping someone up late with the loud television. Yes, I’m that petty and selfish. So, this week’s theme (and thus the bachelor reference) was romantic comedies. His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (a remake of Ben Hecht’s “Front Page”), crackles with slapstick laughs; Woody Allen gets Oscars deservedly for Annie Hall; who can resist Bull Durham?; Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle; Billy Chrystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally; and, Cinderella meets Henry Higgins in Pretty Woman with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. Wonderful films, really wonderful, in my opinion. My personal favorite of them is When Harry Met Sally because I love Nora Ephron’s script, which I think is just as funny as His Girl Friday but much more sophisticated and true to the bone, because I like that Billy Chrystal is a not-that-good-looking nebbish who gets the gorgeous goyisha Meg Ryan, and because I think it was a solidly directed Rob Reiner film with some really iconic scenes (who can forget Reiner’s mother observing Meg’s fake orgasm and the line: “I’ll have what she’s having”?). If you pick one of the others, you won’t get an argument from me; Annie Hall, for example, is a perfect little gem of a movie and maybe one of the best movies of all time in any genre, IMHO.

This week, the one that affected me the most was Sleepless in Seattle. The reason for that is explicit in the movie’s (Norah and Delia Ephron) script; Rosie O’Donnell has a line where she tells Meg Ryan: “You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in the movies.” In fact, the whole film is about how films affect our notions of love. The plot is that Meg Ryan tries to recreate the Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr film “An Affair to Remember” and its climactic and iconic scene where the two lovers are to meet on top of the Empire State Building. Over and over the film talks about how two people meet and it’s “magic”. People meet their “soulmate” and “you just know”. WE WANT THAT! At least, I do. I want to think I’m so special and perfect that I’ll have the perfect love in which neither of us ever have a zit or cellulite and there’s enough money and time to do nothing but wonderful things together and it’ll always be just like the night when we got engaged. And I always resent it when it’s not that way. Often, I’ve blamed perfectly lovely women who cared about me greatly because I wasn’t in that movie I have in the back of my mind. For once, the movie got into my head and I saw myself.

Of course, just to increase the silliness that goes on in my head, I also want to be the hero who has iconic things to say and takes direct physical action to save the damsel in distress and yadda yadda yadda, just like in the movies.

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P.S. Between the OSU/Baylor blowout and tonight’s OU/TxA&M game I saw something that’s really something. I saw the absolutely, positively worst music gig in all of America. The nadir of all music gigs of all time. Some old guy with artificially blackened hair and a tonsure bald spot playing solo keyboards at Buy 4 Less discount grocery on Northwest Highway in Oklahoma City, OK, on a Saturday afternoon game day. Wow. Maybe better than no gig at all, but wow. I’m guessing the tips don’t cover minimum wage for the set up time. I wish I’d taken a picture.