My new favorite movie is Happy Feet. When I was a little girl, my dad used to take me to the theater to see animated movies. I think Disney was the only option in those days. My dad loved animation, and we would sit and watch the same movie over and over again. We would eat chocolate and popcorn, and he would stand nervously outside of the bathroom, and send old ladies in after me to find out why I was taking so long. On the drive home he would tell me all about animation... about how hard the artists worked. How talented they were, and how poorly they were paid. At home, he would draw stick figures over and over and over again on a pad of paper, and each image would move just a little bit. Then he would flip the pages, and the stick figures would dance for me. He would emphasize again how much work it was to make just a little image move for just a few seconds, and then wax poetic about the work that went into a color, full length feature.

Animation today is computerized. No exploited artists sitting over tables painting cell after cell. And movie viewing with the kids is a different experience. We did pizza night again, (going to be a weekly tradition) and watched Happy Feet in front of the TV. But oh..... my dad would have LOVED Happy Feet. Did they make kids movies that smart when I was a kid? This movie was so profound on so many levels. It was about art and science and morality and conformity and the dangers of dogma and the effects of waste and so much else. And it was also really really really cute. And the protagonist was a really smart, creative, marginalized social outcast. How much would my dad have identified with that?

So yeah. Mommyhood is good. And my world is upsidedown. The evening of the New Hampshire primaries, I knew nothing about the exit polls. I spent the evening with penguins. For better or worse, huh?