Not Another List

It hadn’t really occurred to me that it was the end of the decade until I started seeing all these end-of-decade lists. As you might guess, the end of decade lists that most interest me are the top movies. Particularly intriguing about this decade’s lists is that most of the films are crystal clear in my memory. The 2000s saw mostly my 20s, and it wasn’t until I was at least 20 that I was able to pinpoint just exactly what types of stories and storytelling I liked. This was also the first full decade when I could grasp all subject matters at hand and know, really and truly, if I personally liked a film, not just liked it because I was supposed to like it, encouraged by critics or friends. 

So lots of critics have these lists and no two are even remotely similar, except that a Romanian film about abortion (that I have not seen) called 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days is on just about every list. Most critics are also starting their lists with the disclaimer that their 10 films are not necessarily THE BEST films of the decade, because how could you  measure such a thing? No, they are just 10 good films that earned a spot in their blackened critic hearts.

I’ve mentioned before that I prefer modern films and most know that I prefer, as Shaun likes to call them “slice of life” movies. (Though it sounds much more derogatory when he says it.) This idea of creating a list of films from the decade that struck a chord within me was too good to pass up. Of course I haven’t seen nearly as many films as professional critics, but my taste isn’t nearly as wide either. I think the following films represent my tastes pretty well. And as always, please feel free to comment and add your own films to the list, or tell me if I encouraged you to seek out a particular film and what you thought of it. (Sorry, no refunds.)

So if you enjoy lists, then enjoy the list below. If you don’t enjoy lists, then I recommend avoiding the internet for the next few days.

Honorable mention to this year’s Star Trek film. If the second half of the movie had been as good as the first, it would have made my list for sure. It gave me a new respect for science fiction by creating characters I really, really liked. I know Star Trek has been around for generations but this was the first time it proved to me that it wasn’t just a bunch of geeky nonsense.

My favorite sequel was Before Sunset (2004), a film that was made ten years after its predecessor (Before Sunrise), with the story picking up ten years later too. Just a really neat conclusion to an open-ended film.

10) Garden State (2004)

   This one probably sounds cliché because it was meant to speak to people around my age, my generation. And it did. This film was not what I was expecting but I loved it all the same. Life is a roller coaster and the characters in this film are determined to experience the ups and downs as part of a full existence, instead of just riding off into the xanax-covered sunset.

9) There Will Be Blood (2007)

 I saw this film shortly after I saw No Country for Old Men and I couldn’t figure out why No Country won the best picture Oscar (except that Hollywood has no taste). The most off-putting thing about There Will Be Blood is the title, which makes it sound gorier than the unassumingly-monikered No Country. Blood is actually more a story about family. Not a happy story, mind you, but a very good one. A lot of people are calling this film a modern-day Citizen Kane. I wonder if it will hold up.

Juno (2007)

 Funny and poignant and you can’t say that about too many teen pregnancy movies.

7) The Station Agent (2003)

 Talk about a slice of life film. When his only friend dies, a man with dwarfism moves away to live his life in solitude in a small town, only to be befriended by a chatty hot dog vendor and a woman dealing with her own problems. Just an exquisite story that never hits a false note, and the performance by Peter Dinklage as the main character is outstanding.

6) Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

 The only film I’ve ever seen wherein I felt like I was reading a novel. A great novel. This is the most literate film on the list, including those that were adapted from novels.The characters and the plots and the beautiful language are things that are never seen on the big screen making this a truly innovative and fresh film.

5) Wonder Boys (2000)

 A movie about writing and redemption and figuring stuff out. Like the best Nick Hornby novels, the characters in this film start out desperate and downtrodden but end up on a note of glimmering hope. One of the only instances in which I can definitively say I liked the film better than the book.

4) The Lookout (2007)

 This film is an unstoppable force. First of all, it stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt who is fast becoming one of my favorite actors. This movie has great characters and an intricate plot. It artfully walks this fine line between being a bank heist movie and a slice of life movie. I loved the bank heist part. I loved the slice of life part. Like The Station Agent, this was a smaller film so if you haven’t seen it, run out and watch it now.

3) Almost Famous (2000)

 This film is a love story about music. Like the main character, I too waa a young person enamored with rock ‘n roll but who was never really going to be a part of that scene. Every detail of this movie is pitch perfect. I actually prefer the 2 hour, 40 minute director’s cut of this movie to the two hour theatrical release. It’s got everything… Music, romance, travel, humor, peril, and an Oscar-worthy performance by Kate Hudson. Why, oh why, when she is this good an actress does she make crap film after crap film? Almost Famous was her first and best performance.

2) High Fidelity (2000)

 2000 was a great year for music movies. This is film about music, love, lists and life. I was champing at the bit to see High Fidelity when it came out, and I can’t remember if I saw the film or read the book first.  I think I actually read the book first. This is an instance where they monkeyed with the novel ever so slightly by changing the location from London to Chicago, but didn’t lose any of the book’s magic. In fact, they added some magic of their own and for my money, both the film and book are equally good. If you know how much I love Nick Hornby, you know that’s saying something. (Incidentally, I’ve yet to see this year’s Nick Hornby penned film An Education, but I fully expect it could bump one of the other films off this list.)

1) Lost in Translation (2003)

 Hands up, who saw that one coming? I love all the films on this list but Lost in Translation is an exquisite masterpiece. It’s the most controversial film on this list because you either loved it or hated it and if you hated it, you probably think I’m crazy. But this film just spoke to me. It was the first film since Bambi that made me cry. The characters in the film…I know who they are and I love them with all my heart. And this is a film that’s quiet and subdued and just lets you experience it rather than performing for you.

Christmas Traditions

A Christmas decoration I created.

Three years ago was the first Christmas Shaun and I spent in our house and we decided to host both of our families for dinner. Before the party, as a Christmas gift, Shaun’s parents helped us buy new floors for our two spare bedrooms, which were completely bare, having been stripped of the nasty carpet left by the previous owners but unable to be redone due to lack of funds. The floors were finished some time before Christmas, our offices were set up and the house, while not exactly complete, had no glaring omissions. I spent a good long time cleaning beforehand, and my mom brought buffet tables from her work so we’d have a place for everyone to sit. Shaun made prime rib and prawns and a good time was had by all.

The next year, we were housing my long-time friend/pen-pal and her husband who had just moved to Washington state. They found an apartment in Seattle just before Christmas, but they had no family or friends here and I wanted to host Christmas one more time at the house because I thought it would be most comfortable for them to have dinner at a familiar place. So I cleaned for a couple of days, and mom brought buffet tables, and Shaun made prime rib and prawns. A good time was had by all. Our Christmas gift was money to spend on our delayed honeymoon to Disneyworld, where we arrived one year ago today.

This year, I thought somebody else might want to host Christmas. But Shaun was the first to volunteer, happy to cook up a feast for all. I cleaned for two days straight, mom brough buffet tables, Shaun cooked. Good times. And this year our Christmas gift, from both parents, was money towards a new fridge which we needed because ours was on its last legs.

So we’ve inadvertently created a couple of Christmas traditions here. We have the families over, we cook roast, and we receive life  help as gifts. There’s another tradition, which is that of absolutely no pictures. Seems like it might be nice to capture some of those warm fuzzy holiday memories, but no one brings a camera. I fully intended to use mine this year but forgot amid the hustle.

I was super nervous the first Christmas we hosted because we’d not really had the families together in that capacity or close quarters before. And as much as Shaun and I are different people, so are our families. I was, as the pessimist in me likes to do, picturing the worst. A friend of mine (another only child) recently told me that she thought it was weird when I got married because she didn’t see either of us (her or myself) as the marrying type. I kind of understand what she meant. The idea of letting people in, of purposely allowing the chaos and unpredictability of  others to invade what was once an orderly and reliable existence… well let’s just say that type of thing can take up a lot of my resources.

But it’s worth it. And a great time was had by all.

Sid in his new favorite spot. Not Christmasy, just 'cause.

A Homely Dame

His Girl Friday  ***

I think it’s probably fair to say I’m not the most inquisitive person in the room. Certainly in my classes I don’t ask questions very often, if ever. I am of the firm belief that ’tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. However, when it comes to pop culture and entertainment I have a voracious appetite for, well let’s just call it  ”knowledge.”

This appetite has led me to watching a lot of old movies, because I simply must know where a particular quote came from or what previous film the film I am watching is referencing. Some examples: I watched Shane when I was about 14 because every few days the theme song to the cartoon Animaniacs would reference it. (We’re Ani-mainy, totally insane-y, Come Back, Shane-y, Animaniacs!) I watched Sunset Boulevard to find out why she was ready for her close up. I somewhat recently watched Midnight Cowboy to find out who that Ratso Rizzo character was. And I think it may have been forced upon me by my high school English class, but eventually I would have watched Apocalypse Now anyway, because honestly, who doesn’t reference that movie?

Watching old movies with a modern sensibility isn’t always easy. The pacing is slow, the editing is jumpy and sometimes the audio is so bad they’re hard to hear. And, though critics everywhere will probably shudder as I say this, I think a great deal of them don’t hold up all that well. Midnight Cowboy lost me somewhere amidst its drug-induced ’60s haze. And I’ve never quite understood the fuss over Casablanca or *gasp* Citizen Kane. But I keep watching because 1) I MUST know the origins of the references, and 2) some of them are real gems. On the Waterfront… Now THAT was a great movie.

Though I am a great fan of the Marx Brothers, in general I think comedies have a hard time holding up, because all the types of jokes in those movies have been so overly referenced in modern culture that they feel tired and predictable. Yet that didn’t stop me from watching His Girl Friday.

I had to watch it. They use two clips from it in a Pomplamoose video for a song called Expiration Date. They don’t just use them, they make music out of them. So you understand, I had to see the original. 

The clips the music video uses are in the first ten minutes of the movie, and I could have stopped watching there. But I was compelled to continue watching. I was already  interested in what was going on. This movie was made in 1940. That’s kind of amazing in and of itself. There are only about three sets and three characters, but there’s a lot of fast paced verbal comedy and that’s the kind of comedy I like best. Scenes went on for at least twenty minutes, no breaks, barely any cutting. It really was more like a play. But for all its old-fashionedness, the lead character is a woman journalist and that must have been rare in 1940. Not only was she a journalist, but she was the best journalist at the paper.  Oh and there was this actor in it, maybe you’ve heard of him, Cary Grant? He was a real Don Draper type, at least in the looks department.

I didn’t love this movie but believe me it was 90 minutes better spent than many, many of the 90 minutes I have spent on other movies. It made me wonder though how long these references will last. As these movies get older and absorbed into the mainstream, will people forget where they came from? Will they stop being referenced all together? Does anyone younger than me know why [insert random comedy actor] loves the smell of [insert random scent] in the morning?

Now can you resist the temptation to watch that movie? Or sing this song? I couldn’t.

COM 597.Final Paper

Behold.

Music to Live By

COM 597.Week 10.Conclusions

If it’s true that the best way to critique a students paper is by telling them which two sentences were best, then I could say about this class that the two best parts were wireframes and game design. But with a few hundred more words to go, let me expand.

Many of our discussions on design centered on how good design was simple, intuitive and functional. This seems to me such a rudimentary concept that so many people/designers just don’t understand. But as we also saw in our discussions, figuring out simplicity is quite a complex task indeed.

I found out just how complex a couple of months before I entered the class when I tried to design my own website. Keeping it simple was my objective for two reasons. One, so people could navigate it simply. And two, so I wouldn’t have to delve too deeply into web designing programs that I didn’t understand. Designing a site from scratch proved too complex, so I used a free template I was able to download instead. When initially designing this website, a couple of people suggested to me that I get it on paper before I tried to design it on the computer. I tried but didn’t quite have the tools I needed to fully visualize the concept. Wireframes were the tool I was missing, and I’m looking forward to tweaking the site by using what I learned in class. I also learned a lot by creating the wireframe for the bad Abbey Road website and would that I could share my results with the creators of that particular aberration.

The journals about bad usability were not only fun to write but also interesting to see the variety of things people considered bad design. Nobody wrote about the same thing. Further evidence that simplicity is complex. Someone wrote about the poor design of Costco milk jugs, and it further strengthened my resolve that Costco is not all it’s cracked up to be or what I once thought it was. It made me think about all the other poorly designed things at Costco, like the tub of kitty litter that’s almost too heavy for me to lift and leaves me with gigantic plastic tubs littering (ha!) my garage. If I go to Target I can get kitty litter in a recyclable cardboard box.

Speaking strictly about the journal entries themselves, I spent the most time on and learned the most from the entry we made about service envy. It was more difficult for me to wrap my head around this concept than I thought it would be, but the amount of time I spent rereading explanations and talking with my husband about the way a programmer would design a cell phone app gave me a better appreciation of the concept as whole. However, I still don’t like the name.

Though we weren’t asked to write anything about game design, if we were, my entry probably would have examined how games, perhaps more than anything else, don’t have to be simple to be good. They can be simple, they can be complex, and there’s lots of enjoyment to be had all around.

This class was the most practically (as opposed to academically) oriented classes I have taken through the MCDM. Wireframes alone made it worth it. But it also reaffirmed my suspicious that I will not be the person coming up with the next iPod or other must have lifestyle device, because that’s not how I think.  However, I have a better understanding of what goes into that thought process and I think that will help me dissect good and bad design, and why certain things are appealing to me.

COM597.Week 8.Class Presentation

Here is a link to the video I showed as part of my class presentation for COM 597: Theories and Practice of Interactive Media.

http://www.vimeo.com/7776499

*Note to readers of Weary Productions (All three of you): After this quarter is over, I will move all posts pertaining to the MCDM program to another site so as not to interfere with other, more personal posts of (potentially) greater (mild?) interest to you…

Grapefroot

I’m going to talk about something I don’t talk about very often…music. Why don’t I talk about music more often? It seems like I should. I am sort of a musician, and it is my favorite thing in the whole world. And I even have a designated category for it. But I guess it’s because I decided a long time ago that music is a very intimate subject, like religion or politics. So if I like the Beatles and you like the Beatles then by all means, let’s talk about the Beatles. But what I don’t want to do is listen to Joe the Plumber’s 45-minute spiel on why the Rolling Stones are better than the Beatles.

When I was in music theory in college, I was promised by one instructor that by the time I was done with the course, I would be able to tell other people why, specifically, I liked the music I liked. This really intrigued me. I wanted a vocabulary that let me articulately express to others, and myself, the particular magic of the music I loved so much.

The instructor lied. Lied, lied, lied. For a couple of reasons. First of all, if you would like to tell someone that you really like that inverted d minor diminished chord in the bridge of that pop song, well the person you’re facing really has to be equally well-versed in the inner workings of music theory. Second of all, despite a monumental and unprecedented complaint-free effort on my part, I’m just not that great at distinguishing music on this specific a level. Finally, even if I could say I like that inverted d minor diminished chord and you knew what that was, that still doesn’t really explain why I like it, does it? Just because you can analyze it doesn’t mean you can explain it, does it? If music could be explained away in words and mathmatical expressions it wouldn’t be so great.

When the song Single Ladies came out, I heard Beyonce perform it on Saturday Night Live and remarkably, I didn’t hate it.  I liked the rhythm and some of the harmonies. I thought that if they got rid of what could only be described as that digital squeal in the background, they might have something. Then she got to the bridge which made absolutely no musical sense in the context of the song, and I wrote it off. A kernel of an idea that was wasted. Single Ladies and its accompanying video with the funky dancing was a HUGE hit.

Fast forward and my husband, perennial YouTube watcher, had become a fan of this group called Pomplamoose (which means Grapefruit in French, only would be spelled pamplemousse) . It’s just a guy and  a gal making music out of their San Francisco apartment and posting videos on YouTube. Shaun showed me their cover version of Single Ladies. All of the rhythm and harmony without all of the overproduced digital garbage. Plus some improvements and a great solution to that troubling bridge.

Everything about this song is inspired, from the “deluxe memory man” to the drum fill after the line “we’re going to skip ahead to the single ladies part instead.” (Why I love that drum fill so – I just don’t know.) So I listened to some of their other stuff and it was pretty good. I don’t like everything, but I like both cover songs and their original stuff and even the stuff I don’t like I find harmonically intriguing. (They are so going into my final paper this quarter as an example of what people can do without being signed to a record label. Their version of Single Ladies has nearly 2.5 million hits.)

I happened to share both those videos with my father, as he is one person I always talk to about music because we have such similar tastes. First I showed him the video of Beyonce in her skimpy leotard, then the video of Pomplamoose. I explained that I was very happy with Pomplamoose for taking that kernel and making it into something good. A few days later, when I was visiting for Thanksgiving, my dad told me that he couldn’t get that girl out of his head. “The one in the leotard?” I asked. “No the other one” he answered. Apparently all that staring into the camera she does hypnotized him. Now he’s in love with the music and Nataly Dawn.

So do with this information whatever you will. It’s just me sharing, and if you’re not a registered Pomplamoose, that’s fine by me. We can talk about other things at the next block party, like the weather.

Processes and Procrastination

I’ve never been an outliner. I would consider myself, at least at various times in my life, an avid writer, but never an outliner. I never cared for the school exercises in which you were forced to make an outline and then adhere to it. I’m sure this is a very helpful tool for many, but it has never been a part of my process.

I had never been a procrastinator. Not that I remember anyway. I was the kind of student that would finish homework on a Friday so that I could have the rest of the weekend carefree. I was more like that in high school than I was in college, and now as a graduate student it’s a wonder to me that I was ever like that.

As I writhed in agony last weekend trying to prepare a fifteen-minute presentation for my class, I wondered at what point procrastination had crept so sneakily into my life. Lately, I have been feeling the pain on many school assignments and professional assignments and even my own personal assignments, though I’m still not one to wait until the last minute to start or finish something. I understand there’s a deadline ahead, and I start early, leaving me more time to agonize that I should be working instead of playing bejeweled for the hundredth time.

It finally hit me that I was not and am not a procrastinator, I am simply an agonizer. I remember it well from high school and college, the absolute dread that I was going to have to do a bit of work, maybe exert some effort, and all the bitching and moaning about it until that miraculous point at which it is done. It’s all part of my process. What a terrible process.

Still, any attempts to change the process – to outline or in some manner sstreamline things – have been feeble and abandoned quickly. I take a kind of evolutionary approach to my topics. I know how I want to start and if I’m lucky I have a few ideas in my head of what I want to hit along the way, but where it ends up is as much a mystery to me as it is to you. Editing is a different (and much bigger) process entirely, in which I take my beginning and put it in the middle and rearrange all that word vomit I puke onto the page into something…well…edible. (See, I told you I didn’t know where I was going.)

Though I think I could improve my processes vastly with only minor attitude adjustments, I have to say that the bitching and moaning part of the process, when done correctly, can be quite lucrative. And no, I won’t tell you how to do it correctly because then it would be less special when I do it. I also think that the older I get, the more schooling I have and the more things that I successfully complete lead to this kind of subliminal logic that if all that stuff got done before, it’ll somehow get done again.

I can’t say that I love this process, but I continue with it because I like the results. I always do pretty well. In fact, I found out just yesterday that a paper I wrote for a class I took summer quarter was one of the example papers for the same class this quarter. Not too shabby. And though I was extremely doubtful about the presentation I prepared, it was received extremely well. I’m not entirely sure if I can put that in the win column, but that part after the class is over and everybody comes up to me to tell me what a great job I did – I LOVE that part. It makes the whole process worthwhile. The only problem is it’s only retroactively worthwhile. It’s impossible to carry that feeling over to the next project or presentation because you just can’t be sure how it will be received.

COM 597.Week 7.Service Envy

The assignment this week, to propose a way to create service envy in the mobile developer space, made me feel kinda stupid. This was a somewhat difficult assignment for me to tackle as I am not a mobile app developer and have no idea what they might find enviable.

So I took another look at the “cool” mobile developer sites that we looked at in class: The iPhone’s dev site and the Droid’s dev site. These site’s are both beautifully designed but mean little to me as a layperson. The iPhone site at least offered an explanation of the process of creating an app that I could understand. AT&T’s site was useless.

Yet as I finally came to understand, we’re not talking about the website here. We’ve already discussed the many ways in which website’s like AT&T’s could be improved. But why would a person turn to AT&T as opposed to Apple or Verizon/Google to develop their mobile app? What’s the service they offer? This took a bit more research on my part.

I already knew that if you were going to develop anything for Apple or the iPhone, there would be some sort of inspection you had to pass before your app made it to marketplace. I didn’t realize you would have to pay for the privilege. If your app makes it to market, you can make money on it, but Apple takes a percentage.

If you want to develop an application for Android, it’s less restrictive but you have to use linux.

So a few things AT&T might offer that would be better than their competitors… They could (in an imaginary, fictional, fantastical world) come up with a software developer kit that crossed phone platforms. If you create an app for a Windows mobile phone, it would also work with a Nokia phone on their platform.

They could offer access to their services for free, or take a smaller percentage of the app sales.

Another thing they could offer is service. Professional advice for developers when they run into problems.

Or perhaps the ability for a programmer to program in any environment he or she chose.

However, the one thing I was not able to completely reconcile myself with over the course of this assignment was the entire idea of “service envy.” Not a small thing, I agree. The book says that in order for services to be desirable and create envy, they must help people communicate their values and develop an identity in the way products do. There are two things that bother me about this. First, in the context of this assignment and taking the definition in a more literal sense than perhaps was intended, I would think that a person’s identity as a mobile app developer would be much stronger than the service they use to develop the app, no matter how good the service. A particularly good or avid mobile developer would probably use all the services available and have comments and critiques of each. Second, in a broader context but perhaps still too literally, I’ve noticed how, in the digital age more than ever, our identities are supposed to be tied to products, brands and services, and I don’t think I like it. I have brands, I have products, I have services, and at times I sound like a damn spokesperson. It’s an effort to put into black and white an overwhelming amount of information. Good brands and services deserve loyalty, but do we need to go so far as to make them part of our identity?

 

 

The Bunny

 

If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll know that I have been housing a big white bunny with black spots for several days now. He appeared in my yard one morning, happily dining on our overabundance of dandelions and weeds. I thought that he was perhaps somebody’s pet that had escaped his cage and would soon return home or be sought after in some manner by his owner. After about five days of watching the rabbit hanging out in my yard, I began to doubt that he was going to make it home on his own. I really didn’t want this cute little guy to be dinner for the coyotes, so on the advice of a friend I decided to try and catch him. After my attempts to entice him into a box with a piece of fresh lettuce failed, my mom came over, chased after him with an ugly weed in her hand and a few minutes later we had him safely trapped in the garage.

But then there was the whole question of “now what?” The friend who suggested I catch him, a former bunny owner, was able to borrow a cage from a pet store and she brought it over with some hay and pellets. We cleaned and dressed the cage and she told me a little bit about taking care of a rabbit. For instance, did you know that bunnies first pee on their hay, then eat it? I didn’t either.

I hadn’t been under any assumptions that I might be able to keep the rabbit but I found out that if I took it to the humane society, his chances of survival were, ironically, slim. When I called them they said they were obligated to take the rabbit, but did just about everything they could to discourage me from bringing him in. Too many to find homes for, I guess.

So I reluctantly let him stay while I asked around the neighborhood and tried to find the owner. I gave him a bit of freedom each day in the laundry room but didn’t want him roaming around the house. He is a very cute bunny, soft and fuzzy, and he makes a delightful crunching sound when he’s eating lettuce, but rabbits are destructive. They like to chew cords and apparently my friend’s parents had their entire couch eaten by their rabbit. The amount of poo I returned to in the laundry room each day assured him very little freedom while he was staying with me.

I had to find him a home and fast. At first, a coworker of my mom’s agreed to take him, which is one of the reason’s he had an extended stay at my house. I was waiting for her to pick him up. But it was my opinion that if she wouldn’t divulge exactly when she would come get him, she probably wasn’t going to. I was right. It looked like he was headed for a shelter.

Then, as I was awaiting a phone call from a rabbit rescue to see if they would take him, a customer at my mom’s restaurant drove up in a car that had stickers of rabbits all over it. My mom talked to this lady who, it turns out, raises rabbits and had several cages free at the moment. Just a short while later, bunny had a new home with a competent care taker and lots of other animals to hang out with. It was quite the fairy tale ending for the little guy.

I have to say that the thought of losing my own pet is devastating to me and I could never imagine just abandoning him if I could not care for him. I want all the bunnies and kitties and puppies to have great homes and long, fulfilling lives. But as I was begrudgingly cleaning out this cage every day, distraught over what was going to happen if I had to take him to a shelter, I could see how someone might (erroneously) think letting an animal free was the better choice. If it seems chances for adoption are slim, one might  (again erroneously) think, that an animal’s chances for survival were better in nature.

I am so very grateful that this story has a happy ending, yet I am not as happy as I thought I would be. I wondered continuously while he sat quietly in his cage if catching him was the right thing to do. I actually feel bad that I was unapologetic and unwavering in my stance that I did not want to take care of a rabbit and that he could not stay with me. And it would be awful if he were abandoned but worse if someone were looking for him and we missed each other.

However, I do see the bunny as having a very happy and long life where he wound up, so I guess that’s the best anyone can hope for.