blogging from an airport like a good blogger

the secret of roan inish (1994) is the secret of this blog post. folksy irish stories of seals, selkies, babies and cradles as vessels are some things you will find in this movie. also, fish guts. and crazy cousins. but if you're looking for a cute, precocious kid movie with some neat myths and long narrated stories that take you out of but give you some kind of background on the actual story, you might consider watching the secret of roan inish. basically what happens is, in ireland, on an island called roan inish where the people and the seals lived in harmony together, the people who lived there had to leave, i don't think i heard why, and the main character's little baby brother was put in his cradle on the shore while everyone loaded up boats with furniture and relatives, anyway, the sea took the baby, presumably because it was pissy for the people to leave. i mean, it didn't want the people to leave. but word is this baby possibly has some seal blood anyway since he is the one in his generation born with dark hair and eyes (aka a dark one--- the rest of em are blondish and there's a dark one in every litter, we learn) and their great-grandmother (i think) was a selkie (aka half woman half seal, and this i know for sure, that they have a selkie in the family's not too distant past, and anyway, it's ireland so sometimes it's hard to tell what period we're really talking about since they're on sort of a different plane. i guess every country is on a different plane. i'm not trying to be a jerk to ireland, i really like ireland.) so the little girl keeps sneaking back to roan inish with the help of her cousin and they notice that their old house is lived in and one day they see the baby brother (it's been a few years, so he's a toddler) having tea with a seal, which the cousin and girl know their grandparents will never believe because there are just too many superstitions and stories about the sea and about roan inish for the grandmother to bear, but you can tell the grandfather believes them all. would you believe, then, that when the little girl gets her defiant face on and tells the elders, the grandmother packs them all up toooot sweeeeet and off to the island they go in search of that baby toddler pouring tea for two with water mammals! in what i think is supposed to be a really poignant scene, the seals bring the baby back and chase him onto land. he really wants to be a seal, i mean, who wouldn't? but he has to live with his human family for now. i think if he stayed a part of both worlds that would've been a better ending but then again when i think about a baby living as a seal, it does seem morbid. i'll trust the mythmakers.

the thing is, though, about this scene, the seals got pretty far onto the shore so they had to sort of hop/bounce back to the sea and it wasn't sad at all anymore, it looked really silly. maybe that's sealophobic. have you seen the bridge? the one about people jumping off the golden gate bridge? there's a story about a guy not dying when he hits the water and some seals keeping him afloat and kind of warm until the coast guard or a barge or something notices him. seals are so amazing for that, right? so i was thinking maybe it's behavior like that that makes selkie myths. and then what about the way they get those seals in the first place? it's terrible. have you seen the cove or heard about it on npr? it's terrible. i can't watch it, i don't think.

i'm in logan airport, the jetblue terminal, and thinking about all the good junkfood that you can only get in western new york and maybe parts of ohio, pennsylvannia and canada that i'm gonna eat.