Why I heart the Jeremy Lin phenomenon & finding the perfect friend with whom to share it

I am writing this post while watching One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest on PBS.  I don't know how many times I've seen it, but the film never gets old.  The only thing I find is that I wish the 'bad guy' wasn't a woman in charge, which was kind of a trope in the 1970s - I wonder sometimes what kind of unconscious misogyny lies beneath this choice and how much it affected my idea of being female - as I watched many of these films and can't remember one example of a powerful woman who wasn't somehow evil, bad, wrong or ridiculous.

Nonetheless, I can't turn it off.  The scene where Nicholson creates a fictional World Series while watching a blank TV and brings a bunch of the guys on the ride with him is spectacular.

So, I'll watch 'crazy' people on TV and write about watching the new NY Knicks sensation, Jeremy Lin, on TV for the first time.  In case you're not in NYC or the US or are not Asian American or Chinese, I should explain that Lin is a Chinese-American basketball player who attended Harvard and was not drafted out of college into the NBA, was brought in to play briefly and cut by two other NBA teams and was brought into the Knicks recently and only allowed to play off the bench.

Then last week, because of injuries and loss of players for various reasons, he was given the opportunity to start the game, and ever since then - over the course of 4 games, the Knicks, who had a losing record, have been on a winning streak and he's the first guy in NBA history to have such consistently high scoring in his first 4 starts.  Now a 6'3" Asian-American is the toast of New York and has created a kind of wild excitement in the Asian-American community and among all the basketball fans of the city that is kind of hard to describe.  And this has all happened in one week.

Before this week, he didn't even have a contract and was sleeping on a friend's sofa on the Lower East Side.  Now, he's a superstar.  The improbability of all this has left many sports writers speechless and the rest of us just excited to see how life can suddenly turn so good so Fast.  It's also the beginning of the end of prejudice against Asian-Americans, because the only way to get real respect in this country is to be good at some major league sport.

So, that's great.  But it even gets better in my little world.  I had told my new, lovely friend Tamara I would come to her place to watch a movie, but wanted to watch the game, too.  But I went to her house as planned.  I told her what was happening with Lin and it turns out she's a big basketball fan as well, so we watched the game in and between the movie, high-fiving each other and screaming at her computer screen.

She was already an amazing new friend, someone I met at yoga, my age, an actor, a great person with whom I have a lot in common and then this: huge basketball fan.  Some days are just like that.

I started the day with the meditation CD doing sitting and walking meditation and simply cannot say enough for what that is doing for me.

The sad news of the day is of course about Whitney Houston, who was my age, and died suddenly at a hotel in LA before the Grammys.  No one knows why yet but I would imagine it has something to do with her issues with drugs and perhaps alcohol.  This makes me incredibly sad.  I saw a movie with Gwyneth Paltrow a few months ago called Country Strong, about a woman who is a famous singer trying to recover from her addictions and stage a comeback, too soon, and kills herself.  It was a riveting performance that chilled me.  I can't help but think of that now, because I think the way the fame machine works coupled with addiction is a literally fatal cocktail.   I found it even weirder that the party at the hotel where she died went on, so there was a police crime lab van and people walking in to a party at the same time.  That kind of says it all, doesn't it?  As in, oh well, that's sad, where's my agent?  The other weird thing is that there appears to be a bank of ready-to-print obits whenever a celebrity dies, which seems to imply that as soon as you're famous there are vultures waiting for you to die.  So, here's hoping Whitney has been released to somewhere less vampiric where her spirit can breathe more freely.

Speaking of which, back to the Cuckoos Nest...