The Oscars are tonight, and movie talk is in the air. Last night, my friend Katie L realized that there was this pattern in film titles, and we’ve decided to turn it into a little contest. How many movie titles (of films that actually exist, not ones you think would sound awesome) can you think of that follow the pattern *Present Continuous Verb* + *Verb’s Direct Object*? One could argue that these titles end up being gerunds, but that’s neither here nor there. Sound silly? A little specific? There are actually quite a few that we could think of:

Becoming Jane, Being There, Boxing Helena, Chasing Amy, Driving Miss Daisy, Drowning Mona, Eating Raoul, Educating rita, Feeling Minnesota, Finding Forrester, Finding Nemo, Inventing the Abbots, Killing Zoe, Kissing Jessica Stein, Leaving Las Vegas, Losing Isaiah, Pushing Tin, Raising Arizona, Regarding Henry, Saving Private Ryan, Saving Silverman, Stealing Harvard, Waking Ned Devine.

If you’d like, you can branch out to TV shows and songs for half the points. Here’s something to start you off:

TV Shows– Crossing Jordan, Judging Amy, Pushing Daisies, and Watching Ellie.

Songs– Losing My Religion. (We didn’t spend much time on songs.)

Here are the rules:

1. No adjectives plus nouns. Eg., Raging Bull, Sliding Doors– not allowed.

2. No verbs plus prepositions. Eg., Waiting for Guffman– nope, sorry.

3. Nothing longer that the verb plus object formula. So, Killing Me Softly does not work.

I got a little magnet in the mail from my health insurance company the other day, with a “Nurse Line” phone number on it. I’m supposed to call the Nurse Line when I’m sick to find out if I should go to the doctor. Or, as the card says, to help decide if the “doctor’s office, emergency room, or just self-care is needed.”

Suuuuure. I’ll call my insurance to ask whether I should accrue costly hospital bills for them to pay. Or not.

I’m sure it might depend on whether I had paid my full deductible yet, but I imagine the call to go something like this:

Me: Hi Nurse Line? I’m having some chest pains?
Nurse Line: Chest pains are more common than you think, don’t worry.
Me: But it’s kind of [gasp] stabbing? Oh boy. There it goes.
Nurse Line: Have you considered self-care?
Me: Tingling . . . in my . . . left arm . . . [thump]
Nurse Line: Advil should clear that right up.

The information I can get by calling Nurse Line, the card assures me, is “physician-approved.” How do the physicians know what the phone operator is going to say? Does a physician come in and bless the phone with a wave of his or her stethoscope first?

In other health insurance news, I also found out that I could get $50 from my health insurance comp by filling out an online questionnaire. Woo-hoo! right? The questions were a wee bit personal though. They moved from my diet and exercise regimen, to my mental health and family history, right down to the nitty gritty: height and weight please, marked with the dreaded red asterisk — required.

So I lied my suddenly-smaller-on-paper ass off, of course. Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not raising your premiums . . .

But even after I added a full inch and took off 20-25 pounds, the interwebs still said I was fat! Which almost scared me enough to call Nurse Line to see what I should do.

I have no idea who everyone is pulling for in this primary season, and I know a lot of people were probably watching the speeches on super tuesday. But I just had to share this video if others out there were Obama fans. The Will.I.Am video is making the rounds more, but this video is why I am more excited about Obama than any candidate in my lifetime. He has an uncanny ability to capture the emotions of so many years of settling between uninspiring and misguided.

For the past few months, I’ve tried to avoid engaging because I didn’t want to just be disillusioned again. But somehow, because of the hoards of people Obama continues to draw and the words he speaks that seem so unlike a politician, I’ve become hopeful again.

And even if I’m headed for a huge fall as the primary season or general election ends, it feels pretty good.