I'm home sick today. It's amazing how twelve hours of sleep makes me feel so much better. Or, rather, it's not amazing at all. If only that were a scheduling possibility.
Yesterday morning the old woman upstairs was dragging and bumping stuff around at about 5:30, as she is wont to do. At 5:50 there was a big bang noise and I lay there with my eyes open wondering if she had fallen over. Eventually I heard her moving around again and I went back to sleep.
Last night, she was listening to some cheesy drama and then to news reports about Barack Obama. When she does this, I put on my headphones and listen to music, because I'd rather be kept up by my own noise. Falling asleep wasn't really going to happen so instead I lay there and tried to decide whether or not I believed in god and what my ideas were on the afterlife, if any.
I guess it's only pretty recent that ruminating on these concepts has become something we can do in our spare time, as opposed to a necessary aspect of our cultural and social identity. That's kind of nice, I guess, individuals getting to decide by themselves what they do and do not believe in or want to get up early for on Sunday (or any other) morning. It does, however, lead to the situation where you don't really have to think about it if you don't want to and you have the option of sleeping in instead of spending time contemplating where you are headed, in terms of right and wrong.
I think that for the most part, the role that religion would have played in my life if I had been brought up to be religious was replaced by novels. I'm hard-pressed to think of a better way of gaining an understanding of the necessity of being a humanist in this world.
Needless to say, this line of thinking last night lead to some strange and wonderful dreams.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Context
You know what looks weird when you are not actually doing it? Standing on a ski hill. It just looks strange.
Much the way clumping around in ski boots seems normal when you are doing it but is otherwise crazy. I rode the Grouse ski gondola this summer to my friend's wedding wearing a dress and mules and it was the strangest feeling ever, especially when on the way down we went over the midstation and a bunch of water tipped out from somewhere in the ceiling and landed on me and the bride. Thank goodness for being drunk.
Much the way clumping around in ski boots seems normal when you are doing it but is otherwise crazy. I rode the Grouse ski gondola this summer to my friend's wedding wearing a dress and mules and it was the strangest feeling ever, especially when on the way down we went over the midstation and a bunch of water tipped out from somewhere in the ceiling and landed on me and the bride. Thank goodness for being drunk.
Monday, February 04, 2008
The Wonderful World of Shutting Up
I was at a "friends and family" screening for a movie last weekend. That means the people in the audience worked on the movie, or at least work for the company that made the movie, so they worked on the movie in the sense that they posted the job opening for the in-house lawyer in the international sales department who then advised other people who sold the movie to distributers in Uruguay. So granted, they may not be so terribly invested in the magic of filmmaking any more than your average ferry worker is into seafaring (which incidentally some are, not a lot but some).
But it still was a bizarre experience to sit in a theatre on the proverbial lot in which people still let their phone beep every five minutes for the second half of the movie, talked loudly to each other and crumpled popcorn bags in their fists apparently for the sheer fun of it.
At a screening of No Country, the old woman next to me was muttering away with her old husband in her loud, old-person, just-tell-me-if-I'm-yelling voice and when the title card came on the screen, she whispered, "TERRIBLE TITLE" and I got up and moved. The people sitting next to me during Atonement filled me with so much rage with their talking (they did not even have the good grace to think they were whispering) that my own emotional journey was becoming much more compelling than the one on screen. What the fuck people, watch it at home if you are going to say "do you want some popcorn?" to your canoodling mate in a normal speaking voice in a crowded theatre.
It makes me wonder: who are these crazy people? Who do they think they are? Where do they think they are? Obviously their own living rooms in Ultrasuede recliners. It turns out even people whose livelihood depends on people enjoying the movie experience are perfectly content to crap on the work of others. If I could punish these people, I would make them sit through a mix. Like, the whole thing. Of a feature. A Michael Bay feature. That would teach them.
But it still was a bizarre experience to sit in a theatre on the proverbial lot in which people still let their phone beep every five minutes for the second half of the movie, talked loudly to each other and crumpled popcorn bags in their fists apparently for the sheer fun of it.
At a screening of No Country, the old woman next to me was muttering away with her old husband in her loud, old-person, just-tell-me-if-I'm-yelling voice and when the title card came on the screen, she whispered, "TERRIBLE TITLE" and I got up and moved. The people sitting next to me during Atonement filled me with so much rage with their talking (they did not even have the good grace to think they were whispering) that my own emotional journey was becoming much more compelling than the one on screen. What the fuck people, watch it at home if you are going to say "do you want some popcorn?" to your canoodling mate in a normal speaking voice in a crowded theatre.
It makes me wonder: who are these crazy people? Who do they think they are? Where do they think they are? Obviously their own living rooms in Ultrasuede recliners. It turns out even people whose livelihood depends on people enjoying the movie experience are perfectly content to crap on the work of others. If I could punish these people, I would make them sit through a mix. Like, the whole thing. Of a feature. A Michael Bay feature. That would teach them.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Materialistic Ambition, part 1
I have dreams of making a bunch of money and using it to get everything on my Volvo all fixed and nice. So that, for example, I would never again cut my knee open on that broken hard plastic on the drivers' side door (happened again last week) and I could listen to the sound system normally without have to use an ipod as a pre-amp. Fix the rust spots and oh, and maybe get the radio working again. And certainly get both speakers working at the same volume so I could once again enjoying the LR panned stylings of the Beatles while I drive.
I'll know when I really make it huge, though, because that will be the day that I can afford to purchase and have bolted to the hood this magnificent creature:
I'll know when I really make it huge, though, because that will be the day that I can afford to purchase and have bolted to the hood this magnificent creature:
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