Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre but they are more deadly in the long run." - Mark Twain

Reading: Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind

Listening to: Hamza El Din, A Wish

Decluttering accomplishments: caught up on household finances, threw out some old magazines

21 April 2002 - Movie Rentals and Parlor Games

From my forthcoming self-help book for friends and family of Red Sox fans: Never respond to enthusiasm about how they're doing with the phrase, "it's only April." Or, come to think of it, May, June, July, August.

This was a fairly busy week at work. I flew to Denver Monday afternoon. I'd coordinated my travel with one of my support people, and was slightly distressed when I didn't see him at the airport. Nor did I see him get off the plane. It turned out he'd decided to take a later flight, but he hadn't bothered to let me know. It was no big deal, since I had a rental car reserved. We were staying at an airport hotel and he could just take the hotel shuttle, but I do worry. I'm not convinced the meeting we were there for was all that productive, but its main purpose was more to stir a few things up than to solve anything then and there. It ended early enough that we were able to get the 2:45 flight back to L.A. on Tuesday afternoon, giving me lots of time to do stuff at home. Particularly since I was inspired to avoid having to cook dinner by picking up some tamales at Trader Joe's. (Corn Maiden blue corn, green chile and cheese, to be precise - yum.)

I had meetings on Wednesday and Thursday in Azusa, which is always a tedious trip. Wednesday was particularly bad, since that meeting didn't start until 10 a.m., putting me in the worst of rush hour traffic on the 10. (The 10 is the Santa Monica Freeway, which briefly merges with the 5 or Golden State Freeway in downtown, then heads further east in the guise of the San Bernardino Freeway. Saying "the" with the number of a freeway is a peculiarly Los Angeles usage. The road in question is simply dreadful and the question is not whether it will be backed up but how far west the gridlock will begin.) Thursday's session ended early, so I went back to my office. Fortunately, they'd finished up the base exercise they were doing, so I missed the joy of standing out in the parking lot for hours.

Anyway, the early evenings home let me use a bunch of my free movie rentals. I've used six of the coupons and have six to go. The movies I've seen are:

1. Haiku Tunnel - a movie version of a monologue about office work. While Josh Kornbluth's problems are largely of his own making, at least he does go about working things out. And there are some very funny bits.

2. Ghost World - based on the graphic novel. This was a major disappointment. It had been well reviewed, but nothing really happened and I found nothing to like in any of the characters.

3. Riding in Cars With Boys - based on the autobiography of a single mother. This wasn't terrible, but I was still glad I hadn't paid to see it. There was potential for an inspiring story of a woman making something of herself despite a few rotten blows in life, but Bev comes across as selfish and spoiled, instead of heroic.

4. Session 9 - horror story set in old mental hospital. I have to admit I didn't quite get it. There's a nicely creepy atmosphere and some ambiguity about whether events are supernatural or psychological, but the characters seem to be too scared too early. I'm not sure why I ever bother watching horror movies, since I inevitably find them more confusing than scary.

5. Donnie Darko - teenager just hasn't been the same since a jet engine fell on his bedroom, not to mention his relationship with the giant rabbit from the future. This is a movie people either loved or hated. I thought it was definitely original and liked the creativity, though I have some qualms (and confusion) about the ending. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, though. Robert, for example, would definitely hate it. While they're not at all alike, I'd guess that there's a strong correlation between liking this and liking Pi.

6. Maze - Rob Morrow as an artist with Tourette's syndrome. Rob Morrow is cute. And I find neurological disease oddly fascinating. The combination, however, could not rescue this movie from trite preachiness. The Tourette's wasn't handled any more plausibly than the romance story, either, though I have to admit that a tic involving retying shoelaces every four or five steps is an amusing symptom. If you share my fascination with this sort of thing, see The Tic Code instead.

The other thing that the long commute to Azusa allowed me to do was make up a new parlor game. It started out as "one-letter recipes" and the object was to add a single letter to the name of a food in order to suggest an entire recipe. For example, salmond must be salmon cooked with almonds. Papricot is a bland baby food flavored with apricots. Bacone is bacon formed into a cone shape, to be filled with scrambled eggs. I tried this out on Tiny Tim and the best one I heard in response was "skim chee = low fat fermented cabbage." Folks came up with several variants, including adding letters in the middle, to which I speculated on whether pope tarts would be made from communion wafers. You can also just do general puns on the concept, e.g. mustardy is a yellow condiment that always arrives after the rest of the meal. Or add multiple letters. If your friends are anything like mine, they'll be at it for hours. Oh, another good one was "pizzap" for microwaved pizza.

In other news, I put off doing everything I'd planned to do yesterday until today. And then I was supposed to go to a storytelling concert last night and my car wouldn't start. I suspect it's just the battery, though it has another six months on the warranty and they usually wait until the day after the warranty runs out. I'm not sure, since the car was making funny noises on the way home on Friday, which I'd planned to get looked at later this week. So I didn't go to the concert and didn't do a Volksmarch today. I did run a few errands on foot, but it was very hot out. I succumbed to a craving on my way back from the supermarket and got some Baskin Robbins daiquiri ice, which was perfect for the weather. I also called someone to get a ride to work tomorrow, which was only slightly complicated by my not having his number in my address book and having to remember his first name in order to look him up in the phone book. That sounds stranger than it was meant to. It's just that there's often no apparent correlation between a Chinese name and the English first name that somebody uses. I'll use my company's shuttle bus to get to the airport tomorrow afternoon and take a taxi or Supershuttle home on Wednesday. Then I'll call AAA for either a jump start or a tow on Thursday morning and get my car fixed. I suppose that will make my ride share week commuter survey look good, though I'm not sure they have a category to check for "tow truck."