personal

The day after the day after Thanksgiving

I watched two movies today, Rashomon and The Brood, and I don’t think you could ask for an odder double feature than that. Rashomon is pretty remarkable, well deserving of its reputation as a classic, and it’s one of the few movies I felt comfortable buying sight-unseen when I recently picked up some half-priced Criterion Collection discs. The Brood, on the other hand, is quintessential (but still fairly early) David Cronenberg, and as such concerned ultimately with the uncanny, the grotesque, and the horrors of our own psyches. Like Shivers before it, it’s deeply unsettling at times, but it’s also clearly a deeply personal film. It’s not always scary, or even necessarily comprehensible, but it’s intriguing nonetheless.

Other than that? I helped my father and brother-in-law clean the gutters and put the covers on the air conditioners. (Although Brian did most of the heavy lifting, and the climbing up on rooftops.) And this evening, we had a lovely dinner out, just the five of us.

And that’s about it.

Decapitating the luminaries

I made a concerted effort to do absolutely nothing today, and I must say, for the most part, I was entirely successful.

Luckily, I yesterday managed to avoid using any of the “Thanksgiving Phrases to Avoid” given on my Forgotten English desk calendar:

There may be noticed a ludicrously vulgar refinement of speech common to pseudo élégants, namely the use of synonymes so awfully select as might well astound a [perfectionist]. We heard of one young man in America who, desiring some stuffing with his turkey, asked for ‘some of the insertion,’ exquisite refinement with a vengeance. [And] the old joke of ‘decapitating the luminaries,’ for snuffing the candles, is continually and seriously being realized in America. Really well-educated people…are infinitely more careless in their expressions than those less favored, whilst the elevated style, occasionally necessary in literature, would be considered by gentlemen vulgarly pedantic in ordinary society.”

Ah yes, that old joke about decapitating the luminaries. That had high society rolling in the aisles back in 1844.

“Anyway, medical men die every day.”

It got a little colder today, well down into the low ’50s. Which, admittedly, isn’t all that impressively cold, especially not for late November, but it is predicted to be even chillier tomorrow, and one of these days winter is going to happen…or at least a return to the autumn we probably should have been having.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, so I’m off for the rest of the week. We’re hosting, with lots of family visiting, and I’ve mostly just been trying to stay out of the way as my parents prepare the repast. My father has a habit of buying way too much antipasto — a tradition for him, having grown up in a mostly Italian-American family — leaving too little room for turkey and all the trimmings. This year looks to be no different.. We’re bound to have lots of leftovers.

This evening, I watched the thoroughly entertaining The Abominable Dr. Phibes. It’s silly and horrific camp, but great fun, with a delightfully creepy Vincent Price.

And that, really, is about it.

Sometimes a Tuesday is just a Tuesday

The iPad upgrade didn’t take quite as long as I worried it might yesterday, and I did manage to finish reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle before I went to bed. More about that, hopefully, at some near future point, but I really liked the book quite a lot.

And that’s about it, really. Today was mostly just a placeholder of a day, spent researching continuing education providers for mental health professionals at work, and trying to get the bulk of that done before tomorrow, since that’s the end of my work week. And tomorrow only runs to three, since they’re letting us out early for the Thanksgiving holiday.