movies

Dog days of summer

August continues to be something of a let-down. I’d suggest that it outright sucks, but I worry it maybe reads this weblog and would try to get back at me out of spite.

This past Monday, I finally got things sorted out with Dell, in so far as the third time I placed my order for a new laptop I received a confirmation number and estimated delivery date. Of course, my bank decided to flag that transaction for some reason, leading to much confusion. Not on the bank’s end — I was easily able to confirm, in about a minute, that I’d made the purchase and this wasn’t fraud — but again at Dell’s. I finally called them to clarify, and the laptop has now moved out of pre-production into production proper, but it’s a little ridiculous how difficult giving them my money proved to be. I’m still getting phone calls from customer service — mostly just to follow up, tell me things the automated e-mails and Dell website have already told me — but I hope this will stop once the new computer is actually in my hands.

That, of course, won’t be for another week and a half.

This past week, I also went through two days of terrible back pain, enough to keep me from going into the office on Wednesday and Thursday. I actually think this was the worst it’s been since 2008, when my herniated disc was first diagnosed, before I had any physical therapy or spinal injections. (It’s questionable whether either of those truly helped, but either way I’d learned to cope and usually don’t feel much pain.) It hurt just to get out of bed this week, and I spent most of the day hobbling around the house, taking pain medication (just Tylenol, or the generic counterpart) and watching episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The impulse was to lie in bed, since that’s where I most free of discomfort, but I think it was a mistake. Certainly it was harder to get up afterward, and lying in bed seemed to undo any progress I’d made. I spent most of Thursday sitting upright instead, where at least I had some lumbar support, and that seems to have helped considerably. I still missed the live Rifftrax show I’d planned to attend — to say nothing of the team meeting at work where everyone made pitches for “book of the year” — but I was back to the office on Friday.

I decided to work a full day. I could have left early, thanks to summer hours, and I only would have needed to make up 90 extra minutes. (Summer hours means you work 45 minutes extra Monday through Thursday.) So I could have left at 2 or 2:30. But that would have meant working straight through to that, without any lunch. It was a quiet day — most everyone who wasn’t on summer hours was at the company’s summer outing at Great Adventure — so I didn’t mind so much.

Today my back’s doing much better, and I’m just delighted to be able to walk, bend, stand, et cetera without real pain.

Then again, this evening I watched AVP: Alien vs. Predator, so maybe there was a little pain left over for me in the week.

Hello, Sunday

If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been posting here much lately — and, if the site’s traffic in general is any indication, you probably haven’t — it’s because on Wednesday night, while I was in the middle of watching an episode of New Girl on Netflix, my computer suddenly shut down and starting puffing smoke.

This is not, it maybe goes without saying, normal or optimal behavior for a laptop computer, particularly one that isn’t all that old, quite possibly still under warranty. I pulled the plug and the battery, fretted for a while, and then ultimately decided to fret about it on more fully on Thursday. Of course, before turning in for the night — it was already kind of late — I placed an order for a new laptop at Dell’s website using my iPad.

An order which, apparently, never went through. I received an acknowledgement e-mail, but not the promised follow-up with my confirmation number and estimated delivery date. I spent more time on Thursday than I really wanted to talking with Dell’s very unhelpful customer service — including one gentlemen (presumably in India judging by his accent) who wanted me go step by step with him over the components and specs that I ordered. Forwarding him the acknowledgment e-mail with those specs wasn’t enough, even when I explained that I’d prefer not to re-order over the phone with just his say-so that I was actually ordering the same thing. I just wanted to confirm with him what I’d confirmed already with another Dell rep over chat: that the order had not actually be received, was not being processed, and the computer was not being shipped. (I may have been a little frazzled and impatient with him, but this was while I was at work, where I really couldn’t handle it.)

On Thursday evening, I ordered the new laptop for the second time. And discovered on Friday that that order had not gone through. Dell, apparently, does not want my money. Their customer service Twitter account was equally unhelpful, suggesting I wait until Monday or Tuesday, and then, if I still haven’t received a confirmation of my order, to phone them.

So that’s apparently what I’m doing, though I’m close to looking for alternatives and other brands, and I’m keeping a close eye on my bank account to make sure I’m not charged for these orders that haven’t been processed. I’m managing okay without a computer, with the iPad and iPhone and the work laptop, which is what I’m writing this thing on. I missed not really being able to watch a movie this weekend — I have Lincoln out on Blu-Ray but no Blu-Ray player, no TV to take the place of the computer screen, and watching something on the iPad just isn’t the same. (TV’s okay there; I just watched tonight’s Breaking Bad, for instance, and last night the first very mixed episode of Orange Is the New Black. I’ve also watched some more New Girl, maybe just to spite the dead laptop.) But it’s not all bad, the ways this has disrupted my life. It’s more the hassle of trying to order the thing and not being able to, and then getting no help from customer service. I’m no closer to solving my problem, and meanwhile the date when/if I get the new laptop just continues getting further away.

But anyway, enough of that. Today I went with friends to see Elysium, which was okay, and before that wrote this in my weekly writing group of the same friends:

If he hadn’t lost his way, Peter wouldn’t have needed the map, and then he wouldn’t have phoned Holly, just as she was getting ready to leave, and she wouldn’t have doubled back, gone upstairs to the bedroom and the locked chest at the foot of the bed where Peter had hidden the map, and then the twenty minutes she lost to finally prying the chest open and phoning Peter back wouldn’t have mattered, because she would have already been on the road, or even back at the lab, where the fact that she’d been poisoned wouldn’t have cost her her life, because the lab had plenty of the antidote (and, having themselves created the poison, could synthesize more), and the techs who worked with Holly would have recognized the symptoms that both she and Peter had been unknowingly ignoring for almost a week. Holly wouldn’t have died, and then neither would Peter, when an hour later he called her back and said he needed — this time rather desperately — to consult the map once again. For want of a nail, as the saying sometimes goes.

After Holly overdosed on the mutant formula, the lab techs brought her back to life, although they would have preferred not to do things this way, had anyone asked, and in fact they had a long list of regulations that suggested (quite strongly) that doing this could jeopardize the larger project, the single reason that the lab existed, and that even if it worked it would be no picnic for Holly, who would likely remember the deep physical pain of her death, the suddeneness with which the mutant formula played its final havoc upon the body, and she would definitely remember the terrible pain of ressucitation, which the lab techs could do — and would do, because they liked Holly — only with terrible cost and by using the machine. Only Peter had ever used the machine before, and the rumor was that he was lost somewhere in the wild darkness — which is what his notes had called it — with no way of contacting the outside world. Had only one of them thought to check the outgoing calls on Holly’s cellphone…

When he turned on the machine, Peter would have found it difficult to explain what he’d seen, not so much because it defied description or because he normally lacked for words, but because what he’d seen had seemed so mundane, so very ordinary, and none of those words seemed worth the trouble when he finally turned back to his notes about the map that he’d found…

I’m not really sure about this piece, which was born out three separate dependent clauses as a prompt. I was maybe more interested in it structurally — long run-on sentence, short cap, followed by a long-run on sentence, then a cap — than the plot, which leaves more questions than it answers.

Anyway, that sort of has been the last few days. By and large, I’m liking August considerably less than July. I described it the other day as July, but without the character. Same humidity, same long days, but not half as much fun so far. It was an incredibly slow week, interspersed with panic and frustration, and that isn’t anybody’s idea of a fun time.

The weekend what was

On Friday afternoon, since I got home from work early, I decided to watch Ghost Story. (It’s available on HBO Go.) The movie has a notable cast, with Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and John Houseman among others — it was the final film role for all of the men, with the lone exception of Houseman — but it’s pretty goofy and not really what I was expecting.

On Saturday morning, I drove with my father to get his car inspected. It meant I had to get up early, on a Saturday — and my attempt to seriously nap upon my return home failed, unfortunately — but he’d done the same for me last month, so it was the least that I could do.

On Saturday afternoon, I finished reading Ben Loory’s collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. I’m not sure there’s any way I can summarize the book, or the experience of reading its off-kilter, sometimes fairy-tale like stories, except to share this tweet (with scan) I made:

It’s a fun but weird book.

On Saturday evening, I watched another movie from 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief. (This one I’d rented from Netflix.) It’s an interesting movie, in that it feels like an artifact from a different time — a time when ’70s movies were becoming ’80s movies — and there’s some good acting in it, particularly from James Caan. But again, I can’t claim to have really loved it. It’s slow and over-stylized — though maybe the latter’s almost a given with Michael Mann — and it just didn’t thrill me.

On Sunday morning, I did the crossword puzzle (somewhat poorly), donated blood — partly inspired, I must admit, by Radiolab’s recent show about the red stuff — and discovered New Girl (it’s also on Netflix). I have, as of this writing, watched eight episodes, a full third of the first season. This is kind of how I like watching sitcoms: in large blocks. I find it’s easier to get emotionally invested with the characters, while ignoring some of the weaknesses that might become more apparent if I had a week to dwell on each episode. It’s how I encountered (and fell for) How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory, and it might explain why I’ve lately fallen out of watching those regularly, now that regularly means something other than watching a half dozen episodes back to back.

On Sunday afternoon, I wrote this:

“That’s me in the photo,” he says. “I’m there with a shovel.”

“And the plastic bucket and flippers,” she says, “I see. Were you at the beach or…?”

“That’s actually the mall,” he says. “One of those photo studio places at the one in Trenton? We went with the Hawaiian getaway theme.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“It was actually that or the landing on Mars. The place was kind of lackluster, didn’t have a lot of backdrops to choose from.”

“Why didn’t you just go to the beach? Wait, does Trenton have a beach?”

“I don’t know. Carol is — was — afraid of water. And planes. And hula dancers. That was the closest we ever got to Oahu.”

“She sounds like a real catch.”

He looks at her for a moment, then lets out a sigh.

“That’s what I used to think, too,” he tells her, shaking his head, “before she blew up the world.”

“Oh,” she answers. “I forgot that was her.”

“I want to say it wasn’t her fault,” he says, “that it could have happened to anybody. But not just anybody’s girlfriend was a mad scientist stockpiling plutonium.”

“That was Carol?”

“That was Carol. I mean, at first it was cute, just one of those little quirks that seem adorable at the start of any relationship. Like the way she’d giggle at movies, not just the funny ones, or the way she’d toy with her hair whenever she got nervous.”

“The way she was afraid of hula dancers?”

“That should have been a warning sign, I guess. Planes, the beach…I mean, those are normal enough phobias. But when you start coming home to robot armies designed to laser to death anything in a grass skirt, you start to worry, you know.”

“I didn’t know you were living with her,” she says. He knows that look.

“Not at her mountain lair, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says. “I didn’t even know she had a mountain lair. Apparently she bought a hollowed-out volcano during the real estate boom.”

“And that’s where she kept the plutonium?”

“Well, it wasn’t at the apartment. We’d only been moved in together for about six months, but I think I would have noticed plutonium.”

“Six months?” she says. “That sounds serious.”

“She blew up the planet,” he answers. “I’d say she was a pretty serious girl.”

“It’s just, you don’t talk about her that much. I mean, this is the first time I’ve even seen that photograph.”

“I don’t like to be reminded of those days. The moon base doesn’t even have a mall.”

“Well if somebody’s girlfriend had given us all a little more warning she was going to detonate a world-killing plutonium bomb…”

“How did this become my fault?” he asks her. “I don’t want to fight.”

“There isn’t enough air even if you did,” she says. “They’re rationing the oxygen again.”

“That’s like the fifth time this month.”

“They brought in a few hundred new refugees just last week. Folks gotta breathe.”

“God I hope they’re not mutants like the last batch. All those third eyes and blistered skin.” He shudders.

“Well I didn’t see any hula skirts, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she says. “Not one single ukulele among them when we did our low-orbit pick-up.”

“Now you’re just being mean,” he tells her. “Besides, that was Carol’s thing, not mine.”

“It’s hard to tell. You two were apparently so close.”

He just stares at her. Neither one of them says anything for a while.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her,” he says finally. “It was a dark time in my life. Trouble at work, the stress of moving in together…the world blowing up. I forgot I even had that photo. If there was enough oxygen left, I probably burn it.”

With my weekly writing group. It’s not really a thing, more a sketch than a story, but I had some fun with it.

And on Sunday evening, I wrote this. That was the weekend.

Sunday

Not really a busy day. I saw The Wolverine — it’s quite enjoyable — and wrote this:

The Raven tortured the black box, turned it over in her hands, worrying the edges until the wood splintered in her palms, drawing blood and a wince of pain as it dug into her skin. They should have built it better, she thought, as the screws that held the clasp loosened and then fell away. She threw the useless metal to the dungeon floor. If they’d meant to trap me here, they should have built a stronger prison; they should have bound me like the others, burnt a ward into the ground, cut my throat and let it bleed. They never should have left me here alone, unguarded but for the boy already dozing outside. They never should have left me here with the means of my escape. But they had thought to torture her, to leave her weeping in the darkness, bloodied and beaten, with the power that she needed so close at hand and yet under lock and key. They’d warded the box, oh yes, as if such commoner’s magic wasn’t easily broken, as if she didn’t have the strength in her to break a small wooden box and spill out its contents, whatever glyphs had been hastily scratched into its surface. She had felled armies, nearly felled their own until they’d sent that damn mage to meet her on the field. He would not have made this same mistake. He would have recognized the battle as still only half won. She was beaten, yes, but never broken. She was the Raven.

The box was empty. She stared, turned it over in her hands, shook out nothing but air. This couldn’t be. She had seen the soldier place her locket in the box, seen him lock it and place the key inside the front pocket of his vest. She didn’t count these men incapable of subterfuge, but she had seen it — and moreover had seen it still, with was left to her of the second sight, when they’d placed the box before her, laughing, and left the room. That all of that had been a ruse…it made no sense, defied what she knew of magic, and should have been impossible even with that dark mage’s help. They could not have tricked her, tricked the sight, unless…

She turned the box back over in her hands. Oh yes, she thought, there it was, a glyph she had not seen, not scratched but deeply burnt into the hard finish inside the box. Not a ward but a trap. Not an escape but a deeper prison.

And that was when she felt the burning pain in her hands.

And now it’s raining. That’s about it.

Saturday

A pretty ordinary day, really. I finished reading The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly, but despite a promising start and some nice detail, I can’t claim to have quite enjoyed the book. Characters act in ways that aren’t always believable — for the time period of the British Raj, but also just for human beings — and the ending solves the mystery in what’s maybe the least interesting of the most predictable ways. Though maybe we’re at a point in mystery novels at which not confounding your expectations itself counts as a twist? Either way, I found the book ultimately a disappointment.

Moving on the Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, just for a complete change of pace.

I also finished watching Fringe, finally. I’ve had the fifth season saved up since it first aired this fall, and I’ve been watching an episode (occasionally two) every evening this week. It’s not a perfect ending, for a show that was never perfect — started out as pretty lousy, actually, before figuring out how to frequently be terrific — but a satisfying one all the same.

I wish I could say the same for Insidious, which I watched last night. It was a lot less scary than I expected, and doesn’t have a whole lot going for it beyond scares.

Finally, this evening I had dinner out with my parents. I had frog legs for the first time — also unimpressive, but maybe more from the way they were prepared — and a decent if unremarkable duck confit. Then my parents went off to see Mary Chapin Carpenter and Marc Cohn in concert and I came home (to watch Fringe and walk the dog). My mom’s a long-time fan of Carpenter, and I bought her tickets this past Mother’s Day.

And that was Saturday, with a little bit of Friday tossed in.