movies

Weekend

I’m not watching the Oscars tonight. I have no problem with anybody who is watching it, or spending what promises to be a very long evening live-tweeting about it, but I pretty much lost all interest in the spectacle of it several years ago.

On Friday afternoon, my parents returned after three weeks down south, in Georgia and Florida, sightseeing and seeing my father’s extended family. It’s good to have my parents back — I was immediately thrown over by them in the dog’s affections, since they brought him toys — but it’s also a little strange getting used to sharing the house again. I love them dearly — they brought me gifts, too — but I do think this needs to be the year I move out on my own again.

Last night, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which is an odd movie. Jimmy Stewart is very good in it, and it’s understandable why it’s such a classic — recently beating out Citizen Kane as critics’ choice of best movie ever. There’s just a lot to unpack in the movie. Roger Ebert goes into some of it here, but…well, it’s an odd movie, maybe even by Hitchcock standards.

Today, I did the crossword puzzle and finally went back to my weekly writing group. I hope this means I go back to regular writing as well. Anyway, here’s what I wrote off of today’s three-index-card prompt:

As she turned the silver key, a Mask, the same one who’d been following her ever since 85th Street, stepped out of the shadows and leveled his gun at her back. She could hear him pull back the hammer, chamber a round, and even though she couldn’t see his face, she knew his hands were shaky on the makeshift pistol. He wasn’t nearly as good at this as he thought.

“You should leave,” she said, still not turning around. In front of her, the door unlocked. She repocketed the key but she did not open the door; she would not enter the apartment building with this Mask they’d sent to kill her still waiting in the street below. She would not let him see what was waiting just inside. “Put that stupid thing away and go home like a good boy.”

And he was just a boy. She’d seen him lurking on the subway platform, and then failing to look inconspicuous on the train ride downtown. The mask and cowl hid many of his features — she assumed they were supposed to look imposing — but they could not hide the obvious fact of his age, which she pegged at maybe fifteen. At first, she had almost felt insulted, that they’d put a young pup like this on her trail, that they had such little respect for her as a quarry. But then she’d laughed. If the Masks were recruiting this young, they were in more serious trouble than she’d even dared hope. It was ridiculous: the tail, the gun — everything. She wasn’t going to let some teenager interfere with the ritual that was awaiting her inside.

As he pulled back the trigger, she started to reconsider. He was just a boy, but he might also be a true believer, and he might very well prove to be dangerous, even if just by accident. This wasn’t a panicked shot. She’d refrained from showing her true powers deliberately so not to spook him. This was deliberate; she could sense that now. He was nervous as hell but he believed in what he was doing. He was, after all, a Mask. And she, after all, was the enemy. The bullet speeding even now towards her back wasn’t a message or a warning or an accident. It was an execution.

She’d maybe read the kid wrong, but she wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. She threw open the building’s front door and the let the darkness swell out into the street.

That, plus a little bit of cleaning, was my weekend. Seriously, I am no that exciting. Did I tell you? I’m not even watching the Oscars.

The weekend

Yesterday, I gave blood at the local library. Or, rather, in the bloodmobile parked outside the library. This was my first time donating inside one these things, and while I don’t have any pictures, it was similar to this one, only a little smaller and a little more cramped, especially with everyone wearing winter coats and all.

Afterward, I cam home and re-watched Almost Famous. It’s altogether I napped during a small chunk of it. That’s pretty much the highlights of my Saturday.

Today, my writing group was cancelled, thanks to car troubles — not mine — so I went and had what turned out to be a really great sushi lunch. I’m new to this idea that raw fish can actually taste good — although I usually do still stick to the rolls — but today’s tasted very good indeed.

Then I came home, did a little housecleaning, and shredded some old documents while I watched episodes of Rubicon. I liked it for the brief moment it was on TV back in 2010, then bought the season, then just let it sit there. But today I’ve watched a third of it, and I’m still liking it, so I’m not regretting the purchase. I can see why it didn’t click with viewers, and nowadays it would probably fare even worse on AMC. (I like The Walking Dead, except when I don’t, but it’s hard not to argue that it’s distracted AMC from the path it seemed to be on before this. Even its other powerhouses, Mad Men and Breaking Bad seem a little like legacy shows that don’t quite fit the new model.)

Anyway, I like Rubicon, even if it is, by design, slow. But I figured, political thrillers don’t necessarily age well. (Even if I remember being pleasantly surprised by The Parallax View a few years ago, and that was definitely one of this show’s models. And some forty years old.) Time to give it a shot.

That, plus an incredible amount of freezing cold wind, was my Sunday.

Nemo in snowy slumberland

It has definitely been a weird week.

That picture up above is before the worst of last night’s snow, in the early evening when, out with the dog, I was led to think, you know, maybe this historic world-crushing snowstorm isn’t going to be so bad after all.

Well, we didn’t lose power or heat, but between that photo and the time that I woke up — around 6, and let me just say, on a Saturday? — we gained maybe another foot and a half of snow. It was now fun shoveling and snow-blowing off the driveway this morning. I spent an hour and a half at it this morning, and I still only made a dent. A large-ish dent, granted, but both cars are still covered in snow. I’ll take a look at them again shortly, but I’m really hoping the afternoon sun will do some damage.

I did get to stay home from the office yesterday. We were open, and I spent the day working, but doing so from home. My boss had given us permission yesterday to leave early if we thought the weather and commute were going to be really bad. The Long Island Railroad was already talking about shutting itself down before the early evening. I took my laptop home with me just in case. And then when I woke up on Friday, it was already snowing and I made a judgment call. It was a call to my boss to see if my judgment was something I could follow up on. But I was genuinely worried about getting stuck in Manhattan, especially with a hungry dog at home waiting all by himself.

So I worked from home, and for most of the day actually felt a little silly about it. The snow turned to rain for most of the afternoon, and while nasty and wet, it wasn’t exactly snowmaggedon. Even by around 9 o’clock that evening, I was thinking, is that it? I made myself some scrambled eggs for dinner and settled into the mistake that was watching the 2012 version of Total Recall. You can read all my tweets about the movie here, which is probably more informative than trying to go through it all again, and certainly more entertaining than the movie itself. (Even if you don’t find my tweets entertaining at all, trust me, the movie is lousy.)

Today I’m really just hanging out, since I’m still kind of snow-bound. (Also tired. Did I mention I’ve been up since 6 am?) No idea what I’ll do today, though I promised myself I’d write for at least half an hour. Aside from morning pages, I’ve fallen out of the habit this week. It’s been a weird one, have I mentioned?

Maybe next week I’ll actually go into the office more than one day. That’d be weird.

Tuesday

It’s been a weird couple of days.

I did a little food shopping on Monday, then picked up the dog from the kennel. He was, per usual, a little antsy upon release, so I spent the rest of the day just hanging around the house with him. And most of today, as well. I was aided and abetted by it’s being cold and snowy outside and my generally not wanting to do anything. I mostly watched a bunch of television — Bunheads and Supernatural and The Americans and Justified — and movies — Days of Wine and Roses and Slacker.

I also did laundry, so that counts for something, right?

I’d hoped to do some writing, beyond the morning pages, but haven’t. Or much reading. I wasn’t helped by twisting my back late this afternoon. I’m just trying to take it easy, since tomorrow I have to go back to work.

Trouble right here in River City

I spent the weekend in Maryland for my sister’s birthday. My father, my brother-in-law, and I went to the International Spy Museum while my sister and mother went shopping — something of a birthday tradition. Not the Spy Museum, but the splitting up to do something else while the womenfolk shop.

The Spy Museum was interesting, if very crowded. They have a new big exhibit on James Bond villains, which was interesting having only just recently watched all of the Bond movies in quick succession. I’m not sure the museum’s worth a trip from anywhere, especially since it’s one of the few museums in D.C. that you actually have to pay to get into. But it’s interesting.

After that, we had a nice dinner at a tapas restaurant in Gaithersburg.

My parents are on a road trip after this down south, to see family and to see the sights, so I came by my lonesome on the train. They were actually going to stay on another night in Maryland, but I think my father was shocked by the idea of how bad D.C.-bound traffic was going to be on Monday morning — if you don’t leave by six, my brother-in-law said, you probably don’t want to leave until after 8. From my trip down there this fall to UMD, I can say that’s pretty accurate. Traffic down there is terrible.

So my sister and brother-in-law drove me to the train station in Baltimore, and my parents checked out of the hotel and added another stop in a different city to their route. (I spoke with them earlier, and they’d been to a really nice Civil War museum, so apparently the added trip was a smart move.) I hate to wait an hour for my train, but at least it wasn’t delayed like a lot of the trains before it. I made really good time, getting into New York Penn Station around 3:45 and catching a 3:51 train to my home station.

I was home in plenty of time to completely ignore the Super Bowl.

I do mean ignore it, and I do mean completely. I kept seeing updates about in on my Twitter feed, which made me wish I’d at least seen Beyonce’s half-time show, but instead I spent the evening watching and enjoying The Music Man. I don’t have work tomorrow — I’m picking up the dog from the kennel — so I’m thinking about watching another movie or something.

And that was my weekend, more or less.

spymuseum