personal

I feel a little guilty about this, but I didn’t touch the short story today, except in those rare moments that I let my mind drift towards it. No actual writing. And though what I’m telling myself is that a break from it is good and necessary, I’m not entirely convinced that’s true. I’m not going to beat myself up about it, but I do feel a little guilty about it. The most important part of writing is just showing up. One of the things I really want and need out of 2014 is to be serious about my writing, to put in the hours, to show up.

But anyway, that wasn’t today. I had to drive my father around for a couple of errands, and then I spent a large chunk of the afternoon setting up the Christmas tree. It’s a fake tree that comes in many pieces and layers, so it takes a surprising amount of time to get it all finished. I spent the time kind of half-heartedly watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which I wish I could pretend was an underrated gem of a movie, but it’s about as disappointing as I remember it. (Though Crystal Skull has more than stolen its crown as “the bad Indiana Jones movie.)

This evening, I actually watched a couple of movies, two that could not have been more different. (Well, The Odd Couple and Hellraiser were a pretty weird duo.)

First I watched Fast & Furious 6, which was as dumb and fun as I expected it to be. The movie keeps trying to convince you that it’s all about the characters, and I guess there are people who have been heavily invested in the franchise since its beginnings, but for me it’s mostly just about watching people jump from fast cars and laugh at the laws of physics. There’s nothing quite as ridiculous as the giant safe dragged through the streets of Rio in the last movie — the only other one I’ve seen — but the car chase with the tank and Vin Diesel head-butting a guy into another guy come pretty close.

After that I watched Frances Ha, which is a black-and-white indie darling kind-of comedy in which there’s nary a tank or a head-butt. On the surface, there’s actually not a lot that’s special about Frances Ha…which is at least part of what makes it so special. As the Dissolve puts it:

In the grand scheme of things, the career and relationship crises of an educated woman in her late 20s aren’t as important as poverty, war, bigotry, and such. But Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s finely shaded, frequently hilarious character sketch Frances Ha succeeds because it recognizes this, and doesn’t try to blow its heroine’s troubles out of proportion.

But it’s Greta Gerwig’s central performance that truly makes you love the character despite her flaws.

So, no writing, but that will change tomorrow, even if it’s not on this short story, and even if it’s only for forty minutes during my weekly free-writing group.

Have I really been off from work for over a week?

I poked a little again at the short story today, though not as much as I would have liked. It’s a bit like poking at a nest of bees, then being strangely disappointed when they don’t sting. The bees here, I think, are ideas, or words? I’ll admit I haven’t quite thought the metaphor through.

Mostly, though, I helped my father assemble a new snowblower, which was made excessively difficult by the instructions that came with it. We still have to put gas in the tank and test the machine out, and a really proper test will need to wait until a major snowfall. It’s kind of an enormous beast of a machine, and I think it might be overkill for the amount of snow we need to clear. (It might not even be maneuverable in the driveway with three snowed-in parked cars.) But the old snowblowers we inherited a few years ago when my aunt moved down south don’t do trick — even though that’s snowblowers, plural — and my father said this was actually one of the smaller ones he could find. I’m just hoping it works…and that we won’t need to find out anytime this particular winter.

After dinner, I watched Battleship, which was about as terrible as I expected and then some. It rallies a little near the very end, almost turning into dumb good fun in the last twenty minutes, but overall it’s quite terrible. It’s true that I’ve been watching a fair number of bad movies this week, but mostly in the hope that one of them will be as entertainingly bad as Equilibrium.

So I mostly just poked at the short story today. And there was only one movie, mostly because it was Olympus Has Fallen and I felt broken and defeated after watching that dreck. In point of fact, I’m not entirely sure what I did today. I mean, I hung up a wreath, threw out some trash, read a couple of comics, stopped by the post office. But those daylight hours just fly by sometimes.

At least there was a pretty sunset.