"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Less achy, though otherwise kind of a wash as a day. My writing group fell through at the last minute, so it was mostly just the crossword puzzle, and maybe a little bit of Robocop 3 while flipping through channels. I’ve never seen it, and what I did see today convinced me it should probably stay that way.
If I needed any reminder of just how much I am out of shape, my achy legs and back this morning were more than enough. A couple of hours of laser tag, go-karts, and golf swings and I’m apparently nearly out of commission altogether.
Which is just as well, because it was kind of a nothing of a day, really. I capped it by watching The Company of Wolves, which is kind of weird take on Red Riding Hood, more re-examination of fairy-tale metaphor than the horror movie I think I was looking for when I first started looking for something to watch tonight. I’m not sure I loved the movie, but I do think what Roger Ebert said about it is true:
The movie has an uncanny, hypnotic force; we always know what is happening, but we rarely know why, or how it connects with anything else, or how we can escape from it, or why it seems to correspond so deeply with our guilts and fears. That is, of course, almost a definition of a nightmare.
Last night, after work, I joined some fellow cappers for dinner and then the live simulcast of Rifftrax‘s Manos: The Hands of Fate. I thought it got off to a slow start, after some very funny shorts, but in the end I thought they did a really great job. It’s been a little while since I last watched the original riff, but last night’s was probably its equal. It was a good time, though I didn’t get home from Manhattan until after eleven, and I didn’t really fall asleep until after midnight.
So it’s probably a good thing I didn’t have to go into the office today. Every year we have some kind of company outing, and today’s was out on Long Island, at the Country Fair Park in Medford. That’s about a forty-five-minute drive from here, which seemed like the better option than an hour’s regular commute into Manhattan so that I could be on the bus the company had chartered for 8:45. A bus that, even if it hadn’t been a half an hour late, would have taken half an hour longer than my car ride. Then another hour-plus bus ride back into the city and an hour’s train commute back home. We were done at one o’clock, and by driving I was home before two. I think I definitely picked the right option.
The park itself was a lot of fun. There were go-karts, laser tag, a driving range, miniature golf, and batting cages. And while I only participated in the first three of those, I’m kind of exhausted now. Running around and shooting co-workers with sensors on their heads and failing to improve my heretofore nonexistent golf game…well, it takes a lot of you. But there was food, and the weather was good — if quite hot — and I got to leave the house at 9 and get home by 2. So I’m really not complaining.
“They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
I’m never going to complain, like I did last week, about having a boring week ever again.
I didn’t feel so great this morning and wound up calling in sick. I don’t know if it was the garlic shrimp I had for a (rushed) dinner last night or what, but staying home seemed like the preferred course of action. It meant I missed drinks after work this evening, an open bar and hors d’oeuvre to celebrate the end of a recent sales conference, but I wasn’t in shape to make the most of it anyway.
Around 10:30, my mother said she was going out to get a bagel for breakfast and stop at the bank, and she’d be right back. And that was the last I heard from her until almost 7 o’clock. She spent the entire day with a stalled car, waiting for a tow truck and unable to reach me because the phone had gone out in the rain. I admit, I was kind of beside myself with worry at that point.
The weather had been terrible shortly after she left, bucketing rain in a huge and unexpected storm, with lots of flooding and — as I’m sure Heather will be pleased to hear — even some large hail. And despite a short respite, during which you probably wouldn’t even have known it had rained, the bad weather kept up into the evening.
My mother no longer has a cell phone, since this is her first week of retirement, and the phone she had belonged to her employer. So I guess it’s good I was home and she was finally able to reach me — this time from the local deli where she got her bagel. I might not have been home until 8 or 9 if I’d gone to work and drinks. The tow truck she’d been waiting on apparently never showed, so I drove over — at best a five-minute drive — and picked her up.
My father got home a little after 7 o’clock and I drove us both over to see if we could jumpstart the car and then, when that failed, if we could finally get a tow truck from AAA to show up. One finally did, after some more phone tag, and we were back home (sans car) around 8:30 tonight. She’ll have to call tomorrow to figure out what needs to be done with it.
Everyone’s okay, which is what matters, but I don’t know about you, but I think I’d prefer boring any day of the week.
I worked from home today, and then went into Manhattan afterward, which is the exact opposite of how that usually goes. I’d debated just going into the office, and sticking around in the city after that, but the allure of an extra hour or two of sleep in the morning was just too much to pass up.
I went into the city this evening to see Sleepwalk With Me at Symphony Space. I’ve been a fan or director and star Mike Birbiglia’s comedy and appearances on This American Life, and the movie was followed by a short Q&A with him. Both were quite entertaining.