Leisure & Sloth

2006 Movies

So, I'm behind on posting them, but I'm trying to write up something on the books I read this year, less because I have something to say about them all than to keep track. So, interest the competing interests of both parity and laziness, here's a list of the movies I've seen so far this year, broken up by theater viewing, netflix, and other rentals (a couple from Hollywood and the rest from the library). By this count, I've seen 32 movies this year (33, if you count the most of Road to Perdition I saw on TV, which I don't). I may be missing a cople of other rentals. Two movies on the list are as yet unwatched, but be watched by the end of the weekend. Not included are a couple of movies that we own that I've rewatched this year.

THEATER

Jarhead, 2005
Freedomland, 2006
Brokeback Mountain, 2005

OTHER RENTALS

Dark Water, 2005
Fearless Vampire Killers, 1967
High Tension, 2003
A Face in the Crowd, 1957
The Producers, 1968
Trouble in Paradise, 1932
The Shop on Main Street, 1965
A Room with a View, 1985

NETFLIX

The Animal Kingdom, 1932
A Man Escaped, 1957
The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004
Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, 2005
New York, New York, 1977
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974
All That Heaven Allows, 1955
Far from Heaven, 2002
The Tenant, 1976
The Woodsman, 2004
The Corporation, 2004
Kinsey, 2004
Mean Creek, 2004
Personal Velocity, 2002
Thieves' Highway, 1949
Contempt, 1963
Christ in Concrete, 1949
Chrystal, 2004
Russian Ark, 2002
The Lovers on the Bridge, 1991
Scanners, 1980
Vera Drake, 2004
Yi Yi, 2000

Some things end, other things begin

School is basically over; one test remains but it will be minimally taxing. The semester ending with a string of misfortunes, beginning with a disastrous presentation attended by the Dean and climaxing with my car overheating and smoking out in Jackson, en route to a semester-long project-concluding presentation. There was a nice little aftershock that I really thought was quite tastefully done as an hour after I turned in a thirty-page paper, I realized I'd completely forgotten to write an introduction to it. As I said to a classmate, I just jumped right in to "Flyvbjerg this" and "Indianapolis that."The paper was applying Bent Flyvbjerg's Rationality and Power to Fall Creek Place, a public-private renewal project of a few square blocks in Indianapolis. It's a good project, and an interesting challenge to use with the book. I hope to polish it up a bit and post it online sometime this summer.

After getting everything more or less turned in, I stopped at Borders on a slowly meanderI also stopped to pick up a couple of movies, and got Out of Time and Confidentiality. The former was better than the latter, but neither were all that good. Good enough for a tired afternoon's recuperation, though. home. I'd been recommended Evelyn Waugh's Scoop and Vile Bodies, as well as The Victorian Internet, about the Internet-like impacts that the telegraph had on society. All of these sounded good, and yet not quite right. (And, of course, Borders didn't have those two Waugh titles and I forgot the name of the telegraph book.)

Instead, I got Gun, with occasional music by Jonathan Lethem and A Rage to Live, by John O'Hara. I've read Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, so I had expectations for that. Finished yesterday, and was pleased. I liked the title-blurbed juxtaposition of Dick and Chandler, but I also liked the way he pared down society to those who ask questions and those who don't, sort of an idealization of the world of detective fiction. (Or so it seems to me; I'm a procedural-thriller guy, not so much with the older genre of detective fiction.)

I started the O'Hara book last night, a little bit, and a little more today. I don't know him, not even by reputation. He seems keen on lists so far. But it promises to be a big sprawling Book o' America, set in the late teens to the mid-something or others, with lots of politicking and boosterism, and I go in for that kind of thing.

Making Friends Is Easy

I don't know if it's just that I'm a touch SAD, what with the drastic change in daily sunlight, or the transition from work to grad school"Transition" is probably being kind. I'm still hacking away at a report for my previous job, even while I'm struggling with the reading requirements of school and work requirements of a new (10 hour a week, but still) job. Hopefully, the report will be basically out of the way by next week, but for the past month it's been a massive weight on my shoulders., or the fact that T has been back in the field for the past and future three weeks, but I've been mopish lately.

The particular form of mope, though, is interesting. I've been fixated on my inability to form fast friendships. I want to say that I just don't know how other people do it--plenty of people have started clumping together in little proto-cliquesAnd I'm not even being snide! My whole point is: I dearly wish to be on the inside! and fall into natural and comfortable patterns of chatting and walking and socializing and studying together--but I sort of have an inkling that it has something to do with my near-crippling in ability to risk the potential shame that goes along with ... making an approach.

This is weird. I like having friends, and I think I'm pretty goodWhy only pretty good? I have a bad habit of not keeping up with friends who aren't immediately in front of me, and correspondence is a spectacularly weak area. at it. But the actual process of making friends seems nearly insurmountable. First, it seems like a monumental task to make the effort. But second, I get into weird brain-freezes when talking to strangers. It's not that I'm scared to say anything (that was the first step, recall), it's that I simply don't have anything to say. And this is a different not having anything to say than when I'm with T, and it's just a comfortable silence. This is deer-in-the-headlights silence, and I just sort of stand there and smile, awkwardly.

Don't get me wrong, it's not as bad as all that, really. It's just ... I think it's just that I have to be in a position where not socializing isn't really an option, and then I'm able to get comfortable, and relate like an actual human. My fear is that I won't--here, or ever again--be in that position.

footnote1=WorkingBlues
footnote1=ProtoCliques
footnote1=PrettyGood

Rainy day Reno

It's rainy today, and has been for awhile. It's nice, but it's a reminder of what we've been missing. T pointed out today that it was humid enough for condensation to form on cold glasses--it's been two years since I've seen this, and didn't notice the absence.

It would be a good day sloth, for sitting at the table and playing dominoes or playing with Zoot, but it won't happen. This morning, we were ablur with cleaning, to prepare the apartment so the landlord could show it this afternoon. (Which, incidentally, didn't happen.) Currently, I'm at work; shortly, I'll be going home, and doing more work, and then packing, and then dinner, and then work, and then Potter, maybe.

My sloth & leisure will be unavailable for the coming two weeks, sadly.

Eureka!

Spent the July 4th weekend in Eureka, where T is on a dig. It was an excellent time, and probably the most vacation-y time off I've had since Christmas 2001. Friday I watched the town parade (featuring many vaguely costumed people riding horses, the parade of bicycles, pets, a sad boy with a tiny pony, floats, and government service vehicles (mostly firetrucks and big BLM rigs). Afterwards, they had the boys' soda drinking contest, the girls' soda drinking contest, the ladies' nail driving contest, the ladies' beer drinking contest, and the men's beer drinking contest.

That evening, T's boss had a cook-out for the crew, and hangers-on, which was followed by the town's fireworks, which were being set off just up the hill from us. (So close, in fact, that one of the fireworks that went off too soon after launch wound up dripping bits of fire nearly into the yard.) Following the official display, the kids across the street had their own, and set their yard on fire.

The next two days were filled with blissful nothing: some wandering around town, a lot of reading (I managed to finish Bowling Alone and The Road to Wigan Pier, and get a good start on The Power and the Money: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000), and cooking for T & her coworkers. All in all, pure blissful decadence.

Hopefully I'm rejuvenated enough now to keep up with this better. In the coming weeks, I hope to post nearly continuously on the past couple of books I've read (the above, plus Non-Zero), summaries I've been meaning to do for awhile, as well as maybe a post on the difficultly in affecting "environmentally significant behavior."

Grubby slug

This evening I am slug-like. A grubby, sweaty slug, who was going to watch The Seven Samurai, but because the video store forgot to remove their lock, which keeps the case shut tight, I will not be. Instead, I will reheat leftovers, and read the New Yorker, and then probably finish the appendices to Non-Zero, and then maybe start something new. My goal is to wind up in bed early, because I must arise early tomorrow. But it seems really light out now, compared to what it ought to be. I think it will be a restless night.