My Day

Today when I got off the train at 14th and 6th a dog (looking sort of like a lab/pit/boxer mix) ran by with a leash and vest on. Once I realized no one was chasing it I started after him. 8 blocks later I still couldn't catch him and at least a hundred people just stared even as I yelled out for them to stop him. I finally gave up partly because I was late for work but mostly because I figured if anybody was going to catch him it was going to be as he passed them. I got pretty close though, I hope he's alright.






















After work I went to see the movie Atonement alone. I invited Takei but he unfortunately couldn't make it in time. We had previously gone to see Pride & Prejudice together (another period-romance-Keira Knighty film) and when the lights came up I'm pretty sure we were the only people there who weren't a gay couple or girls. It was a very Vanity Fair movie (a term I think I've only ever thought to myself), with plenty of beautifully-lit, well-dressed, upper-class, very attractive people living in beautiful period settings which I still can't help but liking (plus they had sex in a library!). As I sipped at my gigantic rum-and-movie-coke it occurred to me that this should be my new years resolution, to see more movies in the theater. I found my own nebulous feelings about movies explained succinctly by Reynolds Price when he wrote:

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens—second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

(Which I only know about from the last post on Theresa Duncan's blog before she killed herself.) I also love Pedro Almodóvar's reflection that...

"Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness."

Good movies bring about a welcome temporary change in consciousness much like parties, sex and drugs, all of which I increasingly believe we seek out to try and fill the hole left by the end of childhood and therefore the death of magic. On a final note, one very minor character in the movie complains of not being mysterious. Whenever I find myself worrying about the same thing, of not being mysterious enough or Jordan-Catalano-Cool, I remind myself and take comfort in that just as Price equates telling stories with being alive, being mysterious and cool is really just about distancing oneself from any real human interactions, in other words a little death.