Holiday break over

How is it possible that a long weekend can go by so fast? I had a good time though and that counts for a lot. As much as I like to travel, it was nice to have a long weekend at home, not needing to journey anywhere, just being able to take care of business at home, rest, relax and have inexpensive forms of fun. I enjoyed a $1 showing of Knowing under the influence of vodka tonic. A group of gangly teens came in and, for whatever reason, wanted to sit practically on my lap. I told them the seat next to me was saved and that thwarted them. I told my friend, “If I have to lie and say a friend is in the bathroom with explosive diarrhea, I will do it!” People seemed to pile into this showing until it was nearly full to capacity. I guess everyone else in Tulsa wanted to do something cheap, too. This man and his cougar wife came in and sat directly behind us and he was SO LOUD. He talked through 80% of the movie about horrible topics . . . life at the office, his motorcycle, etc. Why even bother going to a dollar movie when all you want to do is talk? Do that for free at your own house. I waited until we were all out on the parking lot and escape was close before screaming, “Shut up” at him at the top of my lungs. He was also wearing one of those really tacky, out-of-date silk shirts. His cougar wife had her hair teased to the ceiling and Tammy Faye type make-up. They were more alarming to me than the ridiculous aliens in the film. The sad thing is that Knowing was not too bad until the last 15 or 20 minutes. After that point, the suspension of disbelief dies and you are left going, What in the hell just happened? And what was the significance of the rabbits? I don’t get it . . .


I’ve been trying to get in some good material on my reading kick, too. I figure I might as well try to un-rot my brain matter before I get sucked into anything during the summer TV show season. I am waiting of course to see if any of the auditions we saw during the AGT taping make it to air and I am anxious for The Philanthropist since James Purefoy is the star. Oh yeah—and Intervention is finally on a new season. And that’s about as far as I want my brain decomposition to go, LOL. I have been on a kick of biographies and re-reading things I brain-dumped from long ago. I re-read The Importance of Being Earnest and I have to admit I had forgotten how funny it is. It is nice when you can revisit something like that at your own pace and in your own way without having it involve a class. Ugggh. People in class in love with the sound of their own voices, keeping you engaged in pointless banter ‘til late in the night when all you want to do is go home and sleep. I don’t miss that at all. I’m re-reading Chopin’s The Awakening now. Since the lead character is 28 in the novel, I thought it might be an interesting endeavor. It is interesting in many ways to re-read something as an adult that you read in school (as in high school or college, not so much graduate school). I can remember re-reading Shakespeare in grad school and being utterly amazed at how filthy and perverse some of it is. You don’t catch those nuances as a kid and, not surprisingly, the stuffy English teacher is not exactly going to point them out. I am fairly sure I nearly fell out of the chair I was sitting in when reading Othello and the line “building the beast with two backs.” My, my. I still have some of the Gardner Bond books to read but haven’t had the stamina to tackle them yet. They are not bad books but there is no substitute for Fleming’s original Bond stories. That is one example in life of how the original holds up so beautifully that a substation, copy or follow-up just isn’t the same.