"okay i actually really like britney spears new song"
The weekend was kind of lame, not gonna lie. Saturday I had work in the morning in Winston-Salem, then I drove all the way home and ended up being late to the Japanese party (also very, very tired). I stayed for the movie though I slept through parts of it; I'd already seen it senior year for my pop culture class. 笑の大学 is actually a really lovely play/movie about a censor in WWII Japan and the playwright of a play he's reviewing. The censor, insistent that he doesn't understand comedy, requests extensive revisions from the playwright, rather than forbidding the play entirely, and an unlikely partnership is born. It's a very simple story, and the subtitles are actually surprisingly useful for understanding the comedy (although it is much easier if you understand Japanese to hear the puns), but the reason I really like it is because it addresses not just the power of comedy in dark times, but the power of the individual imagination and the ways we construct our own fantasies and imaginings.
After the party I went home with Bri for cake. Philip was actually there! but studying for exams!
Yesterday I had work in Greensboro in the afternoon, and made some attempt to do something productive in the morning. Work itself was as usual, and that whole thing was basically the bulk of my day. Any time that I have to drive to the Triad feels like a day devoted entirely to work, even though the work itself is usually only 3-5 hours.
I came home and had dinner, finished a job application, puttered around a bit with other tasks (like writing my rent check and paying my Bursar's bill), then watched In the Mood for Love, which I'd gotten from Netflix 2 weeks ago. It's actually very good. Most reviews say that it's very slow, but I didn't get that feeling at all - the entire movie is about an hour and a half, and the scene cuts are quick and time flows in the movie rapidly. What it is is very elegant and quiet, low-key. I think it helps that I don't understand much Chinese and had to rely on the subtitles >.< I think the film does something beautiful in not trying to be bigger than itself, in simply trying to capture the subtleties and pain of love within its bounds and its specific circumstances. The masochism of the main characters is, in this way, very powerful and telling.
And you know, if I weren't so addicted to my computer, I wouldn't have known about bin Laden until much later because, as it turns out, I can focus when I want to. So there.
My family has never seemed to be big on the whole, "I was there at a historical moment!!1!" thing - in fact, they don't really seem to talk about those kinds of things. Of course they have all indicated that big historical moments happened, and that they were alive, and that it changed something - the assassinations of Malcolm X., Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy, the beginning of the Vietnam War, Pearl Harbor, the ruling on Fred Korematsu's case. But none of them have ever told me, "Oh, I was (HERE) with (THEM) doing (THIS) at that moment!" To be fair, I don't think my grandmother wants to tell me what she was doing at the moment they learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, nor do my parents particularly care where they were when the Vietnam War became reality. They're understandably more interested in what happened afterward.
So anyway, the most I've got is that I was lying on the couch in my pajamas watching In the Mood for Love, then I got up to check Facebook for some inexplicable reason and saw just a few posts, then double-checked it on Twitter to be sure. Then I went back to watching my movie.
That's really the most pathetic story ever and I'm not sure that I'm ever going to tell my imaginary children that. Also because in my mind, it's not really important where I was or what I was doing, since I'm a bit of a pessimist and see this more as a symbolic change, rather than a real one.
Or maybe you'd call that realism. I don't know.
After the party I went home with Bri for cake. Philip was actually there! but studying for exams!
Yesterday I had work in Greensboro in the afternoon, and made some attempt to do something productive in the morning. Work itself was as usual, and that whole thing was basically the bulk of my day. Any time that I have to drive to the Triad feels like a day devoted entirely to work, even though the work itself is usually only 3-5 hours.
I came home and had dinner, finished a job application, puttered around a bit with other tasks (like writing my rent check and paying my Bursar's bill), then watched In the Mood for Love, which I'd gotten from Netflix 2 weeks ago. It's actually very good. Most reviews say that it's very slow, but I didn't get that feeling at all - the entire movie is about an hour and a half, and the scene cuts are quick and time flows in the movie rapidly. What it is is very elegant and quiet, low-key. I think it helps that I don't understand much Chinese and had to rely on the subtitles >.< I think the film does something beautiful in not trying to be bigger than itself, in simply trying to capture the subtleties and pain of love within its bounds and its specific circumstances. The masochism of the main characters is, in this way, very powerful and telling.
And you know, if I weren't so addicted to my computer, I wouldn't have known about bin Laden until much later because, as it turns out, I can focus when I want to. So there.
My family has never seemed to be big on the whole, "I was there at a historical moment!!1!" thing - in fact, they don't really seem to talk about those kinds of things. Of course they have all indicated that big historical moments happened, and that they were alive, and that it changed something - the assassinations of Malcolm X., Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy, the beginning of the Vietnam War, Pearl Harbor, the ruling on Fred Korematsu's case. But none of them have ever told me, "Oh, I was (HERE) with (THEM) doing (THIS) at that moment!" To be fair, I don't think my grandmother wants to tell me what she was doing at the moment they learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, nor do my parents particularly care where they were when the Vietnam War became reality. They're understandably more interested in what happened afterward.
So anyway, the most I've got is that I was lying on the couch in my pajamas watching In the Mood for Love, then I got up to check Facebook for some inexplicable reason and saw just a few posts, then double-checked it on Twitter to be sure. Then I went back to watching my movie.
That's really the most pathetic story ever and I'm not sure that I'm ever going to tell my imaginary children that. Also because in my mind, it's not really important where I was or what I was doing, since I'm a bit of a pessimist and see this more as a symbolic change, rather than a real one.
Or maybe you'd call that realism. I don't know.