on fighting malarky

Jan 18, 2010 18:06

My grandfather, the one who taught me how to laugh and care for green stuff (plants.) has been in and out of the hospital ever since the term started.  I am mentioning this not for pitying reasons, but for posterity's sake, and I dearly hope that I do not have to connotate this week with anything else about it.

I think I just made up a verb.

I am probably not going to get paid for the seven hours of grunt work I did yesterday, thanks to employment rules stating that our 30 hours a week are non-transferable, the fact that KRONOS hates the computers down in the labs and did not record my time out punch, and that today was a school holiday and thus no one could fix my time sheet before it was automatically logged and processed. Damn it.
(I honestly don't understand why the 30 hours cannot cross pay periods.  You are paying me for the same amount of work time no matter what pay period it goes on.  The system even allows you to track your total hours.  There is no reason to suspect that I would go over my hours.)

So to make up for the fact, I spontaneously went and saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  I went on a lark to humor my roommate - well, that and the fact that I didn't feel like sitting around and scanning land deeds all day - and I don't quite regret the lost time.
It was somewhat trippy, in a, "I completely understand exactly what is happening, but I'm not quite certain why it just happened" sort of way, and there is just so so much in there about philosophy, morality, the human experience and the importance of identity and story telling in culture.  Only the father figure experiences significant character growth - and boy, when he does, it is not what you think - and there's a very significant reason why the others don't change.*  It's the sort of film that I would kill for to have a reason to fully analyze it, and I'm somewhat sad that I'm never going to have said reason.

*Well, that's not quite true; two other characters experience significant psyche changes, but the true focus is on the decisions the father makes.  You don't even know that what happens to another character IS growth until the end of the movie - and then you have to assume at what occurred in the interim, because you don't experience it first hand.
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