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Crazy Days

Seems like there was a burst of posts when finals finished, then where'd I go?

Wednesday was my errand day. I took my suit to be altered, dropped off some dry-cleaning, did some mailing at the post office, walked downtown to the social security office for a new card, and hit up a grocery store as well. I also continued to work on outlining my paper whilst talking to Alex. Later, SEA finished her comps exam! I went out to celebrate with her neuro-cronies, and we had a lovely dinner and a couple of drinks before heading home to read up on the American Idol finale, whose results we had strongly anticipated.

Thursday was celebration day! We went to the zoo zoo zoo. We saw zebras and giraffes and elephants and kangaroos and monkeys and lemurs and bison and bears and snow leopard and cheetah and binturongs (butter monkeys) and tortoises and turtles and snakes and bats and birds and other things too. I will someday post a picture of SEA and elephants. After the superfun zoo we had chicken and pasta with squash sauce for dinner, mmm mmm, bought tickets to Oregon for next weekend, and then ran out to catch The Da Vinci Code. My reaction: the overwhelmingly negative reviews reek a bit of jealousy of Dan Brown's sales and lack of respect for him as a writer; as a movie, Da Vinci Code is kind of a fun twist on the normal summer blockbuster. There's all the same action, plot twists, and ridiculous coincidences (oh, you need a way out? I happen to have a plane available!), but punctuated with pseudointellectual historical chatter. The chatter actually provides probably the unintentionally funniest part of the movie; in the midst of the most intense action sequences, characters have drawn out discussions on the Knights Templar during which the action seems to freeze almost completely. AND the dialogue spawned one of the best movie lines I've ever heard (I applauded, albeit quietly): "we need to find a library!" So while brains and the brawn have a more difficult time sharing the screen than they do the pages of a book, I certainly enjoyed my viewing experience.

Today! I got up in time to drop SEA for a 9 o'clock ethics and skills seminar, then returned home to write nonstop until about 3:30. The price one must sometimes pay for a day of leisure is a day of unbroken labor; such was my day today. I managed to bang out a 13 page paper with 50 footnotes in the 6 1/2 hours, although (to be fair) I had fixed up an outline with the quotes I planned on using, so I had a solid framework in place before I began. The end product is likely not the best-written piece of work I've ever produced, but I think it's creative and doctrinally solid. If I'd had another week or so I think I'd have a nicely polished work; as it is, I hope it's good enough. I'll perhaps post it here whenever I'm allowed; for now, such action might compromise my anonymity and thereby disqualify me. Anyway when that was finally over I tried to drive down to Bristol to drop the thing off, but could. not. fight. my. way. through. the. traffic. It was a mess. So I hightailed it back into town to mail the sucka in. When that was done, I threw together chicken fried rice and green beans for dinner as SEA napped her way to recovery from the brutal seminar, then we got some cheeses to sample while watching Fellini's Roma. Despite her nap, SEA was gone after about 20 minutes, but I found myself fairly captivated. I find it difficult, actually, to speak to the film itself, I am so enchanted by the city. My overall reaction, though, was as to a portrait; not a history, but a historically informed sketch of the city with mild focus on antiquity, sharper focus in the Mussolini era, and a frame of the early 1970s. The portrait is almost entirely social, the only interjection of politics occurring in dialogue, but it is also laced with mythological references which I could not figure out given the absence of any concrete plot or other framework to work within. So I just let Fellini take me through his vision, and it made me at once nostalgic, both for my own days in Rome and the days before I was born, and glad to be able to look on the city with the eye of a foreigner. In terms of reader-response criticism, Fellini made me glad to have been an outsider given the extreme privilege of having lived in the Eternal City, able to appreciate its many splendors without being subjected to (too much) of either its gaudiness or its darker sides. I have no idea, therefore, how anyone else would view Roma, but to me, the vision was the perfect way to usher in the summer.

Tomorrow SEA and I will frantically throw together belongings for a brief sojourn to Delaware. I intend to pack no clothing save that which needs washing. We will go to brunch with the professor for whom SEA will be working this summer, then hit the road. We will have a tasty Moroccan dinner, a relaxing Sunday (which will hopefully involve visiting Alex at his brand new job!), and then celebrate Alex's birthday with a luncheon. Monday afternoon we will be on our way, Tuesday I will report to Rhode Island Legal Services, then Thursday evening after work SEA and I will take off for Oregon. Crazy days.

P.S. This evening marks the third consecutive Friday, if I'm not mistaken, that SEA and I have been taken in by WWE wrestling. And I wonder why I'm getting stupider.

P.P.S. I can't stand 20/20.