I really needed this today. It had me laughing so hard I was crying. First I watched the Beatles number, which warmed me up, and then I watched the Queen number. By the time Freddie Mercury started coughing/hacking/wheezing/sneezing at the keyboard, I totally lost it. Tears down my cheeks from the laughter.
Day two of my exile begins.
While still reeling from a great disorientation effected by my sudden exile, I awaken laboriously to record several observations about my environment. It is dark; there is barely enough light to outline a horizon. I appear to be in the middle of a vast expanse of wasteland. The ground is composed of loose sand that slowly begins to subsume a man walking erect. This makes traversing it extremely difficult and laborious. The only way to remain above the surface in one place for any length of time is to sit or to lie in a prone position. This is all the better, as there is a great coldness here and standing alone for too long can result in a tremendous loss of warmth. This coldness permeates all aspects of one’s being and cannot be warmed by any heater; there are also winds that blow incessantly, seemingly from every direction at once, that cannot be shielded by any jacket or coat of known composition.
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’
Here’s a helpful hint for those of you who use Gmail and get a lot of spam.
Gmail’s spam filters are pretty excellent when it comes to spam. I get a lot of spam and rarely does one slip by into my inbox. However I also want to check if real messages (ham) got put in the spam folder by mistake. Here’s how I check to see if something was flagged incorrectly without having to look through every single unread spam message, of which there could be hundreds piled up.
No, I’m not okay. I can’t focus right now. I hurt too much. I know I owe work my full attention when I’m at work, but today is just a very bad day for that. And to be quite honest, I don’t want to see “happy” in front of me either, so if you’re in a good mood, don’t try to rub it off on me. I may just take you down with me. Romantic love is stupid and it sucks. I’m tired of Hollywood trailers, billboard ads, and everything else telling me what my life should be.
This still sucks. I don’t know how she is. I don’t even know where she is. I haven’t seen her, I haven’t heard from her, I haven’t received any form of communication from her in more than what normally should be a reasonable interval. Is she all right? Is she laying in a ditch somewhere? Was she in an accident? I don’t know.
This is not how things should be. I’m not good at this kind of limbo.
Yet this is what I said I would do and I am a man of my word. I simply must trust that she is okay, even without hearing it directly.
Jesse Eisenberg gives a really solid performance. He’s the guy you love to hate while you simultaneously feel sorry for him. The rest of the film was also well-cast. Justin Timberlake plays a convincingly smooth-talking pseudo-psycopath; Bryan Barter rounds out the male leads as the jilted ex-best friend and one of the more relatable, grounded characters. The film is many things, one of which is an examination of the patho-personality and psychology behind nature of our society’s idealized success fantasy.
There was an abundance of high-level techie talk in the beginning of the film, and some very fast-paced conversation between the characters. I had this thought about Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue on the drive home: Sorkin uses his dialogue to convince us that he’s brilliant when I think instead he could use it to convince us that the character’s brilliant (thereby scaling it back ever-so-slightly). Don’t get me wrong, I think Sorkin’s a brilliant writer. I’m a fan of Sports Night, The West Wing, and Studio 60. I just think it’s a bit much for some people to take sometimes. The film calmed down later. Or was that just me adapting to the pace? I’m sure the excellent direction by David Fincher had something to do with it, who manages a very good performance out of Eisenberg and the rest of the cast.
This very clearly stared me down on the way to Grey Gardens callbacks. Yes, it’s a sign. But is it a Sign?
