tv

Weekend

I’m not watching the Oscars tonight. I have no problem with anybody who is watching it, or spending what promises to be a very long evening live-tweeting about it, but I pretty much lost all interest in the spectacle of it several years ago.

On Friday afternoon, my parents returned after three weeks down south, in Georgia and Florida, sightseeing and seeing my father’s extended family. It’s good to have my parents back — I was immediately thrown over by them in the dog’s affections, since they brought him toys — but it’s also a little strange getting used to sharing the house again. I love them dearly — they brought me gifts, too — but I do think this needs to be the year I move out on my own again.

Last night, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which is an odd movie. Jimmy Stewart is very good in it, and it’s understandable why it’s such a classic — recently beating out Citizen Kane as critics’ choice of best movie ever. There’s just a lot to unpack in the movie. Roger Ebert goes into some of it here, but…well, it’s an odd movie, maybe even by Hitchcock standards.

Today, I did the crossword puzzle and finally went back to my weekly writing group. I hope this means I go back to regular writing as well. Anyway, here’s what I wrote off of today’s three-index-card prompt:

As she turned the silver key, a Mask, the same one who’d been following her ever since 85th Street, stepped out of the shadows and leveled his gun at her back. She could hear him pull back the hammer, chamber a round, and even though she couldn’t see his face, she knew his hands were shaky on the makeshift pistol. He wasn’t nearly as good at this as he thought.

“You should leave,” she said, still not turning around. In front of her, the door unlocked. She repocketed the key but she did not open the door; she would not enter the apartment building with this Mask they’d sent to kill her still waiting in the street below. She would not let him see what was waiting just inside. “Put that stupid thing away and go home like a good boy.”

And he was just a boy. She’d seen him lurking on the subway platform, and then failing to look inconspicuous on the train ride downtown. The mask and cowl hid many of his features — she assumed they were supposed to look imposing — but they could not hide the obvious fact of his age, which she pegged at maybe fifteen. At first, she had almost felt insulted, that they’d put a young pup like this on her trail, that they had such little respect for her as a quarry. But then she’d laughed. If the Masks were recruiting this young, they were in more serious trouble than she’d even dared hope. It was ridiculous: the tail, the gun — everything. She wasn’t going to let some teenager interfere with the ritual that was awaiting her inside.

As he pulled back the trigger, she started to reconsider. He was just a boy, but he might also be a true believer, and he might very well prove to be dangerous, even if just by accident. This wasn’t a panicked shot. She’d refrained from showing her true powers deliberately so not to spook him. This was deliberate; she could sense that now. He was nervous as hell but he believed in what he was doing. He was, after all, a Mask. And she, after all, was the enemy. The bullet speeding even now towards her back wasn’t a message or a warning or an accident. It was an execution.

She’d maybe read the kid wrong, but she wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. She threw open the building’s front door and the let the darkness swell out into the street.

That, plus a little bit of cleaning, was my weekend. Seriously, I am no that exciting. Did I tell you? I’m not even watching the Oscars.

Thursday

Not to worry, there’s been no more snow, that’s a photo from a couple of weeks ago.

This evening, I finished reading Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, a beautiful, tragic, frightening, touching book. I really love what the New York Times said about it, not least of all because it’s so true:

And Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader’s expectations: where we expect violence, she gives us sweetness. When we brace for beauty, she gives us blood.

I wish I could say the end of Rubicon was as satisfying. It comes to something like a conclusion, but it seems pretty evident they thought they were coming back for another season — or at least thought so for so long they didn’t have much time to course-correct. It’s a really good show, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Anyway, that was Thursday.

The long weekend

Today is Presidents Day, and I spent most of it spring cleaning, if only to let myself pretend for a little while that it was spring. And not, you know, bitterly and painfully cold.

I took the dog for a walk at 6:30 this morning, and no amount of layers was keeping that windchill away. I looked at the weather report as soon as I came back in, and I seem to remember it saying 17°F (“feels like” -1°F), but I could have been delirious from the cold. (I also remember dreaming an extensive rendition of some children’s barnyard song in the style of Billy Joel, though I can’t remember the song, and the more I think on it, the less I think it would be amusing if I could.)

I did some grocery shopping, some cleaning, and some more watching of Rubicon. I’m three episodes to the end now, and while I know the show was cancelled somewhat unceremoniously, I’m hoping the rumors that it reached some kind of conclusion are true.

I go back to work tomorrow, although thankfully not back to the office until Wednesday. By then, it’s supposed to be a little warmer — back up to the balmy 40° it was on Friday, perhaps? — and I won’t have to worry about dying from exposure just to take the dog out to pee.

The weekend

Yesterday, I gave blood at the local library. Or, rather, in the bloodmobile parked outside the library. This was my first time donating inside one these things, and while I don’t have any pictures, it was similar to this one, only a little smaller and a little more cramped, especially with everyone wearing winter coats and all.

Afterward, I cam home and re-watched Almost Famous. It’s altogether I napped during a small chunk of it. That’s pretty much the highlights of my Saturday.

Today, my writing group was cancelled, thanks to car troubles — not mine — so I went and had what turned out to be a really great sushi lunch. I’m new to this idea that raw fish can actually taste good — although I usually do still stick to the rolls — but today’s tasted very good indeed.

Then I came home, did a little housecleaning, and shredded some old documents while I watched episodes of Rubicon. I liked it for the brief moment it was on TV back in 2010, then bought the season, then just let it sit there. But today I’ve watched a third of it, and I’m still liking it, so I’m not regretting the purchase. I can see why it didn’t click with viewers, and nowadays it would probably fare even worse on AMC. (I like The Walking Dead, except when I don’t, but it’s hard not to argue that it’s distracted AMC from the path it seemed to be on before this. Even its other powerhouses, Mad Men and Breaking Bad seem a little like legacy shows that don’t quite fit the new model.)

Anyway, I like Rubicon, even if it is, by design, slow. But I figured, political thrillers don’t necessarily age well. (Even if I remember being pleasantly surprised by The Parallax View a few years ago, and that was definitely one of this show’s models. And some forty years old.) Time to give it a shot.

That, plus an incredible amount of freezing cold wind, was my Sunday.

The leap home

I wish I could say the last couple of days have been a whirlwind of excitement and that’s why I haven’t posted here. But unless you count a handful of Quantum Leap episodes as excitement — and it’s still a good show, but I wouldn’t go that far — that really won’t hold up under close examination. Thanks to the snow, I didn’t even go to my weekly writing group. Which is a shame, because aside from the morning pages I haven’t been doing any writing at all. And today, I didn’t even remember to do the morning pages until 2:30 in the afternoon.

Mostly, I’ve been going to work in the morning, watching over the dog, getting woken up several times in the middle of the night by the dog, and going to bed earlier than usual just so getting woken up by the dog won’t lose me the decent night’s sleep I need to go to work in the morning.

Plus some Quantum Leap. It holds up surprisingly well.