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The weekend what was

On Friday afternoon, since I got home from work early, I decided to watch Ghost Story. (It’s available on HBO Go.) The movie has a notable cast, with Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and John Houseman among others — it was the final film role for all of the men, with the lone exception of Houseman — but it’s pretty goofy and not really what I was expecting.

On Saturday morning, I drove with my father to get his car inspected. It meant I had to get up early, on a Saturday — and my attempt to seriously nap upon my return home failed, unfortunately — but he’d done the same for me last month, so it was the least that I could do.

On Saturday afternoon, I finished reading Ben Loory’s collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. I’m not sure there’s any way I can summarize the book, or the experience of reading its off-kilter, sometimes fairy-tale like stories, except to share this tweet (with scan) I made:

It’s a fun but weird book.

On Saturday evening, I watched another movie from 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief. (This one I’d rented from Netflix.) It’s an interesting movie, in that it feels like an artifact from a different time — a time when ’70s movies were becoming ’80s movies — and there’s some good acting in it, particularly from James Caan. But again, I can’t claim to have really loved it. It’s slow and over-stylized — though maybe the latter’s almost a given with Michael Mann — and it just didn’t thrill me.

On Sunday morning, I did the crossword puzzle (somewhat poorly), donated blood — partly inspired, I must admit, by Radiolab’s recent show about the red stuff — and discovered New Girl (it’s also on Netflix). I have, as of this writing, watched eight episodes, a full third of the first season. This is kind of how I like watching sitcoms: in large blocks. I find it’s easier to get emotionally invested with the characters, while ignoring some of the weaknesses that might become more apparent if I had a week to dwell on each episode. It’s how I encountered (and fell for) How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory, and it might explain why I’ve lately fallen out of watching those regularly, now that regularly means something other than watching a half dozen episodes back to back.

On Sunday afternoon, I wrote this:

“That’s me in the photo,” he says. “I’m there with a shovel.”

“And the plastic bucket and flippers,” she says, “I see. Were you at the beach or…?”

“That’s actually the mall,” he says. “One of those photo studio places at the one in Trenton? We went with the Hawaiian getaway theme.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“It was actually that or the landing on Mars. The place was kind of lackluster, didn’t have a lot of backdrops to choose from.”

“Why didn’t you just go to the beach? Wait, does Trenton have a beach?”

“I don’t know. Carol is — was — afraid of water. And planes. And hula dancers. That was the closest we ever got to Oahu.”

“She sounds like a real catch.”

He looks at her for a moment, then lets out a sigh.

“That’s what I used to think, too,” he tells her, shaking his head, “before she blew up the world.”

“Oh,” she answers. “I forgot that was her.”

“I want to say it wasn’t her fault,” he says, “that it could have happened to anybody. But not just anybody’s girlfriend was a mad scientist stockpiling plutonium.”

“That was Carol?”

“That was Carol. I mean, at first it was cute, just one of those little quirks that seem adorable at the start of any relationship. Like the way she’d giggle at movies, not just the funny ones, or the way she’d toy with her hair whenever she got nervous.”

“The way she was afraid of hula dancers?”

“That should have been a warning sign, I guess. Planes, the beach…I mean, those are normal enough phobias. But when you start coming home to robot armies designed to laser to death anything in a grass skirt, you start to worry, you know.”

“I didn’t know you were living with her,” she says. He knows that look.

“Not at her mountain lair, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says. “I didn’t even know she had a mountain lair. Apparently she bought a hollowed-out volcano during the real estate boom.”

“And that’s where she kept the plutonium?”

“Well, it wasn’t at the apartment. We’d only been moved in together for about six months, but I think I would have noticed plutonium.”

“Six months?” she says. “That sounds serious.”

“She blew up the planet,” he answers. “I’d say she was a pretty serious girl.”

“It’s just, you don’t talk about her that much. I mean, this is the first time I’ve even seen that photograph.”

“I don’t like to be reminded of those days. The moon base doesn’t even have a mall.”

“Well if somebody’s girlfriend had given us all a little more warning she was going to detonate a world-killing plutonium bomb…”

“How did this become my fault?” he asks her. “I don’t want to fight.”

“There isn’t enough air even if you did,” she says. “They’re rationing the oxygen again.”

“That’s like the fifth time this month.”

“They brought in a few hundred new refugees just last week. Folks gotta breathe.”

“God I hope they’re not mutants like the last batch. All those third eyes and blistered skin.” He shudders.

“Well I didn’t see any hula skirts, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she says. “Not one single ukulele among them when we did our low-orbit pick-up.”

“Now you’re just being mean,” he tells her. “Besides, that was Carol’s thing, not mine.”

“It’s hard to tell. You two were apparently so close.”

He just stares at her. Neither one of them says anything for a while.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her,” he says finally. “It was a dark time in my life. Trouble at work, the stress of moving in together…the world blowing up. I forgot I even had that photo. If there was enough oxygen left, I probably burn it.”

With my weekly writing group. It’s not really a thing, more a sketch than a story, but I had some fun with it.

And on Sunday evening, I wrote this. That was the weekend.

Saturday

A pretty ordinary day, really. I finished reading The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly, but despite a promising start and some nice detail, I can’t claim to have quite enjoyed the book. Characters act in ways that aren’t always believable — for the time period of the British Raj, but also just for human beings — and the ending solves the mystery in what’s maybe the least interesting of the most predictable ways. Though maybe we’re at a point in mystery novels at which not confounding your expectations itself counts as a twist? Either way, I found the book ultimately a disappointment.

Moving on the Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, just for a complete change of pace.

I also finished watching Fringe, finally. I’ve had the fifth season saved up since it first aired this fall, and I’ve been watching an episode (occasionally two) every evening this week. It’s not a perfect ending, for a show that was never perfect — started out as pretty lousy, actually, before figuring out how to frequently be terrific — but a satisfying one all the same.

I wish I could say the same for Insidious, which I watched last night. It was a lot less scary than I expected, and doesn’t have a whole lot going for it beyond scares.

Finally, this evening I had dinner out with my parents. I had frog legs for the first time — also unimpressive, but maybe more from the way they were prepared — and a decent if unremarkable duck confit. Then my parents went off to see Mary Chapin Carpenter and Marc Cohn in concert and I came home (to watch Fringe and walk the dog). My mom’s a long-time fan of Carpenter, and I bought her tickets this past Mother’s Day.

And that was Saturday, with a little bit of Friday tossed in.

Friday

I swear, if I had anything interesting to write about, I’d write about it here. But it was a pretty ordinary week, back to summer hours and slightly later days, after last week’s extra-long weekend.

But Fridays are short days, home by 2:30, which is nice, and I work from home now on Mondays. So it’s not as if I can really complain.

This afternoon, I watched Sharknado. Why did I watch Sharknado? I blame Heather. Or Twitter. Or both. It was…almost everything you expect and hope a movie called Sharknado, and airing on the Syfy Channel, will be. I followed it up this evening with the perhaps more cerebral Copenhagen.

And that was my Friday, and my week. About it, really.

Tuesday

I can’t really claim to be having the most productive of weeks. It seems like just about everything I need to do needs something else to be done first, frequently by someone other than me.

Then again, this is an exceptionally short work week for me. I worked from home yesterday, and today and tomorrow are the only two days I’ll be in the office this week at all. Thursday we’re closed for the 4th of July, and I’m taking the Friday after that off as well. We’re not even on summer hours this week, thanks to the holiday.

I did manage to finish putting up the newest issue of Kaleidotrope over the weekend. There’s a lot of great fiction and poetry this issue, and I had a great time writing the fake advice column. Check it out, won’t you?

Meanwhile, I finally got around to checking out the first episode of the Under the Dome miniseries, and I’ll just say what I said over Twitter: as an adaptation of the novel, it’s a complete (albeit curious) failure. Though it’s obviously not trying — at all — to be a faithful adaptation. So it has to be judged more for what it is. Which is a kind of okay, mostly, but not very remarkable TV series that shares the same starting point and some character names as the book. There’s a part of me that wants to continue watching it just because it’s like a strange parallel-universe version of the novel. Alas, there aren’t a lot of other parts of me that want to continue watching.

Time off is over

I go back to work tomorrow, although luckily not yet back to the office. I’ll be working from home on Mondays starting this week, and also starting summer hours. So that should be interesting.

The weekend was okay. I watched Die Hard again on Friday night for some reason, not that anyone really needs a reason to watch Die Hard. On Saturday, I watched Greenberg, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. I’ve also been watching episodes of Better Off Ted, Orphan Black, and The Fall. It’s amazing that I actually also got some reading done — Under the Dome and World War Z, in preparation for both their adaptations — or writing. But I did:

I wasn’t born on Mars, not like my brother, who nearly died when the borders were closed — he says — and the space ports stopped letting refugees like our parents escape off the planet. They made it as far as Phobos, thanks to a pair of forged visas, my asthmatic brother in tow, and that’s where I was born, in this half-built lunar colony that was never supposed to be anything but a staging ground for the red planet below. If the government of Mars even knows we’re still here, they haven’t publicly acknowledged that fact in fifteen years, just like they’ve said nothing about the military listening posts that are supposed to be someplace on the far side of Deimos, either on the moon’s surface or in near orbit, radioing back to Earth. I don’t know how you can be afraid of someone who’ll keep their head in the red sand like that for so long, but my brother says we’re lucky they don’t turn their attention towards us.

“You weren’t there at the fall, Mary,” David says. “You don’t know what it was like. When they wrested control, it was bloody and brutal and — ”

To be honest, I sometimes just tune him out. David has a flair for the dramatic; and while sometimes that’s fun — it’s maybe the only flair this old abandoned moon base has going for it — it can get a little tiresome. He’s too cautious, which I guess I understand. He’s not wrong, I wasn’t there, and I didn’t see what the new regime did to dissenters less lucky than my parents. Whole villages reduced to dust, like reverse terraforming, the tools of the original Martian settlers turned into weapons by Kendall and his followers. We still have some of the footage, and David’s right about the bloody and brutal part. Kendall was a maniac, vicious and power-hungry, and he forced good people like my parents to flee to this ramshackle little moon.

But is he even still alive?

That was the weekend.

And this is my monthly music mix for May:

  1. “Q.U.E.E.N.” by Janelle Monáe (feat. Erykah Badu)
  2. “Dayton, Ohio – 1903” by Randy Newman
  3. “The Rains of Castamere” by the National
  4. “Buildings & Mountains” by the Republic Tigers
  5. “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr
  6. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by Milan & Phonenix
  7. “Mr. Spock” by Nerf Herder
  8. “Au Revoir (Adios)” by the Front Bottoms
  9. “Dead Against Smoking” by Admiral Fallow
  10. “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes
  11. “My Love Took Me Down to the River to Silence Me” by Little Green Cars
  12. “Dougou Badia” by Amadou & Mariam (feat. Santagold)