Thursday, January 29, 2009

Saw Frost/Nixon last week. Tried to see blah blah Benjamin Button. Also saw The Changeling.

F/N was good. The guy who played Nixon was fantastic. Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell were also great. The interplay between actual Watergate era recordings and the movie was also really good.

Benjamin Button was awful. Terrible. Boring. It should come with a self-strangulation warning. Caution: The contents of this DVD may cause you to choke yourself to death. Bleh.

The Changeling met expectations. Not more, not less. In a few scenes, Jolie wore hats whose brims cast shadows over her eyes and all you could see were her lips. Appa was very impressed with her. She acts! Apparently, he was biased by the constant presence of Brad Pitt by her side in all her photographs and everybody knows that Pitt can't act. She plays pretty much the same role she did in the Daniel Pearl movie. Different costumes, much different hair. Jewish wife missing husband in Muslim country in one, Single mom missing bastard child in conservative and crooked country in the other. Pedophile serial killer in one, Islamic terrorists in the other. Supported by Pakistani cop and Wall Street Journal Editor in one and Priest and Cop in the other. The crooked cops and psychotic psychologists were extra in this movie. Anyway, Go Malkovich!

Friday, January 23, 2009

weddings.

3 people I know are getting married on february 15.

2 people I know are getting married on february 6.

1 person I know is getting married on january 23.

There seems to be a rash of weddings.

Definitions of rash on the Web:

  • any red eruption of the skin
  • imprudently incurring risk; "do something rash that he will forever repent"- George Meredith
  • a series of unexpected and unpleasant occurrences; "a rash of bank robberies"; "a blizzard of lawsuits"
  • foolhardy: marked by defiant disregard for danger or consequences; "foolhardy enough to try to seize the gun from the hijacker"; "became the fiercest and most reckless of partisans"-Macaulay; "a reckless driver"; "a rash attempt to climb Mount Everest"
    wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
I don't have a problem with my friends or family tying the knot. But I am not a fan of weddings. Not even because of my dislike for dressing up, my hatred of crowds or the pain associated with awkward conversations with people I'm supposed to know.

These days, much of my disdain for weddings stems from inquiries made by well-meaning but annoying family members whom I barely know as to when I plan on getting married. "Never", "I have no such plans", "Not in this life" and "Are you fucking kidding me?" don't seem to be considered serious answers. They scoff, and then they say, "That is what they all say, but everybody gets married in the end." The End.

I don't want to get married. I don't want to have children. Unfortunately, I am a vadagala iyengar girl, of "good family". This means that at 26 (in less than a month, feb 17, mark your calendars) I am almost on the shelf (if I may borrow a term much used in Regency novels).

My mother has an theory. Marry at 24, have 2 children by 30 and the children will be old enough and financially able to take care of you when you are in your sixties, retired and infirm. Theoretically sound, practically, I DON'T WANT CHILDREN. At which point, the discussion veers off to voodoo science of maternal urges and body clocks. Exit stage left.

Maybe.

348 Posts, last published on Mar 25, 2008

How hard can it be to start again.
What will I write about.
Why now.
Should I first figure out why I stopped writing.
Or should I just stop thinking and start writing.

I have a problem. They say that recognizing that I have a problem is half the solution. I don't know what to write. I am writing for me, and yet there is a mythical you. That, I think, is half the problem. I want to write and be acknowledged, but some people know me, and some people know of me and I an worried about opinions and comments, said and unsaid, and more worried about the unsaid than the said. Shudder. I sound neurotic. I am spending way too much time with my mother.

Other than that, I am on twitter and facebook since a couple of days ago. With my real name. I have not used my real name here and I'm hoping that that will keep the people who don't know about my blog from finding out about my blog.

I don't know why I have decided to become cyber-social suddenly (or whatever it is called when one starts to use all these online social networking sites). Or maybe I do. I don't know many people outside of work in Rpt and this is going to be my post-work entertainment. Yay.

I'll be touch, dear blog. I hope you didn't miss me too much. I won't be gone so long this time.