Reading: lots

Moving: Nope. Not even a walk. Not even though it was a blue day and there was a magpie in the yard. Je suis une loseure.

Viewing: Everything inside the house. Very little outside.

Learning:

19 February 2000: Sluggish

RDC is rebuilding the Mac which means I have faced a whole Saturday deprived of the net, which is a good thing. I got email this morning. I wasn't that deprived. After this interlude, and after doing four loads of laundry during which I forgot to empty my gym bag even once, and vacuuming, and a slight unnoticeable bit of dusting, I spent the day in the armchair with Blake, reading. In the evening I discovered what a night of good television is: "The Lion in Winter" on Bravo and its not minding when I channel-surf during commercials in time to see Dick Van Dyke dancing with penguins in "Mary Poppins" and the backstage dress-up scene in "Sleeping with the Enemy."

I am so ashamed of liking that scene, that movie, but I do. I went to see it in the winter of 1991, when I lived with my parents in Old Lyme. Living in Old Lyme means I went to see it alone, natch, which I like, because I could get thoroughly into it without at all distracting myself with my companions, and which the rest of the audience likes, because I don't say anything. Not that "Sleeping with the Enemy" is so very difficult to understand, but in the nine years since I've grown quite deaf and now must admit to whispering "What was that?" Of course, I did that in 1991 as well, when I went to see "The Hunt for Red October" with my parents and asked my father to elucidate certain military points. Also during "Sleeping with the Enemy," seeing it for the first time, in a cinema, I reacted with my usual aplomb to a moment of suspense by shrieking. I'm not good with suspense. As the movie let out, I saw a Millstone coworker Bob--all the men were named Bob or Joe or Jim; as one Rob put it, both men and dogs should have simple, one-syllable names that they have a hope of understanding. Well, this Bob played hockey so let's call him Hat Trick (a hockey term I've yet to understand). He introduced me to his wife and we talked about the movie as we wound our way up the aisle.
"When the husband came back, did you hear me scream?"
"Was that you?"
"So you did hear me."
"How could we not?"
Which also reminds me about Hat Trick Bob, he belonged to the same gym my father did, the same gym to which my father bought me a membership for Christmas that (school) year, when I graduated in December and moved home. They had talked in a gym-bud kind of way, but Hat Trick Bob hadn't yet divulged where he worked. When I saw them companionably riding neighboring exercise bikes, I introduced them, and it was then that my father learned Hat Trick Bob worked at Millstone. He wasn't pleased that I worked there, either, but in his mind at least I temped and wasn't employed by NNECO, and at least I was only doing it because it was the only job in the area I could get (all hail nepotism) and not because I had promised him nuclear power would make the metering of electricity unnecessary. He was much less friendly to Hat Trick Bob after that.

Anyway. Watching that scene again at least reassured me that I don't like the dress-up scene so much (my friend RJH says there's a dress-up scene in every Julia Roberts movie because men want to treat her as a little dolly) as I like the song "Brown-Eyed Girl." When the music switched to "Run-Around Sue," I returned to "Lion in Winter" like sensible person.

All that I watched did make me think of my favorite movie scenes of all time. I couldn't think of many because I couldn't distinguish scenes from favorite movies.

• The penguins dancing in the chalk drawing in "Mary Poppins"
• Farmer Hoggett dancing and singing to Babe in "Babe"
• The tapestry scene in "The Lion in Winter"
• All of "The Lion in Winter"

It was a short list.

After my household chores and interspersed with television and napping, I read.

So okay. I'll give Lois Lowry another chance.

I read A Summer to Die the summer of 1988, when I was laying the pattern I would follow for the foreseeable future (up to and including now) of being underemployed. I read children's books, mostly children's books, if memory serves, including Sweet Valley High books. I'm not proud of it. Working a series of part-time jobs left lots of time at several branches of the Boston public library. One of the few titles I remember specifically (which might mean I further wasted time in rereading) is A Summer to Die, and it suited the sonorous lassitude which would be main mood I would remember from that season. So perhaps it's better than I remember it, perhaps I remember it as unspeakably depressing because I myself was being such a slug. Nooooo.

When The Giver won the Newbery, I read it, and I am the only person not to understand why. It's okay, a good premise, but I wanted more. Perhaps it was too much like This Perfect Day, which comparison the 12-year-olds reading Lowry probably didn't suffer by. More recently I read Number the Stars, which I think was a Newbery Honor Book, if not a Medalist, and was much more impressed. A fluke, I told myself.

Not a fluke. I read Anastasia Krupnik and was thoroughly delighted. Completely unlike Summer and Giver and Number, showing Lowry's versatility, and light-hearted without being fluffy. I am going to read all the other Anastasia books now.

However good it is, it doesn't belong on the SLJ's list of most influential ahead of Harold and the Purple Crayon, though. I stand by that.

My favorite line in "The Lion in Winter" is not in the tapestry scene with Philip but at the very end:

"You know I hope we never die!"
"So do I!"
"Do you think there's any chance of it?" as he bursts into guffaws of life-loving belly laughter.

Like "The Philadelphia Story," though, every line is a gem:

In the tapestry scene, when there's a knock on Philip's door and George and John need to hide:
Geoge: May we?
Philip: That's what tapestries are for.

Eleanor, after a quarrel: What family doesn't have its ups and downs?

John, known to history as Lackland and the only king whose name shall never be repeated: My god, if I went up in flames there's not a living soul who'd pee on me to put the fire out.
Richard Coeur de Lion: Let's strike a flint and see.

George to Eleanor, discussing intrigue: I know. I know you know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows. And Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgable family.

Henry: Boy, don't ever call a king a liar to his face.
Philip: I'm not a boy.

Peter O'Toole and Timothy Dalton and Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Hopkins playing the Plantagenets. What an extraordinary piece of work.

It's a long film, and even Bravo couldn't pad it to end evenly at 8:00. So I was left to channel-hop once again, oh the misery, and on TLC I heard half a line: "my sister has--" and I knew exactly what it was. Of course, the costume was another hint. TLC was doing a "Great Books" episode on Pride and Prejudice. This I had never seen, and I would have given up the last hour of "Lion" to watch it, had I known, since I know "Lion" nearly by heart, but I'm glad I didn't: it only would have pissed me off, for these shows are made for people who'd rather watch 60 minutes of television than read 350 pages of novel. I'm just as bad, though: the next hour was about Madame Bovary, whose great impact on literature confuses me rather. It doesn't strike me as any different than anything by Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence about sexual frustration. So I watched.

The Cliffs Notes of the novel are interspersed with contemporary explanations, to set the novel in its time and to explain it to the great unwashed. So they quoted (without source) a statistic about infidelity: it happens in 50%-70% of marriages--or 50%-70% of marital partners succumb to it, which would be twice as bad. What the hell is wrong with people? I don't count polyamory, since that's not infidelity; maybe the statistician does. I don't count kissing SEM when he remembers the name of that other character in "Dukes of Hazzard" (nor does RDC); maybe the statistician does.

I cheated on boyfriends--not BMA (hard to imagine!) nor PSA (not quite as impossible, given how I'd changed, but still unlikely given my circumstances)--but NCS and SSP, and therefore, practically speaking, throughout the boyfriend-having period of my life. It was after all the post-SSP and intra-PLT weirdness that I made a deliberate, conscious choice: that I would get invovled with no one else unless I saw the possibility of permanence, and that permanence means fidelity. And I'm glad I made that choice. Marriage isn't always a bed of roses but it's not, for me, an institution of convenience, of shared housekeeping, lowered bills, and a guaranteed date on Saturday night. It's a commitment, purposefully maintained.

I must still be sick to wax so self-righteous and indignant over a show on The Learning Channel.

---

DEDBG called this morning at the crack of 10. I told her this and that and about someone I call Box, as in Dumb as a Container of Rocks. I told her about when I used the word "waif" in email, with context (someone had settled to a permanent spot and no longer needed to seek whatever shelter was available like a poor lost waif, was the gist of it) and instead of understanding the word in context or, dare I suggest, looking it up, she knew no shame in asking me directly, "What's a waif?" DEDBG asked me, "Did you tell her it's a kind of vanilla cookie?"

I shouted with laughter and, still congested, coughed with laughter. She was highly gratified.

"A broken vanilla cookie," I continued, with my unlovable habit of milking someone else's joke and grasping at the straws of someone else's wit.

She said SPG seldom laughs at her jokes. Which she makes often, as I well know. I agreed that RDC doesn't laugh at me as much as I do--yes, at myself. So I told her about one of the times I have been able to startle him into laughter--a time I remember because I wrote about it in a medium I read and reread. This reminded her that "Miracle on 34th Street" is, like "Toy Story," one of the movies she's unable to get in Froggyland. Well, I bet she could get "Toy Story," but it wouldn't have the right voices. I smiled, remembering Amazon, until later when RDC told me the Usan and Canadian VHS format is different from the European. Stupid Euros. Probably stupid Americans: I bet it's related to not being metric. If not directly, at least in that we're stubborn that way. Usans at least.

Also I remembered to tell her what I forgot to tell her a fortnight ago, that she looks like Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things, which she gave me. "But she's Indian," DEDBG pointed out. I have not been bereft of DEDBG's loveliness long enough to forget her dark blonde hair and green eyes. "It's not so much the coloring--" [the photograph is black and white, which helps the resemblance] "or the features. It's something in the expression. I showed it to RDC and asked him who it looked like and he said it looked like you too." I'll have to scan the photograph.