Reading: Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

Moving: NT 40", 615 calories, something over 4 miles

Watching: The Sunday night line-up. Also, "CBS Sunday Morning" had a bit about my Dame Maggie Smith. Today I recorded "Paper Moon," which justifies TiVo altogether.

21 January 2002

Yesterday morning I showered Blake. He doesn't like to shower with his daddy, so RDC, who otherwise misses these antics, peered through the cracked door as Blake did his usual posturing and feather flipping and general lunacy and suffering from poor balance (because of sopping plumage) afterward. He's learning to enjoy being blown dry afterward, which is good because, as I expected, we've tolerated much cooler air in the house since we started paying for the heat ourselves, and 63 degrees is not a good temperature for a damp cockatiel.

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When I went out to fill the birdfeeders, the bloody battles being waged over the last two inches of sunflower seeds in the tube having touched my conscience, in the door was a package. Amazon duplicated items from my wishlist and I ended up with two Kid As and two OK Computers. A store took OK Computer back (I exchanged it for two Eurythmics albums) and someone offered an array of titles for Kid A. (I asked for her pedestrian titles.) She sent Madonna's Immaculate Collectionand the soundtrack to "Richard III." I love the movie and dancing to Christopher Marlowe.

So RDC and I listened to that as we chopped leeks and mushrooms and celery. Not the Madonna, you understand. That I will listen to this week (along with Radiohead, which I am pleased to know was a good gamble).

In November, we were served a delicious but heretical Thanksgiving meal of roast prime rib of beef. I've had a hankering for the real thing since. Sunday we had it. Well-timed, because RDC is going away and I am not known for my cooking skills. He got the brownie points by making me my holiday meal but doesn't himself have to eat turkey for a week. That's what my sister and I call the selfish present, like when I gave him a pancake griddle last Christmas. And so yum, there are tupperwares of turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, asparagus, and gravy in the fridge. So last night, when I started this entry, we had tryptophan headaches (see picture) almost immediately.

This could have been a psychosomatic effect of the disgust I felt in myself for watching "Pay It Forward." I've seen "Mrs. Doubtfire": I thought I already had seen the worst movie ever. I sat through "Ed Wood" and hated it, to ABW's disappointment. The only theater movie I ever walked out of was something called I think "Poison," a contemporary but black and white movie that featured someone's pus-filled sores dripping onto his sandwich, which was the last straw and drove RJH and me out of the auditorium toward the refuge of TCBY.

Speaking of RJH, he told me just this morning that I remind him of a character in The Green Knight, which he's reading now, and asked if I have read any Iris Murdoch. I said,

I confuse Iris Murdoch with Penelope Fitzgerald, of whom I've read The Bookshop, The Blue Flower, and At Freddie's. The last was one huge waste o' time and therefore the one that I always think is Iris Murdoch through the following lisa-syllogism:

1. I like Penelope Fitzgerald
2. I don't like At Freddie's
3. Jane in "Antonia & Jane" (have you seen it? Imedla Staunton, highly recommended) doesn't like Iris Murdoch
4. Both authors recently died, or maybe Irish Murdoch died well before Penelope Fitzgerald but I confuse them, supra
5. Therefore, At Freddie's is Iris Murdoch.

I want to read The Green Knight because a book I read recently (Radiant Way? I don't remember) uses it for its epigram, and An Unofficial Rose, because that's the Murdoch A.S. Byatt discusses in the book RJH gave me, um, four years ago.

So. "Pay It Forward." The only previous This Movie Will Suck indicator was Andie McDowell (but even she couldn't ruin "Four Weddings and a Funeral"), but Helen Hunt now joins that list: "As Good As It Gets" (pointless), "Twister" (I was at my mother-in-law's), "Cast Away" (I should have known better) and now "Pay It Forward" (I had read reliable reviews but noooooo). When Helen Hunt opened a garage and I saw the truck, I wondered if it belonged to her cast away boyfriend. Haley Joel Osment, I regret to say, plays the exact same character here that he did in "Sixth Sense." I haven't seen AI, but I figure it's along the same lines. That will get old once he hits puberty. James Dean played the same character (extremely well) in "Rebel without a Cause" and in "Giant"; I haven't seen "East of Eden" yet but I know the book inside and out and I figure he plays Cal the same way. If he'd lived, it might have got old.

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My goal is to burn 500 calories per Nordic Track session. I know the machine doesn't give an accurate measure, but it's relative to itself. I started watching "Thirteen Days," because I probably can't keep up a music pace for 45 minutes but a movie could entertain me for that long.

It opens with footage of atom bombs exploding, and I make no apology for my viscerally emotional reaction to that. Not only the current situation, but as a teenage coming of age under Ronald Reagan, nuclear war was my nightmare and daily expectation. I calmly planned how to euthanize my dog and then myself. So that set a mood. Kevin Costner cannot do a Harvard/ Hyannisport accent, but he's not on screen all the time, thank goodness. There was a scene with JFK descending from a plane in Connecticut (oh, and a good line: "The best thing you can do, sir, is go to Connecticut tomorrow"-- Kevin Costner is such a wise ma) and then riding along in a motorcade. I know how obviously the audience is being manipulated in that scene, and I fell for it. About 40 minutes in, military music--Trevor Jones did the score for this as well as for "Richard III"; I'd never heard of him--accompanies scenes of planes scrambling and naval ships steaming toward the blockade of Cuba. I dismounted, crying.

But I also recoiled during "Giant" when a zippy black convertible roadster driven by a dashing young man speeds past another car. It strikes me as odd that that nonvital scene should have been left in considering how and when James Dean died. Anyway. Well, if "Giant" can make me catch my breath and "Thirteen Days" can make me cry, I am at least grateful that I can see through pap like "Pay It Forward."