I saw Brick last night and all I want to do is watch it again and again, because of dialogue like this:
The Brain: Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin. But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said "Show your hands" if any of them've actually seen The Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets.
Laura: Do you trust me now?
Brendan: Less than when I didn't trust you before.
Laura: Why'd you take a powder the other night?
Brendan: Same reason I'm taking one now...Look, I'm not heeling you to hook you.
Hands down, my favorite movie of the year so far.
Last weekend, while in New York, C____ and I had brunch with her cousins at Prune, a cozy little eatery near 1st and 1st. We were waiting for our food to come when her cousin-in-law leaned over and said, "Do you want your celebrity sighting of the day?" C's little eyes opened wide and she nodded. "I think that's Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal a couple of tables behind you." And right he was, Jake and Maggie were sitting no more than twenty feet from us, enjoying brunch on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
I've always wondered what it would be like, to have strangers gawk at you, perhaps come up to you and say, "Oh, I loved you in ..." or "Can I have your autograph?" Personally, I like being anonymously unfamous. Which is probably why Jake was sporting a beard that most lumberjacks would be proud of. It's a lot harder for the actresses, since they can't easily grow beards and those that could still probably wouldn't. Anyway, while we were sitting there, wondering what they were having, our food arrived and soon I was more interested in my food than in our two young stars.
I was at work when I heard this particular gem of double speak, "I am pleased to report that we now have fewer areas of improvement." Apparently the PC way of saying "deficiencies" was now "areas of improvement." I understood well enough what the person making the report was saying; I was no less saddened by the way it came across.
I was in New York this weekend and missed most of this awful California weather we've had. While I was there I managed to have serious talk with C____. There's been something I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while now. The ironic thing is no matter how well I am able to say exactly what I mean here, I'm terrible at doing the same with her. It all boils down feeling under-appreciated. And the instant I let her know why I felt like I wasn't appreciated, she let me know just how much I was. Then all these months of not saying so seemed silly.
I've been sick since I landed back in California. I'm sure that seems a little suspicious since the two days I've taken off are perhaps the most beautiful ones we've had all year. The truth of it is, all I can think about is work and how much I need to do, how much I could get done if I weren't laid up in bed, constantly falling in and out of consciousness. Yet, I know that I have the same thoughts when I do go to work and how little I manage to achieve when I'm actually there.
I had a talk with a friend of mine who just turned thirty. He was happy to report that not much was different in his life now that his age begins with a three. I only have a few more months to go before I reach that same milestone and I'm happy to say that despite the aches and pains that come with getting older, I see more areas of improvement and not less.
Lately I've been obsessed with number puzzles. You might have seen someone sitting in a subway, waiting at a bus stop, standing in a line somewhere holding a sudoku book. It's a simple puzzle with simple rules that often takes some complicated thinking to figure out. Between that and kakuro, which is a sort of number crossword, I've been wasting a lot of time. I don't think of it as wasting time though, I justify it by telling myself that I'm exercising my mind. But I suppose we all lie to ourselves from time to time.
I used to think that my job was boring or that it wasn't challenging. And the fact is, it probably isn't as mentally involving as most of the stuff I used to do in school. I think there's still part of the child in me yearning to scratch out equations on a chalkboard and somehow derive a meaning for my own existence. But the reality of it is that most jobs involve some amount of busy work. Whether it be the physical labor of moving dirt back and forth, the shuffle of paper and balance of ledger line, or the pipetting of genetic samples to run in a agar. The real genius in all these things lies somewhere beneath, buried in a search for efficiency.
The truth is that I've never been much of a long distance runner. Not that I was a terribly good sprinter, but rather endurance was something I was spectacularly bad at. Several years ago I used to work with a guy who was a triathlete. He was good too, making it to Hawaii to run the Ironman a couple of times or more. At work he was equally focused, easily dispatching a solid 10 hours of work without a break or needing to talk to anyone. That singularity of purpose I have always lacked.
This week I'm covering for my boss. Which involves me covering a number of different project which I don't normally cover. The project that I've been working on for the past year or so recently started construction and now the submittals, questions and problems are piling in. There's also this pesky project which had neither scope nor budget, but a firm deadline of this Friday. And so, while I thinkg tossing a ball up and down may not be terribly entertaining, juggling a number of balls becomes quite a feat.
Last night my replacement faceplate came in the mail. Just a week ago I had decided that I had given up having organized sound in my car for long enough; perhaps I should have waited until Easter? It was a strange, unwrapping this fragile thing and feeling it click so easily into the slot for which it was made. Suddenly the stereo came alive. This thing which for months now had been dead and silent, glowed. Driving into work today nothing much was different and yet everything was more alive. One thing this long silence has shown me, I'm not afraid of silence anymore.
This weekend I found out that two of my friends are moving out to Colorado. I was surprised, but then I thought about it and it made sense. They are the type of people that will move to make their lives better. I know many people who would not leave the Bay Area to live anywhere else (except maybe New York). I instantly thought that I had been remiss and that I should go see them before they left. All these years have gone by and I've only seen them a handful of times. We used to spend hours in the ASCE office in Davis Hall talking and joking. Now they are moving to Colorado with their two kids and I realized that we've been separated by a greater distance than that all along. In a strange juxtaposition, a good friend - formed initially of words, then personas, then metaphors, now more - came up to to touch the moon. This distance that separates us hardly matters at all.
We take these things for granted. This physical closeness. It leads us to ignore the value of those simple connections. We treasure these thin threads that span across continents. These connections that can be made only here, only in words. I marvel at the fact that locks and keys, ports and connectors can be separated by such a distance and for so long and still find their way home to make music.