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Instigation
Dec. 14th, 2010 07:29 pmFriday:
Transferred my license and registration to Massachusetts. Mom and Dad came along as an excuse to stop by Best Buy, where they immediately and predictably fell in love with the Kinect demo as soon as I showed it to them. An XBox was ordered immediately. In the evening, went to two gallery openings downtown, the first of which included slot car racing (so Dad came along) and the second of which featured craftspeople that might participate in the next Goose Fair (so Mom came along). In between, we stopped at an unmarked restaurant that turned out to be one of the hot new places.
Basically, my role in the family is finding things on which my parents would enjoy spending money. My parents are, at this stage in their lives, the idle rich, although they weren't always. (Rather, it is something they worked and planned towards.) And most of the time, they, like me, are moderately frugal by habit, and will not, for instance, spend money on something it is not worth. Nouveau riche conspicuous consumption, no thank you.
But they have this money and are excited to find novel liqueurs, good movies and games, and artists and artisans worth patronizing. (And who wouldn't be, you know?) They somewhat explicitly had children to make it easier to follow culture 30 years down the line. I am at least partly an excuse to do things like remodel the bathroom.
I picked up a business card for an artist I didn't especially like because I liked the business card.
Saturday:
Helped Dad install a lamppost for the front walk, which involved mixing concrete. To this end, Dad asked me to boil a gallon and a half of water, which I did. Then the concrete started to set too fast and I found out he meant "heat this water to above room temperature, about 40°C." Dad is good at engineering stuff, but I am beginning to understand why he does not get to help in the kitchen: namely, the distinction between "boil this" and "apply heat using a burner."
Saw Black Swan and found it boring. Not hateable, and in many ways a good effort, but it doesn't progress past its premise or illuminate anything outside itself. Which puts me in an odd position since I didn't like the movie but also disagree with all the criticism I've heard and readad about it, which I think is facile. I'm very angry at the people who call Aronofsky pretentious. I love Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and especially The Fountain. What The Wrestler and Black Swan need is to be more pretentious, to contain more than a predictable repetition of an obvious thesis about an unsurprising character cliche. In other words, I hope he'll go back to writing his own scripts.
Sunday:
Small private screening of a Rwandan/Bostonian documentary called Coexist, which I believe you can also watch at the website. It looks at the efforts to reintegrate the perpetrators of genocide back into the community, and also at the counseling effort for victims from both private organizations and the government. Compelling stuff.
The filmmaker and a Rwandan priest were there, and something unusual about the DVD is that in the spot where it normally says it's intended for private use, instead it says that purchasing it includes purchasing the right to show it in non-profit screenings at schools, community centers, etc. The filmmaker cares more about it being shown than about making money from it; he's a journalist and this is his way of trying to make the world a better place, to help people start thinking of ways to have peace after terrible events. He plans to make a follow-up film about the lead-up to the genocide that can be taught to middle-school students to help them understand where bullying fits in the progression toward dehumanizing a population.
After dinner, ricotta cheesecake. Loaned Scarlett all my Roald Dahl books (which is not many, since I mostly borrowed them from the library) and put away my files, which had been scattered on every surface until we got the file cabinet in position.
Monday:
Got the car inspected, which means I am finally done with the car. Wrestled with furniture repairs upstairs; an antique bureau that looks very good but was horribly made inside and falls apart regularly. And then I try a new way of putting it back together, and that works for a while but is touchy, and then falls apart entirely. But the intervals where it works are just long enough for me to find this worthwhile, although still short enough for me to resent it completely.
I have to return two pairs of trousers I bought last month for what I'm going to call a manufacturing defect; the inside seams are so sturdily reinforced that they actually cut my skin after I wear them a few hours. If there's anything I find more unpleasant than buying clothes, it's returning them.
My very old laptop is dying. It was bound to soon, and everything's backed up, but I hate buying new computers.
And I dropped my iTouch in a puddle, and I didn't like it anyway and it was already not connecting to the wireless network reliably, and I pretty much hate Apple generally as we all know, and now it doesn't work at all and of course the support boards are obnoxious as hell because it's Apple, and anyway it's not like the device lets me get at the hardware or the OS. So both my devices are down.
A rough day on me even though I got things done. Emotionally tired. Uncharacteristically clumsy. Temporarily number dyslexic as well; wrote the year as 2012 all day without realizing it.
Monday:
Dried out iTouch is working and dropping it in water may have fixed its wireless connection problem, or at the very least it's now connecting properly. This is probably not a tactic that will gain wide acceptance. "Your iPod is broken? A connection's probably gummed up or something. Swish it around in a glass of water for a couple minutes. Read your iPad in the bath!"
It is probably a coincidence.
Ciro continues to try to track down the correct padded rollers for his office chair. It has gotten to the point of having to write letters to sub-manufacturers to get part numbers.
Craving salt and pork nonstop for no reason I understand. Eating lots of ham, rejecting most other foods. Elevenses was ham, pinto beans with pepper sauce, and chicory coffee. You can take the girl out of Texas, I guess.
The Kinect has arrived and is sitting in the front hall, but Dad will not be home until 11. I have to pretend I don't know it's there, or it would be unbearable.
My new voter registration also arrived.
Transferred my license and registration to Massachusetts. Mom and Dad came along as an excuse to stop by Best Buy, where they immediately and predictably fell in love with the Kinect demo as soon as I showed it to them. An XBox was ordered immediately. In the evening, went to two gallery openings downtown, the first of which included slot car racing (so Dad came along) and the second of which featured craftspeople that might participate in the next Goose Fair (so Mom came along). In between, we stopped at an unmarked restaurant that turned out to be one of the hot new places.
Basically, my role in the family is finding things on which my parents would enjoy spending money. My parents are, at this stage in their lives, the idle rich, although they weren't always. (Rather, it is something they worked and planned towards.) And most of the time, they, like me, are moderately frugal by habit, and will not, for instance, spend money on something it is not worth. Nouveau riche conspicuous consumption, no thank you.
But they have this money and are excited to find novel liqueurs, good movies and games, and artists and artisans worth patronizing. (And who wouldn't be, you know?) They somewhat explicitly had children to make it easier to follow culture 30 years down the line. I am at least partly an excuse to do things like remodel the bathroom.
I picked up a business card for an artist I didn't especially like because I liked the business card.
Saturday:
Helped Dad install a lamppost for the front walk, which involved mixing concrete. To this end, Dad asked me to boil a gallon and a half of water, which I did. Then the concrete started to set too fast and I found out he meant "heat this water to above room temperature, about 40°C." Dad is good at engineering stuff, but I am beginning to understand why he does not get to help in the kitchen: namely, the distinction between "boil this" and "apply heat using a burner."
Saw Black Swan and found it boring. Not hateable, and in many ways a good effort, but it doesn't progress past its premise or illuminate anything outside itself. Which puts me in an odd position since I didn't like the movie but also disagree with all the criticism I've heard and readad about it, which I think is facile. I'm very angry at the people who call Aronofsky pretentious. I love Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and especially The Fountain. What The Wrestler and Black Swan need is to be more pretentious, to contain more than a predictable repetition of an obvious thesis about an unsurprising character cliche. In other words, I hope he'll go back to writing his own scripts.
Sunday:
Small private screening of a Rwandan/Bostonian documentary called Coexist, which I believe you can also watch at the website. It looks at the efforts to reintegrate the perpetrators of genocide back into the community, and also at the counseling effort for victims from both private organizations and the government. Compelling stuff.
The filmmaker and a Rwandan priest were there, and something unusual about the DVD is that in the spot where it normally says it's intended for private use, instead it says that purchasing it includes purchasing the right to show it in non-profit screenings at schools, community centers, etc. The filmmaker cares more about it being shown than about making money from it; he's a journalist and this is his way of trying to make the world a better place, to help people start thinking of ways to have peace after terrible events. He plans to make a follow-up film about the lead-up to the genocide that can be taught to middle-school students to help them understand where bullying fits in the progression toward dehumanizing a population.
After dinner, ricotta cheesecake. Loaned Scarlett all my Roald Dahl books (which is not many, since I mostly borrowed them from the library) and put away my files, which had been scattered on every surface until we got the file cabinet in position.
Monday:
Got the car inspected, which means I am finally done with the car. Wrestled with furniture repairs upstairs; an antique bureau that looks very good but was horribly made inside and falls apart regularly. And then I try a new way of putting it back together, and that works for a while but is touchy, and then falls apart entirely. But the intervals where it works are just long enough for me to find this worthwhile, although still short enough for me to resent it completely.
I have to return two pairs of trousers I bought last month for what I'm going to call a manufacturing defect; the inside seams are so sturdily reinforced that they actually cut my skin after I wear them a few hours. If there's anything I find more unpleasant than buying clothes, it's returning them.
My very old laptop is dying. It was bound to soon, and everything's backed up, but I hate buying new computers.
And I dropped my iTouch in a puddle, and I didn't like it anyway and it was already not connecting to the wireless network reliably, and I pretty much hate Apple generally as we all know, and now it doesn't work at all and of course the support boards are obnoxious as hell because it's Apple, and anyway it's not like the device lets me get at the hardware or the OS. So both my devices are down.
A rough day on me even though I got things done. Emotionally tired. Uncharacteristically clumsy. Temporarily number dyslexic as well; wrote the year as 2012 all day without realizing it.
Monday:
Dried out iTouch is working and dropping it in water may have fixed its wireless connection problem, or at the very least it's now connecting properly. This is probably not a tactic that will gain wide acceptance. "Your iPod is broken? A connection's probably gummed up or something. Swish it around in a glass of water for a couple minutes. Read your iPad in the bath!"
It is probably a coincidence.
Ciro continues to try to track down the correct padded rollers for his office chair. It has gotten to the point of having to write letters to sub-manufacturers to get part numbers.
Craving salt and pork nonstop for no reason I understand. Eating lots of ham, rejecting most other foods. Elevenses was ham, pinto beans with pepper sauce, and chicory coffee. You can take the girl out of Texas, I guess.
The Kinect has arrived and is sitting in the front hall, but Dad will not be home until 11. I have to pretend I don't know it's there, or it would be unbearable.
My new voter registration also arrived.
