Tonight Husband and I went to see the new Kevin Bacon movie, Death Sentence.  We’re big fans of the revenge movie genre and can’t stop ourselves from tittering with glee when there’s so much as a hint of revenge action in anything we watch, so we were pretty excited to see this movie.  A man wronged?  Out for justice?  A vigilante?  Sign me up!

When we got out afterwards, we had very different perspectives on the movie.  I thought it was okay - I enjoyed it overall but parts were so bad it interfered with my ability to enjoy - and I have low standards.  (I also love zombie movies, which should tell you something about my standards.)  The maudlin music stands out as a particularly stinky element, as well as the cop character who was totally unbelievable, and the first ten minutes, which are necessary as back story but so poorly executed I rolled my eyes the entire time.

Husband, on the other hand, loved it - and here’s why: he figured out, during those stinky first ten minutes, that this is not a movie meant to be taken literally.  It’s more allegory than narrative.  He thought of it as a Greek tragedy and loved every second.  The crappy cop?  A chorus.  Overblown characters?  Totally appropriate to that genre.  Tragic, nobody wins message?  Well you get the idea.

So go into this movie looking for archetypes and grand messages, not plausibility and detail.  It’s not quite as removed from reality as The Warriors but if you’re in that kind of mindset, you’ll probably enjoy the movie much more than I did.  I actually plan to see this one again, though probably not in theatres, to give it another chance.

p.s. - if you go to TinselTown, at the spooky empty mall in east Vancovuer, DO NOT put salt on your popcorn.  The salt shaker is about four inches in diameter across the top and has more volume dedicated to dispensing holes than lid.  I shook it for about .3 seconds over my bag of popcorn and at least four pounds of salt gushed out, making the top layer of my popcorn all white and sparkly.  I hate to waste food, so I ate it - but this then necessitated a large pop from the concession stand, which runs you about five bucks, so if you don’t have five bucks to spare you really should just go saltless.

The pace improves marginally: one hour, 1.5 pages.

You last minute, all-nighter, blitzkrieg writers: how do you do it?  What is the secret to speed?

I’m writing a paper.  The score so far: one hour, one paragraph done.  At this rate it’ll be ready to hand in when I’m, oh, eighty.  I wish someone would give me an hourly rate to do this.

But just think how big my brain will be when it’s all done.  It’ll be so huge I’ll have to carry my noggin around in a wheelbarrow.  And when I meet new people, I’ll be able to win their friendship by quoting outcomes research about an obscure form of therapy to them.  Won’t I be popular!

Last night’s event, hereafter to be referred to as The Great Toe Debacle of 2007, has largely resolved. My toe is actually still swollen, which in my opinion means I don’t have to be embarrassed about crying over it. But the toe is, you’ll all be very relieved to know, basically fine.

I had classes today. It was trying. We did lots of those icebreaker exercises which really make me grit my teeth - particularly the one we were forced to do this morning, which involved a circle of chairs, lots of running around and swapping chairs, and competition between the students.  It was a stupid game, made even stupider by the fact that everyone in the room has been going to classes together for months and hardly require an icebreaker.  It doesn’t help that I’m a grumpy morning person.

If there’s one thing sure to enrage a grumpy morning person, it’s an icebreaker game that requires vigorous moving. This is the thing that morning people, as a class, seem to have not figured out about the rest of us. You cannot cheer up a grumpy morning person by prodding them into playing a game, or having a bubbly chat, or pointing out to them that they are grouchy. You have to leave us alone. Alone! Either we’ll come out of it on our own, or we’ll quietly remove ourselves from the environment. But if you try to prod us, we dig in our heels and become even nastier.

This is the position I found myself in this morning. Our professor was one of those naturally bubbly, happy people who just can’t understand why everyone doesn’t want to run around at 9am Sunday morning. Better yet - let’s make a game of it! Whee! I have reached the point in my life with my morning grumpiness where I can be civil and even pleasant in the morning, if not too many demands are placed upon me. Icebreaker games? Too many demands. I feel all shrivelled up and angry inside just remembering it. I’ll show up at 9am. I’ll say “good morning” and mean it. I’ll smile and ask how you’re doing. All of this I can do. But that’s it. Make me run around and I become positively poisonous.

So I spent the rest of the morning being quite juvenile, sulking and seething in my chair. I refused to crack a smile at the bubbly professors’ jokes (which were, for the record, lame). I’m sure it was obvious that I was unhappy, and while I know that projecting that kind of attitude at school is a mistake not to mention immature - I just couldn’t help myself. It was mean spirited and selfish, and also glorious and deeply, deeply satisfying.

Sometimes you have to indulge your petty nature.

I just stubbed the shit out of my littlest toe on my left foot.  Basically I was attacked by one of our dining room chairs, which are, as far as I’m concerned, the multiply reincarnated forms of Attila the Hun.  Attractive yes.  Dangerous also yes.

So now I have this aching toe which is all swollen and angry red.  It was one of those stubs that is so violent and painful that I actually cried after it happened.  How is it possible for so much pain to be in such a little toe?

And I’m feeling particularly sorry for myself because there’s no one here to show it off to and receive comfort from.  Husband is out playing poker with friends; I elected to come home and study instead.  (Little did I realize the chairs had set up an ambush!)  So here I am, telling The Internet instead of a person.

Sort of pathetic, isn’t it?

Sorry for the lack of posting. I’m deeply immersed in school work at the moment - writing a paper that I’m quite nervous about. My current class has experienced a sudden switch in professors - the old one is out, the new one is in. Two-thirds of the way through the class. You want to see a bunch of adults freak out? Swap their professor in mid-stream. Their heads explode.

I’ve had several classes with the old one, so I knew exactly what to expect in terms of standards of work and whatnot. The new one? Seems like a really hard-charging, demanding type. Overall I like this new person, but it’s pretty nerve-wracking to find myself, again, in the position of not really knowing how my work will be received. In addition to the upped standards, her philosophical bent is quite different from mine - she advocates a type of therapy that is, without going in to boring details, as opposite from the kind of work I want to do as you can get. And she’s made no secret of the fact that, as far as she’s concerned, only her position has proof that it works.

This is a huge discussion, to explain that last statement, which again, I won’t bore you with - let it suffice to say that I’m working my little buns off to come up with scholarly articles demonstrating the effectiveness of my approach (and I’ve found several). I’ll have things to present in my paper that will shore up my position, and that’s good - but knowing that overall she turns up her nose at my style is… a bit scary.

Anyway, back to work.

Jut got up - volunteer job again today.  I am resolved to have a nice day of it.  I have decided I need to try harder to enjoy work I don’t enjoy.  I am going to focus on how what I am doing is helping someone else.  I will reward myself with fantasies of napping at half hour intervals, if I succeed.

Then I am going to come home and drink.

Dialogue is a NOUN, not a VERB.

“Let’s have a dialogue about that.” -Good.

“We can dialogue about that.” -Grounds for shooting.

I’m still craving water, presumably to flush out the salt.  Good god how much sodium did I take in?

Tonight I made my first tofu dish.

Let me say here that I don’t really like tofu. It’s sort of weird and rubbery and mushy and the whiteness makes me think of grubs. For this whole first year of vegetarianism I really haven’t eaten much - I usually crumble a block of tofu into a big pot of spag, if I’m making it, and I have used the textured vegetable protein for tacos, but eat a block of the ‘fu? Naked, not just as an ingredient in a much bigger volume of sauce? No way man.

But last night I had a wicked tofu dish at a Malaysian restaurant. So I decided to give it a try myself. I marinated some tofu slices in a sauce I made with soy sauce, hot Thai chili sauce, sugar, lime juice, and some oil. I baked the slices until they firmed up, the topped them with mung bean sprouts and sliced cucumbers and a thickened version of the marinade.

The verdict? Good but needs work. The tofu itself was suprisingly firm and chewy, almost chickeny actually. None of that mushy tofu syndrome. The sauce was delicious but I learned that I need to cut it with water next time, because the salt of the soy, after some evaporation in the oven, nearly killed me. Even Husband, who as a general rule always likes what I cook, had to admit the saltiness was powerful. It was so salty that even as we speak my internal organs are turning into little shriveled husks from the dessicating effects.

I didn’t finish my dinner because of this business with the salt, but I’m pleased to report that my mind is now open to the possibilities of using tofu in more cooking. It’s always good to try new things and broaden your horizon. Just… less salt next time.