fine whine

Not as a matter of a New Year's resolution or anything (namely since I was doing it mid-December), but I seem to be doing more reading lately. Fiction, even.

Once I started messing around with 43 Things and 43 People it was only a matter of time before I stumbled upon, and likewise began using, All Consuming, also currently run by the same people, the so-called Robot Co-op. The site had existed in some other form before* but in its current incarnation it is connected to the 43 whatevers sites. What matters to me is that it is a simple method of
keeping track of the books I've read and music I've heard (and the DVDs I watch, though those I record elsewhere already).

But that alone doesn't lead me to any more reading. It's effort enough trying to remember the books I've already read. The reason I am reading more books is that it is easy to see what the other members have read recently. At times it's easy to see how a commonly-read book spreads through everyone's lists, and the less common ones that pop up now and then.

But back to that part about seeing what others have read. I can look at which people who have read the books I've read and then the other books they have read, and enjoyed, and sometimes find interesting things to read.

That's how I stumbled across The time-traveler's wife, one of the best books I read last year. If you haven't read it, I heartily recommend it.

In adding to my list I thought back to the other books I've enjoyed this year, including Michael Kun's You poor monster, though I cannot recall how I'd found that one, unless I grabbed it because of the interesting cover image (a guy in a suit, underwater). It's a good read, and in remembering it I decided to seek out Kun's other books, and have already enjoyed his My wife, and my dead wife and look forward to reading The Linklater letters, the book that seems to pop up as the book he's also authored (you know, as in 'by Michael Kun, author of The Linklater letters).

Back to the other people, though, I've read some of Stephen Fry's books as well, though those are more hit or miss. In that The Hippopotamus isn't so much a hit as much as Making history is. And Revenge is somewhere in between.

Even the books that aren't so great are still mostly worth reading. And I do so enjoy reading, and having found a way to find decent books and moreover to keep track of them is all the better.

* To which I undoubtedly belonged, at one point or other. Being a sucker for signing up for interesting free communities as I am, of course.

As the end of the year rolls around (as 2005 just did, you may recall) I always seem to have a surplus of vacation days stored up. Our paid time off combines all sick, personal and vacation time into one big chunk from which I would take any one at a time... except that I haven't been sick enough to skip work in many a year, don't know what constitutes a personal day, and don't take enough vacations. So I end up taking days here and there just to use them up, making long weeekends sometimes and other times merely breaking up the weeks.

Occasionally the days I take off come in handy, such as when roof work needs to be done, or someone needs to give our treadmill its yearly checkup (and susbsequent motor replacement). In those cases I have an appointment of sorts (even if it is just a vague "before noon" or worse) but often no idea of what else I should be doing. Especially when the technician/repair person shows up. Should I be doing housework? Sometimes I wash dishes, but few is the work that takes less time than I use washing dishes. Most of the time I'm left with the question of what else to do. Not wanting to bother them, I leave the workers alone, and hide out elsewhere in the house with a book, or play video games.

Sometime I'd like to ask one of them what other people at home do during work visits. Maybe I can get a pointer or two.

Yesterday, however, we weren't having any work done, but I was still left with the sense that I shouldn't be just sitting around. I think I've had too many days off lately, and developed some weird form of cabin fever wherein I'm completely capable of leaving the house but feel like I've got nowhere to go. So I washed a few dishes, vaccuumed one room, and in the end wound up cutting and sewing some curtains for our dining room. I meant to use it as a teaching kind of thing for Jessica* but she was doing other things and I didn't stop to try and get her to work with me. All in all the curtains came out okay, and they needed to be put together and hung, but to be honest, I still felt like I was supposed to be at work and instead was just doing busywork at home. I guess I need to get out more.

* I was lucky enough to have taken Home Economics classes in eighth grade, in which, among other things, I excelled at sewing. Or at least poking needle holes in paper in very straight lines, as most of the class time we didn't have thread or fabric to work with. It was somewhat like algebra or calculus, in that both are 'math' but it takes some time before you can actually use the numbers. Or something like that.

So now it's 2006. Our plans fell through, and Jessica and the cat abandoned me so I rang in this year by myself (well, I suppose the people apparently detonating small explosives count too since they sounded awfully close).

Which isn't that big of a deal, anyway. It's just another night; one that divides the days dates are written with a twelve at the beginning and one number at the end*, and then dates with a one at the beginning and that old number plus one at the end. Big deal. I write about ten checks a year.

I watch a lot of movies, though, and tonight was no exception. First in the lineup was the 1976 Bad news Bears and, even though it maybe wasn't an out-of-the-park home run, it wasn't just a caught pop fly.

Enough with the baseball terminology. Thankfully the movie doesn't dwell in it, instead focusing on some well-played kids (even if they can't play the game all that well) and a surprisingly good Walter Matthau. He's an actor that has turned in many a good role (Hopscotch is one of the more underrated gems of the Criterion Collection) and here as a casual alcoholic he's just as good as ever. His changes of heart may be a bit sudden, but never as jarring as they might otherwise be in the hands of someone else. The kids, though, prove to be just as much up to the task, including an impressive Tatum O'Neal (who, in doing nothing impressive after Paper moon, may have been cast as the 'old pro' brought in to help out the amateurs in something of a canny, if unintended move), though many a fair-haired buck-toothed boy gets mixed up with another. The movie stands apart from other underdog movies for many a reason, and most make it worth watching. I may check out the remake sometime, just to see what seasoned vets like Richard Linklater and Billy Bob Thornton can do with the same material, but I'm in no hurry. This one's good enough.

To end the year on a more serious note, I next watched Woody Allen's Hannah and her sisters. This wasn't the first time I'd grabbed it at the library; I'd often checked it out but had lighter fare to watch first, or just wanted something less, well, less about three sisters and their romantic entanglements in New York City. But in Woody Allen's hands it's not nearly as bad as something sounding like that could be.

After all, imagine Nora Ephron tackling the same idea. Or don't.

The way Allen writes it it's touching, clever, intelligent and funny, and well worth watching. Almost every character is convincingly fleshed out, and Woody's neurotic nebbish has rarely been more believable. Michael Caine is a bit creepy as an adulterous husband, and it's difficult to pin down if he's playing an American or Brit or someone from somewhere else, for all that matters. In the end it's not about where everybody came from, but where they end up and how they get there that matters, and everybody, Woody and Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest and Sam Waterston and Michael Caine and Max Von Sydow (whose severe artist criticizes TV at one point, his comments no less timely now than they were then; the title of this post is a quote from the scene) and Carrie Fisher and all the rest make for a great movie about love and families and everything in between.

I split my viewing of it, however, to catch the yearly ball-dropping in Times Square. I'm no longer certain why I do this other than to know the correct moment the year turns, since my watches and clocks are all different. I don't care about the people on TV, don't watch the flavor-of-the-month performances and interviews before and after the drop, and don't want to think about all of the garbage littering the Square after the millions file out.

They mentioned that a literal ton (2000 pounds) of confetti was to be thrown on the crowd, they with their big balloons and streamers and promotional hats and stupid, stupid, stupid '2006' glasses, and I could see the few empty inches of pavement behind the announcers (somehow I ended up seeing Carson Daly instead of Dick Clark. The new year came anyway) already covered in garbage even before the climactic last moments.

And for what? Some of those people had been standing around since noon, and that's not even considering the travel time that most of them, out-of-towners, also endured. And without public restrooms, apparently. So they came all that way, and waited all that time, and they couldn't give a crap.

Har har. Happy New Year, for what it's worth.

* I refer, of course, to the dreadful 'month day, year' notation that has so caught Americans' fancy. Why, oh why, ask I, can't we use the much nicer, more logical 'day month year' that so much of the rest of the world uses?