Last Monday and last entry of the year. We went on the road (only a short trip), ate out, finished a season, finished a movie, and so on.
I.
This is our third New Year’s Eve together, and we have a ‘tradition’ of sorts: brunch at the Cheesecake Factory.
It’s not terribly elegant or high-class; it’s not especially unique; but in it’s (lower)-middle-(class)-of-the-road-ness it’s ours. Our little joke.
And a chance to splurge.
New Year’s Eve is not our anniversary, as we began seeing each other a couple holidays before that, but given my return from relatives at that time, given that Ms. S. picked me up at the airport, given that Ms. S. became my new anchor then, it’s arguably when we started becoming serious, and so that makes it an added treat.
Usually we go shopping afterward, and usually we begin at the Summit, first at the upper level, and then the lower, where not only Bed Bath & Beyond, but the Apple Store and Williams-Sonoma are located. But today we skipped all that and headed straight for Whole Foods, where I picked up some bulk items and a couple bottles of beer … one Rogue, one Sierra Nevada, and one bottle of ‘Black, Mocha Stout’ from Highland Brewing Company (Ashville, N.C.); the last I had as ‘dessert’ (or was it ‘dinner’?) tonight.
We finished with a non-romantic stop at Big Lots, where several boxes of tea (green, herbal, black) and a couple gallons of apple cider (oh, I have uses for it!) made their way to my basket. And back home we drove, after stopping at Kohl’s, where once Ms. S. was done with perfumes and clothes we even looked at sports jackets for me.
II.
I end 2012 and begin 2013 at my lowest weight since high school, and this pleases me.
In 2013 I need to maintain that weight, within five to ten pounds, while perhaps putting on a few pounds of muscle to make up for what’s been lost over the past year.
About 90 pounds, even. I recently looked at a spring 2011 (pre-tornado) photo of me and Ms. S., and I’m … large. I looked at a Christmas 2011 photo, from New Orleans, shortly before I began tracking my food again, and I was large (though not necessarily as large as that spring). It’s been a good journey.
I read a good deal. Ms. S. and I watched too much TV; we’ll cut down in the new year. We want more movies, but we did see some good ones this past year. I ate well, I ate healthful food. I want to cook more creatively, though, as that’s a passion of mine.
So for 2013?
Perhaps the seven liberal arts, the trivium and quadrivium, as a model: grammar, logic and rhetoric might suggest more language (or languages!), reasoning (my academic work!), and reading & writing (fiction and otherwise); whereas arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy might lead one to more math and science, as well as music. All interests of mine.
I need a learning element, a mere ‘doing’ element (‘work’), and a creative element, a kind of dialectic: doing, its antithesis in thinking, and its synthesis in reformulating and producing.
And I have a lot to read, a lot to write. On the reading front, I’m thinking in terms of ‘twelve’ … one element per month of a variety categories. One new work of German literature a month. A work by a Nobel Prize winner per month. One new-to-me Shakespeare play a month? I’m not sure about the last. And there’s non-fiction to be had.
Starting points for me include finishing Scott Smith’s “The Ruins” (see below) along with the most recent Dresden Files book, but I’m also looking forward to “Hallucinations” (Oliver Sacks), “How Music Works” (David Byrne), and “The Swerve” (Stephen Greenblatt).
And what about you?
III.
Yesterday we had no shared television or movie time. It was scheduling, it was several things. I finished the evening first on the spare bed with one cat behind me and one against my knees as I read; then I moved to the main bed to continue reading for a while. I transitioned from the latest Dresden Files novel — a guilty pleasure of sorts, originally recommended by a student and her husband a couple years ago — to the equally guilty pleasure that is Scott Smith’s “The Ruins” (2006), which I first heard about around the time the movie adaptation (2008) came out. Ms. S. got her copy from her father, and while I’d seen the film, I thought I’d give the beach read a try.
And try I have a few times since we moved in to this apartment. I progress a few pages further each time, but the early going is slow going, as I find the characters uninteresting and the plot regurgitates what I already know about it from its adaptation. There is no suspense, no interest. But now I’m about half way through, the characterization has picked up a bit (or at least the voices have gotten a bit clearer), and so I’ve decided that it should be the first book I finish in 2013.
But back to today.
We returned from Birmingham, stowed our stash, made tea, and sat down for some TV: ‘The X-Files,’ season two, final episode: “Anasazi.”
Ms. S. was disappointed (but not entirely surprised) that it was a cliffhanger. “Two-parter?” she inquired; I nodded, though I could have said, it’s really a three parter. Or the real beginning of the mythology material, even if we’ve had hints (including Scully’s abduction in “Duane Barry” and the ‘return’ of Samantha Mulder in a previous two-parter) before. What’s disappointing is Duchovny’s continued very limited range and discrete system of emoting; he’s at 1 or at 11, so to speak, and he doesn’t gradually transition well between them. It’s a Prozac-monotone, a la William Hurt in his non-intense roles, or it’s a shouting match. And here he has to be out of his mind, be ill (and there some good moments as he’s sweaty with fever), but his strained relationship with everyone is new territory with no immediate predecessor in the preceding episodes. Then why here? Because the plot requires it. He behavior is explained later; he’s been dosed with some drug/chemical cocktail, leading to his erratic behavior. But while that works intra-episode, it doesn’t help inter-episode.
Afterward we transitioned directly to ‘Dollhouse,’ episode 6 … the Dollhouse that Joss built! *BAM!* — that was a twist Ms. S. didn’t see coming. Victor-squared, so to speak. It’s also the episode with Patton Oswalt, it’s the episode with a message from Alpha, the episode with Sierra’s abuse. It’s a turning point in narrative structure, not just with regard to the extremely meta and self-conscious man-on-the-street framing. Patton Oswalt’s Joel Mynor turns the table on Paul Ballard, exposing his ‘fantasy/fantasies.’ Instead of a main engagement structuring the episode, a mere riff on a monster-of-the-week approach, we have multiple intertwining plot threads that function both as stand-alone stories of sorts within the episode but also as fragments of continuing threads in the series’ narrative.
And from there, since we still had time before Ms. S. had to prepare for work, we took in the second half (give or take) of “Mr. Brooks,” which I introduced to her a few weeks back but during which she fell asleep. It’s a mess of a movie; whether it’s a hot mess is another matter. As with “The Ruins” I came across it because of a review at the A.V. Club a few years ago. It’ a movie that casts certain people — Kevin Costner — ‘against type,’ making use of his limited range in a good way; it also has too many ‘plots.’ We have Mr. Brooks and his ‘situation,’ including the murder that brings Dane Cooks’ ‘Mr. Smith’ into the picture, but we also have the daughter, the police detective seeking Brooks, the detective’s divorce, the detective dealing with a psychotic escaped criminal who has it in for her, Brooks’ daughter’s psychopathic tendencies … we could try to say it’s the *story* of Brooks, Smith, the detective, and the daughter (the daughter’s murderous urges cause her to be more than just an extension of daddy’s through-line), but really, we don’t care about (m)any of them as characters/people. We care about them as plot devices, as chess pieces. And it’s a very tidy game at the end.
And on that note: it’s nearly time to pop my bottle of bubbly and ring in the new year.
Cheers.
