1. As I'm prone to do, because I don't like doing business over the telephone, I've been putting off a certain financial matter. I tried to take care of it using email, but didn't get a response. I probably sent the email to the wrong part of the company (oh well...). Today, I made the phone call, got the information I needed, wrote out a check, and it's in the mail.
I feel lighter, both in spirit and, ha!, my checkbook!
2. Having read Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence recently, I decided to watch the movie this afternoon. I went to it in Portland back in 1993 the first night it was released. I remembered it being visually lush and I remembered enjoying Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer. Today, the smaller screen of our television reduced the movie's visual beauty but the social critique imbedded in Wharton's novel was intact as the movie explored how people in this 1870s world of wealth in New York City spend much of their time doing very little. They pay visits. They have dinners. They live by entrenched social codes and gossip about how others are conforming to these codes or are violating them.
There's almost no action - oh, characters dance at a ball, they ride in carriages, and Newman Archer and Countess Oleska steal some brief moments of awkward passion. But, I experienced the movie as an exploration of boredom. I thought the movie brought its viewers into the experience of lives full of luxuries, but otherwise bored out, emptied out. To me, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Archer's arrested development and immature fantasizing perfectly; likewise, Michelle Pfeiffer brilliantly embodies the more world-worn, insightful, and unmoored life of Countess Oleska.
When I read The Age of Innocence, I disliked Newman Archer and I think Edith Wharton invited me to feel this way. I mean, Newman Archer is not villainous. He's not despicable. He's not interesting enough to be either. He's smug, whiny, uninteresting, naive, immature, and untouched by his travels and the books he's read; in short, he's a cipher. Daniel Day-Lewis manages to portray all of this. Some have thought his performance was flat; I thought Newman Archer was flat and that consistently playing his flatness required great skill.
3. Paul and Carol (and maybe Zoe...not sure) went to Costco and Fred Meyer today and generously offered to pick things up for Christy and Debbie and me. Paul delivered the goods to our porch. It made me very happy to now have a good stock of salmon burgers, shrimp, Kalamata olives, salad greens, broccoli, coffee, feta cheese, sparkling mineral water, eggplant, and oatmeal.
Debbie makes the best green salads and, tonight, after a dinner featuring one of her masterpieces along with salmon and red rice, I decided to try a dirty martini made with Kalamata olive brine and garnished with Kalamata olives. All I've ever drunk before was green olive brine and olives. Guess what? The Kalamata brine and the black olives worked for me. Next up? I'm going to look for pickled onions and see what I think of a Gibson.
Today, Stu reminds us that NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990:
It is wise to not borrow trouble.
Stay safe, not errors redouble.
But if bold efforts not tried,
Those who said "no" been defied.
Most likely they'd never launched Hubble.
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