dappled sunlight nonsense

Never mind your problems, what about the hassles I face trying to read things off my laptop screen while the train is passing through trees and sunlight. I suppose there was a time when people enjoyed this type of thing but let me tell you I have important work to do, work I had a whole week to do and which I now have an hour and a half to get finished, and damn it, I am not going to put up with all this dappled sunlight nonsense.

And for my next meaningless gripe:

I had a particularly nauseating lecturer as an undergraduate who used to rub his/her hands together in faux Dr. Frankenstein style and promise us ‘coffeeee!’ This was the days when an addiction to coffeee was a slightly edgy, terribly cosmopolitan thing to have, a bit like addiction to sex was in the early 70s. I was way up for it then (later clarification: I mean addiction to coffee in the 90s, not addiction to sex in the 70s... OK?) But as long-term readers of this catalogue of complaints and self-flagellation will know, I do occasionally wrestle with this demon.

In consultation with Dr. Clarkey (a user who was once a beacon of hope since she did not drink any coffeee until she was about 45 but not with Dr. Schoen whose general attitude is, one should always do whatever one wishes to do – imagine how society would crumble if we were all like that)(mind you she is not much of a coffee drinker) I have negotiated a significant reduction in my intake and it seems to be working, although of course I drink tea like it was air, and as I am now a nose breather you can imagine how stimulating that is.

The above was written yesterday morning and I admit I succumbed a little to a ‘reverse macchiato’ from Castro’s, the acknowledged gnarliest coffee dump on campus, yesterday and then in the evening before we went to see Children of Men, had a little Turkish coffee at Anatolian, which is the closest thing Broady Plaza has to a restaurant this side of La Porchetta’s (I don’t mean geographically though in fact, it is geographically this side).

We enjoyed CoM a lot. It was really well designed and had a neat story and a bit of good dialogue. I thought the stormtrooper symbolism was a little weak since the Britain of twenty years’ hence as depicted in the film was all about nationality (and nationalism), not race, which for some reason seems – not exactly less sinister, but not quite comparable in a satirical/metaphorical way.

I like it when things are unexplained in films, yet still seem quite plausible. The infertility thing is totally unexplained, as is the fertility thing. The last half hour when the camera (i.e. what we are seeing) gets blood on it is kind of bizarre, because we’ve never been given that documentary sense before, but I guess it works. I sort of half imagine that they got fake blood on the camera lens but couldn’t afford to reshoot, but who knows. It doesn’t detract.

I’d recommend it to anyone who likes to be thoroughly gruelled.

We saw it at Broady Hoyts, with about eight male teens two rows behind us. They were pretty well-behaved throughout the actual film (I think one of them made a loud joke once in an admittedly slightly unconvincing-manipulative-explanatory scene) but as Mia pointed out the time we really heard from them was during the trailers when the second Jackass film was being promoted. Phew! After their excited revelry in the face of that 45-second piece of… stuff… I’m surprised they didn’t want to curl up and go to sleep for a while, or at least have a bowl of nutri-grain.