The weekend

Today was a beautiful day. In fact, this whole weekend was beautiful. The highlights were the movies I watched and the emails I received. Yes, that's right, the emails. I am surrounded by smart, thoughtful people whose ideas and feelings inspire me and intrigue me. Having friends like that is very important I think. It reminds me of what's important in life. It focuses my thinking on issues that are relevant to others as well as to me.
As for why I watched three movies in two days... I was in the mood. The Holiday was a fun and entertaining look at love in the modern world, where cross-continental home-swapping is possible and jerks will cross an ocean to prove how slimy they are. The film's strength is its funny and balanced portrayal of what I consider to be the two primary ways of falling in love: love-at-first-sight and friendship-maturing-into-love. Although in this case the processes are significantly sped up, but I forgive them that.
The next movie I watched is titled No Good Deed and I picked it on a whim from the video store. Turned out to be an excellent (if at times violent) story about a cop who stumbles into a 10 million dollar heist by five thieves. The movie explores the social, emotional and psychological relationships between the characters while carrying on a gripping storyline. My curiosity was constantly piqued, waiting to find out what each character would do next, how'd they'd react. Greed, envy, fear, betrayal, manipulation... all these and more in what I thought was a delectable package. I highly recommend it to those who enjoy intellectual cinema. I just read the review on the imdb page I linked above and it's amusing that he considers it so bad. I still stand by my review of it. :)
Oh, and the final movie I watched was Dune, of the Frank Herbert novels, .... in German... with no subtitles. Yeah, pretty sweet. Thankfully, I remembered practically the entire story from having read it back in grade 11. Which was... spring of 1997, exactly a decade ago. Remarkable how much of it I remember. I feel like going back and reading the rest of the series. I'd stopped where it got too slow and political for me but that may appeal to me more now. We'll see.

That brings us up to today. Today was different. I spent a few hours reading from The World According to Garp in the garden of my favorite cafe. I hate not finishing books but this one can be infuriating sometimes. I have to put it down and let my anger at it settle out. Days or weeks go by before I can pick it up again. Well after reading I bought some groceries then spent the rest of the afternoon in our apartment not doing very much until it was time to cook dinner. I prepared a variation on my usual 'pasta with veggies and ground beef' using an Indian theme. I need to look up how to prepare a proper Indian curry for next time though for a first, uneducated attempt this was ok. At least my flatmates thought so, and that's what counts.