So I have been remiss and haven't added anything here in a week. Sorry.

But I'm sitting here with the last part of a nice bottle of wine (Sebastiani Merlot 1996) and a full belly from dinner (steak, sauteed in butter because I don't have a grill, asparagus, garlic mashed potatoes) and it occurs to me that I probably ought to fill you in.

The week: well, the week was the week. Did actual work, had meetings where stuff actually seemed to be accomplished or decided upon, installed some software for testing and actually tested it and was able to get some good results out of it and throw some feedback towards the vendor. Realized on Thursday that I know exactly how I'm going to solve not only the existing problem in front of me, but the existing problem that's been in front of some other people in other departments too.

Picked up Emily at Dulles on Friday, and she gave me a hard time for getting in the door a minute after she'd gotten through customs and started looking for me. I told her that still meant I was two minutes ahead of her, since it took three whole minutes for her to appear after I cleared customs at Schipol. Took her back to the office and gave her the nickel tour of the data center, and she was suitably impressed. Introduced her to Tino, and to our manager, and then ended up going out for drinks and dinner with Tino and Nicole.

Emily faded promptly at 9:00 (only 3am her time) so we paid the tab and headed home, where she had to play with her new computer for a half hour before falling asleep. Apparently she also woke up a couple times in the middle of the night, but since she was in another bedroom and I sleep like a fitful rock I had no idea this was going on.

Saturday involved an intended brunch at Thyme Square in Bethesda, which turned out to be lunch because they only do the brunch on Sunday. Afterwards we stopped in at a furniture store on whatever street that is, then went shopping for a laptop case for her and a doctor's bag style briefcase for Patrick, and she ended up buying both at the same store in Tysons II. I was amused to hear her bargaining with the guy behind the counter, since nobody ever bargains with anybody in stores here. It worked. She got the prices she wanted.

We then went into the office, since it had turned out that the CD-RWs she'd burned with her data before leaving Haarlem were effectively blank as far as any machine I owned could tell, so we used work's bandwidth to download the web sites she needed. Took about five minutes total to download both sites and their cgi-bin directories. Except for the guys painting the elevator lobby who had all the doors taped off, thus making entry rather difficult, that went well. We then went to the House of Nicole and Tino to see if their CD-RW drive would have more success than the CD drives I had available to me, which turned out not to be the case. Then to dinner, which started out as being at Fuddruckers but then (after a cell phone call from Nicole) turned out to be at Jerry's Subs and Pizza, where I tried not to express the extreme discomfort I suddenly found myself dealing with, due to gas cramps caused by that morning's lunch. Oi. I don't know if I was successful or not. I still ate almost half a pizza. I finally burped enough to make the problem go away, just in time to be able to sit still for a movie.

We saw "Cider House Rules." Emily, many years ago, had handed me her paperback copy of the book and said, "you have to read this." She then followed up for the next week or so until I actually started, at which point she didn't need to follow up anymore. The movie's good, but apparently works much better if you have read the book and can fill in your own continuity where the plot jumps. The theater was full, and we ended up sitting scattered around separately (Nicole and Tino sat together at least, but I was in the solo chair next to the wheelchair spot in the back of the house, and Emily was over in a single chair by one aisle, next to the wall). This is perfectly fine for seeing the movie itself, but it makes it impossible to make snarky comments about other movies' trailers to your companions.

I didn't actually mind sitting alone, which then begs the question of why I don't go to movies alone anyway. Eh. I guess it's because the social interaction before, and the ability to bounce commentary off of somebody else after are what make movie going fun.

Of course I didn't comment to anybody what had been a rather striking moment to me (but one that threw me all the way out of the movie for a bit), when the director staged a scene by starting out with a closeup of Charlize Theron's ass. It's a gorgeous ass, I have to say. But it broke all my concentration on the movie and made me think about nothing more than her ass for a couple minutes. It's the only nudity in the film (and in a film that gets most of its plot from the morality of performing an abortion, that's rather surprising), and I'm not sure it really fit.

But I was thinking about her ass again this morning, and I thought it sad that the next morning the scene that stuck in my head was of little consequence to the plot, so then I had to deconstruct why it was that the ass was featured so in the first place, and then why it stuck in my head like it did.

In answer to the first question, I think it's a symptom of a larger problem in movies nowadays, in that cinematography is being confused with direction. I've seen some beautiful, lush films lately that sucked as movies. They sure were pretty, but somewhere somebody let the beauty stand in for plot, cohesiveness, or direction. So in the case of Charlize Theron's ass, what occured to me this morning was that there's a thin line between a nude portrait that's just a nude portrait, and a nude portrait that in spite of the fact that it's not about sex, is about sex. The camera shot on her ass, which then backed up to become a full picture of her stretched out nude on a bed, was a portrait that both wasn't about sex, and was. But it was a portrait, a still life, not a scene in a movie. This morning I found myself wondering how it was staged, how the director had her model for the camera (and it was indeed modeling, not acting, at that point). And the thing is, an ass isn't necessarily about sex, but most of the time it is. You don't tend to see somebody's ass unless you're otherwise involved with them, so there's this whole connotation about staring at her naked ass (which the camera did for us, making sure that we stared for the proper length of time) that says "This Scene Is About Sex." But at the same time, I'm not sure if we're supposed to stare at her ass that way, or just appreciate it as a portrait of a nude lying on a bed, some modern Modigliani or Degas that just happens to be done in light-on-screen and not oil-on-canvas. So then my thought this morning was that every one of those painters way back when probably had a woody the whole time they were painting, and while we smack the label of "art" on something because it's painted and it's beautiful, that doesn't mean that it can't be sexy too, which is something fucked up in this American culture of ours where we try to convince everybody that sex and beauty are separate things and never the twain shall meet. Fah.

The thing about this is, I don't want to be obsessing over Charlize Theron's ass, and I don't think it's what the director had in mind, but I'm doing it anyway. Which means that it was out of place in the film. Gratuitous. Bothersome even more, because what Homer (Tobey Maguire) says to Candy (that's Charlize) afterwards (that he's seen everything but this is the first time it's ever meant anything to him) is actually a plot point, but I found myself sitting there thinking about how nice her ass was instead of really paying attention to why that's relevant. Luckily I'd read the book so I knew why it was relevant already. But still.

The answer to the second question is that I probably need to get out and meet more girls.

Today brought more computer dinking around with Emily, then a late breakfast at Whiteys (which had lost its little entry shack since last I was there), then we were thinking about wandering around the Tidal Basin so Em could get a good look at the cherry blossoms. It turned out to be a bit too cold for her to wander around outside, so I drove over by the old place Amanda and I had rented, then we went to Pentagon City, to Borders and points in the mall. I spent, actually I have no idea what I spent, buying A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius like everybody else I know, plus Miss Wyoming (how can I miss Wyoming when I've never Wyomed?), O'Reilly's Learning Perl, a couple books on information design, and a coffee table book from Phaidon on 20th century artists that was remaindered at $20. We wandered around the mall trying to figure out what to get mom for her birthday and sorta decided on a digital camera, which the mall isn't a good place to buy and which we didn't buy online once we got home either.

Also bought groceries, drove home in a roundabout way past one side of the Tidal Basin (it's actually marked with "Cherry Trees" in ADC maps) where it turned out the cherry trees weren't in full bloom yet, watched some teevee (introducing Emily to Futurama), and then cooked the aforementioned dinner.

The weekend's various conversations included stuff about work and goals, and unintended intimidation of other people, and well while I should probably recap the results here I think I'm going to call it a night. They can be recounted later.

link (2000-03-12)