Thursday, April 27, 2006
Random Thoughts After A Night Out
Sharon and I had a quick night out on the town last night, but nothing so thematically unified that I can devote an entire post to analyzing it. So instead, I will offer some random thoughts from the evening. While I can't deliver authentic Jack -- who can? -- I will endeavor to offer a truly Jack-style experience.
(** Being a bit of a techie, I will qualify this by noting that these thoughts will actually only be pseudo-random -- most people overlook this finer point when posting their so-called random thoughts.)
If you really, really liked this -- or even really, really hated it -- there's lots more:
(** Being a bit of a techie, I will qualify this by noting that these thoughts will actually only be pseudo-random -- most people overlook this finer point when posting their so-called random thoughts.)
- We decided to do dinner and a movie. But since our mid-week babysitter can't stay late, and the nearest theatre is a 30-40 minute drive from our house, we had to hurry. In an effort not to miss the first half of the movie, I managed to choke down a romantic burger and fries in approximately 18 minutes while Sharon inhaled the more healthy "omellete and assorted slimy fried vegetables sandwich" in approximately the same amount of time.
- Although we were in a hurry to get to the theater, we were confident that we could be a few minutes late without penalty since there are always at least 10-15 minutes of advertisements before the actual paid entertainment begins. So we stopped off to buy a purse in the middle of our run from the food court to the theatre -- how long could that take? Seriously. It didn't take long. One thing I love about my wife is her ability to spend money quickly and decisively. I mean that in a good way.
- Ok, so maybe we're not the savviest of movie-goers as we had thought. We arrived four minutes late and the film was ALREADY STARTED! I thought about complaining to the management about the outrageous practice of starting their movies on time, and demanding they restart the projection because I had missed the first part of the opening credits, but some of the other patrons looked like they might turn on me if I made them watch the credits again. Suffice it to say, I'll be scouring the web for an illicit copy of the opening credits to Spike Lee's "Inside Man" -- and it won't be pirating! I paid for those credits!
- It wouldn't be a Jack-style post without a quick word about urinals. So I should mention that we would have only been two minutes late if we hadn't stopped for a quick bathroom break on the way into Hall #2. I mention it only because of the gross violation of male bathroom etiquette by one of my fellow patrons. I, having entered the empty bathroom first, naturally picked a centrally located urinal, leaving plenty of empty distant urinals available to either side. You might think that is a bad strategy, and that I should have picked either the far left or far right urinal, but the acoustics in the corner are no good. Anyway, there I am, and suddenly another movie-goer strolls in and picks, out of all the urinals in the world, the one IMMEDIATELY to my right! Could he possibly have chosen one a few yards of porcelain away from me? No, apparently he could not. I suppose I could have tolerated this with a little Zen meditation and a little leftward focus -- if it weren't for all of his extra-curricular activity, which made me long for the corner spot with the bad accoustics, and a gas mask. At least it was incentive for me to hurry, lest he manage to leave first and any subsequent urinal patrons assume that I was responsible for his misdeeds.
- Is it acceptable to ignore desparate phone calls from your children when you're watching a movie? I'm really tempted. But then again, there's always the chance that the house is burning down, which is why we pay for babysitters in the first place. I think next time we go out, when we write on the whiteboard the number at which we can be reached, I'm going to put up the number for the fire department instead. After the first angry exchange with the firemen, I think my kids will get the point. Yeah, that's definitely what I should do. Oh, and when I download those opening credits I missed, I'm also going to download the part where they explain who all the characters are, and the climactic scene where they make sense of everything.
- Bullet point movie review of "Inside Man": eh. Stylish and moody, taut and well-paced, the film nonetheless seems hollow at the core. A perfect caper movie needs a perfect caper explication, like the Sting. This did a half-decent job -- not good enough. Spike Lee should avoid caper flicks and stick to whatever kind of films he usually makes. The acting wasn't bad; although, Jodie Foster's acclaimed turn as a carnivourous corporate problem-solver seemed to be done with more gusto than finesse, but who am I to tell Jodie Foster how to act?
- And do rhetorical questions still need a question mark? I think we need a new piece of punctuation: the rhetorical question mark. Maybe I'll copyright it, or patent it or something so I can get a cut of the profits from every rhetorical question from now on.
- When we got home, the kids were in bed and the house was clean -- our cleaner comes on Wednesdays -- so all was well with the world. Except for the usual post-cleaner provocations. Why is it that cleaners never put things back where they find them, and they never notice that every week those things keep moving back to precisely the same other spot they seem to find so offensive? This constant tug of war, week after week, cleaner after cleaner, is driving me nuts. Every Wednesday evening I have to rearrange the order of the burners on the stove top, pull all the tissues back out of the closet and toss them around the house -- I have allergies which is why I'm writing this at 5 in the morning -- and pull all the trashcans back out from their hidden recesses to a spot where trash could actually enter them. After all that, I'm almost tempted to clean the house myself from now on. Almost. Well, not really. But I might super glue the trashcans where I like them.
