5.30.99

    This morning I had popcorn for breakfast.

    We got up early today. Or, maybe it's just that we went to bed so late at night, both of us reading books and playing with the cat. We went to see The Phantom Menace. It was okay. I studiously avoided all negative commentary within the journal world as well as mass-media in order to have hope of enjoying this flick. I think its biggest problem was the way in that everything was obviously a setup for what was to come. I wonder if this should be ignored since this seems to me to be the first of its kind. Who ever heard of a prequel? We already know the ending. Everything else is just filler. What an obstacle.

    We tried to go yesterday but the 4 o'clock show was sold out. T. was irritated. So we bought tickets to the 10:30 a.m. show and got up not so early but bright to see it. The crowd was fun and the mood was jovial. It wouldn't have been so jovial if the ticket-taker had tried to take my coffee away. She was a wise woman and looked the other way.

    We were up late reading the night before, Microserfs for him and Memoirs of a Geisha for me. Memoirs is an excellent book. The imagery and the dialogue and the study of the culture is fascinating. The characters and their motivations take you right into the story. For the past four nights I've had geisha dreams. They've been very tiring and distressful. I've had dreams that I was becoming a geisha, that I was interviewing geishas and that I was researching Japanese culture. I'm finally finished with the book and I hope the dreams will go away. They were so tiring.

    Go buy the book, it's remarkably enjoyable.