I started this post a few days ago and decided to let it marinate, as I wasn’t happy with my writing. I’m still not, but I can live with it for now. I write this intro bit only because some of the days are off. Can you live with that? Good.
First: if this were Christmas vacation, I’d be heading, right now, to school to meet the crew for the Habitat excursion to Mexico. I’d be beside myself with nervousness about bringing high school students to a foreign country. I’d be wondering if I’d packed enough, or too much. It’d be before I got my above-the-eye nastiness. A lot’s changed since then.

Thankfully, this is a break in which the most stressful thing so far has been spending a great and relaxing weekend in Boston with my sisters and some friends. We wandered around, caught up on what’s been going on in our lives, read the paper over coffee, and just had a weekend. Sometimes you need that.

I finished reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American over the weekend as well. I remembered watching the movie, but not very much about what it was about–it was all a blur to me, a blur of beautifully-shot nighttime scenes of Saigon in the 50s, back in the French colonial days, and Michael Caine being Michael Caine. The film was visually stunning and rekindled, when I saw it, my desire to travel in SE Asia. Movies, books, and music have a tendency to do that to me, to make me want to go somewhere new. It was a heady cocktail of Sigur Rós (“Popplagið“) and The Girl in the Cafe that reobsessed me with Iceland.

The book, on the other hand, made me think a lot about my writing. For the past few years I’ve had, at the back of my mind, a nascent novel that would somehow combine my ideas about memory (and its loss due to Alzheimer’s), the Holocaust, and the kind of modern ennui that I was so good at a few years ago. The problem is, though, that writing the book has become a colossal exercise in frustration. What I liked so much about reading Greene’s book, I think, was its simplicity. There are really only three characters and one central problem: Pyle, an American agent whose murder drives the flashbacks in the books, is in love with Phuong, the Vietnamese girlfriend of the British journalist (and the book’s narrator) Fowler. That’s it. And from that simple premise (a love trial superimposed on a murder investigation and some shady colonialist counterinsurgency stuff), a masterpiece.

On Thursday, I saw Notes on a Scandal. Again, another simple premise resulting in a very moving story. Cate Blanchett plays a young art teacher who begins a love affair with one of her high school students. Judi Dench is the veteran spinster teacher who earns Blanchett’s character’s trust, then uses it to manipulate her. That’s pretty much it. It helps that Blanchett and Dench are two of the best actresses in the business, maybe even in the history of the business (is that hyperbole? probably not), but the story was so compelling in its simplicity that the time flew by. I had no idea how long the movie was. It felt like about 30 minutes, but it probably was more.

So what’s left? Going to see Macbeth tonight. Got a couple of rehearsals tomorrow (did you know that I play bass for both an Irish punk band and a neo-soul band?). Then it’s back to work on Monday. I’ll be spending this afternoon getting my act together for this upcoming week. And that’s it.