soleless
Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod. The bus strike is maybe probably possibly ending by Monday. Perhaps. Which is good, because as much as I’m enjoying telling myself how much extra exercise I’m getting with all this walking (got that?), it also feels like the soles of my feet were ripped off, somehow extracted from my shoes, and left behind on the sidewalk somewhere between here and work. Or maybe between work and the film festival. Ouch.
Speaking of the film festival (this would be the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, which ends Thursday the 22nd, so you’d better get busy), I’m going to have to go ahead and NOT recommend Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Maybe it’s wickedly funny or bitingly insightful or at the very least comprehensible if you’re Taiwanese, but since I’m not I think it may be the most boring movie I’ve ever seen. The whole thing took place in a movie theater (whoa, trippy, it’s like…WE’RE…watching THEM…watching a movie…holy shit.), and was comprised primarily of a series of two-/three-/four-minute shots of people doing NOTHING. Not speaking. Quite frequently not moving, either. Or sometimes, just to mix it up, scenes of empty hallways or rooms. No people cluttering the scene at all.
I will say that I wrote more on my little ballot slip than I have for any of the other movies I’ve seen at the fest. But I have a sneaking suspicion that my verbosity was due to the fact that I had…oh, about 82 minutes to plan exactly what I was going to say. It was very much like the quarter in college during which I spent the bulk of my Logic 101 lectures carefully composing my long, scathing evaluation of the complete pompous dick of a professor. God, that was satisfying.
In other news, I had an odd encounter at Pandora’s tonight. (Sadly, it did not involve Angst-Boy, who was, once again, distressingly absent. I hope he’s okay.) I was innocently wolfing my sandwich and reading my book when a woman—late 30s/early 40s, I’d guess, though I’m the worst EVER at gauging age. Absolutely terrible age-gauger. Anyhow, roundish face, glasses, slightly disheveled hair, generally pretty average-looking—approached me and warned me that “this is going to sound like an odd question.”
Always a promising opening.
She proceeded to ask if my name began, by any chance, with a C or a K. When I answered no, she explained that she’d had a dream in which a woman with reddish-blonde hair, blue-green eyes, and a slender nose (ok, so she got that one a bit wrong) told her that she had to meet her at a house converted into a coffee shop. Apparently Mystery Dream Woman also told Dreaming Woman that MDW would be alone and that her name began with C or K. DW explained further that it wasn’t as though MDW was the love of her life or anything, but that it was the kind of dream you have every three or four years and just have to pay attention to. She left saying that she was “still looking.”
So this was kind of weird. But weird in a kind of fascinating way. I mean, if I had been this woman and I had seen me, I would’ve been pretty damn sure that I’d found MDW and the prediction or whatever was coming true. Granted, the nose was off. But other than that, all the criteria were filled. Until we got to the name, that is. And I have to say that, oddly, I felt a little disappointed for her. And maybe for myself. After all, adventure could have been knocking! I wonder what she would have done if I’d said yes?
Hell, she might have at least bought me a latte or something.