Lack of updates
Sorry for the relative paucity of substantive entries lately. I can't really talk about the three or four most stressful things that are going on in my life, and I haven't felt up to journalling about other stuff.
A few things for now:
I'm halfway through the three-week period in which six different out-of-town friends are visiting. That's gone well so far (though sadly, I've entirely missed the visit of one of them), but for that and a few other reasons I've had a fair bit more group social interaction lately than I'd been having for a while. On the one hand, seeing friends good! On the other hand, it's tiring; I'm an introvert. (There's a meme going around in which people take some new rendition of an online Meyers-Briggs test; I'm not gonna bother with this new version, but my traditional results are IN*J, with the * indicating a pretty even balance for T/F.)
Took a vacation day from work on Tuesday to try to relax and de-stress a little. Was nice. Also oddly productive: I'm now, for the first time ever, seven weeks ahead on finalizing stories for SH. Also in the last few days, Mary Anne's helped me pick out and put up curtains in both bedrooms (with Kam's help too); we finished getting them up on Tuesday, and they definitely help block light in my room in the morning. I'm not yet sure whether they help enough; I slept badly both Tuesday night and last night, but that wasn't 'cause of too much light.
Mary Anne and I have seen two movies while she's been here. I'd recommend both of them, though these are not strong recommendations; worth seeing, but not works of genius or anything.
- Intolerable Cruelty is the recent Coen Brothers movie (a romantic comedy about divorce, more or less) starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, with Geoffrey Rush and Billy-Bob Thornton in smaller parts; not one of the Coen Brothers' most brilliant outings, but fun, and has a couple of nice twists and funny moments, and the actors are good. (I keep confusing the title with Cruel Intentions, which is totally unrelated.)
- Mona Lisa Smile features Julia Roberts as an idealistic and progressive young art history professor at Wellesley in 1953; better than I expected from the previews, with some very nice moments and several unusual aspects despite telling a fairly ordinary overall story. And even that isn't quite as ordinary as I expected; I was expecting a female version of Dead Poets Society, but I think there's more to it than that.
Sometime in the last several days I think I figured out what was wrong with the layout code for the show-latest-comments version of my main journal page; I'd appreciate it if folks would take a look at the test version and let me know if it looks okay. You can post a comment (though not in LJ) or send me email; let me know your browser name and version number, and your operating system name and version number, and whether the page has any weird text overprinting or huge gaps of vertical space. I still haven't decided what to do about displaying the entry title, number of comments, and timestamp; I haven't come up with a way to show them all on one line that I like, so if you have any suggestions about that, let me know.
Finally, speaking of comments (and memes, as I was earlier), I rather like this, which I picked up from supergee and metasilk:
Invent a memory of me and post it in the comments. It can be anything you want, so long as it's something that's never happened. Then, of course, post this to your journal and see what people would like to remember of you, only the universe failed to cooperate in making it happen so they had to make it up instead.
I would add that it doesn't actually have to be a memory you would like to have had; any made-up memory of me is fine. Also a reminder that if you're reading this in LJ, you should follow the link to my journal page to post comments.
