Weekend Roundup

It’s been a lost weekend, at least by my count.

As noted before, I tend to feel dissatisfied with time spent in a non-constructive way, even free time. I’ve been lying around the house this weekend, though, watching “The West Wing” and baseball and attempting to not to feel like a waste. As much as I love both of those things, it’s been hard. It’d be easier if I weren’t entering a period of enormous uncertainty regarding finding work and where to live.

I’ve been lying around because I got sick. Friday night. Either I had too much liquid and not enough food in my stomach, or the food I did have was tainted. Either way, I had to leave house party I’d gone to with my roommate, run off the subway because I was getting sick, throw up, and subsequently walk more than a mile home with vomit on parts of my jeans and shirt.

I don’t feel too bad about it, honestly, other than that I’ve stayed home much of today and all of yesterday trying to feel better. It wasn’t my fault, really, at least not as directly as the times I drank myself to puking when I was in college. And what’s finally become real to me is the flipside of New York loneliness – there’s no such thing as shame, because nobody knows who you are (unless you have a Seinfeldian neurosis and can't let things go). The people on the subway who saw me get sick will never see me again, and the poor sap who cleaned it up will never know me at all.

It’s very freeing.

Oh, and one last word on A Clockwork Orange. I rented and re-watched it this weekend while it was still fresh in my mind, and I still think it makes a better movie than book, for a few reasons.

A) It doesn’t get as preachy. I’ve said enough about that already.
B) The made-up language takes over the novella, enough that you have to re-read passages to understand them. In the film, however, it’s scaled back enough and there’s enough exterior context that it’s no problem, and helps create the aura very well.
C) The visual of Alex strapped down in the chair, and the music. People may yammer on about the virtue of books for making the reader employ his/her imagination – and there was, if you can believe this, a trend story in the Times today about the technology gap in how young people and old people read things – there’s no comparing reading about music to listening to music. I’m listening to Beethoven’s 9th right now, and I will fight anyone who says this is not the most incredible work of art created by anyone, ever. I’ve felt this way for some years now and foresee feeling the same way long into the future.

That was perhaps an overly aggressive statement. Forgive me. I'm feeling a big pugnacious now that I have my stomach back.

It’s 3ish on a Sunday afternoon, however, and I’m feeling much better. If only the rain would stop now, I’ll go outside for the first time in a while. If not…there’s still two unwatched episodes on my current disc of “The West Wing.”