I was afraid this would happen. After only a handful of days off from school, I’m already feeling way too lazy for my own good. I like to think of myself as a pretty hard worker, and most of the time I don’t have any problem believing that. Right now, though, I am being extremely lazy. I think I watched more television and movies yesterday than I have on any single day of the last year (video games not included, obviously – but that does include the Lord of the Rings marathons). I watched Bill and Ted, Yessongs, True Grit in the theater (which was incredible by the way) and Audition after midnight. Let me just say a few things about those last two: Jeff Bridges is one hundred per cent the man, I didn’t really want to see that guy get his foot chopped off, the scene with the two guys in the cabin was awesome, and Audition was a lot less scary than I expected it to be. Even watching it at 1 AM didn’t really seem to make that much of a difference. I mean it was definitely gory, and it was definitely an interesting head game, but scary…not really. It’s a Japanese film from the late nineties about this guy whose wife dies and he holds an audition to find himself a new wife – it starts out pretty light and almost romantic-comedy-ish, and at certain point pretty quickly devolves to some classic horror incomprehensibility. It may be due to how tired I was, but I still don’t really know how it makes sense. I just need some time to wrap my brain around it. But it was pretty awesome, regardless.
I don’t watch scary movies too often, but one thing I’ve noticed about the ones I have seen is that a lot of the fear that I get out of them has depended on how scary I expected them to be. Maybe that’s just me, but I feel like horror movies would be a lot less affecting to me if I started watching them not knowing anything about them. I really think the genre depends to some degree on that anticipation and assumption that’s performed by the audience before they even sit down in the theater.
Instead of watching movies today, I decided to make myself a bit more useful and fix my mom’s ancient laptop that ran Windows XP but a few hours ago. My dad insisted that I use the upgrade DVD he bought to install Windows 7, but of course, due to my growing intolerance of things made by Microsoft, I spent a lot of energy attempting to convince him to go the way of Ubuntu. I tried to highlight the increase in performance the laptop would experience once being wiped and reinstalled with Meerkat, as well as the OS’ resistance to viruses, a problem that the computer had run into far too many times in the past. So just a few minutes ago, I managed to convince my parents and I’m now working on the switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu. I’ve never used Wine before, but that’s apparently what has to be done in order for iTunes to run. It’ll be an adventure. Anyway, that whole thing (backup, installation, and configuration included) has given me a nice big project that’s filled most of my day.
I’m seeing the Wu-Tang tomorrow in Philly! That should certainly be interesting. Until then, I’m going to be enjoying my break and chilling….so very hard.