Quick! Someone call the girl police, and file a report

It is currently 77 degrees here in Princeton, at five o'clock in the afternoon in late October - does anyone else feel that there's something wrong with that? Pumpkins on the porch, leaves on the ground...and shorts and flip-flops on every passerby. Although occasionally I do see someone engaging in what I call "wishful dressing" wearing jeans and a turtleneck, pretending it's autumn and sweating like crazy.

Whew. I'm glad I wrote that last back-to-reality post before I checked everyone else's blogs...Doc Broc's post would have made me a wee bit self-conscious, I think. I don't post those lists to sound cooler than I am*, honestly...it's more like, since I consider this blog (and all y'alls blogs) the way that we keep in touch with each other, I like to tell you what I'm up to. And read what you're up to. And then if we've read the same thing or seen the same movie we can talk about it. You know. Connect. Promote interaction. As much as is possible on the web, anyway.

I kind of went on total non-computer status there for a while - didn't read anyone else's blogs, didn't check e-mail, didn't surf the web at all. I'm not exactly sure why...I just needed to disconnect for a while, I guess. These past few months have felt like a sort of time out of time, an extended summer vacation, and the ridiculously warm weather hasn't done anything to disabuse me of that notion. I keep feeling like this life we're living in Princeton is just for now, and that sooner or later we'll have to go back to "real" life, whatever that is. Maybe it's because we lived like that for so long that I expect it to continue, or maybe it's because we're only renting this house so I don't think of it as our "real" house. I don't know. But there's been a feeling of impermanence hanging around me, and I need to take steps to remedy that - start getting involved in life in Princeton in a real way.

*Precisely 19% cool, if you want to know.

And now, a cute Nolan story, apropos of nothing:

Jake (the bigger, male, slightly-less-astonishingly-dumb one of our pair of cats) was having a spazz attack, running around the house in that sudden urgent way that cats have. Nolan was eating breakfast at the table. Nolan says, "Why are you running around, Jake?" and then answers himself as Jake and says, "I'm chasing my tail!"

And another bizarre message has arrived from the outlands of my brain regarding my choice of reading material and inter-arts confusion: I'm reading a book called "The Shadow of the Wind," a sort of gothic, multi-layered book-within-a-book set in Spain around the time of the revolution. It was recommended to me by my mother-in-law, who read it for her book club, and although I normally steer clear of "book club" books and anything that comes with a so-called "reader's guide" in the back, Ann (my mother-in-law) has pretty good taste in books and has recommended some past winners to me, so I'm checking it out. Of course, every time I go to pick the book up and see "The Shadow of the Wind" on the cover, I get the song from Pocahontas stuck in my head, the one that goes, "Can you paint with all the colors of the wind..." but since I never really got into Pocahontas the way I did some of the earlier "new" Disney movies (see also: Little Mermaid, Aladdin, etc.) I don't know the rest of the words to that song, just a vague scrap of the melody, and then that runs over and over through my head and becomes distorted until it further resembles Ronnie Dobbs' plaintive show-stopper "Y'all Are Brutalizing Me" from Mr. Show's second season. And then I start thinking about that episode and how the movie they made from it, "Run, Ronnie Run" (with a guest appearance by Ebony's mayun) never really lived up to the brilliance of that episode, and how some comedy skits should just be left in their short incandescent wonderfulness and not be stretched and tortured into full-length films. Not that anyone from Saturday Night Live would listen to my puny little opinion, and not that I'm not grateful for the sight of Mandy Patinkin, stark naked, singing "Can't a man not control his bitch with violence?," but still. You see where I'm going with this? Neither do I, but it's far, far away from General Franco and the plight of everyday people in war-torn Spain, which is where I started.

Sigh.

Sometimes I worry about me.

Thanks for reading.


P.S. Yes, some new Nolan pictures are coming soon. Soon, I tell you!