various

At the moment, actorly things are fucking with my schedule, and I have to spend today sorting out a morass of random hypotheticals. But at least I'm getting called in for stuff. Saw John on some random UPN show last night, was, as per usual, wondering both how I get to the next level, and what exactly that level is.

Went to the sort of restaurant I used to go to in the good old days of the Internet boom last night, and enjoyed it immensely, but only felt freakish nostaliga when I visited the bathroom, because I had leaned on the sinks in so many of them talking myself down from wine and fury.

The Germans should be catching me up on the last of the back pay when the accountant gets back from vacation, sometime next week I think, maybe it's the week after, I can't remember. They might be giving me some pay now in a direct deposit from Germany, but that would be gross pay and then there would be bizarre accounting to fix that later, which is how they gave me that huge headache last time. Also, the girl I loathed has quit, and now of course, I doubt my entire perception of the whole thing, but no, I _know_ what I heard, and I know people's motions and tones, but when you work off the crap most other people don't bother to notice... le sigh. At least she once made cookies and never poisoned me. Really, what more can a girl ask?

The homemade granola bars at Whole Foods are amazing. And the bathing suit I bought without trying it on actually fits me.

AFI song list

I'm not sure I should be proud of this but I have seen Every. Single. Movie. that spawned the songs on the AFI 100 Songs list. The program was mostly a boring piece of crap, as these things go, but I had lots of fun being nostalgic and crying over every little thing.

When I was growing up, my father and I always watched all the Sunday movies on WPIX. The Morning Movie. The Afternoon Movie. The Late Afternoon Movie.... and so forth. They really did have little title graphics for each of these random installments from their vaults, which were generally either Abbott and Costello films or old movie musicals (I do feel cheated that The Andrews Sisters didn't wind up anywhere on the list).

My parents don't know much about film. They don't even really like it very much. I bought them a DVD player recently that they never use. But I think they've always appreciated the wonder of film's emotional shorthand, which makes sense in a family with a lot of emotion and really peculiar communications skills. Making sure I saw every movie ever was one of the ways in which they did the best they could brilliantly. Which I suppose is why I get go a little nuts when they won't go see the films I push them towards now, but I suppose as the girl who was always called too emotional, my own shorthand is rather too much information.

Lot of very strange memories tonight, including Working Girl of all things, which has that sort of "one day I want to play this song for _my_ moment" sort of cheesy theme song. I saw it in the theatre with my parents when it came out, remember thinking of it often when I temped on Wall Street and bawled like a baby just now because if you remember that film it was _all_ about shots of the Twin Towers.

My grandfather used to sing I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy to me on the phone. And my father always tried to get me to like Mel Brooks movies but it never happened and I don't think it ever will.

And oddly, all of this started with me watching an episode of West Wing that I'd never seen before and is probably the best one ever because it is so about moral ambiguity and how sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing and that it is your friends who lead you into and out of those moments. And then CJ's crying on a bench in Times Square and they're playing Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah and there was a theatre subplot, and oh... I just dissolved.

Hallelujah is a lot of things as a song, and has a lot of resonances with some pretty terrible, powerless times in my life, but what it will always be about in my mind is this need to be destroyed and for that to be a relief, just to be simple again.

I guess it's for the best to know that sometimes the feelings songs tell you about can only be found in songs, because you live life stupid until you know that one, but God, putting that knowledge off as long as you can (or being forgetful) is a fine, fine thing.