In Other News

In other news...

1. According to my doctors, I'm in full remission. That's a happy thought. It's been a long year and a half, but apparently it wasn't all for nothing. The neuropathy in my feet and legs remains fairly ferocious, but compared to ESHAP chemotherapy and c. difficile and apheresis and all that, it's a picnic. Nothing that experienced in 49 years comes close to ESHAP for sheer sustained horror.

2. Our satellite TV blew up the other day. I think it's something wrong with the antenna, but what do I know. Since there's no satellite TV, we watched the new Star Trek movie the other day. I liked it - it's cheerful and adventurous and fun to watch, but it totally destroys everything that I understand to be canonical about the Star Trek universe. Yeah, I know, it's an alternate timeline and all that, but come on, can we stop proliferating timelines all the time? Would it have been THAT hard to write a prequel that didn't destroy the planet Vulcan and spawn a whole new alternate reality? It shouldn't surprise me, considering who directed it - Lost is nothing BUT proliferating alternate realities, so many of them that honestly, there's no catching up for me.

3. I started watching Breaking Bad the other day, when they were showing a bunch of the early episodes in a row. I quite liked it, though obviously my own experiences with cancer, chemotherapy and the costs thereof may have predisposed me to like it. But the new season? Just another grim crime show, as far as I can tell, good but sufficiently far removed from its original premise that it doesn't seem worth my while.

4. Baxter likes me again. He had to be locked up in the office while my immune system was hors de combat, and he appeared to have forgotten who I was in the span of those months. But now he's back out of lockup and seems happy enough to see me, especially when I have food.

5. I keep toying with the idea of learning a second language. Considering where I live, Spanish would be the obvious choice - I'd be able to read the billboards, if nothing else, and there'd be plenty of opportunity to practice. But intellectually, I'm really attracted to the idea of learning Latin. Latin would be about as useful in Arizona as, say, Finnish or Urdu, and contrary to popular belief Latin isn't even the language that English sprang from. So it'd be like a basketball in a hydroelectric power plant - useless, but fun.

6. I was tempted to believe that the population of out-of-state drivers was starting to wane, now that it has started to get warm, but the other day I was sitting in a modest traffic jam waiting for something to happen and realized that every license plate I could see around me was from Washington State. Every last one. If there hadn't been all those people from Washington on the road, there probably wouldn't have been a traffic jam in the first place. But here's what gets me. In any given romantic comedy, the man is usually an architect and usually lives in either Manhattan or Seattle. So every other movie I watch beats me over the head with the hipness, trendiness and sheer superiority of Seattle, and meantime I'm stuck in a traffic jam consisting entirely of PEOPLE FROM SEATTLE. It's not that I hate Seattle, though I will say that I used to think Seasonal Affective Disorder was a joke until I spent a month in Seattle, and then all the chic scarves and trendy trench coats and oppressively hip coffee joints in the city weren't enough to console me in my desolation. If it's so great, how come it takes me 45 minutes a day longer to drive home in the winter because of all the people from Washington?

One rarely sees movies about Portland, and one rarely sees Oregon license plates on the road here. Coincidence??

7. I think cinema hit a new low with the movie Step Brothers. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be a satire of losers who won't grow up and all that, but if it's so painfully stupid and cringe-worthy you can't bear to watch it, what's the point of the satire? It's so awful I actually felt sorry for Will Farrell. It's like watching that ski jumper crash over and over in the opening sequence of Wide World of Sports. You want to reach out and try to help the poor bastard, send him a fruit basket or a coupon for a free massage or something, but there's no stopping the train wreck until the last car has derailed.