Dinner was McDonald's.
Saw the DVD of Daniel Vigne's The Return of Martin Guerre (for the second time). It's a 16th-century courtroom drama based on a true story, about a husband who deserts his wife and property for the army, and returns a decade later... but has he been replaced by an impersonator? Keeps you guessing, with appealing performances by Gerard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye.
Dreamed of visiting the Mount Allison University library building and finding that all the floors except the main floor had been closed off; telling someone I'd decided to retire.
Went shopping.
Dinner was roast chicken.
Went to the NDP campaign office party in the evening. I didn't stay long.
Headache.
"'I'm afraid that would come under the heading of "over-exertion,"' said Madam Pomfrey."
--Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (hey, that entry has a triple-iterated quotation!)
Dreamed of two students (one of them Billy Bob Thornton) coming to London to co-operate in a Ph.D. program creating a Frankenstein-like artificial life; both of them breaking rules together; a British museum that levitated into the air; reflecting that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was fortunate to be able to devote his whole life to his art.
Darren, the NDP campaign's money man, was so grateful to me for finding the list of local Liberal contributors that he treated me to lunch at Harvey's. (For him it was breakfast!) He says that if we can get our support up to 25 or 30%--it was 15% in the last election--we can get critical mass.
Dinner was lasagna.
Saw Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man at the Revue. It's about Timothy Treadwell, a guy who lived among dangerous grizzly bears in Alaska and became famous before he became careless and got killed by one. He was obsessive in a way that clearly endeared him to Herzog.
Went down to Dragon Lady and picked up some Dick Tracys, Steve Canyons and Terry and the Pirates comics I recently acquired on Ebay.
I also got a collection of newspaper comics spanning decades, mostly from Nova Scotia, and some Little Orphan Annie and Kerry Drake Sundays.
Dinner was salmon.
At the campaign office I used cutting and pasting to create a new spreadsheet of names with email addresses. Ron said to me, "You're the man!"
Saw Terry Zwigoff's anti-Christmas comedy Bad Santa at the Royal. Billy Bob Thornton showed his natural comic talent as a boozing, self-destructive skirt-chaser working as a department store Santa as a cover for robbing shopping mall safes. But the joke wore thin in a rather depressing way.
Dinner was roast pork.
Went to the Geneva Centre's Christmas party. They had karaoke, and I sang "Day-O."
The last of the Ebay auctions I bid on in my latest round is over. I bought about a grand worth of stuff over the past fortnight.
Rolf Harris' portrait of Elizabeth II is a pip! She looks like everyone's favourite grandma. (She reportedly enjoyed sitting for him, and it shows.) [This was before he was convicted of pedophilia.]
Dreamed of reading a book of Pauline Kael reviews of Katherine Hepburn movies while walking along York Street toward our old house in Sackville, N.B.; noticing that I was being silently followed by a young Elizabeth Taylor; mentioning that she'd made her first movie at age 12 (which is true); her insisting she was actually 16; being in the Sackville house and mentioning that it seemed bigger in my dreams than in "real life."
At the NDP campaign office I started entering the sign and volunteer location data on the computer.
Saw Bob Clark's A Christmas Story (for the second time) at the Royal. It's a broad but witty nostalgic comedy.
John and his family brought over dinner, which was vegan shepherd's pie. (What a concept!) I showed Kathrine the pictures from my London trip.
On Six Feet Under Nate decided to quit the business; Keith got a new job as a celebrity bodyguard. This episode wasn't as good as usual: too much sex. [The show had "jumped the shark" by this time.]
Baked rye bread overnight.
Went to the NDP campaign office and sorted call sheets into their alphabetical order, then put them into binders.
After I got home I went online, did a search on the Elections Canada website and found a list of the last election's Liberal contributors in the St. Paul's riding. Then I emailed the results to Darren, who plans to put them on a mailing list. (I guess he thinks they can be converted.)
Dinner was takeout Chinese food. (My fortune cookie said my life is about to go through a thrilling period!)
Saw the DVD of Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds (for the second time). Subtly compelling.
Dreamed of Father and I being about to leave London; selling off a black and white TV set we used to own; my going downstairs to a store full of refrigerated desserts to buy one; realizing that I'd left my glasses behind; a book of poems for children.
At the NDP campaign office I addressed some more envelopes and sorted through a big pile of call sheets, separating ones that had no phone address and ones that might be high priority.
Dinner was spaghetti.
The choir had their Christmas concert. The parents attended, but Moira was in Kingston again.
"I thought he was a very nice man, and I thought so up to the moment I cut his throat"--Capote
Got some London Free Press comic sections, a batch of Li'l Abners and a few teenage romance comics from Ebay.
Saw about 20 minutes of Cure, a Japanese movie about a serial killer or something. Too strange for me, though it was well made.
At the NDP campaign office I sorted sign location slips into four zones, then started sending out payment envelopes to committed donors.
Dinner was cod.
In the evening I went back and completed the remaining donation envelopes. The donation total is about ten grand!
Later I saw Capote at the Varsity. It's a fascinating depiction of the process through which the slippery but important writer Truman Capote came to write the landmark "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood. Philip Seymour Hoffman was remarkably creepy in the title role, while Catherine Keener was an inspired Harper Lee. (Now there's an actress who can play smart women!) I was reminded of Janet Malcolm' paradoxical assertion that journalists inevitably play con games in pursuit of the truth.
Went shopping.
Saw the DVD of Fred Zinnemann's movie of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!. Rather dated.
Went to the NDP campaign HQ for the first time. I wrote up some sign location slips, and also met our candidate Paul Somerville.
Dinner was fettucine alfredo.
Got of set of five New York Sunday News comics sections from 1972 and 1975 that I'd bought on Ebay.
The choir had the last rehearsal before Friday's concert. It looks like we'll do "O Wake and Hear the Voices" without the soloists' part.
Stayed indoors all day.
Dinner was roast chicken.
Saw the DVD of Wim Wenders' The American Friend, based on one of the Patricia Highsmith novels centred on the psychopathic antihero Tom Ripley (played by Dennis Hopper here). Wenders' meditative pacing, which worked so well in Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, was less suitable in a thriller.
Finally found out where the NDP campaign headquarters is: the same place as last time! (Moira noticed it.)
Baked whole wheat bread overnight.
Dreamed of reflecting that the Harry Potter books all have basically the same story.
Went to the Rosedale library for my job interview. I think it went pretty well.
Dinner was pork chops.
We went over the whole concert at choir practice. It isn't clear what we'll do with "O Wake and Hear the Voices" since the mezzo is in a family crisis. [I think we cut it.]
Someone in the choir saw the canasta program with the footage of me. It turns out that they presented me as a canasta champion waiting for someone to take me on! [I'd started a Canasta Meetup, so some people came to film some footage of me...]
Dreamed of a short-haired middle-aged guy in the band Bon Giovi(!) with a British accent, doing a TV commercial for a local furniture store with his wife.
Went to a Book Club Meetup where we talked about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Seems to me that C.S. Lewis was throwing in whatever came into his head. There were a dozen people there and we each paid $5, more than enough for expenses. Some went on to see the movie, but I'm avoiding it.
One event a day not being enough, I also went on a Meetin walk in the Kingsway area late in the afternoon. Again there were about a dozen people. We walked in the neighbourhood north of Bloor Street, with street names like Prince Edward Drive and Queen Anne Road and saw fancy Victorian-style houses with flamboyant Christmas lights and some elaborate displays. (One house showed the Grinch descending a tree head first!)
Dinner was Burger King.
Saw the first episode of the fourth season of Six Feet Under, in which Nate fought with Lisa's family over what to do with her remains. (In the end he double-crossed them by giving them someone else's ashes!)
Dreamed of being about to go on a tour of a British museum; trying to put my coat in a coin-op locker; locking it without putting my coat in; searching for the right coin; watching The Beverley Hillbillies through a TV screen's reflection on a window; an LP with yellow vinyl with the label showing the title "Entree." (When I was young we had a lot of 78 RPM Golden Records with yellow vinyl.)
The parents and I went to see Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale at the Cumberland. It's about two New York writers getting divorced and their sons taking sides. They were all so lacking in "people skills" that I had to feel sorry for them. Cold, unsentimental and often perversely funny.
Afterward we went to Pizza Hut and had a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs.
"Then they aren't Christians."
--Walk the Line
Dreamed of visiting my hometown Sackville, N.B.; finding out that they'd changed the name of Union Street; living on my own and being unable to take it; remembering my first experience of it at 24 (I couldn't take it then); comparing it to the scene in Born Free where Elsa the lioness spent a week back in the wild and couldn't take it.
Dinner was KFC.
Saw James Mangold's Walk the Line at the Varsity. It's a somewhat conventional but highly entertaining biography of Johnny Cash. Great concert scenes. (I wish I had a girlfriend like June Carter!) It was a Meetin event, but the only other member I could find was Gerard. He's a special education teacher who's found a six-year-old pupil who seems to have Asperger's Syndrome like me. He may arrange for the kid and his family to come meet me.
Moira went to Kingston again.
Dreamed of driving through San Francisco; passing over the bridge that was in Alfred Hitchcock's movie Vertigo (a scene takes place at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, but the bridge in the dream was closer to the city centre); passing by a miniature version of New York's Chrysler Building; saying that Vertigo is the sort of movie you have to see more than once to appreciate it [very true!]; sticking my legs out the front of the car (which someone was driving from the back); the car going off the road and stopping near some destitute scavengers.
Saw another silent comedy from Turner Classic Movies, the funny Beatrice Lillie vehicle Exit Smiling, about a theatrical troupe's maid who aspires to become a leading lady. (Like The Rag Man, it was a print well scored by Linda Martinez, who recently died at only 29.)
We went out to dinner with Donald at the Red Lobster.
Dreamed of seeing a voodoo spell cast in our old house in Sackville, N.B.; being in a crowd of people driving go-carts in a basement; coming out into the Sackville cemetery and seeing an epitaph for a soldier who was kidnapped and murdered.
Went to Dr. Hassan's office and got a new appointment. I also went to the Geneva Centre and finally got my membership renewed.
Dinner was salmon.
Went to a Writers Meetup at the Duke of York. We did an exercise where we created "stories" by passing them around and each adding two lines after seeing only the previous single line. Pretty crazy.
Saw the silent comedy The Rag Man, which we taped off Turner Classic Movies. It's a cute vehicle for Jackie Coogan, who plays a runaway orphan in partnership with a Yiddish junk dealer.
"You know, everyone's a Democrat until they get a little money, then they come to their senses."
--Freaks and Geeks
Dreamed of a Disney animated movie about a group of three going around the world in an airship; "O Terra, Addio," the final duet in the Verdi opera Aida; going to see the new Harry Potter movie and eating popcorn; the Cosby Show episode whose first half ended with the youngest kid wrecking Cosby's vegetable-juicing machine. (I didn't watch the rest.)
Baked raisin bread.
Mailed four more Ebay packages.
Got a big batch of Menomonee Falls Guardian issues from Germany. (There were a long time coming because I sawved a lot of money by having them shipped by surface mail.) My Guardian collection's almost complete now.
Dinner was roast chicken.
The choir rehearsed for the mass next Sunday. We'll also have soloists do the part of that Bach chorale that's too hard for the rest of us.
Dreamed of finding a street in Toronto that looked like my old neighbourhood in Sackville, N.B.; wondering how I ended up back in dreamland (I'd woken up then gone back to sleep but thought I was still awake) and thinking I was out of my head; meeting the Danish guy who'd bought my Disney comic strips on Ebay and wanted to trade strips.
Went to a Meetin outing where we visited the Catherine the Great exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. That's where the money went in the old days!
Dinner was lasagna.
Someone at last night's party mentioned that satellite TV now has the Turner Classic Movies channel. There's a free preview through the end of the month, then I imagine we'll subscribe to it.
Saw the third season finale of Six Feet Under.
Went downtown to Indigo Books and bought J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And started reading it. (I ended up reading over 70 pages!)
Saw Mikio Naruse's silent Farewell to You at the Cinematheque. A very nice story about the troubles of geishas and their families.
My comic-section ad package sold for $20!
Dinner was steak.
Brought the electric heating element up to my room (because the central heating works poorly there).
Went to a party for the opera chorus people at Chris Lea's house in the East End (near Queen & Pape). I brought strawberries with a chocolate fondue.
Yesterday's New York Times crossword was unusually tough for Fridays, but I cracked it in the end.
Father gave me $2000.
Brass monkey weather!
My job interview is set for the afternoon of Monday the 12th. I'll have to reschedule my next session with Dr. Hassan.
I was in Loblaw's and bought a deluxe edition of Bill Bryson's science book A Short History of Practically Everything for $36, a $25 discount. (After all, I'm in the money!)
Sent Sharhal an email with a list of comic strips I still have for sale or trade. (I have over thirty Little Orphan Annie strips, which he's in the market for.)
Dinner was McDonald's.
Spent a long time posting an Ebay package of newspaper comics-section ads. (I had to write a very detailed description.) So I was in such a hurry to get to the Karaoke Meetup that I got Father to drive me down. Of course, nobody else came. So I went home and saw the last of the DVDs of The Prisoner. A sui generis classic, though the finale is very strange.
Sold a second Prince Valiant package for $30!
"I put my heart and soul into that house!" "You should have used lumber"--Green Acres
"There's something wrong with that carburetor." "Sure it is--it needs a new tractor!"--ibid.
Finished the Green Acres DVD. I'd forgotten how funny the show was! (My favourite character is the local huckster Haney.)
Mailed out eight Ebay comic strip packages. I should make close to $200.00!
Dinner was pork steak.
At the Geneva Centre we finally had the much-delayed games night. We played The Amazeing Labyrinth and Apples to Apples, both of which I'd brought.
High school teacher (after encountering a recent graduate in the hallway): "God, I hate it when they come back!"--Freaks and Geeks
Dreamed of the (actual) 1917 suffragette parade in Washington, D.C., including an (actual) group of supportive men and (not actual as far as I know) women on camels; the actual suffragette motto "Deeds, not words"; a hardcover book of children's stories that seemed to have the first half of the pages missing, but they had actually been moved elsewhere in the book. (We had several such books, and some had missing pages.)
Dinner was salmon.
Went to the last taijiquan class. The teacher gave us some Ferrero Rocher candy. I told him the course would have been worthwhile just for the warmup exercises!
Sold the Bringing up Father, Moon Mullins and Ripley's Believe It or Not packages on Ebay.
Didn't get to sleep till 04:30!
"Didn't I explain it to you?" "Yes."
"And didn't you understand?" "No."
--Green Acres
Father to teenage daughter: "If I were such a prude, you wouldn't be here!"--Freaks and Geeks
Dreamed of visiting Goodenough College in London; dreading seeing the episode of The Sopranos where Adrianna got killed. (Then I woke up and remembered that I'd seen it already.)
Got my hair cut. I just got a slight trim, so it'll be long when we're putting on the opera!
Went shopping. I also got some new underwear.
Baked multigrain bread.
Dinner was spaghetti.
Went to the last opera chorus rehearsal before the new year.
It looks like my job will be in the adult literacy program. Katherine says it's in the bag, but I'll believe it when I see it. The interview won't be till next week. (Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.)
We finally did the October accounts for our used book business. A profit of over $250, mostly due to my Ebay sales.
Sold some more Ebay packages: Steve Canyon, Our Boarding House, Captain Kate, Little Iodine. A German paid over $20 for the Prince Valiant package. Only Dick Tracy didn't sell, and I reposted it for another week, since that strip usually sells.
The mild weather came back. I took a big pile of leaves from the front yard, put them in a big bag and moved them close to the compost box so we can mix the two together.
Dinner was roast chicken.
At choir practed we did the rest of "O Wake and Hear the Voices." (Giuseppe cut one short section, which was just "Hallelujah!" in difficult trills.) Catherine feels frustrated about her medical treatment.
"Then why does she keep introducing me as her attorney?"
--Green Acres
"I'm sick of the unhappiness. I want some new unhappiness"--Six Feet Under
Dreamed of being at a high-rise hotel in Washington, D.C. with my family; the building collapsing while I was out; none of us being hurt but my diary being lost; singing the soul song "Hard to Handle."
I was going to see another Naruse silent at the Cinematheque, but I completely forgot about it until it was too late to make it.
John and Kathrine came over and brought vegan burritos for dinner. (Afterward I sneaked out to McDonald's again.)
On Six Feet Under Claire got an abortion; they handled the funeral for an executed serial killer.
Read an article in The Guardian online where Roy Hattersley of Britain's Labour Party pointed out that improved regulation of privatized utilities hadn't worked but carefully added that "nobody in their[sic] right mind" believes that renationalization is still possible. [Speak for yourself, coward!] I wrote them an email saying "Be crazy and ask for the 'impossible.' That's the realistic way to change the world."
Saw Ingmar Bergman's movie of the Mozart opera The Magic Flute (for the third time) at the Cinematheque. One of the best opera movies ever!
Finished reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Preachy twaddle, with a very strange ending. (The children have spent many years in Narnia, growing to adulthood, then they go back through the wardrobe to their former world and become kids again. What the...!) [And the part with kids fighting a "holy war" was tasteless.]
Dinner was takeout Chinese food.
"Mom, did you just break up with my boyfriend?"--Freaks and Geeks
Dreamed of James Bond; being about to spend the night with a family in an igloo, and shovelling some more snow on it to make sure the walls would be thick enough (I was shovelling our walk just the evening before).
Katherine phoned from the Hawkins Institute. It looks like I'm on the verge of getting a position! I'll have an interview next week.
It's so cold that I stayed indoors all day.
Dinner was McDonald's.
Sold an Ebay package of The Katzenjammer Kids strips to a guy in Brazil. And someone from Denmark snapped up Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Uncle Remus less than an hour after I'd posted them. (I'd been afraid they wouldn't sell at all!)
"You don't have to keep your promises. You're a woman!"--Green Acres
Dreamed of visiting my old high school in Sackville, N.B.; being afraid of meeting someone I knew; wondering whether I was wrong to quit in the last year (when awake I have no regrets!); riding in a London taxi and seeing a jet plane go down in an explosive crash.
Wore my winter coat for the first time since last winter. (It's our first really cold weather.)
Baked rye bread.
I've already sold and mailed an Ebay package of Out Our Way comics.
Dinner was shepherd's pie.
Saw Fernando Meirelles' movie of John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener at the Bloor. It's a masterful political thriller and ultimately a great love story. Ralph Fiennes is one of our finest actors.
Went to a Cinematheque screening of Betty Boop cartoons from the 1930s. Very cute. (They also had some animated bouncing-ball singalongs like "Come Take a Trip in My Airship.")
Headache.
Dinner was roast beef.
Baked gingerbread to bring to the opera fundraiser tomorrow.
Saw the DVD of Alan Parker's The Commitments (for the second time). It's based on Roddy Doyle's novel about a group of working-class Dubliners forming a soul band. An enjoyable comedy with a swell cast.
The New York Sunday Times crossword puzzle was harder than usual. (The long answers involved colleges famous for athletics.)
