Somebody turned on the furnace today. When I got up this morning, I thought: Oh, the house is warm, but our house is always warm. I put on my jeans and headed out to go to lunch. My car was pretty darn hot too, but it's black -- black cars are always hot: hot outside, hot inside, that's the motto of the driver of a black sports car.
I got to Palo Alto, where I was having lunch with Greg, and as I got out of the car a blast of incredibly hot air hit me and I thought, boy, am I overdressed for occasion. We sat out on the patio and everything was fine (once we switched seats and Greg had the sun on him). Lunch was fine and we discussed silly topics, like movies and how Greg was conniving to get Darin to do his work for him this afternoon.
Then the waiter came by with the dessert menus. One of the desserts listed was chocolate souffle cake with a fruit sorbet on the side. California Cafe makes a kick-butt souffle cake.
I sighed and looked up. "It's too hot for chocolate souffle cake."
Greg knows about my "special relationship" with chocolate. He blinked a few times and said, "Somebody call the Weather Bureau -- we're having a heat wave!"
One of the things I told Greg about at lunch was the movie Lone Star, which we saw last night and he didn't because he had better things to do with more important people (phhhhhbbbbbttttt). As Greg is from Texas (not that you'd know that, because reportedly he woke up one day, said, "I don't want to have a Texas accent," and never spoke with one again) he missed out on a good movie.
Actually, whether or not you're from Texas, Lone Star is a good movie. John Sayles wrote, directed, and edited it (those are each hard jobs -- this guy cannot possibly have time for a life). It's a nice, meandering look at a small South Texas town and the relationships between the generations. It has quite a tight plot, which I had heard about it but couldn't believe. After the first thirty minutes I whispered, "He's going to tie this all together?" Yup, he does -- Sayles's movies can be uneven, but they're never boring and he certainly isn't repeating himself. An admirable goal in filmmaking, but not a goal oft admired. Or emulated.
Something I found intriguing in my own reactions to the film was that I was not embarrassed or annoyed by the sex scene, the way I usually am in films. Possibly because it seemed a little bit more like a scene between two people instead of a performance art event. I felt as though I understood the passion between these characters more than I usually do in movies, where all that's required is that everyone be classically good-looking...and heck, the woman probably isn't wearing anything anyway.
Matthew McConaughey, by the way, is in it for just a little bit. He's on the cover of Vanity Fair this month and is being touted as the next big thing. He is very good-looking, but I don't know: blonds have just never appealed to me.
(CJ, who recently turned Lance into a cheap bottle-blond floozie, is possibly glad to hear this.)
I don't know what it is: I have a type in guys and I seem to stick to it pretty closely when deciding who I think is attractive, when I'm mentally casting roles, etc. The type is so narrow though -- tall guys with dark-brown hair. Yes, the tall rules out Tom Cruise, the appeal of whom I have never groked.
I've done a lot of thinking since a few days ago, when I made a couple of comments about another online journal, as did a couple of other writers, and the writer of the other online journal responded.
I haven't come to any conclusions, other than I know the feelings that comments -- either good or bad -- evoke in me. Putting work out there for others to read is a nerve-wracking experience: if people like what I write, I think, Gee, how can I keep this up or even top it? and if they don't like something I write, I think lots of unpleasant self-deprecating and self-defeating thoughts.
Hollywood's going to be a lot of fun for me.
One thing I am sure of: if I ever discuss someone else's work in here again, I owe them the courtesy of a "heads up!" notice.
A CCWW is a Certified California Weather Wimp. A Certified California Weather Wimp is someone who is used to having at most two seasons a year (dry and wet), thinks a variation in temperature of more than fifteen degrees up or down from a median of about seventy degrees Fahrenheit is a sign of the Apocalypse, and does not understand how people can live in parts of the country where every year they're going to get eighteen feet of snow, hurricanes, tornadoes, or some other biblical plague. An earthquake every so often is a hell of a lot easier to take than weather.