pretty little maids, all in a row.
5.3 miles.
[The only thing you need to know to (hopefully) enjoy the following the exchange is that Brian Cox played Hannibal Lecter in the movie version of Red Dragon, which was called Manhunter. Oh, and minor spoiler: in Hannibal, Lecter has plastic surgery.]
DARIN sits in bed, reading Hannibal.
DARIN
I think the problem with making a
movie of this is the part about Lecter
changing his appearance. I mean,
Anthony Hopkins is still going to
look like Anthony Hopkins.
DIANE
Well, they could show him go in for
plastic surgery, and he comes out
looking like Brian Cox.
DARIN
You mean Nic Cage.
Okay, we're cynics about the way Hollywood operates. (Perhaps Darin was simply alluding to Face/Off... but I don't think so.)
One of the nice things about having lots and lots of friends is that there's always one around when you need someone.
Last night Darin, Jim, Lisa, Steven, Andy, Brent, Therese, Elinor, and I went to Buca di Beppo in Encino for dinner. We ordered too many dishes (Caesar salad plus three entrees for 6 adults is above and beyond the call of duty), most of which were swimming in garlic. We did manage to share 2 desserts as well, and the wives split a bottle of red wine. Steven was ecstatic to meet Elinor, who is not only cute but also 5 years old and his height and interested in Pokémon in a way grownups aren't and ready to stand on benches and converse with the 3-year-old at the table next to ours.
By the time I got home, I wasn't in pain, but I felt stuffed and my stomach was a little upset from all the garlic. The huge quantity of carbohydrates did their thing and I went to sleep around 9:30, even ahead of Steven and Andy.
I woke up at 12:30 after a series of what can only be termed as the worst nightmares I've had in quite some time. Despite still being sleepy, every time I closed my eyes images from the dreams started playing again. And Darin, who usually responds to a gentle "Darin, turn over," when he's snoring up a storm, did not respond in any way to anything I said at any volume. I figured he was in Sleep Stage Four, also known as "When the sabre-tooth tigers most like to attack."
I got out of bed, went down to my computer, and replied to some mail, including a message from Greg I'd gotten earlier in the evening.
Greg, conveniently, wrote back. Still at work, I presume.
I told him why I was up and why I didn't want to go back to sleep. He wrote back and told me to write down the nightmare, file it away, and use it in some future project. I responded:
A nightmare which I know is going to end in cannibalism (having been informed by some earlier foreshadowing) and already includes assassination, child murder, a ghost ship, and a crew of extremely dangerous men on a Baltic freighter isn't something I'm likely to use.
He said, Oops, probably not.
(As I write this at 11am the next morning, I can still see images from this dream. I guess if I ever need scary images in a movie, I can mine this puppy. For example, on the freighter--I couldn't think of the word Baltic last night, I kept thinking "Slavic" and "Czech" and I knew neither of those was right--one of the doors to the deck opens and there's a collection of men from the crew, standing absolutely silently, clearly quite homicidal, staring in at me, while from the overhang near them dangles the body of a baby that wears a one-piece with feets, but thankfully the baby faces away, because if you could see what they've done to the front of the baby...)
One of the problems with being up for a while in the wee hours of the morning is that there's not much new on the web since earlier that evening. I went to The New York Times and read today's issue. I visited every journal in my bookmark list. I checked every film site. I read Salon. Checked my horoscopes, went to Facade and did a Tarot reading. And I still didn't want to go back to sleep.
Greg asked me what I thought caused nightmares, and I'm quite sure I don't know. I think the garlic had something to do with it. I guess I might be processing stuff from the day, but I've been pretty placid recently, so I don't know what hellish stuff I have to process.
I have a whole bunch of books on dreams and sleep on the shelves behind me, but I don't think any of them agree on what nightmares are either. I've never been able to get control of my dreams, so I can't do any of those cool things you're supposed to be able to do to use your dreams and nightmares for self-knowledge. I'm usually just in the grip of a horrible experience and can't get out.
After I went back to sleep I had another series of dreams, some nightmares, some not, all of them intense. I woke up this morning incredibly glad not to be dreaming any more. I don't need that much energy in my dreams.
Darin and I both got packages from Amazon yesterday, books bought with "one-click." See if you can guess who got what:
- Pattern Hatching : Design Patterns Applied, by John Vlissides.
- The Art of Profiling, by Dan Korem.
Of course, when I said that to Darin, he replied, "Profiling has a specific meaning in programming, so that's not enough information." Yeah, go ahead, step on my joke.
Darin and I always like to get out of the house on Wednesdays, because that's the day the cleaning lady comes. She does her thing faster and we don't have her swabbing the floors under our feet. Conveniently, since we have guests here this week, we had an excuse to leave the house and we spent the afternoon with them.
We went to Gordon Biersch in Pasadena for lunch. My stomach was still upset from Buca di Beppo last night, so I only had an appetizer for lunch, but everything looked great and Jim and Lisa liked what food they managed to get in between feeding Andy and keeping Steven from racing around the restaurant. Andy, of course, didn't want to eat until the rest of us did (he's very polite), which kept us there way past the time when the rest of us had finished eating. Well, he's 9 months old, what do you want?
After lunch we went to the Huntington, which is, strangely, simply called the Huntington, as though the adjective were good enough. The Huntington contains the Huntington Gardens, Library, and Museum (and probably a few other things as well--it's huge). I could easily imagine coming here to spend an afternoon simply enjoying the outdoors or strolling through the museum; it seems like an idyllic park in the middle of Pasadena.
We decided to stroll through the gardens, which are fabulous: there's a desert garden, a rose garden, a Japanese garden (compleat with rock garden), and a Bamboo Forest. Steven loved the Bamboo Forest: he kept racing through it, yelling, "The Bamboo Adventure!" The koi in the nearby pond did not seem particularly startled by this.
Jim reloads son Steven's camera.
Lisa.
Steven, a very inquisitive 5-year-old.
Andy, who usually looks exactly like this (happy, that is).
The Cactus Hothouse. Jim shows Steven some cacti.
My favorite member of the party.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com