My Life, the Universe, and Everything

For the month of February I'm going to have the weirdest schedule.  Mason has Inter-Session at his school.  Inter-session is Crossroad's answer to not having a traditional summer vacation.  Mason has three weeks off from school now, will again in May, and then have the month of August off.  There are school programs if people have work issues, but we've always found a lot of value in the whole idea of taking time off to do the nothing Shawn and I remember fondly doing a lot of in the three months of summer vacation.  Other Crossroad's families take vacations.  For instance one of Mason's good friends is flying to New Zealand right now.

As you know, I've started a new job. I didn't feel entirely comfortable telling my new employer that I'm planning on just blowing off work for an entire three weeks (though I will feel *just fine* about it come May, because then I will have worked there a lot longer.)  The point is, I've agreed to work a bunch of evening hours.  Tonight I'll be at Roseville from 5 to 9.  I'll be at Maplewood tomorrow night, and then back to Roseville Thursday night (which I belatedly remembered is supposed to be Wyrdsmiths.)

Working nights is weird.  I'm sure I'll have other observations about it, once I've done it a few weeks in a row, but I think I sort of kind of like it.  What I like about it right now is that I feel like I have the day off, even though I don't.  For instance, I have the whole day to get stuff done. I'm sure I'll be super productive and do ALL THE THINGS.


(Miss Ball's opinion about how well that'll probably work out.)

But today is the day that I usually meet with some member of my writers' group to parallel play.  In other words, we sit together and write.  It's kind of our answer to the solitary life of a writer.  And, it can be a lot of fun, because you have an audience who understands when you'd rather be playing Solitaire or can't remember a synonym or just want to read the cool line you just wrote that you're super-proud of.

In other news: last night, Shawn and I finally saw "Elysium."  That's the science-ficiton film with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster? The one where the rich people have moved off Earth to a kind of Niven-esque ring world/L-5 colony?  Yeah, that one.  The one that looks super gritty?  Yeah, it was grim.  About as grim as I expected it to be, but it totally pushed some of my class buttons (in a good way.)  I long ago confessed to naomikritzer that a science-fiction trope that ALWAYS works for me is "stop the line"/labor strike stories.  They'll show up as Very Special Episodes on shows like Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek and every damn time (even though it's essentially the same story) I'll get little tears and my eyes and secretly think it was the BEST EVER.  "Elysium" isn't quite that story made large, but there're elements of that trope in the movie... particularly the end, which I won't spoil beyond that.

There was a surprise character moment for me in "Elysium."  There's a mercenary/thief/fence-type named Spider who is pretty loathsome when you first meet him, but it becomes clear throughout the course of the film that he's weirdly... altruistic and kind of has been all along if you think about it for a few minutes.  He was my FAVORITE character, honestly.

So thumbs up?  Maybe.  I wouldn't necessarily tell you to go out of your way to see "Elysium," but I wouldn't warn you off it either.  I ultimately enjoyed it.  But Shawn had to look away several times because it was so gritty-dark and the beginning is so unrelenting that she kept asking, "Should we turn it off? Is this just going to be AWFUL??"  I'm glad we stuck with it, but, see: I can't exactly recommend it without reservations.

We were able to watch a movie like that last night, though, because Mason was PASSED OUT.  He'd had a sleepover the night before (Sunday to Monday, because of Inter-Session) and I kind of intentionally ran the kids around on Sunday.  Mason's buddy is a bit of a couch potato otaku, which are in point of fact MY people, but Mason can get irritable and restless if he sits ALL DAY.  So we let them game well into Sunday night and then yesterday I got them involved building marble towers (those Rube-Goldberg-type things) and then took them sledding at the St. Paul Country Club's golf course hill.



So, yeah, there's a date stamp now.  That's not from my camera, but from the stupid Mac iPhoto.  (Man, I hate Macs. I don't know why people are such proponents.)  At any rate, they had a lot of fun, but the rest was that Mason crashed sometime before dinner and we couldn't even rouse him to eat.  So, he slept until this morning--a whopping 13 and a 1/2 hours!  I told him he's getting practice in for being a teenager!