Tag: Ethan Hawke

Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday

Monday morning after two consecutive nights of insomnia. It’s been so long since I’ve had it–the night after my surgery was the last time, but it didn’t really affect me terribly much because I wasn’t really all that mobile anyway–but this morning I am fatigued. My body just feels exhausted. I didn’t feel well all weekend, and while I do feel somewhat better this morning in that regard, I am so physically tired that I am not really sure how I am going to get through the day–I have PT this morning–let alone return to the office tomorrow. Hopefully I will sleep tonight. It’s also cold this morning–not even fifty degrees, with the high predicted at sixty, so I had to switch it from air conditioning to heat when I got up. I also feel a bit nauseous, which is going to make PT a lot of fun this morning. Paul had a bug of some sort late last week, something similar to this–his was mostly fatigue–which of course has me worried about being sick before I return to work. But it may be just dehydration again; so I am going to try to get myself as rehydrated today as I can–I always forget how shitty being dehydrated makes you feel and I have the symptoms of that again (cottonmouth, dark urine, etc.). I’m working on eating a bagel slathered with cream cheese right now, and those carbs have already made me feel somewhat better already. I don’t think I am eating enough, either…which is probably not smart while recovering from a surgery.

I was exhausted all day yesterday, so spent most of it in my easy chair. I did read for a while, but mostly just was laying there, unable to do much of anything or to focus at all. Paul got another tattoo yesterday, and when he got home we watched the Mother God documentary series on MAX (it really is amazing what people will believe) and then Leave the World Behind on Netflix, which is an apocalyptic story, but focussed mainly on the small cast of characters, thrown together when everything starts to go bad, and what it would be like to be in that situation–not knowing what’s going on, but knowing something is and it’s bad–and it has a good cast who are great in their roles. These kinds of movies are interesting to me because I inevitably wonder how well I would do in that kind of situation–and then I laugh at myself because the default is, of course, that you would be a survivor who’d find a way to get through it…when the truth is most of us wouldn’t do well. I can barely handle the heat here when the power’s out in the summer, let alone living without power for an extended period of time. My stove is electric, so without power (they still have power in the movie, by the way) I wouldn’t be able to even cook anything.

Although I think my favorite thing about the entire movie is it opens with Julia Roberts basically booking a vacation rental for her family on the spur of the moment and when asked by her husband (Ethan Hawke) why, she goes on this little tear about how awful people are and she hates them all and wants to get away from them for a little while. The movie also plays into one of my primal fears; that I’ll be away from home when something terrible like this happens…Bouchercon being in San Diego over Labor Day weekend a few months ago had me all kinds of stressed–what if there’s a hurricane while I’m gone? How would I ever get home? What about Paul? My anxiety doesn’t make those sorts of things any easier on me, either.

I am also changing medications, and I can’t help but wonder if that has something to do with the not feeling well–but i changed the meds starting yesterday, so that had no impact whatsoever in my not feeling well Saturday and not sleeping well that night, but it could be why I had trouble sleeping last night and why I feel so out of it this morning. My brain isn’t tired, and can focus, but my body just feels exhausted and walking around has been tiring–which means the PT, which is deceptively tiring, may wear me out today and make me useless for the rest of the day, which just can’t happen, you know? Being sick this weekend basically lost the whole weekend for me–I thought I’d worn myself out running errands Saturday morning, but it was definitely more than that.

And now it’s time for me to fly. Wish me luck with my PT, and I’ll check in with you again later.

I Almost Do

The days storms come ashore elsewhere–but still close by– are always weird.

There’s the guilt and shame at the relief that it’s not coming to where you live–which means you are relieved that others will suffer instead of you–and there’s still a lot of tension. While New Orleans will have nowhere near the damage or destruction western Louisiana, and particularly Lake Charles, will suffer yet again a mere six weeks or so after the last time they were hit hard, you never know. We are–or were–supposed to experience only the effects equivalent to a tropical storm, and those aren’t exactly nothing. Will trees come down, will power be lost, will streets flood? Will the high winds cause destructive tornadoes? And while suffering isn’t a contest, even typing those words riddled me with guilt yet again.

The sky has been mostly gray all day, with only occasional glimpses of the sun and blue during all-too-brief breaks in the cloud cover. The wind picks up and drops off–and some of the gusts are extreme. I went into the office for a few hours to help out with the syringe exchange, and both coming and going there were a couple of times when I could feel the wind battering my car, trying to move it–never strong enough to make me nervous, but just enough to be unsettling.

Scooter is currently sleeping on my backpack, next to my desk, and Paul is still upstairs working. I have laundered the bed linens today–it’s Friday, after all–and I currently am in the process of cleaning up my iCloud drive (and finding new frustrations with the MacBook Air, but it’s not as bad as it could be, and really, once I get the dongle adapter thingamabob to connect the back-up hard drive to to it, it should be fine. And at some point I will take it into the store in Metairie….unless I can still get help on-line for free), which is taking some time, but it has been a mess for quite some time, and therefore I have no one to blame but myself.

We finished watching Utopia this week, which we greatly enjoyed, odd as it was, and last night we started watching The Good Lord Bird on Showtime, which is also odd, weirdly entertaining, and kind of interesting. It’s about John Brown, the abolitionist hero of the 1850’s, and I am never entirely certain whether Ethan Hawke, who’s playing Brown, is giving an incredible performance deserving all the Emmys, or if he is overacting in a manner worthy of Nicolas Cage at his worst. It’s told from the point of view of a young Black slave, freed by Brown in the opening minutes of the first episode, who Brown for some reason becomes convinced is a girl and for another reason (you’d have to watch) starts calling by the name Onion. I’m sure we’ll keep watching–I was always raised to believe that John Brown was a monster, and while he was certainly not the sanest individual, his hatred of slavery was not wrong–and the show is set during the days of bleeding Kansas, which I’ve been thinking a lot about lately (the town in the Kansas book is called Liberty Center, and it’s called that because it was founded as a free town during those days–it’s also a call-out to Philip Roth, because it’s the town where When She Was Good was set), and wanting to write about at some point.

We’ve been holding off on watching The Boys’ second season until all the episodes were loaded (yes, binge-watching has spoiled us; we hate to have to wait) and I do want to go back at some point and finish Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, and I also want to watch The Haunting of Bly House, which just dropped on Netflix (Paul never got into The Haunting of Hill House for some reason), and there’s some other movies and so forth that are streaming now that we want to see (I keep meaning to watch Boys State on Apple Plus–I actually went to Boys State when I was in high school in Kansas, and why I have never written about that I honestly do not know).

But since it’s October and I had forgotten, I decided to start watching some horror this month while making condom packs. I watched Carrie yesterday (still wonderful) and today I watched one from the 1980’s called April Fools’ Day, which I think I watched on HBO or Showtime back in the day. It stars Deborah Coleman from Valley Girl and My Chauffeur (why she never became a bigger star is beyond me), Deborah Goodrich (probably best known for playing the imposter Silver Kane on All My Children), the guy best known for playing Biff in the Back to the Future movies, Tatum O’Neal’s brother Griffin, and a big crush of mine from back then whom I’d forgotten, Ken Olandt (he was also in Summer School, where he played a stripper so of course he caught my eye). It takes the ‘stranded on a desert island’ conceit of And Then There Were None (also similar to the one season favorite Harper’s Island) and plays the trope of the slasher film against it/–but it’s not very gory (back then I had no interest in the genre of slasher films because I didn’t like gore and buckets of blood everywhere, although I made an exception for the Nightmare on Elm Street movies; Paul was the person who got me to watch Halloween and Friday the 13th for the first time). It’s a fun little movie, scary and suspenseful enough, and entertaining enough, but a trifle that didn’t really leave much of an impact on the horror genre or on film in general. I added some more horror movies to my lists on various streaming services–I can give the Cynical 70’s Film Festival a break for a while, I think–and it’s actually amazing to me how many horror classics I either don’t remember, or haven’t seen–Fright Night, for example, and The Fog, for another–and so with so much streaming content, there’s no reason not to finally view these movies, right?

Right.

I’m also going to rewatch Christine, and some other King adaptations I’ve not seen (primarily because I heard they weren’t good).

And on that note, I am going to head into the living room with some wine and maybe watch some highlights of last year’s LSU season until Paul is ready to join me.

Have a lovely and quiet Friday evening, Constant Reader.