Summer

One minute, summer vacation and all the promise and hopes and dreams attached to it is a staple of your childhood psyche. The next minute, it's gone. Losing summer is like losing an arm in a battle you don't remember having. Until the day you die, you're going to have phantom twinges of hope for a three-month holiday that is never ever coming.

My solution: move to a beautiful beachside resort town in Italy, where the actual three months of summer are the time when you most want to go somewhere cool and fresh and not crowded with sweaty tourists, and the rest of the year is, basically, like the summer you remember in childhood.

What am I doing today? Fooling about on the internet, when, yes, I really should be doing nearly anything else.

~ * ~


In other news...

Been giving the second two Narnia films another shot, and been thinking that they're not as bad as I had at first thought. Dawntreader especially can be forgiven for at least some of the crimes. The book is really a series of little vignettes, which would not lend themselves to a complete narrative on film. There really had to be some kind of unifying plotline.


Also, there is one way in which I thought the movie outdid the book: Eustace, while a dragon, sacrifices himself to save the ship from the sea monster and complete the quest by taking the last sword back to Ramandu's Island, an act that very decisively indicates a massive change of his character, much more decisively than Lewis had done.

The green mist was, I'll admit, exceptionally stupid, but Hollywood has done worse things to books. and there is some good character development, and they did to Eustace pretty well.

But I will say, the moment Lord Rhoop, on the Dark Island, tells the Narnians, "Don't let it know what your fears are or it will become them." and Edmund says, "I'm sorry," I really, REALLY expected the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man to appear.

~ * ~

And about being an introvert...

"I'm not talking about people who are introverts against their will. I'm talking about the millions of us out there who are introverts because we simply prefer our nice, [safe] quiet houses over the jaw-clinching idiocy of public functions."

I've just come home from a lovely trip to Ontario where I spent a great deal more time in the company of other human beings than I normally am used to, and it was fine. It was great, actually. But I can't describe how glad I am to be back in my cave... my lovely, lovely caaaave.

(Especially after nine hours in that sardine tin airplane.)

Other people are OK, I guess, and I'm working hard on dealing with my crippling social anxieties. And you know that I'm totally on board with the whole "don't kill 'em" thing, but as a day-to-day thing, really I'm always glad to be home.

Always.



~