Two Weeks in Review

[kate_nepveu]

Chad was at a conference most of last week, during which time I failed to sleep but mostly ate properly, so that's an improvement over the last time he was away for an extended period of time. I was scheduled to donate platelets and plasma on Saturday, but my red blood cell count was just a hair too low (they require that you meet the threshold even for non-red-blood-cell donation, in case they can't return the red blood cells to you). I was rather disappointed—I'd gone to a lot of trouble to get properly full of calcium, for one thing—but it was probably for the best given my fatigue.

This Wednesday, we had Chad's current and former research students and advisees over for dinner. All the traditional elements were present: Chad's spiedies, my chocolate chip cookies, and my kicking them out at 9:00 p.m. (I would have just gone up to bed and left them to it, but one of the quieter ones had been looking at his watch for a while, and was giving several others a ride.)

My parents had been thinking of coming up this weekend, but it didn't work out. Instead, we did exciting things like napping, playing with the dog, and yardwork (dandelions everywhere fear me! or at least the ones in the landscaping and the more obvious ones in the yard, since they're hard to spot when they've just been mowed). We also saw Revenge of the Sith, which was dreadful (since I'm cut-tagging something else, I think I'll put my spoilery comments in a separate post), and Chad played in a charity student-faculty/staff basketball game. I had today off, and did a little work, a little reading, and a little basking in the sun. No nap, though; I might be almost caught up on my sleep, and didn't want to mess with my sleep patterns.

On Saturday we had a nice dinner out at Provence, a local French/Mediterranean restaurant. The food was delicious, but what made it memorable was the gentleman who was seated next to us a little ways into our dinner.

This is a fairly nice restaurant, so we'd changed out of jeans and T-shirts for the meal; we were both wearing slacks, Chad was wearing a button-down shirt, and I was wearing a light sweater (I expected air conditioning, wrongly). The gentleman next to us was wearing dress pants, a light-colored button-down shirt, and a cream-colored jacket that appeared to have only one of its two or three buttons fastened, but nevertheless fit to his torso like armor. He had noticeably precise and upright posture—precise hair, too—and carried a glossy magazine, folded in half the long way. He efficiently consumed a single glass of wine, an appetizer, and what looked like filet mignon (the tables were not far apart, but I was trying to be at least minimally polite), before we'd gotten to dessert, paging through his magazine between courses. Just before he left, he pulled out a very fancy cellphone/PDA gadget and appeared to be listening to a message. His jacket stayed fastened the entire time.

Meanwhile, Chad and I were talking quietly—but probably audibly, because the tables were close together—about graduations, silly hoods, the time I fell down the stairs in my robes, and various other lightly silly or schmoopy topics. After he left, I leaned over to Chad and said, "We are so in a different movie than that guy." Chad's response was something along the lines of, "Let's hope so, because if we're not, this is the point where a car comes crashing into the restaurant."

Fortunately for everyone, if the gentleman next to us was in a James Bond movie, the next action sequence took place elsewhere.

This led to a discussion about feeling like you're in a movie, what your movie would be, and so forth. I'd never before been so conscious that someone else's movie was going on right next to me. I'm probably an extra in other movies—dramas of family members, the re-enactment of Reality Bites by some college people, things like that—but I rather doubt that I'm in a movie of my own. Chad and I were insufficiently zany for a romantic comedy, I have no long-supressed desire to find my biological family, and civil defensive litigation is not the stuff of high-powered legal thrillers. (This bothers me not in the least, mind.)

What about you? Have you ever had a moment when you were sure that you'd inadvertently wandered onto a movie set? Are you in a movie now, and is it yours, someone else's, or both? Or was only a specific portion of your life a movie?

Comments

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

Of course, in New York, it's relatively easy to literally wander onto a movie set (or at least a tv show set)...

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

The few times I've been in NYC for reasons other that passing through on the way to the in-laws in CT, I've wandered through someone's shot, not noticing the camera crews until after I'd ruined it for them. It's weird, there are tons of things set in DC, but no one actually shoots here. At least, not in the bits of DC I wander through anyway.