Just watched "D.E.B.S." again--- silly, funny, sweet, unexpectedly charming little film. A fun thing to do on a Sunday afternoon while it rains outside. I'll watch "Henry & June" again in a few minutes--- one of the DVDs I do keep with me in my permanent collection. Sunday nights are for "Dexter" and "Mad Men", but...heavy rains, a few crisp cold Asahi beers, takee-outee garlic chicken, and...a few films I like. "D.E.B.S."--- I will recommend it, especially to Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo and to Caitlin at kissmecaitlin and to Cynthia Gralla. Britt-Nicole and I watched it together by phone once long ago, and I do miss that.

Last night late I watched "After Sex"--- a recommendation from a Vanished girl in Birmingham. A film that really didn't do anything for me. Though the sequence with Mila Kunis and her roommate was actually both sexy and touching.

A friend came over to my coffeeshop table this morning and showed me an article in the NYT Sunday magazine by an author announcing that he'll no longer be pushed around by "language Nazis". Well, he has something of a point. People who insist on a rigid use of "literally" and "unique" do get tedious. But I had to disagree about "decimate". No--- that's a Roman thing, and I'm a trained historian. "Decimate" means to reduce by one-in-ten. That I'll insist on.

Which brings up a note: the decimeter. It's a real unit of measurement. One decimeter = 10 centimeters. Real enough, but no one ever uses it. And...well...they should. After all, a cubic decimeter = 1 litre. I like the decimeter, just as I'm charmed by Pluto's moon Charon. So I will be urging friends to use the decimeter when measuring things.

Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo writes that she's reading Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian". I'm glad she's trying it. It's a favourite of mine. And it's very much a book I'd love to see filmed. The Coen Bros. might do the characters well, but I'm not sure who would have the right sense of colour and shadow. I really do want to sit over drinks with Miss Ginny and talk about Cormac McCarthy, about his language and his sense of place. James Salter, Mavis Gallant, Cormac McCarthy--- so much to talk about with Miss Ginny. And I really do want to read her doctoral thesis and her fiction.

An acquaintance sent me a long angry message attacking me and severing all contact because I said in a paragraph a few days ago that I hoped the Swiss would release Roman Polanski. I read it to Ms. Chang last night--- she called to talk about her grad school applications and her upcoming trips to see the key schools on her list. Ms. Chang was amused/appalled by the message. She did remind me that people take the whole age thing strangely--- she loves dressing up as a schoolgirl, but her husband (who is seventeen years older) can't deal with her pretending to be 13 in bed. (She's five-one and barely ninety-eight pounds at 22; she can bring off being thirteen) Well, she said, her husband had once actually run from the bedroom and locked himself in the bathroom to avoid her doing the junior-high slutgirl pose around him. Now that, we both agreed, was far creepier than anything Polanski may have done.

Back to the office tomorrow. I really have no energy to do that. I really, really hate what I'm doing. Or--- well, not hate. I just have zero interest in it. I don't care about any of it. I want to be doing human-rights advocacy or international law of some sort. I want to be in an apartment on the UWS or in Strasbourg. I might settle for a flat in Montreal while I studied international arbitration and international legal systems at McGill. I want to be doing something I care about and something I've actually trained for. And walking to my office every day does remind me that I'm still in a city I've been trying to escape for much of my life. ("Saigon... Shit. I'm still only in...Saigon.")

I was glad to get an LJ note from Miss Ginny. She's always someone whose notes do mean a lot. I do want to encourage her to post more of her own entries. Her entries from the Year Five and the Year Six, entries about her own life and youth--- I always loved those, just as I loved the entries Stella at stelladellasera and Caitlin at kissmecaitlin used to do about growing up and discovering themselves. I loved Miss Ginny's tales of driving through the Quebec countryside with her friend Evelyn or learning to play the piano and read Yeats when she was a schoolgirl. I've been intrigued and fascinated by Miss Ginny's entries since the early days of the Year Five. I really do want to read her account of her life, her stories of growing up and moving off to university, her memories of being an au pair in England, of skinnydipping on a beach in Mexique, of Russian bars and university film festivals... Read her entries, yes. And sit with her over drinks and listen to her stories 'til dawn over Barcelona...

The Bravery will play here in a few weeks. I just may go see them.

Time to watch "Henry & June" and then settle in for "Dexter" and "Mad Men" tonight.

I really, really, really will obsess over a 15-inch MacBook Pro. And I'll obsess over subway maps and over how to work out some kind of arrangement to barter for a McGill sweatshirt or t-shirt. And I'll keep working on getting Miss Ginny to call and tell me stories...or invite me to run away with her to Reykjavik or Barcelona.