Idle Chatter

When I woke up this morning my left arm was all pins and needles, because I had been sleeping on it. This always hurts like hell. So there I am lying in bed trying not to move my arm until the pain goes away. I know that if you massage the arm it helps to get the blood flowing through it again faster, but it still seemed to take forever before I could move it without feeling pain.

The passage of time takes on a whole new dimension when you are coming out of a dream. I think that the technical term for the space between being awake and asleep is the alpha stage or something. A friend of mine was into lucid dreaming and knew this stuff better than I do.

I think that this is as close as I ever want to get to losing a limb. Its so frightening to have a limb that doesn't work, even if it is only temporary. Fortunately I've never had any broken limbs in my life. If I ever did have a broken limb, my mother would be all over me. She is an occupational therapist and lives for that stuff.

A recent heat wave melted all of the snow here in Wisconsin. I like the warmer weather but the snow makes the city look better in winter. Without the snow everything just looks dank and miserable. I'm sure that plenty of snow will fall in the coming months though.

I decided not to go to the company Christmas party tonight. I agonized for a while about whether or not I wanted to go, but I think I knew all along what my decision would be. Standing around for an hour trying to engage in idle chatter is not my idea of a good time. Besides the company owes me more than free food, they still owe me money from when they sent me to Omaha. I want money from them not food.

Not going to the company party may have caused me to lose face with some people, but I can live with my decision. I have a feeling that I might not be the only person who didn't go. I'll know for sure on Monday.

Instead of going to the party, I decided to go spend some of my Christmas money tonight. This for me was much better than any company party. Being selfish can be fun and I came back with some good stuff including two books and two videos.

Both of the books are biographies of directors. One is on Orson Welles and the other one is on David Lean. I like to think of Orson as a local boy, because he came from Wisconsin. Lean, an Englishman, directed three of my favorite films which include Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

In my reading of the Lean book, I learned that Peter O'Toole was twenty eight when he was in Lawrence of Arabia. Here I am at the same age and no one is asking me to star in an epic desert film.

Amadeus and The Piano were my two movie purchases. I used to have a copy of Amadeus taped from cable, but I seem to have taped over it sometime ago. It was from the movie that I first started to like the music of Mozart.

Tomorrow is laundry and maybe a movie in the theater.