{"id":118,"date":"2006-04-02T02:43:21","date_gmt":"2006-04-02T02:43:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/?p=118"},"modified":"2006-04-02T09:17:53","modified_gmt":"2006-04-02T09:17:53","slug":"pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/?p=118","title":{"rendered":"Odds and Sods"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the interest of continuing to try to post everyday, a general accounting of the last 36 hours or so…<\/p>\n

Yesterday our friend Rudy put on a production of Antigone (or at least a portion of it) at the Lebanese American University (LAU, not to be confused with AUB). Amy and Bjorn went and checked it out, but unfortunately I couldn’t make it. I had previously decided to stay home and polish up the last few scenes of my as-yet untitled screenplay. It’s (what I am hoping to be) a delightful tale of a cantankerous Calcutta shop-keeper who goes on a spiritual journey of self-discovery through the Indian countryside when his estranged brother, who lives in a remote rural village, sends him a mysterious message requesting his aid. Just kidding. I had to work. The plot I outlined, however, is the plot of a non-existent movie that I always accuse Amy of going to rent when she goes to the video store. It is a commentary on Amy’s refined cinematic taste (in contrast to my own).<\/p>\n

After they returned from the play, we ordered some more brown bottles<\/a> and grilled some chicken. Amy opted to stay in, but Bjorn and I went out. The first stop was De Prague for the purposes of saying hi to a friend of his…nearly not getting in due to their sexist door policy. The whole “Two guys? No sorry, we can’t let you in.” pretty much hangs a skull above the doorway of a joint for me (though that is a terrible metaphor, because if a place actually literally<\/i> had a skull above the door…). After this brief foray, we went to the after-party for Rudy’s play. It was actually the first time I’d been to anything like a house party in Beirut. Rudy has a great apartment with a great view up on a hill in Achrafieh. It was a nice, small gathering of new faces, but we ended up leaving before too long. In general I feel more comfortable mingling with strangers as I get older, but I often feel that when I mingle with younger people I return to the social awkwardness that was a hallmark of my early twenties (not to be confused with the completely different social awkwardness of my teens). Afterwards we had a nightcap at Torino and headed home at a reasonably respectable hour. Then I proceeded to stay up till the unreasonable hour of 6am instant messaging with my friend Ray. My justification at the time was that if I was going to allow myself to work till 3am a couple nights earlier in the week, I could allow myself the luxury of staying up till 6am to have a conversation with a good friend.<\/p>\n

Today we’d planned to get out and about, but the weather was terrible. So instead, we stayed in and watched some terrible TV. I am imagining that Lost In Translation<\/i><\/a> star Scarlett Johannsen is wishing that The Perfect Score<\/i><\/a> would be erased forever from film history. We also got fairly engrossed in some made-for-tv, William H. Macy movie called The Wool Cap<\/i><\/a>. The terrible weather caused our television reception to go out several times during the course of the film, but luckily it was being shown with a half-hour offset on another station.<\/p>\n

Our television reception is apparently water-soluble.
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I also made dinner, a note-worthy event in and of itself. I can probably count the number of non-grill, non-egg meals I’ve made over the past year on one hand.<\/p>\n

Also noteworthy, at least in my opinion, is that we have run out of salt. An interesting side-effect about moving somewhere with a one-year time limit is that you can easily keep track of how much of the long-range staples you use over the course of a year. Before we came here, I calculated (and somewhat underestimated) the number of disposable contact lenses I’d need for a year. The fact that I’ve only just cracked into my second tube of prescription flouride toothpaste* tells me that I haven’t been using it as much as I should.<\/p>\n

Ten months worth of salt (I have to admit to posing the scrubby duck there…it belongs in the sink).
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* Facts about my prescription toothpaste:<\/p>\n