As Luck Would Have It,

I've come down with a cold. It's my day off, and I've spent it doing absolutely nothing.

This, on the heels of last night's kickboxing class at the Y. My instructor looks really cool when she punches and kicks. I can see in the mirror that I am a skinny, spazzy white chick. I have tons of energy, though, and maybe that counts for something. So far, this is the only class I've taken at the Y during which the instructor plays music that makes me want to dance.

But back to this morning, when I woke with a sore throat and sinuses. Maybe I'm working out some toxins. I slept in late, talked to my roommate, and then stretched my sore shoulders and legs while I listened to the radio.

And I heard about this movie, which is called The Beaver Trilogy. I'm just dying to see this film, which is based on a chance meeting -- in the seventies, the filmmaker caught a young man on videotape while he (the filmmaker, I mean) was in a parking lot, messing around with a videocamera. The young man was clearly excited to be filmed, and he launched into a series of impressions; John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, and Olivia Newton-John. Mesmerized, the filmmaker keeps the tape rolling and ends up with about thirty minutes of coverage, I think it was? The story, which begins as a documentary, gets stranger from that point, and in the end of Part I, the filmmaker is left with these unresolved feelings of guilt. Part II is a reenactment of Part I, with a few variations. First of all, an actor has been hired to play the part of the young man in the original documentary: Sean Penn. The story progresses exactly as it was originally filmed, Sean Penn doing a pretty good imitation of its original subject, though there's a key variation to the very end of the movie. In Part III, the scene is once again reenacted, this time by Crispin Glover. Part III is filmed, rather than videotaped, and the filmmaker's part has been changed a little; his character is slicker, pushier, much less neutral.




That's enough of that. I've sent out an email in hopes that I can somehow watch this movie.

Now, here's some backstory. On Wednesday I flew to Grand Rapids to see The Who with Ginab. One of my flights was cancelled en route, so I just barely managed to get there on time. On the way there, I read half of Toby Young's memoir, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People. This book chronicles the writer's quick rise in the world of New York magazine publishing and then his equally quick demise as he makes a long series of stupid social faux pas. The author is a little hard to believe, I guess because he celebrates his indulgent, boorish self as an anti-hero. It's as though he's reveling in his own naughtiness, meaning that he winds up sounding a little priggish in the process.

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Here's a picture of Toby Young. I think he's been bald for a while, now (he points that out in his book, though he also implies that the beautiful New York socialites he lusts for don't want to date him because he doesn't have lots of money or social prominence. I'm guessing that his personality [and not some problem originating with the ladies] was the real rub; though he points out his own flaws, he doesn't seem interested in correcting them. And I just don't like his tendency to blame the ladies for being shallow, when he -- well, you get the picture).

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Anyway, we saw The Who, our seats were right up there near the stage, and afterwards I got drunk on three pints. The following morning (e.g. four hours later), we arose and Gina returned me to the airport for my flight back, during which I finished the second half of that memoir.

In the end of this book, Toby Young tells us the stupidest thing he ever said (he told the woman he'd madly pursued and then finally won that he didn't believe in love, and yay! she dumped him). He gets the girl back in the end, but it isn't easy. I hope he learned something, but he sounds a bit too high-maintenance for my liking, I guess.

Is that not an odd frame for a very odd vacation?

All right, I'm going to stir fry some vegetables, clean up a little, work on something, and then I'm going dancing because you know what? I think my head's screwed back on now. I'm glad I had a day off for this.