Ten-Day-Old Travel Post: New Orleans

I went to New Orleans the weekend before last.  It wasn't a super-exciting trip - I was there to see people, not tourist attractions - but there were some cool elements.

• LaGuardia airport, which has been under construction for at least as long as I've been living in New York, has a new cool terminal.  At the gates, instead of long benches, there are various seating configurations (mostly some variation on what you'd find in a bistro... this is probably cool for the short-hop tourists and business travelers who are likely their bread and butter, but seems less hospitable for someone trying to sleep off the layover after a redeye), most with built-in ipads on which you can play games or order from the terminal restaurant.  There's also a high-tech water-bottle filler and a fairly cool newstand/coffee shop (although, arriving there in a totally uncaffeinated state, I was kind of hoping for something normal, like a Starbucks).
• Louisiana is apparently full of plantations-turned-tourist-traps.  Apparently they are furnished in period style and staffed by guides in period costume.  This is mostly kind of weird, like if they had interpretive tours of a concentration camp.  But also they had an art festival at one.  Possibly the most interesting part of that (aside, I suppose, from the deeply-discounted-from-NYC-prices-but-otherwise-mostly-standard art) was the food, which was half Cajun, half State Fair.  So you could have a crawfish sandwich and a funnel cake for lunch, I suppose.
• Oh, yeah, I ate crawfish.  And (inferior) hushpuppies.  And beignets, and various gumbos, and fried chicken, and pralines.  I came home craving salad.
• They really know how to do Halloween in New Orleans.  Houses were decorated, some very thoroughly - skeletons in the lawn, a giant spider covering the whole front of the house.
• There are gorgeous spreading oaks, and spanish moss, and incredible old houses in the Garden District.

• I ran on the levee, which was pretty cool, except for the part about insane late-October heat and unrelenting sun.
• Also, the French Quarter is still there.

Chicago in pictures

The second part of my trip to Montreal was a visit to Chicago with my book (/wine/gossip) club.  It entailed deep-dish pizza, a visit to the top of the Hancock Tower, a boat tour, shopping, fancy sushi, a brief visit to the Chicago Marathon, and a lot of wine.

Magic hour in Wicker Park

A cool art installation on Michigan Ave

The bean

The bean, from beneath

Bean with tourists

Boat tour

It's almost Christmas!

Deep dish pizza

A hyacinth in my drink

Today: A Summary; also Impressions

I had intended to sleep a normal number of hours (I consider normal to be about 7) and wake up at a reasonable time, after which I had planned a route through the downtown, McGill University, Mount Royal, and then I was to take stock over a peaceful lunch.  Of course it went not very much like that.

• I overslept my alarm.  I don't even remember the thing going off.  Not typical for me.
• I walked through the downtown, explored a shopping mall, finally - in desperate need of food and coffee - stopped at a Starbucks.  That was not entirely my plan.  I do enjoy going to Starbucks on vacations, because it's interesting to see the variety they offer (Montreal Starbucks is somewhat European in their beverages - they don't even have drip coffee, which they had in Paris - and largely American in their foods - in some ways, more American than NYC Starbucks, which have recently given themselves a horrifying makeover to make their baked goods fussier) but it is also nice to try local places.
• I walked through McGill University and felt nostalgic for my own university days.  Not so long ago if we count the decade of post-college university life.  In most of Montreal, 75% of the conversations you overhear are in French; on that campus, 10% were.
• While we're on the subject of French, the whole language thing has made me feel very awkward.  It would almost be easier if I spoke zero French at all; then I would have to speak English to everyone always.  Instead, I speak enough French to conduct basic transactions, transactions in which nothing I don't expect occurs.  I can say hello, ask for a coffee, understand numbers and ask to be given a bag (I can also understand about half of what historical placards say and a significant fraction of overheard conversations, if I'm concentrating - it's just that dealing with people in real time is harder).  I cannot ask for a muffin if it's not labelled, and I do not know the French for 'swipe' (apparently they did not teach us this in 1994).  So I tend to start transactions in French, and then a third of the time I have to ask awkwardly if the other party speaks English (they always do, and always better than I speak French), and a third of the time they realize how clueless I am and switch to English themselves.  But I feel bad just going in there like Anglophone Commando and expecting them to speak my language as if everyone in the free world does even though, apparently, everyone in the free world does.  And the few times they haven't switched, maybe they didn't know how to speak English, and then how awful would it have been if I'd tried to make them?  I think there is a good solution, along the lines of returning a greeting of Bonjour with Bonjour, Hello, which is what shopkeepers seem to say to convey that they are happy to speak English.  I am guessing that responding to a French greeting that way would convey "I can speak a little bit of French but English is my preferred language," in some way more graceful than asking - in what I'm guessing is overformal grade-school diction - if they speak English, which is probably like asking if they can add.  But so far I have not pulled this off.
• Anyway.  Then I went to Mount Royal.  It's, you know, a mountain.  With trails and stuff.  I'm not sure how far up it goes - I would guess far-ish, because I saw lots of people with mountain bikes and so forth.  But it seems that most of the people there - runners and tourists alike - just go up to the observatory.  This is a shortish, steepish climb (maybe 200 steps?  and some uphill walking, but not a lot), rewarded by a breathtaking view:

• After relaxing in the sun for a while, and watching a much more enterprising person go through her exercise routine (including various drills I recognized, and an impressive backwards-climbing -of-steps-on-plank-position), I set off again.  The idea was to visit two districts mentioned in a tourist book I'd picked up somewhere, one of which was supposed to be sort of the Madison Avenue of Montreal (my words), with chic shops and the best outdoor cafes - I figured I'd get lunch there - and the other of which was called The Village and was described like a Montreal version of the NYC village.
• The Madison Avenue district seemed kind of down at the heels, relative not only to the real Madison Avenue but to Montreal's own downtown.  I did find a fussy food shop and bought some cheese and bread for dinner (including raw milk cheese, which you can't get in the States, and a baguette far superior to what you'd get in Fairway or Zabar's).  I found a frozen yogurt shop and a couple of fancy restaurants, but not the adorable outdoor cafe serving crepes that I was hoping for.  I nearly went into a couple of fast food places to eat the poutine that seems to be all the rage here (why?? it's french fries - already debatably not good - with gravy poured on them.  gravy is disgusting, and it would make the fries soggy and therefore inedible.  and then cheese curds or meat on top?  now it's just weird.) but the idea of the amount of work it would involve put me off.  I get nervous about unfamiliar lunch places at the best of times - they all have different rules! - and the language barrier and my increasing fatigue and hunger were certainly not helping.  So I found a lovely park, sat by a lake, and ate some bread and cheese.  I've had much worse lunches.
• The Village area was a disappointment.  I suppose it is a bit like what the NYC village may have been like in its heyday - back when it actually was edgy - but it didn't really feel safe, or even terribly interesting.  I made my way back toward downtown.
• On my way back, I stumbled into Chinatown.  This instantly reminded me of the last time I was in Montreal.  It was in March of 2004, for a conference.  One day, at lunchtime, I went with two groupmates - one a native of China - to Chinatown and had a very good, very inexpensive meal.  Another day, I walked around the old city, thinking about a boy I liked who was also at the conference and who, I was beginning to think, did not like me back as much as he sometimes seemed to.  Yet another day, an ex-boyfriend who desperately wanted to rekindle our relationship left fancy pastries at the front desk of our hotel, among the most romantic (and least appreciated) gestures anyone has ever performed for me.  Now, nearly a decade later, we are all in different places.  The guy I liked turned out to indeed not like me back (his stated reason being that I was not thin enough), and he eventually quit his job and moved away; I believe he lives in London now, earns a great deal of money, and - conjecture - dates a succession of beautiful and annoyingly-not-vapid women.  The ex-boyfriend endured a series of tragedies of all sizes before meeting his final and greatest tragedy; his story is sad, but I am reminded of him from time to time - we were close for years after our breakup - and I feel okay about remembering him, because he was a really good person, and not enough people knew that about him.  The groupmate from China finished his PhD and, after some amount of postdoctoral fumbling, found a prestigious research position in China, married, had a couple of kids, and as far as I know is living happily ever after.  The other groupmate also finished his PhD and became a sort of permanent postdoc for a professor who was later jailed for crimes of a sexual nature.  None of this is to any point, really.  I just think it's interesting what happens to people over time.  
• I am writing this from Starbucks (yes, again... I am very ashamed of my evilness, etc.), where I am about to start cheating on Nanowrimo by starting it early.

The Great White Warmer North

Today I am in Montreal.  (Yes, I'm doing a lot of traveling this fall.  No, I didn't really intend to.  It just kind of happened.)  I'm spending a couple of days here for no particular reason and then heading to Chicago to meet up with some friends.

The trip in took the entire morning but was uneventful.  I was very proud of my maturity, at first.  In my young and foolish days, I would have booked the first flight, at e.g. 7 a.m., so as to arrive as early as possible and get as much as I could out of my first day.  I would then have had to wake up at 3 a.m. and would have spent the entire day in a miserable, exhausted haze.  Now I am older and wiser and took a flight that allowed me to sleep to a reasonable-at-least-for-a-weekday hour, and I arrived at my hotel in the early afternoon.  After putting my bags down and eating a mature-adult lunch of trail mix, I set out to do what I typically do when I travel on my own to a new (or in this case, mostly new) city: walk until I physically cannot stand up.

(Side note: I have been attempting to train for the Philadelphia Half-Marathon and struggling with plantar fascitis... I could not decide whether to (a) bring my running shoes and try to get a desperately-needed long run in (I was doing very well until three weeks ago, when I ran almost ten miles at a good pace and felt okay the day of, but later felt I might be slipping into injury... I ran a much shorter long run the following week, and the plantar fascitis began after that... I replaced my shoes and skipped last weekend's long run, but things haven't improved and in fact my running has been short, slow, and sparse, my calves are sore and tight, and I feel weak... possibly the resting is the issue?  At any rate, it's becoming a pretty serious issue as far as my ability to run this race properly goes, although, (a) my ability to run this race properly is hardly a serious issue in itself, and (b) typically every time I train for a race I run into an injury, and illness, or burnout about halfway through, miss the third quarter of the training cycle, and spend the fourth quarter panicking and worrying about my under preparation... seems like I should by now accept it and not fuss too much), (b) bring my running shoes and do a short run or two, or (c) leave the running shoes at home, enjoy my vacation, rest and recover from whatever is wrong with me, and resume training next week.  I ultimately chose c.  Perhaps walking for 4.5 hours straight this afternoon was not the best thing for me and my now-extremely-swollen foot tendon.  Also, it would appear I am getting old, because several other body parts, e.g. hips, back, neck, are also unhappy about all the walking (not that I can remember a time that they wouldn't have been.  But clearly I am meant to be invincible and this deviation is a sign of moral weakening.).

So, anyway, what did I see in my walkings?  I saw the Old Port and the Old City, which are pretty much right next to each other, but which seem to be very different ages (at the very least, the Old Port has been redone as a park, while the Old City has been preserved as a tourist ghetto).  I saw oldish buildings, statues, park-y areas, art galleries etc.  It was very nice.  My only moment of unhappiness was trying to find a dinner spot, for which the only options available were overpriced tourist establishments with mostly-unheated patios (the weather was beautiful today, but not really sitting-outside-after-dark beautiful), all guarded by dragon-girl hostesses who were too busy greeting me to let me look at their menus.  In the downtown area (outside the Old City) there are many coffee shops and lunch spots but, as in apparently every city that is not New York, they all close in the middle of the afternoon.  So I have ended up with cheese curds and granola bars, which is not a horrible dinner as dinners go, but tomorrow I must try to do better.  Or at least to eat a proper lunch.

Prequel

Quick roundup of the last week or so, because I am a good and faithful blogger, really I am.  And because a life unrecorded seems an awful lot like a life entirely spent at work.

• Had a laid-back Sunday night dinner at Noi Due with my fellow traveler, a kosher Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side.  It was good food, and a pretty standard level of pretension for the area.  (I was going to call it "unpretentious", but then I thought a bit more and realized my bar for pretension has risen dramatically in the last few years).  I thought it was pleasant enough, with a diverse clientele (some very Old World types, mixed in with young JCCers on girl dates, plus a couple of multigenerational families), and would have been happy to add it in to our (highly informal) rotation, but apparently - according to FT - the point is to not have a rotation, but instead to visit a different restaurant every time we go out (or, at least, many of the times we go out) in order to experience the diversity of the city.  I am all for diversity, at least in the abstract, but to me the excitement of living in New York is not going to a multitude of different, unusual places, but having a small assortment of these places which become familiar.  This is partly, I believe, due to our differing experiences with small towns (we have both lived in what we consider small towns - but his was five times bigger than mine.  so to him, it's exciting to have an infinite number of restaurants.  to me, it's exciting to have more than one restaurant.) and partly a dispositional difference.  
• Had brunch twice in the last few weeks at Arte Cafe, another Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side.  I concluded that, although I do not like Eggs Benedict or Crabcake Benedict (because of the tartaryness of the hollandaise), I do like Salmon Benedict.  But I like it much better at Josie's, where the sauce is vegan and (I assume therefore) less creamy.  Really, I could do without the sauce at all.
• Attended the ballet.  It was a trio of small ballets, which I prefer to the longer ballets, in part because there are more of them and in part because I have a short attention span and like the contrasts.  I probably had some deep thoughts about the ballet while I was attending, but I can't remember them at the moment.

Actually about Canada this time. Really.

Quebec City, to be precise.  I was there this week for work, and I had a bit of time to do some wandering.  Because it is now getting rather late, I will put my observations in bullet-point form:

Quebec is cold.  I expected it to be slightly colder than New York, but it was much colder, probably in part because of its situation on the St. Lawrence River, which means the touristy Old City gets a lot of wind.

It's expensive, too.  I didn't expect that, because while it's a tourist destination, it's a fairly small city without any particularly noteworthy attractions.

Aside from the complaining, it does have an attractive and nice-sized (eminently walkable, but big enough to explore for a few hours) tourist area, with fortified walls, historical signposts, old buildings, public art, a surprising number of ice cream shops for somewhere so cold (I was interested in, but could not bring myself to actually eat, the maple-flavored ice cream), and lots and lots of shopping.  I was particularly impressed by one Canadian(?) clothing store called Roots.

I had a "traditional quebecois" meal, consisting of split pea soup, meat pie (I thought this would be a pot pie or a shepherds pie but it was an actual slice of a pie, filled not with fruit but with meat, and it was served with french fries), and maple tart (another pie, filled not with fruit but with an exceptionally sweet and mildly maple-y substance).  Fresh fruits and vegetables don't seem to be a big thing there.  They do, however, seem to like their dead animals - my other two meals in the city were a fettuccine-with-duck dish and veal ravioli.  I am not a big meat eater; most of what was on offer was far more carnivorous than that.  I suppose there is not a word in Canuck French for "vegetarian".

The city, in particular its airport and restaurants, seemed very European to me.  Aside from the French-speakingness, everything was very leisurely and everyone was very pleasant.  Nobody made me take off my shoes or inspected my toiletries in the airport, and nobody tried to take my food away in the middle of a meal (I'm a slow eater, so this happens all the time in New York).  It was quite nice for a change, although if I experienced it all the time I would probably find it slovenly.  

I suppose it is a bit too obvious that I would find Quebec to be a mash-up of Paris and Anchorage, but I did.  Small historic downtown with moose souvenirs everywhere + French-speaking and full of overly fancy meats.

Some photos:

The Promenade.  More picturesque than it looks, although if something is picturesque it should probably look presentable in pictures.

Starbucks!  Sadly, they were closed in the evening.

Modern downtown through a gap (like those chinks for arrows in medieval castles, but probably for guns) in the fortified wall.

It was cold and dreary.  Somehow I thought that looked good in pictures.

Building on top of the wall.

Really awesome mural of the city, populated with historical and modern figures, plus ruins in the foreground.

This man walked into my picture and ruined it.  I took another one without him, but it turned out to look much better with the intrusion.  I'm sure that has something to do with symmetry, or serendipity, or both.

also...

We went to Dumbo.  The neighborhood in Brooklyn, not the cartoon elephant.  We walked around the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and the Dumbo (DUMBO?) waterfront, went into a bunch of little stores (mostly bookstores and fussy gift shops) and watched a dog play in the river.

Manhattan skyline

Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.

The Great White Freezing Cold North

It would be nice if I maintained a regular habit of posting here.  Then, when I did something cool but not so exciting that it merited dusting off the old blog, I might post a short remark about it.  I hear that elsewhere in the blogosphere, people are not so wordy, and that blog posts can be just a paragraph or a sentence, or even a picture.  I am dimly aware of a type of blog called a "tumblr", although I cannot pretend to understand what this word means or how it is pronounced.  It seems to be a blog made up of pictures whose wit and relevance is far too subtle and intellectual for me to understand.  So I will have to stick to mundane and tiresome words.

Fortunately, I have no shortage of words.  Before we get to the Land of Freezingness, here are some:
- I have somehow, more or less by accident, planned five trips in a ten-week period, of which the Arctic Circle was #2 (okay, that's probably enough jokes about the cold).  While I like to travel, this schedule may be a bit to frenetic for my taste.  But, at least there is no danger I will be bored.
- The first trip was to my parents' for my semi-customary early-fall beach visit.  It was a pleasant weekend of barefoot surfside runs, long afternoons on the beach, a craft festival, crab legs, and my mother's special secret-recipe triple-chocolate bundt cake.
- I saw my first theatrical production of the fall season, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecological Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City.  It is, as the name indicated, a comedy about cancer.  It's a small cast and a low-budget theater, and while there's some mother-daughter stuff and some cancer-and-mortality stuff and a very well-done portrayal of the straight man of the show by Michael Frederic, the whole thing really rests on Danielle Slavick's tour de force as the main character, who is by turns funny, furious, and vulnerable.  It's not a subtle portrayal - subtle isn't in the script - but she's in full-intensity mode for the duration of the 90-minute play, even when someone else is talking, and her character is utterly convincing.
- This morning my Fellow Traveler (as I am meant to be calling my boyfriend-turned-roommate now that he can no longer call on me as a proper Gentleman Caller would) went for a run by the water.  This is unusual for us; usually we run separately, sometimes at the same time but on separate routes and paces.  I like morning and evening runs and hills and dislike tourists; he likes sunny runs and does not take a very creative approach to direction of travel.  But today we really made an event of it.  We took the train to Fulton Street and walked to South Street Seaport with the plan to head around the southern tip of the island and north up the West Side Highway toward our apartment.  A couple passed us while I was still getting my headphones set up, and since they seemed to be going only slightly faster than I wanted to go, I decided to follow them.  Fellow Traveler had to point out to me a couple of times that perhaps we could not keep up with them for the duration of the run, but having other, pushier runners to follow came in handy when we ran into a half-mile-long tourist scrum around the ferry terminal and had to weave through the crowds.  We survived the first couple of miles but eventually lost the other runners, and we had a nice few miles until the sun and heat and lack of water in the vicinity of Chelsea Piers began to get to me.  I finished the run in decent form, but it seems like my hoped-for half marathon pace may be out of reach unless I become significantly faster / stronger / more able to bend space and time in the next six weeks.

Okay.  What were we talking about?  That's right.  Canada.

Summer Wanderings

Today's adventure was a visit to the Cloisters.  I decided to bike there, which entailed a certain amount of anxiety because I didn't know precisely how to get there or how long it would take, and I was meeting a friend who would be arriving via subway.  But it worked out okay: I biked on the Greenway to 181st St., stopping to walk up a few of the steeper GW Bridge ascents (I've become much less bold on the bike since my spill in Ireland a couple years ago... I would prefer to keep all remaining teeth intact, thank you very much, as well as all other body parts).  Then I was a bit confused about where to go, so I fired up the old Google Maps, which told me I was in exactly the right place to exit the park, and I made it the rest of the way on feel.  That last bit, after I exited the park, was the trickiest - it had gotten very warm, and my legs were a bit tired (the total trip is around 8.5 miles, which is hardly a massive bike trip, but I have nubbly mountain-bike tires and don't actually bike much) and the whole biking-on-streets thing is unusual for me.  We do seem to have a lot of new bike lanes, but once I got away from the park nobody was using them.

The draw at the Cloisters was an exhibit about unicorns.  Apparently they have been around (ficticiously) for much longer than I'd thought.  We also walked around the other exhibits and gardens... possibly the most interesting thing we saw was eight nuns in white habits, opaque nude hose, and identical black sneakers.  Then we found a shady spot in the grass and chatted.  I saw a woman who works in my office and met an adorable orange-red poodle puppy who climbed all over me and licked my face.  On the way out, we stopped at the ice cream truck for sprinkly cones.

I felt shaky at the start of the ride home - I'd had a lot of sun, and the ice cream cone hadn't kicked in yet.  I had a harder time finding the Greenway than I'd thought I would - every road seemed to be one way in the wrong direction, and there were giant buses and people parked randomly in the middle of the street and kids on too-small bikes cutting me off.  Finally I found the road to the park entrance, a steepish hill that I'd ridden up with only moderate effort earlier in the afternoon, and halfway down my fear of flipping over the handlebars or losing control of the bike overwhelmed my desire to not look like an idiot, and I dismounted to walk.  The rest of the trip back was filled with similar bumps - a twenty-block party around the 160's featuring small children playing in the middle of the bike path; an accelerating wind that made the Hudson choppy and meant I had to pedal furiously even though I was going downhill - but I got back safely, surprisingly tired and rather dehydrated.

Before even heading out on my adventure, I had a breakfast picnic at my spot in Riverside Park.  My spot, where I've spent many summer afternoons and the occasional weekday evening over the past few years, is a grassy hillside in Riverside Park.  It's a five-minute walk from my apartment; rarely empty but never loud; and there is sun and shade and often puppies.  And now going there is a little bit sad, because I am about to move away from it.

Not far away from it.  I am moving a grand total of 0.7 miles, in the direction directly away from it.  My new apartment will be very close to Central Park, so I can find a new spot.  My new apartment is also about five time the size of my old apartment, has many more bathrooms and bedrooms (my current apartment has 0 bedrooms so this isn't hard) and a superior kitchen, and I will be acquiring a roommate of whom I am already fond*.  So, in addition to being a geographically trivial move it is a good one, but I am still full of nostalgia for my tiny, semi-infested apartment, my West End haunts, my dwindling bachelorettehood.

* My future roommate is the man who for the last two years has occupied the post of Gentleman Caller.  Since he will obviously not be calling on me any longer when we occupy the same residence, I am retiring that position and creating a new one for him, that of Fellow Traveler.

Tribeca Film Festival so far, and then some

The first movie I saw was the world premiere of Stand Clear of the Closing Doors.  My brother worked on the film, so I'm filialy obligated not to criticize it, but independently of that it was quite good.  It had high aspirations - it was about a thirteen-year old boy with an autism spectrum disorder who runs away from his home in Far Rockaway in the days before Hurricane Sandy and spends several days on the subway while his undocumented mother tries to find him without attracting unwelcome attention - and it seems to meet them fairly well.  But I thoughts its real successes were in the details: the cinematography; the uneasy, argumentative, intense relationship between the boy's mother and his teenage sister; the matter-of-fact portrayal of the thousand mundane indignities (a bedroom just big enough for two twin beds with a curtain between them, a toilet lid wet with urine, a long bus ride to a menial job) that attend this family's life even when things are going well.  

Next, I saw Farah Goes Bang, about a trio of women just out of college - including the title character, Farah, the daughter of Iranian immigrants - who combine their idealistic desire to prevent George Bush from winning a second term in office (the movie is set in 2004) with their youthful need to drive cross-country while making crude jokes by joining the Kerry campaign.  Trying to win Democratic votes in places like Texas and Kentucky exposes them to some fairly predictable confrontations, but also to some less-stereotypical moments that challenge the characters' assumptions.  Amidst all this, a bit nonsensically, is the movie's other plot - Farah's desire to lose her virginity, and her fear of sex, both of which stem from her frankly antagonistic relationship with her body.  These issues are portrayed in a way that is realistic and sensitive without being preachy.  But ultimately the movie is more concerned with being fun - by which I mean funny - than with making its own point, and Farah's bang is more literal than figurative.

Later that same day I saw a set of shorts.  There were seven of them, all set in New York City.  I thought at the time that half of them were good and half bad, but I can only remember three of them now, and the one that sticks out the most was unenjoyable while I watched it.  It's very hard for a short film to be medium-good; they tend to be very bad, forgettable, or amazing.

Around this time I finished the book I had been reading and started a novel called Mercury Falls, which is truly horrible.  It seems to be aiming for a combination of Douglas Adams and Piers Anthony, but it lacks originality, subtlety, and humor, which means it's mostly just literal interpretation of fairy tales with an awful lot of sarcastic apocalysm.  In an attempt to dilute the early phases of the book - sometimes it simply takes a while to get into something - I began alternating it with Something Borrowed, one of the novels I keep on my kindle for literary crises such as this.  I never quite tire of this novel or its sibling, Something Blue, because of the author's stunning command of narrative voice and her Austenian attention to detail.

The next movie I saw was A Case of You.  I had really high hopes for this one.  It was billed as a hyper-modern and highly original love story, but it turned out to be a very old-fashioned love story with some postmodern flourishes.  Justin Long plays a writer of movie novelizations (this is my dream job, or one of them) who longs to become a serious writer (which is way too hard to be my dream job).  Instead he spends all his time gazing longingly at his barrista, a standard-issue Manic Pixie Dreamgirl.  When he accidentally learns her name, he uses her Facebook profile to turn himself into her dream guy.  The relationship is going well - and, better yet, he's writing a book about it - until he decides pixiegirl doesn't really know him.  As with Stand Clear, I thought this movie's successes were in its details - the well-shot scenes, the wardrobe choices, the Sienna Miller cameo and Busy Philips' and Vince Vaughn's small roles.  Even Rachel Wood, as the pixie, had very little to do, and Justin Long's major function was to look confused.  I am writing such a long paragraph about this movie because I can't seem to arrive at a conclusion.  It wanted to be more than a Friday-night chick flick, and in some ways it succeeded.  It had things to say about art and authenticity.  But the core of the movie - the two main characters - felt empty.

My most recent (but, rather alarmingly, not final) viewing was of Adult World.  This has been the sleeper hit of my TFF experience so far.  It's about a recent college graduate who fancies herself a poet but ends up working at an adult video store to make rent.  She develops a one-sided mentor-protege relationship with a semi-established poet and a surprisingly authentic friendship with a transvestite while navigating her shifting relationships with her parents, her best friend from college, and (of course) the adorable manager of the video store.  So this movie had some of the same serious-ish themes as the other movies I just talked about - notably young women coming into their adulthood and the unglamourousness of the artistic life - but it handled them with impressive lightness.  It was, flat-out, funny, in exactly the sort of way I like.  I laughed at the protagonist, all the time, because she was so ridiculous in exactly the way that a 22-year-old poet of course is ridiculous - but I also cared about her.  The other characters, too, were well-drawn, and even the smaller roles seemed multidimensional.  John Cusack was in this movie, and he was as entertaining as he always is, and he was far from the best thing about it.

When I came home from the movie, I found what appears to be a book about the apocalypse in my mailbox.