fatvegan

Google are brilliant. Just I was starting to think I somehow needed my "starred" emails as my default Gmail page, they bring out this brilliant Labs thing called Multiple Inbox. So you can divide your inbox into a few different sections. So now I have my normal inbox on the left and my starred and drafts in two sections on the right. It is so satisfying.

I bought two singlets yesterday. It is the first time in my life and I can remember owning a singlet, although I think mum may have bought me some when I was about four.

So far, I am very happy with my purchases. They add a general glow of warmth to life and chilly evenings.

Crash cars. Talk to some people. Be happy.

That was my friend's review of the film during our post-credits cinema prayers. It is pretty apt.

We went to see Fast & Furious tonight. It was pretty fun. I liked the cars a lot. Except for the lame Smart Car one at the end. I mean, I love Smart Cars, but not in massive car chases through secret tunnels against a Torino.

Another thing was that for a massively amoral film, it was pretty moralistic. What is it with Hollywood obsessing over how naughty drugs are? I would love someone to make a big film where the goodies smuggle a big truck of drugs out of Mexico. They're just drugs for goodness sake. It's not like they're running people over in cars. The movie thought that street racers who were risking the lives of hundreds of people could redeem themselves by racing through streets risking the lives of hundreds more people in order to catch drug dealers.

There were various other plot inconsistencies that struck me as critical flaws as a watched the film. But as the memory of it fades into a warm fuzz, they seem somehow less important.

Deal with the Devil, originally uploaded by Nutloaf.

Never ever make a deal with AFP

I watched The Lives of Others over a couple of nights. I enjoyed it a lot. It felt a little blunt at times. The characters were a little extreme, but I liked the tempo and the style. I found the last part a bit confusing. The hero fellow didn't feel like much of a hero to me. He still ended up inviting people to make some pretty major betrayals. Or perhaps just the one, but it was biggish. I think it was meant to feel like a classic tragedy of miscommunication. But it didn't feel like that too me. The betrayal is still there regardless of the actual outcome.

The acting was beautiful though. The Stasi fellow was brilliant. I liked his face and his manner.

On Easter morning my friend sent me and SMS telling that "Christ is risen." It is a helpful habit that a few of my friends have. But I got to wondering how they work out who to send the reminder to. Presumably they don't remind anyone who has already told them the same thing that morning. You would tend to think that you only send it to people you think might appreciate a reminder. Which leads to the trickier question of who you send a reminder to if you've been reminded by someone else. If you know a lot of the same people then you'd be worried about sending a superfluous reminder to many of your friends. It's a tricky problem to solve, and it's hard to imagine a perfect solution. People are likely to either get two reminders or none at all because people figure they will have already got one. I suspect the reason so few people send out resurrection reminders is because of the difficulty of figuring out this issue. However, it's obviously important to people and I am impressed when people continue social traditions even in the face of logistical or distributional impracticalities.

So I am proposing a government (or perhaps telephone-company) sponsored service, that will send out religious reminders about where Jesus is at on certain days of the year (Easter, Christmas, second coming etc). That way no one risks embarrassingly forgetting what Jesus is doing at important times and no one needs to fret about the niceties of SMS informal reminders.

Zombie Strippers wasn't actually as bad as I'd thought it would be. I found it pretty funny actually. I really like lame zombie jokes and there were plenty of those. It was also massively gross in a funny sort of way and that sort of thing makes me happy too. However, there was a lot of stripping. So much that after a little while I started to dread another person taking their clothes off. I started to feel quite nauseated actually. I can watch zombies eat people for hours and love it, but as soon as they start dancing without clothes it's different. What was bad perhaps is the the strippers kind of took it seriously and were actually trying to be sexy rather than just funny. If they'd just stuck with silly and had totally forgotten about being sexy the movie would have been stacks better.

I went to bed pretty late last night. Or at least late for L'Arche. I stayed up watching movies in bed. By time I was through The Life of Others, Zombie Strippers and the first half of Shaolin vs Evil Dead it was about 2am and I decided it was time for sleep.

At about 4am one of my house mates wandering into my room and sat on my bed. She asked me to make her a cup of tea. She couldn't sleep because she was so thirsty. I just wanted to make her go away so I could get back to sleep, so I suggested she go and get a drink of water. I certainly should have known better than that. She really wanted a cup of tea. She kept gripping my hand and telling me she needed a cup of tea and she wouldn't dob.

I was pretty groggy, but a few thoughts went through my head as my friend sat there in negotiations. The main one was really wanting to go back to sleep. The next one was being worried about the risk of encouraging 4am hand-claspings more often by making her a tea this time. I thought I should be firm, because otherwise I could be up every night making cups of tea. However, I finally settled on a different thought. I remember what it was like to wake up in the night and really need a drink. My poor friend can't make herself a drink in the middle of the because there are ingredients to it that she she doesn't have. I can imagine the powerlessness I would feel in that situation. So in the end I agreed to get her the ingredients for the tea if she made it. I got them and went back to bed.

A little while later I had just started to get back to sleep and was looking forward to the next couple of hours in it. Then my friend opened my door and came in and sat on the bed. She had made me a calendar and wanted to give it to me as a present. She spent a time explaining to me how it would help me and help me to remember the evening. I thanked her for it many times. She asked me what time I would be able to get up and make her another cup of tea. I said 8am would be alright. That satisfied her and she trotted off again.

At 8am, she popped in again. She asked for some help with the next cup of tea and took the calendar back. I got her the tea and went back to bed. As I was leaving she said "You can go get some sleep now Ryan." So I went back to bed. Now I'm off to drive to Balmain.

[I knock on the bathroom door]
Them: Who is it?
Me: It's just me.
Them: Oh gee. Just lay off would you.

We're are going to go to my cubby house and we are going to stay there. We are going to live there. We are going to my C-U-B-B-Y-H-O-U-S-E for our birthdays. We won't leave. We are not going to sell. No. We are not going to S-E-L-L.

I went and saw Frost/Nixon a while ago. But I sure liked it a bunch. The Nixon character was so good, and they did an incredible job of putting it together to make it interesting. However, it made me think more about the nature of power than about the sins of Richard Nixon. I thought the Frost character was really awful, although it may well have been a truthful depiction. No matter how bad Nixon was throughout the movie, all I could think about was how tragic it was that such an amazing man was humbled by such a hack. I wanted Nixon to win, because even though he was probably a bad person, he had some class. I don't think we can ask our leaders to be perfect. All we can ask is that they be the best of us.

It seems that someone has replaced the National Parks website with a massively lame section of the Department of Environment and Climate Change site. The old National Parks was actually good, especially for a government website. The new site has pretty much no information. No information on bushwalks at all. And why else do you go to a National Park?

Yesterday I went up to Wollombi with some chums to get a little afternoon mud brick education. It was a massively stressful day and I felt like I almost died, but the mud bricks were so beautiful that they made up for it. I really want to build a mud brick house now. Any remaining doubts I had have been swept away.

I can't really post photos of people I live with, but this is probably OK.

Kyung, Ripple and I went to see Knowing yesterday. It was pretty shit. Not quite as bad as that other super crap end of the world film, but it was competitive. The only good parts were when cities were exploding, and that didn't happen very often.