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a movie I can watch while working
Tuesday, January 2 2018
Lately I've been waking up (usually in the recuperation fort) at around 9:00am. At around that time, the cats start wanting their food, and Oscar is the one who makes the aggressive demands. He likes to touch me on the face, a stroke that would be tender if his claws weren't part-way out. Lately he's developed the habit of poking me softly in the eye. I put a pillow on top of my head, but he's a hard alarm clock to snooze through.
After taking care of all the critters, I drove into Kingston to deal with the basement drafts causing pipes to freeze in the Brewster Street rental unit. I stopped first at Herzog's to pick up a can of spray foam, since all the cans I had were half-depleted, missing hardware, too cold from having been outdoors, or some combination of all three.
The daughter (wasn't it a school day?) let me in, and, after exchanging some season-appropriate pleasantries, I went directly to the basement. It wasn't hard to find the air leaks, which brushed against my face and hands like icy feathers. I sprayed foam along the gaps in materials and into obvious holes, but there were still apparent leaks even once all that was done. Fortunately there was a bat of fiberglass insulation nearby from which I could harvest wads of glassy cotton candy. The leaks were mostly coming from around a large sewer pipe vent. There were also a terrible leak coming from around a window that had been incompetently installed by some moron well before we bought the place. The window had double-pane glass, but the pane was about a half-inch too short, leaving that half-inch gap for arctic air to pour in like waterfall. I stuffed fiberglass insulation into that gap as well.
[REDACTED]
It being the first business day of the month, I meant to pick up the rental checks from the units at the Brick Mansion, but I was so preoccupied with the filthy spray foam stuck to my fingers that I totally forgot about it.
Today in the remote workplace, my tasks were such that I could watch (here and there) an entire movie as I worked. The movie in question was the Room, which came out in 2003. Supposedly it's the "Citizen Kane of bad movies" and has developed a cult following due to its wanton awfulness. It's not just that the acting is unusually bad, it's that it breaks all the rules of storytelling, padding its hour and forty minutes with all sorts of unnecessary unresolved threads and never properly developing any of the characters. The only reason I knew about it was that Gretchen and I had considered watching the Disaster Artist on Jewish Christmas, which is about the making of the Room, and that had caused me to download. Bad as it is, the Room is somehow compelling and makes you want to watch and re-watch it. What the hell is that kid doing there in the beginning? Why does he want to watch the two main characters have sex? And do they really begin their lovemaking with a pillow fight? And why does that kid spend most of the rest of the movie trying to get others to toss a football with him?
Some of my workplace colleagues had drawn my attention to the release of another (the 4th) season of what must be my favorite television series: Black Mirror. I immediately downloaded it, with plans of having a Black Mirror marathon on Friday when Gretchen goes down to the City. But I couldn't wait. Tonight I watched the first episode, "USS Callister," which opens with a low-production-value knock-off of Star Trek. Where is this heading? We wonder, and (as with all oddball settings), it's soon revealed we were in a simulation of reality. This episode hit all the Black Mirror notes: fully-immersive computer-generated reality, the copying and simulation of human beings (and what that means for identity), and computer blackmail (which, in this episode, is the only available method for a copy to get her real-world prototype to do the "right" thing). It was great, though I was a little angry at the confusion of what a functioning human is and how it may be copied. The copying shown in "USS Callister" is clearly of DNA, which does contain a blueprint for a physical human. But it doesn't contain anything about the content of our brains.
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