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Kim does HTML
Sunday, June 27 1999
While I laboured to catch up on my own projects, Kim was working on an important paper for one of her somatics classes. The paper concerned endometriosis, a chronic condition of the uterus. Kim has suffered from endometriosis since her early 20s and it's the reason she got involved in bodywork to begin with. She wanted to make a web version of the paper, so I clued her in on the "Save as HTML" feature of Claris Works, and then showed her how to tweak the HTML so it would better suit her needs. You wouldn't believe how many useless runs of <strong></strong> tags Claris Works puts in the HTML of the documents it converts from its proprietary format. Understandably, Kim was somewhat intimidated by the raw HTML code, so she kept calling me in to make little edits, leaving me flustered and weary. "I'm not at work, I shouldn't have to do this!" I exclaimed at one point.
After that was over with, we relaxed in front of a horror flick called In Dreams, loaned to us by our neighbor Lisa. I'd been under the impression that I couldn't be scared by movies any more, but this flick changed my mind just a little. It wasn't terrifying, but it was probably the scariest movie I've seen during my adulthood. It pulled off its horror by not falling into the traps that all the bad horror movies fall into. There was none of the usual boring horror movie filler. You know what I mean: the scary music while doors are opened, only for nothing to be there. Instead, this movie focused on the horror of the perceptions of a damaged though unusually perceptive mind. For a character to have a damaged mind, one that sees things that aren't there and thinks it can see into the future as well as the past, affords a script writer all sorts of possibilities, and this movie did a great job of exploring them. Beyond that, I made a meta-realization as I watched this movie. A movie is about interfaces of human experiences, connections between databases if you will. As in the real world, these connections are never perfect, and are usually limited by proximity. With a diseased mind, there are new barriers to data flow, as well as new possibilities. (But the exploration of this latter option usually irritates me because I find it unnecessarily pseudoscientific.) The only thing I didn't appreciate about In Dreams was its cookie-cutter Hollywood-chase-scene-ending. By that time I was coming down off the kind buds and my usual cynicism had returned.
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