I could tell you about lots of things.

Maybe I'll tell you about some of them.

Hooray, the 3-day weekend has begun!

How did I celebrate its onset? I watched Vertigo on streaming Netflix. Vertigo has been on my to-watch list for years and years and years. Frank has had a framed movie poster of it since college. When I first saw the poster, I asked him something along the lines of whether it was really such a good movie. His response reflected his disbelief that I had not seen the film. That, as I mentioned, was years and years and years ago. So tonight I was on Netflix and realized that it would no longer be available for streaming after the end of the month. So I figured I would inaugurate the weekend by watching it.

And while, yes, some of the plot twists were really fun, I couldn't get over two things:

1. Kim Novak. Ugh! She has one of those faces where the cheekbones are way full and they sink in to a pointed chin at some mighty crazy angles. And the painted-on crazy fat eyebrows only made it worse. I couldn't stop looking at her eyebrows! and then it occurred to me: she looks like Linda Evangelista in those horrible horrible L'Oreal Visible Lift commercials. Same facial structure. I actually had to check Wikipedia to make sure they weren't related.

Don't they kind of look like they're trying to get peanut butter off the roofs of their mouths?

Kim Novak

Linda Evangelista

2. As though the eyebrows weren't bad enough, I could have lived with them if she had just had some spine. What an awful character she played! And yes, I realize that this is an old movie, but wow - talk about unable to do anything without a man pulling the strings.

So although the animated opening and dream sequences were very cool, Vertigo didn't do it for me. I'll stick with The Birds and Psycho. And I still have Rear Window and North by Northwest on the list to see.

*****

There are some activities that are very calming to me and yesterday I enjoyed one of them: running my car through the car wash. Why, you might ask, would such an activity be calming? Well, when I worked at the rental car company after college, sometimes the best part of the day was sitting isolated in a car with a buffer of water all around - no one could possibly pop in with a problem that needed attention there.

I should indulge in a car wash more often, even though of course the fact that I washed my car yesterday unleashed a weekend of thunderstorms. We have been on a crazy schedule at school to accommodate all of the state testing going on, and that has meant three-hour-long classes in the morning. Which means spending lots and lots of time with my hardest class. It has been awful. Yesterday was one of the days that that class met. Which meant the onset of an all-day migraine. I swear it melted away as soon as I got into the car wash. Really.

One day when I was in the carwash I had the greatest idea for a story. Someday when I write it, I'll share.

*****

I think I'm done buying books for a while. It's going to take a little while to get through the ones I have bought. This week the Borromini book came. Genius, genius, genius. I want a trip to Rome.

*****

Shall we have a song of the day? I downloaded this album last night. It was just the suggested album on the front page of emusic when I logged on, and I liked it, so I got it. This morning while getting ready for work, I had it playing and this song caught me. Then I was on the npr website later today and found a video.

Listen to it on the embedded video below. Then, if you like the song, see the more literal video on npr. But really, just listen to it first.

Josh Ritter - The Curse