Last night, while I slept, Jes watched Memoirs of a Geisha. She told me that the film, while beautiful, was a disappointment. She wants to reread the book now to confirm that it was as good as she remembers. She said so many of the best parts of the book are simply skipped over in the film. I’m watching it now and without the book to compare it to. It seems like a fine film that is more about setting than plot. Now that my summer stretches in front of me, perhaps I’ll read it. I’d like to teach a class on film adaptation.

Time gap – it has occurred to Jes that what may not have made it into the film may have been from an entirely different book about geisha, as she has read several. Hmm, this film adaptation course that I am mentally developing may get a might tricky. I can’t really have high school kids reading books about geisha anyway. How long until I go back to college teaching I wonder?

There are thunderstorms afoot here in St. Louis with loud booms sufficient to agitate all the animals. I love it, the storms and not the agitation. At different points in my life when I have thought about leaving Missouri, or when I have left, I’ve know that I would miss the storms. It rains in sheets and the streets become rivers. I ran down to the basement earlier and picked up the laundry in case the basement floods. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Oddly we’ve had huge storms followed by basement flooding the last two New Year’s Eves in two different apartments. Shoveling out your basement is a shitty way to start your new year, pun intended.

Once again I slept all day. Jes woke me and I asked if she was home for lunch. She laughed and told me it was time for dinner. So now she has gone to sleep and I remain awake. I am having a glass of the Yellow Tail Merlot, blog walking and watching the fish. Did you know watching fish is clinically proven to lower your stress levels? The Gourami tank needs a hearty Pleco for the glass. Maybe I’ll get a snail instead.

I got a new Hifin Spotted Pleco and another Clown Loach to begin repopulating the death tank. You have to add fish just a few at a time or you can throw off the nitrogen cycle. The larger the tank in terms of gallons, the easier it is to maintain balance. In large tanks you also have more time to correct imbalances. If you’re a novice aquarist thinking about getting fish, get as big a tank as you can afford. A twenty-gallon is twice as easy to care for as a ten gallon. It’s Ted’s inverse law of fish propagation, which I’ve just made up.

Meanwhile, my killer Gourami seem to be at a stalemate. The blue is a little smaller than the gold and thus more maneuverable in the tight turns around the corral. They are mostly ignoring one another with the occasion game of nip tag. I have had to do a fair amount of tank cleaning today as I had just really let everything slide during my last educational push. I am really only two working days into my breather and am just beginning to take stock of how low my battery had gotten. The marathon sleeping is a bit of a clue. I feel like I am resting, but I don’t feel rested yet. I read somewhere that it takes an average of fifteen days to fully de-stress from a challenging work environment. Very few people get that kind of vacation time.

We watched Aeon Flux tonight. We both enjoyed it more than we were expecting to. It’s by no means a great film, but it does all the things a sci-fi genre film is supposed to do. My recommendation is that I would watch it again and if I saw it in a bargain bin I might buy it. I was going to write about where I rented it, but I don’t want to be part of a multi-layered marketing scheme. I already wrote an advertisement for Gourmet magazine the other day and I am trying to limit my corporate whoring to once a week. Maybe I’m more of a Geisha.

I have a friend who just dropped out of advertising and into teaching. He has all the language games of the sales environment in play in his teaching in a very self-aware way. He’ll tell you that companies are trying to sell meaning now and to align their products with meaningful experiences. The pitch is that you’re not selling a product as much as you’re selling an experience – you do the dew. William Gibson tapped into this trend awhile back in his novel Pattern Recognition. You no longer advertise, you brand. Or, more importantly, you perpetually re-brand in something akin to Madonna’s never ending re-inscription of stardom. It’s associative nostalgia (for a life you may have never had) co modified and the cutting edge of almost always bland consumerism.

People seem to need meaning. It’s a basic desire. Think about how much of the average day is bound up in narrative, scripting your experience for yourself and the people that you talk to, or immersing yourself in other worlds of narrative through the news or evening television. Most religions are eschatological narratives that try to spell out some kind of satisfying dénouement where the good guys come out ok and the bad guys get theirs. What if there is no end, just transformation from one state to another. Instead of eschatology we should encourage cyclical scatology, so when it all turns to shit we won’t be surprised.

Honestly, I long for meaning. I am too much of a skeptic who is too well informed to make any of Aquinas’ long jumps. I’m not interested in playing three card monty with consumerist America, squelching my existential angst with my sugar laden burger. Many of the world’s religions agree that service is the key to getting past your ego and figuring out what life is really all about. My leap will not be one of faith, but one of action, so that even if I don’t get any gleaming messages of clarity from the infinite, at least my life will have been of some use beyond the solipsism of these late night reflections. Hmm, do the do.