As so often happens around here, someone else has said it � and by "it" I mean of course something like "part of It," and for the love of all that is good and holy, when am I going to make it through a first paragraph without leaving quotation marks behind, that distasteful sign of my accursed species? � better and much less whingingly than I have, and by someone else don�t you know I mean Sickday. And Sickday, how�s this, a few months ago I too was looking at UIC (but now I am not). May we both find economic salvation in the university setting and thereby avoid the cattle brand in perpetuity, amen.

Yes, I am still your lame-duck Homeland Securitista. Did you non-heathens out there have a good Christmas? Wednesday night I figured out that a genius solution for not getting fired on Thursday and therefore guaranteeing myself the insurance, etc. was simply not to show up on Thursday. What were they going to do, fire me? I�ll admit, it was not my finest ethical hour. But here was my penance, I went to a matinee of "Sideways." Critics of America: WTF?! How was this movie not a big stinky turd? How was it not a historical high-water mark for pandering to its audience? How did anyone even let it into distribution with the horrible score that I swear was cobbled together from episodes of "Diagnosis Murder"? I almost walked out during the scene where Miles and Jack are sneaking out of his mother�s apartment, where what you hear is the most hackneyed ooh-someone-is-sneaking-around music in the entire body of cinema and television. What, did someone think I couldn�t figure that out for myself? Yeah, Paul Giamatti is a brave actor and Virginia Madsen has never gotten the respect she deserves and it is nice that Alexander Payne is so interested in making movies for grownups, blah blah blah. I thought it was predictable and unresonant and (as in the case of the music) an insult to the viewer�s intelligence, not even especially well written, and that technically it was a piece of crap, I�ve seen better filmmaking by undergraduates at the end-of-semester festival. I object strongly, especially in the context of grownuppery, to the lack of moral consequences for Jack, and I want to go burn the houses down of all the critics who are best-movieing this gob over "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." And what I want to know is why "Spanglish" � which I have not seen � is getting hammered for being a valentine to its liberal-guilty yuppie audience, and, bizarrely, part of the problem red-state-blue-state-wise and nobody blinks twice at the "astonishing smugness" (Scott on Brooks) of "Sideways." Is not Jack also "irredeemably selfish, vain, and ridiculous" (ibid.), and do these qualities not perform the trick of making Miles seem better than he is by virtue of contrast? My screening audience at the Uptown was populated mostly by seeming NPR types (I may have been the youngest person there), and hearing the knowing chuckles from all about, at the film�s cues for them that to me felt like thrown elbows, was tantamount to being in Hell. Were these people�s expectations, assumptions, aesthetics, or values challenged by one second of "Sideways," or may they all remain in a coma? Let�s be honest, is anyone who voted for George Bush going to see this movie?

(Does the fact that I put "ibid." in my diary indicate that I have a credibility problem w/r/t the foregoing criticisms? About a week and a half ago I had such a strange morning here � before 9, two people had stopped by, independently of each other, with Latin questions.)

I haven�t seen a lot of movies this year, which is the reason the only comparison I can make is with the ES of the SM. I don�t know what happened. It will be one of my resolutions for 2005 � see more movies, please � and I would especially like to get somewhat caught up, the Eastwood and "Hotel Rwanda" and the Wes Anderson and "Bad Education" (is that here yet?) and "The Woodsman" and "Christmas with the Kranks" (just kidding!), before OP 2005, my last one ever in Seattle so you had best request the following Monday off now.

Oh, and then anyway after I did my little unethical can�t-touch-this with downhill skiing and potential concussions in mind, it turned out that Loop Loop wasn�t open yet so it was all x-c. Further penance. I skied 23 kilometers in one day � I wanted to do 30, but our timing was off and as it was we finished a blue run in the dark and with Steve having broken a pole and my glasses so fogged I couldn�t see down to my bindings, so 23 would have to do. Drank beer, read books, sat in the hot tub. I read A.M. Homes� "Music for Torching," which is one of those kinds of books that make me irritated because they seem to lack urgency and necessity and I can�t rightly say that the world is better for them having been written, but then again there I am, curled up on the king-size at the Cascade Best Western, reading them. Somewhere around page 133 of M for T it occurred to me that the item in question was what "White Noise" would be like if it had been written by a girl (hint: the gun goes off) and contained hot lesbian action. And with "The Airborne Toxic Event" and the following section conflated. Am I crazy? Here is what did it.

A faint line of perspiration breaks out on Elaine�s upper lip. The evening air is still, slightly warm. She begins to sweat, to breathe too quickly, to panic. It feels as if the temperature is going up as the sun goes down, and the humidity is on the rise. The air is without air, there is nothing to breathe.

"You tell me you have no debts, and I believe you," the agent says. "But have you got a bank statement I could take a peek at? Do you have a retirement account? How much are you putting in? Are you maxing out?" He pauses and takes a peek at his papers. "Any health issues? Cancer in the family? Either of you recently diagnosed with a horrible, expensive disease?" The agent looks at them carefully. "Anything you don�t want me to know?" He laughs to himself: heh, heh, heh.

It�s just� less restrained somehow, and in general more emotionally florid. Also, I don�t think DeLillo�s agent would have said "peek," and I don�t think DeLillo would have defaulted to "peek" twice in such swift succession. Neither would the agent have asked his final question or laughed his final hehs. Where I am going with this I have no idea, sorry. I should wrap up the diary so that I can devote some time this afternoon to application stuff � all the schools seem to want my resum� formatted differently, for instance, which is such a pain in the ass.

I forgot to mention in the last entry, another reason I�m chafing at the option of the admin job across the street is that if I were there, then the person who took over for me here would be able to call me all the time and ask me questions, and I�d be obliged to dispense distilled wisdom and make her look good. Again a hit to the ethics, I know, but I don�t want to be in that position; I want to be in *this* position. Besides, everything is documented and filed and cross-referenced just like we do it in the private sector, so all she has to do is look and she�ll be fine. That is another beef I have with the public sector and one of those I might have liked, on the school tip, to tenderize and make tasty: there�s no information management. Nobody bothers to document because everyone knows that they are going to be around for at least 20 years, so when I need to find something out, my recourse is not to a database or a file cabinet but to Jeannette over in Joe Blow�s office, because three years ago she worked for DMS and filled in for Carlene on her days off, and before DMS Carlene, who was close to retirement then and took many weeks of days off, had access to precisely the information I�m after. Needless to say, even to find out Carlene�s connection to the holy grail I have to know the right person to ask, which I am just beginning to learn, and for a whole job req�s worth of such connections to become intuitive a body would have to remain on the scene for, oh, about 20 years. Your tax dollars at work, people.

I am going to go get some salad. Joy units to all.