'Twas a Dark and Chilly Day

"I got one foot stuck in paradise, another foot in the grave"
-"One Foot," Seven Nations

Last night it rained where I live and thirty miles north they got the year’s first snow storm. Today it was actually colder at 2pm than 10am. Go figure. Winter’s coming. ‘Tis the season when I wish I had a fireplace. I do, however, have hand-crocheted afghans that my grandma made, flannel bed sheets, and flannel PJs.

Gotta work at the bar tonight, and I’d much rather not. What I’d like to do tonight is go home and curl up on the couch with my latest Netflix DVDs and a cup of something warm to drink. Mmm… Instead, I get to go to work. Ugh. Still the worst of it won’t be until this weekend – which was remarkably like last weekend – when I’m scheduled for both Friday and Saturday. The up-side of this weekend is that I asked for Friday off, and since I didn’t get it, Marianne scheduled me for a short shift (5-midnight). The down-side is that my coworker for the night noticed, “But isn’t the person who gets here first (4 o’clock) supposed to go home first?”

“Yes, but I asked for the day off.”

“Well, do you think I could go home first, ‘cause I have a test to study for and I flunked it the first time, and I really need to study.”

“We’ll see.” (Nuh-uh)

The part that makes it worse is that this gal only works at the bar one night a week. If she was scheduled to be back Saturday, I’d send her home first without much thought. However, since I’m the one due back Saturday, I’m not feeling generous. After all, I’ve got school demands too. Also not on her side is the fact that she tends to whine and gives the impression, whenever she’s working, that she’d rather be anyplace else. A kind of bare-minimum type of gal who asks for a lot of favors but has yet to do any for me. *Sigh* Can you tell I don’t care for her much?

In other news, my CDs from CD Universe came. I now have seven more albums than I did yesterday, mostly Church, but also Eve 6, Seven Nations, Third Eye Blind, and Rusted Root. These are the first new albums (save one GBS) I’ve bought in six months, maybe more. It makes me happy to think I can go home and fill my stereo (holds 5-discs) with completely new music. Yay!

Movie Review: Beloved. I read the novel a few years ago in class and, from what I remember of it, the film is very true to the gist – if not quite every single detail – of the story. Danny Glover is great as Paul D, and Oprah holds her own as Sethe. Denver and Beloved were also cast well and the actresses deliver high-caliber performances. Watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think of certain parts of the non-fiction book Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin. Though the book was written in the late 1960’s a lot of the same themes occur in both. The most striking instance is the scene in Beloved where Sethe kills her baby and one of the white men, who came after her to take her and her children back to slavery, calls her an animal. Griffin addresses the stereotype of African Americans as somehow subhuman, and basically says “Can you blame people for it when you’re the one driving them to it?” The event he’s talking about is different, but the principal is there. A good movie, but not for a superficial viewer.