Tom & Alissa

Friday night was my first time home since Wednesday morning. We had plans, but they got cancelled. We watched The World, a slightly strange but still coherent Chinese film about workers at a low-budget Epcot-style place in Beijing, interspersed with random thirty-second cartoon bits underscored with Asian pop. I have a really difficult time liking Asian cinema in general, but this one was okay.

Saturday we slept in and cooked breakfast, then went to a small screening of the film Tom worked on in February (just us, the directors and their wives, and the writer). So much fun. It’s great to see something that you were deeply involved with coming together.

We came home and watched Fracture (Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling), followed immediately by Primal Fear (Richard Gere and a mind-blowing Edward Norton) - in doing so, we inadvertently were marathoning movies by the same director. Despite its melodramaticly stupid name, Primal Fear is probably the better movie - but Fracture is worth renting.

On Sunday after church we went shopping, then cooking, and then had a few people over for dinner. I made dijon-dressed new potato salad and hamburgers, and Tom cooked the hamburgers on our new indoor electric grill. They were pronounced by two present as “the best hamburger I’ve ever had”. So, a success for us. We make them with beer and Worcestershire sauce and onions and jalapeno peppers, and I think it makes a difference. Stayed up late discussing life.

We’d originally planned to go to the beach on Monday, but we just didn’t feel like making the long train trip and decided to go out to brunch (Los Pollitos II on 5th Ave in Brooklyn - cheap and yummy) and then went to Prospect Park for a few hours to read books and watch people flying the biggest kites I’ve ever seen in my life, with 8-foot wingspans. I finished Lolita - what a crazy book, but I bow at the feet of Nabokov. Came home and turned the leftover meat into tacos and watched The Wind Will Carry Us, an Iranian film that was surprisingly lively and funny. I was expecting something much more akin to other films I’ve seen from roughly that part of the world - slow, quiet, focus on the cinematography - but this was much funnier, with great dialogue.

I guess this is the start of the school year, which is the start of fall, which means everything starts in earnest again. I got up and took the long route running this morning, managing to cover over 3 miles, mostly running - a record for me, as I have a lot of trouble breathing and I’m trying to push through it. I think I’ve come to understand the concept of pushing through a “wall” better, though. Once you get past it, you start to feel like you could run forever.

Also, we’re returning to small group for the first time in a year, since we got married. We’re trekking out to Jersey City tonight. It’s sort of our old small group (though almost none of the same people), so we have grand hopes. It’s not a long way for me from work, but it’s a little longer for Tom, from Brooklyn; still, it takes a little over an hour, and we spend that much time getting to places in Manhattan.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to go back to IAM’s weekly Wednesday morning breakfast-and-discussion-group, from which we sort of took a break when I couldn’t go any more because of my job and Tom was working more consistently. But we’ll hopefully be back.

Tomorrow is also our first anniversary. :)