Tom & Alissa

It’s been a week.

Tom spent the week working on his various projects at home, since he begins a job on Monday. He also is working on an interview with singer/songwriter/rockstar Katie Herzig, forthcoming in The Curator, and has been keeping busy all week.

I started out quite sick; Monday was adrenaline-powered, with a lot of coffee and water on the side as I went to work around 8am and then class all afternoon, then we met up and headed to a screening of Wendy and Lucy, which, as it turns out, is a very good film - quiet, a little sad, with a beautifully nuanced performance by Michelle Williams. Definitely the best movie I saw all week.

On Tuesday I went to work and coughed my way through the day, with stuffed ears, before heading downtown to meet Tom for a gallery opening and then a screening of Blindness, followed by a panel discussion with Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, director Fernando Meirelles, and writer Don McKellar. They had some interesting things to say, and though the movie wasn’t everything you might hope, it was still engaging and truly beautifully shot - a shoo-in for a best cinematography nomination.

I was completely ill on Wednesday and worked from home all day, then threw on some clothes and ran to class. I’d drank a tea made of ten cloves of garlic, the juice of one whole lemon, and some honey, and though I think it worked, I positively reeked of garlic. But class went well and I got home in one piece.

Yesterday we went to a screening of Ballast - jury’s still out - and then Tom did some work in cafes while I went to the office for a while, and did a lot of work in between finalizing plans for our grand northeastern tour next week. Tom met me at the office and we headed uptown for a reading with John Crowley and Marilynne Robinson, which was, as always, great.

But today takes the cake; I arrived at the office to discover, report, and deal with a break-in (that only apparently resulted in my missing laptop, which is being dealt with). So I actually sat down to work around 4pm. But now that’s mostly fixed, and I have a laptop to work with and I don’t think I lost anything in particular.

Next week: meetings in NYC, DC, and Boston (on Wednesday I will be in all three cities within a twelve-hour time period) and a lot of trying to shoehorn in time to do work and write reviews. Oh, and a screening of Rachel Getting Married on Monday night, and Malcolm Gladwell on Saturday. Break out the vitamin C!