It'll soon be time to do myself the favour someone recently strongly recommended and stop spending money.
This suggestion was put to me with feeling, in circumstances best left unexplained:
"...don't collect shit. Just don't buy anything ever again. That's what I'm going to do now."
And I almost believed her.
By "shit", I suspect my friend meant almost anything, being a person of high standards, but I'm an inveterate hoarder. This is June, I'm on vacation, I've had a clean-out and I have just given away or thrown out a great mass of stuff.
Like every year. And like every year, the cellar is still full of boxes. Cupboards are still packed with files of paperwork I can scarcely face. Under French law, you have to keep some voluminous, routine documents for anything between three years, 10 and a lifetime.
It's a bad idea to grow up.
The folding bed under my own is strewn with thick files that must go. Part of the floor is covered with organised piles of magazines I can't bring myself to chuck out. Elsewhere, there's an ever longer line of books I'm still unable to return to the shelf because the leak in the roof has only been partially repaired. Even if I could, there's no longer enough shelf.
The Kid has done her bit, with much reluctance.
A recent cover story in 'Time' magazine supposedly granted insight into the teenage mind. I could stand just enough of the rag to note that it rendered parents a great disservice. Summed up in a sentence, the science it described offers adolescent offspring the perfect excuse to say, "There's no point in calling me lazy, impolite, unhelpful, difficult and irresponsible because my brain isn't yet sufficiently developed to be otherwise."
Every smile, spontaneous offer, intimate disclosure and contribution to housework should thus be regarded as anomalous behaviour to be welcomed like a Greek bearing a gift.
The Kid may be, as some people seem to enjoy telling me, "precocious," since at just turned 15, she's often a little darling, but by the time she was eight, I had already dubbed her "Bomb-site Marianne."
That must have been the year after she flooded part of a north African hotel and provided the obvious explanation: "Daddy, it's not my fault if the stupid baths here don't have proper walls like they do in France."
Those cheap, second-hand DVDs I mentioned in my last entry, before most of the clean-out got done: my return visit became a near-looting spree, including several absent from my Top 50 list, but which I grabbed for entertainment value. Like all the throwing away, it failed to increase my morale very much, but did wonders for raising the guilt level.
Today, however, all has changed.
The moon is about to start waxing again and she, E., has finally replied to my increasingly frantic, if hesitant, entreaties, having endured a hell of her own.
Hallelujah!
Last night, I was so downcast that I even watched a DVD. The agreeable surprise was that that David Twohy's 'Below' (2002; the Tomatoes) is diverting, unnerving and generally well acted and crafted. It's a combination of WWII submarine thriller and good ghost story, which I shall certainly be watching again, less for the plot, than a commendable attention to mainly accurate period detail.
Twice I've visited submarines, one old and in a museum and the other modern and in port, and both times were frightening. However relatively comfortable today's subs might be, the claustrophobia, let alone an all-male environment, would swiftly drive me mad.
With a small budget and a real sub, Twohy darkly makes the most of both. I'm with Moriarty:
"What I liked most about the film was the way it’s written so you can argue at the end about what really happened. Is this a supernatural story? Or is it a story of guilt and what happens when men do what they think is right, only to be eaten alive by the gradual realization that it’s wrong? All of the more bizarre occurrences could be written off to the mental effects of a lack of oxygen as they stay submerged too long and hydrogen begins to fill the boat. The script only reveals the backstory of things in small bits and pieces, and it works as a result" (from 'Ain't it Cool News').
My now overspent cultural budget allows me only to browse the big Apple event of the week, though I've risked opening an account today at the new iTunes Music Store (Apple UK) -- Europe.
I can spare two cents to add to what many bloggers in France, Germany and the UK have been raving about by noting without complaint that the Factory's report I mentioned on June 8 was misinformed by the rumour mill. We "Europeans" only have to pay a little more per track than Americans, and not half as much again. For once, I insulted the Great Steve and his Works without cause.
I would say "Sorry" but for the fact that I still have every reason to be cross with him when it comes to those DVDs.
On the installation of Mac OS 10.3.3, the classy DVD software I had to pay for -- TransLucy -- abruptly stopped working with my external LaCie DVD machine. CE Software offered no fix for this (but now I understand why), and neither did the assholes in Cupertino with the release of operating system version 10.3.4, who already wouldn't, in theory, let me use Apple's own DVD player.
The only acceptable way round this was French, from those splendid students who started the free VideoLan project. But while their media player is as clever as a Swiss knife and the results excellent, it isn't for novices and it's a bugger of a job to get the DVD menu to work.
My already critical internal operating system went ballistic on Saturday, when I belatedly learned that the infallible Pope Steve I has decided as of Panther version 10.3.3, Apple will no longer allow people who own DVDs they have duly paid for to play them externally. This, purportedly for unspecified "legal reasons", is all the more infuriating if, as with my Mac, there isn't an internal DVD player and even the darned CD player refuses to recognise many perfectly bona fide commercial CDs.
There's a fix, however.
It's risky, since it requires minor Mac surgery and re-installing the old over the new, but it works admirably well if you've got Charles Srtska's superb Pacifist ('MacUpdate') to open installation "packages" and find the bits you need.
Both 'macosxhints' and a couple of helpful fellers on Apple's own boards tell you what to do next.
By Jove, it works, and any fool can do it. I can vouch for this, because E.'s vanishing act rendered me stupid as well as almost hopeless. The Kid came and watched and told me off for "hacking" my computer again, though why that scares her so much I have yet to fathom.
She too was happy enough to have TransLucy back.
I'm infinitely gladder that E. has apparently landed in one reckless-adjective-to-be-avoided piece. Do angels, fallen or otherwise, get jetlag?
I guess there's only one way to find out.
I wonder whether she minds hairy legs and a battle-scar.
If she does, that's tough. The shorts came out yesterday and I hope not to have to put them away again for the foreseeable future. Without socks. This Brit frog prefers to make his minor fashion statements without spending money on clothes.
8:26:42 PM link 
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