When I got back from the Gold Coast, it was time to take a walk.
When I got back from my walk, it was beer o’clock.
When I went to the bottle-shop, they had Mango Beer.
And really, that’s all you need to know to figure out how I reached this point of the evening.
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So here is one of those things that I discovered this weekend: when you read something aloud to my father, particularly if it’s non-fiction, the text isn’t really a text so much as the beginning of a conversation.
We discovered this on Friday night, when my mum was going through the copy of the second Women of Letters anthology I got her for Christmas (This, in and of itself, is something worth writing about, ’cause I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to buy books for my mum and it’s only occasionally that I get it right outside of the cook-book genre). My mum started reading letters aloud, just ’cause, and my dad would start interjecting comments aimed, largely, at the writer of the piece.
It was interesting to watch, ‘specially when my mum pointed out the difference the kindle has made in my dad’s reading habits. He’s always been more engaged with text than most readers I’ve seen – throughout my childhood he was the kind of guy who marked words and recorded them in their own book, and he’s owned some pretty kick-ass dictionaries – but it seems the kind of meta-textual linkages that you can get in an ebook have started to seep over into his print reading as well (he just asks mum to look things up on the iPad instead of tapping a kindle link).
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So here’s the other thing I learned this weekend: the question do you have a woman in your life at the moment is destined to irritate me. ‘Specially if it comes up early in a conversation with someone I haven’t seen in a while.
I mean, seriously, cultural conventions be damned: cut that shit out. People are not defined by their relationship status and, on the whole, whether or not I’m single is probably the least interesting thing I can imagine talking about.
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I watch a lot of terrible movies. I watch them weekly, in fact, and you can usually see the results on twitter (via the #TrashyTuesdayMovie tag) or on the archive my flatmate’s been making in a thread over at RPGnet (although I gather that’s going to end soon).
And yet, there’s still something extraordinary about watching a truly, truly terrible movie. One that’s clinging on to the idea of relevance by one, maybe two, redeeming features. We did that earlier this evening when we sat down to watch Josh Kirby: Planet of the Dino-Knights, which does things to exposition that every writer should see, internalize, and learn to never do themselves.
Worse yet, it’s only kind of half a film. Or, if my suspicions are correct, one-sixth of a film.
It’s gloriously, gloriously terrible. The cinematic equivalent of Space Train, for those who have borrowed said book off me or heard me rant about it’s glorious awfulness.
I truly cannot wait to see how much worse it gets over the next five installments.
