Movies, Mysteries, Medicines

I'm horribly sick, and horribly proud of myself for keeping it to myself. I missed Dougie's soirée on Saturday night, and the chance to see his new digs and meet his three new (kitty) roommates, and to ride down and back on the Hoodie Bus with a designated driver. I frequently complain about those miserable, rotten people who can't stay home when they're sick; they insist on going to work, school, shopping, etc. And what do they do? They make the rest of US sick! Selfish bastids. And so, filing this under Practicing What I Preach, I stayed home and kept my germs under quarantine. Yay, me. (I'm not really horribly sick; I'm a little sick and horribly pathetic.)

So it was a movie-watchin', book-readin' kind of weekend. I watched the 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films, both animated and live action. Except for the first one, At Night, about a cancer ward (oh, those wacky Scandinavians. What's more fun than a cancer ward? Dysfunctional families and suicide!), I really enjoyed all the live action stories. They are funny and charming and fast. I'm sure it's a real challenge to the directors to tell their stories in 10-15 minutes. The first two animated movies were so bad I just skipped the rest of them.

I watched Arranged, a mostly sweet Chick Flick about a developing friendship between two young public school teachers in New York City. They lost me, however, in the very last scene. It didn't exactly ruin the whole movie, but it was a real clunker of an ending. Then I watched In The Land of Women, in which a supposed writer of soft porn films moves in with his grandma to help heal his broken heart, and gets drawn into the lives of the women who live across the street. I wanted to fall back in like with Meg Ryan, but this movie never got me there. In fact, her "trout pout" lips were so flappy, she often sounded like she had a speech impediment. Olympia Dukakis as the wacky, forgetful granny was more of a caricature; what a waste of talent. I think my lesson was to read at least a couple of reviews before adding a movie to my queue.

And now the raves: I'm hip deep in Janet Evanovich's "Lean Mean Thirteen," with bounty hunter Stephanie Plum at the helm. This one is even funnier than usual; the put-it-down-and-laugh-for-awhile kind of funny. With the usual irresistible cast, Stephanie is trying to find a lowlife who leaves a 20-foot snake to guard his trailer, and a taxidermist who's planting bombs in his projects, while Stephanie herself becomes a suspect in the disappearance of her ex-husband. Like McCall-Smith, Evanovich always leaves me wanting more, more. (Especially more of Steph's boyfriend Joe, and boyfriend wanna-be, Ranger. Sizzlin', those two.)

A call to my doc has me on antibiotics as a precaution. The big guns, which will probably give me ear infections, eye infections, girly bits infections. Yeah, love those broad-spectrum jobbies. But since I've gotten worse every day, I figure my traumatized little immune system is just not up to the task right now. With regards to antibiotics, my motto was always "don't use a cannon if a slingshot will work." In other words, don't use the expensive, new antibiotics if a little generic E-mycin would do the trick. I'll probably be needing those cannons for a long time.