Arctangential

So I’m watching this movie.

It’s called Zakhm. It’s from India. Bollywood to be precise. It’s… well, it’s pretty horrible. I have seen one other bollywood movie, called Mohabbatein, and it was actually not bad. I mean, a lot of the artistic choices are nearly diametrically opposed to what a western director would do, and in many places it’s amateurish even to the point of being childish, but it had great songs (it’s a musical), good energy, some funny stuff, etc. I enjoyed it. I bought the soundtrack. I thought I’d try some other indian films.

But Zakhm sucks. It looks like it’s pretending to have songs and dance sequences, but so far in the first hour, it’s only had 2 songs, and only one of them had dancing — the other one had sullen glares followed by a hug. The story is very somber, and is trying to be very serious and political, but the apparent amateurishness of the product and the complete lack of acting skill or production values really does not go well with the serious tone of the film. Add in the occasional schoolboy dancing on the top of a piano, and you get a pretty amazingly unpleasant viewing experience.

I actually wanted to talk about Zakhm because of the language in it. Of course, it’s mostly in Hindi — or some variant thereof, I suppose. But, about 10 or 15 percent of the spoken language is English. People will be rattling along in Hindi and suddenly there will be one phrase or sentence in English. Usually they’re short, idiomatic things — like answering the phone “Hello”, telling somebody “Please be careful”, “Goodbye”, “I love you” or “Happy birthday”. But in the scene I just watched, a doctor is talking our protagonist about his mother, who is sick. He’s speaking incredibly quickly in Hindi about how they’ve had to take in breathing apparatus, but she’ll be alright, etc etc. And in the middle of it, he says one sentence in English. They don’t have subtitles for the English, and since I was not really listening for comprehension, I missed it the first time around. I had to rewind, to hear him say “I think her lungs have collapsed.” Excuse me? Is there not a word in Hindi for “lungs” or something?

Can anybody explain to me why they sometimes speak in English and sometimes in Hindi?

The apartment hunt has begun.

The place I live now is nice enough, but the landlords have gotten more and more to be jerks, and a good portion of my rent payment is for the proximity of the apartment to a lot of things that I don’t need to be… proximate… to. Like, the job that I got laid off from and the other job that moved and the restaurants that I don’t eat at any more. I also want to move into a nicer class of apartment — no more of these student apartments without decent kitchens, loud neighbors, dirty laundry rooms, etc… I’ll end up paying a bit more in rent, but I think it’ll be worth it, and since I’ve pretty much resigned myself to having to drive to work from now on, I can get a place farther away from downtown, which should mitigate the cost somewhat.

So I’m looking through those free rental property magazines, my friend has set up a program that automatically searches the online classified for houses for rent. It’s pretty fun, actually — I enjoy doing all the comparison, looking at pros and cons, estimating costs, etc. If the actual act of moving wasn’t such a pain in the butt, I would do this every 6 months. Well, if I could afford to.

Insomnia has long been a friend of mine. Ever since I was 8 years old, hiding under my bedclothes, clandestinely reading my book by the light of a toy truck, I’ve known what it was like to be unable to sleep. My parents eventually figured out that I wasn’t staying awake just to be spiteful, and they decided to fight the battle on the other end — that is, let me stay up as long as I wanted and then did their best to wake me up in time for school. This didn’t really work either, as I sleep very heavily, once I manage to get to sleep.

Now, as an adult, I have naturally adopted a number of coping mechanisms to get around all of this — I try (and often fail) to go to bed an hour or two before I really want to go to sleep, I have 2 different alarms set for different time, to help me wake up, and I plan a few days ahead when I have an early meeting to get to, to make sure that my schedule is “turned around” sufficiently that I’m able to get up in time. But recently, all of this preparation has been backfiring on me — I’ve been falling asleep within minutes of going to bed, and waking up, feeling rested and refreshed, up to an hour before my first alarm goes off. So here it is, 9am, I’m awake, I’ve had breakfast, I’m showered and dressed, and I don’t even have to be at work for another 4 hours. I feel like an alien.

I think I’ll clean my apartment.

So, when I started this journal I had this kind of idea that I would remain faceless and just kind of present my vague musings to the world ex situ, to be marveled at in their outerworldly glory. Or, something like that at least. I think it kind of worked out at some level, but what I’ve come to realize is that, while I do think a lot and stuff, it’s very difficult for me to get any of that stuff really “down” into words. My internal mental context is far too complicated for me to pry any one thought out of it such that other people can appreciate or even understand it. I’ve spent, quite literally, days working on poems and mathematical treatises only to find, 5 pages later, that the entire thesis is at worst laughable and at best boring. So, I’m going to stop; that is, I’ll still probably do a good number of random and pointless posts, but 100% pointless musing won’t be my goal any more.

The whole anonymity thing isn’t really working out so well, either. I mean, I’ve been pretty obscure, but the attentive reader would already know my name, gender, and the URL of my web page — I don’t really see the point of further continuing any attempt at subterfuge. Although I suspect nobody really cares.

It’s now taken me about 2 days to write this entry… I guess that’s what happens when I don’t have much to say. Anyhow, here’s a link to my latest web page — I just made up some stuff about some things I’ve built recently: Projects Page.

Cheers.