Older and Dumber

I am sure that many people get the same feeling at times. I feel as if I had been super busy forever, and yet when I think about what I have been busy with, I can't pinpoint to any concrete accomplishments.

Of course, the cold/flu season has a lot to do with this sense of "much ado about nothing" - Winston got sick, and then I got sick. Now that finally everyone is healthy, I am almost bracing for another round of sickness to start again. Well, I will keep my fingers crossed. I do believe that people who are used to a constant state of perfect health are particularly vulnerable in times of sickness. I even remember friends from elementary school who were used to having fevers once in a while, whereas any fever would knock me out completely.

I did end up watching quite a few movies. I watched the latest "Mission Impossible" film starring Tom Cruise and it was fun. I watched the Roman Polanski film "Carnage" based on Yasmina Reza's play. I have the feeling that one is supposed to enjoy the dialogues, because they are funny and make caricatures out of the people who utter those dialogues. I am positive that I would have given it a glowing review had I watched it a few years ago, when I was placing much emphasis on "culture". Those were the days when there was no work outside of work, which means that even entertainment needed to have a certain intellectual challenge. Now that there is even more work outside of work, I have come to understand why some of the best-educated people I know choose to stay away from any type of thinking in their leisure time. Yasmina Reza is a talented writer. Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster acted with such ferocious intensity that made their characters even more real than real, but I would rather escape from reality with my movies.

That is why I greatly enjoyed watching Tom Cruise bounce off skycrapers in "Mission Impossible". That is why I laughed my head off watching "Johnny English Reborn" - a mockery of the James Bond films. And that is also why I had fun watching a truly silly comedy "Sophie's Revenge" starring Ziyi Zhang. I would have imperiously laughed them off as having absolutely no substance a few years ago.

It is interesting how we as people change and evolve, and how we get older and wiser - or shall I say "older and dumber", since I am watching "dumber" movies now than before?