MONOdiscovery

Today was an okay mono day. I felt sick enough to stay in bed and that helped my mood. I finished watching the first season of The West Wing and cursed it for ending on such a cliffhanger, but really, what was I expecting. It is sad though when you put in the last disc you have expecting to find out what happens next and it's just the bonus disc. So, without the West Wing I went bravely on with my day. I watched The Lady Eve, a fine film by Preston Sturges. I think I might have seen it before, but I can't remember. I also watched a movie that hasn't come out yet called, Fay Grim. I really enjoyed it. It is the accompaning film to a picture made a decade ago called, Henry Fool. Both are by the director Hal Hartley. Anyway, it is fun to discover good things. I've felt, since I've gotten older, that discovery becomes something rare. Maybe I am just not as open to new things, and maybe I am not looking because I feel like I have been disappointed by so many things, but when I was younger I felt like I found out about things and I gobbled them up. That is how I felt watching Fay Grim, like I had found something and I couldn't wait to gobble up more Hal Hartley films.

So I went to the video store to rent Henry Fool and I asked them at the counter if they had it because when you have mono you really don't like looking for things. The clerk was a young guy with glasses and some ballpoint pen markings on his hand. When I asked about Henry Fool he got all excited, "Of course we have it. It's an awesome movie." I told him that I had just watched Fay Grim and that I really like it and I wanted to see Henry Fool. Well, he was jealous. He knew it wasn't out yet and I have to admit that I felt powerful that I had seen this film geek's wet dream before him. I told him it was playing at PIFF and that he could see it there. As I was driving away I imagined myself maybe six or seven years older, extremely lonely, maybe married but not getting enough attention from my husband, or feeling like I missed out on something, and in this future fantasy I bring the screener copy of the movie back to him, right around closing. He would see me as some really hip film critic, an older woman, and I would use him to make myself feel better. We would have an extremely awkward and unsexy affair (film geeks and film critics are NOT sexy) and it probably wouldn't really ruin anyone's life. It wouldn't be like Notes on a Scandal. And as I was driving away, and having this fantasy I thought, I should write more.