Happy New Year!

Laura and I had a New Year’s Eve party. At 3:00 in the afternoon, we thought no one was coming and it was just going to be the two of us eating chocolate-chip cookies and watching Casablanca. But the tide turned when Salena called to say that she and her sister would be joining us, after all. And then Bernie called and asked if he could bring eight friends with him. All told, we ended up with 15 guests. There were three Spaniards who wanted us to eat twelve grapes for the first twelve seconds of the New Year. This apparently represents the twelve months of the year. You end up with a lot of grapes in your mouth, but it’s nice to wash them down with champagne. Oh, and someone broke a chair.

The next day we got a nasty note from our downstairs neighbors about the “constant, daily, and unacceptable” level of noise that does not contribute to “life in a community.” I initially thought this was directly related to the party, but I can’t really tell. I think their biggest problem is with the kitchen chairs scraping on the floor, so I went out and bought some “patins feutrés” to put on the bottom of the chairs. Hopefully this will satisfy them. Our landlords are in town right now, and we showed them the letter. They said that the downstairs neighbors are very nice, but never said anything about noise when the family of five was living here. So that’s kind of funny.

Laura watched this awful movie the other night, called Funny Games, by some Austrian director. It is a psychological thriller about a family on vacation and the sadistic antics of these two twenty-something boys who invade their vacation house. I was watching the movie with Laura until I figured out that the skinny boy in the too-short shorts had killed the dog. And I said, “He killed the dog. I am done with this movie. It is not going to end well.” Ten minutes later Laura came into the kitchen and said, “You were right. He killed the dog.” After she finished watching the movie she told me the whole story. It does not end well. Sorry if I ruined it for anyone.

My reaction to this movie reminded me of my friend Susie, who was really angry with me for showing her The Long Kiss Goodnight because Geena Davis hits and kills a deer with her car (thereby triggering the memories that launch her exciting dual-identity odyssey). I had totally forgotten that the accident involved a deer. And I didn’t really understand why Susie was upset, since she was the person who had explained to me that watching gory movies sometimes requires suspending your suspension of disbelief. Well, not in those terms. I’m pretty sure her exact words were, “It’s all ketchup and plastic.” We were watching The Thing. The 1980s version with Wilford Brimley.

Anyway, I have learned two things from my reaction to the dog in this movie. 1) I’m good at reading narrative cues. I guess I already knew that. 2) My tastes are becoming so fixed that I’m not willing to give a chance to a movie if I don’t think I’m going to like it. I wonder if this means I’ll start leaving plays at intermission if I don’t like them. Or stop reading novels in the middle. Or give up on my dissertation if I start to get bored with it.

Oh. It all comes back to the dissertation. Blogging is so therapeutic.

And now I have realized that if I had known what the movie was about before I had started watching it, I probably never would have started watching it. Laura told me it was about "a family vacation gone awry," which led me to believe it was a screwball comedy starring the Austrian version of Chevy Chase.