Happiness and Irritation

Yesterday, Suzanne and I went grocery shopping. It was about two in the afternoon and right around the cereal aisle, I felt this strong sense of . . . well-being, I guess. It just hit me that there was enough money in the checking account to do the shopping, enough hours in the day to get it done, the baby was happy, Suzanne was happy, the sun was shining -- things were just really good and I felt very peaceful.

In my experience, moments like that have meant that the next day is going to be truly atrocious. For some reason, you only get the really great moments on the cusp of really bad ones -- kind of that whole "opposition in all things." Well, it's only nine a.m. so I'm not sure what kind of day it's going to be yet but I did think it was worth pointing out that I had one of those moments, a moment when you actually realize you're happy.

Suzanne referred to it as my "Christmas vacation euphoria." I did turn my grades in on Wednesday afternoon and am free as a bird until January 13th -- so there might be something to that.



On another note, we watched Julie and Julia last night. As I'd heard, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are great. The sequences featuring those two are far and away the best of the whole film. The Amy Adams sequences are just something to be endured before there's more Julia Child. I'm not crazy about Amy Adams as an actress in general but additionally her character, Julie Powell, is just really uninteresting. She's frumpy, narcissistic, and never really does or says anything engaging. It's unclear what it is about her that's supposed to be redeeming. She makes a goal and accomplishes it? I guess. At the end of it all, she realizes her husband put up with a lot of crap from her? Maybe. I don't know. I just didn't like her.

Normally, I wouldn't let something like this bother me but I will admit that knowing a little about the real Julie Powell's biography affected how I read the movie. I read an article the other day about her new book that details how, after all the success of her blog and first book, she carried on a two year affair with an old flame from college. It bothers me that her desperation for notoriety led to success that led to infidelity. It bothers me that now she's trying to profit from that choice and chalking it up to "Well, I'm a writer and I must tell the truth." Whatever.

Anyway, the other thing that bothered me was director Nora Ephron's tendency to draw out cutsie-poo performances from her female leads. If Julie and Julia had been made fifteen years ago, Meg Ryan would have played Julia and she would have given the same flustered, twee performance Amy Adams did and it also would have made me throw up in my mouth a little.

I'm being too hard and too negative about a film that, for the most part, I liked. It would have been a stronger film had it focused solely on Julia and her husband Paul but hey -- if wishes were horses, right?

Anyway, today is the girls' last day of school before their vacation. Its a day of goofing off and Christmas parties as near as I can tell. Good for them.