October 6, 1990
Although it is Saturday, a continual rain prevents me from going out. Another typhoon is hitting us, the third in two weeks. The rain and gloom have been ceaseless. I struggle to take advantage of the time alone and calm, to remain cheerful and productive, although all I really want to do is crawl into bed.
Jenny braved the weather and came over last night, looking jaunty on her newly-acquired moped. I bought a platter of sushi and she some beer and we watched 9 1/2 Weeks, enjoying Mickey Rourke's looks and agreeing that, while Kim Basinger is pretty to look at, she plays such wimpy characters. Then, as we ran out of beer and moved on to scotch (Jenny drinks hers straight, reinforcing my belief that scotch is a west coast drink), we argued about whether Mickey Rourke's character, John, was a healthy role model, and how men reacted to him, and if they wanted to be like him, and whether or not Kim Basinger's character, Elizabeth, should have stayed with him (I said yes, and Jenny said no).
For Jenny the movie demonstrates the dangers of controlling and domineering men. It is an archetype of the most typical relationship between the sexes, and it illustrates the unhealthiness of the current state of affairs. But I think that his character and the message of the movie is more complicated. He is inventive, playful and experimental, qualities that I consider rare in men, when it comes to relationships. He is trying to take Elizabeth beyond the realm of her self-imposed limitations. The problem I see is in the inequality of the relationship. But I think that Elizabeth's spinelessness contributes more to their inequality than John's desire to control. Jenny thought my analysis was a little esoteric and that most people went to see the movie to watch Kim Basinger take off her clothes and to fantasize about Mickey Rourke, which was after all why we were watching it. At that point, we felt an acute pain for the lives we've left behind.
Jenny continued feeling restless and a little sorry for herself, stuck in Beppu on Friday night, unable to go anywhere, to a club, to a movie, to the mall, out on a date, or just cruising the freeways. “What do people do here?” she lamented. I coaxed her into cheerfulness the best I could. We turned down the lights and turned up the music and danced into a frenzy. She's wonderfully thin, lithe, and supple. She has so much energy. I, though aged and slow and comparatively dumpy, have more presence. Experience counts for something.
I slept after she left, but restlessly. At 2AM, the bugs were biting and I was dehydrated from the liquor and sushi. So I pulled on my red knit shift and went downstairs to bathe in the hot springs bath. The bath is large enough to stretch out in and deep enough to float. So I floated awhile, listening to the rain on the corrugated tin roof, until I almost was asleep again. Then I went across the street to get a can of Aquarius (a Gatorade-like drink), drank it, and went back to sleep.
Now here it is Saturday and raining still.
The computer is being a little weird this week. It makes me uneasy because if something should go wrong, I am completely helpless to fix it. First it told me that one of my disks was unreadable, although the same disk had been working perfectly that morning. My backup was a week old, so it was a pain to reconstruct everything. After that I became quite conscientious about updating my backups. And then yesterday, when I inserted one of my backup disks, the system crashed and continued to do so whenever I tried to insert that disk. In the 5 years I've had the Mac, nothing like this has ever happened. And that makes me even more paranoid.
Jenny brought the National Geographic with the article on Austin over. I thought the article was fairly mediocre, but there was one photo of downtown that made me incredibly homesick.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
October 06, 2003
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The rain and gloom have been ceaseless.