Thursday shadow casting!

Last night at Big Chicks, Tuppers was rolling his eyes at all the dreary BBC adaptations of Jane Austen et al. he'd been forced to sit through in his youth and in his career as a teacher of "lit'rachure". After my buildup, he's now quite looking forward to seeing Clueless for its unencumbered take. We also talked about the travesty that was Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula and he tried to get me to agree that he'd be a natural for the starring role in a more faithful remake. I wasn't willing to go that far, but I told him I liked the idea of a Dracula with an "elegant northern accent", something that would make him slightly "foreign" without being generically Eastern European. He countered with the idea of an American Dracula, and I immediately began recasting the Count's most famous lines in my best parody of SoCal diction. ("Dʉde, I, like, never smøke...t'bacco.")

So have at it, kids: Amy Heckerling's Bram Stoker's Dracula. Reese is long in the tooth for Mina; who's our current ingenue? And would Keanu as the Nosferatu be just too injokey?

Not a lush, a liquor collector

Although Tuppers and I had had tentative plans for dinner last night since last weekend, I hadn't heard anything from him by the time I left work, so I decided to squeeze in a visit to the Binny's where Halsted meets Broadway. I went to replace my all-but-empty bottle of sloe gin and ended up going a little mad among the fortified wines; I returned to Pod Klonami with the entire suite of Dolin vermouths and, for good measure, a bottle of Lillet. The last of these is necessary for a Corpse Reviver (or at least one version of it), whereas the Dolin blanc is a key ingredient in the Ephemeral. Since I'm now a fan of a cocktail which requires twice as much sweet vermouth than gin, I thought it worth it to upgrade to the Dolin rouge. And there was only one bottle left of the Dolin dry, the only one monshu is likely to enjoy, so I said "What the hell?"

Despite my bulging bag, I made our rendezvous with ease. At first, I offered him the option of going out for Vietnamese on Argyle, but the outdoor seating at Big Chicks was just too beguiling. He was surprised I didn't need a menu, but I've had a jones for their Cobb salad for a month or more. Today, though, a part of me regretted what I'd given up and as I wended my way down to Joy Yee, I find myself hoping they'd have sugar cane shrimp, which they did. Unfortunately, the Cantonesised versions there (not to mention their takes on chả giò and lemongrass chicken) only made me hanker even more after the authentic versions. It's not for that reason alone, however, that my stomach is now a stewing cauldron of regret.

On a ramble

Brother, have you got a smoke
Or, baby, have you got a dime?
Seems like we're all
Just a little down on our luck.

Baby, if you're workin' now
Out in Bakersfield
At some honky-tonk
They call "The Wagon Wheel"

I was managing my LJ tags the other day and came to the sobering realisation that I've used "rant" about three times for every two I've used "strolls". So tonight I went for a walk. Not a particularly ambitious or interesting one, just to the end of the street to pick up antacids and then back the long way. It was even a bit longer since a half block before I came to my corner, Camper Van Beethoven's "Come On Darkness" came on my iPod (my favourite stanza is quoted above) so I walked around the block in order to keep listening to it.

My iPod is a monument to nostalgia. I haven't updated it since before we moved house two years ago, and even before then I'd been buying so little new music that most of the songs--like this one--were about twenty years old. Case in point: the first song that played when I left the house, "Perfumed Lies" by The Judybats. Two weeks ago, I'd actually dug through a couple of boxes searching for the CD so I could play this.

It was nothing at all
The time we shared
And still somehow
I've never felt so alone

I needed the TUMS, I needed the exercise, but even more I needed a break. The personal e-mail account I've had for ten years almost to the day is expiring at the end of the month. And it's not POP-enabled (why didn't I think to look for such things back then?) so the only way to save any of the e-mails is to forward them individually. So I've just completed looking through over 2700 and weeding out the ones I think I may actually want to read again.

We've all done this, I reckon, so I don't think I need to describe how emotional it is to sift through a decade of your life and ponder all the personal connexions made and lost, all the times your friends delighted or disappointed you in ways you never could've imagined, all the mistakes you made and lessons you learned. Am I really any better at any of this shit now than I was back then? I confessed to monshu a couple weeks back that I didn't think so, but perhaps I was only feeling sorry for myself. Scratch that--I know I was feeling sorry for myself. But that doesn't mean what I said was false.