Well, it's September 30, so I had better write an entry, hadn't I? September is looking rather sparse compared to every other month I've been keeping this journal. Well, hell's bells, I have an excuse.

I'm just going to write whatever pops into my head. I know some of you out there do that with every entry (yes, you know who you are) but I usually don't. I usually think about what I'm going to write for a considerable while before I actually write it. In this case, I have no idea. Isn't it exciting?

One of my professors (I think in my Romanticism class) was talking about how the mechanics of writing change the writing itself. With a ream of paper, you have 500 sheets of paper. (Or is it 5000? Well, whichever.) With a blank Microsoft Word document, you have an infinite amount of white space. Is this why we're all going on and on, running off at the mouth? Because words have become so cheap? And if so, is that bad?

Um, okay. Anyway. Let's talk movies.

I went to see Best in Show yesterday (of course, of course) in Berkeley. I took the BART, and the theater was only a half a block away from the Downtown Berkeley BART station. This turned out to be a lucky thing, since I fell down the stairs after the movie, twisting both knees and both ankles, and somewhat tweaking my back. I'm glad I only had to hobble half a block to get home.

The fall was worth it, though. I mean, we're talking about Christopher Guest, here.

Now, Best in Show is no Waiting for Guffman, but it's still excellent. It is hard for me to separate the actors from their Guffman characters (the two movies have basically identical casts) which is because I've seen Guffman about seventy billion times, not because the actors don't fully inhabit their new characters.

My main complaints about Show are:

1. Harlan Pepper is no Corky St. Clair, Nigel Tufnel, or Six Fingered Man. It's not Guest's most fully realized character, which is disappointing, since Guest is usually the highlight of any movie he's in.

2.Unlike the play in Guffman, the dog show is something of an anticlimax. There's not enough of a crescendo, or payoff, or something.

Other than that, it's a really great movie. I loved "God Loves a Terrier", the epilogue, Stifler's mom (especially her first interview) and Parker Posey as the female half of the ultimate yuppie couple. "We met at Starbucks," one of them says. "Well, not the same Starbucks," says the other. "I was at one Starbucks, and she was at another Starbucks, across the street."

How brilliant is that line? That's just brilliant.

I'm watching Harriet The Spy right now, on Shmuel's (Happy New Year, Shmuel) hearty and repeated recommendation. Oh, and also because Michelle Trachtenberg, the titular star, is going to be on Buffy this season. It bugs me that she pronounces Golly's name "Gully" half the time. But I am still predisposed to like her. I trust Joss Whedon. I love Joss Whedon.

Speaking of which, they are filming a crossover episode this week. Lucy was telling me that it's a pain in the ass, because fist they take all the Angel vans and crew and head over to the Buffy set, and then the Buffy people come over to theirs. But I am quite jealous. I wish I was in L.A. right now, so I could finagle my way onto the set. Alyson and Amber! Charisma and Alexis! James and Nicholas! Imagine!

I have also borrowed a huge stack of movies from Leah recently. She recommended most of them to me. Last night, I watched The Winslow Boy. Twice, actually. I've been watching movies twice for some reason. On Friday, I watched Emma twice. On Thursday, I watched Spinal Tap three times.

Of course, I've been going other stuff while I've been watching these movies. I have to watch them more than once, because I always miss a huge portion of it the first time. I've been playing Roller Coaster Tycoon (yes, you see my productive life) and... uuh... well, I am sure there's something else.

Oh! I put my futon together last night, and I decorated my room. It was funny, actually. I bought a couple of gorgeous silk scarves in Istanbul, and I hung them on my wall. They fill up the wall; they're absolutely huge. Lovely. And then decided I would put my Leda and the Swan ceramic wall hanging, which I bought in Athens, on the other wall. The problem is, that when I took it out of the box, it was the size of a postcard. I remembered this thing being absolutely huge, but in reality, it is tiny. So it's this tiny thing floating on this huge wall... looks silly, especially in contrast to the one in my mind.

It is nice, though. It's Zeus, in the form of a swan, raping Leda. That might not sound so nice, but believe me, it is. The original is in the Louvre. So if I decide to go to Paris. I can see it! Incentive, incentive.

I went parakeet shopping today. I just couldn't take it this morning, when Cassie woke me up with her screeching. I'm sure it would be fairly simple to get up, cover her cage, and go back to bed, but I don't think too clearly when I'm half asleep. So I just cuss her out a lot, fling socks at her cage, and wake up grumpy.

And not only did I wake up grumpy, I woke up with the determination to get Cassie a friend. Not only because she's pissing me off but, as I have said before, because I feel bad for her.

So, I went to the bird store. It was quite an ordeal. I went to the pet shop by my house, but they don't sell animals, just animal supplies. I asked directions to the nearest "store where I can buy a bird" and the directions she gave me were as wrong as it is possible for directions to be. She told me to turn left on a street that doesn't exist. When I finally found the street she was talking about, it turned out that I should make a right.

The pet store is in the adjacent city to me, but it took me 45 minutes of driving around aimlessly to get there.

When I got there, there were four cages of parakeets. Cage one had three extremely fat birds. One of them was electric blue. They were funny looking. However, they were also old, and they didn't look too healthy. Parakeet obesity is not exactly a widespread problem, so when it happens, I worry. And these parakeets looked like blue tennis balls with feet.

Cage two had three cute blue birds, but they were pecking at each other. I really liked one of them, but he kept attacking another bird. I think the other bird was the aggressor, but regardless, I don't want to introduce an aggressive bird into Cassie's territory.

In cage three, the birds were all at the bottom of the cage, chewing holes in the newspaper. (Oh, good. More birds that chew. Exactly what I need.) The big problem in this cage was that the movies advertised on the newspaper were kind of old. The Cell, for one. That doesn't bode well for frequent cage cleaning.

By cage four, I just gave up. I didn't fall in love with any of the birds, which is actually fairly surprising. I usually have no problems projecting, "Oh, please, take me home, I want to be your friend" into the peanut-sized minds of birds. But in this case, I was too worried about disease, aggression, and plus-sized parakeets. So I just left.

I fell in love with Cassie the first time I saw her, and I am just waiting for the same lightning to strike again. In the meantime, I should buy earplugs or something. Or a BB gun, so I can shoot the birds in the backyard.

(Settle down. I'm kidding.)

Okay, Harriet is over. Time to watch Bound and do my October redesign. Hey, this turned into a long entry, didn't it? I hope it didn't suck. Was it good for you?

...it’s my journal and we all have our self indulgent days.