more and more about less and less

We're on Day 7 of the diet-until-the-end-of-the-semester-diet, and so far things still seem to be going well. If I continue to survive it and various other travails of this semester, I'll post some graphs or something of its progress.

I had the idea for the diet-until-the-end-of-the-semester-diet in seeing the movie Touching the Void, which features a man who barely survived a femur-shattering fall and being left behind by his partner (who thought he was dead) on the side of the mountain. As he described how he crawled and butt-scooted his way to safety, he said that he couldn't think about the whole improbably journal in front of him. Instead, he would focus on like a rock somewhere ahead and decide he was going to get to the rock in twenty minutes (luckily, his wristwatch, despite taking a licking, kept on ticking). So, I thought, rather than decide to try to make any proclamation that I was going to try to eat-less-and-healthier-and-move-more-and-more-briskly for, say, life, I thought I would try to do it for the rest of the semester, especially since it's so easy to say that one will postponing to resolve doing anything until the end of the semester.

Another part of this resolution: I have declared that I will not again use the elevators in the Social Science building for the remainder of the semester. Really, truly. Not going from 2 (entrance from path to parking lot) to 8 (office) to 5 (exit toward classroom) to 6 (exit to State Street) to 4 (vending machines [although my soda consumption is now exclusively diet and is much reduced]). Once, since making this resolution, I absent-mindedly pushed the button for the elevator, and when it arrived, stepped in, remembered the resolution, and then pounced out, murmuring something about having "forgotten something" to the person already in the elevator. I also pressed the button once and remembered the resolution as it arrived, and again I jumped away.

"thoroughly traumatizing! four stars!"

Erin has sent a movie review that is about as positive as her reviews get: "i saw ___________ last night. wow. it was really good and very heartbreaking. i cried for half an hour in the theater, and then laid awake feeling sad last night." I will leave it as a mystery for readers to wonder what movie she was talking about. Keep in mind, to get a positive review from Erin, she not only has to leave the theater impressed, but also distraught. For a rave review, she must be inconsolable for at least for 3-5 hours afterward.

Meanwhile, we are having a debate over e-mail as to whether any scene Bill Murray has ever done manages to approach the scene that Erin uses as her standard for the greatest performance by an actor ever captured on film: that of the father driving his pickup and waving to his kids behind the doomed schoolbus in The Sweet Hereafter.*

* Update, next day: Erin e-mails to insist: "you have to remove or post something about the second paragraph following the movie review. some people may not know this is tongue in cheek and it will ruin my reputation among serious critics." (Note, incidentally, that she does not contest the assertions made in the first paragraph, in case you thought I was exaggerating there.)

Update Friday: Another reader e-mails in to say: "You should tell Erin to watch out: any who has been 'quoted' on the weblog knows that Jeremy is usually a sticker for accuracy and because of this reputation for fairness and verbatim reporting people are likely to believe even things that seem out of character for those 'quoted' individuals." Or maybe the reader said the opposite of this and I'm dissembling. Who knows? I do, I suppose, but I'm not telling. Ah, the power of having your own weblog, especially if you haven't set it up so as to allow readers to leave their own rebuttals of claims made about them in posts.