score one for the Bard

1. I'm pretty sure Tonks has figured out, in her bizarre catly way, that I'm leaving for a little while. She's been putting all her energy into being unbelievably cute. For example - and this is one example among many - the other night I woke up to the sound of her beating the daylights out of some tissue paper in the living room. I rolled over far enough to look at her through the doorway, and she spotted me, then galloped over, reared up on her hind legs and started waving her paws in the air at me. It was, for all the world, like a kid at summer camp running over to their parents and yelling about how much fun they are having.
Parallax, on the other hand, has been glaring at me.

2. The packing is going well enough, I think. For some reason I'm having difficulty finding sunscreen, but I'm going to go to Shopper's and sort that out tomorrow. I'm going to field test the camera some more today; if the rain holds off, which honestly doesn't seem likely, I'll go take the pictures Mom requested, but regardless, we're making chili this afternoon and I will put up lots of pictures of that.

3. Last night we watched the Rules of Attraction. It's a good movie, but suffers from a few problems, mostly related to the same problems all college movies have.

• The actors playing "college kids" are always about thirty.
• The writers, writing the dialogue for "college kids", have not been in university for twenty years.
  
• The antics that "seniors" get up to because they're apparently graduating soon have the ring of frosh, which I just can't really take seriously anymore.
  

That having been said, the antics of Paul, the Gay Dude, were probably the best thing about the movie, even though they were, like the rest of the film, pretty depressing. One of the little gay frosh dudes "attempts suicide", which should not be funny, but Paul completely sums up the cry-for-help-and-attention attitude inherent in these sort of dorm dramas: "With what? Wine coolers and Sudafed?"
It's a rare and tragic movie where pathetic suicide attempts by cold remedies are the comic relief, not once, but twice.
In order to counteract the cynical depression brought on by Rules of Attraction, we then watched Amelie.

4. Two scenes over the past week that were terrific:

• Sean and I were waiting to catch a bus uptown at the campus stop, and witnessed an exchange that was right out of an after school special from the early nineties. I can't even explain why I found it so funny.
  
• Girl 1: So, that guy you're crushing on, are you really going with him to that party?
• Girl 2: Teehee, yup!
• Girl 1: So, are you gonna, you know... *nudge nudge, wink wink*
• Girl 2: No way, Cynthia! I don't want to get an STD!
• We decided to go to Mexi's for some nachos, and were seated next to a table of eight - two couples and four boys probably all between the ages of 10 and 14. Ew, I thought. This is going to be really annoying. As the meal went on, the parents got drunk and loud, telling obnoxious stories about annoying coworkers, but the kids were closer to us, and so we could hear their conversation:
• Kid 1: ... yeah, I think I'd like to be in Much Ado about Nothing.
• Kid 2: No way, Othello is much better. His monologues are awesome!