The Host (and Hosting)

My roommate and I went to see The Host last night. It was playing at the theater near us and had gotten good reviews so we ventured out. We spend most of our Friday nights sitting at home doing nothing of particular import so we were a bit proud of ourselves. Also, while I am definitely not, she's a bit of a horror movie aficionado. She's been promising to have me watch Them for about five years now. One of these days. Anyway, for all that I don't normally do monster movies, The Host was fabulous. Funny and smart and featuring a totally awesome little girl. It wasn't perfect, and I thought some scenes could be cut down a bit, but it was really very enjoyable. I think that was pretty much the general opinion too because the crowd had a bit of a buzz to it as we were leaving and was very chatty. I always like that kind of atmosphere at the movie theater because if you don't have that why not just watch the movie while sitting on your couch at home and not paying $10.75 which is frankly ridiculous.

Actually the other reason I like to see movies in the theater is that I'm not a good movie watcher when I'm at home. I get up and walk around in circles. I make myself food. I try to read at the same time and miss key plot points. I take breaks every five minutes to do something else like organize my iTunes library. Which all goes to explain why it took me a month to finish watching His Girl Friday. It would be more fun to say that I had to limit my viewing of Rosalind Russell's ridiculous hat, but the truth is that I've got the attention span of a five year old when it comes to watching movies these days. I finally finished it today, along with cleaning my room.

While I cleaned my room (which was truly awful) my roommate--being the neater of the two of us--cleaned the rest of the apartment and tackled the dish pile from hell. We're not going to win any good housekeeping awards in the near future--the food gone bad in our fridge can attest to that--but the apartment looks pretty good right now.

I was excited because my sister, who I don't get to see very often, was coming into town today. Her flight from Alaska was landing in Newark so she got a ride into the city and then took a train out. She came over to my apartment to eat and use the shower and then we met up with her boyfriend and some of their friends. We hung out with them for a bit, walking from Greenwich Village, where I've never spent much time for some reason despite having gone to school right there, to Union Square. Then she and her boyfriend went for a walk and the friends went for a different walk. While the friends seemed very nice, I can wander around New York in the rain anytime, so I headed home. They were redezvousing at my apartment so while waiting for them I made tea and read The New York Review of Books online.

It was nice to see her but also sad that I got to see so little of her. So now I'm feeling a bit down. And I have to do laundry.We're at that stage where there's simply no choice. I haven't done any in three weeks and I don't have enough clothing to last and longer. I also don't have anywhere to put the dirty laundry. So that's the way my morning's going to go. After that I think I'm going to have a totally self-indulgent day. I'm going to go to Pommes Frites for lunch and then in the afternoon I'm going to take myself off to the Angelika to see The Lives of Others and get myself movie popcorn. And then I'm going to take myself off to the grocery store and buy piles of health food because I can feel my arteries closing up just thinking about it.