Week of Bliss

My week of holidays, split right down the middle between home and my dad's place, is drawing to an end. As usual, my stress levels have abated to practically zero. I view these vacations as dress rehearsals for retirement, and I gotta tell ya, the thought that anybody could possibly retire and be bored puzzles me to no end. Give me an unending time when, aside from daily chores and necessary errands, I'm completely free to do what I want, when I want--even if what I want is a vast quantity of "nothing at all and when I want it is "right now until...whenever"--and you've right there described heaven on earth.

I managed to catch up on sleep I didn't know I was missing. Regular readers of this blog will know that I am an 'early to bed, early to rise' sort of person. While up at my father's, I found myself consuming vast quantities of NHL playoff hockey--par for the course--and thus going to bed an hour or two later than I usually do. But I found myself waking up three or four hours later than usual, on one occasion sleeping in until nearly 9:30. I practically levitated out of bed that morning in a momentary state of panic and shame at having wasted nearly an entire morning.

This doesn't surprise me, in hindsight: also as usual, I had carried a great deal of stress into my vacation, almost all of it decently hidden from view. Stress leaches out, fatigue rushes in...simple emotional physics, that.

The air quality is so pure at my dad's that I fully expect it to be bottled and sold at some point. Why not? People have an insatiable appetite for bottled water, after all. The relaxed atmosphere--both inside and outside my dad's abode--draws out the stress, at once invigorating and exhausting me.

Sudbury is the nearest city of any size to my dad's, and we went there on Monday. Our meanderings included a trip to Science North, a hands-on learning center primarily for kids, but interesting to all ages, and located in one of the most beautiful buidings I've ever visited:

I've been here five or six times since it opened in '84 and it's always a treat. This time they had an extensive animatronic dinosaur exhibit that was highly impressive (and, truth be told, a little disturbing, too: I couldn't help thinking I wouldn't last five minutes in the Cretaceous period). There was also a "4D" presentation of "Wings over the North" that was a hell of a lot of fun. Panoramic bush-plane views coupled with unique and at times startling special effects. It may have been a floatplane, but I didn't expect to actually get wet in a theater.

As always, I had a wonderful time "up north". I've also had a wonderful time down here. Just got back from seeing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. This is not normally the sort of film I bother with in theaters; had I never read Stieg Larsson's excellent novel I wouldn't have bothered with this one at all. It runs 2:32, and it's in Swedish with English subtitles. That shouldn't throw you: Swedish is more like English than I would have thought, and before too long I forgot I was "reading" the movie.

Which, by the way, is excellent: a note-perfect adaptation that cuts Larsson's fat while hewing closely to his plot and theme. The acting, particularly Noomi Rapace's Lisbeth Salander, is a revelation.

It's also violent at times. We were warned TWICE before we went in about the occasionally graphic content, which had me wondering just what I had sentenced my wife to (she hasn't read the novel).

Here's the thing: it is violent, disturbingly so, but I didn't feel the violence was gratuitous. It was...direct, though, in a way that's hard to articulate. The closest I can come, I think, it to suggest it had a European feel to it. For at least two decades now, American movies have never shied away from violence, to the point (in some genres) where a mere beheading isn't worthy of notice unless the eyeballs pop like grapes. But introduce sex to the violence and suddenly an American camera is a little squeamish, a little jittery. Here, the rape scene felt almost clinical--which was disturbing on levels I found I'd rather not contemplate for long.

"I don't know what it is with you," Eva said to me on our way home. "You like your movies serious." I do. The biggest reason is I simply do not find comedies funny. They're either relentlessly stupid, or built on somebody's pain and humiliation--which I can only laugh at if they richly deserve it and sometimes not even then. I gravitate towards gravitas because I'm grateful when somebody shows pain as a genuine hurtful thing, not something to be cheered for and laughed off. Other people escape into their movies, where I relish escaping from mine.

I won't relish escaping from these holidays. The consolation is that the next ones involve Disney World...