mid morning 10

This morning my wife and I slept in until 9 because we can, and we tend to do that on Friday's anyhow. For whatever reason, Thursday night begins the academic weekend, which is really no weekend at all. The rate and pace of work just slows. We broke our plans to go to a Christmas party last night and instead stayed home and watched a movie. We were in bed by 11:30.

Usually we get up before dawn. Out of habit now I wake up around six. We all know the pleasure of those mornings when we wake up at the usual time only to realize we can sleep in. I pull my wife close and go back to sleep.

Got up, had two cups of coffee, ran 10 on P. Brook, it cold, and the hills were harder than usual probably because I hadn't eaten much the night before. I've been worried about diabetes lately, ever since reading this article in the NYT. I'm giving up sugary foods, and I plan to be vigilant about my intake of hidden sugars. My wife has warned me that runners eat like fat people, that our organs work as hard as fat peoples' organs to process the outsized amounts of foods we eat, even as our skinny frames belie our crappy food habits. I believe her: kidneys, the liver have to process the crap we eat, even as we have abnormally low body fat percentages.

Last night we watched Dickie Roberts, Child Star, on sale for $5 at Barnes and Noble and better than we thought it would be. (Somehow, this movie choice makes a too telling transition from a paragraph about sugar consumption.) Our choice for tonight was Lars and the Real Girl, an appealing weird movie about a young Wisconsin man's love for a sex mannequin. (I mention the setting because it's important for the setting and costumes--it's a midwestern winter, everyone's wearing beige sweaters, the sky's a monochrome slate, the trees and dead grasses are shades of brown, shots blend the world into a bleak and lifeless earth-tone pallate.) Everyone in Lars's small town goes along with his fantasy that the doll is real. I'll have to think more about how to sum the movie up, but suffice it to say that it sets up more conflicts for the main character than it can resolve. This makes its plotting satisfyingly complex, its ending frustratingly pat. A much more interesting movie than I thought it would be, and I'll have to think about it before I say more about it.

It's almost Christmas. My favorite day of the year is December 23, traditionally a day on which nothing happens.