Odds and Sods

In the interest of continuing to try to post everyday, a general accounting of the last 36 hours or so…

Yesterday our friend Rudy put on a production of Antigone (or at least a portion of it) at the Lebanese American University (LAU, not to be confused with AUB). Amy and Bjorn went and checked it out, but unfortunately I couldn’t make it. I had previously decided to stay home and polish up the last few scenes of my as-yet untitled screenplay. It’s (what I am hoping to be) a delightful tale of a cantankerous Calcutta shop-keeper who goes on a spiritual journey of self-discovery through the Indian countryside when his estranged brother, who lives in a remote rural village, sends him a mysterious message requesting his aid. Just kidding. I had to work. The plot I outlined, however, is the plot of a non-existent movie that I always accuse Amy of going to rent when she goes to the video store. It is a commentary on Amy’s refined cinematic taste (in contrast to my own).

After they returned from the play, we ordered some more brown bottles and grilled some chicken. Amy opted to stay in, but Bjorn and I went out. The first stop was De Prague for the purposes of saying hi to a friend of his…nearly not getting in due to their sexist door policy. The whole “Two guys? No sorry, we can’t let you in.” pretty much hangs a skull above the doorway of a joint for me (though that is a terrible metaphor, because if a place actually literally had a skull above the door…). After this brief foray, we went to the after-party for Rudy’s play. It was actually the first time I’d been to anything like a house party in Beirut. Rudy has a great apartment with a great view up on a hill in Achrafieh. It was a nice, small gathering of new faces, but we ended up leaving before too long. In general I feel more comfortable mingling with strangers as I get older, but I often feel that when I mingle with younger people I return to the social awkwardness that was a hallmark of my early twenties (not to be confused with the completely different social awkwardness of my teens). Afterwards we had a nightcap at Torino and headed home at a reasonably respectable hour. Then I proceeded to stay up till the unreasonable hour of 6am instant messaging with my friend Ray. My justification at the time was that if I was going to allow myself to work till 3am a couple nights earlier in the week, I could allow myself the luxury of staying up till 6am to have a conversation with a good friend.

Today we’d planned to get out and about, but the weather was terrible. So instead, we stayed in and watched some terrible TV. I am imagining that Lost In Translation star Scarlett Johannsen is wishing that The Perfect Score would be erased forever from film history. We also got fairly engrossed in some made-for-tv, William H. Macy movie called The Wool Cap. The terrible weather caused our television reception to go out several times during the course of the film, but luckily it was being shown with a half-hour offset on another station.

Our television reception is apparently water-soluble.

I also made dinner, a note-worthy event in and of itself. I can probably count the number of non-grill, non-egg meals I’ve made over the past year on one hand.

Also noteworthy, at least in my opinion, is that we have run out of salt. An interesting side-effect about moving somewhere with a one-year time limit is that you can easily keep track of how much of the long-range staples you use over the course of a year. Before we came here, I calculated (and somewhat underestimated) the number of disposable contact lenses I’d need for a year. The fact that I’ve only just cracked into my second tube of prescription flouride toothpaste* tells me that I haven’t been using it as much as I should.

Ten months worth of salt (I have to admit to posing the scrubby duck there…it belongs in the sink).

* Facts about my prescription toothpaste:

• Number of lethal flouride doses per tube: 6
• Antidote to flouride poisoning: milk
• Reason for having poisonous, potentially lethal toothpaste: I grind my teeth, causing lesions