2001-07-15 - 8:25 p.m.
I caught most of the film Gandhi on Bravo Saturday night. I think I once read that when he died, the only items in his possession were his glasses and a spoon. Or maybe I'm thinking of Albert Schweitzer. Anyway, I'm looking around at the boxes in my house piling up higher and higher while the number of things left does not seem to decrease. I can't believe I spent most of February cleaning out closets and cabinets and weeding my book collection. How do I still have so much stuff to pack? It's making me think seriously about the shear tonnage of things I own and why.
Mike was a sweetheart this weekend and packed my entire library for me (sparing us both the slow and painful process I make of it) while I ferried valuable and fragile items to my parents' house for safe keeping. I used his diligent efforts as an excuse to drop by the public library Saturday afternoon and borrow a little reading material to tide me over until we unpack in two weeks. By chance, I ran across a book that's been on my "want to read" list for a few months now. (I keep and update a list of books that I spot in catalogs or reviews that look interesting, but not so interesting that I want to sink the money into them yet. Ideally, I would reference this list on each trip out to the library or on before gift-giving holidays when my family asks me what I want. Instead I usually ignore it until I add a new title and then forget about it again.) I was too tired to begin it last night, so I hope to make some headway into it after I finish rambling here and email my former theatre professor on my thoughts about Final Fantasy, which Mike and I caught this afternoon.
My former professor emailed a pile of his students last week about the "threat" that photorealistic animation could pose to the acting community. I replied to him that it would probably be limited to a genre of film rather than take over the entertainment industry at large. The best use would probably be in crowd scenes or other situations that don't require close scrutiny by an audience. I'm not sure he bought it - particularly from me. I did quit the field, after all. Six months of living on $100 a week was enough for me. What I didn't ask, and probably should have, was why the actors' guilds, who have enormous unemployment numbers, are so worried about jobs over this?
