foggy beginnings and tainted beautiful faces

I just typed a wonderful blog that I rather liked and, as is the case from time to time, the stupid system here just POOF took it away. Grrrr. I will now make a feeble, half-hearted attempt to recreate it. As I'm sure you're all aware, it just never comes out the same. Tear.

So yes, in the midst of the holiday marathon, it was nice to have a bit of a change of pace last night and mix things up with a good holiday-related movie. I always like to check out at least one new holiday film a year, and this year I definitely didn't want to miss out on The Holiday. Last night I went to check it out with SL, EB, and MP. We'd all heard the mixed reviews but didn't care. SL mentioned it was supposed to have an Indie film vibe to it, which to me made it seem even more appealing.

I loved it. It was fun to do a mid-week movie. I can't remember the last time I did that. The only downside was I think that as classes have started to dwindle down on the college end (since we were in Georgetown) that the number of mid-week movie-goers must have gone up, which would explain the chatty fellow movie-goers who felt the need to add a running commentary which was most annoyingly inclusive of oooohs, ahhhhs, and noises of the cooing family. Gag. At some times, I expected the lights to come on and a discussion leader to emerge for us all to talk about what we were feeling at the moment. This movie definitely didn't seem to have the need to have that group sort of feel. Now, my story about watching Waiting to Exhale at the dollar theater in AL is another story. That was one prime example of where the group feel worked. Great story ... haha for another time.

I think it's always interesting to watch a film like that when you have mixed feeling about the actors as people. You want to think, or at least I do, that you can walk into a theater and fully disconnect from any form of reality, including which actors have been arrested, are in rehab, or have been spending a bit too much quality time with the nanny. Ahhhhh the nanny. I have to admit, Jude Law's some nice eye candy. But that's about it. I was glad I was able to enjoy him for that... he can have that hour and a half of my time to be attractive. However, any attractive-related adjective that includes in any sort of connection to imply an attractive personality, yeah, he can't have that. SL and I were talking about this after the movie, and there's definitely a difference. He can have one, but the other - he certainly is denied in my books.

So this morning my schedule lined up with the DG again, so this inbound commuter was very thankful and happy to accept a ride in to the metro (and skip out on that invigorating 0.7 mile walk). Today was especially foggy. It looked like DC had plummeted into a thick vat of fog. As we were driving across the Mall area, you couldn't see any of those elements that I think of as symbols of DC. Looking to the left, the Capitol building was completely non-existent. The Mall in general had this eerie air about it, akin to visiting somewhere like the Korean War Memorial at night with the ghostly statues seemingly floating across the ground. The commuters walking across the Mall seemed to take on that ghostly air themselves. At the far right, the Washington Memorial too was just lost in the sea of fog.

It made me think that DC is still DC with or without those elements. While they're such visual elements representing the nation as a whole -- who we are and where we've been -- that they're really and truly just cosmetic elements. As I boarded the metro this morning, I found myself watching the people interacting more... watching their behaviors... wondering what each person's career happened to be. It's fascinating to think the multitudes of people we walk by each day. Each one has their own life. Their own mini-sphere. They have their own group of people who are important to them. They have their own unique sub-set of the area, be it their families, their families, their co-workers, etc. Each person is representative of such a different slice of DC, or for that matter even VA... or MD... it's those people that make up DC. It's definitely not the monuments.