Life on a Saturday

Not a lot to report today. We're having an end-of-semester party this evening for my students, which will be for me an exercise in seeing if I can do this without eating anything inappropriate or accidentally getting unexpectedly drunk by not eating... I'm buying a lovely bottle of gin so that I can skip the the (high-carb) beer and have my favorite summer drink anyway... heavy on the tonic, light on the gin; I don't drink much at all these days so it works out a lot better that way. I thought about trying to do this all low carb... for about 20 seconds. The fact of the matter is that trying to feed 30-50 hungry students on something besides hot dogs, hamburgers, and crunchy snacks is both beyond my budget and beyond the time I have to put into it. So that's the way it is... and I'll have a burger without the bun, thankyouverymuch. My weight seems to be coming back down from this week's mysterious 2 lbs mid-week extra bloat, and I'd like to keep it that way, although I'm sure it's not going to be a stellar weight loss week.

Last night we watched Atonement... lovely movie; I'd been wanting to see it since it came out, as the book was probably the best book I'd read a few years ago. Usually I loathe movies of books that I really liked, but this one worked, although it was certainly helped by the fact that it's been something like 3 years and I don't recall the book details that well. Have to go back and reread it now. Lots of gorgeous cinematography, too... Shropshire in the summer, and Grimsby seafront (where Michael once worked) done up in an amazing transformation as Dunkirk.

But it's mostly taken me into this strange and pensive mood about the stupidness of life and the way that you only learn things too late, and how those missteps haunt you forever. I often feel that way about my whole life, and I know that in the end, today is another day and the past is a memory... and there's no useful purpose in regret. But it hits me more from time to time, the way in which we stumble through, blind in the moment, only wise looking back.

At the end of the day, though, what do you do except move on, do the next thing on the list, get ready for the party, try to do this day better?