“Walking After You” by Foo Fighters summarises things… “Tonight im tangled in my blanket of clouds, dreaming aloud. Things just wont do without you matter of fact. I’m on your back, I’m on your back, I’m on your back. If you walk out on me, I’m walking after you…”
I was watching Friends on cable the other day whilst snacking (healthily of course). They were repeating the first series and everyone looked so different. And by different I mean more slender. My mum pointed this out and so I came to realise that you can tell how successful a sitcom is by watching an episode from the first series and an episode from a much later series. By making this simple comparison, if it’s observed that the actors and actresses have the same body size, then most of the time it can be concluded that the show is unpopular. In Friends, everyone seems to have gained weight over the several long years that the show has been running, especially the guys who seem to have discovered a large supply of junk food. Here’s a simple formula:
Higher viewing figures = Popular show = More series = More money = Higher salary = More pies
Went to see Chicago at the Adelphi Theatre on Wednesday. Dad had bought tickets the previous week and also the soundtrack too, which was on the hi-fi in the living room towards the evenings. I could tell when it was Wednesday because after arriving home from work he was giddy. He’s not usually giddy, you see, and not usually able to out-giddy a schoolgirl backstage at a teenybopper concert. He was teasing my brother to no end, playground style. I love it when dad is that way. For one, it reminds me that it’s hereditary.
Chicago itself was pretty good. Something was definitely missing to make it truly great, but I can’t tell what it was. The live band was good and the performances were great. Something was missing, and this was confirmed when both mum and dad insisted that the film was much better than the live show.
There’s a woman dressed in black standing on the corner of the road, visible from my window. She’s had been there for quite a while, clutching that bag of hers, before a car pulled up, taking her away. To this day, I’m sure my mum thinks that the people down the road from us are operating some sort of escort agency. I’ve never seen this, but my mum claims to have seen lots of made up women (i.e. women with make-up on) emerging from the house and disappearing into a limousine parked outside. I think I’ve heard the sounds of a group of merry women getting into a car a few doors down, but I’ve never actually seen it. Actually, I haven’t seen a limousine come down my road for a long time now. They used to come down a lot but that was before they installed speed bumps.
Today it’s my cousin’s birthday, but he decided to celebrate it yesterday. We went to Loon Fung in the morning and spent a good portion of the afternoon in the kitchen, cooking up copious amounts of noodles and stir fry dishes. It’s been a while since I’d been in the kitchen and for some reason, food always tastes better when you know it’s been made by your hands (i.e. better, unless you get food poisoning).
Sunny day today and it was nice that I had arranged to drive into the city and meet Yogi for a spot of shopping. At last I was able to check out his (still) new car, the very thing that puts a smile on his face, literally. He turned the key in the ignition and when his baby roared to life, he put on a proud face, complete with a genuine high smile. His brother thinks he’s “a twat” for reacting that way to a simple engine running, but I think it’s cute when he does that, if only because he doesn’t react in the same way to many other things. Sometimes it’s the little things in life that bring on the biggest smiles.
I love being able to see the onset of a smile, especially in friends and loved ones. Like sometimes when I’m reading in the living room and facing mum while she’s watching TV, I look up from my book at just the right time to see a smile appear, or at times when my brother is about to react to a silly remark that dad made. More often than not, it’s a domino effect. You smile, I smile.
Went to church with Kev today. It was the first time in quite a long time. Kev (the better catholic of the 2 of us) had not been for a long time too and I knew that he had wanted to go for a while but just didn’t want to go by himself. I haven’t been able to check recently, but as far as I know, he prays in his room every night. He’s a boy with a lot of faith and I feel he needs guidance with things because he doesn’t seem to have shed his cloak of naivety through his teenage years. However, I attribute that to him being young. It’s just difficult to think of him that way sometimes because I’m so different to him. I’d almost say we have respective personalites from opposite ends of the spectrum, yet we have our similarities too (e.g. a passion for music). He can be quite a closed person and if religion is something that will help him interact with his thoughts and beliefs better, it’s something I want to help him with. Something I can’t deny is that my interaction with religion(s) has somewhat made me the person I am today. Maybe it was the thought of Kev not being able to find what he wanted to find, or the guilty thought of me becoming a heathen bound for the firey depths of Hell-o, but I don’t know why I decided to go today. I had also forgotten it was Palm Sunday, so this made it all the more appropriate for us to attend today. I think Kev wants to start going to mass regularly again. Depending on what he wants to do, I will go along too, just to see how that changes him. And how that changes me.
On the way back home, we decided to have a race to see who’d get home first. I left him behind in the initial sprint, and was actually surprised that I could run faster than him, but he got the upper hand over distance. I remember when I was in high school, over the summer I kept writing to a minimum, so by the time the new term started, my hands were a little shaky holding a pen. Same thing happened today with my legs, because it had been some time since I last sprinted. Not just sprinted, but sprinted for the life of me. It felt strange, almost like my legs were going faster than I was used to, so I had to lean forward so that my body wouldn’t fall behind. In the end, over the mile or so we ran, he only just barely beat me home. I thought I’d cough, splutter and collapse on my living room floor, but it didn’t happen. Still, he only just beat me by literally a few seconds. That made me feel better. No excuses, I’m still giving the kids a run for their money.
