Dear Diary: Fun
Even if I wasn’t quite as sparky today as I was yesterday and the day before, I continued to get lots of little stuff done, and some big stuff, and to enjoy life as, really, I haven’t enjoyed it in a very long time. That’s what breaks are for, no? Of course, my 62 year-old’s idea of “enjoyment” would send any healthy twentysomething grasping for a pulse. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
This week’s chicken salad involved doing things by halves: a dressing composed of half an avocado, half a small tub of Greek yogurt, the juice of half a lemon, and less than half a teaspoon of curry powder. The other half of the avocado was cubed and mixed with the white meat from a roast chicken, together with one minced rib of celery and two small spring onions — what my parents called “scallions.” Given the heat wave, the substituion of yogurt for mayonnaise was particularly welcome, but Kathleen had the bright idea of adding Zante currants, which I’ll try next time. We think that they’ll balance the yogurt’s chalkiness very nicely.
It was warmer than I liked (and it still is), but I wasn’t stalled by the heat. I simply took things easy. Having put the salad together, I washed up and went back out onto the balcony and finished the latest Donna Leon, which I believe is called A Question of Belief. My first e-book. When I sat down, I had no idea where I was in the (vitual) text, no sense of how much more I had to read. Now that this uncertainty was bothering me for the first time, I spent a little time with the doodads that appear on demand in the margins. They taught me something entirely new: I had read 53% of the book. How utterly coo-coo.
The reading was preceded by a moment of intense internal debate. Reading Donna Leon on the iPad was all very well, but it wasn’t going to do anything about the piles of physical books that I am trying to bring under control (= “make smaller”). I very nearly settled down with Deanna Fei’s A Thread of Sky, a novel that I’m well into and that I’m liking very much. My fondness for Asian-American fiction has lately been clouded, however, by a rather fishy “complicity”: I am hoping that my grandson will grow up to have primarily Asian friends. Having scolded myself for this improper-sounding objective, I observe that Will lives in a good neightborhood for realizing it.
Earlier in the day, on that round of errands that I looked forward to last night, I added a drop-in at Barnes & Noble. I’ve been in the new store at Lex and 86th precisely three times, including today, and what I wanted this afternoon was a “fun video.” As I trawled the DVD shelves, it became painfully clear that my idea of a fun video, right now, is The Ghost Writer, and only The Ghost Writer. I tried to console myself with Lust Caution, but although Ang Lee’s setting of Eileen Chang’s story is one of the great Chinese movies, it is not a “fun video.” Imagine: I was actually combing the Criterion Collection display for someting “fun” that I didn’t already own.
Here’s an idea for a “fun video”:Â Ewan McGregor remakes Yojimbo. Can you dig it?