Friday, January 4, 2013

man of la rip your heart to bleeding shreds

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    ok so

    i realize i haven't posted in like two months, even before thanksgiving break let alone finals or christmas break (which i am in the last days of)

    but i really wanted to say that it is so awful when one expects a new piece of entertainment to have a certain emotional effect on one

    but then it goes and has the absolute opposite effect in every possible way it could.

    Like when one decides to watch the Man of La Mancha (1972) movie and one doesn't know anything about it except that it is a musical based on a play or something based on the novel Don Quixote by what's-his-face. Ok, musical, those are usually fun and lighthearted right and then one doesn't know anything about Don Quixote except that one thing that one's heard about him going and attacking windmills or whatever which sounds very silly he's like a silly person ok
    musical + silly windmill man = therefore movie must be silly and fun right

    Wrong, the movie is now over and one is standing in the kitchen at 3am silently sobbing one's guts out because that was not a happy movie it was a sad movie, a very sad sad movie

    Ugh I should have known that it would be sad just from the fact that it stars Peter O'Toole.

i think the man just specializes in characters who are falling apart in various ways.


    Anyway um yes what have I done lately that is interesting? Or that I can make interesting? Not much! Just on vacation right now, holed up in a snowy not-place in Idaho, puttering away and getting lots of sleep before the spring semester starts. Oh, I should say something about next semester, that's almost interesting. For classes I am taking:
  • HIS 212: American Civilization: 1865 to Present (american history II),
  • BTS212: New Testament Studies II: Epistles and Revelation, 
  • GRK102: Beginning Greek II, 
  • BTS360: Doctrine of God, 
  • HIS352: American Revolution and Early Republic, and
  • BTS205: Hermeneutics.
    (Hermeneutics used to be counted as a 300-level class but for some reason they changed it to 205 after restructuring the academic program this summer. Dr. S/PME has cheerily assured me, however, that he has no intention of making it any easier just because its listing changed.)
    So I guess that's really all just history and Bible classes except for Greek, which is closely linked to the Bible classes since we're learning biblical Greek/being trained to read and interpret the, uh, New Testament in its original form. So that's good. NT II and American Civ are still core-level, but I'm really starting to move more and more into the two areas of study I've actually chosen for my major. My build-a-bear, mix-and-match major.
    I've got some additional class-like stuff going on this semester but that would take too long to explain so here we go.

2 comments:

  1. Excellent post on Man of La Mancha. You've whetted my appetite to see the film. O'Toole can be mesmerizing. One of my favorite lines from Don Quixote is Sancho Panza saying: "He preaches well who lives well; that's all the divinity I understand."

    JP

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  2. Oh my goodness please do. Tell me what you think of it. It probably just hit me really hard because I'm young and stupid and am having to figure out how to live life and it's got stuff about capital-i Ideals and Identity (plus singing) and romance and whatever, but I'm pretty sure it qualifies as a solid movie even apart from all that.

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