Miami stuff

I don't like sitcoms. Anybody who spent any time with me in front of the TV knows that; I'm pretty vocal about. For those who haven't thought about it, sitcom is short for situational comedy. Literally, there is a situation and you may comedy out of it. The situation, if you can call it that, is always that somebody says or does something that is misunderstood, misinterpreted, misconstrued or simply missed.

In real life, most of the situation resolved by simple means. People ask for clarification, we apologize, we figure out what's really going on, or we never notice and nothing ever happens. In the sitcom, however, even the smallest misunderstanding gets blown out of proportion for a period ranging from 4 to 19 minutes. Sometimes, there are multiple misunderstandings on the same topic which gives the episode, and sitcoms exist as a series of episodes, a theme. The humor comes from the viewer understanding Sometimes all the misunderstandings have resolved at once and sometimes they resolve in stages.

Are used to be fine with this until I realized how repetitive they were. Now I just find them vaguely irritating.

I mention this only because it relates to my current state of mind, so I suppose this has a theme as well. As some of you know, I've been struggling with entanglements, or at least things I viewed as entanglements. It struck me this morning that the problem is not the entanglements themselves but how I deal with them. This may seem obvious to some people but not me,

Last night we saw a movie called Personal Shopper. It stars Kristen Stewart, who you may remember from one of those vampire kinds of things that was around a few years ago. She plays basically the same part here except she's a personal shopper. Or is she? She's also a medium, trying to make contact with her dead twin brother. Or is she?

It's one of those movies where you don't know at the end if anything actually happened or if it was all in the character's head. We saw it at this little place called Cinematheque, which is the closest thing Miami Beach has to an art house. It's just a pretty big room with a large projection screen and 100 seats or so. We were the only ones there when the movie started though someone else straggled in around 5 minutes in.

The whole thing has a pretty spooky feel and Stewart, as is her wont, spends a lot of time biting her lip and pushing her hair around. After it ends with a "did this really happen?" my wife and I strolled out and said to the guy working the ticket stand, "weird to watch that movie with only one other person." To which he replied without hesitation "What other person?"