Film Festivities

Last night I got a call from an old friend of mine whom I've known since I was about sixteen. She was a Taiwanese immigrant who was way ahead of the rest of the class in maths, but struggling to make herself understood in English. Since then, she's become a teacher, gotten disillusioned with today's kids taking education for granted, then emigrated to Hong Kong to teach at an international school where she gets paid big bucks to teach studious pupils.

I didn't know it at the time, but this friend is the one who introduced me to 'real' coffee, arthouse movies and good restaurants. Without her influence, perhaps I would've been a McDonalds-eater, an action-movie and chick-flick watcher, and a Starbucks regular. My friend is in New Zealand for the next four weeks, so we get to catch up in person really soon - cool.

We're both into the International Film Festival which is due to start on Friday - the boy and I are booked to see five films and she is planning to attending fifteen. We couldn't get tickets for Fahrenheit 9/11 as it was booked out, but it's no big deal because it's bound to come back on general release. I'm nore disappointed about missing out on Supersize Me, the documentary about a guy who eats nothing but McDonalds for a whole month to see what havoc it wreaks on his body. It's not that it's sold out, but that I booked tickets to see Bad Santa (Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken department store Santa who is surly to children and has sex with his customers in the store) for the same night and didn't even realise that Supersize Me was in the programme.

Happy anniversary to me
I managed to get away with not telling anyone at work about it being my one-year anniversary at the library...until I was outed by a co-worker; she worked it out because her own one-year anniversary is exactly a week after mine. So my my attempts to avoid putting on morning tea for everybody may have been foiled.

Bad start to class
My first ever audio-conference, and first Management of Information Services class, were cancelled today due to technical difficulties with the university's Chatterbox server. I didn't find out until I'd parked the library bus and rushed in with the laptop and it's power pack - the manager told me. I was really quite disappointed, because everything was ready and I'd already worked through my lunch hour to make up for the time I was meant to be at work.

Unreality tv
I have realised that there's a huge gap in the way cosmetic surgery is depicted, between American and British television. On Extreme Makeover, when the patient gets liposuction or breast enhancement or whatever, all you see of the procedure is the initial consultation and a shot of the patient with marks all over their body. Next time you see the person, they're out of surgery and covered in bandages.

In a British documentary I saw last night about teens getting cosmetic surgery, you get shown so much more detail. I watched an eighteen-year-old getting a breast enhancement - I saw the flesh being cut, the surgeon's hand going into the incised area and shaking it around to make a pocket, a close-up of the saline bag being positioned under the breast muscle, and a final shot of a pair of breasts both completed save for the huge gaping wounds which hadn't yet been sutured. Small wonder that there's a whole lot more cosmetic surgery going on in the States than in the UK.