Posted 8:07 PM by Blah blah

Autumn in New York

Thanks for your patience, guys. You might be wondering why I am talking about all this nonsense and avoiding my personal life. You are right. I should say more about the ordinary day-to-day huh? Well my day-to-day life is pretty unremarkable. I am pretty much dealing with school, work, and a car. Have an exam Wednesday and a Tic-Tac-Toe program to write for next Friday, which should be interesting. For the Tic-Tac-Toe class, the teacher is a young guy who just got his PhD and was at UCLA. Very cool and easy to talk to. He's set up everything so that we submit our homework only through the web, and his site will print this confirmation number page we keep.

I like young professors because, like him, they still really care about explaining the full story to you. They don't get impatient with basic questions, and they try to really satisfy and encourage your curiosity. If you know me, you know I can be an endless bucket of questions if I really try. I usually don't, but one summer in high school I was in a medical program at Stanford, and one of the counselors there diagnosed me with a "question-comment imbalance." He bet me that I could not go through one whole day without asking a single question. He won! I'd meet new people at dinner where we were staying, and I was killing myself trying to get to know them but not say it in the form of a question. Sort of an anti-Jeopardy. "So, Mr. Smith, you ARE from Michigan and you DO some kinda back surgery. Yesss." "Ella, you are standing on your head and wishing to go have dinner, I know..."

Work: I have this new software package my boss wants me to learn. Wants me to be in charge of taking care of the code for my group. Am working on that. Times are tight financially at IBM now, so we are kinda coasting right now, lying low and not trying anything really ambitious.

Car: Basically I made a stupid stupid mistake. I bought a car recently and sold it back. Long story which I will not go into here. But that wasted lots of time and money and interfered with my life the last two to three weeks.

This weekend: Did nothing. Stayed in. Saturday night my housemate took our leftovers from our fridge and whipped up this pho soup, with those umbrella mushrooms and a sour flavor. It was surprisingly good! I am so lazy and lucky. Then we watched this leftover DVD that his girlfriend refused to watch, Autumn in New York, with Richard Gere and Winona Ryder, directed by Joan Chen (her 2nd movie as director). I had read a lot of bad reviews about the movie, but hell I still wanted some pointers from Richard Gere, so Saturday night was two guys staying home watching a chick flick. Yap. Actually I liked the feel of the movie, even though the premise didn't make sense. The Chinese cinematographer, Changwei Gu, was one of the stars of the film, I'd say, making New York and the restaurants and snow and twinges of winter so romantic and otherworldly. He had also shot Farewell My Concubine. I was floating. Watching it was like savoring rich chocolate and knowing it's a guilty pleasure that you'll pay for later but not caring. Richard Gere, acting suprisingly similar to the personality he had in Pretty Woman, was my favorite character to watch. Surprisingly, despite her beauty, I just could not get myself to care about Winona Ryder. But Gere, who plays every pore of anguish and flicker of guilt to the back of the theater, really got me. I felt like he was more naked emotionally than Winona when she was naked physically. Athough the characters differed agewise by 26 years, it was more believeable than the Sean Connery-Catherine Zeta-Jones pairing in Entrapment. Gere just looks eternally boyish with his bright eyes and crinkly grin. (Here's a photo of Joan Chen and Changwei Gu.)

Amazing how a couple of years ago, Liu and I had an argument about Autumn in New York that partially led to me not talking to her for a few weeks. She'd not liked this other movie I liked, The Tao of Steve, but instead she liked Autumn, which had gotten all the bad reviews. I know I know. Petty...that wasn't the only reason I was acting childish with her. I still remember I'd come over to visit her sister, who had made some dinner, and Liu just sat there uncharacteristically cold, with tight silent lips, a slouch, and ignoring me. Then she excused herself and went upstairs. Her sister and I did a double-take and looked at each other like: "what was that all about?" I stood at the bottom of the stairway, pleading in the same way Richard Gere does so well after he's been naughty, and got her to smile again.



That's my personal Autumn in New York.