Buff Stuff

I've been thinking a lot about film because the Sydney Film Festival is currently underway. Over the course of two-and-half weeks, my 10-session flexipass will turn into five documentaries, two profound Asian films about spirituality, an offbeat American comedy, an animation about the dark and an obligatory French film about sex (what else?).

I'm already four into the 10 and all of them have been enjoyable thus far. Last night Sir and I went to see 'Choke' (the offbeat American comedy), which is based on the Chuck 'Fight Club' Palahniuk novel of the same name. The short that ran before it was a photographic animation directed by none other than Chris Jones, a guy I went to high school with.

Chris was considered somewhat a clown, though very good at English and drama, and would never have been on the radar to become a prefect had he not been the only person to campaign for a spot. I distinctly recall being handed a leaflet that said something like "Vote for Chris Jones, he puts the 'Re' in 'Prefect' and Re is like the Sun God in Egyptian mythology and the sun is good because it makes plants grow and stuff". Anyway, good to see he's done well because he deserves it.

All this film buff stuff has gotten me thinking about why I seem to have almost no friends who share the same tastes in music, film and theatre (etc). Is it because I'm so infrequently in that space that I haven't been able to make friends from within the sector? Or is it just because my friends from other walks of life are uncultured heathens? Perhaps a bit of both. Besides which, not many of them have the dispensable income to spend on theatre tickets.

Which further got me thinking about Danny Cameron, who is the editor of Engineering World I have introduced previously. I used to think he was strange for sending me all those weird emails about the sky but now I think it's sweet. We get on quite well (via email) and we're now at the stage where we don't need to have an excuse to send an email about what we did on the weekend.

Anyway, so after a lengthy discussion about which SFF films we were going to see, he mentioned a bunch of other stuff he had on his 'to do' list including going to the new Bell Shakespeare production of 'Hamlet'. Now, this is a version I was thinking of seeing but I can't get anyone to come with me because of general indifference and tightwadness among friends and acquaintances. Ordinarily, I would just go by myself because I don't have any reservations about doing that and I'm not going to miss something cos everyone else is lame, but 'Hamlet' falls into the category of needing to talk to somebody about it to debrief.

So. After four days of sending psychic signals willing him to call me and ask me to go with him, I've decided to ask him to come with me. Now I know that after being the 'dominant one' in all my relationships I said I wouldn't take the initiative for the next one, but then I thought 'that's stupid, if everyone who usually took initiative thought that, no one would ever get together and the world would cease to turn'. Or something along those lines.

Besides which, I don't really know anything about the guy besides his obsession with the arts and the sky so I can't think of it like a date. Really.

Nothing much since last week. Went to the dentist to do the paperwork for my wisdom teeth surgery next month. Had dinner with Skippy and friends at San Juan, a Colombian restaurant in St Leonards, whereby Skippy proceeded to talk about crystals and her brand new unbelievably perfect relationship with Markus (she broke up with Rob a couple of weeks ago). The next morning I went to the optometrist who said my eyesight is steady (which means only one more year of steady eyesight before I can get laser eye surgery - yay!), watched a couple of SFF films and am now on my second major TAFE assignment for this (long) weekend. Le sigh. Back to it.