Driving avarice (Le Salaire de la peur)

Once again I’ve had the opportunity to select the spotlight film of the week for the 1001 Movies Blog Club, and this time I chose La Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), an epic thriller directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Although the Club selections are more or less anonymous by design, I always try to own up to mine just in case my fellow bloggers are wondering who to blame for being subjected to a certain cinematic experience. But it’s hard to imagine anyone taking issue with a magnificent, meticulously rendered piece of art such as this.

Well, just for fun, let’s try to imagine some issues one could take with the film. For background, even if you’ve never seen the film you may have at least heard of it: it’s the one where there’s a shipment of nitroglycerine that needs to be hauled across some bad roads, and there’s some desperate men willing to risk their lives for the astronomical hazard pay, and it gets pretty intense. That’s the core of the film that most people would be familiar with. However, those concepts don’t all come together until deep into the movie, which runs well over two hours long. So, imaginary complaint number one might be pacing, but I would knock down that straw man as being incredibly misguided. Not every movie needs to be a taut 89 minutes, with a protagonist introduced as efficiently as possible right before he is thrown into the crazy inciting incident of the plot. By taking a much slower and more deliberate approach, Clouzot is able to give all of the characters room to breathe and reveal their natures and relationships. Even the setting itself has time to establish itself as a real place, and as the audience sees examples of certain intangibles, from the oppressive heat to the isolation and inescapability, over and over again, the feeling of desperation which preys upon the characters insinuates itself into the audience as well. When the trucking job presents itself, and the stakes are made perfectly clear, it’s no leap of logic to understand why there are so many volunteers that they must all try out and be cut down to four; it’s an inevitability.

Imaginary complaint number two might be that none of the characters are particularly likable. Mario is arrogant and selfish. Jo is a bully. Bimba is aloof. Luigi is too nice for his own good, bordering on pathetic. Again, though, this is an unsupportable objection for any number of reasons. All four men have fallen on desperate times for various reasons, some stated and some implied, to the point where they will take their lives in their own hands. The beauty of the film is that the characters are portrayed honestly throughout, with certain aspects of their temperaments at the forefront in town and others coming through under the extreme circumstances of transporting explosives on a suicide run, but all of them consistent. They may not be someone the viewer would be pleased to spend time with, but they are real human beings and on a gut level we feel for them as such, particularly given the harrowing task they set themselves at. It’s not the same emotional investment we might experience in a feel-good hangout movie, but it is powerful.

Finally (getting into spoiler territory), imaginary complaint number three might be the bleak outlook of the film, including if not exemplified by its downbeat ending. If any given straw man doesn’t consider movies that make with the sad to be his cup of tea, there’s not much I can do to argue around the point. It’s hard to put a positive spin on the notion that when it comes to this world, nobody gets out alive. It’s also not impossible, but La Salaire de la peur doesn’t particularly try, as the deaths of each of the truckers stack up with each one seemingly more meaningless than the last. Still, art can be meaningful even without bold and inspirational declarations of life’s inherent value. It takes many voices and many visions up and down the spectrum.

(Post-finally, there’s always the possibility that a person might not care for a 1953 French-Italian picture because they “don’t like black and white” or they “don’t like subtitles”. Heck, I might have raised those objections myself in my much younger days. For what it’s worth, I didn’t find the subtitles in La Salaire de la peur to be too onerous, as some of the key sequences of maximum tension are basically dialogue-free. And other parts are in English! And as far as color, there were scenes which I can’t imagine working half as well in technicolor, like when Jo and Mario attempt to cross the lake of oil from a burst pipe:

All of that monochrome crude subsuming Jo would lose a lot of its stark power if it weren’t in black and white.)

So it’s a simple but gripping story, with compelling acting and camera direction which is so well attuned to the material it practically becomes invisible. On top of all that, I have to praise some of the technical accomplishments of the film. I continue to find myself more and more impressed by the lengths filmmakers went to in the days before computer-assisted special effects, when showing an oil well fire meant obtaining actual footage of raging flames, and depicting a truck crashing down a mountain entailed pushing a real physical truck off a road and letting gravity do the rest. La Salaire de la peur has these shots and several others, all of which give the film an incredible verisimilitude.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the film, however, is in its sound engineering. The most nail-biting, gut-churning sequences in the film are not artificially heightened by an overlay of theatrical music specifically composed to be tense and discordant. On the contrary, the only music after the title credits is that which comes out of a radio in a cantina. On the road, there is nothing but ambient noise. But the emotional weight carried by the revving of a truck engine, or the creaking of the rotten boards of a support platform, or the monotonous droning of insects, or the heavy breathing of a man trying to transfer nitroglycerine to a blast cavity in a boulder, is simply immense. Clouzot uses these sounds masterfully to ratchet up the anxiety, with their steady insistence contrasting quick visual perspective cuts from one man to another, from shaking hands to sweat-beaded lips, and so on. It’s pretty phenomenal, though again something accomplished in a way that could pass without being consciously noticed, even as it all but overwhelms the senses.

La Salaire de la peur may not be a perfect film, but it comes exceedingly close. It sets out to do many different things, and almost always succeeds wildly. Its philosophical inquiry is valid, albeit not necessarily attuned to every viewer’s sensibilities, which may be the only thing holding it back from being more famously well-regarded by more people. But without question it’s worth taking the time to engage with on its own terms.

TUESDAY BONUS: The last shall be first (Best Worst Movie)

I’m clearing out some unfinished business from last year, before introducing the big obsessive projects and ridiculous running motifs I have planned for this year, and that blog-housekeeping includes the belated final installment of DOXEMBER (remember that?), with a look at the documentary Best Worst Movie.

For various reasons, I’m skipping over yet another movie I watched for the theme month, Lost in La Mancha, which captures the collapse of Terry Gilliam’s doomed production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2000. It was a moderately interesting collection of behind-the-scenes footage and some talking head material by Gilliam himself, but beyond that I didn’t have much to say about it. Although there’s some cheap irony inherent in holding up Gilliam’s efforts to realize his vision for the movie as a quixotic quest (including oh-so-many visual references to tilting at windmills*) the fact is that movies get abandoned all the time. They run out of money (as Gilliam did), or an actor has to drop out (as Gilliam’s did), or any number of prosaic pitfalls open up under the crew’s feet, and studios cut their losses and move on. Arguably it’s a greater shame in the case of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, because it probably would have been an outstanding film, but it’s also just one of those things.

Still, there was something of a throughline with my choices for DOXEMBER, in the following progression: Hearts of Darkness was about a movie (Apocalypse Now) which should never have managed to get finished, yet miraculously was, and went on to become an all-time classic. Burden of Dreams was about a movie (Fitzcarraldo) which also should never have managed to get finished, yet also miraculously was, but went on to become a mostly forgotten obscurity. Lost in La Mancha was about a movie (The Man Who Killed Don Quixote) which should never have managed to get finished, because of very similar trials as beset the first two (including insane amounts of rain) and unsurprisingly was never finished, and remains an intriguing might-have-been. Finally, Best Worst Movie is about a movie (Troll 2) which probably never should have been begun and yet semi-miraculously was finished and became first a bomb and later a beloved cult classic.

(Also note the 1001 Must-See Movies progression (or regression) at play here: Both Hearts of Darkness and Apocalypse Now are on the Master List. Fitzcarraldo is on the list, though Burden of Dreams is not. Lost in La Mancha is not, but Terry Gilliam has a few directorial efforts to his credit on the List, including Brazil and 12 Monkeys. Best Worst Movie is not on the list, Troll 2 certainly isn’t, and in fact none of Claudio Fragasso’s filmography are anywhere within shouting distance.)

Of all the documentaries about movies I’ve watched, Best Worst Movie is the one that made me smile the most. In part it’s a making-of, but it’s also about fandom, and it’s easy in certain moments to get caught up in the sheer exuberance of a midnight screening of Troll 2 with special appearances by the cast members. The documentary was actually put together by the actor Michael Stephenson who played the ostensible hero of Troll 2, Joshua Waits, as a young child. Twenty years later, he tracked down various castmates, the director, the screenwriter, the composer, and seemingly every fan the movie has gained in its second life as a so-bad-its-good masterpiece, fueled by the dubious distinction of a 0% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes as well as the #1 spot on IMDB’s Worst Movies of All Time list.

There’s a segment in Best Worst Movie where a couple of members of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe extol the virtues of the movie and insist that if a person has never seen Troll 2 they should drop whatever they are doing and find it and watch it that very instant. I, for one, have never seen Troll 2, and even after watching Best Worst Movie I’m not sure if I ever will, much as I appreciate the unrestrained recommendation. I do know that if I end up watching it, I will surely do so in some kind of communal experience, because that’s what the documentary makes look the most appealing.

For an independent documentary with a super-simple premise (“I was in a terrible movie as a kid and now two decades later I want to reflect on it”), Best Worst Movie is surprisingly complex. It gives a fair amount of screentime to most of the major players from the cast, some of whom went on to put together humble but successful acting careers, some of whom went on to have more normal but just as successful careers in other fields, and some of whom did not necessarily turn out so well. It gives director Claudio Fargasso enough rope to hang himself (and he does not disappoint). It gives an opportunity to numerous fans to express their love for the movie, and a chance for some of the cast to react to that love, and that may be the most fascinating aspect of all. Clearly, most of the cultish fans of Troll 2 are, to use the time-saving shorthand of a stereotype label, hipster d-bags. They love the movie with irony, which sometimes seems to be the only way certain people can love things. And yes, there’s some tension between the former cast, non-professionals who lived in and continue to live in small towns, and the phenomenon of Troll 2’s popularity amongst big city hipster d-bag kids, with the question remaining open as to whether or not the cast really understands what a standing ovation at the end of Troll 2 signifies. Best Worst Movie isn’t explicitly cruel to its subjects and doesn’t hold them up for mockery, but it does shine a light on the whole notion of pop culture being deemed so-bad-its-good and how people in different social strata process that. And that includes showing some of the cast going from the highest highs of a raucously successful Music Box screening in Chicago where they get to sign autographs for starstruck fans, to showing the same cast members at a horror-con in Texas where they get ignored alongside the actors who played Freddy victims in Nightmare on Elm Street (parts IV and V), to showing a charity screening of Troll 2 in cast member George Hardy’s hometown in Alabama, where his fellow citizens clearly don’t get what the big fuss is all about. Hardy tries, earnestly, to explain that the movie is funny, and does so by quoting some of his own dialogue which always gets big laughs at the hipster d-bag screenings, but he doesn’t seem to realize that the dialogue isn’t inherently funny until he gets blank stares in response.

But at the same time, somehow, it’s not all about hipster d-bags taking something worthless and pretending to love it in order to be archly amusing to themselves. There is something sincere in more of the fans than not (at least among those captured on camera by Best Worst Movie) in the affection they feel toward the movie. Many of them cite the utter guilelessness of the film, which perhaps triggers an equally unguarded response in them. Others genuinely seem to enjoy the pleasures that can be had in considering something which shouldn’t conceivably exist, and yet does in spite of itself and the hard, uncaring world it came into. Anything that can bring people together, even if it unites them in shaking their heads in disbelief, becomes a positive thing which people can appreciate, one of life’s little unexpected bright spots.

Ultimately that’s the message of Best Worst Movie: Troll 2 was awful, having gone wrong in almost every way a movie can from day one, and it emerged from the dustbin of history as pure unintentional camp, which is not necessarily something to be proud of. And yet, a lot of the people associated with the movie are proud of their involvement. And rightly so, because the movie makes people happy. Whether that happiness is partly a put-on, partly mean-spirited, or wholly unadulterated joy at unmitigated weirdness, is basically beside the point.

Again, I can see myself maybe watching Troll 2 some time, with several of my friends, because we are all geekily hardwired to experience that appreciation for so-bad-its-good. And I know not everyone is so wired, and consequently I wouldn’t urge everyone to run out and see Troll 2. But, I would urge everyone who’s ever been a fan of a film, any film, to see Best Worst Movie, not because it’s about Troll 2 but because it’s about movies, dreams, and all kinds of love.

(* Did you know that tilting at windmills is literally the first thing Don Quixote does in the novel once he fully embraces his delusion of being a knight? I do, because I am a d-bag bibliophilic snob who has read the entire 900 page translation of Don Quixote. Cervantes describes his hero doing lots of other crazy and amusing things over the course of the book, but the windmill scene is the one that has become shorthand for the character. I suspect this is because that’s as far into the proto-novel as most people get, before deciding “AND IT GOES ON LIKE THAT” is all they really need to know about the latter 90%.)

Update: Everything is cool

So in the end, they cancelled school for today, and thus my wife was not forced to figure out how to get the little guy to and from the bus stop without complications from hypothermia (for him, herself, or the two other little ones). On the other hand, work was open for business on the regular schedule. The e-mail from the schools came at about 3 p.m. on Monday, whereas I stayed up as late as I could refreshing the Office of Personnel Management page looking for some sign of news, but ultimately fell asleep and then checked this morning when I woke up and discovered there was no news after all. I layered and bundled up, drove to the train station, waited in my car right up until the VRE was pulling up to the platform, hurried onboard, and once the train arrived in my work neighborhood I hurried off and across the street to the underground. I survived.

The house survived, too, despite some heavy wind last night rattling the rafters. I didn't mention it in yesterday's post but one of the facets of my distraction was a paranoid certainty that somehow the cold would cause some kind of property damage. I drained/winterized the outdoor water fixtures a month ago or more, but I've failed to do so in years past and paid the icy burst-pipe price for it, so it will probably haunt me forevermore. And on an even more insane level I was convinced that the panes of glass in my house's windows would just spontaneously crack if not shatter overnight, like so many hot coffee pots tossed into sinkfuls of cold dishwater. None of those dread premonitions came to pass, though, nor even so much as a power outage due to downed limbs.

So, quite possibly a whole lot of fuss over nothing, and certainly over nothing long-lasting, since I see now that by the weekend it could very well be up in the 50's or 60's around here. As you were, then.

The work at hand

Right then, the holidays are over, the vacations built around the holidays are over, it's Monday and I'm back to work along with everyone else. Things should be feeling as if the workaday rut has resisted any and all erosion and is in fact quite easy to settle back into.

(And, I mean, you guys, things got a little bit weird towards the end of last year, seriously. There was that whole ultimately fruitless attempt on my part to jump jobs, only to find that all the groundwork a buddy of mine had laid kept leading to people who just didn't have any open positions right now, sorry. And that in turn made me resolve to find a new job this year one way or the other, with or without my buddy, but I was purposefully putting it off until this year because I figured no one would be hiring right around the holidays. Meanwhile I was letting little things slip, like getting my hair cut, because clearly the optimal time to get a haircut would be right before a face-to-face job interview, right? I ended up getting a haircut the Saturday after Christmas. And I've started grooming my vandyke again, at that.)

In point of fact, I should be working on my annual review self-evaluation. Improbable as it seems, that time of year has rolled around yet again, and it's due by the end of the week. And I should be laying out a kind of roadmap for myself as far as how I'm going to keep busy going forward day to day and week to week and month to month (until either I do land that mythical new job, or I'm forced to make yet another yearly justification for my continued employment). Really I should be working on any number of things, both the work-related as mentioned hitherto and non-work-related-but-much-easier-in-my-cubicle-than-almost-anywhere-else, like for instance the ol' blog.

But as it happens I am entirely too distracted by the fact that temperatures are going to plummet overnight into the single digits (Fahrenheit!) and will still be in that range when I am supposed to leave the house and head to work tomorrow morning. Will the federal government allow for liberal leave, if not delay the opening of offices? Will the city schools cancel kindergarten on the little guy, who just went back to class today after two solid weeks of winter break vacation? Or will it turn out that while a light dusting of snow is considered threatening enough to public safety that all manner of emergency measures are implemented, an ambient air temperature (not even counting wind chill) cold enough to give you frostbite in 30 minutes or less is no cause for alarm and means business as usual? I do not know, and I can only wait and see, but while I do just that I am finding it hard to concentrate on much else.

Saturday Grab Bag Still Kickin'

So somewhere in the tumult of year-ending holidays and vacations and whatnot, the regular 2013 NFL season came to a close. Count me among the fans who enjoys the intra-division rivalries getting their last match-ups in during week 17, in what often turn out to be games with playoff implications. There were of course no playoffs at stake for my beloved Giants, but they did manage to beat the atrocious local Washington franchise, both in the Sunday contest in question and the Battle To Stay Out of the NFC East Basement, so there was that.

There's no shortage of adverbs I could use to describe the way December 29th unfolded for my wife's team, as the improbable interlinked scenarios for the Steelers to grab the last AFC wildcard slot all came to pass in favorable ways and then - sadly, maddeningly, unjustly-upon-further-review, &c. - after Pittsburgh had won their game and needed the Chiefs to beat the Chargers, that late game went into overtime after a missed KC game-winner field goal attempt where SD committed an unflagged procedural penalty, and then SD took the eventual W and the playoff spot. It's more or less what you have to expect when your team doesn't control their own destiny and needs immense amounts of help, but still pretty crushing.

So now it remains to be seen if my wife and I will spend the weekends of January following the playoffs so that we have informed opinions for a Super Bowl where we will have virtually no emotional investment, or instead get an early start on, say, catching up on Downton Abbey Season 3. Either should be good times.

+++

Also, for what it's worth, I had a bad run there at the end of the Pick'em Pool, with a TOTAL of 11 right across both weeks 14 and 15 combined, but then a bit of a bounceback in the last couple weeks, 9 correct followed by 11 on that final, fateful Sunday. But 13 correct was the winning mark in the last week, so I was never really in it. Overall, I finished the season tied for 25th place out of 30 entrants, and those bottom four who actually did worse than I did all season long were all people who, at one point or another, had simply not submitted any picks in a given week and thus got a goose egg somewhere along the way. I got a mere 3 right one week, but never a 0. My plucky 88-year-old grandma failed to make her picks for week 17, probably because she was traveling to see her children for Christmas. If she had gotten 9 or 10 right (not hard in a week where even I could get 11) instead of zero, she would have beaten me for the year. My Very Little Bro, my cousin, and my two uncles did beat me for the year, all pretty handily.

And the person I was tied with for 25th overall? That would be my dad. We were actually pretty neck-and-neck all season. So, to whatever extent fathers and sons use sports as a proxy for resolving interpersonal stuff, kind of amusing (to me, anyway) that we wound up in exactly the same position of "well, thanks for playing, there's always next year!"

+++

Of course I would be remiss if I did not mention that Community is back(!) and of course my wife and I were glued to the tv on Thursday evening. It's too early to say anything too sweeping about the second Harmon administration, but after the double-shot of episodes this week it does feel as though at least some of the old crackle is back. I was geeked about the new season going into Thursday, and I remain pretty much the same level of geeked.

It was not easy getting our butts on the couch by 8 p.m., though. Thursday is one of the days both my wife and I work, and since I got home first I very quickly started dinner for the kids, got them fed, and then proceeded to the pre-bedtime baths. I did get an early jump on the whole routine/rigamarole, but it quickly went pear-shaped with the little girl refusing to go to bed until her mother got home (and sang her songs, &c., &c.) and the baby not feeling particularly sleepy as of 7:45. Basically the two older kids were tucked in just before 8, and I was rocking the baby in the master bedroom with the lights off and the tv on, while my wife very sweetly got our dinner in the oven and missed the first few minutes. By about the second commercial break, the baby was sleeping soundly enough that he could be laid down and my wife and I could relocate to the den. Fortunately, there was a two-fer of new episodes for premiere might, so at least my wife got to watch the entirety of the second one.

Also one miniscule "duly noted": don't suppose for a second that I didn't notice during the closing scene of "Re-Pilot" when Britta was ignoring her friends as they tried to talk her out of pursuing a masters in psychology, despite her friends' reasonable suggestions to go for some easier degree, and Shirley put forth "How 'bout English?" Almost twenty years out of college and I still identify as an English major, so that stung a little. But I gotta acknowledge a good burn, and that was a good one.

All kinds of dissonance

Sure enough, my wife and I did watch a little bit more Game of Thrones over Christmas vacation. Specifically, we fired up one episode on an evening in between when this post was written and when it was actually scheduled to go up on the blog. Technically the post was still accurate in the broad strokes, because our trek through Season 2 is still incomplete as of today, although we now have only one episode left instead of two.

If you are a GoT superfan you might recall that the episode my wife and I watched most recently was “Blackwater”. The penultimate S2 episode was all about the siege of the Red Keep by Stannis’s fleet, and it deviated from the usual GoT formula by sticking with that storyline in King’s Landing for the entire running time (focusing mainly on Tyrion and Bronn, and Cersei and Sansa) instead of checking in periodically with Jon Snow or Robb Stark or Daenerys Targaryen or whathaveyou. It was also pretty spectacular, in both the visual and the storytelling sense of the word. Not a bad episode at all to let the show get its hooks back into us and urge us to power through the season finale sooner rather than later.

Spoilers, I guess?

What’s funny, though, is that we watched it in such close proximity to our little guy developing an intense attachment to several of his Christmas presents which are now his new favorite playthings: a handful of Imaginext knights and their castle playset and the matching red dragon. The little guy loves playing knights and dragon so much that it is literally the first thing he does every day now: he gets up out of bed and puts on his glasses (usually) and comes downstairs and heads straight for the castle on the living room floor. Eventually, he remembers to eat breakfast. (It’s going to be tough getting him back into the habit of getting ready for/actually going to school this coming Monday, but that’s not what I’m dwelling on at the moment.)

So, essentially, the little guy’s new favorite game is Siege, which of course evokes comparisons in my mind to “Blackwater”. Or contrasts, really, because although kindergarten and the attendant socializing with other little kids who may not be as inherently sensitive or parentally sheltered has meant that the little guy has picked up on pretend violence of the “GRRAAHH, I killed you, you’re dead!” variety and taken to it (as dudes do), still it’s pretty bloodless stuff. Cute little toys suitable for ages 3 and up don’t really lend themselves to out-and-out gore. As opposed to Game of Thrones, where for fifty-some minutes we were treated to much screaming and dying and blood-splattering, as men were burned and maimed and trampled and at least one person was cleaved in twain while another had his head exploded by the impact of a rock thrown from the parapets above.

But it’s the same story either way! Castle attacked, castle defended, and there’s ways to construct and experience that story where it’s brutal and stomach-turning and there’s ways to do it where it’s plasticized and bowdlerized. I got a lot of both last week.

My wife and I have also been talking a lot about Hobbit 2 since we went and saw it right before Christmas, and yet again there’s an example of a kind of disconnect between instances of the same idea. The little guy is so into knights and dragons that it seemed natural to explain to him, when he asked us, that in fact we were talking about a dragon who was in a movie that mommy and daddy went to see recently. We quickly followed that up with a couple of addenda: the reason we didn’t take the little guy with us is because we’re pretty sure that the dragon in the movie would be too scary for him right now, BUT we’re also fairly sure that in a few years he’s going to love the movie. (At the very least, my wife will have primed that well by reading The Hobbit novel to the little guy over the course of a slew of bedtimes, once he’s old enough.)

The little guy took all of this in pretty well. He did not, for example, try to argue that he had a toy dragon and wasn’t scared of that, so why should he be scared of a movie dragon? I’m not sure how I would have answered that, honestly, without further traumatizing the little guy by reminding him of how sometimes he runs out of the room when animated movies get too intense, and the movie we saw looked very real. But instead, the little guy was curious as to whether or not in the movie we saw there were any knights to defeat the dragon. We admitted to him there were not, which confused him, until I explained that it was part of a trilogy (he was bound to get this lesson from me sooner or later) wherein the first movie was about getting to the dragon, the second movie was about seeing the dragon, and the last movie would be about defeating the dragon. A few days later I actually heard him playing with his sister and explaining to her “No, this is the middle of the trilogy!” so apparently the formula made enough sense to him to be adopted into his own flights of fancy.

(Incidentally, vis-a-vis the little girl, we are still dealing with some of the fallout from that movie theater trip to see Hobbit 2. Originally we were going to put the little girl down for a nap, leave when the babysitter came over, and let the little girl wake up to the sitter and her brothers, but when we tried to explain this to our daughter she FREAKED OUT so we amended the plan and let her skip her nap so that she was awake when the sitter came and we left, which went down much easier. But she remains a little scared that at some point we are going to casually abandon her while she’s sleeping, despite our continuous reassurances to the contrary. She also is convinced that, because we left almost as soon as the babysitter arrived, that my wife and I do not like the sitter, and the little girl often tells us, “You should like her, she’s nice!” The two-year-old kid-logic of it still amuses me.)

The upshot, I suppose, is that there’s always a hazy distinction between tales of heroism, be they consumed or play-acted, and tales of harrowing terror, all dependent on where you allow your point of identification to rest. And there are fantasies for little kids and fantasies for grown-ups, but those distinctions can get somewhat hazy as well. I’m sure this will be far from the last time I’ll find myself wondering over these things as the little guy (or any and all of my children, really) continues to absorb more and more.

Deep breath

And we're back! I had thought it was at least possible I might do some irregularly scheduled blogging over the back half of my holiday vacation, but clearly that did not happen. Today, though, I am back at the Big Gray and able to devote a modicum of attention to belatedly kicking off the new year's worth of posts. Of course, this is going up in the afternoon because I spent most of the morning trying to get some server admins to resuscitate my databases, which apparently had been offline since Tuesday.

And some things never change. Of course this was just about irritating enough to walk into after a week off to justifiably prompt a round of screaming, but I held back. I've had quite enough of screaming as it is. It was really, truly, fundamentally lovely to spend an entire eight days with my wife and our three darling little ones with very little agenda in terms of places to go and things to do, but man those kids can get loud:

- The little guy will start screaming if things aren't right, which includes of course personal affronts but also encompasses more general transgressions against proper procedure (usually as committed by his little sister) even if they have nothing to do with him and are seriously none of his business
- The little girl will default to screaming if she doesn't get her way, which on the one hand is simpler and more straightforward than her big brother's triggers, and yet of course is unreasonably selfish in the manner which only two-(almost-three-)year-olds can manage
- And recently the baby has started screaming at random for no reason whatsoever. These aren't particularly agitated or angry screams, more full-throated exercising of his vocal capabilities to hear the sound of his own voice. If there's any deeper reason behind the mindless yelling, it's that he's developing an awareness of his two siblings and their behavior modeling, to the point where if everyone else is raising a ruckus than he's not going to be left behind, by gosh.

So yeah, the relative peace and quiet of the cubicle farm (still not fully populated, as a handful of stragglers have extended their vacations through this week) is welcome, I can't deny it. Christmas and New Year's were both fun, in blessedly low-key fashion, and I'm just easing myself into life-as-passes-for-normal again. I expect I'll have a longer, more discursive post tomorrow as I really get my legs back, and then, what the heck, let's plan on the normal weekly schedule more or less returning to form come next Monday.