Haven't done much of anything else today -- feeling fairly sluggish. Jed and I stayed up late last night watching a silly movie, America's Sweethearts. Mostly rented because we like watching Catherine Zeta-Jones. A fair number of funny lines, some very slow bits, and a great bathtub scene -- Julia Roberts (Kiki), dressed, perched on the back of the tub, giving a shoulder massage to Catherine Zeta-Jones (Gwen), who is covered in bubbles. At one point:
Gwen: Kiki! Is that your foot?
And Roberts gets this great, slightly evil, look on her face. They're clearly having a little girl-on-girl humor here, though they then camouflage it a line later with Gwen telling Kiki she needs a pedicure. Still made me giggle, though. And the thought of those two together is not bad, not bad at all...
Mya will be here shortly and we'll traipse off for shopping and cooking. Much fun. In the meantime, I'll keep reading. In the midst of two short story collections, The Heat Death of the Universe, by Pamela Zoline, and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, by Nathan Englander. Both very good, in very different ways. I don't usually read so many short stories -- Jed is good for me, because that's mostly what he reads, and he knows them a lot better than I do, and since I'm writing short stories these days, I really ought to be reading them. I *have* read one of the Englander stories before; "The Gilgul of Park Avenue" was in the O'Henry collection I had my students read last semester. Great story. I'm having a very satisfying time with both collections. (Also slowly reading through the Tiptree collection, which is interesting, but less sharp on a sentence-by-sentence level and more than a little depressing to read overall, given her themes and attitudes...)