Sunday, April 23, 2006

Nausicaa

Last night my friend Jeff called around 9:00 to come over with popcorn, a movie and the new Parcheesi game board he got at a yard sale for only a buck. Since this was a rare treat for me, I decided to say a resounding YES! rather than my usual "Are you kidding me? I go to bed at 9:30 on Saturday nights!" and I'm so glad I did!

Parcheesi is a game I never played before in my life! It looked complicated and adult. It reminds me of ancient Moraccan tea tents and flea-bitten nomads lounging on hassocks and playing board games in the Casbah. I shouldn't avoid a game that reminds me of those things, because backgammon reminds me of those things and it's my favorite game, ever! Except for maybe Aggravation, which was invented by a friend of my family. I remember when he brought over a wooden prototype, carefully drilled and painted, and gave it to us. We played that game for decades, using REAL glass marbles and old, heavy dice. The precise clickety-clack of the marbles counting their way around the board was such a pleasant sound! I wonder if my Mom still has that old board tucked away somewhere?

A few years ago, I ran across a game of Aggravation and was just sickened to find that the marbles were light-weight plastic and the board was merely cardboard. It was such a dissapointment!

But I love board games in general and so Jeff and I set up the board and I read through the instructions on the lid. It was really easy and a lot of fun! But then Mackie decided that it was also fun....more fun than we should be having by ourselves! He pounced on the open box that held the rest of the game pieces and the dice, and proceeded to fish them out of their slot, dancing gleefully on all fours on the box as he did so. Then, just because it felt so good, he decided to add a little claw action to the play, and the next thing we knew, he had SHREDDED that box to Kingdom Come. It happened so fast that Jeff and I barely had time to have a conversation about it. Fortunately, Jeff thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen so he didn't mind a bit about the box being ruined! When Mackie decided to jump up onto the table to mess with our game pieces, though, that was the end of it.

I wish I had taken a picture! Sorry! I've just got to pin him down one of these days soon and trim those claws. They are beyond deadly!


The movie Jeff brought was: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, or something like that. It was the best movie I've seen in ages and I can't wait to get my hands on more anime! Wow! How did this movie genre escape me all this time? Granted, I hate the way the big bug-eyed characters are drawn, but the backgrounds! And the plot lines! And the dialogue! And the complexities of the personalities! I cannot believe that a CARTOON character can have more dimensions, scope, motives, depths and emotions than a real live human actor! What is WRONG with Hollywood these days? Formula film after formula film. And all so one-dimensional. This film was so colorful and had so many unexpected surprises, it was anything but one-dimensional!

Jeff was soon snoring in my only comfortable chair, and I was left with the Danger Sofa, but I didn't mind! I was riveted by the movie and I highly reccomend it to anyone who is bored and wants to be really entertained by a film.

Oh, I forgot to mention that right before Jeff called, I had painstakingly wound my hair into pin-curls to sleep for the night. I thought I had to do something since the guy who did my hair at some local Vietnamese nail chop-shop slightly over-processed my color. I am now slightly pink around the scalp. It's okay, because I have so much gray it will turn ashy in about 5 days anyway, but in the meantime....meet Mopsy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your hair looks awesome! I bet you are having to shoo the fellas away!