hannah

In trying to tidy my closet and the dresses I've got in there, I'm now seeing how many "nice" dresses I have that cover a fairly wide variety of situations. It's nice to see that the ones I bought well over a decade ago are still largely holding up well.

In other news, while my sister in law E. and my brother J. are planning on going to Cancún, I somehow doubt they're at all interested in visiting the Chicxulub crater. Some people just don't know how to have a good time.

At present, settling into telling myself the story and figuring out how it's put together, is the important part. What the story's about, its purpose and intentions, can come later. Right now, I'm telling it to myself. Well, myself and the accountability readers. Mostly myself. Nobody else is thinking about it as much as I am.

Keeping to that tunnel vision of one word at a time, no matter how good the word happens to be or how much I like it, is where I'm at. I'm likely going to opt to stay in New York for most of the vacation my parents planned for upstate and that's only in part because I'm not sure how I feel about always automatically being included. It's a lot of complicated feelings, and what's not complicated is it's easier to keep writing when I'm in my apartment. All my stuff is here. My notes, my research materials. Also the practical momentum of sitting down and getting the words out.

You know a drink's good when you take a sip and all you can say is, "Hot damn." It was a 35mm at Metrograph, one of the in-house cocktails. I was in the mood to give something like that a try and I'm happy I did. Also worth a "hot damn" tonight was the bar making two Pink Flamingos by accident and giving us one for free, and getting home by midnight.

I took my younger brother and his wife out to see Magnolia on, yes, 35mm film. They covered the tickets and I covered dinner, food and drinks both. They said it was a lot, and it might have been; I don't have a good frame of reference for a fairly upscale dinner for three with dessert and drinks included, especially when I usually drink at home and the closest I ordinarily come to eating out is buying some ready-made food at a grocery store. Especially when it was my genuine pleasure to do so. A great movie followed by a good meal with lovely company - well worth the end cost.

It turns out something that I thought conflicted with plans this week is happening next week. I'm almost disappointed: it would've been nice to have an outstanding commitment preventing me from having to make a decision. It's eminently possible something might come up and take care of things for me that way. I'm hoping it does. If not, I won't be able to complain - I'll have the day free for it, so I might as well spend it on the event with an invitation.

Today would've been spent being more productive, but then I saw the job listing required a link to a short video explaining why I should get hired. Stopped me cold. I figure with something like that, I might as well just call them in the morning, because I'm probably about as likely to get a job cold-calling a place as I am linking to a video. Not sending it in; uploading it somewhere.

I got a fistbump from Tom Cruise yesterday.

No big deal.

For context, I went to the Mission Impossible red carpet event opening yesterday. The New York Adventure Club had gotten 20 red carpet passes issued to them, and because I get their newsletter, I was able to sign up and get in - a case of the right place, the right time, and knowing exactly where to look. There was waiting in line, there was standing in line, there was making sure I had the right information readily available, there was getting up as close to the front of the line as possible and then getting right up as close to the wall to the red carpet as possible. There was more waiting. There was a trivia question giveaway of sweatshirts and backpacks - to many, many people dressed in cocktail attire, no less - to keep energy going, and then the entertainment professionals getting people cheering.

During the waiting, I kept watching the crowds around me and on the other side of the fence. The way people were arranging cameras, getting microphones set up. I saw cast and crew walking around, glimpsing recognizable faces on the other side of the partition. The waiting around before and after intense, brief moments of activity seemed fitting, for what I know about making movies. Lights, camera, hang on, hold on, give me a moment, camera again, and then it's action. I watched pigeons fly around, and I joked about the largest animal that could be knocked unconscious by the sound system. I looked at the architecture of Lincoln Center and appreciated how Robert Moses might've liked this use of the space for a whole lot of reasons.

I got two passes and brought a friend with me, who kept checking her phone, as did many people around us. I took a few photos of Cruise at a distance, half a selfie with him, and not much else. I didn't want much else. I wanted to be right there in the moment. I wanted to take the three seconds I'd have to say something of momentary value to someone who meets more people in a day than I've probably met in the last two years.

He was announced, he was cheered for, he came out with fireworks and blaring music. He stood and smiled and waved as people looked at him, watched him, tried to capture a piece of him. There was gasping and there was cheering and I wasn't above looking at him standing there, a small army's worth of cameras from TV to handheld to drones all pointed at him. I thought about how the night before, people had waited to catch a glimpse of him walking from a car to his hotel door, and how video footage of that was uploaded to the internet, so yet more people would know where to go that night and where to wait. The architecture of Lincoln Center meant people could come out on balconies to look down at him, and people across the street could walk to the roofs of their buildings and stare down through binoculars like he was some kind of rare bird.

I knew he'd never be my friend.

Not in a negative way. I like to think we'd be friends, if the heavens parted and angels sang and we had genuine reason to speak to one another for more than a handful of seconds. It's a thought I'm happy to entertain. It's something I know won't happen unless the heavens part and angels sing. Meeting him on the red carpet was wonderful, and it wasn't celestial. I met a man. A handsome, charming man who's been meeting people for over forty years now. He's gotten quite good at it. He never learned my name and I already knew his. Everyone knew his name. Everyone there, and everyone who was watching him from far away.

We'd all been given small posters for cast and crew to sign, and I knew he'd stop for as long as it took him to deliver his signature. I'd known it was coming for some days, so I'd had time to prepare a few words to get them out as quickly and cleanly as possible.

I told him, "Minority Report was the first movie of yours I saw in a theater and I've been a fan ever since." He said he'd had a lot of fun making that, I said I'd had a lot of fun seeing it. I said, "I got these passes through the New York Adventure Club, and I'm sure the movie's going to be an adventure."

He gave me an adorable scrunched-up smile. And he offered me a fistbump.

Naturally, I took it.

There were other people who came by. I recognized the bird pin on Simon Pegg's jacket and told him, "A swift bird for a swift man!" and he liked that. I commented on people's clothing, occasionally asked for a handshake, and kept looking around at all the people coming by - the huge camera rigs, the tiny iPhone mounts, the drones buzzing by. The other actors, the sailors coming off an aircraft carrier, generally famous people I didn't recognize. Everything spinning around the gravitational pull of the star.

I got a pass to an early screening, and had a good time - anything more specific can wait a few days. But I'll still say it was a delightful movie to look at, and I couldn't understand why the person next to me kept regularly checking her phone. Later, I could barely understand why people were clustering around the service entrance's door in the hopes of glimpsing Cruise - barely, because I'd have liked a glimpse myself, and as much as I'd wanted one, I knew it was late and he'd probably like to get some sleep even more than I did, and if he was using the service entrance like I'd thought he might, that spoke to a level of necessary caution I shudder to think about. The only way he'd have been safe from people looking at him is if he'd gotten into a vehicle and then left the building, and even that would require several decoy vehicles.

I was there, and I felt the pull, and I still don't quite grasp it. I'm hoping I can hold onto that.

Yesterday I got a fistbump from the biggest movie star on the planet.

No big deal.

In line for milk, the people standing just ahead of me was a father, a child old enough to carry a bag, and an infant. The father kept admonishing the child to not play around with the bag of three glass bottles because they might break - holding and carrying was fine, but shifting them over and around too much was straight out.

I told them that they did need to be careful because yesterday I'd dropped a glass bottle and could show off the bandage. It wasn't a bad cut, just a pair of small, shallow ones on the side of my wrist, but the placement meant a larger bandage that was easy to see by, for example, a father and child standing right in front of me.

And in fact, the child stopped messing around with the bag and making their father uneasy.

It wasn't planned. It wasn't coordinated. There was no way for anyone involved to have known beforehand. I simply happened to be in the right place at the right time.

I have a new best time for donating a pint of blood: 5 minutes 9 seconds. That's it! That's all it took. 28 seconds better than my last record. I'm still proud of that. My hematocrit was 13.9, too, which is satisfying, but not as satisfying as 5 minutes 9 seconds. Let's hear it for taking the stairs.

They also happened to be giving out boxes of Girl Scout cookies, one per donation volunteer. I grabbed Thin Mints.

It took me some effort to gather my energy to cook up lunches for the coming week, and I managed after I put on headphones and started some music. Now there's an asparagus-bean soup in the fridge, and I won't have to worry about that for a few more days. So that's two items crossed off the week's to-do list.

Good news: after a stressful 14 hours, the car was found this morning. It'd been towed down the street from where it'd last been spotted. The working theory is that as construction progressed up the block, cars that got towed were moved according to the most recently cleared space from previous construction work.

Right down the block.

It's a major let-down in the best possible way.

Between one thing and another, from browser hiccups and subway delays, it took me until about ten to get the usual thousand words. Few of them are good; half of them were from another scene in an older draft. And they're still there. I wouldn't know how to make them better if I didn't have them to begin with. I can take some satisfaction in that.

Also satisfying was going into Brooklyn today, even with subway frustrations and having to deal with a computer with limited search engine safety measures in place. The trees were astonishingly green, the lilacs still in fragrant bloom. Even just a few moments was a balm after a few tiring days.

It was Killer of Sheep yesterday, and Sinners today. One hard to find movie in a small four-screen independent theater, one playing just about everywhere - even taking special screening formats into account - in a multiplex on IMAX. One very quiet, one with a lot of sound. One trying to show you something so ordinary it becomes extraordinary, one trying to tell you a roaring story that takes you all the way out of yourself.

Two movies about being Black in America. Two movies that articulate the directors' intended visions as perfectly, forcefully, and gracefully as you could ask for. Two movies about the sublime power of music and its ability to transfix and transform and take you someplace else, wherever you happen to be. Two movies that each have a scene of people dancing that communicates the central thesis of the whole movie for the length of the song. Two movies with killing and death, and blood flowing freely. Two movies where there's barely the idea of a way out of a suffocating life, much less a means to achieve it. Two movies that capture a specific time and place, looking carefully at the community being portrayed, whether it's in the Mississippi Delta or Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood - it's the same struggle all over, no matter the time or place, to find a little bit of freedom and feel a little bit of joy.

It made for a wonderful double bill, just as I'd hoped they would.