you have chosen...death

I'm back into the pit of nonwriting despair, which I shall have to force myself out of this week. I almost wrote today -- after sleeping until eleven, putting on workout clothes and then failing to go to the gym, I finally changed into real clothes at 1:30 and went to a cafe, where I intended to write over a late lunch. However, the cafe closed at two, not at three as I thought it did, and so I didn't linger (or write anything other than the title of the scene at the top of a blank sheet of paper). Then I came home, talked to my parents for quite some time, played on the internet to keep myself awake, and reread some bits and pieces of "The Odyssey". I read it all a decade ago for SLE, and it may have been my favorite book -- this particular translation is wonderfully poetic, and I felt myself being sucked into it tonight even though I only intended to read a few pages. The basic premise of my next book is that it's a Regency twist on Penelope and Odysseus, as I've mentioned before, and so I intend to refamiliarize myself with the story over the next few weeks.

After eating some leftover chili, I sat down with the intention of writing a bunch of blog posts for zee romance blog. I turned on the television, thinking to have some background noise, and got distracted because "The Amazing Race" was in Varanasi, India, which I found v. entertaining. Then, I put in "The Fellowship of the Ring", thinking that I've seen it so many times that I could write with it in the background -- but that was stupid, since I've been meaning to rewatch them all for awhile, and within twenty minutes I just put my computer away and gave up the blog as a lost cause. My brother called at some point and distracted me for a bit, but it's still funny that I watched for almost two hours and only got through the first half of the first movie -- they haven't even started off to Mordor yet.

My fascination with these movies, though, is that the worldbuilding is excellent -- Tolkien put so much thought into the thousands of years of history that came before this particular story, and as a linguist he invented entire languages for the various peoples to speak. Perhaps some of his characters are two-dimensional, and he certainly didn't seem to think that women should be included in epic quests, but the story arc, structure, and narrative is fascinating. And, in the movies, the actors bring it all to life so well that it's interesting to watch how a single glance or sigh can change the viewer's perception of everything. So, I predict I have a Lord of the Rings marathon coming up this week...bear with me.

And now, I'm going to go to bed; I have lunch plans tomorrow, and I must go to the gym beforehand since I didn't make it in today. Goodnight!