This is a quick one:
I was swimming in my gym's small pool earlier this week and as I was doing my laps in front crawl, I kept feeling splashes that were obviously not self-produced. At one point I was at the wall to change direction when I got a mouth full of water. I stopped and looked...
It was an older woman who told me in a heavily accented English:
"It is not just you in this pool! I don't want to get my hair wet!"
When I swim, I may drag some water with me but I'm one of the better swimmers I've seen in the pool. I've seen many people flailing and wallowing and splashing much more than I'm sure I do.
My response: "I'm sorry if I'm splashing you, but this is a swimming pool."
I went into a fever this week, but to explain it, I must give you some background information:
In February 2006, I went to a cinema here in Prague and saw the newly released (in the Czech Republic, that is) film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice.
I loved the story, being a sucker for romance.
Flash forward to this week, when I decided to pick up the book and read it. In an effort to broaden my literary knowledge, in the past few years I've been trying to catch up on many of the classics that I never read (even if I was supposed to) in High School. So I picked up Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice and I started to read. I've been maintaining trade paperback size novels as public transport reading - things to read when I'm in the often lengthy transits in Prague.
I had just finished Pushkin, my first ever Russian writer. I decided that I wanted to give Austen a shot. I was apprehensive; I knew that I had very much loved the film, but the writing was something I thought I would never get into.
I was completely wrong.
With a bullet, Pride & Prejudice is easily my favorite novel thus far read in my life. (Geez, I'm even writing like her.) In a position formerly occupied by Heller's Catch-22, it's hard to imagine it being supplanted by a book of such radically different character.
Pride & Prejudice was, without a doubt, one of the funnier books I've ever read, as I could often tell that Austen had her tongue firmly planted in cheek. Other times, the simple ridiculousness of the characters brought a full laugh. All this, but the thing that drove me through it so quickly was the romance underneath.
It should be no secret that I am a romantic, but this book, I fear, has just proved that I am an unabashed, sentimental romantic. I wish the world could be so perfect.
The thing is, I was saving the book for trams and metros and buses and cafes, but I spent most of one day finishing off the final 200 pages, even though I knew the story and the outcome.
My obsession is about to get more ridiculous though:
Within 30 minutes of having finished reading the novel, I popped in the 1995 BBC/A&E miniseries version, which I'd never seen before. When I was home this winter break, I bought it on DVD because I knew that I loved the 2005 film and that many people regarded the 1995 version as the definitive version. So I figured that I would watch the "definitive" version and brought it back with me to Prague, along with the 2005 version.
So I watched the BBC series with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. It felt a little too staged at times which is the nature of the BBC, I feel; but it did strike many of the right notes. It contained a lot of lines directly from the book and the actors were well-cast.
The thing with literary adaptations is that I have never had a problem distinguishing between a book and a film - I fully understand that what works in one medium does not necessarily work in another. It never bothered me if a film strayed too far from the book, as long as the film was good...
The BBC version of Pride & Prejudice was great, except it felt too much like a BBC version just from the production aspects.
To complete my mania, I decided with only a few hours break, to rewatch the 2005 version as well, which I did last night. It wasn't hard because they cut so many corners and I enjoyed seeing how they did it... But because they cut so many corners and that I now knew the full story, I was bugged by how much they forced and/or cut into a 2 hour adaptation of the story. A film which I once loved is now only decent - considering how much they crammed into 2 hours, I'd say it's a good adaptation, but it misses a lot of the charm of the book.
So, in the end, what's the point of all this? Nothing, really. Except maybe that, in an ideal world of recent Austen adaptations, they would give the production values of the 2005 film to the 1995 cast. But even then, the book would still be better.
This is the only instance where I've been disappointed with film adaptations which are so severely different from the book.
This inaugural installment in pet peeves is about Jean and Boots:
Worn separately, they do not look bad. Heck, boots or jeans can be super SuperSexy. Worn together jeans and boots don't necessarily look bad as I have seen one or two combinations that have worked (and I stress that very low number), BUT...
Ladies. LADIES! If you're wearing tight jeans with tight boots over the jeans, it simply doesn't look good, ESPECIALLY if the boots are so tight that the jeans muffin-top over the top of the boots. Loose or untied boots make the victim look like a careless dresser.
Now read carefully, it is acceptable to:
1) Wear jeans and boots if and only if the boots are under the jeans, which defeats the purpose of wearing boots which are obviously meant to be seen, so why bother.
2) Wear jeans with cute shoes or tennis shoes, high heels included.
3) Wear sexy boots with skirts or dresses, especially mid-length skirts. In fact, in the right combination this is almost unbeatably sexy.
Be careful: mukluks in general are not attractive except in extenuating circumstances, like if you're an eskimo and hence wearing an enormous coat made of seal or polar bear skin.
It's not acceptable to:
Wear jeans with boots over the top as it simply doesn't look good. In fact, I often find the combination to be atrociously ugly. I know many other guys and even some gals who agree. Stop the madness! Or rather, stop the ugliness!
Now, having my second consecutive case of horrendous jetlag, I've decided that since I always recover much faster from jetlag flying West, I will only ever fly West. That means, next time I fly from the States to Europe, I'll go through Hawaii, Japan, Australia, China, Mongolia, Siberia, China, India, New Zealand, Egypt, Phillipines and Myanmar before getting to Europe. Not necessarily in that order, though.