Tuesday, January 25, 2011

It's very Kafkaesque.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH, I can't fucking win. It's supposed to snow LATER today, and I have a dentist appointment this AM. It's quite closeby, but still, I wake up, and apparently it snowed JUST ENOUGH last night to totally cover the car, especially the front. GOD. DAMN. IT. Unearthing the car, as you can probably tell, is one of my favorite things. And I don't mean there is a LIGHT DUSTING. I mean, the front of the car has it PILED ON. Sigh.

I also appear to be awake before the Oscar nominations are announced, which is weird, because I always thought they did it at some ungodly hour, but no, 8:30 EST, it seems.

Otherwise, it seems today will be a good day to stay inside and keep studying/researching. I still like my tax professor quite a bit. It's a huge class, but yesterday she was trying to describe "imputed income." She frequently uses stories to illuminate her point, so she was telling us about a douchy professor she met on a train, which lead her to make a side reference to The Squid and the Whale. She couldn't recall the line, so she asked who had seen it. Naturally, 100 or so people just sort of sit there and I awkwardly show my hand...

(So in the movie--which I have not seen since it first came out, so bear with me--these two teenage kids are talking, and the one (son?) has a professor for a father,--and it's hard to describe how well-done and totally depressing this movie is--but let's just say he's raised in a very intellectual/pretentious household, not necessarily in a good way, but there you have it. I believe the son and the girl he's trying to impress are discussing The Metamorphosis, and he says something like, "It's very Kakfaesque," which he says all the time about lots of books, if memory serves. But in this case, obviously, it's quite douchey, and she looks at him...and she's like, "Well, yes, Kafka wrote it...")

So anyway, long story short, my prof couldn't quite remember who the author was the kid kept referencing, she looks at me, and she's like, "Was it Sartre?" And I thought it was Kafka, but hell, it just popped in there and I hadn't seen it in years, so I just said I wasn't sure. But she also kept saying how funny this movie was, completely recommending it to the whole class. Wow.

I did actually run into her at some point after class and had to tell her how disturbing it was that she thought the movie was hysterical rather than totally fucking depressing. (I get why she thinks it's funny, because she can really appreciate the Jeff Daniels character, but I also love the total lack of warning that btw, it's also mega-depressing.)

So that was a really long and somewhat useless story but I was just so proud to brag that I have a tax professor who makes references to The Squid and the Whale in her class, even if it's a movie I don't need to see again. (Though apparently she could watch it repeatedly. Weird. She is also eager to see Greenberg (same director, Noah Baumbach), which I just saw for the first time and I'm pretty sure I could have done without.) Anyway. I hope all the 22-year-old idiots in my class go watch Squid and expect it to be funny.

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