Saturday

Today there were things to do: a party for the whole group of Sunshine's coworkers who will be going over to Vietnam between now and the fall (including those heading for work in both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi) and their Vietnamese language and regional studies teachers. Also, tonight was the very last showing of Kenji Mizoguchi's the Story of the Last Chrysanthemum* at AFI's Silver Theater* at the very end of the red line in Maryland. Here are some guesses about these things: the party was fun and filled with people I'm dying to meet--such as the people Sunshine will be working closely with for the next several years and the interesting teachers I hear about every day. Probably it was mostly indoors because it's rainy outside today. The Mizoguchi film, his masterpiece by many estimations, would be a wonderful work of exquisite subtlety light-handedly documenting the intricate landscape of Japanese Kabuki culture at the end of the nineteen thirties. The deceptively simple-looking method of long, still takes the director perfected to make this movie would have leant each scene an offhand familiarity, highlighting the actions and humanity of the characters rather than the exoticism of their surroundings. It would probably have been raining as I walked back to the metro afterwards. Then, after about fifty minutes on the red and orange lines, it would have been raining still for the half-mile walk back to the unit. All of these are guesses, of course, because that little head cold I caught on Wednesday night was somehow resurrected by last night's drinking game party, and I didn't really feel good enough to go out and do any of these socializing and quietly sitting still activities. I'll be well again tomorrow, but it's too bad about today. [Cavin]