Tuesday

Sometime around two this morning I started coughing and sneezing. My nose started running. I'd gotten a scratchy-throat feeling early Sunday, but that had gone away. By the time I went to bed, after four, I was in misery. I tossed and turned and was certainly still awake after seven thirty. Today's plans had included waking early (for me) and heading down 19th Street to get passport pictures taken. I also was hoping to start the ball rolling on the paperwork, too. Time was of the essence, though: the special issuance office closes at four thirty. With a walk, a Metro ride, a photo shoot, and possibly a line, I figured I should get started sometime around noon. Then I slept through early (for me). I also slept through noon; I almost slept through afternoon, too, and felt crappy when I did get up. If there is one thing I wanted to avoid, it was five years of an official passport portraying me as a pallid and unshaven baggy-eyed red-nosed thug. So I cancelled all of those plans, skipping right to the part of my calendar where I was to meet Sunshine for dinner and mojitos at Karma before seeing Kon Satoshi's Paprika (or in Japanese: Papurika, 2006)* at the E Street Cinema.* Paprika is an animated film very much in the spirit of other recent paranoid Phillip K. Dickian near-future armchair-psych fictions--only without robots. In this, brilliant mental health authorities have engineered a device to allow psychologists to record and edit the dreams of patients, allowing greater analytical access. Of course, things go wrong when several units are stolen. The movie is sinister and baroquely beautiful to the point where I became frustrated whenever it wasted precious surreal dream time on the nearly throwaway thriller narrative. [Cavin]