The representative from California has the floor

I’m late with this update, as I spent tonight finally upgrading to the newest version of the Mac OS (10.4 Tiger). Once I installed it, I had to play with all the cool new features, thus resulting in my spending two-to-three hours adding calculator widgets to the dashboard and searching for files with the new Spotlight feature just for the hell of it. It’s been a nerdy couple of days.

For more on my school situation: The problem I’m facing for next year is that I’m actually stupidly close to having enough History classes to earn a History degree. To the point where I only need to take a couple of History courses each semester. The rest of my courses? Can be anything! But I feel like I have exhausted most of my interests. What am I supposed to take? Anthropology? That’s a fake science! Comparative Religion? I can compare them on my own time! Philosophy? Yeah, what I really need is a three-hour night class on existentialism every week; that’ll put me in a REAL good mood.

So I don’t know. I’ll probably just look for second-year classes that only meet once a week and take those. Some people would see this as squandering the university opportunity. Meanwhile, I am convinced that any opportunity the post-secondary education system offers is found outside the classroom. While others are toiling away in MWF classes requiring weekly assignments, I’m out forging lifelong friendships and accumulating life experiences that, taken together, are a fundamental part in the process of building a better me. Or, you know, sleeping. I’m usually doing one of those two things.

I caught a movie called The Girl in the Cafe on TMN this past weekend. Starring the awesomely British Bill Nighy and featuring a script written by Richard Curtis (Four Weddings & A Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually — you know the guy), it was a pretty good, if ultimately unsatisfying little film. Nighy gives a really great performance as a British politician who becomes enamored with a girl (the cute Kelly MacDonald) he meets in a cafe over coffee. The first half of the film hums along, telling an entertaining — if a little too reminiscient of Lost in Translation — plotline that succeeds largely on the merits of Nighy’s acting abilities. Things shift gears radically in the last half of the movie, however, as suddenly we’re at the G8 conference in Iceland and everyone is talking about child poverty and politics and protesting. And it’s not that it isn’t done well — because it is, though I could see people calling the film preachy — but rather that the third-act child poverty plot is hard to connect with the love story, which had been building up nicely.

In the end, maybe there isn’t room for G8-protest child poverty discussion in a British romantic comedy, but, still, god bless Richard Curtis for trying. At the very least, it’s unique!

Good Soundtrack, too.

Matt