1999 january 22

a simple plan

if you haven't seen it, you should run as fast as you can to your local theater and check out a simple plan. it was a fabulous film, although not uplifting in the slightest. the cinematography was wonderful, snow hasn't looked this good since fargo and crows have never looked this good. the acting was incredible, billy bob thornton just continues to amaze me and bill paxton made the choices his everyman character makes seem utterly plausible.

after the film let out and i was done brushing the popcorn crumbs off my chest, we talked about it for hours. whether or not we would have kept the money right from the very beginning and if we had, what we would have then done.

this is a favorite game of mine, similar to the lottery game. if you won $12 million, what would you do with it? a variation of this game when i was working as a teller was, if you could take all the money in the vault and the atm machine where would you go and how would you live? i can play these games for hours, devising clever ways to launder money [and traveller's checks for that matter], setting up artist's communes, becoming the country's foremost philanthropist behind misters gates and allen.

while we couldn't agree on how exactly we would live [mexico or ireland or the south pacific or france] nor how we would spend the money discretely [dropping $100 bills at department stores or opening swiss bank accounts], we did agree on one thing. we'd keep the money.

**

peter parker has a new nickname.

i have officially christened him the weasel. he slinks, he slithers, he weasels. he can insinuate himself into the smallest places, his current favorite being the space between the small of my back and the back of the chair. one of these days soon, i am going to crush the weasel beast.

poor in cash but rich in imagination, claire