Second Thoughts

On the train home from New Haven and it looks exactly like the scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--also gray day, cloudy, spare number of people on the maroon and navy seats. Elin and I spent a weekend doing a fine job of posing as Yale students, and stayed with her high school friend Abby who is starting in the Anthropology department, and her boyfriend John, who is a genius at pointing out puns.

This is my third visit to a prestigious university when it's been raining and cloudy the whole time--Oxford, Princeton, and Yale--and it's adding to a romantic image I have of places like them, where people live a melancholy life of the mind, subdued on the outside, a mirror of some intellectual detachment that is soundtracked by the patter of rain. It's really rather nostalgic, the idea that intellectuals and writers reside in rainy cities laced with a feeling of sadness, which, for me, is a close cousin of the profound. No great novel was written in a sunny veranda in Mexico. Not a true statement, but it's still a stereotype I hold on to.

We ate well: had fantastic Eggs Benedict with avocado and roasted tomato in a small corner place, which Howard Dean walked into halfway through our meal; garlicy tomato-bread salad with basil in a park watching an outdoor jazz concert; coconut ice cream bar at the top of the New Haven bluffs; homemade strawberry pie at the potluck.

We also saw a lifeless movie called "You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her", a faux-artsy thing from the late 90s which chronicled the lives of seven women and how they were utterly depressing (though sewn together, however patchily, with the thread of some silver-lining fate). It never took off the ground and was sort of frustrating. I think what I didn't like was the way the movie pretended to be very important and was weighted down by a lot of self-seriousness, when really its story was conventional, the writing was self-consciously "artsy", and the way characters functioned and interacted felt canned and un-human: homeless woman who is actually a prophetess and serves nicely to insert all important themes; lesbian psychic who takes care of revealing the character's personality via a tarot card reading (while the character says absolutely nothing); precocious children to explain to the adults how-things-really-are.

On the whole, spent great time with Abby and John who are the best of the best when it comes to people.