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Wednesday, September 29, 1999

Home Depot, Open Relationships, and American Beauty

Today I took my remaining slate into Home Depot to have it cut. The fellow who ran the saw was quite helpful so I tipped him $5. He didn't want to take it, but I told him I was impressed that he was actually trying to do a good job of it, and that that's an increadibly rare thing today.

When I got home it seemed like a good time to procrastenate installing the tile so I started pounding on the piano, fueled by a funk of recent issues. My best friend, Garrett*, came in and spontaniously titled my improvisation "My Best Friend Fell In Love With The Woman Who Could Have Been My Soul Mate". (No, it wasn't a country song!) That may have been more apropos than I was consciously aware of. It's all very complicated.

My girlfriend returned from Costa Rica today. Right in the middle of my piano pounding. I haven't seen her in a month. She was a wee more standoffish on her return than I would have expected, so I asked her what his name was. It turns out not only did she meet some local boy, but some friends of his sold her an acre of rain forrest too. You don't want to know for how much. You really don't.

They make these checklists to measure your stress level. Things like: "Have you changed jobs in the last month?" "Have you moved in the last month?" Stuff like that. If you check more than two, you're supposed to be at high risk of stress-related problems. I inevitably score like 8 out of ten on those things, but I think this month I'm going to get a perfect score and have some categories of my own to add.

For an intermission in the madness, I saw American Beauty today. Increadible film. I was impressed and entertained and even slightly inspired. But maybe my emotions were just primed, I dunno. But, no, I have to say objectively it was a great film. The story, the directing, the filming, the acting, all very clever. That and the Matrix are my two picks for the year. They are so completely different, and yet in a meta sort of way they actually say the same thing.

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