We talked about Amelie in French class tonight. (Do you know that its proper title is Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain? Bet you didn't.) Amelie is one of my favourite films, anywhere, anytime. If you don't like non-American films, or have never bothered to see one (o thou Hollywoodized nutters!) I very much recommend giving Amelie a try. Its charmingly modern fairy tale of a narrative is quite universal, as is its emphasis on the visually and eccentrically spectacular. In fact, the ever-deep and vibrant colours used throughout Amelie could drive any artistic type to tears.

But I didn't get on this tack to ramble on in blatant film majorspeak. Nay, I got on this tack because I was thinking about how people in this modern age of ours tend to identify their favorite films with their own selves. And however cliché and ridiculously silly that practice may be, as for Amelie, well, I identify with it. In other less-cliché words, though, true beauty has always moved me, and I am ever-moved by the beauty in Amelie. I too grew up with a wildly outsized imagination. I too hung bing cherries on my earlobes. I too was never very good with people. Of course, my parents were beautiful rather than emotionally strangled, but as an only child I feel that I still know exactly where Amelie stands -- somewhere between imploded and exploded, between the world of adulthood and the world of childhood, always tiptoeing along that oh-so-fine line between eccentricity and estrangement. And I can identify with the film's sense of loneliness, too, and with the empty metro stations, and the traveling garden gnome and the cat at the doorway and the mad lovely people cycling around Amelie's world, and yes, even the beautiful dreaming boy floating around Amelie's city like some tempting lotus flower in a unreachable bowl of milk. So what does this all mean? Do I give myself up to film affinity completely? Do I don some Zorro mask and seek out deserving strangers in need of little white lies or anonymous heroism?

Well, I wrote a little note on a slip of paper today. It reads, "You matter." Tomorrow I shall fold it up and put it the coin-return slot of a telephone. And I think that shall have to do for now.

When they invent unbreakable machines, let me tell you, I'll be there. I'll be waving signs around and shouting for joy. I'll probably wave one of those useless giant foam fingers around too, one that reads, "UNBREAKABLENESS IS NUMBER ONE!" When machines become unbreakable, you see, my computer will no longer be able to short out unexpectedly, thereby rendering itself completely unusable and ... yes, I'll say it: completely broken. I will no longer have to bite my nails in the computer repair shop, waiting for various affable technicians to pry at least five gigabytes worth of four years of work from the decaying body of my late computer's self-inflicted wreckage. I will no longer have to use public campus computer labs as the sad outlet for my sad scribbling of randomly-lost machinist woe, while waiting never-patiently until a new computer can be both mentally afforded and physically procured. You see? The invention of unbreakable machines will solve most, if not all, of my problems.

Then again, they say the Titanic was supposed to be an unbreakable machine. You can still see the filmic debris issuing from that fiasco.

O Oberon, Shakespearean-nomered laptop of auld lang syne!
I do rue thy name, and curse thine star-crossed parting of ways!
How soon wert thou snatched from mine computering hands!
How soon, how stressing, and how bloody sodding inconvenient!

How simperingly pathetic.

Where did I go for the entire month of January, you ask? Absolutely nowhere, my ardent little asker. That's what's so pathetic: all this empty space with nothing to show for it. It makes a girl feel marvelously uncomfortable, as though I'd been to sea and forgotten my anchor, or some other such wimpy metaphor. The shorthand of it is, I am very tired of life intruding on ... well, on my life. But now that I've stumbled back on land, I find this apologetic scribbling to be the simperingly pathetic thing of all.

At least 59 is here. Better times ahead, please.