It's all Spanish to me...

I slept in until 1 p.m this afternoon.

Most of this can be attributed to the fact that I've been sleeping at 3 a.m for the past few nights, thanks to that stupid essay. I finished writing it and realised that I'd just written a 1, 500 word babbling exegesis that made absolutely no sense and was completely non-cohesive, and furthermore, I'd just written 1, 500 on a fiction piece about a romance between a gay Russian and a gay Englishman that also MADE NO SENSE.

See what stress does to my brain?

Anyway...my studying habits are shocking. So far, in my second day off, it has been:

Sit at laptop. Type. Wander off for a snack. Sit back down. Stare at screen. Wander off to make instant coffee. Sit down. Type. Get up to check e-mail. Go on Facebook. Check other people's blogs. Get on Facebook chat. Get distracted. Get another snack. Look at the paper...ooh, it's already afternoon. Get back and type. Get on Blogger. Get another snack.

And the vicious cycle continues.

I was wandering through the house at 11:30 p.m the other night, wondering at how little television I watch these days. Which is actually a very good thing. I couldn't remember the last time I had sat down to watch something stupid and mindless without feeling guilt, so I flicked open the Green Guide to see if anything was on at 11:30 p.m besides Lateline.

And lo and behold, there was a random Spanish film called Buena Vida Delivery on SBS.

I figured that I might as well grab a beanbag and watch it, since my voluntary exposure to foreign language films has thus far consisted of Godzilla and Gamera marathons on SBS as a kid, and you really don't pick up much of the language at all when all you hear are terrified Japanese people screaming "GOD-ZILLA!" and "GA-ME-RA!" while running for their lives from a giant radioactive fire-breathing turtle.

So I sat down to watch this Spanish 'comedy', hoping that this would broaden my horizons.

It's not uncommon to automatically lump the term 'foreign language film' with 'arthouse'. They're not synonymous at all, but in this case, I had the same reaction to the end of the film as I would to an arthouse one:

"What the f**k was that?"

I just sat there as the credits rolled at 1 a.m in my little bunny pyjamas feeling rather un-cultured and wondering whether or not I had gotten the point of that film.

Most people would have viewed it as a black comedy cleverly satirising the state of the Argentinian economy in that particular period of history, but I saw it as a depressing exploitation of other people with not one blackly humourous moment in it.

I understood, on a purely objective level, what they were trying to say. I appreciated the cinematography, the cleverness of the repeated dialogue...but I just didn't connect with it. It was like when I read Chekhov for the first time, and I just sat there blankly wondering why it was left open and struggling with the lack of a finite conclusion.

(But then again, maybe some things are better left open-ended...like that awful epilogue from the seventh Harry Potter book which read like a snippet from a 15-year old girl's fanfiction.)

I got to read Chekhov again this year. In fact, I cannot actually escape him- I always end up studying The Lady With the Dog in some form. This was the third time I'd done it, and admittedly, it has grown on me the more I've read it. True to life, there are no definitive conclusions (except, as the old saying goes, death and taxes) and having grown up watching happy Disney films where everyone lived happily ever after, it was a bit of wake-up call.

(At this point, I must cite Pocahontas as breaking the trend. They had a slew of Disney movies on TV earlier this year, and I disconcerted my entire family by singing along somewhat loudly to Aladdin, so much so that when I left the room to do some work, my Dad called me on the intercom to tell me that they'd reached the flying carpet Whole New World part so I could flounce around the room doing my best Lea Salonga impression...anyway, the fact that Pocahontas gave up John Smith almost made me weep with frustration. Hot blonde English chappy who can sing like Mel Gibson? What is wrong with you, woman?!)

Back to whatever original point I was waffling on about...

Realism, and surrealism, are basically reflections of reality, although surrealism likes to pick out the more grotesque aspects or twist them in some way. Surrealism unsettles me, but it makes me think. Realist material is difficult, it's slow-going, but at the end it always reveals something to you...like chewing very slowly on a hard caramel.

(I felt this way while reading Love in the Time of Cholera and 100 Years of Solitude...but in the end, seeing the entire book as a whole, you realise what a beautiful, albeit pathetic, love story it is.)

As you can see from this fractured post, my brain is somewhat muddled at the moment. Expect a more cohesive post in the not-too-distant future, and stay away from foreign movies....