At least, I’ll watch part of it.  The great thing about watching movies that I’ve already seen a dozen times before is that I feel no remorse about switching the channel at the nearest available commercial break.  Last weekend, I flipped to TNT just in time to see badass Sean Connery bust through that metal door and say “Gentlemen, welcome to The Rock™.”  And when the film gave way to the inevitable marathon of SlapChop and Snuggie commercials, I changed the channel before you could say “Time-Life Soft Rock Collection.”  That five minute clip was enough to make me feel like I’d watched the whole movie.  Who needs to stick around for the rest? 

I’ve started watching other movies this way as well.  The other night I spent 45 minutes watching some Bruce Willis thriller called Striking Distance, or whatever.  But it was getting late, and I was pretty sure that I knew where things were headed , so I turned it off and went to bed.  And who cares if I’m wrong?  The movie wasn’t that good anyway, so my made-up ending was probably as good as whatever actually happened.  The point is that I feel like I’ve watched all these movies, but in a fraction of the time.

This efficient method of movie viewership reached an extreme level on Thursday, when I tuned in just in time for the last 30 seconds of Trainspotting.  There’s something about that ending that I really love.  I sat there watching the credits, listening to that goofy circus song by Blur, and remembered all the great scenes I’d just missed.  I’d seen literally 30 seconds of the movie, but felt like I had watched it from start to finish.  

This got me thinking about other movies with great endings.  I haven’t put enough thought into this list to call it my “all-time favorites,” but these are the ones that first came to mind.  (Spoiler alert: I spoil the endings of all the following movies.)

1. City Lights (1931)  Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp spends the whole movie pretending to be a wealthy man in order to woo the poor blind shop girl whom he loves.  Having managed to pay for surgery to restore her sight, he returns to his life of penury, until a chance meeting brings them together again.  She touches his face and realizes that he’s the “wealthy” man who had helped her.  In one silent gesture, Chaplin expresses shame, embarrassment, and hope.  The film fades to black, and what happens next is anybody’s guess.  This movie is a reminder of how much emotion and meaning can be conveyed without a single sound.

2. The Italian Job (1969)  The raucous song.  Michael Caine.  The improbable physics of a bus balanced so precariously on the side of a cliff.  Zoom out, fade to black.  Brilliant!  For some reason I only recently got around to seeing this movie in its entirety, and what the hell took me so long?  

3. Barton Fink (1991)  I’ve probably seen this movie a dozen times, and every time it leaves me delightfully perplexed.  I’m convinced I know what’s in the box (hint: human head), but that doesn’t really explain much.  WTF?  Exactly.

4. Citizen Kane (1941)  An episode of The Real Ghostbusters ruined this ending for me roughly eight years before I even saw the movie, but that made the ending no less moving.  Bernard Herrmann’s dark score and the image of that sled going up in flames make for one poignant-ass denouement.  

5. Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)  I just re-watched this movie, since I’d only seen it a few times before.  The whole film is cute enough, but the ending turns the film’s Hollywood sweetness on its head.  Turns out, things don’t always work out in the movies after all.

It seems the network I’m analyzing is a mod mod mod world.  (And it doesn’t even have anything to do with scooters!)

I’m going to make this quick.  If you don’t know already, I quit my job in New York and moved to Chicago to start grad school.  Sociology.  PhD.  OMFG.  

I’m doing my best to get readjusted to the academic life, and finding it a bit difficult to effectively manage my time. That is to say that I’m procrastinating quite a lot.  But once I get back into the swing of things, I hope to have a little time (and motivation) to update this site again.  Moving forward, my posts might be a bit shorter than they’ve been in the past, but it has always been nice to have a forum to share whatever has been on my mind with the world.  Also—and this is especially true when I was in college and writing papers on cultural capital and dialectics and whatever—it gave me a reason to remember how humans actually write to one another.  A few people actually read my silly little notes, too. 

Looking to the future, I’m still contemplating what I want this site to be. I’m well aware of the potential professional hazards of revealing too much about one’s self online, especially in the academic sphere, and I don’t need some stupid rant about how much I hate dislike love Matchbox 20 to someday come back and bite me in the ass.  You never know what kind of unearthly academic powers Rob Thomas will wield 10 years from now, after all.

Anyway, hi again.  See you soon.

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From the TV show Cheaters:

- If you really want answers for why your partner is cheating on you, leave the camera crew at home.
- No one really minds being “the other man/woman.” They will say things like “she should have seen the writing on the wall,” and “he hasn’t loved her for months now.”
- When confronting your cheating boy or girlfriend, it is unlikely that the television host’s comments will contribute anything useful to the conversation. Leave him at home with the camera crew.
- Cops comes on right after Cheaters, so if you’re not careful, you could end up watching the first few minutes of Cops by accident. Beware.

Other Miscellanea: 

- Battlestar Galactica is awesome.

So what have I been up to, anyway? A lot of things, I guess. Allow me to enumerate.

1. Work. It’s a fact. I’ve been working. Same job at the hedge fund. It’s good, but my departure from said job is imminent. See #2.

2. Getting into grad school. Also a fact. After several weeks of compulsive email checking and checking those cursed forums on The Grad Cafe, the letter finally came. This fall, I will be enrolling in the Ph.D. program in sociology at the University of Chicago. I’m pretty excited about this.

3. Watching bad, bad movies. Jon-the-Roommate convinced us to go see National Treasure: Book of Assclownery one fateful Friday night, and I still haven’t forgiven him. In retribution, I (somehow) convinced him to pay real, legal tender to see 27 Dresses the next week. As we sat watching ”The Twenty” before the movie, group after group of single women filed into the theatre, and Jon knew what he was in for. I laughed and laughed. Even though I had to sit through this god-awful chick flick too, knowing I had suckered Jon into coming along somehow made it worth my troubles. But man, was that movie terrible.

And then there are the movies I’ve watched at home. A sampling:

Employee of the Month . This is that movie where Jessica Simpson or whatever her name is inexplicably does it with whoever is crowned “Employee of the Month” at the local Wal-Mart. Lucky for us viewers, that employee happens to be the hunky Dane Cook, not one of those old-ass greeter dudes at the front door. As you might imagine, the whole situation gets pretty crazy, and at some point it almost looks like he might possibly not get the girl. Then he gets her anyway.

Although this movie sucked, I found myself “lol-ing” now and again, in spite of Jon’s scornful glances.

Wild Hogs. Okay, we only watched the second half, but man… seriously? Did we really watch this? I guess John Travolta wanted to… diversify his roles, but his overacting as the high-strung jobless dude is just embarrassing. Tim Allen is much better, and that’s sayin’ something. Because he was bad, too.

Meatballs. This movie is actually pretty awesome. This may be Bill Murray’s first “Bill Murray Inspirational Speech,” too (“It just doesn’t matter!”). And the rag-tag summer camp versus rich kid camp competition at the end is a classic matchup. All this movie lacks is Corey Feldman. For that, you need to watch Meatballs 4.

Beerfest. Another pretty awesome movie. Inspiring, even. Just thinking about this movie makes me too stupid to write anything witty or even sensible, but that’s the joy in it. Want stupid fun? See Beerfest.

In the Good Movie Department, we also saw The Bank Job this weekend. They say it’s “based on a true story,” but as far as I’m concerned, that probably means that there was really a bank, and someone once had a job. I don’t much care about the authenticity of the plot, though. It was just a good crime story. And I like me a good crime story.

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I have also been corresponding with a friend who is looking for a job, which has resulted in many links offering resume and cover letter help.

All of this points to one sad fact: Google thinks I am an unemployed cat lady.

Yesterday I spent several hours pulling hundreds of addresses out of a database, cleaning up the data for a batch geocoder, plotting these points on a map, then checking the mean distances of these points with another set of points I had already derived.

Thanks to all of this work, I can now tell you what proportion of our employees live within 1 mile of an Equinox Fitness Club.

See? Complex problem solving, multiple layers of analysis, less-than-riveting questions.

The thing is, I don’t particularly mind this. First, there is a difference between dull and unimportant.  The work I do has very real implications, and I know this.  But more importantly, the bulk of my time is not spent pondering the dullness of the question; it is spent finding answers. And as dull as many of these questions might seem compared to the Grand Questions of the World, they are never easy. The company dress code might be lax, the rhetoric might be hip and fun, but the methodology is muthafuckin’ rigorous. There will be no slacking. Guessing is okay, but only if it’s the “best unbiased estimate” you can muster. When it comes to data analysis, they mean business.

I shouldn’t be surprised that a company that made its fortunes building hypercomplex algorithms to beat the stock markets would be so quantitatively driven in other ways. What’s surprising is the degree to which this ethos permeates everything that happens there. Even the company’s interior aesthetic, as designed by architect Steven Holl, emphasizes the presence of order in what looks to be random. Over a staircase on my floor hangs a 9-foot-tall tapestry depicting pi to the nth decimal place. You cannot walk to the coffee maker and back without seeing something to remind you that there truly is order in the universe.

Astronomers look for this order in the stars. Geneticists find it in chromosomes. I search for it in the average employee’s mean proximity to high end health clubs. So what?