i'm been avoiding buzz about the slumdog millionaire for weeks now. i've also had multiple chances to see the movie snatched from my grasp just moments before the lights in the theater dimmed. very frustrating. so when walt and i had a friday night dinner engagement cancelled the day before, i pounced. we had the sitter. we had the evening. marty was too exhausted to voice an opposing opinion. it was on.

when we sank in the seats i couldn't believe how much effort went into seeing a simple film that runs hundreds of times a day in our city. as for the film, this film, we made it twenty minutes before walking out. a friend of marty's said we just needed to make it another five minutes and we would have been alright. this friend does not have a son that looks like one of the main child actors, so our stomachs didn't have five minutes in them. we instead went and had persian kabobs and talked and laughed and made it home at a respectable hour in that we were missing our kids after our bad movie outing and thought we might sneak in cheek kisses before they drifted off.

i spoke to bookguy a few days earlier regarding our annual ski adventure. he said he was reading three musketeers. i said i was reading three musketeers. he asked if i had seen slumdog. i said i had not yet but was hoping too. i asked why those were connected and he said they just were and he was fearful of saying more giving my neurosis about learning stuff about movies before seeing those movies. he did add though that seeing the movie would not wreck my ability to read three musketeers. we had both just started reading so we compared how far we had gotten. he said he had just read the translator's forward and was ready to dig in. i said i skipped over all forward and preface material and turned to the first page of the first chapter and started at the first word (because i like my books like i like my movies, unspoiled by insight and opinion). bookguy went on to say that the forward was interesting because the translator of his text explained how it was important to continue re-rendering and re-translating books even if this had previously been done in order to keep them semantically relevant and readable to contemporary audiences. i thought this was a sound insight but not worth risking a spoiler just pages before the real story begins.

then sometime after talking to bookguy (but before seeing slumdog) i was chatting with a colleague. they asked me if i do a certain thing. i said no i don't, i in fact avoid it like the plague. then i took pause long enough to know that i don't really spend much time avoiding plague so corrected my comment by saying i avoid it like i avoid syphillis, because i think syphilis is actually something i've actually tried to avoid in my lifetime. i think the person i was talking to wanted to say "too much information" but knew me well enough not to bother.