Happy Monday, everyone. On the drive down to Hyde Park I noted that today seemed high on the Monday quotient, from the cloudy pall over the sun to the needling wind (ever notice just how inaccurate those always seem to be?). Maybe because it's Monday the 13th. Today is the first day of my Spring classes at Loyola University Chicago, a contradiction, to be sure. At most schools, Fall semesters and Summer semesters begin in their said seasons, with falling leaves and swelter respectively, but Spring semester begins in the dead of winter. So, why is Spring semester named for the season in which it ends, rather than begins? By that logic, we should be calling the tern that begins in September and ends in December the "Winter semester" - it strikes me as subtle double-speak, but perhaps it's just optimistic language.

Oh, bosh. Just get me a cup of coffee to shut me up.

Saw a few movies this weekend in the theater; Catch Me If You Can and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Also rented Frailty and Neon Genesis Evangelion:Death/Rebirth and the End of Evangelion (which, if you're unfamiliar with the titles, is a Japanese anime series), all of which I'll try to review for you shortly on Reeling It All In, the movieblog.

Both Catch Me If You Can and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets were good clean fun. Frailty (directed by and starring Bill Paxton, with Matthew McConaughey and Powers Boothe) was a surprise movie pleasure: a delusional rural single father begins an axe-murder spree, killing people he believes to be "demons" named on lists he receives through "divine visions", involving his two young sons in the process. The film develops a disturbing sense of emotional tension, being rather oddly warm and folksy for an axe-murderer flick; far less gory and much more disturbing than I'd expected, with a surprising Sixth Sense-flavor twist at the end, Frailty comes highly recommended. The Neon Genesis Evangelion DVD's would have been mesmerizingly enjoyable, with artful juxtaposition of animation styles (and some film footage as well) - but unfortunately, they attempted to compact 26 episodes of the hit series into about 2 hours of time, resulting in a confusing, jumbled plot mess often filled with incomprehensible jump-cuts and flash frames. The concept is ambitious and original, but I'll need to see the full series to make any sense of it!

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