I like how when you look at my lunch from today, it looks like the kind of food you’d see in a prison film or otherwise a movie meant to suggest the person is being punished for eating. It was good, mind. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich with orange slices and a spotty banana. I liked it, it just doesn’t quite sell itself.
Last night, we had our first exam for our Nederlands Cursus. The oral portion. We had done the writing [fine], reading [mostly fine], and listening [somewhat fine] portions prior to the class. The reading had one portion that felt like it was suddenly quite advanced but I made it work. The listening had a limit to the number of times you could play the file (3) and I found this out after playing one of the clips twice to just the cadence of the speaker down. Added some spice.
The oral portion was probably the most stressed I have been while taking a test in a good minute, though.
It ended up going fairly well but when answering the question “Waar woon jij?” I had a strange blank and started to talk about living in Huntsville, Alabama. I mean, it was in language. That might count as my first senior moment.
Second glitch was when trying to figure out how to ask Kaz if they liked swimming (“Zwem jij graag?”) and my brain kept trying to force the “graag” to the front (“Graag zwem jij?”). I just couldn’t unlock it for a half second. The teacher fussed as I tried glancing through my notes but my brain unlocked after a second.
It is a weird sensation to be on the other side of the teaching process, but always good for long-time academics like me to have that pain, I suppose.
After our class, I got a package that had the two Arrow box-sets for Gamera (Showa and Heisei). I’m in the camp that feels like Heisei Gamera is just about absolute peak tokusatsu. We watched Gamera 2: Attack of Legion and I had a grand old time. One of my favorite movies of all time, and high up on the kaiju flick rating for me. I appreciate that Gamera 3 is overall a more interesting movie but what makes it interesting somewhat requires the other two moves of the box-set.
I do have the even bigger all-Gamera, all-the-time boxset from Arrow but it’s one of those encyclopedia sized numbers that makes it kind of hard to get the movies out without lots of faith. Having the individually boxed blu-rays is nice in that regard.
As a final note, had a strange dream last night. The bits I remember, I mean. The dream was third person (not involving me) and was something like a very-extended movie trailer. A group of friends doing stupid stuff.
At the very end, four of the friends are in a truck — it was a kind of smaller truck, but somehow one of the friends was sitting on the dashboard looking backwards, dream-logic — and one of the friends start talking about wanting to die and how he hopes it hurt. He then pulls out some sort of explosive device and starts playing with it and it starts counting down.
The guy on the dashboard reaches over and grabs his hand and the two (out of four) are waiting for death together. It had the vibe of a nightmare though the scene was ridiculously “shot” like some 90s movie.
Right as I was waking up, the dream had the device fly out of the truck and go across a field and blow up harmlessly…maybe. It was an odd experience like I was recalling something I had seen but it did not quite happen. Like my brain had scripted out more of a dream and then wanted to try and get to a good stopping spot.