random thoughts while flying to the far side of the planet

1. Some very fine colors at both sunset and sunrise.

Sunset had a kind of rich, persimmon liqueur color going on--I don't know if there even is such a thing as persimmon liqueur or if it would anything other than nasty (can anybody say "Jaegermeister"?)--but if there were, it would surely look like the sunset I saw. Liquid, deep orange with just a hint of rosy peachskin.

To stick with the cocktail theme, sunrise offered much more of a grenadine--a long, thin layer of intense clear red bordered top and bottom with cake-frosting cloud strips, quickly dropping off to darkness.

Nicely done, God!

2. Delta weren't no Singapore Air, but it wasn't awful. I was relieved not to learn too much about the flight attendents' personal lives or level of job dissatisfaction.

One steward, who might have even been heterosexual, did "confide" to his colleague: "I'm not feelin' it today." Well, I wasn't feeling it either. But there you have it.

But, boy, once you experience individual seat monitors, anything else seems so shabby.

Also, at the risk of sounding elitist: I admit a moment's disappointment upon seeing that the wine came from a paper carton...

3. I was able to confirm that I'm not a big Julia Roberts fan. The last film on the flight was, if I'm not mistaken, "Eat, Pray, Love." I seem to recall a DVD cover with that title starring Ms. Roberts, and had heard of the book it's based on.

I saw this quote from a review of another movie: "If a volcano erupts in the city you're in and the only safe place to be is a theatre showing Apollo 16, go jump in the lava."

Well, sitting in a middle seat on a Boeing 747 with big-screen monitors, I was basically at the mercy of this movie during the last stretch of the flight. I didn't put in the headphone tabs, which probably helped...

It was a very religious movie--if your religion happens to be Spiritual-ish Hedonism.

Having not read the book or listened to the dialogue, I gather it was about Julia Roberts Career Woman going off in search of Herself and, indeed, finding Herself in several modes: Julia Robert Repeatedly Enjoying Italian Cuisine. Julia Roberts Getting All Conflicted in a series of more or less casual romantic involvements. Julia Roberts Experiencing a Stream of Moments of Enlightenment involving indigenous people in various foreign countries. All interspersed with a smattering of Julia Roberts Doing Meditation.

But, you know? I'm always just happy when Robert Downy Jr. can find work.

4. There are two elements in novels or movies that I find so deeply uncomfortable emotionally that I will often stop reading or watching works that contain them: marital infidelity, and a fall back into addiction.

One of the other movies on the flight, The Dilemma, incorporated both of those themes! To be fair, some close calls notwithstanding, the main character was able to stay clear of his gambling addiction.

But the whole cheating on your spouse thing? It drives me nuts. It's equally excruciating to watch whether the guilty party is the husband or the wife. But I guess I tend to expect female characters to act with a little more selfless maturity, so am more disappointed when they choose What's Good for Me Now over faithfulness.

I enjoyed the male friends' relationship at the heart of this film. Who knew it was possible for two men to be vulnerable and committed to one another without having sex? It's so Nineties! 1890s, that is.

The "dilemma" of title was the main character wrestling with whether to to tell his best friend about his wife's affair. It raised interesting questions about painful honesty and loyalty and the demands of love between friends.

I was saddened but not surprised with the film's conclusion. After all beans get spilled at the climax, we find out that the cuckolded friend's marriage has ended, offscreen. No anguishing, not the slightest sense that reconciliation was even a possibility.

But Hollywood has pretty much just assumed the easy disposability of marriages that "don't work" at least since Kramer vs. Kramer.

On the other hand, the cheating wife's attempt to go with the "you're partly to blame for the fact that I couldn't keep my pants on with another man" was rejected for the lame infantile ploy that it is. Even she didn't buy it, finally.

All in all a good film.

5. America is definitively a nation of a Generously Sized People. The two male leads in The Dilemma were both...big and fat. There, I said it. There was some TV show, too (Molly & Mike? Mike & Molly?) where the two main characters were QUITE girthful. And their obesity didn't seem to be a recurring source of humor (I think--I had the sound off).

And then, sitting in the hotel sports bar last night, I realized how shrewd it is for popular entertainment to reflect the thunderous reality on the ground.

I guess I just wonder why it took so long.