秋分

看了那么多年师太，当然还是受了她的审美影响。
这次要买表，先看了浪琴，然后换欧米茄，想买块星座薄表，结果附近表店的欧米茄很有限，几个要看的款都没有，需要订货；今天再去看，换到劳力士柜台一看，电光石火间想起师太笔下女性的经典装束：白衬衣卡其裤，带个劳力士大号男士精钢蚝表。
我看了看，大号精钢男表实在太大，比我手腕还要宽，只好降一下，买了个中号31毫米的。没有钻，没有粉红面，没有玫瑰金或者黄金，就是精钢表带加白金外表盘，銠金的罗马刻度（噢我太喜欢这个罗马刻度，顶讨厌阿拉伯数字的大刻度了）和指针，很低调的表，除了表面稍显小点儿（我心里觉得33毫米左右更好些）指针没有夜光，几乎是我心中的完美表型。
那位尽心尽责给我看了无数欧米茄表的柜台员给我填表的时候，我才惊觉今天是8月8号。
北京奥运，过去两年了。

昨天在去接安宝儿的路上听NPR，车堵在17街上的时候，正好是一个低沉男声出来，在评灾难片与生活里的真灾难。
时间也掐得刚刚好，我快抵达FDIC楼门口的时候，他说完了。
当时忙乱，不过对他最后那句，“The movie doesn’t have to show you how long the tunnel is. You see the light, the credits roll, and you know that either the hero or whoever the hero was trying to save will be OK.
And the next 30, 50 or 100 years? That’s left for the sequel that never gets made.”印象十分深刻，甚至回家以后，依然有这个人的声音在脑子里转。
早上来上班又想起这个来，网上一搜（感谢伟大的互联网，咨询交换分秒必达），就搜出来了。
原来是那位著名的Bob Mondello出品。
先把全文收录，供稍后翻译。
另外，说到灾难片，以前有一次想起，忽然发现大多灾难片有以下共同点：
1，男猪脚大都婚姻失败（2012, The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds)，有孩子，影片开头必然要让他跟前妻见面，然后对比前妻现在的衣食无忧好生活。
2，但凡逃难，必要跟孩子一起，发挥之前未能发挥的父爱。
3，最后前妻总要发现前头人总是最好。
这么看来，好莱坞蛮传统的嘛，就是借灾难片的壳，行破镜重圆的实。然而灾难毕竟万年一遇，当然共同经过山崩地裂以后有革命情谊，可是生活里还是鸡毛蒜皮的琐碎，共得大苦，未必能同小甘。
闲话不说，还是上美文

Disasters In Reel Life: It’s About Time (And Suspense)
by Bob Mondello

We’ve been through a lot in the past year or so. We’ve been shaken by earthquakes, pummeled by boulders the size of houses, chased by lava, smothered by ash clouds, battered by tidal waves — and that was all in the movie 2012. Let’s not even talk about The Road or The Book of Eli.

Now, all those cataclysms were perfectly persuasive; in fact, Hollywood’s gotten so good at making them persuasive that disaster movies are almost always cited these days for their “realism.”

So how come when a real disaster strikes, it feels so different?

The most obvious disconnect is how long it takes. If the Gulf oil spill were happening in a film, you’d see oil-covered polar bears within hours of the Deepwater Horizon’s demise. Never mind that in real life, disasters mostly roll out slowly and with scattered effects: In films, they obey the classic Aristotelian unities — one big catastrophe, taking place really quickly. No thousands of years for global warming to create an ice age; in The Day After Tomorrow, it takes 48 hours.

There are lots of other differences, of course. Disaster movies have characters; real disasters have casualties. Disaster movies are exciting; real disasters are agonizing.

And things happen in a different order — something else you can blame on Aristotle. His rules for effective drama call for rising action leading to a climax, and across two millennia we’ve gotten so used to that formula that now we see it in real life. Election cycles, sports tournaments, childbirth, Thanksgiving dinners — they all feature slow buildups to a climactic event.

Disasters are disasters, in fact, because they don’t follow that dramatic arc. Disasters happen, and then we have to deal with them — sometimes for decades.

Disaster fiction won’t work that way: If you start with your catastrophe, you’ve got nowhere to go except cleanup, and where’s the fun in that? So directors start by introducing victims we’d normally meet only after they’ve been dodging tidal waves or meteors or whatever. Screenwriters put warning signs everywhere — temperature dials, radiation meters, whatever’s appropriate to the coming apocalypse, anything that can be ignored or misjudged or gazed at uncomprehendingly by the folks on screen.

This has to do with what Alfred Hitchcock said about how suspense is the audience knowing something the characters don’t. In real life, nobody knows anything, so suspense isn’t really the issue.

Prior to 9/11, if you’d asked most people what would happen if a jumbo jet crashed into a skyscraper, they’d have guessed the building would either stay standing or get knocked over sideways. The reality, now seared into a generation’s consciousness, seems obvious after the fact. Even as it happened, you understood why it was happening — how each floor’s collapse was putting more weight on the floor below — but the building’s vertical fall wasn’t what you expected. Nor was that enormous cloud of ash — a visual that now shows up in all sorts of movies, but one that no one had considered until we were all horrified by it in real life.

And that points to the biggest difference between disasters cinematic and disasters authentic: In real life, catastrophes are just catastrophes. In films, something good almost always comes of them — a last-minute rescue, a family unified, a disgraced scientist vindicated — some kind of light at the end of the tunnel.

The movie doesn’t have to show you how long the tunnel is. You see the light, the credits roll, and you know that either the hero or whoever the hero was trying to save will be OK.

And the next 30, 50 or 100 years? That’s left for the sequel that never gets made.

2，我的热情只有你最懂

芝麻街公园早上是10点开门，与偶像Elmo共进早餐却是9点15开始10点15结束。
那天早上安宝儿大约是8点多起来的，我一看时间，手忙脚乱的收拾行李，收拾行李期间安宝儿翻出来装点心的小袋子，自己在袋子里挑挑拣拣的，选出来几个徐福记的夹心糕点，凑到我跟前非要我给他打开。我拗不过他，只好给他一一撕开，又争分夺秒的拉着行李抱着小人儿下去退房。
在Penns Landing的凯悦其实位置非常好，旁边就是水，可以划船，还有一条颇长的漫步道。可惜我们都来不及看了，我扯着安宝儿上了车，赶紧开出去，离开的时候，已经9点快10分。 Read more »

因为找咫尺的缘故，我惊奇的发现我居然没有在博上贴过这篇，补贴一下。
是2005年结婚前在单上连载写完的，当时赶着要在睫毛赴法前写完，还是湾区DC来回飞的时候，很多章节，是在飞机上完成。
这个故事，在我心里位置很特殊，不仅仅是因为它是我写的第一篇长篇BL，更重要的是，当年写的时候，正值告别单身前夕，很多前朝回忆翻滚上来，虽然真身并非是个PKU的故事，却寄托我对那里无限的追忆。记得那时候写，晚上还经常梦回过去，醒来的时候不知身在何处，十分彷徨。
一晃又快5年过去了，原来的单关闭以后，因我没有保存帖子的习惯，当时所有人给我的留言都丢了，连同阳光和草草的长评。
如今回头再看，写得虽然是很矫情，依然忍不住叹息。

E 2010。07。14

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1。前记

今年的独立日正赶上周日，联邦统一在周一7月5日补放一天；周中间我送安宝儿上daycare，门口贴个彩页通知，daycare周五7月2日也放假。
我于是扯了这彩页找老板请假，老板脸色不好看，当然还是得准。
于是我们就有了连续四天的假期。 Read more »

终于把有史以来写过最痛苦的故事给完结了。
故事比较特殊，所以设了密码，需要密码的，请在这里留email索取。
有认识的人要看msn上要密码也可以。