A Real Pain

Do you have a to-do list?

I usually send myself an email last thing at night with the next day’s to-do list as the subject title.

But when I wake up on these cold, grey, dismal, February mornings, I have been looking at the list and thinking “Can’t be bothered!” 

Then I go into my studio and light the fire and because I’m between paintings right now, having just finished this one

I wonder what to paint. And because I’m in a blue February funk, there’s nothing that inspires me, especially with the wider world veering dangerously towards an abyss of fascism.

Being in this kind of mood, it’s been hard to blog.

I will just say that Chrissie and I went to see A Real Pain, which is supposed to be funny, as well as a lot of other good things, and has wall to wall 5 star reviews, and a 96% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

We, however, would both have turned it off after 15 minutes if we’d been watching it at home, because we both found the central character, Benji, so incredibly irritating. Why would we want to spend 90 minutes with him? 

Also, neither of us found the film in the least bit funny. We’d have given it three stars and said it was mildly thought provoking.

I need to emphasise that Chrissie and I do not have identical taste in cinema, television or books.

What’s going on? Are we outside the film’s audience demographic?

Lastly I have to ask those of you who have seen the film, what did that scene mean where the two guys place their large pebbles right in the middle of a doorstep in memory of their grandmother who used to live there? I know why they wanted to leave the pebbles, but why right in the middle of the doorstep, where an old person walking out could stumble on them and fall over and break their hip? Was it to show they were thoughtless? Or entitled? And why, when they were told by a neighbour to move them, did they pocket the stones? Why didn’t they just move them to the side, where they should have placed them in the first place?

This has been bugging me ever since I saw the film. I’d love to ask Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote the screenplay, what was in is head?

OK. Rant over.

My to do list this morning has two things on it - varnish my last three paintings, and go to a planning meeting for this year’s refugee hospitality days. That’s fine.

I haven’t drawn the blinds yet so I don’t know if it’s grey, but the weather forecast gives rain and a temperature that feels like minus 2 degrees F. And so it continues. 

Mary died ten years ago on February 13th, and I blogged the following February, that I would never moan about February again, because I was here to enjoy* so much and she wasn’t, her life was cut short. But here I am, moaning again. What can I say? I think the winter gets harder to endure the older you get.

*Talking of things I enjoy…last week I was playing shop with 2 years 3 month old MsX, and when I said I’d like to buy some cheese, she said “We have some Jarlsberg, but we’ve run out of Brie.” 

And last week I played a video game called Dress to Impress with 12 year old Cece- she in Colorado and me here at home. Amazing and hilarious.