My girlfriend is awesome.

I thought it was way past my bedtime, but the clock has fallen back an hour, so now it's only moderately past my bedtime.

Today I went to the movies. I accidentally bought a ticket for Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and didn't realize it until the title popped up on the screen (I was eased into it a little by the preliminary Telefilm Canada co-production credit). For a minute I thought, "well, okay, I like Cronenberg. Maybe I'll just stay and see it," but five minutes into the film I was presented with bloody vaginal discharge and the most realistic throat-slashing I've ever seen on film. I really wasn't in the mood, especially since I hadn't intended to see THAT film, so I theatre-hopped over to see Gone Baby Gone - Ben Affleck's directorial debut with his brother Casey in the lead. What a fantastic movie. The performances are all top notch, especially Affleck and Amy Ryan, who plays a neglectful Bostonian mother with a mouth like a racist sailor with such centred effect that you'd swear the casting director just picked her up off the street. It's a really intense thriller and one of those great neo-noirs of late that I've been really excited about.

After the flick I grabbed a bagel and coffee and went to Robarts to work on the annotation exercise. My group is looking at the poem "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We have to pick out twenty points for annotation, and I'm looking at extratextual elements. It basically involves researching the etymology of certain terms and expressions via dictionaries, guides and other support materials. After about three hours of research I had picked out seven and decided to call it a night.

I walked home from Keele station and watched some Seinfeld while eating dinner, did laundry, read some more of Notes from the Hyena's Belly, and watched a documentary on the making of Halloween (which primarily features a bunch of people sitting around talking about how great it was to get rich). Think I'll use that extra hour to get some additional sleep.

Happy Halloween. I met up with the Opera folks and went over what we're going to look at until our next meeting in a couple of weeks. I have a few ideas regarding thematic, biographical and linguistic angles that I can bring up on Death in Venice, but I need to do more research. Tomorrow I'm meeting with ANOTHER group to go over an annotation exercise for Bibliography, which sounds pretty intense. The readings and research at this level are constant and voluminous.

I watched the Peanuts Halloween special on YouTube before heading over to Matt's. His new place is in a nice spot but he and Kim have apparently been having their share of problems with the apartment. They've been riding their landlord a bit to take care of them. They made some vegan pitas for supper and Matt and I settled in to watch Halloween I and II. The original Halloween is a suspense classic and a dictionary definition of proper horror execution. I hadn't seen the second in years, but it wasn't as good as I recalled. It has a great elements to it (the ending may be even better than the first), but those elements are intercut with a gore-intent bodycount victimizing people the audience can't possibly care less about. Halloween is scarier because the people who die, though fewer in number, are more or less established personalities. Plus, it's set at a spookier time of day - the first half of the film sees the sun gradually setting behind the red and orange trees of suburbia, and you get the sense that the inevitable is coming with the approaching night.

I'm exhausted. Tomorrow I'll be phoning my girl to wish her a happy birthday. It will be outstanding to hear her voice.