Non-linguistic Adventures

We just finished watching the fourth Marx Brothers movie, Horse Feathers, which was possibly even better than Monkey Business. I guess the quality just kind of steadily climbs over those first five movies. It's weird, because I'd always thought Animal Crackers, the second one, was my favourite. It definitely has some great moments, like the whole "Hooray for Captain Spaulding/Hello, I Must Be Going" number, but it also drags pretty heavily in parts. Anyway, this one we just saw takes place at a college where Groucho is the new president and tries to improve the football team by hiring a couple of ringers, but ends up with Chico and Harpo, who are of course chaotically terrible at football, by accident. Harpo really shines in this one comedically, and performs possibly his best harp solo, a rococo version of "Everyone Says I Love You". Next is Duck Soup, generally estimated to be the best of all Marx Brothers movies. I've never agreed with that before, but maybe my opinion will be changed by this back-to-back chronological viewing. It does definitely contain the funniest scene, where Harpo, dressed as Groucho, tries to fool Chico, also dressed as Groucho, into thinking that he, Chico, is looking in a mirror. An old gag, yes, but an early and spectacularly varied version of it.

At yoga last night we did a meditation where we were supposed to ask ourselves, "Who am I?" and pay attention only to our body for the answer, trying not to think in linguistic terms. I started seeing all sorts of colours before my eyes, repeating in a certain pattern. At first I thought it was pretty cool, but then I realized they were the exact colours I'd just used in a piece I'd been designing at work yesterday. It kind of bugged me because I didn't want to think that I'm just the last bit of work I did, even if it was enjoyable, but I couldn't make the colours go away.

We also did a lot of shoulder- and chest-opening poses, which Michi said might cause some unexpected emotional reactions because we can keep a lot of emotion bottled up in those places. I don't know about that, but I did have a lot of weird nightmares that kept waking me up all night. One was about there being mice everywhere. I guess that's not too surprising, though, since Buster "caught" a mouse yesterday, meaning that he played with it until it was completely exhausted and left it in a fearful ball on the kitchen floor. We put it outside under a tree and were then thinking about it out there when there was a heavy thunderstorm just before going to bed. I hope he either was all right or died quickly. Poor little guy.

- Andrew