Thursday, March 6, 2008

Getting in touch with my inner Mulder

This has been a week of doing just enough to keep up rather than diligently working ahead. After the frenetic pace of last week, including the weekend, I really needed what R&R time I could carve out of my schedule. I've lucked into a lot of cheap fun so I've been able to avoid dipping into my entertainment budget.

I gave my dad a four month subscription to Netflix for his birthday in January, and he's getting a lot of use out of it. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the watching movies online thing may be done on multiple computers (up to four in a year, though not more than two at a time on the plan I gave him), and my brother and I have been making our way through the first season of Heroes together. It's a good show for sibling bonding time, and it's gotten us through the writers' strike.

As I was chatting with one of the grad students while we both procrastinated on Tuesday, he brought up a series of books he's hooked on. I was intrigued, and he offered to lend me the first one. I devoured it Wednesday, and I finished the second book this evening. They are absolute junk, all about vampires and werewolves and not exactly spectacularly written, but they are mildly addictive. I thought I got the whole bad fantasy thing out of my system years ago, but it seems not. If he'll keep lending them to me, I'll keep reading them. Everyone needs a little fluff once in a while, right?

This weekend I'll probably take advantage of one of the perks of being on a college campus: free tickets to student performances. They'll be doing Plan Nine from Outer Space: The Musical, which should round out a somewhat geeky week of entertainment perfectly. I haven't seen the movie, but my dad and I have started making Ed Wood a Halloween tradition so I'm eager to find out what I've been missing.

So, you are welcome to mock me mercilessly for my entertainment choices this week, but not for overspending.

2 comments:

Jim ~ mydebtblog.com said...

I'm glad you take the time to read and go to musicals. My wife and I have seen a few musicals, one of her most recent favorites is Wicked though. We also bought the Harry Potter series in hardcover and we're going through them one by one. She got hooked on a different author's series so we're not staying in line anymore.

I find Heroes really frustrating because of how much they repeat the same thing over and over again. To me it felt like it could have easily been a miniseries like Merlin or something. Hope you enjoy it though and Season 2 was really short due to the strike. Season 3 begins in the FALL though so it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

E.C. said...

I don't think Heroes would be nearly as much fun if we were watching it stretched over many months and interrupted by commercials, and I probably wouldn't be quite so into it if my brother weren't such a fan. It's a pretty nice break when we're both stressed out by electromagnetism homework, though.