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I did, but I just barely remembered. I completely forgot my grandmother's admonition against doing laundry on New Year's day. I'm not sure exactly what this means&mdash;it's always made sense to me on some level, at least until now&mdash;but she used to say if you do laundry on New Year's, you'll be doing it all year. 

We survived our holiday travel, but it was not pleasant. The airlines barely seem able to keep things moving with their normal passenger loads, so the increase in the number of travellers coupled with the unpredictable winter weather pretty much ground things to a stop. Luckily, we were not traveling through Denver, so we didn't have to spend two or three days sleeping in the Denver airport. We did, however, endure delays of several hours both going and coming, and when we got back to Salt Lake City, we found that our luggage had not made the connecting flight in Dallas. The airline was supposed to deliver our bags, but they did not let us know when to expect the delivery, so of course we weren't home to accept them and had to go back to the airport to pick them up the day after the delivery attempt. Joy.

It's hard to believe that I'm back in school already&mdash;yes, another semester of freshman comp is under way. This time I have a new prep&mdash;one of my sections is the second semester comp class. So much for taking the lazy way out and repeating last semester's syllabus. I wasn't really planning to repeat last semester's syllabus, since I'm using a different book, but my life would be much easier if I could do basically the same thing in each class. 

Last weekend, we went to see two different movies set in 18th c. France: <em>Marie Antoinette</em> and <em>Perfume</em>. Interestingly enough, despite radically different narrative orientation and content, the two films are similar. Both Tom Tykwer and Sofia Coppola seem concerned mainly with film as a visual, rather than narrative, medium. My response to <em>Perfume</em> was fairly incoherent&mdash;I've read the book on which it's based but can remember next to nothing about the plot or characters, so I can't make the "book to movie" comparisons I typically enjoy. One thing I didn't like about the movie was the reliance on narration to move the plot; a little bit of voiceover goes a long way for me. I understood why this was necessary, but that didn't make it any less annoying. Like <em>Run Lola Run</em>, the best thing going in <em>Perfume</em> was the sumptuous imagery, with it's heavily saturated colors and rapid-fire movement from one extreme close-up to another. 

From <em>Marie Antoinette</em> I expected both not much and quite a lot, and it delivered on both counts. Sofia Coppola, as a director, seems to me a stylist, more concerned with setting a scene and creating a mood than with telling a story or communicating "meaning". I think people who call her "vapid" really miss the point and judge her based on something she's not trying to do. She has a great eye and put it to good use in <em>Marie Antoinette</em>, which seems a lot like <em>Lost in Translation</em> in it's concern with ennui. In both movies, we meet a young woman existing (and not much more) in a situation not of her making and not enjoying herself very much. In each case, the young woman tries to escape her ennui through various amusements but only earns a brief respite through the human connection of a fleeting romantic encounter. I'm reminded of <a href="http://www.musicandmeaning.com/forster/" target="_blank">E.M. Forster's</a>, "Only connect." Like Forster's novels, Coppola's films show how difficult that can be.