I leave tomorrow morning on a flight to St. Louis. Going to spend New Year’s in Carbondale, Illinois. I’ll be back January 3rd. A couple days later I’m driving to Rochester to say hello to Tim as he passes by on his epic drive out west. (Lengthy parenthetical: Most of the people I worked with at all of my jobs while living in Southern Illinois pronounced “Illinois” the wrong (”ignorant”) way: Illinoi-s. I found it really aggravating. The other day someone (I don’t remember whom) caught me pronouncing it “Illinoi-s” in a conversation, and quickly pointed it out and corrected me. Can you imagine? I was horrified! Damn osmosis.) Hopefully, the security check goes smoothly. Last time I flew from St. Louis to Minneapolis it went rather badly. Something beeped as I walked through the metal detector. Airport security promptly confiscated my shoes, my socks, my jacket, my scarf, my gloves, my hooded sweatshirt, my purse, my backpack (Alas, I hardly had any clothes left!), and painstakingly picked them apart, checking them for explosive residue, razors, etc., while ordering me to sit on a chair, to the amusement of fully-clothed passerbys. Oh the ignominy! Why, considering that experience, it’s a wonder I’m willing to fly at all.

At the suggestion of John Barach and Gideon Strauss, I finally saw Wit the other evening. I’m not sure any comments I could make on the film come accurately come close to describing the emotional trauma chronicled therein. Emma Thompson did an absolutely brilliant job — perhaps the performance of her career — of playing Vivian (stoic English literature professor who’s diagnosed with terminal cancer). Some of the expression’s on Vivian’s face immediately occurring after epiphanies about her life — or while undergoing the humiliations of treatment — are heart-breakingly obscene. At first she voyeuristically revels in the paradoxes and ironies of her grave and absurd situation, as only an English professor or student could. However, she eventually begins to unravel emotionally as the situation worsens and she eventually is completely isolated from humanity. The Runaway Bunny scene at the end really got to me. I resent when films make me cry; it’s really bothersome. It makes me feel really irrational and weak-headed. I’m probably just paranoid.

Here’s the review from Amazon:

Deservedly hailed as one of the best films of 2001, Wit makes it clear why top-ranking talents seek refuge in the quality programming of HBO. Unhindered by box-office pressures, director Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson turn the most unglamorous topic–the physical and psychological ravages of cancer–into an exquisite contemplation of life, learning, and tenacious, richly expressed humanity. In adapting Margaret Edson’s compassionate, Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Nichols and Thompson open up the one-room setting with a superb supporting cast. But their focus remains on the hospital experience of Vivian (Thompson), a fiercely demanding professor of English literature whose academic specialty–the metaphysical poetry of John Donne–is the armor she wears against the cruel indignities of her cancer treatment. While losing all that she held dear, she reassesses her life as an aloof intellectual, and Wit illuminates her bracingly eloquent and deeply moving struggle for dignity, meaning, and peace at life’s ultimate crossroads.